According to the Categories, predicates can be ‘said of’ their subjects or they can be ‘present in’ their subjects. The said-of relation has received relatively little scholarly attention, and scholars disagree on the answers to four foundational questions about the relation. (i) What is it? (ii) Is it an essential relation? (iii) How is it related to predication? (iv) Is it primitive? I argue that A is said-of B just in case A is a formal part of B. On this (...) account, said-of is an essential relation and it is definable, but it is not defined in terms of predication. (shrink)

Much recent work on Aristotle's Categories assumes that there is an ontological theory presented in that work and tries to reconstruct it on the basis of the slender evidence in the book. I claim that this is misguided. Using a distinction made by G.E.L. Owen between theory and the "phaenomena", I argue that the Categories is mainly concerned with setting out the phenomena -- the intuitions that any ontology must explain. This thesis has consequences for the interpretation of Aristotle's ontological (...) writings. I explore some of these. (shrink)

Typically, Aristotle’s notion of an accidental unity is explained using our concept of identity, but doing so is fraught and liable to mislead. I argue that we should explain accidental unities in terms of sameness: doing so not only shows a coherence among texts thought to be in tension with one another, it reconciles the two competing conceptions of accidental unities in a satisfying way. I conclude by answering several Boolean questions that naturally arise in response to the inclusion of (...) accidental unities in Aristotle’s ontology. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical logic rests on a distinction between things and properties. Properties are thought to differ from things in that their proper expression is incomplete or unsaturated. In this paper, I will argue that Aristotle did not distinguish between things and properties in this way. I will show, first, that Aristotle’s essences are not properties, and that certain passages in Aristotle make sense only if we do not take accidents to be properties either. The notion of a property is thus (...) not fundamental in Aristotle’s theory of predication. Aristotle’s predicate terms do not stand for properties but for non-substantial things. Second, I will explain and explore the distinction between substances and non-substantial things. This will yield a viable alternative to our contemporary, Fregean account of predication. (shrink)