Metaphysics
...) has myriad senses, as do its cognates “being” (on) and “entities” or “things” (onta). Ergo, the collective science of “being qua being” appears to founder on an equivocation: Can there be one science of being when the very term “being” burgeons on ambivalent? However, Aristotle shall persuade all benevolent readers that, rather, the several implications of “being” have, what Aristotle calls, a ‘pros hen’ haziness — they are all correlated to a sole innermost sense. Aristotle elucidates his assertion by examples that he feels are analogous to the word “being”. Aristotle contemplates the terms “healthy” and “medical”. Neither words have a single meaning that operates homogeneously to all cases i.e. not every healthy entity is healthy in the same sense of “healthy”. There are copious things that can be seen as “healthy”: people, diets, exercise, et cetera. Regardless, all of these are healthy in the same sense. An underlying, pertinent meaning — exercise is healthy in the significance of being constructive of health, a fair skin texture is healthy in the sense of being symptomatic of health, and a man is healthy in the sense of encompassing good health. “Being” has an initial sense as well as related senses in which it pertains to other things, since they are suitably connected to things that are identified as “beings” in the primary sense. Beings in their primacy are substances; the beings in other senses are the qualities, quantities, etc., (all of which matriculate into attributes) that belong to substances. Hence, much like the trope “health”, “being” also possesses a core of meaning, moreover, this central sense comes to be akin to “separate” and “sensible” substances — an assertion that may appear to run converse to the axiom res ipsa loquitor, (let the thing speak for itself) but shall prove to be apropos, in the teleological sense. The seventeen chapters that comprise Book Z of the Metaphysics, Aristotle endeavors into the pledged query of substance. Aristotle starts by recapping and redefining what he avowed in : “being” is said in multi-faceted ways, and the principal gist of “being” is the sense in which substance are beings. However, he unambiguously connects the minor senses of “being” to the non-substance groupings. The primacy of substance makes Aristotle ask the age-old question “What is being?” and unite it inextricably with the query, “What is substance?” (1028b4). A subject, Aristotle persuades, is “that of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else” (1028b36). This depiction of a subject is evocative of the patois of the Categories, which maintains a primary substance is not predicated on anything else, while all other things are predicated on it. The aforesaid leads to the declaration that the first substance needs to be the ‘unmoved mover’ that Aristotle intimates at in Λ, “neither the mater ...