4Ancient and Medieval Interpretations of Aristotles Categories

The idea for this journal issue sprang from a conference of the same name which took place in April, 2011 at Franciscan University of Steubenville un-der the joint auspices of the departments of Classics and Philosophy. The great interest which the conference elicited among scholars indicates an even greater interest in the history of the interpretation of Aristotles Categories. The papers published here, when taken together, describe the development of thought from the Middle Platonists to Duns Scotus on Aristotles Catego-ries. What is of particular interest here is the place of continuity in the history of interpretation; the tradition of reading the Categories in the light of the Platonic principle of beingbeginning in the second century with Plotinus, and reaching its height in the fourteenth centurywhich belies a harmony between Plato and Aristotle, as understood by their interpreters. Namely, the commentators come to understand that the Platonic category of Being, found in the intelligible realm, can be reached when one comes to understand the process of signifying things, as explained in Aristotles Categories. The mark of the late antique Platonist and the medieval Scholiast readings of the Categories is more ontological than logical. As a prolegomena to a study on the history of interpretation of the Categories, Lloyd Gersons, The Aristotelian Commentaries and Platonism, provides a context for understanding the interpreters of the Categories with respect to the Platonic tradition. Gerson argues that the Platonists of late antiquity used Aristotles Categories in a manner much more akin to that of the medieval scholastics than of contemporary scholars. Namely, both the ancient and medieval commentators view the aim of the Categories as the beginning of an ascent to the intelligible world. Gerson looks to Simplicius, in particular, who shows the utility of the Categories for the ascent to the in-telligible realm by first studying things of this realm. Simplicius, according to Gerson, shows that Aristotle recognizes the universal nature of conceptsanother major theme developed in other papers in this volume. The next five papers treat ancient interpretations of Aristotles Cate-gories. Michael Griffins, What is aisthton? Ordinary things among the Neo-platonist commentators on the Categories, outlines Neoplatonic approaches to reading the Categories; particularly their methods of turning attention from things to the reality signified by those things. Griffin shows how the meth-

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od of division, or cuts between genera, is an important trend among the Platonists to understand things signified and the signifier. Charlene Elsbys, Plotinus on the Reality of the Category of Relation, and Sarah Klitenic Wears, Syrianus the Platonist on Aristotles Categories 8a13b24: The Onto-logical Place of Skhesis in Later Platonic Metaphysics, both treat Aristotles category of relation coupled with the assertion of the reality of relations by the Platonists. For the later commentators it appears that relation can func-tion not only as a reality, but as a dynamis with a generative force for creation. Joseph Almeidas paper, Simplicius on Categories 1a1617 and 1b2527: An Examination of the Interests of Ancient and Medieval Interpreters of the Categories, examines the place of Simplicius in the philosophical tradition of the Categories, particularly, Simpliciuss use of the Categories as a means to return to first principles. Gary Gabor caps off the section on ancient inter-preters by also treating Simplicius, along with Ammonius on the Categories. Gabor, providing original translations, affirms that Ammonius treats the cat-egories as universals and provides sophisticated attempts to justify the cate-gorical scheme described by Aristotle. He shows how Simpliciuss derivation of Aristotles categories are a development from Ammoniuss account. The second half of this issue consists of five papers on the medieval commentaries on Aristotles Categories. In Platonic Elements in Albert the Greats Commentary on the Categories, Lloyd Newton develops Alberts har-monist reading of Plato and Aristotle by examining Alberts description of the transcendentals which are predicated of the categories. Gregory Dool-an and Mark Roberts both discuss Aquinass interpretation of the Catego-ries. Doolans Aquinas on the Metaphysicians vs. the Logicians Categories shows the implications of Aquinass views on the logicians and metaphysi-cians treatment of the categories. Aquinas says that a logical account of the categories is pedagogically prior to a metaphysical account because logic is learned before metaphysics however metaphysics is prior to logic in terms of importance because real being is prior to intentional being. In Robertss, The Second Sense of Being, Roberts considers whether the dispositio rei is the second sense of being in Aquinas. Mark Gossiaux shows how James of Viterbos theory of the categories casts light on his metaphysics of finite being in his article, James of Viterbo and the Nature of the Division of the Categories. The last article, Andrew LaZellas, The Simplicity of Being in Duns Scotuss Quaestiones Super Praedicamenta Aristotelis and Later Works, argues that Scotus claims being is said equivocally of the ten categories. From this collection of ten papers, it seems that the ancient and medieval commentary tradition on Aristotles Categories is unified in its under-standing of the role of being in Aristotles Categories. Namely, both traditions are, in fact, a single tradition which finds continuity between the thought of Plato and Aristotle, in part due to Aristotles Categories. For, Aristotles

interpretationS of ariStotleS cateGorieS6

Categories points to the being in the categories and things of this world which signifies being in the intelligible realm; thus, the ancient and medieval minds both see the categories as the first step in the path towards the souls quest for the intelligible realm.

Joseph Almeida & Sarah Klitenic Wear,Special Guest Editors

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Lloyd P. Gerson, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2014)

The Aristotelian Commentaries and Platonism

Lloyd P. Gerson

1.

All students of the history of philosophy are apt to be seduced by linearity. What I mean is this. Naturally, we read the texts of the history of philosophy in the chronological order in which they were written. So, for example, we read Aristotle after we read Plato. And we read the supposedly later works of Plato after the earlier ones. Perfectly reasonable. But in pursuing the task of trying to figure out the meaning of what we have read, we tend to seek out or suppose the influence of the earlier philosopher on the later or the de-velopment of the philosophers views. The employment of these two seem-ingly innocuous and certainly ubiquitous terms is in fact rarely edifying. An easy means of seeing why this is so is to ask what sort of Aristotelian cause are influence and development supposed to indicate? Since we are talking about temporal succession, presumably we would have in mind efficient or moving causes. But it only requires a moments reflection to realize that the views of one philosopher never stand in relation to the views of another as efficient cause to effect. Thus, for example, it is not because Plato believed that nominalism is false that Aristotle believed that nominalism is false even if it is indeed the case that Aristotle accepted Platonic arguments to this ef-fect. If, however, we loosen the connection between Plato and Aristotle and agree that the views of the former did not cause the views of the latter, what is the influence supposed to amount to? Indeed, why claim that Aristotle is influenced by Plato, with whom he happened to agree on many issues, and not by, say, Democritus, with whom he happened to disagree? Surely, one can be inspired to embrace a position which is exactly the opposite of that which one hears from another. Consider development. The perfectly anodyne sense of this termnamely, that according to which the sequence of writings in an author indi-cates the progress or course of his thoughtis quite useless. But as soon as you try to gin up this weak sense of development into something more portentous you get into serious trouble. If, for example, you say that Platos

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thought developed in the sense that his later dialogues represent an advance-ment in, or even a change from, his earlier thoughtapart from cases of outright contradiction of which there are few or noneyou have to specify what the development is a development of; that is, to use Aristotelian termi-nology once again, what is the underlying substrate for the development? But this underlying substrate will be the locus of continuity throughout the putative development; continuity which may be far more important than any change. I am not suggesting that Plato or any other philosopher never changed his mind. I am suggesting that the changes cannot ever be viewed uncritically as going from false to true or wrong to right. Consider someone who believes that the highpoint of Platos thinking occurred in the early or middle dialogues. Someone like this would not consider the middle or late dialogues developments in any sense but the anodyne one mentioned above. Some scholars, looking at the identical texts, believe that Aristotle developed from a Platonist to something like an anti-Platonist while others believe that his anti-Platonism was only a phase after which he developed into a Pla-tonist once again. None of this is very helpful. The reason I bring it up is that the Pla-tonists of late antiquity who introduced the philosophical curriculum where-in the commentaries played such an import role were mostly impervious to the siren song of linearity. As we know from the accounts of the philosoph-ical curriculum, perhaps introduced by Iamblichus or Porphyry in the late third century, students were obliged to study Aristotle before studying Plato. Studying Aristotle, or at least some of the works of Aristotle, was thought to be the most suitable preparation for studying Plato. The reason for this is quite simple: the Platonists were aiming at truth rather than what we might like to think of as an objective and unbiased account of the develop-ment of the history of philosophy. But we still should want to ask why the study of Aristotle was supposed to be conducive to understanding the truth as it is revealed in Plato and articulated by the man whom Proclus called the exegete of the Platonic revelation, namely, Plotinus? Simplicius provides a preliminary answer to this question when he says in his Physics commentary that Aristotle was authoritative for the sensible world as Plato was for the intelligible world.1 Beginning the study of philoso-phy in the sensible world, in accord with Aristotles remark in Physicsthat we start with things more intelligible to us and move to things more intelli-gible by natureputs the student in a better position to appreciate the more difficult insights found in the two works that comprise the culmination of

