Sorglose Nacht

Overview

After the critique of innate notions in Book I of the Essay, Book II sets forth Locke’s theory of ideas.

Because Book II is quite long, these notes focus primarily on what I understand to be the Book’s most salient chapters (with regard to Hume and subsequently to Kant, which is where I’m going). Generally speaking, the focus is on the Locke’s doctrines of simple and complex ideas, of primary and secondary qualities, and finally his still interesting theories of general and personal identity.

Again, these notes are made on a copy of the Essay usefully excerpted by Jonathan Bennett.

Outline

Chapter I: Ideas in General, and their Origin

1. Since it is beyond doubt that we have ideas, the first question is “how do we acquire them?” Locke’s critique of innate ideas will be received more favorably, he thinks, once he shows how ideas can be acquired.
2. Suppose the mind starts out blank, “like white paper.” If this is so, experience can fill it with ideas. Experience has two forms: (1) experience of things outside the mind and (2) experience of the mind reflecting on its internal operations.
   1. Sensation is the vehicle which conveys to the mind things in the world that produce perceptions (ideas).
   2. Reflection is a type of “inner sense.” By reflecting or becoming conscious of the operations of our mind - believing, reasoning, willing, knowing, etc. - we get a distinct set of ideas that are not triggered by sensations of things in the world.
3. Now Locke then challenges the reader to “search into his understanding” and see whether he has any ideas other than those of sensation and reflection.
4. Locke believes that empirical research into child development supports this theory. Children, he believes, develop ideas of qualities by experiencing them in the world, and eventually cataloging them in memory.
5. How many simple ideas a person has depends for ideas of sensation on what variety there is among the external objects that he perceives, and for ideas of reflection on how much he reflects on the workings of his own mind.
6. This reflection requirement is why it is quite late before most children get ideas of the operations of their own minds, and why some people never acquire any very clear or perfect ideas of most of their mental operations. Unlike the objects of external experience, we are not forced to turn inward and reflect on the mechanism of our thoughts (Locke likens them to the parts of a clock - we can experience the clock without ever having a clear idea of how it works).
7. Since perceptions are the same thing as ideas, people have ideas as soon as they can perceive things.
8. For some rationalists, as long as the soul exists, it actually thinks (much like actual extension is coextensive with the existence of the body).
   1. Contrarily, Locke believes that the perception of ideas is to the soul like motion (as opposed to extension) is to the body. That is, it is not something essential to it, but rather something it sometimes does.
   2. It is at least not self-evident, Locke thinks we can all agree, that the soul always thinks.
9. On the contrary, Locke thinks that when we are asleep, the soul isn’t thinking. If the soul is in some state of thought while the body is sleeping, and when that body wakes, it has no consciousness of those states, then the sleeping and unsleeping version of Socrates seem to be two different people (insofar as they have different sets of mental experience, presumably).
   1. Since we know some people sleep without dreaming, and since it is implausible that someone would think of something for several hours and be able to give no account of it, it is likely that during that time, the person is not thinking at all.
   2. He carries on about this at some length, the basic drift being several versions of the argument that, “Nature never makes excellent things for trivial uses or for no use; and it is hardly to be conceived that…the power of thinking…is so idly and uselessly employed, at least a quarter of the time.”
   3. He writes of thoughts that we do sometimes have in our sleep and remember after waking, pointing out that they are mostly “extravagant and incoherent.” He says that his present opponents, faced with this evidence, will have to say that the soul thinks better when employing the body (in waking, i.e.) that when thinking “apart” from the body. He evidently thinks that this is an intolerable conclusion.
   4. The discussion gradually moves to the thesis that the soul thinks only when it has ideas to think with, and allowing him to return to the discussion of how ideas are acquired. So, finally, the chapter circles back.
10. Since there don’t appear to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have conveyed some in, Locke concludes that the understanding arises at the same time as sensation.
    1. In time the mind “comes to reflect on its own dealing with the ideas acquired from sensation, and thereby stores up a new set of ideas” (ideas of reflection).
    2. Note that this means that in getting ideas, the understanding is passive. It cannot refuse the sense data it receives.

Chapter II: Simple Ideas

1. Some ideas are simple. Some are complex. Simple ideas cannot be broken down into smaller component ideas. His examples are sensory: softness, warmth, whiteness, sugariness, etc.
   1. “Nothing can be plainer,” he marks, than the “clear and distinct perception” of simple ideas.
2. Simple ideas are supplied to the mind by sensation and reflection.
   1. Stocked with simple ideas, the understanding can “repeat, compare, and unite them” in an almost infinite variety of ways, thus making new complex ideas.
   2. No one, though, can invent a simple idea - these only come through sensation and reflection - nor force the understanding to destroy those that it has acquired.
3. While it seems sure that there are other possible senses than our five (or six, Locke teases), we, constrained as we are, cannot imagine qualities outside of those delivered by these particular, contingent senses that we actually do have.

Chapter VIII: Some further ideas concerning our simple ideas

1. When an object causes the mind to have a perception, the perception is a positive idea, regardless of whether the quality which is being perceived is positive or negative.
   1. E.g. heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest, are all equally clear positive ideas in the mind, despite the fact that one of each pair is (qua the object itself) a mere privation.
   2. To explain this he appeals to the experience of perceiving a shadow: “the shadow of a man consists of nothing but the absence of light, but doesn’t it cause in an observer as clear and positive an idea as does the man whose shadow it is, even though he is bathed in sunshine? And the picture of a shadow is a positive thing.”
   3. Now, if a person can be said to truly see darkness, it is hard to know for sure whether darkness is any more a privation than light is, and thus whether there really are any ideas from a privative cause.
2. For reasons of intelligibility and convenience, it will be useful to distinguish the idea of a thing as it exists in our minds, and the thing itself as it exists in the world.
   1. Call the immediate object of perception an “idea”, and call the power to produce an idea inherent in an object a quality. (E.g. a snowball has whiteness, coldness qualities insofar as it produces white and cold ideas in our minds).
3. There are two kinds of qualities: those that are utterly inseparable from the body, whatever state it is in - primary qualities - and those that that “are really nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities” - secondary qualities.
   1. E.g. An ice cube has the primary qualities solidity, extension, shape, rest, and number, and these produce corresponding simple ideas in us.
   2. Our ice cube also has the secondary qualities of coldness, slipperiness, taste, etc.
   3. A third kind of quality may be called a “power”. Powers are those things by which the primary qualities of a body (e.g. fire) give it a power to affect another body (e.g. wax) in a way as to change the sensible properties of the latter.
4. How do bodies produce ideas in us? Obviously they do it by impact.
   1. But, since external objects are not directly touching our minds, there must be some bodies too small to be seen individually that go from the object to our sense-organ.
   2. We can conceive of these very small particles as conveyances of secondary qualities also (smell, taste, etc.)
   3. But, where the ideas of the primary qualities of bodies resemble them (they exist in the bodies themselves), the ideas of secondary qualities don’t resemble them at all.
   4. “What is sweet, blue, or warm in idea is nothing but the particular size, shape, and motion of the imperceptible parts in the bodies that we call ’sweet’, ‘blue’, or ‘warm’.”
5. Arguments against secondary quality inherence
   1. This only makes sense, too, because while it might be sensible to imagine that an icicle inherently contains the quality “cold”, it seems less sensible to imagine that it contains the quality “pain”, even though I could stab you with one.
   2. Consider a stone that is red and white in the light. Prevent light from reaching the stone, and its colours vanish. Can anyone think that any real alterations are made in the stone by the presence or absence of light?
   3. Imagine that one of your hands is very cold. Now imagine you put both hands in water. The water feels hot to one of your hands (the cold one) and cold to the other.
6. So the qualities that are in bodies are of three sorts.
   1. Primary - the size, shape, number, position, and motion or rest of their solid parts. These are in bodies whether or not we perceive them.
   2. Secondary - the ideas of colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc.. These are the power that a body has, by reason of its imperceptible primary qualities, to operate in a special way on one of our senses.
   3. Powers - the power that a body has, by virtue of the particular set-up of its primary qualities, to change the size, shape, texture or motion of another body so as to make the latter operate on our senses differently from how it did before.
   4. Though the two latter sorts of qualities are merely powers, secondary qualities are often otherwise thought of as akin to primary qualities. However, by understanding one’s self as merely another body on which an object acts, one can easily see that secondary qualities work one’s senses precisely as the powers of one body (fire) work another (wax).
   5. The second sort of qualities “may be called secondary qualities, immediately perceivable,” and the third sort “secondary qualities, mediately perceivable.”

