The Grice Club: Thesaurus griceianum -- in twenty volumes, vol. xix.

TERMINUS. nomen, ὅϱος, term, Fr. terme, G. Begriff GREEK horos. v. CONCEPT [BEGRIFF, CONCEPTUS], INTENTION, LOGOS, MERKMAL, PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, PROPOSITION, SIGN, SUBJECT, TO BE, TRUTH, WORD In the vocabulary of the Scholastic Organon, “terminus” designates an element of the proposition. This is what delimits a proposition, like the endpoint of a line. Rendering “ὅϱος” as “terminus” did not raise major issues of translation for a reader of medieval texts on logic. The various classical/modern avatars of the elementary constituents of a proposition in the original Aristotelian sense of the term serve as markers for changes in epistemes, corresponding to changes in the understanding of the very object of logic. Characteristic of the Aristotelian form of the enunciation/proposition is a structure that is sometimes called binary, in which two terms, respectively called the subject (ὑποϰείμενον) and the predicate (ϰατηγόϱημα) are linked or separated by a copula, itself affirmative/negative. This structure finds lexical form in the verb “to be” (which means that one has in fact three terms—subject, copula, predicate—in what would be more accurately called a ternary form, despite the affirmations of Kant or Hegel). In the classical period various rivals for the term “term” emerge, with the effect of moving away from the sense of enunciation/proposition and toward the idea of judgment. The principal rivals were “noun” (nom) and “concept” (Begriff). The fate of terminus/horos is an indication of the pendulum swing that starts in the Middle Ages and accelerates in the classical age, between two conceptions of the object of logic. “Noun” is a semiotic conception in which the terms are treated as signs (where logica is presented as a scientia sermocinalis [the science of discourse/language]). “Concept” is a more intentionalist than Thomist conception (even if Thomas remains the “great transmitter” of Scholastic language, from the Germany of the Frühaufklarung to present-day Germany). In the latter case terms are treated as concepts, making logica a “science of the secondary intentions that are added to the first intentions” (see INTENTION). This bears on the diverse “operations of the intellect”—the apprehension of simple quiddities, the composition/division of “terms” that contribute to a (propositional) judgment, and the forms of “reasoning” (“ratiocinatio remota”), understood as a syllogistic chain of judgments that are the products of the “second operation of the intellect.” The fate of the Aristotelian “term” thus appears in the first analysis to be inherently caught up in a perpetual oscillation between sign and concept, between “nominalism” and “conceptualism.” Yet its movement cannot be reduced to this simple oscillation. Other forces affect its semantic drift, from one translation to another. They include the Hegelian exposition—following in Kant’s footsteps—of the ternary formal structure of the “Aristotelian” proposition, and the modern and contemporary critique of the “copula” whose confusion of functions is supposed to include, “on some occasions judgments of existence, on other occasions the inherence of a predicate within a subject, sometimes the membership of an individual in a class, at other times the inclusion of a class into a higher-order class, and sometimes the equivalence of a noun and its description, or the equivalence of a term and its definition” (Rougier, La Métaphysique et le langage). The history of the term “term” is also a history of the copula, and thus a history of the oppositions at work in the apophantic Aristotelian logos. In general, medieval authors followed the indications given by Aristotle in the Prior Analytics (24b 16–18): “I call the term that which resolves the premise [῞Οϱον δὲ ϰαλῶ εἰς ὃν διαλύεται ἡ πϱότασις], that is to say the predicate and the subject of its affirmation [οἶον τό τε ϰατηγοϱούμενον ϰαὶ τὸ ϰαθ’ οὗ ϰατηγοϱεῖται]; whether joined by being or separated by non-being [πϱοστιθεμένου τοῦ εἶναι ἢ μὴ εἶναι].” This was translated by Boethius as: “Terminus vero voco in quem resolvitur propositio, ut praedicatum et de quo praedicatur, vel appositio vel divisio esse et non esse.” The direction of horos [ὅϱος] is obvious (Fr. obvie): it is the limit, which delimits a proposition (protasis [πϱότασις] or diastêma [διάστημα]), like the endpoint of a line. Aside from the obvious senses of “final term,” “end” (finis), and “extremity,” which explain the existence of periphrases such as extra terminum to designate the infinite, the word terminus has three meanings in medieval logic. Two of them are common: 1. the minimal syntactical/semantic unit that resolves a proposition: “the term is that which results from the analysis of a proposition, that is to say, a subject and predicate” (terminus est in quem resolvitur propositio ut subjectum et praedicatum) (Peter of Spain, Tractatus, 5–6); 2. the fundamental semantic unit in logic, as opposed to the noun or verb as grammatical units, which carries different couplets of difference depending on the competence of the logician: universal/particular, abstract/ concrete, categorematic/syncategorematic, etc. Finally a third use, rarer than the other two, makes the terminus a synonym for definitio; “the [objects] whose terms or definitions are different are themselves different” (quorum termini sive definitiones sunt differentes, ipsa quoque sunt differentia) (19–20). Aside from terminus, the lexicon of medieval logic also includes extremum. Extremum presents the same ambiguity as subjectum: most of the time, the referent of the word is that element through which the proposition can be analyzed and which is targeted by the vocable, but sometimes it is also or even only the object referred to by the proposition that is in question. This is especially the case in the various formulations of the rules regarding the truth of a proposition that stipulate that in “matters of nature” (en matière naturelle), “existence of the extremes is not required.” The expression existential extremorum is thus partially equivalent to that of constantia subjecti (see SUBJECT, II). The only difference between the two is that the former extends to both the signified/referent of the subject as well as the predicate, while the latter is limited to only the signified/referent of the subject. A good example of this usage can be found in this passage from a sophism attributed to Robert Kilwardby (cf. “Omnis homo de necessitate est animal”; ms. Erfurt, Amplon. Q328, f. 8rb–10rb): “I say that the propositions ‘every man is necessarily animal’ [omins homo de necessitate est animal] and ‘man is [an] animal’ [homo est animal] are true, for in matters of nature the truth of a proposition does not require the existence of its terms in act [quoniam ad veritatem propositionis in naturali material non exigitur existential extremorum actu]. Indeed, the concepts of man and animal are naturally coherent [naturaliter coherentes]; thus, whether or not it is any one man in question, as long as the speech of man absolutely signifies that ‘Man’ is speaking, ‘Animal’ shall be understood to be within the speaker [dummodo hec vox “homo” hominem significet simpliciter in ipso intelligitur animal].” Terminus appears in several thematic networks. The first contains the distinction among “written term”/“spoken term”/“mental term,” which touches upon the Augustinian notion of “mental verb” on several points. Following the distinction between three kinds of propositions—written, spoken, mental—taken from the first (16a2–3: “the sounds made by the voice are symbols of states of mind [τὰ ἐν τῇ φωνῇ τῶν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ παθημάτων σύμϐολα]”) and the last (24b 1–2: the affirmations and negations put forth by the voice [αἱ ἐν τῇ φωνῇ ϰαταφάσεις ϰαὶ ἀποφάσεις], are symbols of those in the mind [σύμϐολα τῶν ἐν τῇ ψυχῇ]”) chapters of De interpretatione, certain medieval logicians accepted the idea of “mental terms.” This is the case, for example, of Boethius, who is said to have handed down the notion from Porphyrius. In his first Commentary on the Perihermeneias, he presents the set of ideas as a doctrine of the Peripatos, insisting on the existence of “nouns and verbs” manipulated “in the silence of the mind” (In Aristotelis De interpretatione [RT: PL, vol. 64, col. 407B]): It is said that the peripatetics held that there are three kinds of discourse: one which is written with letter, one which is put forward with the voice, and the other which is articulated by the mind. If there are three kinds of discourse, there is no doubt that there are also three parts of discourse. Thus, since noun and verb are the principal parts of discourse, there are distinct written nouns and verbs, other spoken nouns and verbs, as well as those that one moves about silently in the mind. (Dictum est tres esse apud Peripateticos orationes, unam quae litteris scriberetur, aliam quae proferretur in voce, tertiam quae conjungeretur in animo. Quod si tres orationes sunt, partes quoque orationes esse triplices nulla dubitatio est. Quare quoniam verbum et nomen principaliter orationes partes sunt, erunt alia verba quae scribantur, alia quae dicantur, aliae quae tacita mente tractentur.) The notion of “mental nouns” and “mental verbs” is a first step in the direction of a “mental language,” even if the Porphyro-Boethian thesis does not conform to all the requirements of a theory of “mentalese,” such as that which William of Ockham seems to be the first to have proposed (cf. Panaccio, Le Discours intérieur). A second network carried by terminus is the distinction, based on scattered sources in Priscien and Boethius, between categorema and syncategorema, often expressed in Paris, if not in Oxford (where the word dictio and its derivatives, such as dictions officials, official terms, are equally prevalent), as a distinction between “categoremic terms” and “syncategoremic terms.” In this approach, called “terminist,” the notions of categoremic and syncategoremic terms are applied to various kinds of syntactic-semantic analyses. There is a modeling of the meaning of sentences by virtue of the relations of inclusio (“scope” in modern logic, in French, champ and portée) that exist between categorema and syncategorema or among syncategorema themselves. And there are theories of the “generation of discourse” (generatio sermonis) that seek to account not simply for the passage of thought to written or oral expression, but also for the formation of thought itself structured like a language. Some authors in this school use signs (signa) to designate the categoremas of quantity exclusively (see SIGN), the medieval form of quantifiers. Or they will use the term less restrictively to refer to all categoremas. These terminist distinctions, along with their discrepant applications, will reappear in Leibniz. There is yet a third network carried by “term”: that of the syntactic-semantic properties of categoremic terms understood within propositional contexts—the proprietates terminorum—whose analysis constitutes the most notable contribution of medieval logic to the history of logic. When they are inserted in a specific context, terms that carry signification acquire new semantic properties. Distinctions are drawn among the suppositio (reference; see SUPPOSITION), the appellatio (denotation or reference solely to that which exists), the copulatio (a syntactic-semantic property of verbs and adjectives), and the relatio (anaphora). As employed by medieval logicians, the terminus is radically set off from the nomen and the verbum, which are reserved for the use of grammarians. The Platonic theory of the primordial interconnections of nouns and verbs, which is authentically binary, is expelled from logic in favor of the falsely binary theory of Aristotle, founded on the pairing of subject-predicate + copula. Even if the distinction between substantive and adjective, apprehended ontologically, is present in the analysis of various types of suppositiones, the term has more in common with the sign than with the nomen. At least for a while, it does not precisely correspond to the concept (until Occam’s redefinition of the concept as a natural sign as a term of a mental language and referential act). This primacy of the terminus/ signum over the terminus/intentio/conceptus is evident by virtue of the fact that the authors, principally theologians or intentionalists (who put forth concepts as the elementary units of meaning within a theory of judgment), experience certain difficulties in taking full advantage of the novelties of the Logica moderna. The increasing power of the concept in relation to the term/sign and to the nomen marks the beginning of one of the great debates of the classical age. But an unfortunate ambiguity weighs down the lexicon from one end to the other. It goes back to the restricted use of “sign,” starting in the Middle Ages, as an equivalent for syncategorema or operator. As a result, for adherents of the binary interpretation of the proposition, only subject and predicate could be considered “terms,” while the copula was simply a “sign.” II. Signum, Terminus, Nomen in the Classical Age The proximity of meanings among “sign,” “term,” and “noun” is everywhere evident in the philosophical practice of the classical age. In the following passage, for example, Leibniz defines signification as the relationship between nomen and terminus, the latter also identified with notio interpretations. This is not the case in the German logical treatises, starting with Christian Thomasius and Christian Wolff. In recent translations from Latin to German, terminus is sometimes rendered as Begriff, which is partly justified by history (the importation of Latin vocabulary into the logic of the Frühaufklärung), but which poses certain problems of intelligibility. In the Leibniz sentence quoted above, it is impossible to identify Begriff with terminus at the lexical level, even though it may seem appropriate at the level of the informational content carried by the statement. For if one makes this identification along with the equivalence of notio/ Begriff, one ends up with the statement that “Per terminum (Begriff) non intelligo nomen sed conceptum (Begriff), seu id quod nominee significatur, possis et dicere notionem (Begriff) ideam” (By “term” [Begriff] I understand not the word but the concept [Begriff], that is, what is signified by the word, for which one could also say “notion” or “idea” [Begriff]). One cannot properly understand the constitutive conditions of the German language without considering it within a very general slide from terminism in the direction of conceptualism. In the German logicians who still wrote in Latin, in particular in Jungius, the tripartite Scholastic division of the terminus into mental, written, and spoken terms gave way to a dualistic distinction, according to which the oratio is considered either as an internal or as an external reality in relation to the mind. No doubt because he inherits this distinction, Jungius has a tendency to abandon the terminus in favor of the notio. He makes the analysis of notions (“De notionibus”) the first chapter of the Logica, reinterpreting the traditional plan that has been generally if not exclusively accepted since the commentary of Thomas Aquinas based on the three operations of mind: 1. “intelligentia indivisibulium sive incomplexorum” (the understanding of indivisible or non-complex things) 2. “compositio vel divisio intellectus” (the intellect’s action of combining or dividing) 3. “discurrere ab uno in aliud” (to advance from one thing to another [i.e., to go from what is known toward what is unknown]) (Aristotelis libros posteriorum analyticorum expositio [Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle], Proemium, 4) In the Logica Hamburgensis of 1638, these three operations become “notio, enuntiatio et dianoia sive discursus” (Prologus, §1–7), which in an author so concerned with historical accuracy, clearly indicate that the understanding of the incomplexes (termini) should henceforth be interpreted as the science of notions. The notiones are also the object of a separate study, entitled Disputationes noematicae, for the ancients, including Aristotle himself did not sufficiently develop this part of the Organon, which should not consist only of the study of predicaments. One of the most common errors in relation to the notiones/noemata (the text of Jungius constantly reminds the reader of this identity) consists of neglecting the cognitive dimension of the foundation of logic, as is the case when the words used by logicians are taken as having direct reference to things. According to the thinker from Hamburg, this is the principal error of logicians (which is a By “term” I do not mean a noun but rather a concept, that is to say, that which is signified by a noun, which could also be called “notion” or “idea.” (Per terminum non intelligo nomen sed conceptum seu id quod nomine significatur, possis et dicere notionem, ideam.) (Specimen calculi universalis) This highly conceptual iteration of terminism is specific to Leibniz. It is clearly a new synthesis of several philosophical instruments, drawn from rather different traditions, but which constitute the common ground of logical and linguistic positions that are themselves occasionally contradictory. Since different medieval criteria enable the distinction between categorema and syncategorema, Leibniz retains the functional criterion—the being or non-being of the subject or predicate—whence this other definition of term: I call everything that exists on its own a TERM, that is, everything that can be a subject or predicate of a proposition; for example: man, chimera. A term is either possible or impossible. But what is POSSIBLE is that which can be conceived distinctly, without contradiction. (Ibid.) Leibniz no longer speaks of “syncategorematic terms.” He refers instead to syncategorema using the medieval term signum (see SIGN). The signum is thus considered a prefix of the terminus or of the entire propositio. One also comes across signum in the vocabulary of mathematics. The French algebraics of the School of Viète spoke of the “sign of affectation” “+” or “-” (cf. Vaulézard, La Nouvelle algèbre de M. Viète) When this use became impossible by its proximity to the logical acceptation, the authors subsequently employed the Latin nota or the French marque (see MERKMAL). These multiple overlays and contaminations are linked, up to a point, to effects of translation. It is necessary in French, for example, to put terme in quotation marks when translating passages of Porphyry’s Introduction (or Isagoge) to the Logical Categories of Aristotle in order to avoid recourse to words like chose (thing), nom (name or noun), and concept (concept), all of which are absent from the original Greek. To not do so would run the risk of placing Porphyrian definitions of species and kind under the rubric of “realism,” “nominalism,” or “conceptualism.” The word terme is also often added to translations into French during the classical age to render the generality and indeterminacy of the Latin neuter pronoun or the substantive adjective. For example, when Descartes writes in the Regulae, “Item quaedam interdum sunt vere magis absoluta quam alia, sed nondum tamen omnium maxime,” the most scrupulous translator cannot avoid, “Et aussi certains termes sont véritablement plus absolus que d’autres, mais pas encore les plus absolus de tous” (Fr. trans. Marion) (In addition, some terms are truly more absolute than others, but yet not the most absolute of all). This habit may run the risk of surreptitiously conferring a logical background or underpinning that the author may not have intended. But on the other hand, it has the advantage of neutralizing as much as possible the term terme in French, relative to its cognitive TERM 1121 there are also differences, whether in relation to Hobbes’s treatise on computatio or the Logique of Port-Royal. Whereas the very base of the edifice was contaminated by the notiones in Jungius, in these latter writers the whole construction is devoted to the mode of being of the idea in language, even if it does not build up a complete doctrine of the idea. For the idea enters into the signification of words, as “there would be a contradiction between saying that I know what I am saying when I say a word and my not conceiving of anything when pronouncing the very sound of the word” (Logique, I, I). As a general cognitive event, the Aristotelian-Thomistic “constituit intellectum” is clarified by the relation of the word to the idea. And the details of this relation account for the amphibology of signification, according to whether it is from one to one, from one to several, or from several to one. . If the term is thus excluded from the first part of logic for the sake of the sign, this does not mean that it is reintroduced into the second part as an element of the proposition. For the latter is analyzed according to grammatical reminder of the approach of the school of Ockham). For the nouns that occur in the phrases of calculation are the names of notions, and to claim otherwise would be to confuse the primary and secondary objects of logic. The Latin word terminus still appears in the German of Thomasius, (e.g., in the Einleitung zu der Vernunftlehre [Introduction to the theory of reason]), although it is much less frequent or important than in Leibniz. It appears to be strictly limited to the technical vocabulary of syllogistics in the Philosophisches Lexicon of Johann Georg Walch: the expression Ideen oder Termini appears in the article “Syllogismus,” itself completed by a short entry on “Termini Syllogismi.” In Wolff’s Deutsche Logik, the term has completely disappeared and been replaced with the concept of things (von den Begriffen der Dinge) and the usage of words (von dem Gebrauche der Worte) as if the elision of terminus resulted in the split of the first level of logic, which had traditionally been considered as one, into two different chapters (one more cognitive, the other more semantic). Similar transformations occur in the corresponding passages from Latin to French and from Latin to English. But 1 Signifying/the constitution of a thought: Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Port-Royal v. SENSE In the De interpretatione, 3.16b 19–25, Aristotle writes, When uttered just by itself a verb is a name and signifies something. [αὐτὰ μὲν οὖν ϰαθ’ αὐτὰ λεγόμενα τὰ ῥήματα ὀνόματά ἐστι ϰαὶ σημαίνει τι.] This line has been one of the fundamental starting points of a philosophy of signification. The passage bears principally on verbs: rhêmata [ῥήματα] must be considered a kind of noun (onoma [ὄνομα]) insofar as they too signify something. In fact, Aristotle continues, in a kind of parenthetical remark, meaning is produced when the speaker arrests his intellection: [T]he speaker arrests his thought and the hearer pauses. [ἵστησι γὰϱ ὁ λέγων τὴν διάνοιαν, ϰαὶ ὁ ἀϰούσας ἠϱέμησεν.] The Greek phrase is rendered into Latin by Boethius as follows: Ipsa quidem secundum se dicta verba nomina sunt et significant aliquid— constituit enim qui dicit intellectum, et qui audit quiescit. (Aristoteles latinus, II, 1–2) Despite what the translation might lead one to think, the Latin commentary (RT: PL, vol. 64, cols. 309–10) indicates that Boethius took the dynamic metaphor of movement and rest quite seriously, and that he took his own constituere as a “fixing in place” or “stopping,” which is rendered rather well in Ackrill’s English translation, here reproduced with the phrase in its entirety: When uttered just by itself a verb is a name and signifies something—the speaker arrests his thought and the hearer pauses—but it does not yet signify whether it is or not. See PROPOSITION. When we use a noun, Aristotle specifies through paraphrase, the thinking of the listener is put into motion (inchoat) along with our enunciation (prolatio). When I say, for example, “Hippocentaurus,” the thoughts of the listener start with the first syllable and come into full effect only when the word has been completely pronounced. Verbs and nouns have in common this power of generating a kind of anxiety, which is only released upon understanding their meaning. Signification is nothing more than this effect: the possibility of being able to rest (conquiescere) on something completed, of operating in consecutive order on the anxiety and repose of the listener. According to Boethius, the “constituit qui dicit intellectum” of De interpretatione sets out a process of meaning-analysis that applies equally to the utterance of a verb and to a proposition, for it is only when one has understood the entire proposition, “Socrates ambulat” (Socrates walks), for instance, that the listener can settle fully on a completed signification. Thus in Boethius’s commentary, a wide interpretation of the constituit intellectum comes to light, but this is not without problems of its own. Everything happens in fact as if the relative positions of the parts of the discourse enabled a double analysis, both ascending and descending, depending on whether one stresses the relations of words to meanings or the relation of utterances to the truth. In the first case, the relations of words to meanings, every oratio or part thereof is meaningful when it answers to the constituit intellectum (that which establishes the understanding of a thing). The basic atomic unit is thus the nomen, insofar as the subdivisions within a word itself are not meaningful. The horizon of signification, on the other hand, is more or less wide open as a result of the multiplicity of possibilities afforded by the infinite combinatorics in the composition of words. In the end, it can be said of an entire discourse that its completion has produced a thought process. According to the second case, the relation of utterances to truth, what signifies is that which is capable of telling things as (continued) “modern” definition of the judgment/proposition as the representation of a relation between two concepts (“I was never satisfied with the definition that logicians give to judgment in general, when they say that it is the representation of the relation between two concepts” [Critique of Pure Reason §19]). His own concern was to introduce an innovation that one might call a first form of ternary judgment. His discovery is in effect the “medium,” unknown to his predecessors, in other words, the relation of concepts to the “originary synthetic unity of apperception.” The term “medium” has a long history; first and foremost it is the “middle term” of Aristotelian syllogistics. But the Kantian medium of judgment is not the middle term of a syllogism, it is not exactly a term enabling the passage from (two) premises to a conclusion. This “third” (Ger. Drittes) is neither another “concept,” nor an “addition” (see PREDICATION) but rather, self-consciousness itself as a “principle of affinity” binding subject and predicate within a single judgment (A 766, B 794). One also finds a ternary schema in Hegel, this time pushed to its paroxysm, with the categories: nouns, pronouns, and verbs (cf. Hobbes, who defines the propositio as “a statement consisting of two coupled nouns [oratio constans ex duobus nominibus copulates]”; Logica, chap. 3, §2). Any search for the terminus as endpoint of the