Names Equivocal by Reason: Six Kinds and the Senses of 'Nature'

Orientation #

He continues “the way that I’ve been talking about here recently”: nature is said of nature and of reason, and reason gets a new name because it adds something noteworthy (prev. lecture). He looks ahead: “tomorrow we have to go into the third reading and the fourth reading,” the third being a mistake that denies ability, the fourth the truth; the fifth reading will carry “act” over from motion to form by analogy. Verified sources: handout “The First Definition of Reason,” p. 95, and DHB Vol. III, p. 299 (both read from); the placement between Metaphysics V lectio 3 and VI lectio 4 is only inferred, and the transcript’s own references to the third, fourth and fifth readings on ability and act suggest Book IX (inferred). The previous class treated the nature/reason distinction as “naming equivocal by reason”; the next works through the Megarian denial of ability.

The class, in order #

1. His own division: six kinds, by “the rule of two or three” (“six main kinds of name equivocal by reason”) #

Point: there is no one text in Thomas giving all the ways a name becomes equivocal by reason; he is “piecing together” scattered remarks into a division he does not claim exhaustive but thinks “more complete than anyone I’ve seen.”

• Method: he begins as Aristotle begins in the Politics, “the man who considers something from its beginning will get the best understanding of it,” and divides by two or three.
• First division: a name said of two or more things with more or less the same meaning becomes equivocal by reason either (A) by being kept by one of them as its own name while the other gets a new name, or (B) by being carried over from the thing it was placed on to another thing “for some reason.”

2. Kept, first way: the other has “something noteworthy” in addition (“nothing that stands out or is noteworthy”) #

Point: the thing with nothing beyond the common meaning keeps the name; the thing with a notable addition is renamed.

• doing vs. making: sometimes you do something with nothing to show for it, sometimes there is a product; the product “stands out,” so it gets the name making. Hence prudence/foresight is right reason about doing, art right reason about making—yet “making something is doing something, in another sense.”
• episteme (reasoned-out understanding through causes) kept by geometry; wisdom, understanding all things through first causes, gets the new name sophia.
• disposition kept; the one with permanence and stability gets the name habit.
• animal (living body with sensation) kept by the beast; the one with reason and will is renamed man.
• nature/reason is “a particularly difficult example” of this same first kind. He stresses this is “extremely common” in daily speech, “nothing private here in Aristotle’s philosophy at all,” so Aristotle and Thomas are not “inventing a new way of naming things.”
• Aside: the nurseryman asks “you want a tree or a plant?"—and may get indignant if you call a tree a plant.

3. Kept, second way: one has the meaning perfectly, the other imperfectly (“fully or completely or perfectly the meaning”) #

Point: here it is the imperfect that gets the new name.

• understanding (as the ability to understand): said of the angelic and the human; but man has it “in a very imperfect way,” having to think a lot to understand a little. So the angel keeps intellectus and man’s understanding is renamed ratio—“although sometimes we say ratio is intellectus too.”
• kitten/cat, puppy/dog: a kitten is a little immature cat, yet we also divide cat against kitten; the immature one gets the new name.
• boy/man, girl/woman: “he’s not really a man; he’s just a boy.” Man and woman are distinguished by the ability to reproduce; boy and girl “have defectively what’s meant by the common name.” Boundary between ways 1 and 2: in the first, the renamed thing adds; in the second, the renamed thing falls short.

4. Carried over, first way: dropping part of the meaning (“by dropping part of its meaning or generalizing it”) #

Point: a name is moved to a new thing by generalizing.

• property: first (in Porphyry) what belongs to only one species, every member, always; then carried to what belongs to every member always but not only to that species, and so on—part of the meaning dropped each time.
• undergoing: Aristotle says understanding is undergoing. The first meaning is to be acted on destructively, to suffer; then to be acted on and changed but not necessarily for the worse; then finally merely to receive.
• names of the emotions carried to acts of the will (Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles): drop the bodily aspect, keep the formal.
• names carried over to God: as Thomas often points out, you drop the genus (the more potential and imperfect) and keep the difference. “God doesn’t have in his mind syllogisms making him know the cause, but he damn well knows the cause”—you skip the syllogism, keep the knowing of the cause.

5. Carried over by ratios: three kinds (“by reason of ratios”) #

Point: the name moves because of a ratio; there are at least three cases.