Chapter XXIII: Our complex ideas of substances

1. Our complex ideas of substances
   1. The mind is supplied with many simple ideas, and sometimes, when it perceives several simple ideas together regularly, it presumes that they are one thing (with one name).
   2. Then we “carelessly talk as though we had here one simple idea, though really it is a complication of many ideas together.”
   3. We become acclimated to the idea then that these simple ideas are reliant on some substratum, which we call substance.
   4. Pure substance is thus merely the supposition of an unknown support of the qualities that cause simple ideas.
   5. From this we form a “relative” idea of substance in general - that is, our idea of it consists only in how it relates to other things, it has no non-relational content.
   6. From there, we move to the idea of several substances, which are defined by regularly repeating combinations of simple idea producing substances: man, horse, gold, water.
   7. Hence, Our complex ideas of substances are made up of those simple ideas plus the confused idea of some thing to which they belong and in which they exist.
2. When we think of any particular sort of corporeal substance - a stone, e.g. - although our idea of it is nothing but the collection of simple ideas of qualities that we usually find united in the thing called a stone, we think of these qualities as existing in and supported by some common subject.
   1. We give this support the name “substance,” though we have no clear or distinct idea of what it is.
   2. We are led to think in this way because we can’t conceive how qualities could exist unsupported or with only one another for support.
   3. The same goes for the functions of mind, whose substratum we call spirit. We have an equally foggy idea of spiritual substance as we have of bodily substance.
3. The most perfect idea of any particular sort of substance results from putting together most of the simple ideas that do exist in it.
   1. §7-8 is an apology for the remainder of this section referring to all powers as simple ideas for brevity’s sake. They are not actually simple, Locke cautions, but they are “simpler than the complex ideas of kinds of substance, of which they are merely parts.”
4. Again, recall that our complex ideas of bodily substances are made up of primary, secondary, and (passive and active) powers. (E.g. your complex idea of gold involves the power of being melted without being burned away, etc.)
   1. And again, secondary qualities are also powers, this time powers of affecting us, e.g. gold’s “color” is its power to induce the sensation of that color in us.
   2. As further evidence that these secondary qualities are relational, e.g. the color of something appears quite different to the naked eye as it does under a microscope.
   3. Locke is inclined to believe that God has “suited our organs to the bodies that are to affect them, and vice versa.” E.g. if our senses were much more or less acute, Locke observes, we would be less adapted for survival, despite the additional depth of knowledge we may acquire from such senses.
   4. §13 is a great tangent, in which Locke imagines angels that can “flex” their senses (vary their acuteness of perception). He is somewhat obviously jealous of these conjectural angels, but admits that God must have his reasons.
5. Besides the complex ideas we have of material, sensible substances, we can also form the complex idea of immaterial mental (”spiritual”) subject from the simple ideas we have through our minds’ operations (e.g. thinking, willing, understanding, knowing).
   1. Empirical knowledge is always knowledge of both some stuff in the world and of some mindly processes which cohere into the idea of a thinking subject (Locke: a “spiritual” or “immaterial thinking” being).
   2. Again, we /really/ know about as much about bodies as we do about immaterial spirit.
      1. Bodies uniquely have the basic ideas of (1) holding together parts that are solid and therefore separable, and (2) of causing things to move by colliding with them.
      2. Spirit uniquely has the basic ideas of (1) thinking, (2) will - putting body into motion by thought, and (3) liberty.
      3. Bodies and spirit share the basic ideas of (1) existence, (2) duration, and (3) mobility (note that the mind has to go when the body does, and, Locke notes, also has to leave the body at death).
   3. Neither the idea of body (extended thing) nor that of spirit (thinking thing) is very clear.
      1. Body is “an extended solid substance, capable of transferring motion by impact.”
      2. Spirit is “a substance that thinks, and has a power of making a body move, by willing or thought.”
      3. If anyone says “I don’t know how I think,” I respond that he also doesn’t know how he is extended, that is, how his parts cohere.
6. The next three sections deal with the problem of parts cohering. Namely, we don’t have a compelling hard stop for the regress of progressively smaller particles that we use to explain the coherence of each set of immediately bigger particles. (E.g. we explain water wrt molecules and molecules wrt atoms and atoms wrt … etc.)
   1. §27 addresses the appeal to surrounding pressures: if things get held together by pressure, what’s holding the entire finite universe together?
7. From here, Locke addresses bodies’ other quality, the power of transferring motion by impact (alongside the soul’s power of inducing bodily motion by thought). Locke here suggests that we have no more empirically-derivable knowledge about how bodies transfer motion from one to another than we do about how minds transfer motion to bodies.
   1. In fact, minds moving bodies is actually more comprehensible than other bodies doing it, because we intuit that minds have exclusive claim on the active power of moving, and objects on the passive power.
   2. Since minds (created spirits) are not separate from matter, they are both active and passive. God is totally active.
   3. In conclusion: Sensation convinces us that there are solid extended substances, and reflection that there are thinking ones. Experience assures us that one has a power to move body by impact, the other by thought. “That much is sure, and we have clear ideas of it; but beyond those we cannot go.”
   4. So, in sum, “we have as much reason to be satisfied with our notion of immaterial spirit as with our notion of body, and of the existence of the one as well as of the other.”
8. Finally, it may be hard to conceive how thinking could occur without matter, but it’s at least as hard to conceive how matter could think.
   1. We can build up an idea of God as infinitely powerful, wise, etc. through a general procedure that involves taking simple ideas from the operations of our own minds and from exterior things and enlarging them to infinity. (E.g. I know something. From that, I conjecture that I can know twice as many things. And then twice as many again. Etc. And the same way for magnitude/perfection of knowledge.)
   2. “It is infinity - joined to existence, power, knowledge, etc. - that makes our complex idea of God … God may be simple and uncompounded, still our only idea of him is a complex one whose parts are the ideas of existence, knowledge, power, happiness, etc. - all this infinite and eternal.”
   3. §36 brings the angels back, suggesting that we can imagine them as posessing qualities to a degree and extent between those of ours and God. Angels also provide, he thinks, further evidence that we are limited to knowledge by reflection and sensation - we cannot imagine how to communicate or know in a way that is not embodied.
9. The existence, configuration, and genesis of our ideas of substances make three things evident:
   1. All our ideas of substances are collections of simple ideas, along with the supposition of some unclarified substratum (substance).
   2. All of these simple ideas are received either by sensation or by reflection.
   3. Most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances are really only ideas of powers, however apt we are to interpret them as ideas of positive qualities.

