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Aristotle's Abstract Ontology, Allan Bäck
Aristotle's Abstract Ontology, Allan Bäck
The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter
Aristotle has a metaphysics of individual substances, substrata persisting through time that are neither in nor said of a subject. That I do not dispute. However, when we move from the individual to the universal, from perception to knowledge, Aristotle has a metaphysics of relations. This I will try to sketch out here.
Aristotle appeals to abstraction at key places in his philosophy. Somehow abstraction gets us to the first principles and to the objects of the most fundamental sciences. Somehow universals are abstracted from singulars and have no transcendent existence.
Aristotle never states his theory of abstraction formally or …