Essays on Being This page intentionally left blank Essays on Being Charles H. Kahn 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Q in this volume Charles H. Kahn 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2008942643 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group ISBN 978-0-19-953480-7 13579108642 Acknowledgments These essays were previously published as follows: Essay 1 in Foundations of Language, 2 (1966), 245–65; Essay 2 in S. M. Stern, A. Houvani, and V. Brown (eds.), Islamic Philosophy and the Classical Tradition: Essays presented . to Richard Walzer, (Oxford: Cassirer, 1972), 141–58; Essay 3 in Archiv fu¨r Geschichte der Philosophie, 58 (1976), 323–34; Essay 4 in Phronesis, 26 (1981), 105–34; Essay 5 in Ancient Philosophy, 24 (2004), 381–405; Essay 6 in The Review of Metaphysics, 22 (1969), 700–24; Essay 7 in La Parole del Passato, 43 (1988), 237–61; Essay 8 in Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Alexander Mourelatos (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 81–93. I gratefully acknowledge permission for republication from Springer Verlag, University of South Carolina Press, Walter de Gruyter & Co., Koninklijke Brill NV, Ancient Philosophy, Review of Metaphysics, for Essays 1–6 respectively and Ashgate Publishing Company for Essay 8. The variations in presentation of Greek here reflect the different editorial policies of the original publications. For the convenience of readers, the pagination of the original papers is indicated in double square brackets, thus ½½ 245 . This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 1. The Greek Verb ‘To Be’ and the Concept of Being (1966) 16 2. On the Terminology for Copula and Existence (1972) 41 3. Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy (1976) 62 4. Some Philosophical Uses of ‘To Be’ in Plato (1981) 75 5. A Return to the Theory of the Verb Be and the Concept of Being (2004) 109 6. The Thesis of Parmenides (1969) 143 7. Being in Parmenides and Plato (1988) 167 8. Parmenides and Plato Once More (2002) 192 Postscript on Parmenides (2008) 207 Parmenides and physics. The direction of the chariot ride in the proem. The epistemic preference for Fire. Bibliography 219 Index of Names 227 This page intentionally left blank Introduction The papers reprinted here, published over a stretch of forty years, reXect my continuing concern with two distinct but intimately related problems, one linguistic and one historical and philosophical. The linguistic problem concerns the theory of the Greek verb to be: how to replace the conventional but misleading distinction between copula and existential verb with a more adequate theoretical account. The philosophical problem is in principle quite distinct: to understand how the concept of Being became the central topic in Greek philosophy from Parmenides to Aristotle. But these two problems converge on what I have called the veridical use of einai. In my earlier papers I took that connection between the verb and the concept of truth to be the key to the central role of Being in Greek philosophy. I think that clue pointed in the right direction, but I would now interpret the veridical in terms of a more general function of the verb that I call ‘semantic’, which comprises the notions of existence and instantiation as well as truth. More on that below. The veridical use was not a new discovery on my part. It had long been recognized by Hellenists that esti could mean ‘is true’ or ‘is the case’.1 However, the philosophical importance of this connection between the verb and the notion of truth seems to have been generally neglected. I think this neglect was due to the traditional assumption that uses of the verb could be assigned either to the copula or to the verb of existence. In terms of this distinction, the veridical use is an 1 Liddell-Scott-Jones illustrates the meaning ‘be the fact or the case’ in section A. III of its entry on Nìß, with examples from Herodotus and Thucydides. For a rare instance of scholarly attention to the role played by this use of the verb in Platonic texts see Burnet’s commentary on Phaedo 65c3, 66a3,c2. 2 charles h. kahn anomaly, since the syntax of the verb is absolute (without predicates) but the meaning is not ‘to exist’. I decided that, in order to understand the fundamental role played by the verb (and its nominal derivatives such as ousia) in the formulation of Greek philosophy, it was necessary to replace the copula–existence dichotomy with a more adequate account of the verb. Thus my linguistic study of to be was motivated by the desire to comprehend the philosophical concept of Being, and above all to understand why the introduction of this concept by Parmenides had such a profound and lasting impact on Greek phil- osophy. It was for philosophical reasons, then, because of the connection with truth, that the veridical use was at the center of my attention in these earlier publications. On the other hand, from a linguistic point of view the predicative function of the verb as copula had to be recognized as more fundamental. In the memorable phrase of G. E. L. Owen, to be in Greek is to be something or other. The copula use is not only the most frequent; it is also the natural basis for any uniWed account of the diverse system of uses of the verb. That was my conclusion from the description of these uses in my 1973 book. But at the time I did not see how best to formulate this conclusion. I could not claim chronological priority for the copula use, since there is absolutely no evidence that this use is older than the others. (The existential use occurs in the Rig-veda for the cognate verb; and the words for truth in Sanskrit and Scandinavian demonstrate that the veridical use is also prehistoric.) I was able to give a precise transformational statement for the priority of the copula only much later, when I had the opportunity to reformulate my account of the verb in the introduction to the reprinted book in 2003. (That account appears here as Chapter 5: ‘A Return to the Theory of the Verb be and the Concept of Being’.) The outcome is a strictly syntac- tical analysis, which takes the copula construction as the basic, Wrst- order use of the verb, but construes existential and veridical uses as second-order, semantic transforms from the copula construction. In addition, I now recognize a third semantic transformation, correspond- ing to an instantiation of the predicate concept (to be described below). Hence I propose now to replace the copula–existence dichotomy with a distinction between the syntactic role of the verb as copula and the semantic (extralinguistic) function of the verb as an expression of introduction 3 existence, instantiation, and truth. I will have more to say on this in Essay 5. My syntactical analysis is presented as a linguistic theory of the verb, not as a philosophical account of the concept of Being. On the other hand, this linguistic picture is designed to clarify, and also to be conWrmed by, the role of the verb in philosophy. Thus the fundamen- tal nature of the predicative function is neatly illustrated in Aristotle’s theory of the ten categories, which is a device for showing ‘how Being is said in many ways’: the syntax of the verb is copulative in every category. (What is it? How large is it? Of what quality is it? What is it related to? Where is it? and so forth.) From an entirely diVerent point of view, the basic importance of the predicative function appears again in Plotinus’ doctrine that Being (ousia) does not belong to his funda- mental principle of the One. The One does not have Being because it cannot have predicative structure. Subject–predicate structure would pluralize it, but the One admits no plurality. Note that in this argument einai itself is construed as the predicate, not simply as the copula. But the einai denied for the One cannot mean ‘to exist’. For Plotinus, if the One did not exist, nothing else could exist.