1. By the ratio of the second to the first. political: placed first on the polis; carried to government, not because it is a polis but because it rules the polis; carried to revolution because it is the change of government. Being: from substance to quantity (the size or measure of substance), to quality (a disposition). philosophy: from philosophy proper to logic, the tool of philosophy—equivocal, but “not by chance,” and not for the same reason we call geometry or wisdom philosophy.
2. By other ratios to the same thing. Thomas’s example: being carried from quantity to quality, not by quality’s ratio to quantity, but because quantity is the measure of substance and quality the disposition of substance. healthy: my complexion is a sign of health, my diet a cause of it. Counter-case: seeing has a ratio to the eye, two to three, but not to the same thing, “so there’d be no reason to give two and seeing a name together.”
3. By like ratios to other things—“the most difficult way,” what “analogy” properly names. It will come up in the fifth reading when act is carried from motion to form. His example: before, carried from before in being (some things can be without others, not vice versa) to before in knowing (some things can be known without others, not vice versa); square before cube in both. If the proportion gets “too far apart, it would be more like a metaphorical likeness.”

6. The count, the boundaries, and the danger of “analogous” (“at least six kinds of name equivocal by reason”) #

Point: the six follow from the divisions (kept: 2 ways; carried over: dropping, or by ratio in 3 ways), and the remaining combinations are excluded.

• Other ratios to other things: no reason for a common name. Same ratio to the same thing: “more like univocal than equivocal.”
• The first kept-way is “the closest to univocal”; his teacher Monsignor Dionne would not admit it as an analogous name. His reply: if you sometimes divide sophia against episteme and sometimes say sophia is an episteme, “if you are not contradicting yourself, you must be using two different senses.”
• The danger of calling every name equivocal by reason “analogous”: analogy originally means proportional, a likeness of ratios, which is only one of the six, so one may think it the only kind.
• Yet naming by extension is possible: virtue is Latin for manhood, which first names courage and is then generalized; Shakespeare usually uses manhood for courage, but in Henry V “moves the word” to justice. Calling moderation manhood sounds “kinda sissy stuff”—we only avoid getting hung up because we say virtue and forget it meant manhood.
• Student: so calling all of them analogous is itself extension by dropping? He answers with another example: equivocal is kept as the name for equivocal by chance (a name with many meanings and “nothing really there besides that”), while equivocal by reason, which adds a connection and order among the meanings—“very important for the life of the mind”—gets the new name analogous. That is the first kept-way. He does not think Thomas “gets into that exactly,” but many do.
• proportion/proportionality: analogy is Greek for proportion, but proportion (in Latin and English) has come to mean ratio; used for both ratio and likeness of ratios, “proportion” is itself equivocal by reason. Thomas’s Latin uses proportio for ratio and must invent proportionalitas—“clumsy”; “Thomas should have been more docile to Euclid.” Modern science too uses proportion for ratio.

7. Applying the six to this treatise: ability and act (“Ability is carried over from the active ability”) #

Point: the readings at hand use two different kinds.

• Today’s first reading: being carried from substance to quantity and quality by their ratio to substance (kind 5.1). Aristotle takes ability the same way: from the active ability to the passive (the ability to be acted on by that first ability), and to the durable (which resists being acted on by it)—each with “some inner ratio” to the first.
• The fifth reading: act carried over “by analogy,” i.e. a likeness of ratios (kind 5.3): as my eye, not blind but closed, is to seeing when I open it, so the wood is to the chair or table before and after the carpenter forms it. “So the form is an act, just as the seeing is an act. Not the same kind of an act.” There are other ways too in which act is equivocal by reason.
• Tomorrow: the third reading is about a mistake that denies, or at least clouds, the distinction between ability and act—“appropriate to the treatise on ability”; the fourth goes on to the truth.

8. Student: healthy temperature and healthy medicine—two ratios, or a doubling? (“you have two ratios to the same”) #

Point: kinds 5.1 and 5.2 can both be at work, and multiplying the “many” complicates things.

• Answer: “You do both.” Thomas in the SCG: being is carried substance to quantity by quantity’s ratio to substance, quantity to quality by another ratio to the same thing; he does not take up substance to quality, which would be by quality’s ratio to substance. political: polis to government by ratio to the polis; government to revolution not by another ratio to the polis but by revolution’s ratio to government.
• Aristotle further ties “the one thing to which others have a ratio” to the kinds of causes: healthy things are related to one end, the health of the body; medical (of the man, the art, the operation) to one mover; being (of substance and quality) to one subject, “more like matter.”
• Aside: government is for the sake of the city, not the city for the government; politicians may think otherwise, but that is a disorder; government is good or bad as it aims at the good of the whole city.