Chapter XXVII: Identity and Diversity

1. Leading up to xxvii, Locke had been talking about our understanding of various relational properties (duration, place, etc.) Now he introduces identity, in which we compare something at time t1 with itself at t2.
   1. Two things can’t exist in the same place at the same time, nor can one thing exist in two places at once.
2. We have ideas of three types of substances: God, finite intelligences, and bodies.
   1. God is without beginning, eternal, unalterable, and everywhere; and so there can be no doubt concerning his identity.
   2. Finite spirits and bodies have determinate times and places of beginning to exist. Each one’s relation to it’s beginning time and place will determine its identity for as long as it exists.
   3. While we can conceive of overlap of all three kinds (e.g. God, a person, and some matter can occupy the same space), we can’t conceive that two of any single kind can occupy the same place at the same time.
   4. Modes and relations ultimately depend upon substances and therefore the identity and diversity of each of them will be determined in the same way as the identity of particular substances.
   5. Finally questions of identity and diversity don’t arise for things whose existence consists in a succession of events, such as actions (thought, movement) - these are ephemeral, and don’t have the requisite parts for identity, namely substantiality.
3. Hence, the principle of individuation is “existence itself,” by which a being is tied to an unsharable particular place and time.
   1. While this seems straightforward qua simple substances, it seems equally clear that you can’t just linearly apply it to complex ones. E.g. a living creature is self-identical throughout periods of fatness and thinness.
   2. This imples that such an identity doesn’t depend on merely accounting for the same particles at different times.
4. So, for one mass of matter (an oak tree): where the mass of matter is merely a cohesion of particles, the oak tree is the disposition of particles such that they consist in an individual life.
5. If we imagine a watch whose parts are “repaired, added to, or subtracted from, by a constant addition or separation of imperceptible parts, with one common life, it would be very much like the body of an animal.” The unique bit of animality being that motion comes from within, not without.
6. If you don’t conceive identity as the participation of some matter in a unified life, your only recourse to an intuitive concept of identity is by the soul.
   1. But if you do this, then you run the risk of leaving open the possibility that a single soul has inhabited many men over time (e.g. that Socrates, Pilate, and St. Augustine are the same man).
7. So there are at least three different types of identities: “it is one thing to be the same substance, another the same man [e.g. animal], and a third the same person.” (Assuming these three are different ideas.)
   1. To be clear, although man is an animal, the idea of a “rational animal” is wrong. There’s a long story about a rational parrot here. The point is that even if you believe there was a rational parrot, it’s still a parrot, not a man, and hence, rationality is not necessarily exclusively criterial for man-ness.
8. So much for the identity of a unified life (animal/man identity). Now, what about “same person”?
   1. Well, what’s a person? Locke thinks it is a “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing at different times and places.”
   2. The enabling faculty for this is consciousness: “Consciousness always accompanies thinking, and makes everyone to be what he calls ’self’ and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things; in this alone consists personal identity…”
9. While it may be reasonable to question whether (e.g. you or I) are self-identitical thinking substances (res cogitans) - e.g.when we are asleep, or focused on the present moment, or forgetful - this is not the same question as whether we are self-identical as persons.
   1. What makes a person self-identically him- or herself is his or her selfsame consciousness, regardless of whether the consciousness is tied to one substance (res cogitans, again) throughout.
   2. The classic appeal to amputation: if I cut off your hand, you’re still the same person, hence, personal identity isn’t constituted substantially.
   3. If you hold that thought is instantiated immaterially, you can appeal to a sameness of immaterial substance as criterial for personal identity, but these immaterialists have to explain why personal identity /couldn’t/ be preserved through a change of immaterial substance (since, by analogy, animal identity - unity of an individual life - can be preserved through a change of material substance).
   4. Either way, until we have a clearer idea of the nature of thinking substances, “we had better assume that such changes of substance within a single person never do in fact happen, basing this on the goodness of God. Having a concern for the happiness or misery of his creatures, he won’t transfer from one (substance) to another that consciousness that draws reward or punishment with it.”
   5. Locke finally dismisses reincarnation theories: his thought experiment involves showing that while it is logically possible that you and Nestor share a soul, you can’t really conceive of yourself and Nestor as one identical person.
10. Let’s now agree that the some sort of non-stringent body identity settles the “man” question. Hence, the same immaterial substance or soul does not by itself necessarily make the same man. Although this is the case, it is clear that consciousness unites actions into the same person, and thus is the basis of selfhood.
11. Personal identity is the basis for the justice of reward and punishment.
    1. “…to punish Socrates awake for something done by sleeping Socrates without Socrates awake ever being conscious of it would be as unjust as to punish someone for an action of his twin brother’s merely because their outsides were so alike that they couldn’t be distinguished.”
    2. If one man could have distinct disconnected consciousnesses at different times, that same man would be different persons at different times.
    3. This is intuitively understood by the fact that someone’s insanity can legally disprove their guilt: we don’t punish the sane man for what the madman did; they are treated as two persons.
    4. Meanwhile, we sometimes justly punish sober men for their bad actions while drunk, Locke thinks, because while their bad actions are proved against them, their lack of consciousness of those actions can’t be proved for them. It’s a sort of rough and ready juridical heuristic.
12. Whatever substance there is, and whatever it is like, there is no person without consciousness.
    1. On the question of contingent fact, “the more probable opinion is that this consciousness is tied to, and is a state of, a single immaterial substance.”
13. “Person” is a legalistic name for a self which applies only to active, thinking beings capable of law, happiness and misery.
    1. Through consciousness, this personality is concerned and accountable for its past and present actions.
    2. That concern and ownership derives from a fundamental concern for happiness which necessarily accompanies consciousness.
14. Thus, it appears that the obscurity that people have found in matters of identity has arisen from the sloppy thinking rather than from any obscurity in things themselves. To wit:
    1. Any substance that begins to exist must necessarily be the same substance so long as it continues to exist.
    2. Any complex of substances that begins to exist must during the existence of its component parts be the same.
    3. Any mode that begins to exist is throughout its existence the same.
15. The general point is that the complex idea we use when classifying a thing as being of a certain kind also determines what it is for a thing of that kind to continue in existence.
    1. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit”: then it is easy to know what is the same man, namely the same spirit - whether or not it is embodied.
    2. Suppose a man is a “rational spirit vitally united to a body with a certain structure”: then such a rational spirit will be the same man as long as it is united to such a body, though it needn’t always be the same body.
    3. Suppose a man is a “vital union of parts in a certain shape”: as long as that vital union and shape remain in a compound body, remaining the same except for a turnover in its constituent particles, it will be the same man.

Overview

Primary Truths was written shortly after Leibniz’s famous Discourse on Metaphysics, which places it about ten years after Freedom and Possibility, five before A New System, and almost twenty five before the mature position in the Monadology and the Principles of Nature and Grace.

This essay importantly develops at least two of Leibniz’s fundamental principles, the so-called “Predicate-in-Notion Principle” (PIN: that the notion of the predicate is in some way included in that of the subject - cf. §2.a below) and the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernables (PII), which he indicates here is derivable from combination of the Principles of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and Contradiction (PC) (cf. §4 below).

Brandon Look explains the implicit argument nicely:

1. Suppose there were two indiscernible individuals, a and b, in our world, W.
2. If this were the case, then there must also be a possible world, W^*, in which a and b are "switched".
3. But if this were the case, then God could have had no reason for choosing W over W^*.
4. But God must have a reason for acting as he does. (PSR)
5. Therefore, our original supposition must be false. There are not two indiscernible individuals in our world. (PII)