analysis of propositions will be in vain. The concurrence of the two traditional axes remains (vox significativa, oratio/terminus, propositio vera ) but it is now split into two separate and largely asymmetrical functions: on the one hand a semantics whose closure is ensured metaphysically by the idea, on the other hand a relatively open syntax, whose role it is to expose the deep structure of enunciations. In French-language philosophy terme becomes a sort of free electron used here and there in multiple contexts, and which attests, at the very least in a negative way, to the different paths set out during the classical age toward the deconstruction of terminism. III. Binary Form/Ternary Form; Kant, Hegel, Heidegger As Kant knew nothing of the Middle Ages, he knew nothing of termism. His critical efforts were directed instead at the they are, that is, saying if they are true or false. Here, the basic atomic element is the propositio, defined as the smallest part of the oratio that can carry the predicate of truth. A closer analysis still leads to the terminus as part of the propositio. But on this point, except for the specific case of Leibniz, the terminus is not generally qualified as true or false, such that the analysis of discourse into categorema and syncategorema remains a proto-analysis, or rather, in Carnap’s words, a quasi-analysis. The concurrence of these two axes (vox significativa, oratio/terminus, propositio vera) has been the starting point for an extensive debate on the proper scope of the “constituit intellectum.” Thomas Aquinas notes, for example, that the nomen cannot be rigorously considered as significant in itself according to the criterion of movement and repose of the mind. If, for example, the speaker says “homo” (man), the mind of the listener remains, so to speak, in suspense until he knows that what is being said is de homine (of or about man); and likewise, when he hears only the verb currit (to run), his mind will not come to rest until he knows the answer to the question “Who is being spoken about?” (Thomas Aquinas, In Peri hermeneias, L I, 1. V, 68). The criterion traditionally applied to signification thus seems paradoxically to preclude any philosophy of the sign in favor of a hypothetical oratio perfecta (a sentence that yields a complete understanding in the mind of the listener), unless it is itself supported by another supplementary distinction that establishes the orders of discourse. This is the path undertaken by Thomas. Referring to the division of the intellectio according to the three operations of the mind, he affirms that the constituit intellectum is only pertinent within the limits of an apprehension of the intellectio by the concipere (conception), but that it must be abandoned at the higher levels of the divisio (division) and compositio (composition), which the classical age will call “judgment.” Just as the analysis of propositions through attention to terms is necessary to elucidate the concept of truth (even though the terms themselves are neither true nor false), so the grasping of meaning within a phrase does not entail any generalization in the use of the criterion of constituit intellectum that would apply only to their constituent parts. One can say that the nomen promotes signification (and this is true of all words that signify) as conception because at this level it effectively produces a state of rest. But at the same time it ignites anxiety in the subsequent sequence of the composition (In Peri hermeneias, LI, I. V, 69). Signification and conception thus have a deep historic tie, and Alberto Coffa seems to have been truly inspired when he suggested a correction to Quine’s aphorism to say, “Meanings are what concepts became when wedded to the word” (The Semantic Tradition). These remarks also serve to clarify the treatment of signification as developed in the logic of Port-Royal. We know that Arnauld and Nicole followed the classic Thomist tripartition of operations of mind, but that they claimed to enrich it in a fourth chapter inspired by Descartes and devoted to method. It would be highly unlikely for the whole edifice not to suffer from such an addition in extremis. As far as the tradition was concerned, this would in effect remove the structuring capacities of the three operations for rationality in general. And as far as modernity was concerned, it proceeded as if method had not been introduced by the author himself in the place of logic, in order to correct the excesses of his precepts and distinctions. But out of this double infidelity a new philosophical and Scholastic object would be born, giving rise to the conventionally accepted uses of term and noun or name in philosophy in the French language. Jean-Baptiste Rauzy REFS.: Aquinas, Thomas, Saint. In Aristotelis libros Peri hermeneias et posteriorum analyticorum exposition, cum textu et recensione leonine. Turin: Marietti, 1964. Translation by Jean T. Oesterle: Aristotle: On Interpretation. Commentary by St. Thomas and Cajetan (Peri hermenias). Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962. Aristotle. Categories and On Interpretation. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. French translation by J. Tricot: Organon I: Catégories et sur l’Interprétation. Paris: Vrin, 1989. . Complete Works. Edited by J. Barnes, Translated by J. Ackrill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. . Aristoteles Latinus, II, 1–2, De interpretatione vel Periermenias. Edited by L. Minio-Paluello. Bruges, Belg: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995. Arnauld, Antoine, and Nicole Pierre. La Logique ou l’art de penser. Edited by P. Clair and F. Girbal. Paris: Presses Universitares de France, 1965. First published in 1662. Translation, with an introduction, by James Dickoff and Patricia James, and a foreword by Charles W. Hendel: The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Coffa, Alberto. The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (continued) TERM 1123 itself” (Phänomenologie des Geistes), in a word, it is the Aufhebung, “suppression, elevation, conservation” (see AUFHEBEN). It is actually rather amazing that Kant and Hegel (to different degrees) criticize or claim to move beyond binarism in the analysis of the proposition that originates in Aristotle. The “invention of the middle term” (inventio medii), as elaborated by Avincenna or Albertus Magnus in the context of reflections on natural prophecy has a number of resonances with the idea of a syllogism as a “judgment according to its fundament.” But most importantly, the Aristotelian interpretation of the propositio is eminently ternary—something for which modern logicians have reproached it ever since Frege. . On a more positive note, Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, §44) maintains that the Aristotelian proposition is not limited to uniting two concepts. In his view Aristotelian propositions are same intention of breaking with “classical” logic. The difference between the two readings lies in the fact that, for Hegel, the complete form of the proposition, what he calls the “universal form of reason” (Wissenschaft der Logik) does not consist in the simple judgment, but in the syllogism itself—albeit revised. By “syllogism” Hegel does not mean a chain of three predicative enunciations, but the “judgment according to its foundation.” Thus a single enunciation that is “wholly contained within the universal proposition,” as in the example used by Hegel of Socrates, “through the particularity of his being a man.” In virtually any predicative syllogism one can speak of a “life” of “triplicity,” which can be unpacked in terms of the “movement” of the middle term in its “unifying of the extremes.” The “is” of the Hegelian proposition is thus not the “simple copula of judgment,” the “is without spirit [geistloses Ist]” of classical logic (PREDICATION, Box 3), but is the “dialectical movement of the proposition 2 Science, natural prophecy, and “invention of the middle term” according to Avicenna v. INGENIUM, Box 1 According to Avicenna, the practice of syllogisms requires an aptitude for discovering the middle terms that are necessary for deduction. This aptitude is the capacity to identify with active intelligence. It is present in varying degrees. Some have it to a degree sufficient to be able to obtain something of this activated intelligence without much effort or training. They also have a second capacity, which the Avicenna Latinus starts by calling subtilitas (subtlety) and then intellectus sanctus in habitu (intellect in habitus; see INTELLECT). This subtilitas renders the Arabic hads [الحدس) [Bakos translates it as “intellectual intuition” [Fr. intuition intellectuelle]; Van Riet as “flash of intellectual intuition” [Fr. éclair d’intuition intellectuelle]). It is the same word—subtilitas—which occurs later in the text to render the Arabic d ¯ aka¯′ [الذكاء .[The Arabic text says that “Intellectual intuition [hads] is an action by which the mind discovers the middle term on its own, and that wisdom [d ¯ aka¯′] is the faculty (quwwa [قوة ;[ Lat. virtus) of intellectual intuition.” The Latin version adds a further complication by stating “ingenium autem est actus rationis, cujus propria vi invenitur medius terminus; subtilitas autem est supra ingenium” (intellectual intuition is an act of reason; by reason’s own power is the middle term discovered; subtlety, however, is above intellectual intuition)—whereas the Arabic says something that should be closer to “subtilitas est virtus ingenii” (subtlety/wisdom is the faculty of intellectual intuition). Returning to the original meaning of the Arabic, in the passages where hads [الحدس [was initially rendered as subtilitas, ingenium (intellectual intuition) would have been the closer term. Étienne Gilson, following the Latin as written, says that subtilitas is superior to ingenium. And this, in fact, is what the Latins thought as well (as shown in Gilson’s chart of “Les sources gréco-arabes de l’augustinisme avicennisant” [The grecoarabic sources of Avicennian Augustinianism]). Assuming that what is at stake in the Avicennian notion of natural prophecy (what we might today call “science”) is an aptitude for discovering large numbers of middle terms, we see that men can be categorized according to a quantitative aptitude (the breadth of invention) and a qualitative one (the speed of invention). This natural inequality among men finds its lower limit in those who have no ingenium at all, and its upper limit in those whose ingenium applies to all questions (or at least most of them) and who can apply this ingenium rapidly. The Avicenna latinus thus describes the highest workings of intelligence in the form of the man whose spirit is so sufficiently purified and at one with the principles of intelligibility that it is as if he were inspired (inspirata); a person whose intelligence (ingenium) would seem to be on fire (accendatur). He obtains an answer to all of his questions from the intelligence at work; he knows everything in an instant (subito), or at least almost instantly (pene subito). The answers to his questions (the Latin mentions only quaestiones) are powerfully impressed upon him (firmiter impressas), and not just as a simple probability. He apprehends all the necessary middle terms in the correct order, not as some blind belief (probata) but as rational certainty (intelligibilia—the Latin a poor rendition of the Arabic). Indeed, “belief does not entail rational certainty when it is applied to things that are known only if their causes are known.” This state is one of the modes (or conditions) of prophecy; a virtus sancta (sacred virtue), the highest of all human faculties. The theory of Avicenna will be taken up by Albertus Magnus, who makes the Avicinnian natural “prophet” the prototype of the man of science, capable of “prediction” (Fr. prévision) in the sublunar world. REFS.: Avicenna. Liber de anima, seu sextus de naturalibus. Edited by S. Van Riet. Leiden, Neth.: Brill, 1968–. . Avicenna’s Psychology: An English Translation of Kitāb al-najāt, book II, chapter VI. Translated by F. Rahman. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Davidson, Herbert Alan. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroës, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Elramani-Jamal, Abdelali. “De la multiplicité des modes de la prophétie chez Ibn-Sina.” In Études sur Avicenne, edited by J. Jolivet and R. Rashed, 74–92. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1984. Gilson, Étienne. “Les sources greco-arabes de l’augustinisme avicennisant.” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen-Âge 4 (1929–30): 74–92. Torrell, Jean-Pierre. “La Question disputée. De prophetia de saint Albert le Grand. Édition critique et commentaire.” In Recherches sur la théorie de al prophétie au Moyen Âge, XIIe–XIVe siècle 13 (1992): 11–204. 1124 LEX. H. P. Grice uses ‘law’ in “Method in philosophical psychology” in a technical way, to introduce a predicate about the soul (such as ‘will’) as a ‘theoretical’ predicate constant within this or that law within this or that theory of philosophical psychology. θέμις δίϰη, νόμоς, rule, juridical norm, principle, procedure, justice, law, Fr. règle, prescription, jugement, justice, loi G. Gottheit der Recht, Ordnung v. DESTINY [KÊR], JUSTICE, LAW, LEX, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, and FAIR, GOD, LIBERTY, OBLIGATION, PARDON, POLIS, PRAVDA, VIRTÙ, WILL The vocabulary that organizes the theories and practices of justice in ancient Greece changes a great deal from Homer to Aristotle, with a succession of expressions for “rule” or “law” that includes θέμις (or the plural θέμιστες), then θεσμός— both drawn from the root *dhe-, “lay down,” which refers to external sources of authority and divine power—and finally, starting in the fifth century, nomos [νόμоς], “division,” which signals a spatial notion of the city. These terms are always complements to dikê [δίϰη] and, in the classical age, to its cognates (τὸ δίϰαιоν, “the just”; dikaiosunê [διϰαιоσύνη], “justice”), which clearly refer to the situation of judgment; the meaning of the former is, in fact, a “sentence.” The other values attached to the word, such as “justice” (as a principle or a virtue), are constructed out of this institutional signification: the law is established through procedure and does not preexist it. As a decision (be it divine or human) whose purpose is to put an end to a conflict dividing the community, dikê does not designate (at least before the distinctions drawn by Aristotle) a sphere of law considered to be autonomous, but rather refers to the political, moral, religious, and juridical norms that have been negatively affected by such conflicts. I. Themis, Dikê, and Traditional Formulas Translations of the terms themis, dikê, and their cognates, which encompass the notion of “justice” in Greek, are often hesitant and controversial for reasons that are not limited to the particularly open polysemy of each. The difficulty derives instead from the fact that ancient authors (before Plato and Aristotle) did not develop any terminological explanations, and the meanings of these concepts of law are only available through their repeated reuse of traditional syntagmatic formulas. It is this frozen quality of poetic diction (the only medium of a public reflection on the law) that explains that real juridical innovations resulted in a sudden change in terminology (whereas the vocabulary of law is generally more stable in other cultures). In the epic poets (Homer, Hesiod, eighth century BCE), the law is apparently articulated through the couplet themis/dikê [θέμις/δίϰη], that is to say, roughly, “rule, prescription” / “judgment.” Later on, dikê (or rather the substantive adjective derived from this noun, “the just,” to dikaion [τὸ δίϰαιоν]) is defined in its relation to other terms: in the seventh century BCE, the “codified rule” (for example, the “laws” of Dracon, around 621 BCE) is called the thesmos [θεσμός], a word from the same family as themis, which is absent, at least in this usage, from the epics; as themis, it refers back to the idea of a rule imposed from without, but it does not have the connotation of “tradition”—on the contrary, it often relates to new institutions. Starting at the end of the sixth century BCE in Athens (perhaps as part of the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes), nomos [νόμоς] starts to be substituted for thesmos, before replacing it completely. In its political usage, nomos, unlike thesmos, seems to involve the idea of an order that is accepted by those who submit to it (cf. Ostwald, Nomos). not predicative but apophantic: “the medium of apophantic propositions not being only alêtheia, but being itself as alêthes ê pseudos, from which basis such propositions are true as well as false.” (Beaufret, “Hegel et la proposition speculative”). REFS.:. Aquinas, Thomas, Saint. In Aristotelis libros Peri hermeneias et posteriorum analyticorum exposition, cum textu et recensione leonine. Turin: Marietti, 1964. Translation by Jean T. Oesterle: Aristotle: On interpretation. Commentary by St. Thomas and Cajetan (Peri hermenias). Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1962. Aristotle. De interpretatione vel Periermenias. Edited by L. Minio-Paluello. Aristoteles Latinus. II, 1–2. Bruges, Belg.: Desclée de Brouwer, 1995. Arnauld, Antoine, and Claude Lancelot. La Grammaire générale et raisonnée. Edited by H. E. Brekle. Stuttgart: Frommann, 1966. First published in 1660. Translation: A General and Rational Grammar. Menston: Scolar Press, 1968. Arnauld, Antoine, and Nicole Pierre. La Logique ou l’art de penser. Edited by P. Clair and F. Girbal. Paris: Presses Universitares de France, 1965. First published in 1662. Translation, with an introduction, by James Dickoff and Patricia James and a foreword by Charles H. Hendel: The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Beaufret, J. “Hegel et la proposition speculative.” In Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. 2, Philosophie modern. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1973. Boethius. Commentaries on Aristotle’s De interpretatione. 2 vols. Edited by Karl Meister. New York: Garland, 1987. Descartes, René. Regulae. In Œuvres complètes. Edited by C. Adam and P. Tannery, Paris: Vrin, 1996, French translation by J.-L. Marion: Règles utiles et claires pour la direction de l’esprit en la recherche de la vérité. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. Hegel, G.W.F. Phénoménologie de l’Esprit. Edited by J. Lasson and completed by J. Hoffmeister. 4th ed. Leipzig: Meiner, 1937. . Wissenschaft der Logik. 3rd ed. Stuttgart: Frommann, 1959. Hobbes, Thomas. Logica. Edited by William Molesworth. London, 1839. . Part I of De Corpore [Elementorum philosophiae section prima de corpore]. Translated by A. P. Martinich. New York: Abaris Books, 1981. Jungius, Joachim. Logica Hamburgensis. Edited by Rudolf Meyer. Hamburg: J. J. Augustin, 1957. First published in 1638. . Logicae Hamburgensis Additamenta. Edited by W. Risse. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1977. Kant, Immanuel. Critique de la raison pure. Translated by A. Tremesaygues and B. Pacaud. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. Kretzmann, Norman, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg. The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Recherches générales sur l’analyse des notions et des vérités. 24 thèses métaphysiques et autres textes logiques et métaphysiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. . Philosophical Essays. Translated and edited by Roger Ariew and Dan Garber. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989. . Philosophical Papers and Letters. Edited and translated by Leroy E. Loemker. 2nd ed., Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, 1969. . Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz. Edited by Louis Couturat. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1903. Nuchelmans, Gabriel. Theories of the Proposition: Ancient and Medieval Conceptions of the Bearers of Truth and Falsity. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1973. . Late-Scholastic and Humanist Theories of the Proposition. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980. . Judgment and Proposition from Descartes to Kant. Amsterdam: NorthHolland, 1983. Panaccio, Claude. Le Discours intérieur. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Peter, of Spain. Tractatus. Edited by L. M. De Rijk. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1972. Rougier, L. La Métaphysique et le langage. Paris: Denöel, 1973. Thomasius. Christian. Einleitung zur Vernunftlehre. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1968. Vaulézard, J.-L. La Nouvelle algèbre de M. Viète. Paris: Fayard, 1986. First published in 1630. Walch, Johann Georg. Philosophisches Lexikon. Leipzig, 1726. Wille, Dagmar von. Lessico filosofico della Frühaufklärung. Rome: Ed. dell’Ateneo, 1991. THEMIS 1125 “to say” (Fr. dire), and as the Greek deiknunai [δειϰνύναι], “to show” (and comparisons to other Indo-European languages indicate that the latter meaning is the older one). Two interpretations are thus possible. If one starts from the “showing,” the dikê, often accompanied by the epithet “right,” would consist in designating a straight line, like a dividing line between two properties. This demonstration of visible evidence would be the original sense of “judgment,” the meaning that dikê most often assumes during the archaic period (cf. Gagarin, Early Greek Law); on the other hand, if one wants to account for the passage using the sense of “saying” in Latin and with a word like iudex (“he who speaks the law”), then the supposed indexicality in the root will become a speech-act. Benveniste sees in dikê a formula that serves to “show what one should do,” that “prescribes the norm” (RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes). From this comes one of the Homeric names for the judge: dikaspolos [διϰασπόλоς], or “he who guards over the formulas of the law.” . II. The Autonomization of the Sphere of Law The classic question for interpretation is to determine when and under what conditions terms such as themis and dikê, which seem to have first referred to traditional forms validated by custom, acquired a fully juridical meaning. This required establishing at least some measure of autonomy for the sphere of law. The different interpretations have focused on two general historical lines of development that determined the juridical use of these words. At the beginning of the twentieth century, themis and dikê were understood as embodying two forms of justice: the first, themis, was understood as applying to the archaic community of family (or “tribe”); the second, dikê, was considered to apply to an interfamilial justice on the way to becoming political organization. “That which is themis” is linked in its content to a “jurisdiction” internal to the tribe, whereas dikê as judgment (and not as simple arbitrage) requires an external authority (cf. Glotz, La solidarité de la famille; Gernet, Recherches and Droit et société; followed by RT: Le vocabulaire These radical changes correspond to differences in concepts and practices. In his Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (Vocabulary of Indo-European Institutions), Émile Benveniste examined the Homeric usages and compared them to languages related to Greek in order to expose the semantic kernels around which are organized the meanings of themis and dikê (RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indoeuropéennes). Attached to the Indo-European root *dhe-, “to put down, to place, to establish” (cf. Lat. facere, Fr. faire, Gr. tithenai [τιθέναι], “put down, make”), the feminine derivative themis marks the institution as the result of an act of external authority. It is the rule established by the gods, which Zeus, with his scepter, transmits to the kings (cf. Iliad 2.205ff., 9.97): “Coming face-to-face with Atrides Agamemnon / [Odysseus] relieved him of his fathers’ royal scepter— / its power can never die—and grasping it tightly / off he strode to the ships of Argives armed in bronze (Iliad 2.214–17, trans. Fagles). These kings know the themistes [θέμιστες], that is to say, the collection of prescriptions that establish the rights and the duties of the individuals subject to them (the laws or sanctioned customs, the traditional sayings, the oracular proclamations). The application of these rules by the king is not simply automatic; it requires a decision, which may be good or bad, depending on whether it is linked to violence (bia [βία]): “When Zeus flings down his pelting, punishing rains—/ up in arms, furious, storming against those men / who brawl in the courts [themistas (θέμιστας)] and render crooked [skolias (σκολιάς)] judgments, / men who throw all rights to the winds with no regard / for the vengeful eyes of the gods” (Iliad 16.386–87, trans. Fagles, 16.457– 61). The frequent use of the formulas “as is normally the case” (hê themis estin [ἣ θέμις ἐστίν]) or “it is not normal to . . .” (ou themis esti [оὐ θέμις ἐστί], followed by an infinitive) is based on this first meaning of a divine prescription guaranteed by the king. Dikê refers to another order of activity (even if a dikê can also be described as “twisted,” and even more often than the themistes). The word has the same root as the Latin dicere, 1 Dikê The word dikê, which is of the same family as deiknunai, “to show,” has the primary meaning of “sentence” (as a “monstration” of the just, in an act of speech); from this derives dikazein [διϰάζειν], “to judge.” By extending this action to a procedure, it means “an action of justice” (from which comes “case argued, right claimed,” in other words, the expected sentence given) and, more generally, “trial.” In these institutional contexts, still linked to the temporal idea of a procedure that is meant to end in a decision, the word, unlike the Latin ius, does not designate a preexisting right that ought to be recognized. Instead, the rights are themselves defined by the judgment. The sense of “punishment,” which it has in the fifth century (for example, in the expression dikên didonai [δίϰην διδόναι], “to yield to what is due”), is derived from that of “verdict.” When the word refers more abstractly to the principle of just action (“justice,” as opposed to hubris [ὕϐϱις]), it is in fact still linked to procedure, providing it with a criterion of rectitude. In the classical period, this value is conveyed more by dikaiosunê [διϰαιоσύνη] or to dikaion (in which dikê takes on a technical sense of “action of justice”). Another range of meanings derives from the notion of formula. It covers “usage” or habit, which occurs in archaic epic and in later archaizing prose (cf. Odyssey 11.218 for a “dikê of mortals,” which prevents one from seizing the spirits of the dead). At stake is an imperative rule that determines the norms to follow. From here, one gets to the sense of “like” or “as” (Fr. comme) in comparisons taken on in the classical period by the accusative dikên [δίϰην] accompanied by a genitive, as in kunos dikên [ϰυνὸς δίϰην], “like a dog.” of straight and proper judgments [itheiêisi dikêisin (ἰθείῃσι δίϰῃσιν)]” (Theogony 85–86)—or the opposite, “by means of twisted judgments” (skoliêis dikêis [σϰоλιῇς δίϰῃς], Works and Days 221). The problem raised by this formulaic sentence concerns