Aristotle on Truth and Falsity in De Anima 3.6

Notes and Discussions ARISTOTLE ON TRUTH AND FALSITY IN DE ANIMA 3. 6 It has commonly been supposed that there are at least prima facie inconsistencies in Aristotle's remarks on truth and falsity. More specifically, it has been supposed that Aristotle withholds truth as well as falsity from items of a certain kind in some passages, while allowing such items truth, if not falsity, in other passages. De Interpretatione 1 and .Metaphysics 6. 4 contain passages cited as exhibiting this withholding of truth; Metaphysics 9. 10. 1051b17-1052a4 contains passages cited as exhibiting an apparently opposed view. A striking instance of a line of interpretation in this vein finds Aristotle assuming both of these apparently opposed positions within De Anima 3. 6. A position on which truth as well as falsity is withheld from items of a certain kind is discerned in the opening paragraph of this chapter at 430a26-b2. A position on which truth is allowed such items is found in the closing lines of the chapter at 430b26-30) It is my contention in this note that the opening paragraph of De Anima 3.6 can perfectly well be read as withholding not truth but only falsity from items of the relevant kind. A pertinent part of the opening paragraph of De Anima 3.6 may be translated as follows, with numerals inserted to make future reference more convenient: (1) Not only is the thinking of undivided objects one of the things with respect to which there is no falsity; (2) but also where there is falsity and truth there is already a composition of thoughts .... (3) For falsity is always in composition.... The clauses translated by (1) and (3) provide no support for attribution to Aristotle of a position on which he withholds truth from items not composite. One can there find evidence of Aristotle's withholding falsity from such items, hut no good argument for his there withholding truth from them can rely on that fact alone. Thus the 1Authors adopt a variety of strategies in mitigating or explaining the prima facie inconsistenciesthey think are found in such passages. See Ammonius, In Aristotelis De Interpretatione, ed. Adolf Busse, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, vol. 4, pt. 5 (Berlin: George Reimer, 1897), 27.27-28.1; Franz Brentano , On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, trans. Rolf George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), chap. 3, "Being in the Sense of Being True"; Werner Jaeger, Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Aristoteles (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1912), pp. 21-27. (Note that Ammonius may in the lines cited be alluding to Metaphysics 9. 10 rather than to 12.9 as Busse supposes in the apparatus criticus. "The theological treatise" need not be Metaphysics 12. Ammonius 253.29-34 is adequate evidence on this score, but see also the opening lines of Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy, ed. L. G. Westerink [Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Co., 1962].) 2An adequate discussion of the secondary literature cannot be presented here. But I am prepared to argue that the line of interpretation to which I allude is adopted by Franz Brentano and Sir David Ross. D. W. Hamlyn possibly adopts it as well. For Brentano's view see Being in Aristotle, pp. 15-17, 155 n. 3. For Ross's view see Aristotle's Metaphysics, corrected, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 2 :274276 ; Aristotle, 5th ed. reprinted with revisions (London: Methuen, 1953), p. 25; Aristotle DeAnima (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 300. For Hamlyn's view see Aristotle's De Anima II, III, Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 142, 145. [2191 220 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY line of interpretation under attack must rely heavily on the text translated by (2). But now everything depends on how that text is taken. The line of interpretation under attack paraphrases that text in a manner conveyed by paraphrasing the nucleus of (2) as "where there is falsity there is a composition of thoughts, and where there is truth there is a composition of thoughts." In this way it is made to seem that Aristotle's intent in this passage is to require psychological vehicles of falsity to be composite and to require...