1 See Simplicius, In Phys., 1249.1213.

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philosophical study: namely, Timaeus and Parmenides.2 Let us be quite specif-ic. The study of Categories is supposed to assist the student in preparing for study of the intelligible world. Initially, this seems farfetched. Indeed, it is not uncommon for contemporary Aristotle scholars to take Categories as in a way programmatic for an anti-Platonic Aristotelian philosophy, the focus of which is the individual sensible substance. So, on this showing, Iamblichus was naive to think that he was molding disciples of Platonism by having the students read Categories even before they encountered a dialogue of Plato. As I have argued elsewhere, Iamblichus and Simplicius and many other prominent Platonists of late antiquity believed that Aristotles philoso-phy was in harmony with Platonism.3 The way I characterized harmony was to argue that Aristotles philosophy stood to Platonism analogous to the way that Newtonian mechanics stood to quantum mechanics. I was and am not altogether happy with letting my argument rest on an analogy in part because in trying to explore further the details of harmony one soon runs up against the limitations of the analogy. Instead, I would like to pursue a different ap-proach here. I would like to argue that what underlies the claims of harmony is a set of shared principles; shared not only by self-proclaimed Platonists and by Aristotle, but by virtually all philosophers from at least 200 CE until perhaps the beginning of the seventeenth century with only a few notable exceptions. It will become clear as I proceed why I have cast my net so widely. And I hope it will also become clear why the Aristotelian commentary tradi-tion remains a critical component in the larger Platonic project.

2.

Let me begin with a hypothetical reconstruction of what I shall call Ur-Pla-tonism (UP).4 This is the general philosophical position that arises from the conjunction of the negations of the philosophical positions explicitly reject-ed in the dialogues, that is, the philosophical positions on offer in the history of philosophy accessible to Plato himself. It is well known that Plato in the dialogues engages with most of the philosophers who preceded him.5 Some

2 Cf. Anonymous Prolegomena to Platos Philosophy, ed. L.G. Westerink (Amster-dam: North-Holland, 1962) (parallel Greek text and English translation); new edition with French translation, Prolgomnes la Philosophie de Platon, ed. and trans. L. G Wes-terink, J. Trouillard, and A. Ph. Segonds (Paris: Las Belles Lettres, 1990), 26.4344.

3 See my Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).4 This section is elaborated upon in my From Plato to Platonism (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2013).5 Diogenes Lartius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 3.25 (henceforth D.L.), says

that since Plato was the first to attack nearly all of his predecessors, one wonders

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of these, like Parmenides and Protagoras, exercise his intellect more than others, including probably some unnamed ones as well as some unknown to us. All of these philosophers, with the exception of Socrates, are represented as holding views that are firmly rejected in the dialogues either explicitly or implicitly.6 It matters little for my purpose if Plato misrepresented or mis-understood some of these philosophers, though I do assume that he did neither of these things. I am not claiming that anyone, including Plato, simply embraced UP. I am, however, claiming that Platonism in general can be seen to arise out of the matrix of UP, and that Platos philosophy is one version of Platonism.7 So, in a manner of speaking, UP is a via negativa to Platos philosophy. To be a Platonist is, minimally, to have a commitment to UP. It is

why he did not mention Democritus. In the subsequent chapter on Democritus (D.L. 9.36), Diogenes quotes Democritus as saying that I came to Athens and no one knew me. At D.L. 9.40, however, Diogenes, relying on an account of Aristox-enus, says that Plato did in fact know of the works of Democritus but was unwilling to controvert him in writing owing to Democrituss eminence. Fritz-Gregor Herr-mann, in Platos Answer to Democritean Determinism, in La Catena Delle Cause, ed. C. Natali and S. Maso (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 2005), 3755, argues that Dem-ocritus does appearanonymouslyin Platos Timaeus, particularly as a representa-tive of those who think that necessity () governs all change. In F.-G. Herr-mann, Words and Ideas: The Roots of Platos Philosophy (Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2007), 23943, 3324, and 334n467, Herrmann adds an argument that Phaedo 95e105e is responding to an (unidentified) account of causality in Democritus and to the older philosophers use of the term . If Herrmann is right, then virtually all of Platos illustrious predecessors do in fact make appearances in the dialogues, even if some do so anonymously. See Sara Magrin, Sensation and Scepticism in Plotinus, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 39 (2010): 24997, who shows that Ploti-nuss analysis of the nature of the Receptacle in Platos Timaeus and of it relation to cognition assumes that Plato is using Democritus as a foil in that dialogue.

6 In Plato, Tht. 183e, Socrates declines to criticize Parmenidess claim that all change is unreal after criticizing extreme Heracliteanism. The criticism of Par-menides is taken up again in Plato, Soph. 244b245e which, though not directly a criticism of the claim that change is unreal, is a criticism of the claim that all is one which would, it seems, entail that change is unreal.

7 D.L., 1.20 says the term (sect or school of thought) is used for those who in their attitude towards appearance ( ) follow or seem to follow some principle. He adds that the term is also used for a bias () in favor of coherent positive doctrines. Diogenes refers to the earlier historian Hip-pobotus who lists nine including the Old Academy. What I am calling UP may be understood in this context as a proto-. The unity of the Old Acad-emy (and those who came after) is a unity of a proto-. I thereby leave room to account for the specific differences among individual philosophers despite this unity. See John Glucker, Antiochus and the Late Academy, (Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 16692, on the uses of the term in antiquity.

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only a slight step further to recognize that this basic commitment is virtually always in fact conjoined with a commitment to discover the most consistent, integrated, and positive metaphysical construct on the basis of UP. This con-struct aims to unify logically the elements of UP. UP is, of course, an ahistorical framework for analysis. It bears em-phasizing that Plato himself employs such ahistorical frameworks for con-sidering the views of his predecessors. For example, in Republic lovers of sights and sounds, evidently referring to no one in particular, are contrasted with philosophers; in Sophist, pluralists and monists, idealists and materialists are lumped together ahistorically for criticism; and, indeed, the term sophist famously made a pejorative by Plato, is used to refer to those who actually held different views. In this regard, Aristotle just follows Plato in his catego-rization of various philosophical positions in order to submit them to criti-cism. Adherence to UP and to an integrated, systematic construct on its basis is what all Platonists share. Disagreements among these same Platonists are best explained by the fact that this systematic construct does not decisively determine the correct answer to many specific philosophical problems raised especially by opponents of Platonism. Any positive construct is underdeter-mining for the answers to a variety of philosophical problems. The elements of UP according to my hypothesis are anti-material-ism, anti-mechanism, anti-nominalism, anti-relativism, and anti-skepticism. The polar opposite of UP is naturalism, the philosophical position that con-sists of, more or less, the conjunction of the above five positions opposed by Platonists. Perhaps Atomists represent the purest example of naturalism in antiquity. Contemporary naturalists such as Rorty and Quine and a host of others have striven for the most part to attain the most consistent possible version of naturalism and in this they rely heavily on the most spectacular deliverances of modern science. In a way, the entire history of philosophy at least since the seventeenth century has been a series of attempts by natural-ists to accommodate one or another element of Platonism and vice versa. For the present, a rough sketch of these elements must suffice. Anti-materialism is the view that it is false that the only things that exist are bodies and their properties. Thus, to admit that the surface of a body is obviously not a body is not thereby to deny materialism. The anti-ma-terialist maintains that there are entities that exist that are not bodies and that exist independently of bodies. Thus, for the anti-materialist, the question is the soul a body or a property of a body? is not a question with an obvious answer since it is possible that the answer is no.8 The further question of

8 See esp. Plato, Soph 246a248a; Plato, Lg. 891c14. Likewise, Cornford thinks that when Plato is criticizing materialists in Sophist, he means to include At-omists, who are nowhere explicitly named in the dialogues (F. M. Cornford, Platos Theory of Knowledge [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trbner & Co., 1934], 2312). I

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how an immaterial soul might be related to a body belongs, of course, to the substance of the positive response to UP, or to one or another versions of Platonism. Anti-mechanism is the view that the only sort of explanations avail-able in principle to a materialist are inadequate for explaining the natural order. What, then, distinguishes materialism from mechanism? It would be possible to be an anti-materialist yet still believe that all explanations are me-chanical. Such might be the position of an occasionalist. Conversely, it would be possible to believe that materialism is true, but also maintain that there are non-mechanical explanations of some sort, say, at the quantum level.9 Anti-mechanism, though, seems to be derived from anti-materialism. That is, having rejected the view that everything that exists is a body or an attribute of a body, the way is open to propose non-bodily explanations for bodily or material phenomena. One way to understand anti-mechanism is as the denial of one version of what we have come to call the causal closure principle; that is, the principle that physical or material causes are necessary and suf-ficient for all events in the physical world.10 Although contemporary denials of this principle are generally focused on supposed mental events having at least no sufficient physical causes, anti-mechanism takes the stronger posi-tion that even admittedly physical events are not comprehensively accounted for by physical causes. An anti-mechanist in antiquity generally relies on the principle that an ultimate or adequate explanation for a phenomenon must be a different sort of thing from that which is in need of an explanation. Thus, the principle of number, one, is not a number. Accordingly, one might argue that since the properties of bodies are not bodies there is nothing in princi-ple amiss in using bodies for accounting for these properties. Helens beauty, say, is accounted for by her body, perhaps by emerging from or supervening on it. In order to make this work, and to remain within the confines of the principle of explanationnamely, that that which explains must be different from that which is explainedit is necessary to maintain that the body itself, and no other properties of the body, is the explanation for the beauty. If it were other properties then the original principle would be violated. But of course this way leads to shipwreck. For we either continue to explain prop-

agree with Cornford that it is unlikely that Plato did not know about Democritus and Leucippus or that their materialism is not implicitly rejected in the Sophist passage.