9. Student: fire acts by nature—is “nature” equivocal in the first sense? (“one of the most difficult words in the world”) #

Point: the senses of nature in Metaphysics V (“the most complete distinction”) use more than one of the six kinds.

1. birth (the first meaning; the Latin word is the same).
2. the source of the baby within the mother—by the ratio of this to the first (5.1).
3. any intrinsic source of any motion (the sense of Physics II, “natural hearing”)—not by ratio of third to second, but by generalizing, dropping “birth” and keeping “source within” (kind 4).
4. then nature as matter and nature as form, “because they’re parts of the thing”—“a difficult thing,” and “maybe something a little different than my six.”
5. through form, nature as what a thing is—which is said of reason and of fire, and then reason is divided off and given its special name against nature (the first kept-way).

• Student: why is nature carried from form to what a thing is? Exchange: form is at least a cause of what it is; matter and form together make what it is, but “it’s form that gets to the sense of nature as what a thing is.” Since the same what-it-is can be realized in different matters, what-it-is is to matter somewhat as form is to matter—“partly by proportion.” But also form completes the nature; and “nothing prevents a name being said of two things for more than one reason.” He reaches for Aristotle’s definition of form as a cause—“the logos of what was to be,” ho logos tou ti ên [einai]—and the recording ends there. He calls it “kind of strange as a definition of what it was to be.”

His words #

• name equivocal by reason: a name with many meanings that have a connection and order among them; vs. equivocal by chance, which merely has many meanings.
• the rule of two or three: divide into two or three at each step.
• kept vs. carried over: the two roots of his division.
• noteworthy / “stands out”: the addition that earns a new name.
• foresight: his rendering of prudence.
• episteme: “a reasoned-out understanding or a knowledge of things through their causes”; sophia: understanding of all things through the first causes.
• natural hearing [ed.: Physics].
• fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V].
• ability [ed.: potency]; active, passive, and durable ability.
• undergoing [ed.: passio]: first to suffer, then to be changed, then merely to receive.
• ratio: the relation by which a name is carried; proportion: originally likeness of ratios, now often ratio; proportionality: Thomas’s coined word for likeness of ratios.
• analogous: originally “proportional,” a likeness of ratios—one of the six only.
• metaphorical likeness: a like-ratio “too far apart.”
• manhood: the etymology of virtue; first courage, then generalized.
• what it is / what it was to be [ed.: quod quid est / to ti ên einai].

Texts #

Read in class

• Handout, “The First Definition of Reason,” p. 95; DHB Vol. III, p. 299 (verified sources).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V, senses of nature (worked through orally, from memory).
• Aristotle, definition of form as cause, “ho logos tou ti ên [einai]” (Greek quoted at the end).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Politics, opening (considering a thing from its beginning).
• Aristotle, Physics II (nature as intrinsic source of motion).
• Aquinas’s commentary, third, fourth and fifth readings on ability and act (Metaphysics IX, inferred).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (emotion-names to the will; being from substance to quantity to quality).
• Porphyry (property).
• Shakespeare, Henry V (manhood moved to justice).
• Euclid (ratio and proportion).

His questions #

• “There is two ways in which a name comes to be equivocal by reason”—what are they? Kept by one of the two things, or carried over to another.
• Isn’t making something doing something? Yes, in another sense; making gets the new name because of the product.
• “Is man really able to understand? Not very much?” He understands imperfectly, so the angel keeps intellectus and man gets ratio.
• Do seeing-to-eye and two-to-three have other ratios to the same thing? No, so there is no reason to give them a common name.
• If you sometimes divide sophia against episteme and sometimes say sophia is an episteme, are you contradicting yourself? Not if you are using two different senses—so the first kept-way is a real equivocation by reason.
• Which kind of equivocation by reason is the naming “equivocal” vs. “analogous”? The one where equivocal by chance keeps the common name, having nothing beyond “many meanings.”
• (Student) Healthy temperature and healthy medicine: two ratios to the same, or a doubling? “You do both”—as Thomas’s being and his own political show.
• (Student) Is nature, said of fire, equivocal in the first sense? Its senses use several kinds: ratio (birth to source), dropping (to any intrinsic source), and perhaps something beyond his six (matter/form).
• (Student) Why is nature carried from form to what a thing is? Partly by proportion (what-it-is to matter as form to matter), partly because form completes the nature; a name can be said for more than one reason—left open at the cut-off.