the criterion of rectitude that enables the king, in a pronouncement (dikê) adapted to a new situation, to apply a traditional prescription that is met by the general approval of his community. The goal of the right judgment is in fact to reestablish agreement where argument had taken over (law and politics are not differentiated). Other uses of dikê, this time in the singular, refer to the value or norm that is destroyed when judgments (dikai) are not correct: bad king-judges “banish justice [dikên]” (Iliad 16.388; cf. above). Hesiod gives content to the norm of corrective judgment through his work on the poetic code. First, he seems to invent a formula that makes the expansion of the norm more explicit. The Works and Days opens with a request addressed to Zeus that defines the relation of the sovereign god to the king-judges: “You, with justice [dikêi (δίϰῃ), in the dative singular], make judgments [ithune themistas (ἴθυνε θέμιστας)]. For my part, I will inform Perses of the confirmed truths” (9–10). A second-order corrective justice is superimposed over human justice in action. This statement presupposes that the king-judges themselves do not have at their disposal the principle of rectitude to inform their judgments. They must have recourse to a knowledge of Zeus and his justice, which only the poet can give them. This norm can be external, when a divine action is expected to reestablish it (in his other poem, the Theogony, Hesiod sets a framework for the validity of this norm when he makes Dikê the daughter of Zeus and a Titan, Themis; cf. below), or it can be internal as a criterion of just behavior (toward one’s own: one’s own family, people, inner circle, group of fellow citizens, or even the foreigners with whom one has contact). Its opposite, then, is hubris [ὕϐϱις], that is to say, transgression as “oppressive violence” (cf. Perpillou, Recherches lexicales). Morality and law are not distinguished (although Hesiod immediately asks that kings conform to “morality” in their judgments), and Aristotle will analyze this confusion in the uses of the expression to dikaion (the just) at the beginning of book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, in order to distinguish justice as properly juridical from the inclination to do what is just. The debate that arises between the archaic Greek authors centers on the definition of this fundamental norm of behaviors and procedures. Hesiod does seem to take issue with Homer, for whom, in the Iliad, the correctness of a judgment is clearly evident (for example, in the judgment scene represented on Achilles’s shield in book 18): the right and proper judgment is immediately praised by the community, which reunites as a result. The law, in Homer, can take care of itself, by respect for its own procedures. This implicit thesis has enormous influence over the course of the poem: the injustice of Agamemnon when he decides to take Achilles’s captive Briseis for his own is apparent to all members of the Achaean warrior assembly; but this decision, which sets the whole account of the Iliad into motion, is necessary from a point of view that transcends the law and that, for Homer, is the very defining feature of reality, that is, Zeus’s will to impose his own direction on history: as a result of this twisted judgment, he imposes both ruin on the Greeks and des institutions indo-européennes). This material and historical distinction does not, however, accord with what one reads in Homer and Hesiod, where the two terms are complementary, each with its own distinct function. Thus, the passage in the Iliad that refers to Zeus’s rage at the kings “who had decided upon twisted themistes” (Iliad 16.387) is immediately followed by: “and who banished justice [dikên] without consideration for the vigilance of the gods” (16.388). Furthermore, the fully developed and most common form of the expression “who decided upon twisted themistes” is in fact “who decided themistes by means of twisted judgments [dikai (δίϰαι)]” (or “rights,” depending on the context). The core of the problem lies in establishing the relationship between these two uses of the same word, dikê (justice/judgments), in relation to the themistes. Another weighty tendency of interpretation is to explain the development of archaic law in terms of the passage from orality to writing. According to this line of thought, there can be no law in the strict sense unless the rule can be identified as such, in its universal value and application (“whoever does x will be subject to y”), and unless it is independent of the traditional contexts of its enunciation, which are always specific and particular. This would only become possible with the institution of writing (which appeared in Greece in its alphabetical form in the first quarter of the eighth century, but became widespread later, at the same time that prose developed as distinct from oral poetry). In this context, the Homeric themistes and those in Hesiod cannot even designate an oral “code” (whose existence does not seem to be documented by other sources). They would be “norms of behavior,” which the king, in a correct judgment, decides to apply (Gagarin, Early Greek Law). This stage would be considered as a “proto-legal” moment, in which the rules are not conceived as juridical rules, but in which there are recognized procedures (dikai) for the resolution of conflicts. On the cognitive level, this reconstruction, focused on the procedures and acts of language, leads one to defer until much later (in fact, not until Plato) the moment in which a general concept like “justice” not only can be extricated from each concrete situation in which speech about the law is uttered, but also and especially can be thematized in its universality (Havelock, The Greek Concept of Justice). III. Reformulations and Displacements A. Hesiod, or the expansion of norms Though the general outlines of this framework can be accepted as stable (with a dikê that is first and foremost procedural in origin), one still needs to examine the workings of those Greek authors themselves on the notions and formulas that they inherited. The texts establish perspectives and theoretical positions antithetical to the received traditional terms. In an implicit and contradictory dialogue with the Homer of the Iliad, Hesiod reflects on the formulaic usage of the term dikê and proposes a new definition of the fundamental norm that governs the legitimacy of all norms or procedures in effect. According to the archaic poetic code, dikê is generally used in the plural, in the instrumental dative dikais, for “judgments”: “deciding upon [diakrinonta (θιαϰϱίνоντα)] prescriptions [themistas (θέμιστας)] by means identifiable juridical and political rules that are the objects of a new legislation, breaking with the past. Solon, the archon of Athens in 594–593 BCE and the author of many new laws (thesmoi), no longer bases the authority of the laws on an external divine authority, but instead (cf. Blaise, “Solon”) assumes the role traditionally ascribed to Zeus and claims to have reconciled the two opposites, dikê (understood in the institutional sense of “procedure”) and biê [βίη] (violence: fr. 36 West). He is violent as a legislator: force is not a support or compensation for the law, it is internal to it, because of the law’s constraining dimension. As for the content of the law, it is not deduced from something preexisting, but is a direct result of legislative activity itself. Solon (fr. 36 West 18–20) transforms the traditional saying that links the themistes, the prescriptions, to right justice (in the sense of “sentence”) and states a paradox: “I have written the laws [thesmoi] as much for the bad as for the good, and I have adjusted the right judgment for each [eutheian dikên (εὐθεῖαν δίϰην)].” The sentence establishes the written law, the individual case makes the rule; norms are created by accounting for diversity, and they gain legitimacy through their application, not by virtue of a principle that transcends them. This position would wither away if one translated dikê as “justice,” without taking into account the procedure of judgment. Even if we already recognize in the differences between Hesiod and Solon (who is, in a sense, already prefigured by Homer) some elements of the discussion that will subsequently pit the adherents of the law as something deduced from a more fundamental ontological reality against those who posit an autonomous legitimacy of the law, the framework of the discussion will change when the pole of the “rule” (as opposed to the dikê or its cognate to dikaion, “the just”) will come to be represented, starting in the fifth century BCE, no longer by a word that is almost always used in the plural (the themistes or the thesmoi), but by a generic term, usually found in the singular: nomos. . Nomos is opposed by another term in the singular, phusis [φύσις], “nature”: “The law [nomos] that tyrannizes men does violence [biazetai (βιάζεται)] to the nature of many the capture of Troy (which in an eschatological perspective leads to the end of the “age of heroes”). Hesiod, on the other hand, constructs a reality in which the principle of justice plays a determining role. This requires him to deduce the necessity of this norm from a general conception of things. The personification of Dikê (absent from Homer) and her genealogy enable this principle to take its proper place in the hierarchy of beings. By making Dikê one of the Horai (along with Eunomia, “well-ordered politics,” and Eirene, “peace”), that is, one of the daughters of the Titan Themis and the Olympian Zeus (Theogony, 901–2; this union also produces the Moirai, or Fates), who determine the quality and length of existence of mortals, Hesiod indicates two things. Dikê has to do with human beings, not with the gods; and her birth reconciles the two previously antagonistic generations: the Titans (Chronos, Themis, Ocean, Tethys, etc.), and the Olympian gods (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hera, etc.) who had succeeded them in the course of total war. As Heinz Wismann (“Propositions”) has underscored, the differential norms of the Titans and the gods are mediated by those of Man. The Olympian order is characterized by a fixed and constraining differentiation of the regions of reality to ensure peace in the divine world (according to a spatial representation of the city). This world needs to be reconciled with the vitality and fecundity of the world of the Titans. Human beings enable this reconciliation because, by definition, they are subject to excess, since their survival depends at every instant on overcoming nothingness through their work. Order is not given to them, as it is to the gods, but must be imposed on their activity, in the form of justice. B. Solon, or the violence of the legislator In Hesiod, the law as a procedure for decisions that guarantee a good distribution of vital resources is thus drawn from a natural order that is already given. In fact, its criterion of rectitude lies in taking into account the necessity of work, the consequence of a general theodicy—from which comes the ambiguity in Hesiod’s text between dikê as procedure and dikê as principle. The opposite position, already evident in Homer, of a right to self-legitimization will be developed later, in another conceptual and social context, when the traditional themistes will give way to the thesmoi [θεσμоί], 2 Nomos The word nomos is derived from the root *nem-, “to attribute, to distribute according to custom or propriety” (see RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, s.v.). It has an older homonym (with the accent on the final syllable and not the first) that signifies “(out to) pasture,” “nourishment” (cf. nomeus [νоμεύς], “shepherd,” nomas [νоμάς], “pastoralist, nomad”). Accented on the first syllable, it has a meaning of “sharing” (cf. RT: Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, s.v., despite Ostwald, Nomos). Not only is it a “habitual way of being” that would tend toward a meaning of “rule” (“law and order”); it also implies the idea of constraint: the notion of an “imposed division” is present from its very first uses (cf. Hesiod, Works and Days 276: if men, unlike animals, are subject to justice [dikê], this in fact results from a partition determined by Zeus, which establishes work as the means of subsistence, and not the devouring of other humans). The idea of an arrangement also appears in the use of nome in the musical sense (as melody). With nomos, the rule becomes something that is admitted (and not “posed” like thesmos, which nomos supplants): the word in itself does not distinguish usage from custom, or from the law. The verb nomizein [νоμίζειν] is derived from nomos and means “habitually using, recognizing, believing, thinking.” REFS.:. Ostwald, Martin. Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. 1128 THEMIS (1131a1) as private relations (en tois sunallagmasi [ἐν τоῖς συναλλάγμασι]), whether based on free choice (a sale and a purchase) or not (as in clandestine cases, such as false witness or theft, or violent cases, such as defamation or armed robbery). These two parts of justice have as their goal not the legal, but the equal (to ison [τὸ ἴσоν]). What is not so obvious to us, if we are used to the formal universality of republican equality (“all men are born equal and with equal rights”), are the Aristotelian definitions of equality. For an equal distribution does not consist in giving the same share to each, but requires instead a proportional estimation (axia [ἀξία], 1131a26) of persons and of parts: “the just is an analogue” (to dikaion analogon ti [τὸ δίϰαιоν ἀνάλоγόν τι], 5.3.1131a29; see LOGOS). Depending on the political regime, value can be defined in terms of liberty, wealth, birth, or excellence, but in each case equality is calculated as a geometric proportion establishing a one-to-one correspondence between persons and things. Injustice consists, then, not in a different distribution, but rather in a lack of proper proportion. Corrective justice, by contrast, follows an arithmetic proportion (1132a1). It treats all persons as being of essentially equal value (chrêtaios isois [χϱῆταιὁς ἴσоις], 1132a5). Yet upon closer analysis, its workings only serve to maintain proportion (in the case of a transaction) or to reestablish it (if there is a grievance), by averaging out loss and gain. The judge “equalizes” (ho de dikastês epanisoi [ὁ δὲ διϰαστὴς ἐπανισоῖ], 1132a24). This is not so different, says Aristotle in a play on words, from the judge (dikastês) being someone who “cuts in two” (dichastês [διχαστής], 1132a32), that is, he returns the distribution to its prior state (“as before,” 1132b20). Proportionality as the only guarantor of equality: this is the Aristotelian position, and it is politically fundamental. Rather than start by considering all social atoms as identical, it starts with those differences without which there is no community. In order to enable exchanges and organization— a city, in short—distinct forms of competence and virtue are needed, as well as a common currency to make them commensurable (cf. all of Nicomachean Ethics 8). This is why, for example, money relates to philia [φιλία] (see LOVE, II.B.2). One can thus appreciate the difference in principle between the equality of the ancients and the equality of the moderns, and why some would advocate a return to antiquity (see LIBERAL). B. The epieikeia, or soft rule Aristotle proposed a form of justice to serve as a corrective to justice itself: the epieikeia [ἐπιείϰεια] (a term formed from *eikô, “resemble, appear to conform, to be suitable for”; see EIDÔLON, Box 1), which we have rendered as “equity” along the lines of the Latin aequitas, “equality,” although it is as far as possible from formal equality. Equity redresses legal justice, not because the law is incorrect or erroneous, but because, by definition and structure, the law is general. “It is the imperfections [lacunae] that we are correcting [epanorthoun to elleiphthen (ἐπανоϱθоῦν τὸ ἐλλειφθέν)]” (5.14.1137b22), by acting “as if the legislator himself were there,” by ruling “as he would have ruled if he knew the particular case” (1137b22–24; cf. also Rhetoric 1.1374b10). It is the rigidity of the law that needs redressing, by bending it like a soft rule(r): “In relation to the indeterminate, things” (Plato, Protagoras, speaking as the sophist Hippias). In this statement, the law is posited in its autonomy for the first time, as a positive law, and as Hippias’s statement points out, it can be contrasted with the norm that underlies it, with justice (through the idea of a tyrannical, i.e., unjust nomos). Plato will isolate the principle of a just, and hence natural, nomos by connecting it to the mind’s faculty of intelligence (in the Laws, he derives nomos from noos [νόоς], the “spirit,” 4.714a). Aristotle will be the first to detach political (or juridical) justice from absolute (or moral) justice and thus move beyond the opposition between law and nature by turning them into two aspects of political justice whose existence as such depends on their realization in particular laws. The variability of the laws is thus naturalized: “The politically just [to politikon dikaion (τὸ πоλιτιϰὸν δίϰαιоν )] is in part natural [phusikon (φυσιϰόν)] and in part legal [nomikon (νоμιϰόν)]” (Nicomachean Ethics 5.10.1134b18–19). IV. Justice and Equity: Aristotelian Distinctions Book 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to the just, to dikaion, and to justice, dikaiosunê [διϰαιоσύνη]. Aristotle explores their multiple meanings (pleonachôs legêtai [πλεоναχῶς λέγηται], 5.2.1129a26). These meanings are pregnant with most of our modern distinctions, but with some distortions and differences in emphasis, which is why it is important to understand their exact significance. A. Global and partial justice, distributive and corrective: Equality and proportion Justice is first of all a virtue, aretê [ἀϱετή], that is to say, an individual disposition (hexis [ἕξις]; cf. chap. 13). It is all the more fully developed (teleia [τελεία], 5.2.1129b30) in that it serves (chrêsis [χϱῆσίς], 1129b31) in the relation between the self and itself, as well as between the self and other (pros heteron [πϱὸς ἕτεϱоν], 1130a4). It is also an allotrion agathon [ἀλλότϱιоν ἀγαθὸν]: a good for the other, a good for someone else, an altruistic good (insofar as the goal is to promote and maintain the harmony of the political community [politikê koinônia (πоλιτιϰῆ ϰоινωνία)]), but not a good for the foreigner. It has the same final purpose as the laws, and in a sense, it coincides with the obedience that is owed to them (1129b12–19). Aristotle thus returns to the ethico-political nexus of the old myth of Protagoras, in which Zeus adds to the technical gifts of Prometheus and grants to humans those excellent political qualities of aidôs [αἰδώς] (modesty, respect [as an awareness of others]) and of dikê so that they can live in peace (see VIRTÙ, Box 1). According to Aristotle, this is a total or global (holê [ὅλη]) justice that is dependent on the culture of the community, on education in the common interest (peri paideian tên pros to koinon [πεϱὶ παιδείαν τὴν πϱὸς τὸ ϰоινόν], 1130b26). The new distinctions that will carry into the future concern partial justice (kata meros [ϰατὰ μέϱоς]) as a part of global justice (1130b30). Aristotle distinguishes between distributive justice, which regulates public participation and applies “to the distribution [en tais dianomais (ἐν ταῖς διανоμαῖς)] of honors, riches, or other advantages to be split up among the members of the community” (1130b31–32) and so-called corrective justice “that directs or redresses.” The latter supplies the meaning of diorthôtikon [διоϱθωτιϰόν] . Recherches sur le développement de la pensée juridique et morale en Grèce: Étude sémantique. Paris: E. Leroux, 1917. Glotz, Gustave. La solidarité de la famille dans le droit criminel en Grèce. Paris: A. Fontemoing, 1904. Harrison, A.R.W. The Law of Athens. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968–71. Havelock, Eric Alfred. The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Judet de la Combe, Pierre. “Les critères du jugement droit dans Travaux et les Jours d’Hésiode.” Droit et Culture 29 (1995): 159–75. Latte, Kurt. “Der Rechtsgedanke im archaischen Griechentum.” In Zur griechischen Rechtsgeschichte, edited by E. Benecker, 77–98. Darmstadt, Ger.: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968. Ostwald, Martin. Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. Perpillou, Jean-Louis. Recherches lexicales en grec ancien: Étymologie, analogie, représentations. Louvain, Belg.: Peeters, 1996. Reneault, Alain, and Lukas K. Sosoe. Philosophie du droit. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. Romily, Jacqueline de. La loi dans la pensée grecque des origines à Aristote. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971. Rudhardt, Jean. Thémis et les Hôrai: Recherche sur les divinités grecques de la justice et de la paix. Geneva: Droz, 1999. West, M. L. Iambi et elegi Graeci. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Wismann, Heinz. “Propositions pour une lecture d’Hésiode.” In Le métier du mythe: Lectures d’Hésiode, edited by Fabienne Blaise, Pierre Judet de la Combe, and Philippe Rousseau. Villeneuve d’Ascq, Fr.: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1996. the canon is also indeterminate [tou gar aoristou aoristos kai ho kanôn (τоῦ γὰϱ ἀоϱίστоυ ἀόϱιστоς ϰαὶ ὁ ϰανών)], like the lead in the canon of the architects of Lesbos.” It moves and adapts to the curves of the stones like a psêphisma [ψήφισμα], a decree adapted to a particular affair (1137b28–31). The inventive consideration of the individual and of difference (one will refer to “personality” and “circumstances”) is thus inscribed at the very heart of the evaluation and reestablishment of equality. . Pierre Judet de la Combe REFS.: Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and edited by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Aubenque, Pierre. “La loi chez Aristote.” Archives de Philosophie du Droit 25 (1980): 147–57. Blaise, Fabienne. “Solon, Fragment 36W: Pratique et fondation des normes politiques.” Revue des Études Grecques 108 (1995): 24–37. Gagarin, Michel. Early Greek Law. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Gernet, Louis. Droit et société dans la Grèce ancienne. Paris: Sirey, 1964. The status of equity in Nietzsche is, of course, inseparable from his conception of justice, essentially developed over the period extending from Human, All Too Human (1878–79) to Dawn (1881). Justice—or equity—does not originate in a disinterested or unselfish act, but rather in a barter or exchange between equally powerful men who consider this preferable to a mutually damaging struggle (Human, All Too Human, 1.92; cf. Genealogy of Morals, 2.8). Properly speaking, equity is a development of justice that is born among those who do not sin against equality in the community: it is applied to cases where the law does not prescribe anything, in which a subtle sense of equilibrium intervenes, which takes the past into account, and whose maxim is to not do to others what you would not wish to have done to yourself. (The Traveler and His Shadow, §32, in Human, All Too Human) Equity is thus defined primarily through the figure of the “equitable man,” whose virtue consists in his ability to determine what is just (as to equality or inequality) when the law is mute or where the legal relations are unstable (cf. Dawn §112). Nietzsche takes up Aristotle’s analyses (Nicomachean Ethics, 5.14.1137a31–1138a30) and gives them an “aristocratic” interpretation, which also grants a certain reciprocal indulgence to the “equals”: Aequum means specifically: “it conforms to our equality.” Equity levels out our little differences to reestablish the appearance of equality, and means that we forgive many things in ourselves that we shouldn’t forgive. (The Traveler and His Shadow, §32, in Human, All Too Human) Philippe Raynaud REFS.: Nietzsche, Friedrich. Dawn: Thoughts on the Presumptions of Morality. Translated by Brittain Smith. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. . Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Chose: Causa, Res The French words chose and cause come from the same Latin word, causa, which is part of the juridical vocabulary and designates a case in which interests are at stake—simultaneously the trial, the object of the trial, and the parties concerned— all things that French also designates by cause. Causa is often joined with ratio, and then it takes on (or recovers, for some uses seem to have occurred earlier; see RT: Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue latine) the meaning of cause as “reason,” “motive,” “influence,” what in French is called cause in the causal sense of the term (à cause de). Moreover, causa is often joined with res to designate the “matter” or the “facts of the case.” Causa and res, which first meant “the family goods,” “property,” “wealth” (cf. Sanskrit revā َn), and then “matter,” “object,” grow weaker and at the same time contaminate each other to designate together what we call chose (Ger. Ding and Sache, Eng. “thing,” in which we also hear an old word for assembly or tribunal). On the other hand, the 1130 TIME I. Objective Time and Subjective Time 1. Time is often analyzed by differentiating objective time, which can sometimes be physical and an object of mathematics, and at others historical and chronological, from a subjective time defined as time in relation to life and as duration. These two models, of the Greek chronos and aiôn [αἰών], of the Latin tempus and aevum, are in fact very intertwined and cannot be simply superimposed: see AIÔN. 2. On physical time, which is objective, measurable, and used as a measure itself, which Aristotle defines as “something of movement,” see FORCE, MOMENT; cf. NATURE, WORLD. On its linear or cyclical representations, see also CORSO. On the measurement of musical time, see MOMENTE. 3. On subjective time and its representation specific to human existence, one can refer to DASEIN, ERLEBEN; cf. DESTINY, ESSENCE, LIFE, MALAISE. II. Cut-Up Time; Present, Past, Future 1. There is some dispute as to the etymology of tempus (in linking tempus as weather and tempus as tempe). It is sometimes described in relation to the Greek temnô [τέμνω], to cut; see MOMENT, II. Whence the importance of the three instances that define time by cutting it up into present, past, and future, and the inflections suggested by the doublets that occur in certain languages (Ger. Gegenwart and Anwesenheit, vergangen and gewesen; Fr. futur and avenir); see PRESENT. On the preeminence of the present, see also ESTI, IL Y A. 2. The objectivity of these moments in time, linked to events and to narrative, is implied by history (see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, PROGRESS), and their subjectivity, which is sometimes upset or overturned, is linked to memory and forgetting (see MEMORY). 