9 Plato in Phaedo seems to hold that Anaxagoras tried to be an anti-mecha-nist, but failed because he was a materialist. The simple hypothesis of Socrates in response to Anaxagoras, 99d4ff, is an especially clear example of the beginning of an effort to construct the positive response that is based on UP.

10 It is a version of the causal closure principle that is implicitly rejected at Tim. 47e48b where it is that overrules a in the generation of the cos-mos.

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erties by properties or we explain properties by bodies, but since the bodies are only differentiated by their properties, the explanation for Helens beauty will be the same sort of explanation as the explanation for Socratess virtue. Anti-mechanism and anti-materialism are distinct views, though within the versions of Platonism that arise from UP, they are always held to be mutually supporting.11 Along with anti-materialism, the exploration of the nature of explanation in an anti-mechanist framework belongs to a positive construct on the basis of UP. Anti-nominalism is the view that it is false that the only things that exist are individuals, each uniquely situated in space and time.12 Nominalism can be local or general; denying the existence of anything other than individ-uals within one kind of thing or denying their existence generally. It can also be extreme, by denying that there can even be a multiplicity of individuals, each one nevertheless not being utterly unique since it can be the same as each other in virtue of the fact that it is one. The anti-nominalist thus allows that two or more individuals can be the same and still be unique individu-als. He thus allows conceptual space for sameness that is not identity. By contrast, the nominalist maintains that if two things are the same then they are identical; if two things are not identical, they cannot be the same. An an-ti-nominalist could insist on the reality of the phenomenon of sameness in difference and yet deny that there is an explanation for this, claiming rather that it is just a brute fact. Platonists generally associate the acceptance of the phenomenon with at least the possibility of giving a substantive causal expla-nation for it.13 Anti-relativism is the denial of the claim that Plato attributes to Pro-

11 It is perhaps possible to be an anti-materialistsay, by affirming the exis-tence of an immaterial deityat the same time as one maintains mechanism, thus making this deity causally irrelevant. But this very odd view seems explanatorily un-motivated.

12 I take the Eleatic monism in Parm. 127d128d, as the central target of Platos anti-nominalism. The target is absolutely clear since Eleaticism is unqualified nominalismnot even two things can exist if from this it follows that they will be the same in each being one. Antisthenes may also be a target; see Plato, Soph. 251a251c. See R.E. Allen, Platos Parmenides: Translation and Analysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 7980, on Eleaticism as a form of nominal-ism.

13 The rejection of nominalism presupposes the falsity of extreme Heracli-teanism. If everything were always in flux in every way, things could not have prop-erties. I do not, however, list the rejection of extreme Heracliteanism as one of the central elements of UP because Plato agrees that sensibles are in some sense always becoming if not becoming in all ways. To be able to show that an account of same-ness in difference is possible is, along with the evidence of the senses, sufficient to remove any reasonable motivation for extreme Heracliteanism.

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tagoras that man is the measure of all things, of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not.14 The claim is expressed in two forms in the di-alogues: one epistemological and one ethical. Epistemological relativism is not skepticism; hence, the denial of this form of relativism is not a denial of skepticism. One may, after all, be skeptical of the possibility of acquiring knowledge about properties that may well be objective. Relativism is the view that true just means true for me or what appears true to me or true for some particular group. The ethical form of relativism maintains that good just means good for me or good for the group where good is deter-mined by or constituted by a mental state or states, roughly, pleasure broadly conceived. Thus, ethical relativism is virtually hedonism in some variety. The denial of ethical relativismindividual or socialholds that what is good is determinable independently not of what is good for someone, but of what appears to that person as good for him. Thus, the anti-relativist can maintain that good is the same as good for x so long as she insists that good for x is not equivalent to what x claims is good for x. A similar point can be made about epistemological relativism. An alternative way of expressing anti-relativism is to maintain that goodness is a property of being. Anti-skepticism is the view that knowledge is possible. Knowledge () refers to a mode of cognition wherein the real is in some way present to the cognizer. The skeptic does not maintain that cognition gen-erally is impossible but only that knowledge is. According to the argument we get in the dialogues, if either materialism or nominalism were true, skepti-cism would follow because it would not be possible for the real to be present to any cognizer; there could only be representations of some sort of the real, representations whose accuracy would be indeterminable.15 Throughout the dialogues Plato has Socrates rail against sophists, rhetoricians, and various demagogues who share at best a cavalier attitude towards the need for knowl-edge of any sort.16 Platos anti-skepticism assumes the legitimacy of such attacks.

14 We learn from Sextus Empiricus, M 7.60 (cf. Plato, Tht. 161c3) that this claim comes from Protagorass book On Truth.

15 The so-called Recollection Argument in Plato, Phd. 72e378b3 provides a sort of transcendental argument against scepticism, showing that certain cognitive acts in which we manifestly engage would not be possible if we did not already possess . I take Theaetetus, despite its aporetic conclusion, to attempt to provide the necessary foundation for an adequate response to the sceptic. That re-sponse begins, naturally enough from a Platonic perspective, with an account of what is.

16 Plato, Phdr. 259e274b is a particularly vivid and wide ranging attack on those who disregard knowledge in the practice of their craft. As we learn from

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There is no way of decisively proving that Plato, apart from the dialogues, actually embraced these elements of UP. The best one could do is show how much of the actual form and content of the dialogues make sense when we see them as built upon a conjunction of the above five an-tis, and an attempt to unify them in some way. But it is worth here pointing out, I think, that if Plato is, say, a crypto-materialist, masquerading as an anti-materialist, that would make him the worst kind of sophist. It would make his apparently relentless condemnation of sophistry and counterfeit philosophy in the dialogues more than ironic. It would suggest a man with a psychological makeup that can be only characterized as pathological. And more to the point, it would suggest that the man for whom Aristotle had the greatest respect was basically a fraud. Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that Aristotle thought this to be the case or that he took Plato as anything other than a serious philosopher, indeed, the touchstone of his own philoso-phy. Obviously, there is a large but not infinite range of possible posi-tions consistent with being anti-materialist, anti-mechanist, anti-nominalist, anti-relativist, or anti-skeptic. For example, an anti-nominalist is not neces-sarily an anti-materialist, as I have defined it. The anti-nominalist position known as conceptualism does not entail that concepts are immaterial en-tities as opposed to properties of material entities. Nor is an anti-materialist necessarily an anti-nominalist, as is evident, for instance, in the philosophy of, say, William of Ockham. Nor is an anti-mechanist necessarily an anti-nom-inalist. If, though, we begin to explore logical or explanatory connections among the five antis, the range of positions begins to narrow. Thus, if one is an anti-materialist because on is an anti-nominalist, a number of possible positions are eliminated. For the UP of the dialogues, anti-materialism is entailed by the only possible explanation for the supposed datum of two non-identical things nevertheless being the same. Continuing along this line of thought, ethical or epistemological an-ti-relativism does not require the embrace of anti-materialism or anti-nom-inalism. If, however, it turns out that the only way to make plausible the justification for a claim about the objectivity of the good or of reality itself is to hypothesize the existence of an immaterial entity, commitment to anti-rel-ativism at least provides one reason for commitment to anti-materialism.17 And, of course, anti-nominalism is thereby strengthened. As we have already

272d2273a1, the pursuit of the likely ( ) is not an acceptable substitute for the pursuit of knowledge.

17 At Plato, Tht. 186a186e the refutation of Protagorean relativism turns upon showing that the possibility of knowledge, that is, cognition of what is objec-tively, entails the falsity of relativism, the view that what is is reducible to what is for one person or another. Thus, relativism makes knowledge impossible.