Outline

1. The primary truths are identities (A is A, everything is similar or equal to itself).
2. All other truths are reducible to these identities by resolving their definitions into their (progressively simpler) component propositions. This is called an a priori proof.
   1. Predicate in Notion Principle (PIN): Since all truths follow from primary truths, it follows that in any true proposition the predicate is always in the subject.
   2. This is the case for every (necessary or contingent) affirmative truth, and this tells us something about the nature of contingency and the challenges in thinking necessity (the fate of the free, e.g.).
3. The principle of sufficient reason
   1. Take this axiom: “There is no effect without a cause/Nothing is without reason.” (PSR, see Overview) If this were false, then there would be a truth that couldn’t be proved a priori (couldn’t resolve into identities). So, if this is false, Leibniz’s theory of truth is false. So, this follows from Leibniz’s theory of truth.
   2. This also applies to symmetries: Symmetry will follow from symmetry.
   3. Finally, there is even a reason about eternal truths. Imagine that we live in a world constituted by tiny spheres. There still needs to be a reason why they aren’t cubes.
4. The principle of the identity of indiscernibles
   1. From these considerations, it follows that in nature there can’t be two things that differ in number alone. (PII, see Overview)
   2. The basic idea in this argument seems to be that if x is identical to y in every way but in the fact that it one a second instance of the other, then there is no reason for them both to exist.
5. It also follows that there are no purely relational properties - that is, all properties are properties of things, and relational properties are grounded in non-relational ones. This, I think, is meant to follow from (2.a): Since all P’s of a given S are contained within S, it would seem to follow that if relational predicate R is attributable to S, then it would have to be contained in S, or at least in some P of S.
6. Any complete notion of a substance contains all its predicates: past, present and future. (If an S will have P, then it is now has T where T = “it is true now that it will have P”).
   1. This is a complete (perfect) notion of a substance, and from this we are meant to understand that God, who has knowledge of the possibilities for each of infinitely many potentially actual complete notions, would choose the ones that it, in its supreme wisdom, thought best.
7. Every individual substance contains in its complete notion the entire universe.
   1. For any given things x and y, there is a true proposition about how x relates to y only if they are related to each other.
   2. Since there are no purely relational predicates, both x and y must contain a predicate that explains their relationship.
   3. This must be the case for x viz. every other thing in the universe.
8. This means that all created substances are mirrors of the entire universe, which is to say, God, the universal cause. These expressions vary in perfection.
   1. This implies that every time any created substance changes, it changes all the others.
   2. However, strictly speaking, this does not mean that any created substances exercises metaphysical action or influence on anything else. This is to say that there is no inter-substance causal relationship, because each substance already contains within itself the entire universe, past, present, and future, which means that substances just harmoniously change without any sort of meaningful interaction.
   3. This theory also cleanly accounts for the correspondence of soul and body, without having to provide a medium of transport. By the nature of their complete concepts, they are simply in harmony already.
   4. Further, this implies that there is no atom (no body that could not be split). If there were atoms, there would be no cause to explain the effects of (e.g.) their size and shape. Every material thing requires smaller material things to explain its various properties.
   5. This means that every particle in the universe contains a world of infinitely many creatures.
   6. It also means that there is no determinate shape in actual things, because there is infinite complexity in any materially instantiated thing. Therefore, perfect circles, etc. exist only in our thoughts.
9. Bodies, Monads
   1. Since things have no determinate shape, this means that bodies are just extension and motion (which are “not substances, but true phenomena”)
   2. That means that something unextended is required for bodies, because material, extended stuff (as infinitely complex) can’t deliver unity. Since this can’t be atoms, all that remains is something analagous to souls.
   3. Corporeal substance comes into existence through creation (as opposed to construction) and leaves through annihilation (as opposed to dispersal), because there is no reason for them not to last forever. (Luckily, we know this argument gets better.)
   4. Therefore, animate things don’t come into or go out of existence entirely, but are merely transformed.

Bureaucratic Note

Finally, I should note that this ends my dalliance with pre-Kantian rationalism. Although I plan to come back to Spinoza at some point, for now, in order to push through to modernity, I’m going to take a step back to the roots of Kant’s other wellspring, British empiricism, and take a look at some bits of at least Locke and Hume, before finally arriving at Kant himself, who will represent the start of the period of philosophy in which I am most interested, German idealism. So, up next: John Locke.

Overview

Leibniz’s famous 1695 essay (in long form: A new system of the nature and communication of substances, and also of the union that exists between the soul and the body) was the introduction to a broad European readership of his original metaphysical ideas (many of which he had come to a decade earlier).

Outline

1. This paper is published in a scholarly journal - it is not written in the popular style.
2. Physics needs more than the concept of matter (”extended mass”), it also needs an operative concept of force.
3. At first, Leibniz favored an idea of matter and empty space (because it gives us a physics we can always “picture”).
   1. The matter itself, he realized, doesn’t yield any real unities. Because matter, by its nature is always divisible into smaller matter, and thus never a unity per se.
   2. Likewise, he thinks, geometrical points can’t yield existential unities, because points aren’t real extant stuff.
   3. In order to get a unity (a thing that’s deep down really just one thing), he needed a “real and living” point.
      1. These points, he realized, must be something like our idea of a soul - must be a force - that is, like appetition (desire and its low-grade analogs) and sentiment (belief, feeling).
      2. We can use these substantial forms to solve general (not particular) problems in natural science. Indeed, they are what Aristotle calls ‘first entelechies’.
      3. Leibniz calls them ‘basic forces’ for intelligibility, and because they involve actuality and activeness.
4. These forms and souls had to be indivisible.
   1. However, since this is the case, it also had to be the case that they were created and annihillated (rather than assembled/dismantled).
   2. This means that all substances were created with the universe, survive its duration, and will die with it.
5. There are at least two types of simple substances, though: rational souls (minds) and other souls. Compared with the latter, our minds are “like little Gods.”
   1. So, where God has imposed an order on matter, minds have special laws that raise them above that, or that matter works for minds (the punishment of the wicked, and the happiness of the good).
6. Since we are saying that souls (rather than atoms) last forever, one might be disposed to imagine that they pass from body to body. Because of microscopic observation, Leibniz is rather inclined to conclude that the animal simply begins and then just adds on other bits to itself in growth and development.
7. But what about the end of the animal, then? Since it is unreasonable to assume that souls just occupy a chaotic material station after death, the only tenable position is that not merely the soul but the animal is conserved (albeit in much smaller form) after death.
   1. This entails that rather than a transporting of souls, there is merely a continuous transforming, and that there is no death in a metaphysical sense.
8. God, however, has provided for rational souls so well that nothing can ever make them lose the “moral qualities of their personhood”.
   1. Thus it can be said that everything tends to not merely the perfection of the universe in general, but of these creatures in particular (who are destined to reach such a high degree of happiness that it affects the universe as a whole!)
9. Leibniz now attributes something like this view (that things don’t die, just appear and disappear) to Hippocrates, Parmenides, and Melissus.
10. The moderns take there to only be a quantitative difference - i.e. large and small - between the machines of nature and of humans, rather than a qualitative one. This is too far.
    1. For Leibniz the machines of nature and of humans differ not only by degree, but in kind. He isolates three differences:
       1. Nature’s machines are so well equipped as to never succumb to accidental destruction.
       2. Nature’s machines have a truly infinite number of parts.
       3. Nature’s machines remain the same, although they are (beautiful here:) “folded together differently.”
11. Furthermore, the soul is a true unity (which is what we call the ‘I’). Where human machines are more like armies of parts, and thus require unified parts somewhere.
    1. Since these unified parts clearly can’t be material (which for Leibniz is infinite in its compositional complexity). Rather we need something like “atoms of substance” (contra atoms of matter).
    2. These atoms of substance are:
       1. the sources of activity
       2. the basic reason for the composition of things (the explanation for material unities)
       3. the ultimate elements in the analysis of substantial things
    3. They might be called metaphysical points. They are not merely mathematical points because they have something alive in them (a kind of perception).
    4. So where material points seem indivisible but are not, and mathematical points are indivisible but are not things, only forms or souls/metaphysical points are both exact and real.
12. This generates a problem viz the soul’s communion with the body. The Cartesian/Malebranchean position is that senses and the motor behind actions is that God manually coordinates our activity/sensation with our volition, as well as causality in general.
13. Leibniz thinks that this is motivated right (its negative argument is good), but that its positive argument is wrong.
    1. In other words, it’s right that one created thing has no real influence on another and that all things are continually produced by the power of God, but relying on a deus ex machina is ostensibly the same as relying on miracles.
    2. Leibniz wants to explain how God coordinates causality.
14. Leibniz thinks that this happens because God initially created each soul to be spontaneous (aka. not causally affected by other monads), but meanwhile to just be in perfect conformity to things outside it.
    1. This entails that the internal perceptions of our souls are purely mental phenomena. The constitution of the soul “gives the substance a representative nature”: or, each substance reflects the entire universe in itself according to its particular point of view.
    2. Thus, the interaction of the body and the soul works by means of a universal spontaneous coordination that is the property of every substance.
    3. This theory has the charm of explaining how the soul resides in the body: e.g. in the same way that a unity is in a multitude.
15. Why couldn’t souls be like formal, free automatons? (This question will turn out not to answer itself.)
    1. Since the soul represents the entire universe (although with differing degrees of clarity), conversely, the body is adpated to the soul, and this gives us the sense of causal mind-body interaction.
16. It also has the advantage of showing that we are not susceptible to any kind of material causal determinism.
    1. Every mind is like a world apart: self-sufficient, independent of every other created thing, involving the infinite, and expressing the universe.
    2. It is also meant to be another proof of God that so many interacting substances do so harmoniously, a fact which implies that they share a common cause.
17. This system finally also allows us to understand “x acted on y and z” as “A change occurred in x which intelligibly explains changes in y and z, in such a way that we can conclude that when God was decreeing what substances were to exist he chose y and z so as to fit with the already chosen x.”
    1. That is, if matter is not substance, then something like this story is the only coherent way to explain the appearance of material causality.
18. This will prove useful in physics, despite its metaphysical character.

