The Fallacy of the Accident Continued: Porphyry's Predicables, De Fallaciis, and What Is First Simply

Orientation #

He begins “I’m just on page two here now,” continuing the fallacy of the accident from the handout, and refers to “this work that I’ve mentioned before, the De Fallaciis”. He ends: “we’re still on the first one” (fallacy of the accident), with the second, simpliciter / secundum quid, previewed for next time. The previous class introduced the fallacy of the accident with Albert and Metaphysics XI; the next takes up simpliciter and secundum quid.

The class, in order #

1. The middle term is not connected in the same way (“Socrates is a man, and man is a species”) #

Point: in the fallacy of the accident the middle term is not joined to one extreme in the way, or insofar as, it is joined to the other.

• Socrates is a man; man is a species; therefore Socrates is a species. Man is said of Socrates by reason of what “man” signifies (an animal with reason), not by reason of its being a universal or a species; to be a species happens to man insofar as man is said of Socrates. He warns: “it belongs to what man as such to be a species” is a very hard thing to get right—be careful when someone asks “is man said of Socrates as such?”
• Michael is a rational animal; rational animal is a definition; therefore Michael is a definition—“you belong in the science of logic,” not natural science. Same structure.
• “It’s a very hard thing to be able to express the right when you first meet it.”

2. Porphyry’s five and the change of order (“He must have lost his notes”) #

Point: Porphyry (asked by Chrysaorius to explain the Categories) shows that genus, difference, species, property and accident are needed not only for the Categories but for definition, division and demonstration—yet he gives them in one order in the proemium and another in the tractatus.

• Why the five matter: definition is of a species by genus and differences; the chief division is of a genus into species by differences; demonstration proves a property of a species through its nature.
• Proemium order: genus, difference, species, property, accident. Tractatus order: genus, species, difference, property, accident. Question put: which comes first, difference or species? Student: “depends on which sense of before.” Difference before species in the order of being; species before difference in the order of knowing.
• Order of knowing: genus and species are like father and son, correlatives—genus is a name said with one meaning of many things differing in species, signifying what it is; species is what is placed directly under the genus. So species comes right after genus, and difference is made known through both (what a species has in addition to the genus; what separates species under the same genus).
• Order of being, by the square: equilateral right-angled quadrilateral. Quadrilateral can be without square, not vice versa; equilateral without square (the rhombus—his mnemonic: it ends in S like square); right angles without square (the oblong, what people call rectangles). So genus before difference, difference before species.
• Aristotle does the same in the Categories: in the Antepredicaments he enumerates substance, quantity (how much), quality (how), then relation; but he takes up “towards something” before quality, because of the order of knowing—things that are basically qualities are said towards something, Plato had not fully defined it, so one must distinguish what whose whole nature is towards something from what has a relation following upon it.
• He admires the care: “magnificent minds,” looking for the different senses of before and after.

3. Aside on modern sloppiness: image and thought (“sometimes they mean an image, sometimes a thought”) #

• Locke and the English philosophers use “idea” for image and for thought without distinguishing. People say “imagine” when they mean “think.”
• Story: a priest translated a Spanish text using “imagine”; the Spanish was concebir [transcript: “concevere”]—“conceive, imagine, it’s all the same.” He: “I don’t think it’s the same.”
• The likeness that is real: in imagining you form an image, in thinking you form a thought (unlike the exterior senses). Thomas uses this when he treats the Trinity—not as a demonstration, but a thought proceeding from you makes a thought in God less mystifying.

4. Back to the handout: what happens to man in reason (“can we excuse you from being a definition?”) #

Point: what belongs to man insofar as it is in reason (universal, more precisely a species) happens to man insofar as man is said of Socrates. Since “man” signifies in general what Socrates is, it is said of Socrates by reason of what Socrates is, not by reason of what happens to it in reason.

• Objection he raises: it seems it doesn’t merely happen that man is a species, since a species by definition is said of singulars. Reply as above: it is said of Socrates by what it signifies. So Michael is excused: being an animal with reason “in your mind or our mind” is a definition, but that is not why we say he is an animal with reason. “Hard thing.”