3. This objective partitioning (a “period piece” of furniture) and/or subjective partitioning is a characteristic of the notion of “epoch” (from the Gr. epi [ἐπί], on, and ochê [ὀχή], support, bearing, superimposed on echein [ἔχειν], to have to hold on to). A return to or reinvestment in the Greek meaning of “suspension” and “stop” characterizes the phenomenological method; see EPOCHÊ. This way of cutting up also applies to the great periodizations of time, for example, in aesthetics—see BAROQUE, CLASSIC, ROMANTIC (and STYLE)—which vary somewhat in different cultures, and to the determination of the contemporary; see NEUZEIT. III. Remarkable Instances of Time Under the rubric of MOMENT, one can find a study of the expression of some singularities in the course of time, especially the Greek kairos, which designates the opportune moment. Its seizure and use properly belong to GENIUS, to INGENIUM (see also WITTICISM). See also, under JETZTZEIT, the irruption of a messianic present into the course of history, under RÉVOLUTION, a study of the ambiguity of change. Greek doublet aition/aitia [αἴτιον, αἰτία], which translates causa in both the legal and the causal sense, remains quite distinct from pragma [πϱᾶγμα] (from prattein [πϱάττειν], meaning “act”) and especially from chrêma, chrêmata [χϱῆμα, χϱήματα] (that which is used, wealth), which are the best equivalents of res. We will begin by using the example of res in these ancient and modern systems to explore the word’s polysemy and at the same time its extreme indetermination: see RES, Box 1 on Greek, RES, Box 2 on Arabic, and RES, Box 3 on all the etymologies of res and Ding, which refer to both the objective, solid consistency of Being (ratum) and thought and representation (Lat. res/ratitudo, Ger. Ding/Denken, Eng. “thing”/“think”). II. Chose, Quelque Chose, “Being,” “Nothing” 1. On the extension of the term “thing,” which applies to everything that exists, and even to everything that does not exist (thus we speak about “something” that does not exist, and in French, especially about rien (nothing), derived from the Latin accusative rem, see ESSENCE, IL Y A, NOTHING, OBJECT, REALITY, RES, SACHVERHALT, SEIN; cf. NEGATION, PERSON, II.4, TO BE). See also VORHANDEN for a determination of the thing as “subsisting” or “available.” On the relationship between “thing” and “word,” see SIGN and TRUTH, WORD; see also LOGOS, Box 4. 2. On the difference between “thing” and “person,” see ANIMAL, I/ME/MYSELF, SUBJECT; cf. LIFE/LEBEN, PERSON. 3. On “the thing in itself” (Ding an sich), see ERSCHEINUNG, GEGENSTAND; cf. GERMAN. v. NATURE, WELT TIME / TENSE FRENCH temps GERMAN Zeit, Wetter, Tempus LATIN tempus The French language has a particularly striking number of meanings attached to the word temps, each corresponding to a distinct and different word in the other European languages. First, there is le temps qu’il fait, which in English is the weather, and in German das Wetter. Second, there is le temps qui passe, which refers to time in English and Zeit in German. Third, le temps des verbes correlates to the tense of verbs in English and the Tempus in German. The Latin word tempus, from which the French word derives, had, interestingly enough, already applied to both chronology and grammar. It was also linked to meteorology: in addition to tempestus—whose first meaning is “opportune” and which translates the Greek kairos [ϰαιϱός]—starting with Ennius, the word tempestas refers to “the state of the atmosphere,” and hence euphemistically to “bad weather” (Fr. mauvais temps), or tempest. Finally, the plural tempora designated portions of time, the “epochs” as well as the “seasons.” Thus the Latin term encompassed all the usages of the Greek words chronos [χϱόνоς], “time,” and kairos, “opportunity.” The broad French usage attests to the term’s ample range. See ETERNITY, INSTANT, MOMENT. I. Objective Time and Subjective Time 1. Time is often analyzed by differentiating objective time, which can sometimes be physical and an object of mathematics, and at others historical and chronological, from a subjective time defined as time in relation to life and as duration. These two models, of the Greek chronos and aiôn [αἰών], of the Latin tempus and aevum, are in fact very intertwined and cannot be simply superimposed: see AIÔN. 2. On physical time, which is objective, measurable, and used as a measure itself, which Aristotle defines as “something of movement,” see FORCE, MOMENT; cf. NATURE, WORLD. On its linear or cyclical representations, see also CORSO. On the measurement of musical time, see MOMENTE. 3. On subjective time and its representation specific to human existence, one can refer to DASEIN, ERLEBEN; cf. DESTINY, ESSENCE, LIFE, MALAISE. II. Cut-Up Time; Present, Past, Future 1. There is some dispute as to the etymology of tempus (in linking tempus as weather and tempus as tempe). It is sometimes described in relation to the Greek temnô [τέμνω], to cut; see MOMENT, II. Whence the importance of the three instances that define time by cutting it up into present, past, and future, and the inflections suggested by the doublets that occur in certain languages (Ger. Gegenwart and Anwesenheit, vergangen and gewesen; Fr. futur and avenir); see PRESENT. On the preeminence of the present, see also ESTI, IL Y A. 2. The objectivity of these moments in time, linked to events and to narrative, is implied by history (see HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY, PROGRESS), and their subjectivity, which is sometimes upset or overturned, is linked to memory and forgetting (see MEMORY). 3. This objective partitioning (a “period piece” of furniture) and/or subjective partitioning is a characteristic of the notion of “epoch” (from the Gr. epi [ἐπί], on, and ochê [ὀχή], support, bearing, superimposed on echein [ἔχειν], to have to hold on to). A return to or reinvestment in the Greek meaning of “suspension” and “stop” characterizes the phenomenological method; see EPOCHÊ. This way of cutting up also applies to the great periodizations of time, for example, in aesthetics—see BAROQUE, CLASSIC, ROMANTIC (and STYLE)—which vary somewhat in different cultures, and to the determination of the contemporary; see NEUZEIT. III. Remarkable Instances of Time Under the rubric of MOMENT, one can find a study of the expression of some singularities in the course of time, especially the Greek kairos, which designates the opportune moment. Its seizure and use properly belong to GENIUS, to INGENIUM (see also WITTICISM). See also, under JETZTZEIT, the irruption of a messianic present into the course of history, under RÉVOLUTION, a study of the ambiguity of change. Greek doublet aition/aitia [αἴτιον, αἰτία], which translates causa in both the legal and the causal sense, remains quite distinct from pragma [πϱᾶγμα] (from prattein [πϱάττειν], meaning “act”) and especially from chrêma, chrêmata [χϱῆμα, χϱήματα] (that which is used, wealth), which are the best equivalents of res. We will begin by using the example of res in these ancient and modern systems to explore the word’s polysemy and at the same time its extreme indetermination: see RES, Box 1 on Greek, RES, Box 2 on Arabic, and RES, Box 3 on all the etymologies of res and Ding, which refer to both the objective, solid consistency of Being (ratum) and thought and representation (Lat. res/ratitudo, Ger. Ding/Denken, Eng. “thing”/“think”). II. Chose, Quelque Chose, “Being,” “Nothing” 1. On the extension of the term “thing,” which applies to everything that exists, and even to everything that does not exist (thus we speak about “something” that does not exist, and in French, especially about rien (nothing), derived from the Latin accusative rem, see ESSENCE, IL Y A, NOTHING, OBJECT, REALITY, RES, SACHVERHALT, SEIN; cf. NEGATION, PERSON, II.4, TO BE). See also VORHANDEN for a determination of the thing as “subsisting” or “available.” On the relationship between “thing” and “word,” see SIGN and TRUTH, WORD; see also LOGOS, Box 4. 2. On the difference between “thing” and “person,” see ANIMAL, I/ME/MYSELF, SUBJECT; cf. LIFE/LEBEN, PERSON. 3. On “the thing in itself” (Ding an sich), see ERSCHEINUNG, GEGENSTAND; cf. GERMAN. v. NATURE, WELT TIME / TENSE FRENCH temps GERMAN Zeit, Wetter, Tempus LATIN tempus The French language has a particularly striking number of meanings attached to the word temps, each corresponding to a distinct and different word in the other European languages. First, there is le temps qu’il fait, which in English is the weather, and in German das Wetter. Second, there is le temps qui passe, which refers to time in English and Zeit in German. Third, le temps des verbes correlates to the tense of verbs in English and the Tempus in German. The Latin word tempus, from which the French word derives, had, interestingly enough, already applied to both chronology and grammar. It was also linked to meteorology: in addition to tempestus—whose first meaning is “opportune” and which translates the Greek kairos [ϰαιϱός]—starting with Ennius, the word tempestas refers to “the state of the atmosphere,” and hence euphemistically to “bad weather” (Fr. mauvais temps), or tempest. Finally, the plural tempora designated portions of time, the “epochs” as well as the “seasons.” Thus the Latin term encompassed all the usages of the Greek words chronos [χϱόνоς], “time,” and kairos, “opportunity.” The broad French usage attests to the term’s ample range. See ETERNITY, INSTANT, MOMENT. TO BE 1131 II. The Different Senses of “Being” We generally distinguish four main senses of being: existence, copula, veridical, identity. These senses involve several crosscutting and complex divisions: essence/existence (quiddity/ quoddity), object/subject, truth/falsehood/fiction. A. Being-existence / being-essence See under ESSENCE the study of the major ambiguities and translation that yield the divisions of essence/substance/ existence. On the fact of being, see OMNITUDO REALITATIS. For the existential meaning, related to the object, see IL Y A [ES GIBT, ESTI, HÁ] cf. EREIGNIS; related to the subject, see DASEIN, ERLEBEN, EPOCHÊ; see also SUBJECT and cf. CONSCIOUSNESS. On being in the sense of objective reality and in its relationship to “things,” see GEGENSTAND,OBJECT,REALITY,RES (and under RES, especially the Greek pragma [πϱᾶγμα], chrêma [χϱῆμα], and the German Ding, Sache), SEIN, VORHANDEN. Cf. THING. On the ontological-theological identification of being with God, see I/ME/MYSELF, Box 4); cf. GOD. Cf. ACT. . B. Being-copula See, besides ESTI: PRÉDICABLE, PREDICATION, Box 4, SUBJECT. C. Being-veridical See, besides ESTI, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH; see also SEIN, III. Cf. APPEARANCE, DOXA, ERSCHEINUNG, FALSE, FICTION, LIE. D. Being-identity See I/ME/MYSELF, Box 2, SELBST, SUBJECT (under which we discuss the Latin persona, especially SUBJECT, Box 5; cf. AGENCY). See also IMPLICATION. Cf. IDENTITY. v. EVENT On the sudden, the instantaneous, and the immediate (Gr. exaiphnês [ἐξαίφνης]), which is tied to perception (see PERCEPTION), to evidence (see CONSCIOUSNESS, I/ME/MYSELF, and cf. CERTITUDE), to intuition (ANSCHAULICHKEIT; see also INTELLECTUS, UNDERSTANDING, and cf. INTUITION), and which is subject to mediation (see AUFHEBEN), see also INSTANT and ETERNITY. IV. The Expression of Time 1. On time in narrative, see ERZÄHLEN; for time in chronicle and history see GESCHICHTLICH, HISTORIA UNIVERSALIS, HISTORY (cf. above, II.2). On the enunciations of time in the grammar and syntax of languages, see ASPECT, ESTI. 2. We have paid special attention to the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard as an example of the idiomatic construction of a network of time within a language; see CONTINUITET, EVIGHED, MOMENT, Box 4, NEUZEIT, Box 1, PRESENT, Box 2, PLUDSELIGHED; cf. STIMMUNG. v. EREIGNIS, TO BE TO BE I. “To Be”: The “First Verb” “To be” is, according to Friedrich Schleiermacher, the “first verb,” and even it is “illuminated and colored by the language” (“Of the Different Methods of Translation,” §239, Eng. translation in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed. [Routledge]). We have examined the following in particular: a. the pecularities of Greek: ESTI; cf. TO TI ÊN EINAI; b. the Spanish pair ser/estar, see SPANISH, to which add the Portuguese verb ficar, see FICAR; cf. HÀ; c. the complexity of post-Kantian terminology: see SEIN. 1 Impotentiality It is well known that Aristotle created the category of “potentiality” (dynamis) and opposed it to the category of “actuality.” But the philosopher also invented a third modal notion, “impotentiality” (adynamia), and it may be that it alone explains the other two. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle undertook to define and distinguish potentiality and actuality. His argument was directed against the Megarians, who held that potentiality exists only in actuality. According to the Megarians, the citharaplayer, for example, is capable of his art only during the moment in which he actually plays his cithara; at all other times he possesses no potentiality to set his art into effect. Wishing to vindicate the autonomous existence of skill (techné) and other potential beings, Aristotle posited the existence of impotentiality as a structural requirement of potentiality. “All potentiality is im-potentiality of the same [potentiality] and with respect to the same [potentiality] (Metaphysics, 1046.a.32), since “that which is potential can both be and not be, for the same is potential both to be and not to be” (ibid., 1050.b.10). Aristotle thus argued that the notion of potentiality constitutively requires that every potential to (do or be) be at the same time a potential not to (be or do), that every potentiality, in short, be also impotentiality. His reasoning can be simply summarized: if potentiality were always only potentiality to (be or do), everything potential would have always already been actualized; all potentiality would have always already passed over into actuality, and potentiality would never exist as such. In his Freiburg lecture course of 1931, Martin Heidegger drew from these Aristotelian lines a single conclusion: all force (Kraft) is originally “un-force” (Unkraft). Giorgio Agamben is the contemporary thinker who has most incisively developed this thesis. Commenting on Aristotle, Agamben has written that “the ‘potentiality not to’ is the cardinal secret of the Aristotelian doctrine of potentiality, which transforms every (continued) 1132 TO SENSE TO SENSE I. Sentir, Sentio, Sensus The meaning of the Latin verb sentio, sentire (from which the verb “to sense” is derived, by way of the French sentir) is presented in classical dictionaries along two major axes: 1. to perceive by or with the senses, or to experience; 2. to think, to notice, or to realize, to furnish an opinion (from the Latin sententia, partially corresponding to the Greek doxa [δόξα]), see PROPOSITION, SENSE, III, and DOXA. It may be more comprehensive, however, to present a tripartite definition with respect to the term sensus: (1) perception; (2) intelligence; (3) signification. The entry SENSE expands upon the origins and variations of this tripartite definition. For the meaning of “signification,” consult, beyond SENSE, the following: HOMONYM, LANGUAGE, LOGOS, SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, TERM, TO TRANSLATE; cf. INTELLECTUS, INTENTION. II. Sensation, Sentiment, Sensibility 1. For English terminology related to “sensitivity,” see FEELING; cf. PASSION. For terminology related to morality, see MORAL SENSE; cf. COMMON SENSE. There is a difference among languages with the adjectives sensitive/sensible. In French the adjective sensible preserves both an objective and a subjective quality (for example, a sensitive person, a sensitive trait), whereas English privileges a link to the notion of signification or sense-making (sensible, related to the expression “to make sense”): see SENSE, Box 1), COMMON SENSE [SENS COMMUN]; cf. LOVE (particularly LOVE, Box 2). 2. Concerning the verb sentir, the French seemingly preserves only the first of the two registers given above in section I, although the language generates here a certain ambiguous polysemy between: a. the modality of “sensation, Greek aisthêsis [аἴσθησις], see CONSCIOUSNESS (particularly CONSCIOUSNESS, Box 1), and SENSE, I, PERCEPTION; b. and the modality of sentiment. The difference between modalities does not rely on an opposition between “external” and “internal” feeling, but is rather due to the latter modality’s effect on the soul and its communication with the passions; see GEMÜT, PASSION, PATHOS, STRADANIE. 3. The German doublet Gefühl/Empfindung does not divide along the lines of the French amphibology between sensation and sentiment, but rather introduces other connections and convergences, notably with the concept of moral sentiments; see GEFÜHL; cf. STIMMUNG. 4. French philosophy has developed a phenomenology of both the senses and of sensitivity that builds on (and is distinct from) a tradition of philosophical reflection on le corps propre from Descartes (his sixth meditation in Meditations on First Philosophy, and Passions of the Soul) and Malebranche to Maine de Biran, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty. Privileged in this instance are states that unite the soul and the body, such as pain: see ERLEBEN, FLESH, LEIB, PATHOS, SOUL; cf. MALAISE. The relative untranslatability of this discourse is ably demonstrated by Locke’s reaction to Malebranche’s The Search after Truth. In his personal annotations to the work, Locke expresses his incomprehension of what Malebranche means by the term sentiment intérieur. Conversely, French readers of Locke stumbled over the term “consciousness.” See CONSCIOUSNESS, GEFÜHL. v. GOGO, HEART, REASON potentiality in itself into an impotentiality” (Potentialities, 52). Something can be capable of something else only because it is originally capable of its own incapacity, and it is precisely the relation to an incapacity that constitutes the essence of all potentiality: “in its originary structure, potentiality maintains itself in relation to its own privation, to its own steresis, its own non-Being. To be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity” (ibid., 15). But Agamben’s analysis leads to a further conclusion, which concerns the passage from potentiality to actuality. Aristotle taught that “a thing is said to be ‘potential’ if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential” (Metaphysics, 1047a.24–26). Agamben notes that “usually, this sentence is interpreted as if Aristotle had wanted to say, ‘What is possible (or potential) is that with respect to which nothing is impossible (or impotential). If there is no impossibility, then there is possibility.’ Aristotle would then have said a banality or a tautology” (Potentialities, 20). But another reading is possible. If impotentiality is understood as a structural condition of potentiality, then the sense of the affirmation changes greatly. “What Aristotle then says is, ‘if a potentiality not to be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is potentiality only where the potentiality not to (be or do) does not lag behind actuality but, rather, passes wholly into it as such’” (ibid., 21). Impotentiality is not effaced in the passage into actuality. On the contrary, actuality is itself nothing other than the full realization of impotentiality. Actuality shows itself as an impotentiality turned back upon itself: a potentiality capable of not not being and, in this way, of passing into the act. Daniel Heller-Roazen REFS.: Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. . Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta, 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force. Translated by Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “On the Different Methods of Translating,” translated by Susan Bernofsky. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2004. ESSE -- QUIDDITAS. τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι] (GREEK) ARABIC h. aqīqa [حقيقة ,[māhiyya [ماهية[ FRENCH la quiddité, l’essentiel de l’essence. v. QUIDDITY, and ACT, ASPECT, ESSENCE, ESTI, LOGOS, REALITY, RES, SEIN, SPECIES, TO BE “To ti ên einai” could literally be taken to mean something like “the what it was to be” or “the what it was being.” Few Aristotelian expressions fundamental for all of ontology raise as many issues as to their literal meaning. The most commonly accepted translation, “quiddity,” is a perfectly opaque term operating as a mere signal, and is itself already symptomatic of this difficulty. The English “quiddity” (as well as the French quiddité) is just a modernized version of the Scholastic quidditas, itself a simplified and abbreviated form of the Latin “quod quid erat esse,” which can be found, for example, in the translation by Guillaume de Moerbecke of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (cf. Thomas Aquinas, In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio, nos. 1270, 1307–10, and passim). The undeniable progress of philology due to the great modern editions of Aristotle in the nineteenth century led to a slew of attempts at retranslation. It is impossible to choose between the translations without starting by (1) recognizing the specific structure of the question and differentiating it from the more general question of ti esti? [τί ἐστι;], “What is it? What is the essence of ?”; (2) clarifying the syntax of Aristotle’s formulation; and (3) taking a position on the meaning of the imperfect tense used with the verb “to be” in this expression. To these three approaches we have added Schelling’s speculative interpretation as an illustration of all of these exegetical difficulties. An Overly Translated Expression Quidditas appears in the Latin translation of Avicenna (Avicenna Latinus, Liber De philosophia prima, sive Scientia divina), in which it serves for both ḥaqīqa [حقيقة [and māhiyya [ماهية .[This last term is formed from ma, “that which,” and hiya, the thirdperson personal pronoun meaning “she is.” It was selected by Al-Kindi to translate the Greek to ti [τὸ τί] in the putative Theology of Aristotle. In Avicennius, the term is a response to the question: Mā huwa, “What is it?” (Goichon, La distinction, 32; RT: Lexique de la langue philosophique d’Ibn Sina, no. 679) Ḥaqīqa, built from the root ̣ hqq, which expresses “the general idea of reality, of truth,” is usually rendered in medieval translations by certitudo. . II. Determinants Internal to the Aristotelian Corpus The first obstacle to grasping the meaning of the formula is posed by the difficulty of holding together the series of determinations that characterize it within the corpus aristotelicum. If one asks what is in fact the to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], several features emerge that combine to form a complex figure. First of all, the ti ên einai is what defines a thing: “esti d’ horos men logos ho to ti ên einai sêmainôn [ἔστι δ’ ὅϱος μὲν λόγος ὁ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι σημαίνων]” (Topics 101b38). Or, more precisely, in the Metaphysics (Z 4, 1029b13): “For each being, the ti ên einai is what is said to be of itself [esti to ti ên einai hekastôi ho legetai kath’ hauto (ἐστὶ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι ἑϰάστῳ ὃ λέγεται ϰαθ’ αὑτό)].” In the “philosophical lexicon” that makes up book Δ of the Metaphysics—in reference, it seems, to Antisthenes and his doctrine of “proper definition” (oikeios logos [οἰϰεῖος λόγος])—Aristotle invokes the logos, “which manifests the ti ên einai [ho dêlôn to ti ên einai (ὁ δηλῶν τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι)].” Antisthenes, for his part, according to Diogenes Laertius’s account, was the first to define “discourse” as “that which manifests what it was, which is to say, what it is [prôtos te horisato logon eipôn: logos estin ho to ti ên ê esti dêlôn (πϱῶτος τε ὁϱίσατο λόγον εἰπὼν· λόγος ἐστὶν ὁ τὸ τί ἦν ἢ ἐστι δηλῶν)]” (Lives and Doctrines of the Philosophers 6.3). It may be helpful to compare the expression—coined by Aristotle, but never justified or explained as such—to the Platonic formula of the Phaedo 78d: “auto ho estin, auto hekaston ho estin [αὐτὸ ὃ ἔστιν, αὐτὸ ἕϰαστον ὃ ἔστιν]”—that very 1 On some translations The difficulties of the Aristotelian expression are already apparent in the great variety of translations that have been proposed. Below is a mere sampling: English “The answer to the question, what was it to be so-and-so” (W. D. Ross); “Essence” (W. D. Ross, H. Tredennick); “What it is to be something” (W. D. Ross); “The what it was to be,” “the what it was for each to be” (E. Buchanan); “What it is to be a thing/something/it” (J. Barnes, M. Furth); “The-what-has-been” (P. Merlan). French “Quiddité” (P. Aubenque, J. Tricot); “Le fait pour un être de continuer à être ce qu’il était” (E. Bréhier); “L’essentiel de l’essence” (J. Brunschwig). German “Das, was war das Seyn, dass heist, das gedachte Wesen, vor der Wirklichkeit der Sache,” “Der hervorbringende und vorangehende Grund” (F. A. Trendelenburg); “Das Sosein” (H. Seidl); “Das Wesenswas” (H. Bonitz); “Das, was es war, sein” (C. Arpe); “Das jeweils zugehörige Sein” (F. Bassenge); “Das vorgängige und durchgängige Was des Seins von Seiendem” (K. H. Volkmann-Schluck); “Das Wesen als wesentliches Wassein” (W. Bröcker); “Was es heisst, dieses zu sein” (M. Frede, G. Patzig). One can also say, and in a more rigorously Aristotelian manner, that a good answer to the question “What is it?” once narrowed and reformulated as ti ên einai is one that puts forward a well-articulated definition that can narrow down as much as possible the x in question, instead of simply giving it a name, even a proper name: “esti d’ horos men logos ho to ti ên einai sêmainôn [ἔστι δ’ ὅϱος μὲν λόγος ὁ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι σημαίνων]” (101b38). What we have here is a case of “logos ant’ onomatos [λόγος ἀντ’ ὀνόματος],” which is to say a “discourse,” an “articulated utterance” (a “formula,” says Brunschwig), which takes the place of a pure and simple name that would otherwise simply be in apposition to the object in question. In his French translation of Aristotle’s Topics, Brunschwig addressed the difficulties of settling on a translation of the term to ti ên einai in a “supplementary note,” and explained his rendering of it as “that which is essential in essence [l’essentiel de l’essence]”: Lorsqu’on demande ce qu’est [ti esti] telle chose ou tel être, un homme par exemple, on peut d’abord répondre en nomman son genre, en l’occurrence animal. La réponse est bonne; mais elle a la propriété de convenir aussi bien à d’autres êtres qu’à celui dont il s’agit. Si’l paraît souhaitable d’obtenir une réponse plus ajustée, il est nécessaire de serrer davantage la question, et c’est à ce besoin que répond la formulation ti ên einai. Le redoublement du verbe être [ên-einai] a pour fonction, dans cette formule, d’écarter, parmi toutes les réponses possibles à une question posée, tout ce qui pourrait convenir à d’autres êtres qu’à celui dont il s’agit. (When one asks what is it [ti esti] about some thing or being, a man for example, one can start out by indicating his genre, in this case an animal. This is a good answer; but it also applies to beings other than the one in question. So if it seems desirable to obtain a more fitting answer, it becomes necessary to further narrow the question. The expression ti ên einai is meant to respond to this requirement. The doubling of the verb to be [ên-einai] in this formulation is intended to eliminate all the possible answers to a particular question that might apply to beings other than the one concerned.) (Topiques, 119–120 n. 3) In other words, the logos (horos [ὅϱος], horismos [ὁϱισμός]) that expresses the ti ên einai is carefully