Overview

The Principles is among the last philosophical texts of Leibniz. It provides a short summary written in lay style of his philosophy. Taken together with the Monadology, Theodicy and the New System, Leibniz found it to be a coherent and comprehensive statement of his philosophy. (cf. Pauline Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World pp. 7-8)

Outline

1. Substances
   1. A substance is a being that is capable of action.
   2. Substances can be simple (having no parts) or composite (collection of simple substances, monads).
   3. Simple substances = unities; Composite substances = multiplicities
   4. Lives, souls, and minds are simple substances, and therefore where there is simple substance there is life.
   5. Since the whole world is built out of simple substances, life is everywhere in nature.
2. Monads
   1. Because monads have no parts, they can’t be made/unmade.
   2. They also cannot come into or go out of existence. They last as long as the universe does.
   3. They can’t have shapes or sizes (since for this they would need parts).
   4. Therefore, they must be distinguished by their qualities (perceptions) or actions (appetitions).
   5. A simple substance can be in many states at once since these states match up with its various relations to things outside it. (E.g. a geometrical point is simple, but is at the center of infinitely many angles.
3. Causes
   1. Nature is totally full of simple substances, which are separated by their actions, and in a constant state of change relative to one another.
   2. A body is an infinite number of monads clustered around a central monad.
      1. If we can think this, then we can think that the central monad corresponds with the states of the body.
      2. This means that a body is a collection of progressively complex machines, a natural automaton.
      3. In turn, this means that every monad is a living mirror which represents the universe in accordance with its own point of view.
      4. “Living” refers to a monad’s being its own source of activity.
      5. Deleuze loves this bit.
   3. A monad’s perceptions arise out of its other perceptions by the laws of appetites (the final causes) just as changes in bodies arise from the laws of movement (the laws of efficient causes). [Note: formal and efficient causes in the Aristotelian sense.]
4. Animals, Subconscious Perceptions
   1. Since every organism is made up of smaller forms of life (less complex monads, say, organs), and so are these, and so on, then not only is life everywhere, but there are “infinite levels of life.”
   2. A sufficiently complex (?) lifeform is called an animal, and its (central?) monad is called its soul.
   3. Non-reasonable animals (”bare life”) have unelevated monads for souls. They don’t have distinct enough perceptions to be remembered.
      1. Here’s a distinction between perception (say, mere perception or sentience) and awareness (say, reflective knowledge or sapience).
      2. Awareness is not given to all souls and no soul has it all the time.
      3. Here’s where Cartesians went wrong - they didn’t grok le petit perceptions (we now say: subconscious perception).
5. Minds
   1. Animals have interconnected perceptions in a way that is not quite by reason. (A dog remembers a stick with which it has been beaten.)
      1. This is to say that it is grounded only in the memory of effects, without knowledge of causes.
   2. The kinds of animals that can understand causes (and therefore other analytic principles) are rational animals. Their soul-monads are called minds. Minds are capable of reflective acts (self-knowledge, science).
6. Death
   1. The ancients believed that life emerged from chaos, but we now know that it comes from organized systems (seeds), and therefore from other forms of life.
   2. Since this is the case, since animals do not emerge out of nowhere when they are born, it is unlikely that they disappear completely when they die. There is no metempsychosis, rather merely metamorphosis.
7. Since nothing comes about without sufficient reason, and since things do exist, we should be able to give a reason why there being something is preferable to there being nothing.
8. God
   1. The sufficient reason for the existence of the universe can’t be found in the order of contingent things (bodies and their representations in souls).
      1. It can’t be in bodies because there’s never a reason in matter for its own motion. The material reasons for the motion of matter are causal, and as we know, if we follow this chain, we regress infinitely.
   2. Therefore the sufficient reason for the universe must lie outside of the causal chain. It must be something that exists necessarily and without cause.
   3. This is called God.
9. God’s Perfection
   1. This simple, primal substance must have in a higher form the perfections of those things derivative from it.
   2. Directly this means that God has perfect power (omnipotence), knowledge (omniscience), and will (is supremely good). From this follows perfect justice (goodness + omniscience).
   3. Whatever imperfections earthly stuff has, they don’t derive from God, but rather from their own limits as created things.
10. The Most Perfect Universe
    1. Since God is perfect, it follows that he chose the best design for the universe. One with:
       1. The greatest variety and orderliness.
       2. The best arranged time and place (and terrain).
       3. The maximum effect produced by the simplest means.
       4. The highest levels of power, knowledge, happiness and goodness in created things that the universe allowed.
    2. This all follows since things must lay claim to existence where their claim is in direct proportion to their perfections.
11. The Most Perfect Physics
    1. God’s perfection is also exemplified in the laws of motion, which hang together the best and are the most comprehensible to metaphysical reasoning.
    2. Leibniz, who himself discovered some laws of nature, notes that these cannot be justified merely by means of (efficient) causality, and rather require appeal to final causes, a fact which provides yet another evident proof of God.
12. The Harmony of the Monads
    1. From the perfection of the universe (by way of the perfection of its author) it follows that every living mirror (monad/substantial center) must have its perceptions and appetitions ordered in the most perfect way qua compatibility with the rest of the monads.
13. The Fold
    1. So monads are ordered in perfect harmony with one another. This implies a serious kind of determinism (Leibniz nicely says “The present is big with the future, the future could have been read in the past, and distant things are expressed in what is nearby.”)
    2. If we could unfold any individual soul, we could see the beauty of the entire universe.
    3. But, since most of a soul’s perceptions are confused, and since the soul can only know its clear and distinct perceptions, which are /much/ fewer, individual souls know very little of the universe at a given time. Only God can have distinct perceptions of everything.
    4. Leibniz is obviously getting romantic here. He waxes poetical that in the roar of the ocean, he has many confused perceptions of distinct waves.
14. Imperfect Works and the Mirror of the Creator
    1. A rational soul is not merely a mirror of the universe, but also a likeness of its creator.
    2. It not only perceives God’s works, it can reproduce something like them on a smaller scale.
15. The City of God
    1. This means that all minds, entering into a kind of harmony with God, are members of the City of God - the most perfect and judicious state, with many fine characteristics:
       1. no crime without punishment
       2. no good deed goes unrewarded
       3. “as much virtue and goodness as possible”
    2. God achieves this City by means of a pre-established harmony between the kingdoms of nature and of grace, between God as the architect and God as the monarch.
    3. Nature leads on to grace, while grace perfects nature while at the same time making use of it.
16. Love of God
    1. Reason can’t tell us about the next life, but it can assure us that things have been done in a perfect way.
    2. In loving God, we can take pleasure in his perfections, which are … perfect … and so love for God must give us the most pleasure of which we are capable.
17. Pleasure without Sensory Input
    1. It is easy to love this God. There is nothing mysterious about taking pleasure from something imperceivable. Supporting arguments:
       1. People get pleasure from honors.
       2. Martyrs show the power of the pleasures of the mind in going happily to their deaths.
       3. The pleasures of the senses, in the end, are intellectual pleasures. Their sensory character is just our confusion (the real pleasure of music is in the numbers, e.g.).
       4. Again, very poetic Leibniz: “We are not aware of the numbers of these beats, but our soul counts them all the same!”)
18. The Pursuit of Happiness
    1. Loving God is its own reward, and gives us a foretaste of our future happiness.
    2. Finally, since God is infinite, and thus never knowable in its entirety, our happiness in loving it won’t ever consist in a mind-numbing complete enjoyment with nothing left to desire, but rather in “a perpetual progression towards new pleasures and new perfections.”

