Status Updates From Catégories - De l’interprét...

Finishing De Interpretatione soon. What a great mind Aristotle was!

Ça se lit vite, en vrai, c’est sympa. J’aime bien la clarté sur les propositions (qui est l’essentiel des parties du traité), ça fait réfléchir un peu.

For Aristotle, the statement that good is bad is less wrong than the statement that good is not good, since the former holds only accidentally, whereas the latter is wrong about it as it is in itself

Does possibility follow from necessity? If no, what is necessary is not possible to be or possible not to be, since possibility has to be negated in the follow-up. Discussion of capabilities(such as of being) follows: Possibility applies to changeable becomings only, while actuality admits of being. So, for necessary to be possible there has to be a capability for being, and not just becoming. ahaha

"Here "to be" serves as subject while "to be possible" and "to be admissible are additions-these determining the possible and not possible in the case of "to be", just as in the previous cases "to be" and "not to be" determine the true"

When being becomes subject, it is determined in terms of modality. Also how about statements like "It is possible/necessary/whatever that "Moon is in the sky" is a true statement".

modal sentences can take subjects like "a Man shall be late", the bare form of modality doesn't require anything else besides a grammatical one and can contain the proper sentence as an expression of whole state of affairs, where substance is defined. Like "it is possible that a man shall be late/is walking". In this sense it lies always above the "this". (in finnish you can also just say: IS possible that..!)

Modality of being has a different form of contradiction, different semantics than plain being: man is walking --> man is not walking rather than not-man is walking, but: it is possible to be --> it is impossible to be, rather than possible not to be. It seems modality creates a pretty rash inversion of normal semantics even in unpredictable ways. Here substance is taken up by mere modification of being.

"It is not true to say that what is not, since it is thought about, is something that is; for what is thought about it is not that it is, but that it is not"

"For example, Homer is something (say, a poet). Does it follow that he is
? No, for the "is" is predicated accidentally of Homer; for it is because he is a poet, not in its own right, that the "is" is predicated of Homer"

Theres an opposition between consistency/coherence and particularity or not-necessarily-allness, but even those who emphasize the idea every man is wise/not every man is wise have to refer to "every" and "man", where there is its own set of statements Man is wise/No man is wise, which in turn have to refer to "every" of something. V mysterious? The opposition is: [every/not every]/[this/not this], it comes in pairs

Every not-man does not recover vs a not-man does not recover...Negation when expressing universality of some subject turns out to express particularity rather than universal negation. Whereas: a man recovers - a not-man recovers, negation introduces the universality.

A statement, affirmation as well as negation, requires a verb, and verb signifies time. Compare this to time in "Categories" and the conclusions arising from it.

Not just vs. Not-Just, hypostatization of negation

Opposites of contradictory universal opposites are no longer contradictory compared to each other (every man - no man, not every man - some man). Very weird. Possibly a motivation for the major term of syllogism, but also the universal affirmation and negation are what first creates this harsh sense of contradiction.

(de interpretatione) What is being? For Aristotle, apparently it is distinguished by its role of adding a truth-value

The most interesting thing about Categories was the omnipresence of opposition in working out everything in it. In addition to what I already wrote, Aristotle's distinction between possession/privation and assertion/negation, with the former not being necessarily true or false and with the latter being necessarily so.

priority in number series as based on contingency of moving from 1 to 2 but not vice versa. Non-necessity as the essence of transition.

"And in virtue of its form each thing is said to be qualified somehow" So, shape is not actually part of the "this", since "this" is qualified as possessing certain shape. This makes the concept of substance very obscure, something akin to a pure plenitude, which is still isolable. Or just empty reference. But at the same time Aristotle proves that anti-substantialists have to presume it...Something about that.

Basically, substance allows relatives which allow quantity. So "this" is before quantities, too.

"Relatives seem to be simultaneous by nature" If quantity is that which admits the type of relatives equal/unequal and time is a quantity, time is essentially simultaneous.

"If there's no slave there's no master" re: relatives...since equal is a relative, we can say: if there's no equal, there's no unequal. How does this relate to the weirdness of quantities? Also: is this what Sartre meant when he was talking about objects turning to mere plenitude? Despite the stereotypes, Sarte had some knowledge which won't be noticed by trendy people.