distinguished from all that is predicated kata sumbebêkos [ϰατὰ συμϐεϐηϰός] as accidental determination. By the same strict logic, this logos is distinguished from anything that relates to the universal or generic (as both Bonitz in his Commentarius and Trendelenburg in his article from the Rheinisches Museum [1828] had clearly indicated). Brunschwig subtly illustrated the function of this “redoubling” in reference to perfectly common French turns of phrase: On n’a pas assez remarqué que le français possède des ressources d’un type tout à fait semblable, puisque, à côté de la formule simple “qu’est-qu’un homme?” et de la formule déjà dédoublée “qu’est-ce que c’est thing that each thing is in its being, in its identity, its permanence, its stability. Thus to ti ên einai seems to become an overdetermined form of to ti esti [τὸ τί ἐστι] (Metaphysics Z 4, 1027b28), a substantiation of the question that bears on the “definition,” on the kath’ hauto [ϰαθ’ αὑτό], the “by virtue of itself,” of the eidos [εἶδος]. So, to understand the meaning and structure of to ti ên einai, it is crucial to start from the question ti esti? [τί ἐστι;] (What is [it] ?), or from its nominalized version: to ti esti [τὸ τί ἐστι] (The what is [it] that . . .). At any rate, this is what is suggested by the Aristotelian variations on the (still indeterminate) question ti esti? in the Topics (1.9.103b27–29, as translated into French by Jacques Brunschwig): Il est claire qu’en désignant une essence [ho to ti esti sêmainôn (ὁ τὸ τί ἐστι σημαίνων)], on désigne tantôt une substance, tantôt une qualité, tantôt encore l’une des autres prédications [hote men ousian sêmainei, hote de poion, hote de tôn allôn tina katêgoriôn (ὁτὲ μὲν οὐσίαν σημαίνει, ὁτὲ δὲ ποιόν, ὁτὲ δὲ τῶν ἄλλων τινὰ ϰατηγοϱιῶν)]. (It is clear that by referring to an essence [ho to ti esti sêmainôn (ὁ τὸ τί ἐστι σημαίνων)], one sometimes refers to a substance, at other times to a quality, and sometimes to one of the other predications [hote men ousian sêmainei, hote de poion, hote de tôn allôn tina katêgoriôn (ὁτὲ μὲν οὐσίαν σημαίνει, ὁτὲ δὲ ποιόν, ὁτὲ δὲ τῶν ἄλλων τινὰ ϰατηγοϱιῶν)].) In Aristotle, then, the ambiguity of the question “What is it?” is such that one could respond by “signifying” essence, substance (ousia [οὐσία]), or some other category. Previously in the same chapter, Aristotle had enumerated the “genres” or “types” of possible predications or categories, numbering ten: ti esti, poson, poion, pros ti, pou, pote, keisthai, echein, poiein, paschein [τί ἐστι, ποσόν, ποιόν, πϱός τι, ποῦ, ποτέ, ϰείσθαι, ἔχειν, ποιεῖν, πάσχειν] (essence, quantity, quality, relation, location, time, position, state, action, passion). To the question “What is it?” (ti esti?), the relevant answer is one that indicates the primary or secondary ousia. A few lines later, it becomes clear that this polysemy of the question ti esti? is in turn only an echo of the polysemy of being, or rather, of esti [ἐστι]. It is clearly unnatural in modern European languages to answer a question like “What is it?” with “numerous,” “large,” “blue,” “cold,” “on the horizon”; but when, “about a white color over there,” one says, “It is white, and it is a color [to ekkeimenon leukon einai kai chrôma (τὸ ἐϰϰείμενον λευϰόν εἶναι ϰαὶ χϱῶμα)],” then one is in fact saying what it is (in response to the question “What is it?”) while simultaneously referring to a quality (“ti esti legei kai poion sêmainei [τί ἐστι λέγει ϰαὶ ποιὸν σημαίνει],” 103b31–33). Thus it is possible to think that one of the first objectives of the complex formula to ti ên einai was to disambiguate the socratico-platonic question ti esti? as Plato had already attempted to do, by emphasizing that the “good” answer to the question about the essence of x is one that designates auto ho esti, that which is proper to and of itself (kath’ hauto). First, in the plural: Second Analytics 93a13; Metaphysics Z 6, 1031b28; b. as a predicate—without to—after einai: for example, Metaphysics Z 6, 1031b31: “kaitoi ti kôluei kai nun einai enia euthus ti ên einai ? [ϰαίτοι τί ϰωλύει ϰαὶ νῦν εἶναι ἔνια εὐθὺς τί ἦν εἶναι ;]” (mais alors qui empêche, dès maintenant, que des êtres soient immédiatement leur propre quiddité ? [But what prevents beings from being immediately their own quiddity ?], trans. Tricot); and c. as a member of a coordinated group—for example, Metaphysics 983a26ff.: “tên ousian kai to ti ên einai [τὴν οὐσίαν ϰαὶ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι]” (l’essence et la quiddité [the essence and the quiddity]). These examples clearly show that the entire phrase ti ên einai is nominalized by the neuter article to, not just the infinitive part of it. In analyzing the expression, one must choose between two possibilities: (1) It is a question that has been made into a substantive (similar to the substantification of the question ti esti?); or (2) it is a complex variation in usage of the substantivized infinitive, to einai, with a dative construction. If one construes it in the manner suggested by Trendelenburg (Ein Beitrag zur aristotelischen Begriffsbestimmung und zur griechischen Syntax) as to einai, then ti ên should become the predicative complement of einai: “the fact of being.” But this interpretation is not convincing, because if this were correct, instead of the dative, one would expect here a relative construction and hence a different word order (for example, as “to einai ho ên [τὸ εἶναι ὃ ἦν]” or “to ho ti ên einai [τὸ ὃ τι ἦν εἶναι]”; cf. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote). It appears from William David Ross’s translation that he takes ti ên einai as one single syntagm, since he interprets the to ti ên einai as a generalization based on phrases that apply to particulars, such as one found in De partibus animalium 649b22: “oion ti ên autôi [tôi haimati] to haimati einai [οἶον τι ἦν αὐτῷ (τῷ αἵματι) τὸ αἵματι εἶναι]” (Blood inasmuch as it is for it to be blood). This analysis seems correct, and it is further confirmed by two linguistic features: 1. In the Metaphysics Z 17, 1041b6, one finds “oikia tadi dia ti? hoti huparchei ho ên oikiai einai [οἰϰία ταδὶ διὰ τί; ὅτι ὑπάϱχει ὃ ἦν οἰϰίᾳ εἶναι]” (Why are these materials a house? Because that which was the essence of a house is present, the “quiddity” of the house belongs to them—or, more literally: Because there is present what it was for them to be a house). Here, ho ên einai can be taken as an example capable of clarifying the formula ti ên einai. Ho ên oikiai einai is the subject of huparchei; within the relative clause, ho is the subject of ên and of the infinitive einai. This infinitive should be understood as a “final” infinitive (for the construction of eimi [εἰμί] + infinitive, cf. RT: Ausführliche Grammatik der Griechischen Sprache, 2:10: the infinitive can be the complement of verbs such as eimi, pareimi [παϱειμί], pephukô [πεφύϰω], “when they signify: I am here for that, I am naturally capable of, the right one for, I have a natural capacity for, the natural quality of . . .”; these turns of phrase, which belong to everyday language, are very qu’un homme?” il présente des formules dédoublées (“qu’est-ce qu’être un homme?”) et même détriplées (“qu’est-ce que c’est qu’être un homme?”). Si l’on pouvait substantiver cette dernière expression, on obtiendrait à coup sûr le meilleur équivalent possible de to ti ên einai. (It has not been sufficiently pointed out that the French language has perfectly similar resources, since in addition to the simple question qu’est-ce qu’un homme? [What is a man?] and an already double formula qu’estce que c’est qu’un homme? it also contains other doubled formulas, qu’est-ce qu’être un homme? and even tripled formulas, qu’est-ce que c’est qu’être un homme? [What is it (that which is) to be a man?]. If one could turn this last form into a substantive, it would be the closest possible equivalent to to ti ên einai.) Despite the fact that his translations were not always consistent or very well explained, we are not far in this instance from what Léon Robin pointed out in his La théorie platonicienne des idées et des nombres d’après Aristote (The Platonic theory of ideas and numbers according to Aristotle): We know that Aristotle, for his part, distinguished between to ti esti [τὸ τί ἐστι], which is the part of the definition that designates the genre [Topics 6.5.142b27ff.: to de genos bouletai to ti esti sêmainein (τὸ δὲ γένος βούλεται τὸ τί ἐστι σημαίνειν); cf. also 4.6.128a23–25] from to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι], which is the unified whole of all elements of the definition. The ti ên einai is proper to the definition itself, whereas the ti esti [τί ἐστι], in signifying the genre, extends beyond it. (Robin, La théorie platonicienne, 27–28 n. 24 [emphasis added]) Another striking confirmation of this restriction or narrowing down of the question ti ên einai? in relation to the question ti esti? is to be found in the passage of De anima in which Aristotle emphasizes that the intellect, in its direct intellectual apprehension, is always “true,” just as aisthêsis [αἴσθησις] is always true in relation to its proper sensible object. Both intellection and sense discover their proper object. Intellection is always true when it is “tou ti esti kata to ti ên einai [τοῦ τί ἐστι ϰατὰ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι]” (the thinking of the definition in the sense of the essence). The translation by Bodéüs is basically correct, but it completely misses the point of the text: “When it grasps something in conformity with its essence”; Tricot translated it thus: “L’intellect, quand il a pour objet l’essence au point de vue de la quiddité, est toujours dans le vrai” (The intellect, when it has as its object the essence from the point of view of quiddity, is always within the truth). III. The Structure of the Greek Expression The second difficulty arises when one attempts to analyze the expression itself through its morphological and syntactic structure. One should note at the outset that the ti ên einai constitutes in effect a nominal group, as it can be employed as follows: or: “to hoper anthrôpôi einai [τὸ ὅπεϱ ἀνθϱώπῳ εἶναι]” (What it was [that which was] to be [for a] man; cf. Metaphysics 1041b6); or: “leukôi einai [λεύϰῳ εἶναι]” (To be [for] white; cf. Metaphysics 1031a20–22); or still yet: “Kalliai [Καλλίᾳ]” ([For] Callias); cf. Metaphysics 1022a27, “hippôi [ἵππῳ]” ([For a] horse); and cf. Metaphysics Z 6, 1031b30), “sphairai ê kuklôi [σφαίϱᾳ ἢ ϰύϰλῳ]” ([For a] sphere or [a] circle; cf. De caelo 278a3). b. The interrogative phrase has been transformed into a substantivized and generalized formula, without an interrogative dimension, which itself assumes several variants: “to ti ên einai autôi, ekeinôi einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι αὐτῷ, ἐϰείνῳ εἶναι]” (The what it was for him / this one to be; cf. Historia animalium 708a12; Metaphysics Z 6, 1031b6); “to ti ên einai hekastôi [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι ἑϰάστῳ]” (The that which it was for each entity to be; cf., for example, Metaphysics 988b4, 1022a9, 1022a26); “to ti ên einai tôi toiôide sômati [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τῷ τοιῷδε σώματι]” (The that which it was for such a body to be; cf. De anima 412b11); “to ti ên einai [τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι]” (ibid.); “ti ên einai [τί ἦν εἶναι]” (predicative form, cf. Metaphysics 1031b31). IV. The Problem of the Imperfect Tense Beginning with the Greek commentators, the imperfect ên [ἦν] has been interpreted in widely different ways. Alexander of Aphrodisias wrote in relation to the Topics (5.3, 132a1; RT: CAG, 2:2.42, In Topica, 1.4) that this use of the imperfect tense had no temporal dimensions. This interpretation is maintained today by Brunschwig (Topiques, trans. Brunschwig, 120), Horst Seidl, and others; yet one can wonder if this use of the imperfect, in referring to the present, is not directly linked to dramatic dialogue. Ross seems to accept, with some hesitation, the interpretation that dates, via Schwegler, at least back to Trendelenburg, which sees in the use of the imperfect an expression of the “Aristotelian doctrine of the existence of the form, prior to its incorporation into a particular substance,” its “designated” matter. Other interpretations, like Arpe’s, specifically reject this interpretation as Platonic. In order to understand this usage of the imperfect in the canonic formula, it is certainly possible to start from the use of ên in the passage cited above: “oikia tadi dia ti? huparchei ho ên oikiai einai [οἰϰία ταδὶ διὰ τί; ὑπάϱχει ὃ ἦν οἰϰίᾳ εἶναι]” (Why are these materials are a house? Because there is present what it was for them to be a house). Here, the imperfect tense of the verb “to be,” ên, is clearly the predicate of a relative proposition, and thus a standard predicate in a standard utterance. Like every predicate, ên needs to be attached to a referent term. Since Aristotle’s pertinent to our formula). As for oikiai [οἰϰίᾳ], this dative should be taken as a predicative dative with a “possessive” dative—autois [αὐτοῖς], being implied with the verb huparchei, and referring back to tadi [ταδί]. It is also possible that the syntax of huparchei ho ên oikiai einai was influenced by the common construction of a predicative dative with a noun in the dative (cf., for example, Plato, Phaedo 81a: “huparchei autêi eudaimoni einai [ὑπάϱχει αὐτῇ εὐδαίμονι εἶναι]” (It belongs to her to be happy: cited by RT: Ausführliche Grammatik der Griechischen Sprache, 2:25). 2. In the Metaphysics Г 4, 1007a21, one finds: Holôs de anairousin hoi touto legontes ousian kai to ti ên einai. Panta gar anagkê sumbebêkenai phaskein autois, kai to hoper anthrôpôi einai ê zôiôi einai mê einai [ὅλως δὲ ἀναιϱοῦσιν οἱ τοῦτο λέγοντες οὐσίαν ϰαὶ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι. Πάντα γὰϱ ἀνάγϰη συμϐεϐηϰέναι φάσϰειν αὐτοῖς, ϰαὶ τὸ ὅπεϱ ἀνθϱώπῳ εἶναι ἢ ζῴῳ εἶναι μὴ εἶναι]. (En général, ceux qui raisonnent de cette manière anéantissent la substance et la quiddité. Il sont, en effet, dans la nécessité de dire que tout est accident et de dire que tout ce qui constitue essentiellement la quiddité de l’homme, ou la quiddité de l’animal, n’existe pas.) (Trans. Tricot) (In general, those who reason this way obliterate the substance and the quiddity. They are in fact obliged to say that everything is an accident, and to say that nothing exists that essentially constitutes of the quiddity of man or the quiddity of animal.) (Et de façon générale, ceux qui disent cela détruisent l’essence, à savoir que quelque chose soit ce qu’il est. Car ils doivent nécessairement affirmer que tout arrive ensemble, et que être, pour un homme ou pour un animal, cela même qu’il est, n’est pas.) (Trans. Cassin and Narcy) (And in general, those who say this destroy the essence, which is to say that something is what it is. For they are forced to claim that everything occurs together, and that being itself, for a man or for an animal, is not.) Here, the characteristic generalizing expression of to ti ên einai is illustrated by to hoper anthrôpôi einai (This is what being is for a man: based on the French translation by Cassin and Narcy, 129). Drawing on a range of French translations of to hoper anthrôpôi einai by Léon Robin, Monique Dixaut, Raphael Kühner, and Bernhard Gerth, the formula to ti ên einai is analyzed thus: a. Implicit in the various constructions of the expression, there must be an underlying question (whose existence can only be imputed , since it never literally appears in Aristotle) along the lines of “ti ên einai hekastôi? [τί ἦν εἶναι ἑϰάστῳ;]” (What was it for each entity to be?). To this, the answer (also assumed) would be: “ho ên oikiai einai [ὃ ἦν οἰϰίᾳ εἶναι]” (What it was [for] being a house; cf. Metaphysics 1041b6); TO TI ÊN EINAI 1137 matter. Aristotle relied on this linguistic fact to underscore this aspect of the eidos, and especially to indicate without any equivocation his interest in a purely non-Platonic meaning of eidos. On the other hand, one can deduce from the fact that the to ti ên einai is never employed in referring to the genos that the latter does not directly precede its own realization in matter, but does so only through the intermediary of the eidos. We can conclude with some remarks relating to translation: “Essence” can certainly be rejected as a translation of to ti ên einai: the term is too vague, and it works just as well for translating to ti esti. “Quiddity,” whose only purpose is to underscore this distinction between to ti esti and to ti ên einai, is both artificial and cryptic. The German das, was es war, sein and the French le fait pour un être de continuer à être ce qu’il était (in English: “What it is for a being to continue to be what it was”) should also be rejected, for the reasons listed above. The French translation as l’essentiel de l’essence (the essentiality of the essence), which clearly indicates the distinction from the ti esti, even if it diverges substantially from the Greek text, is to be preferred. The English versions, “What it is to be something” and “What it is to be it,” remain much closer to the structure of the Greek and, aside from omitting the imperfect tense, make clear that to ti ên einai applies to an individual being. . Jean-François Courtine Albert Rijksbaron question is posed in the present (cf. tadi), within a kind of mini-dialogue, it is the present of the utterance huparchei that provides the point of reference and orientation. The materials that will constitute the house in question possess hic et nunc what they already had prior to this hic et nunc, “before their incorporation in a designated matter,” to use Ross’s terms. In this way, the imperfect tense conveys a precise temporal reference. But in the general formula, nominalized by the neuter article to, in which ên is followed by the infinitve einai, ên no longer has a fixed point of orientation and hence does not refer to some specific past, any more than any particular name would do. As a result, the entire formula has acquired an omnitemporal value. One should note that it is not just the imperfect alone, as Seidl and Brunschwig believe, but the combination of ên with einai that results in this omnitemporal quality. But in that case, how is this rendering of to ti ên einai different from that other ontological formula to ti esti, which also expresses omnitemporality? This latter expression is more directly tied to the genos [γένος] (cf. Topics 120b29a: “to genos en tôi ti esti katêgoreitai [τὸ γένος ἐν τῷ τί ἐστι ϰατηγοϱεῖται],” literally, “The genre is predicated in the that which it is,” or “It is an essential predication”; cf. also Topics 142b27–28: “to genos bouletai to ti esti sêmainein [τὸ γένος βούλεται τὸ τί ἐστι σημαίνειν],” “The genre aims to signify the essence”). Aside from to ti esti, with its Platonic tone, Aristotle coined another expression whose purpose was to designate eidos, in the specific technical sense of species and not genos. Employing the grammatical model of the substantivized phrase to ti esti, he took care to adapt it to his own purposes. So, even though ên does not refer to the past in this new turn of phrase, the imperfect tense still evokes the fact that the eidos exists prior to its realization in 2 Schelling’s interpretation We give here as an example of interpretation, or better yet an exemplary interpretation, the main passages of The Historical and Philosophical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, in which Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling works through to ti ên einai (Sämtliche Werke, 11:402–7). We have added, in brackets, some of the main Aristotelian references. We should distinguish between being and that which being is. Every becomebeing is nothing but a determinate figure of being, and the closer it comes, in its materiality, to being in its entirety, the stronger will be the attraction it exerts on that which is being, and this latter will be in it as that which is. No matter whether the issue concerns being as such or being under a determinate figure, that which is is thus in the first place characterized by Aristotle by saying: its nature is to ti ên einai. And Aristotle uses the same expression to refer to the fourth cause, the first by rank [Metaphysics A 3, 983a27–28], but the last from the point of view of knowledge, for he considers it the limit of knowledge [Metaphysics Δ 17, 1022a8–9]. Despite the different interpretations to which this formula, specific to Aristotle, has given rise, the context within which it appears shows us that we were correct in maintaining that it must express not only what belongs to being, but that whose nature is to be being. Given that all the difficulty derives from the grammatical construction of the formula and that the analysis of this grammatical construction will help us more completely clarify the thing itself, we will start by examining its literal signification. In fact, as far as the content or real meaning of the formula is concerned, there has in general been no possible doubt. We have always been guided by the passage in which it is noted: one could say that up to a point, the house is born of the house. The material house, constructed of stones and timbers, is born of the immaterial one, that which is only present as a concept, which was in the mind of the architect before the material house [ek tês aneu hulês tên echousan (ἐϰ τῆς ἄνευ ὕλης τὴν ἔχουσαν), Metaphysics Z 17, 1032b12], where Aristotle adds that he calls “ti ên einade” the thing in question its immaterial ousia in the mind [legô de ousian aneu hulês to ti ên einai (λέγω δὲ οὐσίαν ἄνευ ὕλης τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι), Metaphysics Z 17, 1032b14]. But the question of the grammatical form of the expression remained unresolved, particularly the imperfect tense. So it was tempting to maintain that the imperfect was being [ên (ἦν)] was based on the having-been-present of the form (the form having been in the mind of the sculptor prior to the statue), while the “being” refers back to the fact that the form is in the statue, that it was already previously. Those who have followed us this far will not fail to realize that it would have been easy for us to provide an explanation of this sort: there needs to have been a unity prior to the separation of the three powers, none of which was being for itself; this unity is that which was being, and that which over the course of the reunification of the three powers enters into the resulting union and is its very soul. So it is not at all impossible to reconcile the imperfect with our presuppositions, insofar as we explain ourselves. Yet what still shocks us at the outset here is that, to a certain extent, the imperfect ἦν seems to fall on the good side, so to speak, while the present being falls on the lesser one. For example, the flesh and blood, and everything that constitutes the material side of man, can be crushed, destroyed, and obliterated, but that which is this material side (which for itself is nonbeing) cannot be destroyed. It is in a different sense than was being, and by its nature is eternal. But the imperfect? It, too, is eternal, we will maintain, but this can only be explained by the extraordinary subtlety of the sense of the language that caused the Greeks to use the imperfect in identical or similar cases. For example, where we would say: “What all the world desires is the good,” Aristotle says: “hou pantes ephientai, touto agathon ên [οὗ πάντες ἐφίενται, τοῦτο ἀγαθòν ἦν]” (It was [being] the good) [Rhetoric 1.24, 1363a8– 9]. It was the good even before anyone desired it; it is not the good because everyone desires it, but it is desired because it was already being the good. And it is only through this confrontation that the good shone because of what it was. Likewise, the ti esti of each thing, that which is what each thing is (its quid), becomes ti ên when confronted with what it is (that by which it Is). It is thus that we answer that question, which had heretofore remained unclear, of the relation between the ti esti and the ti ên einai. The painter who paints a portrait of Callias sees first of all what he is: dark or light in tone, hirsute or bald, etc., but none of this is Callias yet; there is nothing that is not shared by many others, and all of it put together would produce only a material resemblance; but the artist continues his explorations until he reaches that which is all of that, that for which everything else was mere presupposition, that which, properly speaking, was being—and it is only then that Callias himself is presented. When Aristotle explains himself most clearly and simply, he says: the ti ên einai is each thing according to which it is Itself, disengaged from all accident, from everything that has to do with hulê [ὕλη], from everything that is other. We can fully render the Aristotelian expression by saying that it means “das, was das jedesmal Seyende ist” (Fr. “ce qui est l’à chaque fois étant”). For Aristotle, the eidos is actus, and consequently not a simple quid, but rather the quod [dass] of the quid posed in the being; the eidos is synonymous with ousia, insofar as it is for that which is the cause of being every time—in our terminology, “das es seyende” (Fr. “ce qui l’est”). I can answer the question “What is Callias?” with a generic concept, and say, for example: he is a living being; but that which for him is the cause of being (in this case, of living) is no longer something general, but rather the ousia, not in its secondary, but in its primary and highest meaning, the prôtê ousia [πϱώτη οὐσία]. And this is proper to each, belonging to no other, while the general is shared in common with others. It is each one itself; in the living being, it is what we call the soul (Fr. l’âme), of which it is said that it is the ousia, the “energy” of an organic body. And as energy, the soul is the quod of any determinate body. Being what is [what it is] or even further—if one thinks of it as anterior—what was being [what it was being], this is the fundamental concept, the nature of the fourth cause, that by which it rises up far above the simple being. (Schelling, Philosophische Einleitung, trans. Christian Hubert, based on French trans. by Courtine and Marquet, 376–80) REFS.: Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Philosophische Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie oder Darstellung der reinrationalen Philosophie. In Sämtliche Werke, edited by K.F.A. Schelling, 14 vols. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–61. French translation by J.-F. Courtine and J.-F Marquet: Introduction à la philosophie de la mythologie. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. (continued) REFS.: Alexander of Aphrodisias. In Topica. Edited by M. Wallies. Commentaria in Aristotelem graeca 2.2.42. Berlin: Prüssiche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1883. . On Aristotle Topics 1. Translated by Johannes M. Van Ophuijsen. London: Duckworth, 2001. Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Translated by John P. Rowan. Rev. ed. Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Books, 1995. . In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis expositio. In Opera omnia, vol. 8. Turin: Marietti, 1964. Aristotle. Aristoteles, Metaphysik. Translated by H. Bonitz. 2nd ed. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1989. . Aristotelis De anima libri tres. Edited by F. A. Trendelenburg. Berlin: Weber, 1877. . Aristotelis Politica. Edited by W. D. Ross. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962. . Aristotle’s De anima, Books II and III (with Certain Passages from Book I). Translated with introduction and notes by D. W. Hamlyn. Oxford: Clarendon, 1968. . Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Revised text with introduction and commentary by W. D. Ross. 2 vols. Corrected ed. Oxford : Clarendon, 1966. . Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Translated by H. Tredennick. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933–34. . Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. . Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics. Edited by W. D. Ross. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. . De caelo. Translated by J. L. Stocks. Oxford: Clarendon, 1922. French translation by P. Moraux: Du ciel. Paris: Les Belles lettres, 1965. . De l’âme. Translated by Richard Bodéüs. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1998. . La décision du sens: Le livre Gamma de la “Métaphysique” d’Aristote. Translation of Métaphysique Γ by Barbara Cassin and Michel Narcy. Paris: Vrin, 1989. . Metaphysics: Books VII–X. Translated by Montgomery Furth. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985. . Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles. Translated by A. Schwegler. 4 vols. Tübingen: Fues, 1847–48. . La Métaphysique. Edited and translated by J. Tricot. 2 vols. Paris: Vrin, 1964. . On the Parts of Animals. Translated with a commentary by James G. Lennox. Oxford: Clarendon, 2001. TO TRANSLATE 1139 . Topics: Books I and VIII. Translated with commentary by Robin Smith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997. . Topiques, livres I–IV. Edited and translated by Jacques Brunschwig. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1967. Aubenque, Pierre. Le problème de l’être chez Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. Avicenna. Liber De philosophia prima, sive Scientia divina. Edited by S. van Riet. 3 vols. Louvain, Belg.: E. Peeters, 1977–83. Bassenge, Friedrich. “Das τὸ τί ἑνὶ εἶναι, τὸ αγαθῷ εἶναι etc. und das τὸ τί ἦυ εἶναι bei Aristoteles.” Philologus 104 (1960): 14–47. Bonitz, Hermann. Aristotelis Metaphysica, Commentarius. Hildeshem, Ger.: Olms, 1960. Bröcker, Walter. Aristoteles. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1935. Buchanan, Emerson. “The Syntax and Meaning of τὸ τί ἦv εἶναι.” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Monographs 2 (1962): 30–39. Frede, Michael, and Günther Patzig. Aristoteles “Metaphysik Z”: Text, Translation and Commentary. 2 vols. Munich: Beck, 1988. Goichon, Amélie-Marie. La distinction de l’essence et de l’existence d’après Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936. Hintikka, Jakkao, and Simo Knuuttila, eds. The Logic of Being. Dordrecht, Neth.: D. Reidel, 1986. Kühner, Raphael. Ausführliche Grammatik der Griechischen Sprache. Hanover: Hahnsche Hofbuchhandlung, 1872. Merlan, Philippe. “τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι.” Classical Philology 61, no. 3 (1966): 188. Owens, Joseph. Aristotle’s Gradations of Being in Metaphysics Ε–Ζ. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007. . The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background of Mediaeval Thought. 3rd rev. ed. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978. Plato. Plato’s Phaedo. Translated by G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1977. Robin, Léon. Aristote. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1944. . Greek Thought and the Origins of the Scientific Spirit. New York: Knopf, 1928. . La théorie platonicienne des idées et des nombres d’après Aristote. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1963. Trendelenburg, Friedrich-Adolf. “Das τὸ τί ἑνὶ εἶναι, τὸ αγαθῷ εἶναι etc. und das τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι bei Aristoteles: Ein Beitrag zur aristotelischen Begriffsbestimmung und zur griechischen Syntax.” Rheinisches Museum (1828). . Geschichte der Kategorienlehre. Hildesheim, Ger.: Olms, 1979. Tugendhat, Ernst. TI KATA TINOΣ, Eine Untersuchung zu Struktur und Ursprung aristotelischer Grundbegriffe. Freiburg, Ger.: Karl Alber, 1958. Volkmann-Schluck, Karl-Heinz. Die Metaphysik des Aristoteles. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979. than translation itself. We do well to keep in mind this initial, indefinite vagueness attached to the verbs we translate as the verb “to translate,” verbs that always also designate something additional or something other than the passage from one language to another. We should keep in mind as well the determining role of Latin culture as it appropriated and adapted Greek culture in the construction of the Latin language. It takes at least two languages for any translation, but the Greeks, even when they spoke other languages, were willing to recognize only the logos [λόγоς], their logos, the Greek language. Yet the lexicon of translation is partly Greek as well, since it derives from another foundational moment, the commission in Alexandria of a translation into Greek of the Old Testament, the Septuagint Bible, which joins together both interpretation and translation within hermêneuein [ἑϱμηνεύειν] and in the hermeneutic gesture. In different languages, particularly in Latin and German, a skein of recurring and varying tension runs through this lexicon of translation: between the precise and exact relations from one word to another (the verbum e verbo of the interpres) and the literary image (the sensum and sensu of the orator). The close proximity between translation, metaphor, and equivocation (the medieval translatio) is troubling for us. As a result, translation can both be appreciated as “treason,” treachery, or betrayal, according to the Italian saying “traduttore, traditore,” and, on the other hand, as the very essence of tradition (starting with that translatio studii that applies to the displacement of Greek, then Latin, then Christian knowledge right through to the Überlieferung, or transmission, that enabled Heidegger access to an authentic Übersetzung, or “translation.” But as Schleiermacher explains, there are basically two, and only two, manners of translation: the exchange of supposedly equivalent linguistic values in the passage from one language to another according to the methods of an interpreting agency (dolmetschen) that “leaves the reader in peace as much as possible”; and the displacement of the reader in relation to his native language by virtue of the translation (übersetzen) such that they become foreign to each another, which is perhaps the best method for presenting it. I. Greek Monolinguism: Hellenism or Barbarism A. Hellênizein One needs at least two languages in order to translate. But the Greeks, in A. Momigliano’s expression (Sagesses barbares), were “proudly monolinguistic.” Instead of speaking their language, they let their language speak for them. In this way, the polysemic value of the term logos [λόγоς] allowed them to dispense with distinguishing between discourse and reason, between the language they speak and the language proper to man (see LANGUAGE, LOGOS, and GREEK, Box 4). In a more definitive manner, hellênizein [ἕλληνίζειν] (after the adjective hellên [ἕλλην], “Greek”) fixes under the same term the meanings of “speaking Greek” and “speaking correctly,” or even, insofar as the corpus of rhetoric and the historico-political corpus are bound together here as one, to “behave as a free, civilized, and cultivated individual”—in short, as a person. To speak, to speak well, to think well, and to live well—these goals all nest together. Two occurrences in Plato reveal their interrelatedness. In the Meno (82b), the only criterion that Socrates applies to the young slave in order for him to come to understand the idea of the square root is that he “Hellenize”: “Hellên men esti kai hellênizei? TRANSLATUM. To translate, Fr. traduire G. dolmetschen, übersetzen, übertragen, überliefern, ἑϱμηνεύειν, μεταϐάλλειν, μεταφϱάζειν, μεταφέϱειν, μεταγϱάφειν, μεθαϱμόζειν, vertere, convertere, exprimere, reddere, transferre, interpretari, imitari, traducere v. ANALOGY, COMPARISON, CONNOTATION, EUROPE, HEIMAT, HOMONYM, INTENTION, ITALIAN, LANGUAGE, LIGHT, LOGOS, MIMÊSIS, SENSE, SUPPOSITION, TROPE, WORD “To translate,” in the generally accepted sense of “passing from one language to another,” derives from a relatively late French adaptation of “traducere,” which means literally “to lead across” and whose application is both more general and vaguer 1140 TO TRANSLATE form which is the name in itself, naturally appropriate to its object), then the matter itself is of little import, and the user will be the one to judge if the tool (organon [ὄϱγανоν]) is of value: And the legislator, whether he be Hellene or barbarian, is not to be deemed by you a worse legislator, provided he gives the true and proper form of the name in whatever syllables—this or that country makes no matter. (Cratylus, 390a) The verb that Catherine Dalimier chose to render as “translation,” apodidôi [ἀπоδιδῷ], literally signifies “to render to someone by right,” “to restitute,” “to give in exchange,” “to transmit.” It substitutes for the expression tithenai eis ti [τιθέναι εἰς τι] (389d, 390e), “to transpose, to impose” (the name in itself) “in” (syllables), as one imposes the form of a shuttle on a particular piece of wood: the terms definitely derive from another technical model. Most often, besides, the difference between languages is taken into account in the major philosophical texts only as a gap or void, as if by inadvertence. It is only implicit in the text or in a concept, and there is simply no term to specifically designate the operation of translation; thus, Aristotle’s De interpretatione simply mentions that “just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds” (1.16a5–6; see SIGN, Box 1) and refers to the Stoics’ “signified” as that which Sextus Empiricus defines as “what the barbarians don’t understand when they hear the sound” (Adversus mathematicos, 8.11; see SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED, II.A). The operation of translation is touched upon from many different points of view. Thus our verb hellênizein, when used transitively, can mean “learning Greek” (Thucydides, 2.68), to “Hellenize” a barbarian, or later—but essentially only in relation to the translation of the Bible—to “express in Greek,” and thus to “translate” words or a text (in the second century CE, in Dion Cassius [55.3], in relation to what we would call the transliteration of “Noah” or “Jacob”; see Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 1.6.1). The same holds true for a number of composite verbs that incorporate meta, as indicating trans-port and trans-formation: metapherein [μεταφέϱειν] (to transport, transpose, employ metaphorically, or report); metaphrazein [μεταφϱάζειν] (to paraphrase), and especially metagraphein [μεταγϱάφειν] (“to change the text,” “to falsify” but also “to transcribe,” “to copy”). These all designate literary operations of a poetic, rhetorical, or philological nature and only marginally take on the meaning of “translating” in classical Greek. (For metaphrazein, see Flavius Josephus, ibid. 9.14.2; for metagraphein, see Thucydides [“On being translated,” 4.50.2] and Lucian, How History Must Be Written, 21, in which a purist claiming to be an inheritor of Thucydides purports to “transform Roman names [μεταπоιῆσαι]” and “to translate them into Greek [μεταγϱάψαι ἐς τὸ ἑλληνιϰόν] such as Chronion for Saturn” or others even more ridiculous.) The Aristotelian title “Peri hermêneias” is rendered as “De interpretatione,” as Lehre vom Satz, but never as “On Translation,” and yet it is the phrase hermêneuein, meaning “interpreting, explaining, expressing,” in the manner of one who puts his [῞Eλλην μέν ἐστι ϰαὶ ἑλληνίζει;]” (He is Greek and speaks our language?). Answer: Yes, he is “born to the household” (оἰϰоγενής). In the Protagoras, the apprenticeship into Hellenism is indistinguishable from the apprenticeship into political competence and the practice of isêgoria [ἰσηγоϱία], that equality of speech that is a characteristic of Athenian democracy. (327e: In the city, all are teachers of virtue, just as everyone in the home teaches the child to speak Greek. “In the same way, if you asked who teaches hellênizein, you would not find anyone.” See VIRTÙ, Box 1; cf. B. Cassin, L’effet sophistique, pt. 2, chap. 2). Beginning with Aristotle, hellênizein or hellênismos [ἑλληνισμός] serves as a chapter heading in treatises on rhetoric (Aristotle, Rhetoric, 3.5: “On correction”) or on grammar (Sextus Empiricus: “Is there an art of the Greek? (῞Eστι δ’ ἀϱχὴ τῆς λέξεως τὸ ἑλληνίζειν)”; Adversus mathematicos, 1.10). One has the choice of rendering the first sentence of the Aristotelian description as “The basis of expression is to express oneself in Greek” or as “The principle of style is in speaking correctly” (Rhetoric, 3.51407a20–21; on lexis [λέξις], see WORD, II.B and SIGNIFIER/SIGNIFIED). In order for what one writes to be easily read or spoken aloud, one must simply respect the “natural order” (pephukasi [πεφύϰασι]), the sequences set out by articles and conjunctions (that remain within the reach of memory in the same way as they are within hearing in the city) that respect semantic propriety (proper nouns, idia [ἴδια]; see PROPERTY), propriety of reference (by avoiding ambiguities and circumlocutions; see COMPARISON, HOMONYM), and propriety of grammar (the internal consistencies of genre and number). Speaking naturally, by following the accepted norms of clarity and precision—this remains the definition of Hellenism and of the classical “style.” “Whoever Hellenizes [ὁ ἑλληνίζων] is able to present the idea of things in a clear and distinct manner (σαφῶς ἅμα ϰαὶ ἀϰϱιϐῶς), as in a conversation [homilia (ὁμιλία)] which signifies a band of warriors, companionship, society, commerce, relation—including sexual relation—the lessons of a master, discussion and the normal usage of a word” (Adversus mathematicos, 1.10.176–79). This concept cannot but provide support for a claim to universal legitimacy. The semantics of verbs that touch upon the operation of translation If translation does not constitute a problem all unto itself, this is because the difference between languages is not taken into consideration as such. Instead, the place of translation is more of a gap or void. So it should come as no surprise that there is no Greek verb that signifies “translating” purely and simply, even if a certain number of them can be rendered that way. One of the most explicit and general models of the difference between languages is sketched out by Plato in the Cratylus. It is presented as a simple matter of phonetic difference. As long as there is a competent nomothete capable of forming names that take into consideration the eidos [εἶδоς] (the subsequently be raised starting with Jerome and the translation of sacred texts, when faithful rendering verbum pro verbo will become the very principle of translation: for the classics, translation consists of adhering to a meaning (“vis”) and not to a word (verba), and it is primarily an occasion for reflection on the creative modalities of the Latin language. At play in “translation” is the very reception of Greek culture in Rome, with all that entails. First, Fluidity of meanings and contradistinctions. The uses of the verb interpretari in a single author reveal the fluidity of meanings that only contradistinctions can fix point by point. Thus Cicero has Varro say (Academics, 1.8) that he has imitated (imitari) rather than translated (interpretari) Menippus. Cicero himself specifies that he followed (sequi) Panetius rather than translating (interpretari) him in his treatise On Duties (2.60). But the same verb applies as much to the hermeneutic activities of the Stoics in relation thoughts into words (Plato, Laws, 966b) as well as one who serves as the interpreter for the gods (the poet, the rhapsodist, the seer), that is the most likely candidate for the retroversion of “translating” (starting with Xenophon, Anabasis, 5.44). At least this is what the future will hold (see below, II and III). II. Greece in Rome. Translating/Adapting. In the classical Latin authors, the translation from Greek into Latin very barely satisfies modern criteria, and the process of translation itself is not clearly defined in the Latin language. The verbs vertere, convertere, exprimere, reddere, transferre, interpretari, imitari can all refer to what we would call “literal translation” as well as to looser adaptations of Greek models. The fact that we are unable to find a sharp distinction between literal translation and literary adaptation in these verbs rather clearly indicates that the question of translation is posed differently in the classical period than it would 1 What is a “barbarian” for a Greek? v. AUTRUI, COMPARISON, PEOPLE Hellên and “βάϱϐαϱος” are, as Koselleck puts it, “asymmetrical antonyms” (Futures Past, pt. 3, chap.1). The former is both a noun and a proper name as well, while the latter is only a common noun. “βαϱϐαϱίζειν” is an onomatapoesis similar to “blah-blah-blah” (Fr. blablater; cf. Lat. balbus, stutter) and refers to a conjunction of linguistic, anthropological, and political features that make the “barbarian” altogether other from the self, a heteros [ἕτεϱος]—that make it unintelligible, perhaps even not altogether human. In the rhetorical and grammatical corpus, “barbarism” refers to an effect of unintelligibility: for instance, in poetry, when one diverges from the proper meaning or common use (to idiôtikon [τὸ ἰδιωτιϰόν], to kurion [τὸ ϰύϱιον]) and uses “foreign” expressions instead (xenika [ξενιϰά]). Too many metaphors result in ainigma [αἴνιγμα]. a confusion of the signifier, and too many borrowings (glossâi [γλῶσσαι]) lead to barbarismos [βαϱϐαϱισμός], gibberish, and the confusion of the signified (Aristotle, Poetics, 22.1458a18–31; see LANGUAGE, II.A). Diogenes Laertius went so far as to specify the difference, which is still current in classroom exercises, between “solecism” (soloikismos [σολοιϰισμός]), which is an error of syntax, and “barbarism,” which is an error of morphology—which renders a word morphologically unrecognizable (7.44 and 59). For the Greeks, the underlying problem was apparently to determine whether barbarianism (and hence Hellenism as well) is itself a fact of nature or a fact of culture (see BILDUNG, Box 1). Hence Antiphon uses the verb barbarizein to refer to those who make the distinction between Greek and barbarian into a natural distinction. “We make ourselves into barbarians in relation to each other [βαϱϐαϱώμεθα] whereas by virture of nature itself, we are all naturally made to be barbarians and Greeks [ὁμοίως πεφύϰαμεν ϰαὶ βάϱϐαϱοι ϰαὶ ῞Ελληνες εἶναι]” (P. Oxy, 1364 + 3647, fr. A, col. 2, in Bastianini and Decleva-Caizzi; cf. Cassin, L’effet sophistique). Similarly, Euripedes’s Orestes contrasts a barbarian conception of Hellenism, which Orestes believes is a result of a natural difference, with a Greek conception of Hellenism, based on respect for legality, for the law, and maintained by Tyndareus (Cassin, ibid.), and Isocrates praises Athens for this advance. Our city has made the use of the word Greek no longer as a reference to the race [μηϰέτι τοῦ γένους] but as a reference to the intellect [ἀλλὰ τῆς διανοίας], and we refer to those who play a part in our upbringing [paideuseôs (παιδεύσεως)] as Greeks, rather than to those who have the same nature [phuseôs (φύσεως)] as us. (Panegyric, 4.50) But in either case, the question is in the end a political one: barbarians are those who submit to, or even seek out, despotism. If, according to Aristotle, “barbarians are more slave-like by nature [doulikôteroi (δουλιϰώτεϱοι)] than are the Greeks” (Politics, 3.14.1285a20; cf.1252b9, 1255a29), it is because, like the slave in his master’s house, the barbarian is de facto ruled despotically (despotikôs [δεσποτιϰῶς]), according to the Persian model (every Persian, a slave to the great ruler, is “another’s man”) in contradistinction to the hegemonic (hêgemonikôs [ἡγεμονιϰῶς]) Greek model, which binds a leader (hêgemôn [ἡγεμών]) and a free man. This is what is at stake in the entire book 7.7 of Politics, which lays out a first theory of climate, in which the Greeks occupy a temperate middle zone between the thymic, passionate, and cold zones of Europe, in which life is free but disorganized, and a hot, dianoetic, and technical Asia, in which life is lived in submission. As for Greece, it is both passionate and intellectual; it is “capable of living in freedom within the best political institutions, and it has the capacity to give directions to all.” An internal domination, the slavery of the slave, rests on an external domination, the slavery of the barbarians, who require a master, in a theoretical compact to which the modern era will no longer so easily subscribe (cf. Cassin, Aristote et le logos, pt. 1, chap. 3). REFS.: Bastianini, Guido, and Fernanda Decleva-Caizzi. Corpus dei papiri filosofici greci e latini, pt. 1, vol. 1. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1989. Cassin, Barbara. Aristote et le logos. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. . L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. also describes the displacement of meaning that is at work in the deployment of metaphor. By using the same verb for the activity of translation and the creation of metaphors, Cicero establishes the link in language between translating and writing; one has only to apply to translation what he has to say about the development of metaphor, undoubtedly starting from the Aristotelian reflections on metaphor as a process of enrichment of language, to define translation as a true creation: The third genre of ornament, the metaphorical use of a word, is born of necessity and constrained by need and inconvenience; it subsequently finds general application as a result of the pleasure and ease which it provides. (On the Ideal Orator, 3.155) But this rapprochement has a broader scope as it is inscribed in language itself. The Greeks, who have no need to “translate,” do not take advantage of this potential usage of metapherein (Plato uses it once to designate the transcriptions of proper names: Crito, 113a), and when Plutarch invokes the philosophical works of Cicero (Life of Cicero, 40), he uses the verbs “μεταϐάλλειν” and metaphrazein to designate his “translations” in general and employs the term “metaphor” only in connection with isolated translations of terms that Cicero was unable to render through a word in its common form of usage. The work of polysemy that Cicero achieves through transferre is invisible to the Greek language because its referent is something only thought in Rome. To translate is to achieve a new splendor, a new brilliance that results from a use of language that is out of the ordinary, that results from borrowings instead of the familiar and proper usage: “these metaphors are a kind of borrowing [mutationes] which enable us to find elsewhere what we are lacking ourselves” (On the Ideal Orator, 156). The language of the other can thus provide what is lacking, but borrowings are only acceptable and provide appropriate ornamentation if they are fully reappropriated. To put metaphors (verba translata) to good use, “rather than suddenly appearing in some place that does not belong to them [alienum locum], they must appear to take up residence [immigrasse] in their own surroundings” (Brutus, 274). This is none other than an integration, a borrowing that does not arrive as a foreigner but makes itself at home. Seneca will also say that the “Latin grammarians give the [Greek] word analogia the right to the city [civitas]” (Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, 120.4). This idea of the reception of the Greek language, described as the integration into the body of citizens, validates the link established between translation and the use of metaphors by the verb transferre. It does not consist of a change from one language to another. It takes place within a single language, as a result of the transfer from Greece to Rome, as displacements and borrowings that create splendor. “[T]he metaphors draw attention to the discourse and illuminate it like so many shining stars” (On the Ideal Orator, 3.170). This is the sense in which Lucretius calls his poem a “translation” of the doctrine of Epicurus: “bringing to light the obscure discoveries of the Greeks” (1.136–137) and “composing sparkling verses on obscure subjects” (1.933)—bringing a new splendor and to the mythic narratives (On the Nature of the Gods, 3.60) as to the interpretation of a philosophical doctrine (On Moral Ends, 2.34) or the adaptations of Greek works by the founders of Latin literature, such as Ennius did for Sacred History of Euhemerus (On the Nature of the Gods, 1.119). None of the other verbs referred to above is sufficient to specifically designate the activity of translation: instead, each of them allows the Latin authors to define their work in relation to a Greek “model.” The lexicon of translation can thus be understood only in relation to the tensions of literary polemics and within the specific context of Latin literature. When Plautus uses the verb vertere to refer to his translation/adaptation of a Greek play, his usage is not neutral but instead underscores the difficulties that underlie the development of the literary Latin language (The Comedy of Asses, v. 11) In Greek, this play is called The Donkey Driver. It was written by Demophilus, and Maccus [Plautus] translated it into the barbaric language (vortit Barbare). “To translate into the barbaric tongue,” that is to say, into Latin, is a provocative expression that Plautus also employs in The Three Crowns (v. 19), and it must be understood as a literary manifesto: that it is not a matter of submitting to the original language, the Greek, in relation to which everything else is the barbaric. On the contrary, in order to avoid the loss of meaning and end up with an incomprehensible language, one must write in one’s own language and create one’s own language. This is why Terence can contrast his comic rival’s ability to translate well and his inability to write well: By translating well, but by writing poorly, he took good Greek comedies and made them into Latin ones that weren’t. ([Q]ui bene vertendo et easdem scribendo male / ex graecis bonis latinas fecet non bonas.) (The Eunuch, v. 7–8) B. Cicero and the sparkle of philosophical translation The articulation between translating/adapting/creating sketched out by the Latin playwrights is explicitly taken up by Cicero, who defines his conception of philosophical translation in reference to the practices of the founders of Latin literature: Even if I were to translate [vertere] Plato or Aristotle literally, as our poets did with the Greek plays, I hardly think I would deserve ill of my fellow citizens for bringing [transferre] those sublime geniuses to their attention. If I think fit, I will translate certain passages, particularly from those authors I just mentioned, when it happens to be appropriate, as Ennius often does with Homer and Afranius with Menander. (On Moral Ends, 1.7) What is at work in this “transfer” from Greece to Rome is not some simple transport