Overview

1. The Two Systems

There are actually two sets of Categories articulated in the Categories. The first (2.b) is four-fold, and the second is ten-fold (4.a). It is notable that there is considerable debate about the subject matter of the second system of classification (aka. whether it is a classification of (1) words or of (2) objects in the world, or as classifying (3) linguistic predicates in so far as they are related to the world in semantically significant ways).

2. A Metaphysical Note about the Second System

That there are highest kinds (categories) can be motivated by noticing the fact that the ordinary objects of our experience fall into classes of increasing generality. Consider, for instance, a maple tree. It goes something like ‘maple trees’ -> ‘trees’ -> ‘plants’ -> ‘living things’ -> and so on. Now, quite naturally any good Aristotelian will tell you that this increase in generality or extension cannot go on ad infinitum. We seem to require, then, a highest kind. The obvious appeal here is to Being.

The class that contains all and only beings must be the class with the greatest possible extension. However, in the Metaphysics, however, Aristotle argues that being is not a genus. Why? According to Aristotle, every genus must be differentiated by some differentia that falls outside that genus. Hence, if being were a genus, it would have to be differentiated by a differentia that fell outside of it. In other words, being would have to be differentiated by some non-being, which, according to Aristotle, is a metaphysical absurdity. This can generalize to any proposal for a single highest kind.

Hence, he does not think that there is one single highest kind. Instead, he thinks that there are ten.

3. The Structure of the Categories

In the Pre-Predicamenta (1-4), Aristotle discusses a number of semantic relations (1,3), gives a division of beings into four kinds (2), and then presents his canonical list of ten categories (4). In the Predicamenta (5-9) Aristotle discusses in detail the categories of substance (5), quantity (6), relatives (7), and quality (8), and provides a cursory treatment of the other categories (9). And finally, in the Post-Predicamenta, he discusses a number of concepts relating to modes of opposition (10-11), priority and simultaneity (12-13), motion (14), and ends with a brief discussion of having (15).