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seen, anti-materialism at least opens the way for anti-mechanist explanations. Finally, though anti-skepticism is itself the basis for a host of dogmatisms, among which are many contradictory positions, anti-skepticism yields an in-creasingly focused range of options for one who is also an anti-materialist, anti-nominalist, and anti-relativist.18 The appropriate context for connecting all of the elements of UP is explanatory. That is, the general reason why Plato rejects nominalism, ma-terialism, etc., is that these positions render impossible the explanation for the phenomena they are supposed to explain. So, for example, the phenome-non of two or more things having an identical property cannot be explained by nominalism. Or, the existence of distinctly human cognition cannot be explained by materialism. Or, the objectivity of human nature cannot be ex-plained by relativism. The elements of UP belong to an explanatory frame-work. In constructing this framework, Plato is in one respect perfectly in line with his Pre-Socratic predecessors. That is, he assumes that the true explana-tory framework will converge on the minimum number of principles.19 Thus, Plato assumes that nature () is an orderly arrangement of its parts (). This reductivist tendency is a key facet of Platonism. It serves as a constraint on philosophizing within the framework of UP. So, a multitude of principlesespecially principles that are unrelatedis prima facie suspect with regard to their explanatory power. Just as modern theoretical physics assumes that the four fundamental forces in nature must be explanatorily connected, so those who embraced UP assumed that the elements of their positive constructs needed to be unified in some way. The default unifying framework will be a fundamental metaphysical theory of some sort. Indeed, the principal reason that later Platonists attributed a metaphysical theory to Plato was the assumption that without it it would not be possible to unify the elements of UP. And without such unification, the positive doctrines would lack a highly desirable mutual support.20

18 See Plato, Tim. 51b51e where the proof of the falsity of materialism goes like this: if (intellection or knowledge) is different from true belief, then Forms must exist. But if Forms exist, then materialism is false.

19 Atomism is not really an exception to this, since the reduction of all phe-nomena to atoms and the void is far more important than the fact that the atoms are infinite in number. See H.J. Krmer, . Zu Platon, Politeia 509B, Archiv fr Geschichte der Philosophie 51 (1969): 1518, who argues that Platos doctrine of first principles is exclusively the result of his encounter with Ele-aticism, and is not a product of general Pre-Socratic reductionism. This seems to me to be too narrow an explanation.

20 H. Cherniss, in The Philosophical Economy of Platos Theory of Ideas, American Journal of Philology 57 (1936): 456, thinks that the theory of Forms itself provides the requisite unification: That the necessary and sufficient hypothesis for

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The assumption that a positive response to UP will be a unified ex-planatory framework has an immediate and portentous consequence. This consequence is that the explanatory framework will have to be in some sense hierarchical. The unification will consist in showing that that which is in need of an explanation is explained by that which is notthe heteroexplicable requires the autoexplicable. As a principle of metaphysics, this means that the autoexplicable has ontological priority over the heteroexplicable. All ver-sions of Platonism introduce some sort of hierarchy into the explanatory framework.21 The basic hierarchy posits the ontological priority of the intelli-gible realm to the sensible. But this leaves open the very difficult question of hierarchy within the intelligible and sensible realms. Throughout the history of Platonism, as intra-hierarchical analysis proceeded, the complexities per-taining to unification seemed to increase. To claim that the elements of UP belong to an explanatory frame-work over against the frameworks provided by the positions UP rejects leaves open the essential question of the explananda. Thus, for example, anti-nom-inalism is a principle that nominalism cannot explain the phenomenon of sameness in difference or, stated otherwise, the phenomenon of things possessing properties, that they do not exclusively possess. Nominalism is not an alternative explanation for this phenomenon since it rejects its exis-tence, even its possibility. The positive constructs that constitute the versions of Platonism do not generally engage directly with their opponents over the existence or possibility of such a phenomenon. Indirectly, Platonists seek to show that, in the above example, sameness has a nature different from iden-tity which, if true, makes it at least intelligible how two things that are not identical can yet be the same. With respect to skepticism, the phenomenon to be explained is obvi-ously not knowledge, but rather rationality. Knowledge is not the explanandum for the simple reason that even one who believes that knowledge is possible (like Socrates) might well claim not to possess it. The Platonists want to argue that our ability to reason or make rational judgments could not be explained unless we either already possess knowledge or we are capable of possessing

this sphere [the sensible world] turns out to be the very one needed for ethics and epistemology makes it possible to consider the three sphere of existence, cognition, and value as phases of a single unified cosmos. It is historically implausible that any Platonist supposed that the cosmos was unified by a multiplicity of Forms. See, contra Cherniss, H.J. Krmer, Die platonische Akademie und das Problem einer systematischen Interpretation der Philosophie Platons, Kant-Studien 55 (1964): 8588.

21 See P. Merlan, From Platonism to Neoplatonism, 3rd ed. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), 16677, on the evidence for such hierarchy in Plato, Aristotle, Academics, and later Platonists.

the ariStotelian commentarieS and platoniSm18

knowledge. Knowledge is here the explanans, not the explanandum. Another way of indicating the phenomenon is to say that humans possess a mode of cognition that animals do not. This mode of cognitionwhich even the skeptic manifests in reasoning to the denial of the possibility of knowledgecannot, the Platonists maintain, be explained unless we are knowers.22 The materialist denies the existence of any immaterial entities. The proponent of UP holds that the only possible explanation for the above phenomena requires the rejection of materialism. In this sense, anti-materialism is a de-rivative or second-order element of UP. It does not offer an explanation for an independently ascertainable phenomenon.23 Similarly, the mechanist de-nies the phenomenon of purpose in nature, something which could only be possible if there were a being or beings capable of making judgments about the future, which in turn is possible only if they possess knowledge or the possibility of acquiring it. Teleology in nature, which is what anti-mechanism seeks to explain, appears to be a real phenomenon only if anti-materialism is true.24 And anti-materialism follows from the explanations for the phenome-na that constitute anti-nominalism and anti-skepticism. Finally, anti-relativism is supposed to be the starting point for ac-counting for the phenomena of objective or interpersonal reality. To deny that true is equivalent to true for me is as much as to claim that there is a world independent of any judgments made about it and that things in this world have the property of objective truth. Of course, to identify ob-jective reality as a phenomenon that needs to be explained is problematic on at least two counts. First, a phenomenon, as Protagoras would no doubt indicate, must be contrasted with reality. Second, what are the grounds for assuming that reality needs any explanation at all? The proper response to the first problem is to show that there is a distinction between epistemic and non-epistemic phenomena. The former entail the existence of objective

22 Heraclitus or Cratylus would seem to deny that the objects of knowledge must be stable. The Platonists claim that the objects of knowledge cannot be unsta-ble is as much a claim about what the ne plus ultra of cognition must be as it is a claim about the nature of the objects of such cognition.

23 At Plato, Soph. 247b247c, the reformed materialists are said to allow that justice or wisdom, for example, exist and that it is not reasonable to say that they are bodies. But their concession need not be taken to constitute their abandonment of materialism as I have defined it. For these might be properties of bodies or superve-nient on bodily states.

24 It is thus possible that Plato thought that the refutation of Anaxagoras in Phaedo was sufficient for refuting Democritus and Atomism. It is also pertinent to mention here that Aristotles teleology is in his writings never separated from his commitment to the immateriality of intellect. Even if his account of nature does not presume anti-materialism, his argument in his Metaphysics for the purposefulness or final causality of nature does.