5. Thomas, De Fallaciis: per se, per accidens, and three ways of being in (“tripliciter dicitur aliquid esse in aliquo”) #

Point: the fallacy arises where accident is taken as opposed to per se, and it is possible only between things not wholly the same in definition.

• Work: De Fallaciis ad quosdam nobiles artistas, among Thomas’s short philosophical works (Marietti edition); authorship disputed; some think it was written after he was kidnapped, for his friends.
• Per se: what is in something according to the ratio of its definition—either belonging intrinsically to the definition, or following upon the nature expressed in it. Everything else in a thing is per accidens.
• Three ways something is in something:
  1. Altogether the same in ratio: synonyms, vestis and indumentum. Only per se, no per accidens.
  2. One altogether extraneous to the ratio of the other: white and man. Only per accidens. (A white man and a black man are not different kinds of man; a different kind of man would need a different kind of reason—“maybe a man or woman, I don’t know.”)
  3. One pertains in some way to the ratio of the other but not wholly the same: the superior (more universal) and inferior—the superior is in the definition of the inferior, which adds to it (his mother: it “didn’t sound right” to say man is an animal—he’s not just an animal); likewise property and species (species is in the definition of the property). Partly per se, partly per accidens.
• In the first way, whatever is true of one is true of the other (same secundum rem, differing secundum nomen solum), so no fallacy. In the others, it is not necessary, so concluding from one to the other can be the fallacy—“sounds very strange, people just got to study the syllogism.”
• When the conclusion does hold: when something is attributed to one according as it is the same as the other (the predicamental order of the Categories). Substance is said of animal, animal of dog, so substance of dog. Contrast: man is an animal, animal is a genus, therefore man is a genus—identical in speech to “man is an animal, animal is a substance, therefore man is a substance.” Substance still signifies what man is; genus says something belonging to animal not insofar as it is said of man. “Very slippery.”
• Albert: this fallacy deceives most of all, even the wise—as in troubles about the intellect, tying up imagination with superior reason (“you do geometry, you understand what you imagine”). Thomas often quotes these men with approval. He notes Thomas’s later example of “the four-footed”—a fallacy of the middle term, “maybe.”
• Close of passage: as the Philosopher says in Sophistic Refutations I, the fallacy of the accident comes about because someone cannot judge the same and the diverse, one and the many.

6. Toward the second fallacy: simpliciter and secundum quid (“What is pleasant is good”) #

Point: “the same could be said of simpliciter”—one must be careful whether something is said simply or in some respect.

• Is first philosophy wisdom simpliciter—compared to natural or political philosophy, or compared to the wisdom of God?
• What is pleasant is good; adultery is pleasant; therefore adultery is good. Student: good “in some way.” He: but you say it is good simply, without qualification—“one of the biggest mistakes in thinking.”
• The materialist: matter is the source of everything. True simply? Aristotle, Ninth Book of Wisdom (“my favorite of the fourteen”): what goes from ability to act is ability before it is act (wood can be a chair or table before it is one), but simpliciter—haplōs—act is before ability, because a thing goes from ability to act by something already in act. The materialist takes what is before in a diminished sense as before simply.

7. The four causes on the blackboard (“the word cat is on the board”) #

Point: Aristotle distinguishes “cause” (equivocal by reason) into matter, form, mover, end, in that order—the order in which the mind is forced to recognize them, not the order of what is first simply.

• Matter, most known: “cat” depends on C, A, T—remove them and “where’s the bird?”
• Form: “act” has the same letters, so there is another dependence—order. Likewise a wooden table depends on wood (take the wood away, nothing is left—student: “an idea”) but also on its shape, the order of parts. Matter is that from which; form is what makes it be what it is.
• Mover: the letters do not arrange themselves—the writer put C before A here and after A there.
• End: why this order? Because he likes cats; to teach ability and act in the Ninth Book he would write “act.” The end is causa causarum.
• Which is first simply among matter, form, mover? The mover: “I made the letters C, A, T and put them in order.” Matter is before only in some way: the letters can be without the word, not vice versa.
• Aside: TAC (same letters); the register’s article on commencement speakers at Catholic colleges—Thomas Aquinas College had the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Life.

8. Timon’s common mother and the materialist (“materia might come from mater”) #

Point: matter is more known, so it is mistaken for what is first simply.