Outline

1. Equivocations, univocations, and derivatives.
   1. Equivocations (homonyms) are things sharing a name but with different meanings. His example is a real man and a figure in a picture are called “animals”.
      1. Such words are applicable to various items in the world in virtue of the fact that those items all bear some type of relation to some one thing or type of thing.
      2. A second example of such a homonym is “healthy”: A regimen is healthy because it is productive of health; urine is healthy because it is indicative of health; and Socrates is healthy because he has health. In this case, a regimen, urine and Socrates are all called ‘healthy’ not because they stand under some one genus, namely healthy things, but instead because they all bear some relation to health.
   2. Univocations (synonyms) are things that mean the same thing and are applied to different things. His example is a man and an ox; both are “animals”. That is, they all stand under a genus; in this case, “animals”.
   3. Derivatives are things that derive their meanings from other things. His example is the way a courageous man derives his name (as such, “courageous man”) from the word “courage”.
2. Kinds of things qua predication
   1. Simple and composite expressions.
      1. Simple forms of speech are either a single subject or predicate: ox, man, wins, runs.
      2. Composite forms of speech are subject/predicate expressions: The ox runs. The man wins.
   2. Things (a) predicable of the subject, (b) present in a subject, (c) both predicable of, and present in, a subject, (d) neither predicable of, nor present in, a subject.
      1. Qua (2.b.a): ‘Man’ is predicable of the individual man, and is never present in a subject. Presence here means “contained in”.
      2. Qua (2.b.b): Think of a particular piece of grammatical knowledge. It is present (”contained”) in the mind, but is not predicable of minds (or anything?) in general. (Try also the particular whiteness of Socrates; even if some other white is qualitatively different that Socrates’, it is numerically distinct. This is what we mean by a nonsubstantial particular.)
      3. Qua (2.b.c): While knowledge in general is present in the human mind, it is predicable of grammar. Again, whiteness provides a somewhat more intuitive example. The universal whiteness is said-of many primary substances but is only accidental to them.
      4. Qua (2.b.d): These are individuals. An individual man or horse.
   3. Irritatingly, this set of distinctions rests on a circular definition (of what “present in” means) and a missing definition (”said of” or predication). Apparently, most scholars conclude that beings that are said-of others are universals, while those that are not said-of others are particulars. Beings that are present-in others are accidental, while those that are not present-in others are non-accidental. Now, non-accidental beings that are universals are most naturally described as essential, while non-accidental beings that are particulars are best described simply as non-accidental.
   4. Putting all that good work of interpretation together, we can gather that we have
      1. Essential universals (2.b.a)
      2. Accidental particulars (2.b.b)
      3. Accidental universals (2.b.c)
      4. Non-accidental particulars (2.b.d): Primary substances, individuals.
3. The Transitive property of predication and its effects
   1. That which is predicable of the predicate is predicable of the subject.
      1. ‘Man’ is predicated of an individual man. ‘Animal’ is predicated of ‘Man’. Thus, the individual man is ‘Animal’.
   2. The differentiae of species in one genus are not the same as those in another, unless one genus is included in the other.
      1. E.g. The genera ‘Animal’ has differentiae (internally-differentiating characteristics), e.g. ‘with feet’, ‘two-footed’, ‘winged’, ‘aquatic’.
      2. These differentiae do not arbitrarily apply to all genera, e.g. ‘Knowledge’.
      3. They may, however, apply, to subordinate genera, as the parent genus will be predicated of the child.
4. The eight categories of objects under thought.
   1. The (ten-fold) categories (substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, affection) are signified by simple expressions.
      1. E.g.: Substance - ‘man’, ‘the horse’
      2. E.g.: Quantity - ‘two feet long’
      3. E.g.: Quality - ‘white’, ‘grammatical’
      4. E.g.: Affection - ‘to be cauterized’. Etc.
   2. No one of these terms involves an affirmation. Positive and negative statements arise only by combination.
5. Substance
   1. Primary and secondary substance.
      1. Primary substance is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject (2.b.iv), aka. an individual man, horse.
      2. Secondary substances are the species and genera into which primary substances fit; in the case of a man, the species ‘man’ and the genus ‘animal’ are both secondary substances.
      3. An interesting proposed secondary substance tree from the SEP:
         1. Immobile Substances - Unmoved Mover(s)
         2. Mobile Substances - Body
            1. Eternal Mobile Substances - Heavens
            2. Destructible Mobile Substances - Sublunary bodies
               1. Unensouled Destructible Mobile Substances - Elements
               2. Ensouled Destructible Mobile Substances - Living things
                  1. Incapable of Perception - Plants
                  2. Capable of Perception - Animals
                     1. Irrational - Non-Human Animals
                     2. Rational - Humans
   2. Difference in the relation subsisting between essential and accidental attributes and their subject.
      1. Essential: Predicating secondary substances of primary substances entails that the primary substance is predicated by both the name and the definition of the secondary substance. (Both “man” and “bipedal animal” - or whatever - are predicated of a man by the predication of the former).
      2. Accidental: Predicating accidental characteristics of substances of the substances themselves, however, does not entail that the substance contain the definition of its attribute. (E.g. you can say, “the man is white,” but that doesn’t mean that “the man is [the definition of whiteness]”).
      3. In overview, this model entails a twofold manner of predication, one is a definitional/essential predication-relation (used by species and genera) and the other is an accidental relation (e.g. “the man is white”).
   3. All that which is not primary substance is either an essential or an accidental attribute of primary substance.
      1. Everything except primary substances is predicable (in the sense of definition) of a primary substance, or is present in a primary substance (is an accidental attribute).
   4. Of secondary substances, species are more truly substance than genera.
      1. A more convincing account of a primary substance can be given via species than via genus.
      2. The same predication-relation that exists between primary substances and everything else also exists between species and genera. [ species:genus :: subject:predicate ]
   5. All species, which are not genera, are substance in the same degree, and all primary substances are substance in the same degree.
   6. Nothing except species and genera is secondary substance: These alone convey knowledge of primary substance.
   7. The relation of primary substance to secondary substance and to all other predicates is the same as that of secondary substance to all other predicates. [E.g. a man -> “skilled in grammar” implies “man” -> “skilled in grammar”.]
   8. Substance is never an accidental attribute; e.g. a secondary substance is never “present” in a primary substance.
   9. The differentiae of species are not accidental attributes. [’two-footed’ is not in ‘man’ (remember that /in/ here is the container definition: (2.b))].
   10. Species, genus, and differentiae, as predicates, are ‘univocal’ with their subject.
       1. This means that when you predicate any one of them, they are related both in definition and name to the children of that which is predicated of them.
       2. In other words, this means specifically that there’s an inheritance effect if you enter into one of these /specific/ chain of predication:
          1. individual (primary substance) <- species <- genus <- differentiae
          2. individual (primary substance) <- species <- differentiae
   11. Primary substance is individual; secondary substance is the qualification of that which is individual.
       1. A secondary substance is a class that can be predicated of individuals.
       2. Species and genus signify substance qualitatively differentiated.
   12. No substance has a contrary.
   13. No substance can be what it is in varying degrees.
       1. If you’re a man, you’re a man all the way, contra, say, your whiteness, which admits of variation in time.
   14. The distinctive mark of substance is that contrary qualities can be predicated of it.
       1. For any other term, contraries cannot be predicated. Later (6a:0-3) we find that nothing can admit contraries at the same time.
   15. Contrary qualities cannot be predicated of anything other than substances, not even propositions and judgments.
       1. Interestingly, he admits statements and opinions as an exception here, although he argues that it is not they themselves that undergo modification, but things external to them which retroactively modify their truth values.
       2. Hence, it is distinctive that substances seem to be internally-modifiable in a way that admits contrary qualities.
6. Quantity
   1. Discrete and continuous quantity.
      1. Discrete quantities are things like number and speech. They share no “common boundary”.
      2. Continuous quantities are things like lines, solids, time, and place.
   2. Division of quantities, i.e. number, the spoken word, the line, the surface, the solid, time, place, into these two classes.
      1. Numbers and speech are constituted by discrete packets of information.
      2. Lines are constituted by continuous points, surfaces by continuous lines, solids by continuous planes.
      3. Time, past, present, and future, forms a continuous whole.
      4. Space, likewise, is a continuous quantity, as its parts share a common boundary (this is evidenced by the fact that space can be occupied with solids: cf. (6.b.ii)).
   3. The parts of some quantities have a relative position, those of others have not. Division of quantities into these two classes.
      1. Either a quantity’s parts have a relative position, each to each, or they do not.
      2. Quantities that do: Lines (their parts are distinguishable and relative to their other parts), and hence planes, solids, and space.
      3. Quantities that don’t: Numbers, time, speech do not because they don’t have “an abiding existence”. One might say they have a relative order, but not a relative position.
   4. Quantitative terms are applied to things other than quantity, in view of their relation to one of the aforesaid quantities.
      1. E.g. A white wall is large in terms of length (solid), a speech is long in terms of time, etc.
   5. Quantities have no contraries.
      1. Terms such as ‘great’ and ’small’ are relative, not quantitative, and moreover cannot be contrary to each other (because of their reliance on a third party or external standard).
      2. That which is most reasonably supposed to contain a contrary is space. But this seems to fall apart because of a confusion of contrariness and extreme difference of degree (the weight of the universe is not the contrary of the weight of a dust mite). Interesting that he should say this and still call sickness and health contrary.
   6. No quantity can be what it is in varying degrees: Just because n is bigger than m, it doesn’t make n /more of a number/.
   7. The peculiar mark of quantity is that equality and inequality can be predicated of it.
   8. Question: “Perhaps the most interesting question concerns the fact that some of the species in quantity appear to be quantified things rather than quantities themselves. Consider, for instance, body. In its most natural sense, ‘body’ signifies bodies, which are not quantities but rather things with quantities. The same is true of line, surface, place and arguably speech. Of course, there are quantities naturally associated with some of these species. For instance, length, breadth and depth are associated with line, body and surface. But Aristotle does not list these as the species under quantity. So, in the first instance, we can ask: does Aristotle intend his division of Quantity to be a division of quantities or quantified things?”
7. Relation
   1. First definition of relatives: Relatives are explained by reference to some other thing. (E.g. “superior” implies superiority over something else.)
   2. Some relatives have contraries (e.g. virtuous/depraved) but not all (e.g. “double”).
   3. Some relatives are what they are in varying degrees (e.g. likeness or unlikeness).
