On Aristotle’s Notion of Existence

ARISTOTLE AS A DIALECTICIAN. Tom Nagel once wrote a paper on "What is it like to be a bat?" I am tempted to give this paper the somewhat less outlandish title "What would it be like to be Aristotle?" Notwithstanding the lip service some scholars have paid to the peculiarities of Aristotle's ways of thinking as compared with ours, I have seldom felt that a commentator has managed to get inside Aristotle's mind and made us grasp what made Aristotle tick--or, rather, think in the way he did. All too often Aristotle has been treated by twentieth century philosophers as if he were, to borrow an Oxonian phrase, just "a fellow of another college." The reason for such an alienation is not a lack of any intuitive Einfuhlung or intellectual sympathy in the eighteenth-century sense. It is not a Schelerian failure but a Collingwoodean one. It is typically a failure to grasp the problem context of Aristotle's thought and to grasp his ultimate presuppositions. In my earlier work, I have sought to identify some of his presuppositions and problems. Only some of them are relevant here. One interesting background feature of Aristotle's thinking about logic, reasoning and the scientific method is that he is considering such matters always in a dialectical context, in the sense of thinking of them on the model of question-answer dialogues not unlike the Socratic elenchus. That this was the model of Aristotle's methodology in the Topics is of course fairly obvious. Yet what is not usually noted is that Aristotle is still in the two Analytics thinking of the scientific method as an interrogative process, what constitutes the bridge between the overtly dialectical framework of the Topics and the syllogistic framework of the two Analytics is the idea that logical inferences are those answers to questions that are (as we would explain the matter) logically implied by the respondent's earlier answers. One example should be enough to show this. Right in the middle of explaining the nature of logically necessary inferences Aristotle suddenly catches himself and warns that such inferences are not the only steps of interrogative inquiry. Yet one might perhaps wonder what purpose there could be in asking [questions] about such items if it is not necessary for the conclusion to be the case--[apparently] you might as well ask an arbitrary question and then state the conclusion. Yet we should ask questions not on the grounds that the conclusion will be necessary because the [earlier] answers make the conclusion necessary, but rather because it is necessary for the person who accepts the proposals [that is, who answers the questions in the proposed way] to state the conclusion--and to state it truly if they hold truly.(3) I have modified Barnes' translation here in that I have taken the words [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in their most straightforward sense as meaning "because of what was asked earlier," that is, in effect, "because of the earlier answers." As far as Aristotle's "proposals" are concerned, according to him in a propositional question a preferred answer is proposed to the responder; see for example, Topics 1.4, especially 101b28-36. Most recent translators and commentators have had no inkling of what is going on in this passage. Out of desperation, some even try to insert a completely unsupported restriction to merely dialectical reasoning. Yet as soon as we realize that Aristotle is treating the entire inquiry, including deductive steps, as an interrogative process, what he says becomes crystal clear. What he is doing is to think of necessary inferences, too, as question-answer steps in an inquiry. They are the ones where the answer is necessitated by earlier answers. After all the attention he had lavished on such necessitated answers (alias conclusions of syllogisms) in the Prior Analytics and in the beginning of Posterior Analytics, he realized that he had to remind his audience of the framework in which he was operating, that is, to remind them of the truism that in an interrogative inquiry we also need non-necessitated answers. …