Jaakko Hintikka Ta Meta Ta Metaphysika: The Argumentative Structure of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

In the pages of the forthcoming Library of Living Philosophers volume devoted to my work,1 there is an exchange between Simo Knuuttila and myself concerning the methodology of the history of ideas. One of the central issues in that exchange is the admissibility and significance of systematic ideas and results for the purpose of historical interpretation and other understanding. We agree happily about the admissibility, but subsequently I have come to think that in that exchange I did not emphasize strongly enough the value—sometimes amounting to indispensability—of topical insights for a full understanding of critical issues even when they are doctrinally incommensurable with the theses of our own contemporaries. It is not only that systematic insights may be used as an integral part of historical interpretation. Sometimes they must be so used. And this “sometimes” includes (I hold) some of the most important issues in the history of philosophy. In this respect I have been putting my pen where my mouth is, in essaying inter- pretations of such topics as the Cartesian cogito2 and Kant’s theory of mathematics.3 It nevertheless seems to me that even more important case studies are in the offing. Here I will be dealing with only one target of historical interpretation, to wit, Aristotle’s meta- physics. I am bold (or foolhardy) enough to maintain that recent systematic insights enable us to see the dynamics of Aristotle’s science of “being qua being,” including its main tenets, the problems that led Aristotle to those views, the interplay of his different theses, the tensions between the different strands in his thought, and the seeds of future developments. Fulfilling such a promise cannot be done within one paper. It would require at least a major tome, not to say a lifetime’s work.4 What I can do here is to sketch briefly the outlines of my interpretation, without attempting anything like a full documentation. It probably will not come as a surprise that some of my leading ideas come from logical and semantical analyses (and syntheses).

1 Auxier (forthcoming). 2 See Hintikka (1962)and(1996). 3 For a discussion, see Webb (forthcoming). 4 The traditional discussions are surveyed and prominently contributed to among others by Aubenque (1962), Owens (1963)andIrwin(1988).

Vesa Hirvonen, Toivo J. Holopainen & Miira Tuominen (eds.), Mind and Modality: Studies in the History of Philosophy in Honour of Simo Knuuttila. Leiden: Brill, 2006. 42 jaakko hintikka

Needless to say, utilizing such sources does not seem to be much of a novelty. For Aristotle, metaphysics is a study of being. Hence distinctions between different varieties of being predictably play a major role in Aristotle’s metaphysics, and indeed in any ambitious metaphysics. And Aristotle himself presents what looks like the most fundamental distinction of this kind, viz. the distinction between different categories, each with its characteristic variety of being. This doctrine of the different categories does indeed occupy a prominent place in Aristotle’s metaphysics. For one thing, it poses one of the crucial questions in Aristotle’s science of being qua being, viz. how there can be a study of being as such when any one use of the notion of being inevitably falls into, and is apparently restricted to, some one category. In the harsh light of contemporary logical semantics, Aristotle’s doctrine of categories can be seen to be a logico-semantical rather than metaphysical doctrine. It is a chapter in the logic of natural language. In such a language, quantifiers usually do not range over some fixed universe of discourse. In the modern jargon, they are restricted quantifiers, occurring as ingredients of quantifier phrases. Such phrases are exemplified by

(1)SomeXwhoY.

In order to understand (1), we must know what entities the quantifier ranges over. Differences between the largest non-overlapping ranges separate different senses (or uses) of the notion of being from each other. These differences can be indicated in different ways. They are indicated by the kind of predicate X is, or by the question word or phrase (what, where, when, …). Hence four distinctions coincide in Aristotle’s theory of categories: between the widest genera (i.e. widest ranges of quantifiers), between different senses of being, between different predicabilia, and between different questions one can ask about an entity. These four things match the different ways in which Aristotle speaks about his categories, and their parallelism relieves us of the question as to which of them Aristotle “really” meant. In any case, the distinction is predominantly logico-semantical. It tells little about the actual structure of beings, for instance about how the modes of being in the different categories are related to each other. More generally speaking, category distinctions pose a problem for a metaphysician who wants to develop a theory about all beings. How can such a theory or science be possible when the scope of each science is apparently restricted to one category only? Some influential scholars, most prominently the late G.E.L. Owen, have seen a key to an answer to this question in a logical device they label “focal meaning” or πρ$ς 0ν multiplicity of senses, in this case of different senses of being.5 But πρ$ς 0ν ambiguity (if

5 See Owen (1988), especially ch. 10.