Destructionis destructio (II) : existence and truth (7)

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After a development on the relations "being in a subject"(ἐν ὑποκειμένῳ εἶναι), "being said of a subject"(καθ' ὑποκειμένου λέγεσθαι), and their articulation in Ammonius' "square", we have taken up the text of 16b9-10 from which we have proposed the following retranslation for.. καὶ ἀεὶ τῶν ὑπαρχόντων σημεῖόν ἐστιν / οἷον τῶν καθ' ὑποκειμένου : ... moreover it [the verb] is always the sign of what belongs / as what is said of a subject. It is this formula: "what belongs" (here in the plural), which is taken up again in the immediate sequel (17a26-31) where Aristotle proposes a new Combinatorics to distinguish the four possibilities of affirmation and negation within the synthetic structure ofapophansis as ti kata tinos legein, i.e. the four possibilities of kataphasis(apophansis tinos kata tinos) andapophasis (apophansis tinos apo tinos). Here we've highlighted a new translation problem. Tricot translates: "And since it is possible to state [Tricot: to affirm!] what belongs to a thing (τὸ ὑπάρχον ἀποφαίνεσθαι) as not belonging to it [ὡς μὴ ὑπάρχον], what does not belong to it as belonging to it, what belongs to it as belonging to it, what does not belong to him as not belonging to him, and that it is also possible according to the times that lie outside the present moment, whatever has been affirmed it will be possible to deny, and whatever has been denied to affirm. " Unlike Tricot, Boethius translates τὸ ὑπάρχον as "that which is", rather than "that which belongs". He therefore reads "Quoniam autem est enuntiare et quod est non esse et quod non est esse et quod est esse et quod non est non esse, etc.". In fact, both translations are possible. There is a founding double meaning, "historial" (making history) of the Greek ὑπάρχον: belonging and existence. We have given a series of examples drawn from the corpus of Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. Encouraged by these results, we turned our attention to other cases of relating the Perihermeneias to the rest of the Aristotelian corpus. To do so, we started with a passage from Thomas Aquinas'sExpositio of 17a2-7 on the locus of truth, which explicitly connects the Perihermeneias to the Metaphysics and the Categories: "Dicitur autem in enunciatione esse verum vel falsum sicut in signo intellectus veri vel falsi; set sicut in subiecto est verum vel falsum in mente, ut dicitur in VI Metaphisice, in re autem sicut in causa, quia, ut dicitur in libro Predicamentorum, eo quod res est vel non est, dicitur oratio vera vel falsa. " Thomas' answer superimposes two triangles: 1) that of words or voices, here: enunciation, in other words external, oral discourse; concepts, here mind, mens; and things, 2) that of the sign, the subject, and the cause. The articulation of the two triangles allows us to posit three locations: a) true and false are in the enunciation as in the sign of the intellection [thought, intellect] of true and false; b) in the mind, as in a subject c) in the thing as in their cause. To these three locations correspond three modes of being: a) semantically; b) subjectively; c) causally. For these last two modes - subjective and causal - which are not in the skopos of the Perihermeneias, Thomas refers to the Metaphysics and the Categories.

Thomas's two references show that an exegesis is built up in a network - according to an interpretative tradition, a history - traditionis traditio - that it's up to the archaeologist and historian to reconstruct and question, not only in its trajectory, but also in its successive outcome(s), as is the case here. The reference to Book VI of the Metaphysics is understood from E 4, 1027b25-27, which locates the locus of truth in " thought" ("Falsehood and truth, indeed, are not in things,... but in thought, ... connection and separation are in thought, and not in things,.. and "[the cause] of Being as true is only an affection of thought"), a text that joins Γ 7, 1011b 26, mentioned on February 12, 2018, which located truth at the level of " saying " and Θ 10, 1051b, 7-10, which, for many interpreters, locates it at the level of " things" . This trio of texts is no accident: it has been imposed on us at various times by Foucault, Bouveresse, Heidegger and Thomas Aquinas. What's worth noting is that each vertex of the Thomasian triangle (a, b, c: enunciation, spirit, thing) can be matched with a different passage from the Metaphysics (respectively: Γ 7, E 4, Θ 10). The divergence of Aristotle's answers to the most fundamental questions of his own thought is the basic given of the history of philosophy set in motion by what Foucault calls the apophantic operation. The triangle a, b, c articulates what common sense and ordinary language apportion about the difference between truth and reality, a difference attested since the mention of the ἀληθέα and the ἔτυμα of the Theogony (February 5 lecture). The true is distinguished from the real as a,b from c: truth being assumed to be a characteristic of what we say (= a) and what we think (= b); reality, a characteristic of what is (= c). After an analysis of the Ammonian commentary on 16a3-9, which expressly introduces the triangle of phônai, noemata, pragmata, locates the locus of truth and falsehood in thoughts and, hence, in voices, but " not in things taken in themselves, even if composed", we turned our attention to Thomas's second reference, opening onto a theme of capital importance in the history of truth, the history of Being and our own attempt to deconstruct the Heideggerian grand narrative: the idea of an ante-predicative truth, of a truth in things founding or rather causing the truth/falsehood of the declarative statement. We have shown that the road of things partially closed (here) by Ammonius was reopened by Thomas with the help of Cat. 4b8-10:what a statement is said to be true or false for is the being or non-being of the "pragma": τῷ γὰρ τὸ πρᾶγμα εἶναι ἢ μὴ εἶναι; " ut dicitur in libro Predicamentorum, eo quod res est vel non est, dicitur oratio vera vel falsa". We followed the medieval fortunes of this formula, recalling the ambiguity not only of the Latin res, but of the Greek πρᾶγμα, divided between thing (individual) and state of things (factual), which must no doubt be preserved even in Peter of Spain 's Syncategoremata , ensuring that : " Res est causa veritatis orationis". We concluded with a few remarks on the entities likely to be considered as verifiers today: states of affairs, tropes (abstract particulars) and individuals, pointing out that the elements of the truth-reality-existence trio were articulated in the Truth-maker Principle, whose standard version, presented and implemented by D.M. Armstrong is that "for every contingent truth, indeed for every truth, whether necessary or contingent, there must be something in the world that makes it true".