19lloyd p. GerSon

reality; the latter do not. What Plato and later Platonists maintain is that epistemic phenomena are only explicable if relativism is false. So, it is not reality that needs explaining but epistemic phenomena; objective reality is the explanation for these phenomena. The particular task of the Platonist is to show that the explanation for these phenomena so defined is not circular. Naturally, the Platonist will be able to recur to the argument that concludes to the possibility of knowledge to support the non-circularity of the claim that only objective reality explains epistemic phenomena. A pertinent objection to the above analytic framework is that it is otiose. If, indeed, Plato is a systematic philosopher, we need only start from the elements of the systemin the dialogues and in the indirect tradition not from a putative matrix, UP, out of which the system arises. In reply to this objection, the main problem with coming to grips with Platonism is arriving at a non-question-begging definition of it. Assuming, charitably, that Plato is himself consistent, how is it that philosophers who disagree about doctrine can both rightfully declare themselves to be followers of Plato? In-deed, how is it that apparent differences in doctrine in the dialogues can all be held to be elements of Platonism? One considered response to the first ques-tion is to maintain that fidelity to Platonism is actually a multifarious fidelity to Plato himself.25 The usual response to the second question is to maintain either that (a) there is no systematic unity throughout the entire corpus, or else (b) that the system is localized to a particular set of dialogues, or that (c) it is detachable from the dialogues altogether. I would maintain that (a), (b), and (c) are unsustainable based on both the indirect evidence and the dialogues themselves. But this fact does not preclude changes in doctrine across dia-logues. Nor does it preclude disagreements among Platonists. These changes and disagreements all occur within the commitment to UP and to the con-struction of a unified system on its foundation. Not only is a commitment to UP what Plato and virtually all Platonists share, but recognizing this commit-

25 See e.g., G. R. Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Devel-opment from the Stoics to Origen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 6, esp. 99105. He argues that [t]he particular doctrines held by particular Platonists is (obviously related, but actually) incidental to what they were: I want to argue that they held the doctrines they held because they were Platonists rather than vice versa. And Platonism at root seems to me to be this: the belief that Platos philosophy was dogmatic and authoritative. Everything else follows from that (Boys-Stones, Post-Hellenistic Philosophy, 102). Brittain thinks that the Platonic tradition has three essential characteristics: (a) the authoritative status of Platos work; (b) a shared set of assumptions about the inadequacy of empirical experience for understanding the world, and (c) an increasing interest in a range of religious practices (C. Brittain, Plato and Platonism, in The Oxford Handbook to Plato, ed. G. Fine [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 527).

the ariStotelian commentarieS and platoniSm20

ment allows us to see what in fact underlies the many disputes we encounter in the history of Platonism.

3.

It is my contention that UP provides the appropriate framework for the examination of just about all the Aristotelian commentaries, including, of course, those on Categories. Let me recur once again to Simplicius and his com-mentary where there is a striking expression of his view of the underlying basis of harmony. Simplicius, raising the question of the goal () of Aristotles philosophy generally says, that with regard to character, it is perfection by means of virtue and with regard to cognition, it is the ascent towards the first principle of all.26 Simplicius goes on to add that these two goals are really one, namely, complete happiness. So, we are asked to consider Aristotles Categories as a component in the ascent to the first principle of all, for Simplicius, the Good or the One. And, of course, this ascent is also a means to perfection. At the beginning of chapter two of Categories, Aristotle makes a divi-sion among things said and another among things that are ( ). It is quite common among contemporary students of Aristotle to take the words things that are as exhaustive, that is, as equivalent to all the things that are. Such an approach is convenient for one wishing to ignore, or at least to marginalize, that parttraditionally, at least, the central partof his philosophy that is focused on the intelligible world, that is, the world of the divine. But Simplicius evidently does not take the words this way, nor is it plausible that he should if he maintains that Categories needs to be studied as part of an ascent to the first principle of all. In fact, Simplicius rather seems to take the words in the more normal Greek sense of a partitive genitive, that is, as meaning among the things that are, which leaves open the question of what things there may be that are neither said of nor present in, said of and not present in, present in and not said of, and both said of and present in. We can see that this is so from a passage later in the commentary when he denies that Aristotle is in this work concerned with beings qua beings or being tout court. Rather, he is primarily () studying things of this realm ().27 But, as Simplicius explains, one can pass on from this realm to intelligibles, making use of analogy.

26 Simplicius, In Cat. 6.79. Cf. Ammonius, In Cat. 6.916 and Philoponus, In Cat. 5.348.2.

27 Simplicius, In Cat. 73.32.

21lloyd p. GerSon

At this juncture it is well to consider whether Simplicius is not stretching the point in trying to show the utility of Categories for the ascent to the intelligible realm. In reply to such an objection, I would like to re-cur to my account of UP, in particular the anti-nominalism component. An anti-nominalist is committed to acknowledging the reality that is expressed in predicative judgments. A Platonist will insist that such acknowledgement must lead by a not altogether lengthy road to the positing of immaterial par-adigms which explain the possibility of real predication or sameness among things that are nevertheless numerically distinct. Aristotles Categories is a work firmly in the anti-nominalist camp. Only among Stoics is the reality analyzed by Aristotle along Platonist lines denied. Simplicius says that Aristotle is to be praised for recognizing the universal nature of our concepts (), which we extract from our experience of individuals.28 In universal conceptualization resides the possi-bility of scientific knowledge. But the student of Platonism can be brought to see that universal concepts do not explain the possibility of predication or sameness in difference. The paradigms which inhabit the intelligible world are not universals or universal concepts. As Simplicius later shows, Aristotle is in Categories consciously treating universals other than as causes, that is, as causes in which particulars participate.29 A universal is, for Simplicius, properly treated adverbally, so to speak, indicating the manner in which one considers some group of things. This manner of consideration has no causal relation to reality. So, Aristotles realism about universals is a good starting-point for the ascent to the intelligibles which Simplicius calls pre-existing causes ( ).30 Simplicius adds that Aristotle certainly knew about such causes even if he did not characterize them in exactly the way that other Platonists did. The way Aristotle does characterize these pre-ex-isting causes, according to Simplicius, is as the intelligibles which the divine mind, called by Aristotle the Unmoved Mover, contemplates, and with which it is eternally cognitively identical. That Aristotle did not quite see clearly enough that this Unmoved Mover could not be the first principle of all does not disqualify him or his works from being indispensable to the Platonic course of study. On the contrary, it is immensely powerful in heuristic terms to study a philosopher who, despite affecting a critical stance in relation to the doctrine you are advancing, accepts your assumptions. In this case, all the Platonist needs is the anti-nominalist element of UP along with anti-mech-anist element; that is, the acceptance of the insufficiency of bottom up

28 Simplicius, In Cat. 70.2930.29 Simplicius, In Cat. 82.3583.10.30 Simplicius, In Cat. 70.26.

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explanations. Indeed, as Aristotle argues in Metaphysics Alpha Elatton and in Physics and elsewhere, what science seeks are per se causes, or ultimate expla-nations of things. A commitment to ultimate explanations makes evident the preliminary explanatory framework for Categories and for all the treatises of Organon and all the treatises belonging to the sciences of nature. It seems to me fairly obvious that the Platonists of late antiquity used Aristotles Categories in a manner much more like that of medieval scho-lastics than like that of contemporary scholars. The so-called Neoplatonists and the Scholastics shared a commitment to UP and, roughly, to the specific exigencies of a positive construct on its basis. This last point is especially im-portant when we consider the second part of Simpliciuss claim, namely, that Aristotles philosophy aims at happiness and, therefore, not only is Categories a valuable way to begin the ascent to the first principle of all but it also nec-essarily has a utility for achieving happiness. I think it is safe to say that this is not a motive for the study of this work that is today usually advanced by teachers to their pupils. Shall we take the easy way out and say that in fact the utility of the study of Categories for achieving happiness is merely remote in the sense that it is a modest step along a path which if assiduously followed will eventually lead to the discovery of works in which the study of virtue is explicit, works in which the relevance to achieving happiness is plain? Simplicius actually considers the possibility that one should begin ones study of philosophy with Aristotles ethical writings because char-acter formation in students is foundational.31 He resists this approach on readily intelligible grounds: Aristotles ethical writings are produced with the most scientific divisions and demonstrations ( ). Accordingly, one must under-stand the nature of division and demonstration in order to appreciate these arguments. Granting the methodological utility of the entire Organon, Simpli-cius does not mean that what is needed is a neutral logic course. Aristotles divisions and demonstrations are contentful. And for Simplicius, these only make sense within the context of what we may call a top-down metaphys-ics wherein the simple and independent is explanatorily prior to the complex and dependent. Simpliciuss advice to would-be commentators on Aristotle that they should know all of the writings of Aristotle before beginning their workall of course including much more than we have and, needless to say, available for study only in Greekis particularly pertinent to Categories itself.32 That the divisions of types of predication, the distinction between essential and accidental attributes, and the necessity and universality of sci-

31 Simplicius, In Cat. 5.16ff. Simplicius may here be referring to Philoponus, In Cat. 5.24ff.

32 Simplicius, In Cat. 7.2324.

23lloyd p. GerSon

entific demonstration all depend for him on the priority of the intelligible realm to the sensible. More to the point, for Simplicius it is evident from the writings of Aristotle that he shares this commitment. Simplicius has no doubt internalized the argument of Plotinuss lit-tle treatise on dialectic, 1.3. Plotinus sees dialectic, by which he means the science which can speak about everything in a reasoned and orderly way, as essential for instilling in the student the confidence in the existence of the immaterial ( ).33 With this confidence, the ascent to the first principle of all receives all the motivation it needs. The superiority of Aristotles divisions and demonstrations about things that exist in nature are uniquely conducive to this ascent. For the sensible substance that is the focus of study in Categories is that which in Metaphysics is said to be posteri-or.34 In Categories itself, where Aristotle distinguishes senses of priority, he indicates the primary ontological sense, namely, that A is prior to B if A can exist without B but B cannot exist without A.35 It is the opposite of fanciful or arbitrary for Simplicius to take the ontological posteriority of sensible substance in this way. Accordingly, Categories is to be read as based on the assumption of the priority of the eternal and intelligible to the temporal and sensible. Let me conclude by returning to my initial point. The Platonist com-mentators on the works of Aristotle did not pay much attention to linearity, though of course they were very much aware of it. As a consequence, they were better historians of philosophy than those who much later reduced the history of philosophy to a one-dimensional linear account. Because they focused on the truth and not on the putative influences and developments of earlier philosophers, they were better able to appreciate how in fact the later were actually related to the former. And because they were focused on the truth rather than on the imagined novelty that supposedly is left after all the influences have been peeled away, they actually had a better appreciation of constructive novelty as opposed to mere gimmicks or novelty for its own sake.