   4. A relative term has always its correlative, and the two are interdependent (e.g. slave->master, double->half, greater->lesser).
   5. The correlative is only clear when the relative is given its proper name, and in some cases words must be coined for this purpose.
      1. This is a little convoluted, basically he seems to be talking about something like this:
      2. Call the condition of being a ruddered thing “rubob”. Call the opposite condition “belbob”. Something is rubob in virtue of its rudder and relative to something belbob.
      3. E.g. a “slave” is not usefully defined with reference to bipedalism. The correct correlative of a relative term (a) is what remains after all incidental attributes are removed from (a).
   6. Most relatives come into existence simultaneously; but the objects of knowledge and perception are prior to knowledge and perception.
      1. True, e.g.: Doubleness and halfness are mutually dependent immediately.
      2. False, e.g.: The objects of knowledge/perception.
   7. No primary substance or part of a primary substance is relative.
   8. Revised definition of relatives, excluding secondary substances.
      1. The fact that a thing is explained with reference to something else does not make it essentially relative. (This is the argument against ‘head’ and ‘hand’ as candidates for categorization as relative.)
         1. Question: How do we distinguish between those things about which we are just confused and need new terminology (7.e) and the case when something that requires something external in its explanation is actually not relative?
      2. There’s an appeal to intuition now, (if a man knows something is beautiful, he knows that than which it is more beautiful). I frankly don’t see how this is a helpful criterion though, given the whole “rudder” problematic.
   9. It is impossible to know that a thing is relative, unless we know that to which it is relative.
      1. He concludes that no substance is relative in character, but again I am still stuck up on rudders.
   10. Overview: “Perhaps the most straightforward reading of Aristotle’s discussion is the following. He noticed that certain predicates in language are logically incomplete - they are not used in simple subject/predicate sentences of the form ‘a is F’ but rather require some type of completion. To say ‘three is greater’ is to say something that is incomplete - to complete it requires saying what three is greater than. Nonetheless, Aristotle accepted a doctrine according to which properties in the world always inhere in a single subject. In other words, although Aristotle countenanced relational predicates, and though he certainly thought that objects in the world are related to other objects, he did not accept relations as a genuine type of entity. So, Aristotle’s category of relatives is a kind of halfway house between the linguistic side of relations, namely relational predicates, and the ontological side, namely relations themselves.”
8. Quality
   1. Definition of qualities: “that in virtue of which people are said to be such and such.”
   2. Different kinds of quality.
      1. Habits and dispositions
         1. Habits are more lasting and firmly established than dispositions.
         2. Knowledge and virtue, e.g., are habits.
         3. On the other hand, heat and cold, disease and health are dispositions.
         4. Habits are dispositions, but not vice versa.
      2. Capacaties
         1. Capacities are predicated of a person in virtue capacity (nice). E.g. being a good runner or boxer.
         2. There is also a kind of health that is less a disposition (e.g. I am healthy at the moment), and more of a capacity towards health (e.g. I am a healthy person generally).
      3. Affective qualities (distinction between affective qualities and affections)
         1. Affective qualities and affections are like: sweetness, bitterness, whiteness, blackness, heat and cold.
         2. Affective qualities are actually capacities to produce affections “in the way of perception.” These are things like sweetness and heat, which are capable of producing affections in the senses.
         3. Contrarily, affections are like pallor and flushing (in skin). This is again reliant on a more permanent/less permanent distinction. Affections are caused by affectors (shame/fear). So the white of Socrates when he sees a ghost is an affection, and the white of my walls is an affective quality.
         4. There are also affective qualities and affections of the soul. Of the former: temper, insanity, irascibility as constitutional. Of the latter: the same list as a temporary state. We can say that affective qualities are pathologies of affections.
      4. Shape, etc. (Rarity, density, etc. are not qualities)
         1. Straightness, curvedness, triangularity or octagonality are qualities.
         2. Rarity and density, roughness and smoothness because these are actually composite attributes: roughness is due to the unevenness of an array of parts, sparseness because of the distance between parts, etc. These are not intrinsic, and thus not qualities.
   3. Adjectives are generally formed derivatively from the names of the corresponding qualities (e.g.: the quality ‘whiteness’ nominates the adjective ‘white’).
      1. The alternative to that is when things derive names from sciences (e.g. the ‘boxer’ derives his name from the science of ‘boxing’, as the innate capacity for boxing, as a quality, has no name).
   4. Most qualities have contraries
      1. Usually: justice/injustice, whiteness/blackness
      2. Not always: Red, yellow
      3. If of two contraries one is a quality, the other is also a quality.
   5. A quality can in most cases be what it is in varying degrees.
      1. In the case where it is debatable whether it can (e.g. justice), we can at least say that subjects can possess most qualities in varying degrees.
      2. Qualities of shape are an exception to both of these rules (8.e, 8.e.i).
   6. The peculiar mark of quality is that likeness and unlikeness is predicable of things in respect of it.
   7. Habits and dispositions as genera are relative; as “individuals”/(species?), qualitative.
      1. While knowledge, e.g., as a genera is relative (to something) - knowledge is always knowledge of something, a particular branch of knowledge (say, musicology) is not relative to anything.
      2. Furthermore, if something should happen to be both a quality and a relation, this wouldn’t really hurt anything.
9. Action and affection and the other categories described.
   1. Action and affection both admit of contraries and of variation of degree (heating/cooling, being glad/being vexed).
   2. Position we understood back in (7.d-e), when we “stated that such terms derived their names from those of the corresponding attitudes.”
   3. Time, place (’in the Lyceum’), state (’shod’, ‘armed’) are easily intelligible.
10. Four classes of opposites.
    1. Correlatives: ‘Double’ and ‘half’.
       1. Correlatives are defined in reference to each other: A double is two times its half, knowledge is grasping an object.
    2. Contraries: ‘Good’ and ‘bad’. (Some contraries have an intermediate, and some have not)
       1. Tautologically defined: The ‘good’ is not ‘the good of the bad’ (qua 10.b), but ‘the contrary of the bad.’
       2. There are some contraries that are mutually exclusive (odd, even) and some that aren’t (blackness, whiteness).
    3. Positives and privatives: ‘Blindness’ and ’sight’.
       1. Positives and privatives reference the same subject (blindness and sight reference the eyes).
       2. Also, it is “a universal rule” that positives are the “natural” state of things. We don’t refer to blind chairs, because they are not missing sight in any significant sense.
       3. The terms expressing possession and privation (’being blind’) are not the positive and the privative (’blindness’), though the former are opposed each to each in the same sense as the latter.
       4. Similarly the facts which form the basis of an affirmation or a denial are opposed each to each in the same sense as the affirmation and denial themselves.
       5. Positives and privatives are not opposed in the same sense in which correlatives (10.a.i) nor contraries (10.b.i) are opposed.
       1. Viz. contraries: (1) Positives/privatives are not like contraries with no intermediates because in the case of the latter, one or the other has to be present in the “subject in which they naturally persist.”
          1. His examples are health/sickness and odd/even. You get odd/even: Every number has to be either odd or even entirely. His argument is that there exists a subject who has not advanced to the state in which sight is natural, and thus is neither seeing nor blind in the sense set forth in (10.c.ii).
       2. (2) They are not like contraries which have intermediates because in the latter, only one of the two contraries need be in a subject which is constituted by that quality (e.g. fire must be hot, and hence not cold. Otherwise, things can be in the middle of the hot/cold spectrum.)
          1. The appeal here is that - while it is not necessary per se for a given subject - once said subject has reached a stage in which sight is natural, it will either see or be blind.
          2. This contra contraries with intermediate stages, for which (a) it is never necessary that one or the other be inherent in a subject, and that (b) in the special cases, if one or the other should be present, it will not admit of its intermediate or its contrary.
       3. Also contra contraries, there can be no change from one state (e.g. privation) to its opposite.
11. Affirmation and negation: ‘He sits’, ‘he does not sit’.
    1. These are distinguished by from other contraries by the fact that one is always false and the other true.
       1. Opposite affirmations seem to possess this mark, but they do not. Eg. [”Socrates is ill”, “Socrates is well”] will always contain only one true and only one false statement if Socrates exists.
       2. Contra (10.d.i), the set [”Socrates is ill”,”Socrates is not ill”] always contains one true and one false statement, regardless of the existential status of Socrates.
12. Contraries further discussed
    1. Evil is generally the contrary of good, but sometimes two evils are contrary (e.g. defect, excess).
    2. When one contrary exists, the other need not exist (when “Socrates is well” then manifestly not “Socrates is ill”).
    3. Contrary attributes are applicable within the same species or genus (whiteness and blackness require a body, disease and health, a living body).
    4. Contraries must themselves be within the same genus (white and black->color), or within opposite genera (justice,injustice->virtue,vice), or be themselves genera (good and evil).
13. The word ‘prior’ is applicable:
    1. To that which is previous in time.
    2. To that on which something else depends, but which is not itself dependent on that something else.
    3. To that which is prior in arrangement.
    4. To that which is better or more honorable (he’s “first in my book”).
    5. To that one of two interdependent things which is the cause of the other and not the other way around. (The being of j:The truth of the proposition “J is.”)
14. The word ’simultaneous’ is used:
    1. Of those things which come into being at the same time. (”Double/half” cf. 7.f)
    2. Of those things which are interdependent, but neither of which is the cause of the other. (”Double/half”, cf. 10.a.i)
    3. Of the different species of the same genus (’animal’: ‘winged’,'terrestrial’,'aquatic’).
15. Motion is of six kinds: Generation, destruction, increase, diminution, alteration, and change of place.
    1. It is obvious that five of the six are distinct kinds; the exception is alteration. One may feel like alteration implies other types of movement.
       1. This is not the case, apprarently, insofar as a square can increase but not alter (qua square). Hence it is does not directly alteration or diminution, which it seemed to initially.
    2. Rest is the contrary of motion generally, but the contraries of the specific kinds have their contraries in other kinds (e.g.: generation/destruction, diminution/increase).
       1. The contrary of change seems to be either rest in place or change in the reverse direction.
       2. The contrary of alteration seems to be either stability of quality (rest) or change of quality in the reverse direction.
16. The meanings of the term ‘to have’.
    1. With reference to a habit or disposition (”he has a pleasant temperment”).
    2. With reference to quantity (”he has a height of six feet”).
    3. With regard to possessions and parts (”he has a coat”, “he has two hands”).
    4. With regard to content (”the jar has wine”).
    5. With regard to a wife/husband, which Aristitotle concludes is the most remote meaning of “having”, since it really parses out to “lives with”.