• Timon of Athens (Plutarch; the great misanthrope), generous host ruined, refused by friends, turns against mankind; digging for roots he addresses the earth as “common mother… whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast teems and feeds all”—Mother Earth as beginning of all and infinite. Thomas: the early thinkers took the beginning as infinite but misunderstood its infinity, thinking in terms of matter.
• Materia may come from mater: more known that you came from your mother than your father. Story: his little son Paul asks “did I come from Mama?"—he, Maria, Marcus did; “did you come from Mama?” “No.” “Then you don’t really belong here, but you can stay.”
• More known that you came from your father than from God; yet Aristotle saw the human soul comes immediately from God (dog, cat, tree souls come from the parents). And the father is more source of the form—he determines male or female—so more the mover-maker; “God most of all makes you,” but this is most hidden.
• So simply first is the maker, or rather the end, “even more hidden than the maker.” Thinking matter first simply makes one a materialist; dialectical materialism and evolutionary modern science do this.
• Asides: Holy Cross professor’s transgender database (“take the holy out”); Cardinal Sapieha sending John Paul II to the Angelicum rather than the Gregorian, to the Belgian rather than the Polish house—prudence; Chesterton: “the more a man worships nature, the more unnatural he becomes.” Student asks whether the transgender foolishness will fizzle; he: “we keep getting more and more outside of nature.”

9. Closing (“we’re still on the first one”) #

The materialists and evolutionists commit the second kind of fallacy (simpliciter / secundum quid); but the first, the accident, is even more difficult. “Stop here, I guess.”

His words #

• fallacy of the accident — the middle term is not connected with one extreme in the same way, or insofar as, it is connected with the other
• per se / per accidens — in a thing according to the ratio of its definition (intrinsically or as following on the nature) / everything else
• ratio — the definition or meaning of a name
• superior / inferior — the more and less universal (genus/species, species/individual)
• secundum rem / secundum nomen solum — the same in reality / differing in name only (synonyms)
• ability / act — [ed.: potency / act]
• simpliciter, haplōs / secundum quid — simply, without qualification / in some respect
• Ninth Book of Wisdom — [ed.: Metaphysics IX]
• causa causarum — the end, cause of the causes
• Antepredicaments — the opening part of the Categories
• proemium / tractatus — Porphyry’s preface / his drawing-out of each of the five

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, De Fallaciis ad quosdam nobiles artistas, the passage on the fallacy of the accident (per se/per accidens; three ways of being in; citation of Sophistic Refutations I)
• The handout page 2 on the fallacy of the accident (Socrates/man/species)
• Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, Timon’s address to the earth (“common mother”)

Mentioned

• Porphyry, Isagoge (inferred): reply to Chrysaorius; order of the five predicables; definitions of genus, species, difference
• Aristotle, Categories: Antepredicaments, order of the categories; predicamental order (substance of animal of dog)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX: ability before act, act before ability simpliciter
• Aristotle, Sophistic Refutations I (via Thomas)
• Aristotle’s distinction of the four causes (matter, form, mover, end), locus not stated
• Albert the Great on the fallacy of the accident deceiving even the wise
• Thomas on the Trinity (thought proceeding), locus not stated; Thomas on the ancients’ infinite principle, locus not stated
• Plutarch on Timon of Athens; Locke on “idea”; Chesterton on worshipping nature

His questions #

• Is man said of Socrates because Socrates is universal, or a species, or because man signifies the nature? Because it signifies the nature, animal with reason.
• Which comes first, difference or species? Difference in the order of being; species in the order of knowing.
• Can there be equilateral without a square? right angles without a square? Yes: the rhombus; the oblong.
• Is a white man and a black man a different kind of man? No; accidental to being man.
• Adultery is pleasant, therefore good—would you say adultery is good? In some way, not simply.
• Is matter the source of everything, simply? No; act is before ability simpliciter (Metaphysics IX).
• What does the word “cat” on the board depend upon besides C, A, T? Order (form); then the writer (mover); then his purpose (end).
• Simply, which is first among matter, form, mover? The mover; and the end even more, the causa causarum.
• Is the transgender foolishness going to fizzle out? He: we keep getting more outside of nature—left open.