University of Toronto

33 Plotinus, 1.3.3.67; 1.3.4.23.34 Aristotle, Meta. 7.3.1029a3132.35 Aristotle, Cat. 12.14a30-5. Cf. Aristotle, Meta. 5.11.1019a14.

Michael Griffin, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 2014)

What is an aisthton? Ordinary things among the Neoplatonist commentators

on the Categories

Michael Griffin

In this paper, I undertake a tentative exploration of views about ordinary things1 that are found among the Neoplatonist commentators on Aristotles Categories. Neoplatonist opinions about ordinary things are notoriously unor-dinary: at any rate, a reader who bravely cracks the spine of the Enneads or Platonic Theology may expect to find everyday objects relegated to the meta-physical basement suite of the sublunar world, supplanted in the spotlight by a four-course meal of hypostases and analogies, processions and reversions, the ascent of the soul and a vision of the One.2 My aim here, however, is not to investigate this later Neoplatonic picture of what is really real, but to offer a rough and ready sketch of what some Neoplatonists took their reading au-diences pretheoretic ontology to be at the early stages of the philosophical cur-riculum represented by the Categories; in other words, what the Neoplatonist commentators on the Categories take to be the items of common sense that are already familiar to their audience. Based on that sketch, I outline some of the Neoplatonists methods for turning their readers and pupils attention from these things to reality,3 in particular by treating the disciplined study of

1 I would like to start with a notion of an ordinary thing that is fairly ambig-uous, but hopefully flexible enough to cover the examples I give from modern and ancient philosophical writing without creating confusion. My account of things will be close to the description of the primary ousiai of the Categories in W.-R. Mann, The Discovery of Things: Aristotles Categories and Their Context (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2000); for an overview of his project, see 336.

2 A.C. Lloyd, The Anatomy of Neoplatonism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).3 On the pedagogical function of the commentaries and their preambles, see

for example P. Hoffmann, La function des prologues exgtiques dans la pense pdagogique noplatonicienne, in Entrer en matire: Les prologues, ed. J. Dubois and B. Roussel (Paris: Cerf, 1998), 20945; P. Hoffmann, Catgories et Langage Selon Simplicius. La Question Du skopos Du Trait Aristotlicien Des Catgories, in Sim-plicius: Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre, Sa Survie; actes du colloque international de Paris (28 Sept.1 Oct. 1985), ed. Ilsetraut Hadot (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), 6190; I. Hadot, The Role of the Commentaries on Aristotle in the Teaching of Philosophy according to the

25michael Griffin

the highest kinds of the Categories as a corrective for the vagueness of the items denoted by ordinary terms.

I. A sample of modern perspectives: Thinking about the everyday

To draw out the notion of ordinariness or the pre-theoretical that I would like to employ here, we might contrast the temperament of some genre-defining works in the last century of Anglo-American philosophy. For the sake of illustrating the ancient arguments that follow, I consider in sec-tion I(a) instances of the kinds of items that have been treated as obvious, pre-theoretical items in analytic philosophy. In section I(b), I then sketch some of the challenges that have confronted philosophers about these every-day objectsin particular, the problem of vagueness. Finally, in section I(c), I very briefly sketch the association of the problem of vagueness with the division of terms in our language, as our language is said to carve reality at its joints.4

(a) Starting from the ordinary

Bertrand Russells Problems of Philosophy or On Denoting or G.E. Moores Defence of Common Sense get off the ground using thought-experiments rang-ing over diverse and imprecisely bounded yet extremely ordinary and familiar phenomena: tables, beds, Mount Everest, nation-states, Big Ben, and so on.5

Prefaces of the Neoplatonic Commentaries to the Categories, in Aristotle and the Later Tradition (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1991 supp.), ed. H. Blumenthal and H. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17589; H. Baltussen, Philos-ophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator (London: Duckworth, 2008). I have also attempted an exploration of some related issues in the Neopla-tonist tradition on the Categories in M.J. Griffin, Universals, Education, and Philo-sophical Methodology in Later Neoplatonism, in Universals in Ancient Philosophy, ed. R. Chiaradonna and G. Galluzzo (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2013), 35380.

4 For a modern perspective on this kind of carving of reality at its joints us-ing language, see E. Hirsch, Dividing Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

5 Moore and Russells common-sense revolution in the analytic tradition might be regarded as a reassertion of the Peripatetic intuition that philosophy should begin from the sorts of things most clear and familiar to us at first (Aristotle, Physics 1.1.184a22184b14: e.g., gnrimteros, saphesteros). That temperament was already an organizing principle of the Peripatetic schools reading list in the early Roman Em-pire: thus Boethus of Sidon writing around the turn of our era, reported by Philo-ponus in Cat. 5.16 and David [Elias] in Cat. 117.21.

ordinary thinGS amonG the neoplatoniSt commentatorS26

What sorts of things are these, assumed to be obvious to common sense? One characteristically modern examplestemming perhaps from Des-cartess Meditations,6 with a healthy overtone of Johnsons refutation of ideal-ism adapted to more sedentary timesis the authors writing-table:

Russell. It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. [L]et us concentrate attention on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound. Anyone else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin.7

Eddington. I have settled down to the task of writing these lec-tures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about metwo tables, two chairs, two pens. This is not a very profound beginning. But we cannot touch bedrock immediately; we must scratch a bit at the surface of things first. And whenever I begin to scratch the first thing I strike is my two tables. One of them has been famil-iar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantialit is the distinctive characteristic of a thing to have this substantiality, and I do not think substantiality can be described better than by saying that it is the kind of nature exemplified by an ordinary table. And so we go round in circles.8

6 Perhaps a locus classicus for this particular sort of opening gambit in phil-osophical writing is Descartes at his writing-desk in the Meditationsin particular, Meditation 1.5: Atqui nunc certe vigilantibus oculis intueor hanc chartam, non so-pitum est hoc caput quod commoveo, manum istam prudens & sciens extendo & sentio; non tam distincta contingerent dormienti (All the same, I am now perceiving this paper with eyes that are certainly awake; the head I am nodding is not drowsy; I stretch out my hand and feel it knowingly and deliberately; a sleeper would not have these experiences so distinctly) (Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, With Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. M. Moriarty [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008], 14).

7 B. Russell, Appearance and Reality, chap. 1 in The Problems of Philosophy (Home University Library, 1912).

8 A. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, The Gifford Lectures 1927 (London: Dent, 1935), 58.

27michael Griffin

Quine. 1. Beginning with Ordinary Things. This familiar desk mani-fests its presence by resisting my pressures and by deflecting light to my eyes. Physical things generally, however remote, become known to us only through the effects which they help to induce at our sensory surfaces. Yet our common-sense talk of physical things goes forward without benefit of explanations in more in-timately sensory terms. Entification begins at arms length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimpses. In this there is little cause for won-der. Each of us learns his language from other people, through the observable mouth of words under conspicuously intersub-jective circumstances. Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identi-fied and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.9

For some philosophers, then, nothing could be more obvious and familiar than a writing-table (though perhaps, ironically, its everyday familiarity is de-clining in this century; it is already an example tinged with history and tra-dition). Now I suppose it would be difficult to find an ancient philosopher, even of the most skeptical persuasion, drafting a treatise or offering a lecture that started in quite this style represented in the passages above; I take it that such a mode of introducing meditations is characteristically post-Cartesian. But, for Russell and Quine, it is perfectly reasonably taken for granted that, in the context of their intended readership, readers or hearers know all about writing-tables, and that this is a fine example of the familiar and the obvious, from which more theoretical activity might begin.

