Franz Brentano: On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle ed. by Rolf George (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 513 Franz Brentano: On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Edited and translated by RoLF GEORGE. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. $13.50. Franz Brentano's dissertation, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle , is a classic of modern Aristotelian scholarship. Its content, however, has been by and large digested and superseded by contemporary Aristotelians ; so, in this sense, the significance of its belated translation is more historical than philosophical. But Brentano's philosophy itself is by no means merely of historical interest; it still attracts the attention of phenomenologists of various kinds as well as analytic philosophers interested in epistemology. Brentano's reistic ontology, however, does not seem to enjoy the same kind of popularity as his descriptive theory of intentional psychology. Perhaps this is rightly so. At any rate, the present work under review can be construed not only as an interpretation of Aristotle's metaphysics but also as Brentano's first step towards his later development of reism, and in that sense we can discuss it as a clue to his ontology. Brentano pursues the ideal of philosophia perennis under the influence of the exact method of the natural sciences and with the religious conviction of rational theism. His dissertation is an attempt at a rigorous investigation of being as being, the prototype of which he finds in Aristotle. Its aim is to show a possible deductive inference in the coherent system of reasoning in Aristotle's metaphysics. Brentano's argument is roughly as follows. Aristotle says: "Being is said in various ways." The several senses of being fit into a fourfold distinction: I) accidental being, 2) being in the sense of true being, 3) being of the categories, and 4) potential and actual being. Accidental being is out of the question for ontology, since science cannot deal with it. Being in the sense of true being is not an ontological topic either, because it and its opposite, i. e., non-being in the sense of being false, are only in the thinking mind and not in the external world. Brentano believes that the subject of metaphysics should comprise only extramental being in the external world, and, accordingly only the last two senses of being are truly ontological. Brentano's exegesis of the sense of potential and actual being in Aristotle is neither interesting nor particularly original. However, the central thesis of the work, that being in the sense of the categories, in particular, substantial being, is the most basic, and the other categories can coherently be inferred from substantial being, is important. This thesis repudiates Kant's and Hegel's complaints that Aristotle haphazardly raked his categories together for a round number of general concepts. Before Brentano, Trendelenburg, rejecting Kant's and Hegel's critiques, hypo- 514 BOOK REVIEWS thesized a grammatical origin for Aristotle's categories in order to find something which could have served him as a guide in determining them. But Brentano rejects this explanation as superficial, since it lacks an ontological principle, although there are unmistakable correlations between Aristotle's categories and grammatical relations. Brentano emphasizes the importance of Aristotle's view that the categories are not merely a framework for concepts but also themselves real concepts, extra-mental and independent beings. Being is not divided according to the schema of the categories like a univocal concept, i. e., as a genus into its species, but rather in the manner of a homonym which is differentiated according to its various senses. But the use of ' being ' for different categories is not a mere accidental likeness of names. There is among the senses of being a unity of analogy which is a twofold one, namely, not only an analogy of proportionality, but also an analogy of the same terminus (p. 58). The second kind of analogy, in Brentano's view, occupies an intermediate position between the univocal and the merely equivocal. It is not only the equality of relations which holds for various senses of being, and which distinguishes them from chance homonyms, but also the analogy with respect to one and the same terminus (p. 65). Among the categories it is substance which is being in the...