How Things Are

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

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2. Introduction

   • James Bogen

   Pages 1-19

3. Zeno’s Stricture and Predication in Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus

   • Robert G. Turnbull

   Pages 21-58

4. Form and Predication in Aristotle’s Metaphysics

   • Frank A. Lewis

   Pages 59-83

5. Forms and Compounds

   • D. K. Modrak

   Pages 85-99

6. On the Origins of Some Aristotelian Theses About Predication

   • Alan Code

   Pages 101-131

7. Plato’s Third Man Argument and the ‘Platonism’ of Aristotle

   • Frank A. Lewis

   Pages 133-174

8. Things versus “Hows”, or Ockham on Predication and Ontology

   • Marilyn McCord Adams

   Pages 175-188

9. Buridan’s Ontology

   • Calvin Normore

   Pages 189-203

10. Phenomenalism, Relations, and Monadic Representation: Leibniz on Predicate Levels

    • James E. McGuire

    Pages 205-233

11. Predication, Truth and Transworld Identity in Leibniz

    • Robert M. Adams

    Pages 235-283

12. Towards a Theory of Predication

    • Wilfrid Sellars

    Pages 285-322

13. Back Matter

    Pages 323-345

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One of the earliest and most influential treatises on the subject of this volume is Aristotle's Categories. Aristotle's title is a form of the Greek verb for speaking against or submitting an accusation in a legal proceeding. By the time of Aristotle, it also meant: to signify or to predicate. Surprisingly, the "predicates" Aristotle talks about include not only bits of language, but also such nonlinguistic items as the color white in a body and the knowledge of grammar in a man's soul. (Categories I/ii) Equally surprising are such details as Aristotle's use of the terms 'homonymy' and 'synonymy' in connection with things talked about rather than words used to talk about them. Judging from the evidence in the Organon, the Metaphysics, and elsewhere, Aristotle was both aware of and able to mark the distinction between using and men­ tioning words; and so we must conclude that in the Categories, he was not greatly concerned with it. For our purposes, however, it is best to treat the term 'predication' as if it were ambiguous and introduce some jargon to disambiguate it. Code, Modrak, and other authors of the essays which follow use the terms 'linguistic predication' and 'metaphysical predication' for this.

• Aristotle
• Plato
• Plotin
• history of philosophy
• language

• Pitzer College, Claremont, USA

  James Bogen

• University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, USA

  James E. McGuire

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