(b) A problem with ordinary things: Vagueness

When philosophers in the analytic tradition (broadly conceived) come to fo-cus on the nature of such ordinary and everyday objects as writing-tables, the story grows more complicated. Let me give a more current example of the sort of thing I have in mind, this time not from a book targeting the interest-ed public, but from Mind:

Consider Mount Everest. It seems obvious that there is no line which sharply divides the matter composing Everest from the matter outside it. Everests boundaries are fuzzy. Some molecules

9 W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 1.

ordinary thinGS amonG the neoplatoniSt commentatorS28

are inside Everest and some molecules outside. But some have an indefinite status.10

Or consider the list of examples that Michael Loux would regard as familiar to the beginner undergraduate philosopher amongst a roster of everyday items, such as Loux [the man himself]Big BenWembley Stadiumthe Sears Tower.11 Skeptics certainly might deny that such ordinary objects, the ex-tensions of familiar English count-nouns, properly exist,12 or might perhaps adopt the (more Aristotelian) position that properly speaking there only exist living beings and physical simples, and that it is counterproductive to regard Big Ben or a writing-desk as fundamentally real.13 But the notion that mate-rial things like this are familiar to us, and that it is useful to appeal to them as a starting-point for beginners in philosophy, seems fairly firmly entrenched. Discussions of such ordinary objects raise various metaphysical problems, including the so-called composition problemthat is, are there really such things as mereological sums?and puzzles associated with vague-ness, which often take a form similar to the ancient sorites puzzle.14 For exam-ple:

The predicates tall, red, bald, heap, tadpole, and child are paradigmatically vague. First, our sample predicates have borderline cases. These are, roughly, cases where it is unclear whether or not the predicate applies. A second characteristic of vague predicates is that they apparently lack well-defined exten-sions. On a scale of heights, there is no sharp boundary between tall people and the rest; nor is there an exact point at which our grow-

10 M. Tye, Vague Objects, Mind 99, no. 396 (1990): 53557.11 M.J. Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Abingdon: Taylor &

Francis, 2006), 238.12 See, e.g., Peter Unger, There Are No Ordinary Things, Synthese 41, no. 2

(1979): 11754 on the ordinary objects of common sense.13 For example, consider P. van Inwagen, Material Beings (NY: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1995). We might add, as an historical footnote, that the general notion of such primary, countable things that have properties may not be pre-theoretical at all, but things in this sense only show up as things at a certain turning-point in the Greek philosophical tradition, with Aristotles response to Platos worries about the substantiality of such ordinary things (so Mann, Discovery of Things; Manns argument is more subtle than I can do justice to here).

14 Detailed below, for instance, in Diogenes Lartius, Lives of Eminent Philoso-phers 7.44 (henceforth, DL); on ancient forms of the puzzle, see also literature cited in following pages.

29michael Griffin

ing creature ceases to be a tadpole. Third, our vague predicates are susceptible to sorites paradoxes.15

In antiquity as today, the sorites paradox was a useful way of focus-ing thought on the vagueness of ordinary things. Modern examples given have not drifted far from those in Diogenes Lartius and Galen (reporting the Stoic tradition of treating the sorites as a sophistical puzzle applying to epistemology):16

Diogenes Laertius. It is not the case that two are few and three are not also. It is not the case that these are and four are not also (and so on up to 10,000). But two are few: therefore ten thousand are also.17

Galen. According to what is demanded by the analogy, there must not be such a thing in the world as a heap of grain, a mass or satiety, neither a mountain nor strong love, nor a row, nor strong wind, nor city, nor anything else which is known from its name and idea to have a measure of extent and multitude, such as the wave, the open sea, a flock of sheep and herd of cattle, the nation and the crowdthe transition of man from one stage of his life to another. [I]n the case of the boy one is uncertain and doubt-ful as to when the actual moment arrives for his transition from boyhood to adolescence.18

(c) A solution of sorts: Learning to cut

What can be done to make philosophy about ordinary objects possible in the face of such puzzles? Quine, among many other contemporary philosophers, points out problems stemming from the alleged vagueness of such ordinary thingsthe vague terms we learned by ostension.19 Many arguments can

15 R. Keefe and P. Smith, eds., Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 23.

16 See also C. Atherton, The Stoics on Ambiguity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1993), and M. Burnyeat, Gods and Heaps, in Language and Logos, ed. M. Schofield and M. Nussbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 31538.

17 DL 7.44, translation after Barnes.18 Galen, On Medical Experience 16.117.3, in The Hellenistic Philosophers, trans.

and ed. A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley, vol. 1, Translations of the Principle Sources with Phil-osophical Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 37e, 222.

19 W.V.O. Quine, What Price Bivalence?, Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 2 (1981): 92; cf. Quine, Word and Object, 1.

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be offered about what makes these sorts of objects vague.20 Consider Quines response to problems associated with vagueness:

When we do reach the point of positing numbers and plying their laws, then is the time to heed the contradictions and to work the requisite precision into the vague terms we learned by ostension. We arbitrarily stipulate, perhaps, how few grains a heap can con-tain and how compactly they must be placed. What had been ob-servation terms are arbitrarily reconstructed, on pain of paradox, as theoretical terms whose application may depend in marginal cases on protracted tests and indirect inferences. The sorites par-adox is one imperative reason for precision in science, among others.21

The difficulty, then, is that when we want precision we can no longer rely on ordinary languages intuitions alone: to get on with scientific investi-gation, we have to try to rebuild a language, however arbitrarily, that deploys more (stipulative) precision than ordinary language has to offer. Contrast a different line of reflection suggested by Eli Hirsch on the way in which lan-guage can be seen as carving reality:

Our language divides up reality in a certain way, though we can apparently describe an indefinite number of other ways in which this might be done. This fact may not in itself be seen as gener-ating a philosophical problem, for it may merely suggest the need for an empirical explanation, in terms of psychology or sociol-ogy, of why our division practices are as they are. A philosophi-cal problem is generated, however, by certain normative intuitions which we seem to have about these practices. Intuitively, it seems that there are good reasons why we ought to have essentially the division practices we do have. [T]he single words of our language denote (the members of) certain classes of things rather than oth-ers.22

Hirsch is here interested in a different kind of question, what can be learned about these normative intuitions that appear to underlie the cuts or carv-ings of ordinary-language denotation, and where these intuitions might come from. I will not delve into this question in its own right here, but I hope to have set the stage for the Neoplatonists, who (as I explore below)

20 Several from antiquity forward to the present are summarized in Keefe and Smith, introduction to Vagueness, 157.

21 Quine, What Price Bivalence?, 92.22 Hirsch, Dividing Reality, 34.

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treat philosophical division as an especially useful technique for improving on ordinary language.

II. Ordinary things among the Neoplatonists and Categories as philosophical introduction

I think we can locate, in the influential Neoplatonic tradition on the Catego-ries and the earlier Platonist and Peripatetic views which it preserves,23 some interesting analogues to the notion of ordinary thing that we have just reviewed. I would also like to suggest that some similar puzzles about the vagueness of ordinary things, though rather differently framed, played into the perception of the value of the Categories.24 I try to build here on some of the key conclusions of Wolfgang-Rainer Manns treatment of Plato and Aristotles view of ordinary things in The Discovery of Things, by pointing to some ways in which the Neoplatonist commentators take a similar line to the usefulness of the study of the Aristotelian Categories for honing our ability to

23 On this question see, for example, R. Chiaradonna, Sostanza, Movimento, Analogia. Plotino Critico Di Aristotele (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2002); R. Chiaradonna, Por-phyry and Iamblichus on Universals and Synonymous Predication, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 18 (2007): 12340; S. Strange, Plotinus, Porphyry, and the Neoplatonic Interpretation of the Categories, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Rmischen Welt, ed. W. Haase, vol. 36, no. 2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987): 95574; P. Hoffmann, Catgories et Langage Selon Simplicius, 6190; F.A.J. De Haas, Did Plotinus and Porphyry Disagree on Aristotles Categories? Phronesis 46, no. 4 (2001): 492526; F.A.J. De Haas, Context and Strategy of Plotinuss Treatise on the Genera of Being (Enn. VI.13 [4244]), in Aristotele e i suoi esegeti neoplatonici, 5th ed., Cel-luprica (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2004): 3753; C. Evangeliou, Aristotles Categories and Por-phyry (Leiden: Brill, 1988). On Porphyrys importance for commentary on Aristotle in general, G. Karamanolis, Porphyry, the first Platonist Commentator of Aristotle, in Philosophy, Science, and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic, and Latin Commentaries, ed. P. Adamson, H. Baltussen, and M. Stone, Supplement to the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 83, no. 1 (London: Institute of Classical Studies, 2004): 97; see the same authors chapter on Porphyry in Plato and Aristotle in Agreement? Platonists on Ar-istotle from Antiochus to Porphyry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006): 243330. Porphyry successfully positioned the Organon as the lingua franca of subsequent philosophy of language in Greek and Latin; on the role of the Categories in this process, see recently the collection of papers edited by L.A. Newton as Medieval Commentaries on Aristotles Categories (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

24 I have attempted a more detailed exploration of related issues in the earlier Peripatetic tradition in M. Griffin, What Does Aristotle Categorize? Semantics and the Early Peripatetic Reading of the Categories, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 55, no. 1 (2012): 69108.

