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E-book
Author Mann, Wolfgang-Rainer

Title The discovery of things : Aristotle's Categories and their context / Wolfgang-Rainer Mann
Published Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2000

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Description 1 online resource (xii, 231 pages)
Contents Cover Page -- Half-title Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Citations -- Introduction -- 1. The Project -- 2. The Problem -- 3. The Task of Part I: The Problem of Categories 1 and 2 -- 4. The Task of Part II: Plato's Metaphysics and the Status of Things -- 5. The Task of Part III: The Categories Once More-The Role of the '-onymies' -- 6. Final Methodological Preliminaries -- Part I. Setting the Stage: The ""Antepraedicamenta"" and the ""Praedicamenta -- 1. Preliminary Remarks: The Role of the First Two Chapters of the Treatise
2. The Definition of the '-onymies' -- 3. The Four Kinds of Eponymy -- 4. The Distinctions of Chapters 2 and 3 -- Appendix 1: Difficulties with the Received Text and a Role for Chapter 4 -- Appendix 2: Speusippus, the Speusippean '-onymies', and Topics 1, 15 -- Part II. Plato's Metaphysics and the Status of Things -- 1. Preliminary Remarks -- 2. Forms and Participants in Plato's Middle Dialogues -- 3. The Problem of Becoming -- 4. Three Difficulties for the Proposed Account of Becoming -- 5. Plato's Introduction of the Distinction between Being and Becoming
6. The Background to Plato's Special Use of 'Becoming' -- 7. The Participants: Plato and Anaxagoreanism -- 8. Self-Predication -- 9. The Being of the Participants: Preliminaries -- 10. The First Objection: Does Plato Distinguish between Essential and Accidental Properties? -- 11. The Second Objection: The Extent of Forms (and a Methodological Digression) -- 12. The Second Objection Continued: Forms and 'Incompleteness' -- 13. A Third Objection: Can Forms Be 'Ingredients'? -- 14. The Participants: Being and Becoming -- 15. The Late-Learners: Real Being for Ordinary Things
16. Does Plato Modify His Picture in Some Late Dialogues? -- Part III. The Categories Picture once More: an Alternative to Platonism And Late-Learnerism -- 1. Aristotle's Introduction of Paronymy -- 2. Some Difficulties -- 3. The ""Antepraedicamenta"" as an Introduction to the ""Praedicamenta"": The Project of the Categories Reconsidered -- Epilogue -- Select Bibliography -- Index Locorum -- Index Rerum
Summary Aristotle's Categories can easily seem to be a statement of a naïve, pre-philosophical ontology, centered around ordinary items. Wolfgang-Rainer Mann argues that the treatise, in fact, presents a revolutionary metaphysical picture, one Aristotle arrives at by (implicitly) criticizing Plato and Plato's strange counterparts, the "Late-Learners" of the Sophist. As Mann shows, the Categories reflects Aristotle's discovery that ordinary items are things (objects with properties). Put most starkly, Mann contends that there were no things before Aristotle. The author's argument consists of two main elements. First, a careful investigation of Plato which aims to make sense of the odd-sounding suggestion that things do not show up as things in his ontology. Secondly, an exposition of the theoretical apparatus Aristotle introduces in the Categories--an exposition which shows how Plato's and the Late-Learners' metaphysical pictures cannot help but seem inadequate in light of that apparatus. In doing so, Mann reveals that Aristotle's conception of things--now so engrained in Western thought as to seem a natural expression of common sense--was really a hard-won philosophical achievement. Clear, subtle, and rigorously argued, The Discovery of Things will reshape our understanding of some of Aristotle's--and Plato's--most basic ideas
Analysis Abstract Nouns
Academy, The
Aspect, verbal
Becoming
Beings
Cave Analogy
Clusters
Common Sense
Count Terms
Divisibility
Dream Theory, the so-called
Elements
Entities
Essentialism: mereological
Expressions
Features
Genera
Heteronymy: generic notion of
Homonymy: Aristotle's notion of
Identity (through time)
Incompleteness
Ingredients: Anaxagoras's conception of
Late-Learners, the
Linnaean Trees
Mass-Terms
Mixtures
Multiformity: Anaxagorean version of
Names
Natural Kinds
Natures
Non-Count Terms
Nonsubstance Categories
Objects
One-Over-Many Principle
Ordinary Language
Parmenides
Paronymy
Participation
Platonic Forms
Predicate Nouns
Qualified Things
Qualities
Receptacle, The
Replacement, versus Change
Self-Predication (SP)
Sortal Terms
Stuffs and Quasi-Stuffs
Tests, Linguistic
Things
Uniformity: Anaxagorean version of
Unity: genuine
Whole(s)
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and indexes
Subject Aristotle. Categoriae.
SUBJECT Aristotele. Categorie
Categoriae (Aristotle) fast
Subject Categories (Philosophy) -- History
PHILOSOPHY / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical
Categories (Philosophy)
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2021694881
ISBN 9780691221595
0691221596