Subject: Re: "metaphysical and not phenomenology"?
Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2002 04:10:39 +0000


michaelP wrote:

>I'm not sure you've caught my drift here. As I read it, Aristotle means to
>institute a philosophy, not another dialectic and not another physics, as 
>he
>says:
>
>"It's [being's] attributes and contrarieties are the province of no science
>but philosophy; not of physics, which studies things not qua being but qua
>sharing in motion, nor of dialectic [Plato] or sophistic, which study the
>attributes of things that are [beings], but not qua being." [Metaphysics
>'Aspects of Being Qua Being' -- sorry I have a version translated by John
>Warrington that doesn't seem to enable me to specify exact positions in the
>text...]
>
>In such a delimitation Aristotle marks off another part of being (what the
>other sciences and practices leave aside, take for granted, ignore in order
>to get on with their business) just as the special sciences do, and he 
>calls
>this 'philosophy'. It seems to me that his intention (to inaugurate
>philosophy as apart from science and dialectic) because it deals with what
>is left out, a remainder, has resulted in an other science like the special
>sciences (because he has marked off a special topic, 'being-qua-being', 
>that
>the others have not [cannot] marked off) -- only broader, broadest, in 
>scope
>and generality. Another way of putting this is that he has failed to show
>how his very inauguration of philosophy has itself been in the grip of 
>being
>itself (but being-qua-being has once again been left out, strangely by
>making it a topic, taking it up as if an other thing) -- i.e.,
>philosophy is.
>
>And that's where my original point about the ontological difference comes 
>to
>bear: in Aristotle's institution of philosophy he has ignored being itself
>by making it the topic of a new bigger science, metaphysics: the science of
>beingness (i.e., an other area of beings and their attributes).

Even if you disagree with Aristotle about that, I don’t think what he says 
is all that strange. The explicit condition Aristotle gives for first 
philosophy being "a new bigger science" is the existence of beings other 
than physical ones. In other words, if there are non-physical beings, then 
obviously being in general must be more universal than just physical being, 
which means that the investigation of being qua being must be more universal 
than, and therefore not the same as, the investigation of being qua mobile. 
Otherwise, he says, if the only beings were physical ones, the first science 
would then simply be physics.

Anthony Crifasi

_________________________________________________________________
Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com



     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---