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recognize and discourse philosophically about everyday objects (even as the commentators also assume, with Plato, that those objects are less real than Platonic Forms). I will begin in section II(a) by reviewing the reasons why, on the commentators view, we should begin by treating ordinary things; section II(b) will review the problems associated by the commentators with these ordinary entities, namely their vagueness, and section II(c) will explore the solution that the Categories might offer, namely the ability to correctly cut or carve beings precisely at their joints, correcting for this vagueness.

(a) Starting from the ordinary

First, to illustrate the later ancient treatment of the Categories as a book about the ordinary things of our ordinary, pre-theoretical ontology, here is a rep-resentative passage from the Neoplatonist commentator Simplicius (which matches views found in the Alexandrian Neoplatonists and Porphyry, and traceable, as I have argued, at least to Boethus of Sidon in the first century). This passage follows the basic description of the subject-matter or target (skopos) found in the Categories neither as linguistic entities (phnai) nor as con-cepts (nomata) nor as realities (pragmata, onta), but as words significant of things, qua significant. So Porphyry ap. Simplicium:

Porphyry, for his part, both in his [commentary] To Gedalius and in his [commentary] By Questions and Answers says that the goal (skopos) of the book is about predicates (katgoriai). These are sim-ple words significant of realities, qua significant, and not qua sim-ple expressions.

That [Aristotle in the Categories] is talking about perceptible things (aisthta) [hence this papers title: What is an aisthton?], which are also what is investigated by the common man, is obvious first from the fact that he chose that substance (ousia) which is so called by everybody. [Using analogy from this substance] we are able to rise up from the perceptible to that which is apprehen-sible by discursive reasonfrom which we encompass sensible substance, filled though it is with infinity and indefiniteness, with-in a definition (horos). [Aristotle] ranks sensible and particular things before those which are universaland he is right to do so: for he seeks the difference in accordance with those meaningful words which were first and most properly assigned to sensible things, and which are familiar to the common man.25

25 Simplicius, in Cat. 74.4 ff., in Simplicius on Aristotle Categories 14, trans. M. Chase (London: Duckworth, 2003).

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Porphyry begins his short surviving commentary on the Categories by explaining that philosophers are occasionally obliged to coin new words just due to the imperfections of ordinary usage (suntheia). After a review of mis-taken titles for the treatise, Porphyry, at in Cat. 56.9, then explains the nature of a katgoria, for which (he believes) the Categories is correctly titled: it is a simple verbal expression significant of something to which I can point (the speaker might have been literally envisaged ti daktuli epideiknus, as Ammo-nius puts it at in Cat. 10.2):

I claim that once man himself had come to be able to indicate and to signify the things around him, he also came to name and to indicate each thing by means of words. Thus his first use (khrsis) of linguistic expressions came to be to communicate each thing by means of certain words and expressions. In accordance with this relation between words and things, this thing here is called a chair, that a man, this a dog, that the sun, and again, this co-lour is called white, that black, and this is called number, that size, this two cubits, and that three cubits. In this way words and expressions have been assigned to each thing which serve to signify and reveal that thing by employing particular sounds of the voice (phn).26

This is the first imposition of a referring term on a this, or tode ti; perhaps fa-miliar from a celebrated passage of St. Augustine,27 it may well have a source in Hellenistic speculations on the origin of language, ultimately rooted in the commentary tradition on Platos Cratylus.28

26 Porphyry, in Cat. 56.9, in Porphyry on Aristotles Categories, trans. S. Strange (London: Duckworth, 1992).

27 St. Augustine, Confessions 1.8.13, quoted by Wittgenstein at the outset of his Philosophical Investigations. See Myles Burnyeat, The Inaugural Address: Wittgenstein and Augustine De Magistro, in Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 61 (1987): 124, and compare Quine, What Price Bivalence?, 82: Each of us learns his language from other people, through the observable mouth of words under con-spicuously intersubjective circumstances. Linguistically, and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identified and learned by name; it is to these that words apply first and foremost.

28 On that tradition in general, see R.M. Van Den Berg, Procluss Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming, Philosophia antiqua 112 (Leiden: Brill, 2008). On the Hellenistic traditions, see for example T. Reinhardt, Epicurus and Lucretius on the Origins of Language, Classical Quarterly, n.s., 58, no. 1 (2008): 12740.

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(b) A problem with ordinary things: Vagueness

The Categories is about the objects of this first imposition, as Porphyry argues. They are ordinary. How, then, does the question of the vagueness of such ordinary objects of (verbal) ostension come into play? There is a hint already in Simpliciuss comment above on how a concept, once formed, is somehow able to contain or circumscribe an infinite or indefinite multi-tude of uncountable particularslike a heap of grain. Here are some further examples from Porphyry and Boethius, who is somewhat reliant on him:

Porphyry. The subject of this book [Categories] is the primary im-position of expressions, which is used for communicating about things. For it concerns simple significant words insofar as they signify things... things and expressions are both practically infinite in number (apeira men skhedon.).29

Porphyry. The individualsthat is to say, the items after the most special itemsare infinite (apeira). That is why Plato ad-vised those who descend from the most general items to the most special to stop there, and to descend through the intermediatesand he tells us to leave the infinites alone, for (3) there will be no knowledge of them.30

Boethius. The first imposition of names, then, was that by which [human beings] could point out things subject to concepts or to the senses. Because things (res) are infinite, significant expres-sions must also be infinite. But there is no cognition of infinites, for they cannot be comprehended by the mind. And that which cannot be circumscribed by a mental account (ratione mentis) can-not be bound by the limit of any knowledge (scientia): therefore there is no knowledge of infinites.31

Aristotle had already described the numerical infinity of particular things (e.g. Soph. El. 165a612, on apeirapragmata; but note that Aristotle makes onomata [names, which might be types of expression] limited, whereas it is lexeis [perhaps actual verbal utterances or token speech-acts] that Porphy-ry in Cat. 58.535, excerpted above, makes infinite). Aristotle also provides the locus classicus for the claim that one cannot go through an infinite number

29 Porphyry, in Cat. 58.5 ff., trans. Strange.30 Porphyry, Isagoge 1016, in Porphyry: Introduction, trans. J. Barnes (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 2013).31 Boethius, in Cat. 159b160b, in J. Magee, Boethius on Signification and Mind,

Philosophia antiqua 52 (Leiden: Brill, 1989).

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of things in thought (Post. An. 1.22, 82b36). This problem of infinity is dis-cussed as a puzzle by Middle Platonists and Peripatetics:

Alcinous. Learning cannot arise in any other way than by remem-bering what was formerly known. If we had in fact to start from particulars (kata meros) in forming our conception (enenooumen) of common qualities, how could we ever traverse the infinite series of particulars (dideusamen apeira), or alternatively how could we form such a conception on the basis of a small number?32

Alexander of Aphrodisias. We cannot get something through induction by going over all the particular cases (kata meros), since the particular cases are impossible to go through (adiexitta).33

(c) A solution, of sorts: Learning to cut reality

As we have seen earlier, one of the major sophistic puzzles that bore on this question in antiquity was the sorites attributed to Eubulides.34 I think that the Stoic treatment of the sorites and similar little-by-little puzzles like the Bald Man, structurally similar to the original paradoxes of Zeno of Elea, proves relevant to the problem above. Thus consider the Chrysippean response to the sorites:

32 Alcinous, Didasc 25.3.6, in Alcinous: The Handbook of Platonism, trans. J. Dil-lon, Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

33 Alexander of Aphrodisias, in Top. 86.2527.34 C. Atherton, The Stoics on Ambiguity, Cambridge Classical Studies (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),151 comments as follows:Recent scholarship has shown that the Soriteswhich for modern phi-losophers is a potential threat to the coherence of a wide variety of ostensibly vague predicates and concepts, was in antiquity exploited and understood as an epistemological puzzle, not as an ontological, concep-tual, or linguistic one; it was certainly so understood by the Stoa. Strictly speaking, the Stoa cannot be said to have eliminated vagueness, for the upshot of the schools (that is, Chrysippuss) response to the Sorites was that any vagueness people might experience is a result of their own sloppinessvagueness itself has no basis in reality, in theory, or in the languages that people useit is just not there to be eliminated. This