of booty, even if this dimension is always present in the background (see, e.g., Tusculan Disputations, 2.5: where it is expressed that it is necessary to tear away [eripere] Greece’s philosophical preeminence in philosophy and transfer it to Rome): the verb transferre nationality, and it would subsequently gain political recognition as well. Versions of the other books followed: spread out over two or even three centuries and probably completed by Christian writers. This was an event without precedent. The idiom of the Greeks, the language of thought that aspired to universality, now became the language of the Bible. Toward the end of the second century BCE, a widespread legend, first referred to in the Letter of Aristeas, would introduce “the book” (hê biblos [ἡ βίϐλος]), as the law in question became Greek, as the extraordinary work of seventy or seventy-two scholars of Iouda at the request of the grand priest of Jerusalem. The order is said to have come from the royal librarian of Alexandria at the request of the second monarch of the Ptolemaic dynasty, Ptolemy Philadelphus (Ptolemy II). The latter wanted the books of the Ioudaioi included in the famous library of his sumptuous city. According to the same source, each of the translators translated the text in a rigorously consistent way, identical to the work of the other translators. In the middle of the second century CE, Christian authors circulated or forged the letter and set in place the Latin word septuaginta, “seventy.” They made this into the general title of this collection of Greek writing that they had inherited and would henceforth be the only ones to use. The word is still in use today—although not without ambiguity, since the legendary role of the “seventy” applied only to the five books of Moses—as the title of the Greek Old Testament. B. Translation, interpetation, inspiration, prophecy The unprecedented event of the translation of the Law appealed immediately to the theoreticians of the local Judaic community, which was entirely hellenophonic. It was thus and at that moment that the conceptual field of translation became established in the Greek lexicon. The verb hermêneuin and the nouns, hermêneia [ἑϱμηνεία] and hermêneus [ἑϱμηνεύς] saw their respective meanings of “express” or “signify,” “expression,” “signification” or “interpretation,” and “interpreter” become qualified to specifically signify “translate,” “translation,” and “translator.” Other etymologically related and practically synonymous terms, such as diermêneuein [διεϱμηνεύειν] and diermêneusis [διεϱμήνευσις], were subject to the same process. The word metagraphê [μεταγϱαφή], “copy” or “transcription,” came itself to signify “translation,” and metagraphein, “to transcribe” or “to copy,” became equivalent to “translate.” The verb metagein [μετάγειν], to “deport,” now applied to the text as “transferred into another language”; in other words, “translated” (Prologue by the translator of the Siracides around 100 BCE). Recourse was also taken to metharmozein [μεθαϱμόζειν], “to arrange differently.” Three great agents or Judaic witnesses of this semantic innovation succeeded one another between the second century BCE and the first century CE, all of them convinced that the translation of the Law was in response to an external political will. Around 180 BCE, the philosopher Aristobolus claimed that the “entire translation [hermêneia] of the Law” was realized under Ptolemy Philadelphus, but he insisted that there had been previous attempts at translation, ones that were fragmentary or flawed, which is impossible to verify anyway. His intention was to make more credible his own belief that Moses, the father of universal culture, was the original teacher of the Greek thinkers, luminous intelligibility through translation by appeal to the senses. If “all metaphors are addressed directly to the senses, especially to the sense of vision, the most penetrating of them all” (On the Ideal Orator, 3.160), one can see that what is at stake in the transference by translation is precisely to achieve a form of immediacy in the form of the “living” language of Latin. Translations of the Bible: The Lexicon of Translation and the Status of the Hermêneus The translation of the Bible into Greek is not a counterexample to the monolinguism of the Greeks but rather an illustration of it. This translation is of Jewish inspiration rather than of Greek, born from the idea that Greek is de facto the language of culture par excellence, which enables it to render accessible the Book par excellence. The body of literature that will be given the overarching title of Biblia [Bιϐλία] in the twelfth century of the Common Era was translated into Greek first, though only in part, in Alexandria starting in the third century before Christ. It was a great novelty in the world of culture. These Greek “writings” (graphai [γϱαφαί]), which even today embody the Old Testament in the Greek Orthodox Church, served straightaway as the linguistic matrix for Christian doctrine, providing the concepts and expressions that course through the new phraseology. These texts provided the basis for most of the older versions of the Bible, right up to the translations of Cyril and Methodius (middle of the eleventh century) into old Slavonic. Competing Greek versions of the text appeared in the course of the second century, including an extremely literal one commissioned by the rabbis from the proselytizer Aquila. But this did not keep the former from serving as the exclusive source of the first Latin translations. Saint Jerome first proposed a series of scientific and literary revisions before deciding to directly translate the Hebrew texts of Jewish writings directly into Latin. The end result of his work of revision and translation was the Latin Vulgate, the official Bible of Roman Catholicism until the middle of the twentieth century. Jerome remained the champion of what he would himself call hebraica veritas. This conception even served as a model for Luther’s German Bible. But in actuality, and despite his intent, a reign of latina veritas was the result of Jerome’s labors instead. For centuries the Latin Vulgate would provide the textual basis for most translations into the so-called vernacular languages. Whatever the destiny of the Greek Bible itself, its appearance in classical antiquity signals an important moment in the very history of culture. Moses, in fact, lays down a challenge to Homer! And most of all, the objective foundations of the lexicon and of the discourse that have subsequently come to be known as “translation” are put irreversibly in place. A. The Greek Bible of the Septuagint Thus, in the third century before Christ, the peoples of Iouda, or the Ioudaioi [’Ioυδαῖоι], took up the translation of their hagiai graphai [ἅγιαι γϱαφαί], “holy writings,” into Greek, starting first and foremost with the Law of Moses, nomos [νόμος]—or as they would say, their nomothesia [νομοθεσία], or “constitution.” The politeuma [πολίτευμα], the “community within the city” that they formed in Alexandria, protected their difference of their interpreter (hermêneus) in Moses. Philo designates the latter as ho theologos [ὁ θεολόγος] (De proemiis et poenis, 53; De vita Mosis, 2.115). Insofar as the divine logos expresses itself through the “holy laws [nomoi hieroi (νόμοι ἱεϱοί)],” Moses is their hermêus, or more precisely, prophêtes [πϱοφήτης]. Yet he himself needs interpreters in his own image and of his stature, whence Philo’s report of a chain of interpreters, “prophets,” in which the translator and commentator hold the same rank, each “inspired.” (We can compare this with Plato’s Ion, in which the chain of enthusiasm goes from the muse or from the god to the poet and then to the rhapsodes, whose performances interpreted the interpreters [533c– 535a]). Thus all the quantitative and qualitative divergences of the Greek version of the holy books are a priori justified and already fully recognized as authentic graphai. In some cases, the translator went to great lengths to repair the language of the works, occasionally going so far as to write what amounts to a new text. This is particularly evident for the book of Proverbs, entirely redrafted by a talented author of Greek wisdom. This is indeed the case of a hermêneus who is not so much a “translator” as an “interpreter” with literary and even musical connotations, since the book also contains poetry. But if there is translation nevertheless, it is insofar as the biblical message remains constant through its potency and deep articulations in relation and opposition to everything else. The semantic plenitude of the word hermêneus is thus assured. C. Jerome, translator (interpres) or writer (orator)? With Jerome (born in 347 CE near Emona, now Ljubljana in Slovenia, and died in Bethlehem in 420 CE), who was trained at a high level of humanism in Rome, the occidental destiny of the Christian Bible arrived at a decisive threshold. Very early on, he undertook to revise the text of the Latin scriptures, which appeared first in Africa around the beginning of the third century CE, then in Spain and in southern Gaul, and finally in Rome. Aside from the so-called Vulgate of Jerome, these writings are known as Vetus Latina, “old Latin,” Vetus edition, Antiqua translatio, or Vulgata editio. Augustine called them Italia, “the Italian.” Jerome considered all translations prior to his to be vulgata editio, or “commonly accepted editions,” starting with the Septuagint (Letters of St. Jerome, letter 57, to Pammachius, para. 6). The variants of this editio, and especially the recensions, seemed to reflect a very ancient model of Greek related to a Hebrew family of texts that were found among the scrolls of Qumran. This Bible made a significant contribution to the establishment of Christian Latin as distinct from classical Latin. The vocabularies of occidental languages that derive from Latin are deeply influenced by it. Shocked by the profusion of variants and its general literary impoverishment (at one point a sermo humilis had been the rule), Jerome wanted the Bible to be worthy of a Roman society that was rediscovering its classics. An extended stay in the East enabled him to perfect his knowledge of Greek and to properly learn Hebrew. He first used these skills with the encyclopedic accounts of Eusebius of Caesarea. Upon his return to Rome, he began to revise the Latin text of the Septuagint, limiting himself to stylistic corrections. In 386, he settled in Bethlehem permanently, where he discovered the Hexapla of Origen. His confrontation especially of Plato and Pythagoreas, who would have learned directly from the Greek sources of “the Law” (text cited by Eusebius of Caesaria, Praeparatio evangelica, 13.12.1). Aristobolus was the first to demonstrate the use of hermêneia in the technical sense of “translation.” A half-century later, and still in Alexandria, a lengthy piece of fiction appeared carried down in its entirety under the title Letter of Aristeas. This work decisively confirms the use of hermêneia as “translation,” a term it immediately distinguishes from metagraphê, “transcription.” It also contains the formulaic expressions ta tês hermêneias [τὰ τῆς ἑϱμηνείας] and even ta tês metagraphês [τὰ τῆς μεταγϱαφῆς], the “work or works of translation” that one “executes” (epitelein [ἐπιτελεῖν]), or that one “achieves” (telein [τελεῖν]). As for the “translators,” it would seem that they are still designated only by a participle of the verb diermêneuein. The decisive setting up of the complete lexicon of translation is both certified and commented upon by the Alexandrian exegete and philosopher Philo in the first decades of the first century. The relevance, if not the legitimacy, of the act of translating the hierai bibloi [ἱεϱαὶ βίϐλοι] (the sacred books) or simply graphai (writings) is demonstrated within the framework of a theological reasoning in which the mythological figure Moses plays the central part. Here are two essential texts: 1. For any time that Chaldeans who know the Greek language, or Greeks who know Chaldean [i.e., Hebrew] were to come upon the two versions [graphai] simultaneously, namely the Chaldaic and the translated version [hermêneutheisê (ἑϱμηνευθείση)], they would look upon both of them with admiration and respect them as sisters, or rather as one and the same work in both substance and form, and they would call their authors not translators [hermêneutheisê] but hierophants and prophets to whose pure minds it had been granted to go along with the purest spirit [pneuma (πνεῦμα)] of Moses. (“A Treatise on the Life of Moses,” 2.37) 2. For a prophet does not utter anything whatever of his own, but is only an interpreter [hermêneus] of another being who prompts and suggests to him all that he utters, at the very moment he is seized by inspiration [enthousia (ἐνθουσία)]. (“The Special Laws,” 4.49) For Philo, the Greek translation of the writings is equally as “inspired” as the Hebrew original. The same holds true in his eyes for the interpretation of the sacred texts, which is limited to a small number of the elect, or the “initiates.” To add force to his argument, he resorts to the register of the mysteries in the same manner as the Alexandrian writers in their explications of Homer’s works. The schema that underlies his propositions is that of language (logos) as the interpreter (hermêneus) of thought or spirit (nous [νοῦσ]), whence his expression ho hermêneus logos [ὁ ἑϱμηνεὺς λόγος], “the speech which translates our thought” (De somniis, 1.33). He uses the same schema in relation to the fact or process of divine revelation. The science and God’s word (logos) have basic rudiments the tender childhood of the just man is instructed in the divine doctrine. (Prologue to the Book of Samuel in the Book of Kings) Thus, there was the need to have recourse to the Hebrew text in order to translate the Bible and to limit the translation to the Hebrew corpus as a remedy to both the excesses and deficiencies of the Septuagint. The “revealed” truth, which is one with the “name,” in other words the formula itself, will thus be preserved. The books translated by Jerome will not be “corrupted by the transfer into a third vase [in tertium vas transfusa].” “Stored in a very clean jug as soon as they leave the press, they will retain all their taste” (Prologue to the books of Solomon). For profane works and in his youth, Jerome claims to have applied the rules of Cicero or Horace, translating not “verbum e verbo but sensum e sensu,” not “as a simple translator, but as a writer [nec ut interpres sed ut orator].” He specifies that “I have not translated the words, but rather the ideas [non verba sed sententias transtulisse]” (Letters of St. Jerome, letter 57, §5 and §6). And he invokes those authors, starting with the Septuagint, who “translated according to the meaning [ad sensum interpretati sunt],” or some others, like Saint Hilary of Poitiers, who “captured the ideas in his own language by the law of the victor [victoris jure transposuit]” (ibid.). For the sacred texts, Jerome requires verbum e verbo. But what this means is that he does not want to lose a single word, for each and every one contains part of the divine “mystery” (mysterium or sacramentum). He is thus a “translator” and not a “prophet”: “It is,” he states, “the erudition and richness of the words that translate what one understands [eruditio et verborum copia ea quae intellegit transfert]” (Prologue to the Pentateuch). Even if he uses it, he rejects Aquila’s Greek translation, done by a “meticulous interpreter [contentiosus interpres] who translates not only the words but also the etymologies” (Letters of St. Jerome, letter 57, §11)—in other words, Jerome rejects the servile forms of literality that evacuate the “mystery,” the carrier of truth. In addition, he affirms that the ad verbum, or literal, version “sounds absurd” (ibid.). The hermeneutic way of putting verbum e verbo to use allows the talent—or even the genius—of the translator, in this case Jerome, to come into play without affecting the meaning or mysterium. It is even possible sometimes to “keep the euphony and propriety of the terms [euphonia et proprietas conservetur]” (ibid., letter 106, §55). This explains and justifies the literary qualities and even the audacities of Jerome’s translation, which is certainly exempt of all servility. Jerome’s contemporary and correspondent Augustine rejected the rule of hebraica veritas. For him, the Greek text of the Septuagint is “inspired by the holy Spirit”: it is the very best version in existence. This means that if there is an original truth, it is contained within this text. This Greek Bible had truly announced the Christ (e.g., by introducing the adjective parthenos [παϱθένος], “virgin,” to translate “young woman” in reference to the mother of the Emmanuel, in Isaiah 7:14), and the church made this translation its own. Augustine believed in the progress of humanity through history, culminating in its final stage, which the Christ had “completed.” In addition, his position is directed by a with this exhaustive synopsis in six columns raised profound questions regarding the truth of the text and its language. And he undertook the task of addressing them, limiting himself to the Hebrew canon of writings. He became increasingly open to Greek versions of the text other than the Septuagint, such as those of Aquila, Symmachus ben Joseph, and Theodotion. These were much closer to the Hebrew text that was already the official Jewish version than was the Alexandrian translation, the classic text for the Christians. Jerome thus adopted the Hebrew text as the only basis for the “revealed” truth, what he called hebraica veritas. This would be the third and final phase of his work as a translator, which lasted from 390 to 405. In his Latin translation of the Hebrew corpus, he was returning ad fontes, “to the sources.” He put aside, although not completely, the other books contained in the Christian Bibles, generally known as deuterocanonic, which he called apocryphal. Beginning in the thirteenth century, the Latin Bible that derived from the work of Jerome was called the Vulgate. Its contents do not all come from Jerome. As in the case of most of the deuterocanonic books, it limits itself to adopting the older revision of the text of the Vetus Latina. The success of the long work of editing that the Vulgate embodies results from the fact that it answered the pressing need to have a standard text with a prestigious signator as well as being partly anonymous. It would thus remain the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church until the middle of the twentieth century. As a firm proponent of the hebraica, or hebrea veritas, Jerome saw the Hebrew language as the “matrix of all languages” (matrix omnium linguarum; Book of Commentaries of the Prophet Sophonias, 3.14–18), as the first language from which all others derive. As the originary language, Hebrew was thus at constant risk of having truth erode. Jerome was sympathetic to the pessimistic theory of history dear to Hesiod, which sees history as the progressive decay of humanity with perfect truth found only at its point of origin. So the Greek version of the Septuagint could only be a pale reflection of the Hebrew bible. Nonetheless, Jerome believed himself qualified to translate the holy books because his interventions occurred after the coming of the Christ, the historical principle of all truth. In regard to the technical framework that he formulates, his competence is far greater than that of the Septuagint, whose version, he admits, had “prevailed with good cause in the churches because it had been the first one and the apostles had made use of it” (Letters of St. Jerome, letter 67, §11). But he justifies his rule of the hebraica veritas through the philosophy of language, influenced by Origen and Plato’s Cratylus). Adopting the doctrine of the indivisible link between “being” in Greek, on [ὄν], and the “name,” onoma [ὄνομα], he shows that this union is most forcefully achieved in the Hebrew language, the primordial idiom and the most apt to express and guarantee the truth. He comments upon it in these terms: Just as there are twenty-two letters in Hebrew with which to write everything that is said, and that the human language is captured through the elementary functions of the letters, so too are there twenty-two books of the Bible, through which, as by the letters and name: gubernator) “Translatio nullius proprietatis est [transfer is a property that belongs to no thing],” says Boethius, and this formula must be understood in relation to case (2): the transfer does not establish the property of a thing (since it does not receive its proper name by transfer) nor of a name (since the transferred usage does not constitute a stable or permanent property of the name). Abelard will also emphasize this latter point: the transfer occurs for some given length of time as part of a specific utterance and is to be understood in its context. He thus confirms that this does not lead to equivocation, since there is no new imposition of meaning, only an “improper” usage. He adds that this kind of translatio is a form of univocatio because there is only a single imposition, even if the term takes on an acceptation different from the original acceptation. The analysis of several of these variations in acceptation that are contextually determined, along with the idea of univocatio, forms the basis for elaborating the theory of supposition: one speaks of translatio disciplinalis for the specific ways terms are used in expressions of grammar (e.g., homo est nomen [“man” is a noun]), of logic (homo est species [“man” is a species]), or of poetry (prata rident [the prairies are laughing]). It is a matter of determining if the predicate is the reason for the particular acceptation or if it only actualizes some semantic potentialities already contained in the term. In the context of the medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations, translatio is often analyzed as the second kind of equivocation: between the equivocation that is produced when two signifieds are equally present in the term (e.g., canis) and the contextually determined equivocation (e.g., monachus albus, “white monk” [Cistercian], where albus can only refer to the Cistercian in this particular context), one finds translatio, in which the two acceptations of a term are in a hierarchy “according to the anterior and the posterior [secundum prius et posterius].” One can see that the medieval commentaries are more precise than Aristotle’s original text, which is difficult to interpret because of the absence of examples to illustrate this second kind; it seemed to concern the semantic variations due to use, when we make a habit of using a word in a sense that it did not originally have (166a–b16–17): “another manner, is when we have become used to expressing ourselves in a certain way”). In the thirteenth century, the notion of analogia would be developed within this second category, as when one acceptation is primary and all the others can be traced back to it according to a determinant relation (e.g., sanum relates first to the health of the animal, then later, and in relation to the first, to the urine, the potion, etc.). 2. The theological context In a theological context, Augustine contrasted signa propria and signa translata (De doctrina christiana, 2.10.15); among the latter, he mentions the name “bull,” which properly refers to the animal but also, by usurpatio, refers to the evangelist: the name properly refers back to a thing, which itself refers back to a second thing, and it thus signifies the second by transfer. In a different perspective, the De trinitate, §4 of Boethius, which takes up in part the De trinitate, §5 of Augustine, is the point of departure for a series of important reflections. In this text, Boethius speaks of the mutatio of categories when applied to the divinity: they are modified as a function of concept of language that stems from the Stoic doctrine of the res et signa (the things and the signs; On Christian Teaching, bks. 1 and 2, passim). If on and onoma are fused, res and signa are separated. The unique and only res for Augustine is God, and veritas is just another way of saying God. Language, on the other hand, falls under signa, and writing is only a “sign” of a “sign”: it cannot be identified with truth, which belongs to the order of the res (see SIGN, and below, IV). Medieval Translatio In the Middle Ages, the term translatio encompassed different usages, all of which referred to a common idea of “displacement” or “transfer”: 1. “transfer from one meaning to another” for one word, or “from the name of one thing to another” in a given language; 2. “transfer of a term from one language to an equivalent term in another,” whence “translation” (see the difference with etymologia and interpretatio); 3. “transfer of culture or government from one epoch to another,” “from one place to another” (translatio studii, translatio imperii). A. Transfer of meaning The notion of translatio is truly at the confluence of the arts of language (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and of theology. In its widest accepted meaning, the term translatio designates a transfer of meaning, a displacement of signification, from a proper usage to an improper usage. In a narrower acceptance, which one can find in grammar or rhetoric (in Quintilian or Donatus, for example), translatio is equivalent to tropus, defined as a change in signification for reasons of ornament or necessity (cf. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 12.8–9) In an even narrower sense, translatio is equivalent to metaphora, which is one of the tropes; it entails using a word in some unusual and particular way, either because there is no proper word for this meaning or because this usage intensifies the meaning. The new use of the word is based on a perception of a resemblance between the thing that it properly signifies and the object to which it applies by transfer (e.g., when one says of some person: “he or she is a lion” because of his or her strength). The two first meanings apply equally to a single word as to a sequence of words; the third applies to a word in isolation. The terms translatio and transumptio, which had been distinct from each other in antiquity (e.g., with Quintilian), were, according to some medievalists, used interchangeably in the Middle Ages. 1. Translatio: Equivocation/ornament In a very influential passage of his first chapter of the Categories of Aristotle, Boethius introduces the notion of translatio. He distinguishes two cases: (1) the transfer of meaning that occurs when one uses the name of one thing to designate another that has no name; this is done out of “penury of names” and results in equivocation, since the same name now applies to two different things; (2) the transfer of meaning that occurs for reasons of ornamentation and that does not result in equivocation (e.g., using aurigia [cart driver] to refer to the pilot of a ship, although this has its own proper TO TRANSLATE 1147 but connote different properties (the root of all justice and the effect of divine justice, respectively). So there is no incommensurability between the two kinds of discourse themselves, only a partial incommensurability, and the notion of connotatio permits the precise designation of this difference (see CONNOTATION). Alain de Lille, starting from the different theological sources mentioned previously and borrowing from the arts of language, specified the notion of translatio by distinguishing between the translatio nominis (transfer of the name) from the translatio rei (transfer of the thing). When one says linea est longa (the line is long), there is a transfer of both the word and the object it specifies; in seges est leta (the harvest is a happy one), there is only a transfer of the thing (the joy is transferred from a human, to which it properly belongs, to an inanimate object); in monanchus albus, there is a transfer of word only (only the name is transferred, as a “white monk” is not white), and only this latter mode comes into play in the translationes in divinis (see HOMONYM). In this way, Alain de Lille shows how language is subject to a general displacement when it is applied to God, a global distortion: Here, the words do not express existing realities. The terms are removed from their proper signification here the nouns become pronouns, the adjectives become substantives, the verb does not apply in the usual way, the predicate has no subject, the subject has no content, here the affirmation is proper, the negation true, the words cannot be evaluated by the meaning they provide, but according to the meaning from which they originate, here syntax is not subject to Donatus’s laws, metaphor (translatio) is a stranger to Cicero’s rules. (Quoted in Dahan, L’exégèse chrétienne) 3. Translatio and analogy The introduction of the notion of analogy in the thirteenth century reduces the scope of translatio (see ANALOGY). Analogy is introduced based on the second mode of equivocation of On Sophistical Refutations, the very same passage that had been previously considered a mode of translatio and following the same formula calling out the passage from prius to posterius (“healthy” refers first to health and then to urine, a constitutional walk, etc.). In theology, the question of ineffability is subdivided, starting with Pseudo-Dionysius, into two distinct parts: the first includes the case of “mystical” nouns, essential nouns, or nouns of perfection (“justice,” “truth,” etc.). The second applies to “symbolic” nouns (e.g., when one uses the name “lion”). The real philosophical and theological problem, according to Duns Scotus, applies to the former: to determine the relationship between divine justice and human justice, which will permit the analysis of the relation between the expression “God is just” and “man is just.” Translatio or metaphora will be limited to “symbolic” nouns: purely linguistic questions that do not address resemblance or similarity between God and man (these are the dissimilar symbols, or metaphors without resemblance, of Pseudo-Dionysius). In order to determine the kind of “transfer,” it is important to consider the location of the per prius that is transferred. Thus justice as a “thing” or “signified object” is found per prius in God, and secondarily per posterius in man (according to different modes of analysis, but, e.g., by virtue of a relation of participation). the subjects they are applied to, whence the adage “talia sunt praedicamenta qualia subjecta permiserint [the categories are such as their subjects permit them to be]”; when the predicates apply to something other than the divine reality, they can be substance or accidents; but they are modified when they apply to the divine (“cum qui in divinam verterit predicationem cuncta mutantur que predicari possunt [when one turns to divine predications, that which can be predicated finds itself completely changed]”). The adage is subject to two modifications in the context of the analysis of the propositions of Trinitarian theology. The first substitutes predicata for praedicamenta and gives it a semantic application: the value of predicates, when applied to divine reality, can change, even to the point of rendering false the utterance, says John of Salisbury in the first half of the twelfth century, and on the same occasion, Thierry de Chartres specifically talks of the “verborum transsumptio.” The second transformation consists in the inversion of the terms subjecta and praedicata (“talia sunt subjecta qualia praedicata permittunt” [subjects are such that predicates allow]) It is no longer an issue of showing the “improper” character because of the “transfer” of the discourse on God, but rather of setting out a general principle making the semantic and referential properties of the subject depend on the nature of the predicate (e.g., the predicate “engender,” in “God engendered” [Deus generat] restricts the subject “God” to refer only to God the Father). Through this latter acceptation, the adage becomes the very principle of contextual semantics developed by the determinist logicians of the thirteenth century. The notion of the transference of meaning was also influenced by the Dionysian tradition, starting with John Scotus Erigena, who took up the teaching of Pseudo-Dionysius. The term “metonomy” (translated as transnominatio in Erigena or as denominatio in John Sarrazin) is generally used here, and the trope by the same name likewise designates a transfer of sense based on different relations, especially from cause to effect, which makes it particularly useful in this context. Erigena chooses the term translatio (and its derivations) both for the transfer of categories and the transfer of names, and this usage would continue in all subsequent literature devoted to the divine names. He also speaks of metaphora when he considers types of relation and resemblance, but also relations of opposition and difference, which legitimize the transfer of names to God. These latter are affirmations that are called per translationem, which are improper and false, while the negations are proper and truthful. The idea that names are attributed to God by a process of translatio, which results in an improper usage because it is different from the one assigned to the name by virtue of the first imposition, leads to the analysis of translated usages as examples of equivocation, aequivocatio (Abelard, and then the commentators on De trinitate of Boethius: Gilbert de Poitiers and Thierry de Chartres). At that time, one generally considered there to be “equivocity” between a noun or name applied to a created reality (which the name is proper to, having been first imposed upon it) and a noun applied to God. Toward the end of the twelfth century, several authors would think the opposite, that there is “univocity” in “God is just” and in “man is just” because in both expressions the word “just” signifies the same thing (whence the univocatio) letters and sounds, and it (most often) occurs within a single language.” It includes examples of type (1) but excludes (6) due to the absence of formal similarity. It can include the process of composition/derivation, although, as illustrated by example (2), which is fairly representative of what one finds in the dictionaries known as Derivationes (Hugh of Pisa, for example), the passage from one language to another is also authorized, since a Latin term is decomposed into Greek units. As for the second: “Interpretatio is the expositio or the translatio of a term into another language, whether or not there is similarity in sound.” Interpretatio can be applied to (4). Depending on the author, the distinguishing criterion is either: in the same language / in another language; or: with a formal similarity / not necessarily with a formal similarity. Some authors distinguish between the two first notions of translatio, which occurs when a term is “transferred” from Greek to Latin—for example, ego, tu, sui, which are therefore “derived,” according to John of Genoa. He then asks himself if there is always derivation (derivatio) whenever there is translatio, to which he replies in the negative: in the case of translation (3) or (5), one cannot say that there is derivation, since in both cases the same noun is subjected to a simple formal modification in passing from one language to another (detorsio unius lingue in alteram); each of the words in these copulas is thus the same in both its signification and its signifier. One can speak of derivation when this is not the case, as in the coupling (Latin) of olor (swan) “derived” from olon (“completely”; Gr. holon [ὅλον], “because the swan is COMPLETELY white,” or in the case of gigno (to engender) from gê [γῆ] (earth). One should note that this problematic of the “unity of the noun,” which originates from a theological context (it needed to be demonstrated that the Gospel was everywhere the same, even if it was written in various languages, see WORD), is also raised in relation to example (4) of interpretatio. We can see from these remarks that it would be misleading to start from a problematic of translation when the heart of the matter is establishing the relationship between two words (or expressions). The function of all these expositiones is to account for the signification of words and/or to justify their formation, which explains how etymologia as a form of veriloquium (true talking) sometimes becomes the generic term applied to the different types we have encountered. Only with Roger Bacon did the notion of etymologia become defined by precise characteristics that are closer to modern criteria and clearly exclude what came to be called fantasy etymology (what Buridant, in “Les paramètres de l’étymologie médiévale,” calls ontological, because of the kind of relationship between objects they depend on; cf. Rosier, “Quelques textes sur l’étymologie au Moyen Âge”). Thus we see that only some of these expositiones serve as translations, translatio, in the modern sense, for example, (3), (4), and (5). . The German Tradition of Translation: Dolmetschen/Übersetzen/Übertragen Dolmetschen: “To render in German” and “to translate” It is often said that modern German was formed primarily through a translation: Luther’s translation of the Bible. But on the level of names or words, the relation is reversed, since the word “justice” applies per prius to the living creature (since names were first imposed on the things of this world, and then per posterius, “transferred” to God). On the basis of signification, such a noun applies “properly” to God, but it applies “improperly” on the mode of signification, since the latter is necessarily adequate for its user and thus inadequate to speak of unthinkable and ineffable realities (see SENSE, III.B.3). For a symbolic name like leo, there is no relation between the signified and the thing that the subject it is applied to signifies; the transfer, which is purely nominal (translatio nominis), is achieved by virtue of a property judged to be one of similarity and of a relation of proportionality (one says “God is a lion” by positing God/strength : lion/strength); for this reason, says Bonaventure, these are the only words that are truly “transferred names” (nomina translativa) (In IV Sententiarum, distinction 1.22, a. un., question 3 resp.). We should note that Albertus Magnus, on the other hand, considers that there is in fact a “transfer of thing” due to the fact that it is the property (strength) that is transferred from the lion to God. Whatever the case, these symbolic names are absolutely improper, both on the level of the signification and, as is the case with all names, on the level of the modes of signifying. B. Transfer from one language to another: translatio/“translation” The medieval grammarians and lexicographers sought to distinguish the different modes by which two terms can be set in relation to each other, on the condition that they have something in common. It is the recognition of what they have in common that allows one of them to serve as a gloss (expositio) of the other. One can see some of the difficulties they encountered by considering the following couplings of terms, where the equals sign points out an equivalence that is precisely what needs to be specified. 1. deus  Dans Eternam Vitam Suis (God  Giving Eternal Life to his Own): etymology called “by letters”; 2. episcopus  epi  skopos [ἐπί  σϰοπός]: analysis by composition; 3. deus  theos [θεός]; 4. homo  anthropos [ἄνθϱωπος]; 5. Iacob  Ioacobus; 6. sapientia (wisdom)  amor philosophiae (love of philosophy). The most common generic term for these equivalences is expositio. It is also used in logic to designate the logical structure of an utterance (e.g., homo qui currit disputat, “a man who runs discusses” = homo qui currit et ille disputat, “a man runs and he discusses”). In the same way, the expositio enables the recovery of multiple meanings or acceptations of a term, which may also explain its material form: the more difficult a word is to understand, the more one is tempted to capture it by a multiplicity of expositiones based on more commonly understood expressions, as in the case, in the Catholicon of John Balbi of Genoa, of the word dues (we find, among others, [1] and [3]). The authors of the twelfth century distinguish two kinds of expositions. As for the first, “etymology (etymologia) is the expositio of a term by one or more better-known terms, based on the property of the signified object and the similarity of that are judged to be equivalent. This is why dolmetschen is rarely used in philosophy: Fichte, for example, used it occasionally to designate the interpretive activity of the preacher, the intermediary between human beings and the gods (Fichtes Werke, 7:600; 8:254), but never as part of a theoretical discussion. In contemporary philosophical language, both in the hermeneutic tradition (Gadamer) and in the analytic tradition, übersetzen is rendered as “to translate” (Quine, Davidson) or traduire. B. Übersetzen, übertragen: “Translation” and “transposition” The German language also includes a synonym of übersetzen, the verb übertragen. Übersetzen literally means “to transpose,” whereas übertragen means “to transport.” Übertragen is the more general term and designates all sorts of “transposition,” “transfer,” or “transmission,” whereas today übersetzen is limited to the written transposition of discourse. Thus “to translate” is generally applied to übersetzen, while “to transpose” is used for übertragen. Übertragung can also designate “transfer” or even “metaphor.” In Nietzsche, the verb is translated (into English) as “to transfer” (“On Truth and Lie”). In their normal usage, the terms are strictly equivalent, but they are distinguished from each other in the reflections and analytic writing of Heidegger and Gadamer, who used the nuances of this distinction in philosophical discourse. C. Übersetzen, übertragen, überliefern: “Translation” and “transmission” In fact, like “transmission” in general, übertragen can underscore the existing link between translation and transmission. In this sense, the two terms are complementary, as for Kant, Luther designated the act of translating, constitutive of language and culture, as dolmetschen, and he often clarified it by substituting the verb verdeutschen (“to make German,” to “Germanize,” or as Philippe Büttgen translated it into French, “to put in German”). To explain dolmetschen by verdeutschen is to specify the method and purpose of translation: to make it understandable for the people, for “the mother at home and the ordinary man” (“Ein Sendbrief” [1530]), and to facilitate the mediation of cultures. In our day, dolmetschen has remained close to “interpreting agency,” that is to say, the oral and immediate translation of the interpreter-guide or the interpreter-translator. In Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Translator as Interpreter” (“Der Übersetzer als Dolmetsch”) designates the intepreter-translator as part of a living dialogue. We should note nonetheless that within the domain of translation, the German language does not contain a term that in itself refers to interpretation as a necessary part of the understanding of meaning. Dolmetschen has simply been progressively replaced by übersetzen, and the two terms, which had started out as synonyms, have ended up being opposed to each other to the point of excluding dolmetschen from the philosophical vocabulary. Thus Schleiermacher sets them in radical opposition (“Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens” [1813]): the two verbs designate two distinct manners of passing from one language into another and thus two perspectives on the activity of translation. Schleiermacher distinguishes authentic translation, which takes the signified content as its object and draws upon reflection (übersetzen) from simultaneous or immediate translation (dolmetschen), which is a simple exchange of linguistic values 2 Translatio studii: The constituent languages and traditions of philosophy in Europe The theme of translatio studii constitutes a topos in medieval thought destined to illustrate how, at different moments, knowledge (savoir) “moved” from Greece to Rome and then from Rome to the Christian world. The concept was first developed by the defenders of Charlemagne and the empire as a defense of Capetian power. From the twelfth century on it reappeared at different times and under different forms, notably in the Scholastic setting, and then especially in the universities: the University of Paris was thus legitimized as the culmination of a long journey of knowledge, first from Greece to Rome, and finally as an essential component of the “identity of the French realm.” One problem with this topos derives from the term studium itself when identified with knowledge or wisdom (sapientia): is this sacred knowledge or profane? Roger Bacon’s approach was an original one. In discussing translatio philosophiae, he stated that “[i]t pleased God to give whatever wisdom he wanted, since all wisdom comes from God; he thus revealed it to philosophers, both to the faithful and the infidel alike” (Opus Tertium). This voyage of philosophy was necessarily a voyage through the languages, a translatio linguarum: God first revealed philosophy to his saints and gave them the laws. It was thus primarily and most completely given in the Hebrew language. It was then renewed in the Greek language, primarily by Aristotle; then in the Arabic language, primarily through Avicenna; but it was never composed in Latin and was only translated/transferred [translata] based on foreign languages, and the best [texts] are not translated. (Bacon, Opus Tertium) The improbable status of the Latin language is clearly apparent here. It is simultaneously a language of sacred knowledge, since it is one of the three languages of the cross, along with Hebrew and Greek, but it is not really a language of profane knowledge, since, according to Bacon, the “Latins” did not add anything to that domain, unlike the Greeks and the Arabs. REFS.: Bacon, Roger. Opus Tertium. Edited by J. S. Brewer. London: Longman, 1859. Jongkees, Adriaan G. “Translatio studii: Les avatars d’un thème médieval.” In Miscellanea mediaevalia in memoriam Jan Frederick Niermeyer, 41–51. Groningen, Neth.: J.B. Wolters, 1967. Lusignan, Serge. “L’université de Paris comme composante de l’identité du royaume de France: Étude sur le thème de la translatio studii.” In Identité régionale et conscience nationale en France et en Allemagne du Moyen Âge à l’époque moderne, edited by R. Babel and J.-M. Moeglin, 60–72. Sigmaringen, Ger.: Jan Thorbecke, 1997. comprehension of the world, according to the general structure of understanding. Übersetzen is thus not a “replacing” (ersetzen) but a “transposing” (es setzt über): there is a true “transfer,” “transport” (Heidegger, Parmenides). 2. Überliefern: “Tradition” and “revealing” If Heidegger’s analysis of the term “translation” as “transmission” remains within the classical perspective, he nonetheless inflects it by introducing the dimension of truth. In translation as tradition (tradieren), Heidegger gives the idea of transmission (Übertragung) a particular form in which “to transmit” is called überliefern. By its connection to “tradition” (as Préau translates Überlieferung, without being able to render the full Heideggerian sense), the German language does not promote the relationship between translation and treachery (Verrat) that is imprinted so forcefully in the Italian expression traduttore-traditore. Trahir (to betray) is an adaptation of the Latin tradere, which signifies “to surrender,” “to hand over,” or “to bequeath,” so that in French trahir also means “to reveal.” The German connotation is different from the common usage in French and the Romance languages. If “translation” is “treason” or “betrayal” in French, it is because even a beautiful translation does not express the original text. The translation “abandons” the original. But by underscoring the tie to tradition, Heidegger instead conveys the Übersetzung of fundamental concepts into the historical languages, that is to say, the translation of a culture, touching upon the essence of language, as an Überlieferung (The Principle of Reason): Übersetzung as Überlieferung ensures a reprise, a taking over (Übernahme), which is a reception or “collection.” In Übersetzung/Überlieferung, the transposition is a reappropriation, a deliverance, a liberation: [T]radition [Überlieferung] is what is proper to its name: a transmission, a handing over, a delivery [ein Liefern] in the Latin sense of liberare, a liberation. As a liberation tradition opens up and brings to light hidden treasures of what has never ceased from being, even if this light is only a first tentative dawn. (Heidegger, Principle of Reason) There is thus an inflection despite the relation between überliefern and tradere, “to betray,” “to hand over,” “to reveal” (German has kept tradieren and Tradition as synonyms of überliefern, Überlieferung). For the connotations are different in French: if livrer can be traced back to its origin in liberare by Heidegger, to link traduire to trahir is to place it under the sign of infidelity and falsehood. But in following Heidegger’s German, on the other hand, what translation reveals instead is the “truth,” the “unconcealment.” The French language seems less inclined to think of tradition as a revealing, whereas the German seems less inclined to think of tradition as treachery and betrayal. The importance attributed to translation in contemporary German thought, and especially in Gadamer’s hermeneutics (Truth and Method), is based on this approach. In effect, Gadamer sees “Heidegger’s genius” in the analyses that lead back to the “natural meaning of words and to the wisdom that can be discovered in language” (Philosophical Hermeneutics). In this context, the rehabilitation of tradition for example. He writes in Religion within the Bounaries of Mere Reason (RT: Ak., 6:166): Indessen es ist nicht genug, es in Übersetzungen zu kennen und so auf die Nachkommenschaft zu übertragen. (It does not suffice to be acquainted with the book [the Bible] in translation and to transmit it to posterity in this form.) It is this proximity that binds in French traduction and tradition. It is in this same sense that Heidegger took up the philosophical problem of translating: übersetzen is to pass from one shore to another, the translator being the ferryman (passeur). Übersetzen signifies “translation” in the Latin sense of traducere, “to lead across.” “To translate” is to bring a discourse across from one language into another, that is to say, to insert it into a different milieu, a different culture. Translation is not to be understood as a simple “transfer” or as a pure linguistic “version,” but instead within the general development of the spirit. This idea, already present in Luther, would be taken up by Goethe, Herder, and Novalis, and in a general way by the first romantics that considered this exchange between languages as the condition of Bildung (Berman, The Experience of the Foreign). Schleiermacher’s theory of the methods of translation, which favors the reader’s encounter with the foreign, is likewise completely based on the analysis of this movement. “Translation” is thus considered as a “transplantation”: to translate is “to transplant [verpflanzen] to a foreign soil the products of a language in the domains of the sciences and the arts of discourse, in order to enlarge the scope of action of these products of the mind” (“Über die verschiedenen Methoden”). F. Schlegel used similar formulas as early as 1798: “Each translation [Übersetzung] is either a transplantation [Verpflanzung] or a transformation [Verwandlung], or both at the same time” (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, 18:204, fr. 87). The same metaphor allows Benjamin to talk of a Nachreife, that is to say, a ripening of words past the point of their usefulness (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”). 1. Über-setzen: Trans-late This is the classical perspective that Heidegger inherited when he affirmed that translation transposes the work of thought into the spirit of another language and thus transforms thought in a fruitful manner: this is why a translation “serves mutual comprehension in a higher sense. And each step in this direction is a blessing for the peoples” (Heidegger, author’s prologue to Henri Corbin’s French translation of What Is Metaphysics?). The “translation” of Über-setzung (Über-setzung, with the accent on the penultimate syllable) is thus, “trans-lation” (Über-setzung), the transposition of a thought into another universe of thought (Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track). The displacement of the stressed accent indicates the focus of the thought: to lead to the other side, to another context that will reveal its truth. Such a passage can be measured by what it passes over, “a bound over a trench,” a “Sprung über einen Graben” (Off the Beaten Track), which becomes in Gadamer an “abyss” (Kluft; Truth and Method). Thus, translation is no longer a simple transfer, but an inscription into another relation to the world or global form of yield a better understanding, but just another one “all the while still encountering the same” (Off the Beaten Track). Difference and identity are the gap that translation straddles and that becomes an abyss for Gadamer. Here, translation, in its inevitable infidelity, becomes the revealer of truth. Thus translation-tradition-treason loses the linguistic rigor on which it was based and becomes in Gadamer and later in Heidegger, the very revelation of the essence of language as a dimension of human accomplishment (cf. Escoubas, “De la traduction”). “To translate” becomes synonymous with “to think.” In this context, it is in the very term in German that we can read the passage of translation from simple transfer to translation as an interpretation of the world (see WELTANSCHAUUNG). See Boxes 3, 4, and 5. Clara Auvray-Assayas Christian Bernier Barbara Cassin André Paul Irène Rosier-Catach is inseparable from the concept of translation. In Truth and Method, it is this notion that opens up the reflection on the “ontological turn taken by hermeneutics with language as its guide”: not only is tradition usually transmitted to us through translation (Truth and Method), but it is essentially “translation.” Tradition-translation transmits interpretations, that is to say, the understanding of the world that constitutes the framework in which the world reveals itself to us and in which the existential dimensions of comprehension are inscribed (Heidegger, Being and Time, para. 31). So to understand is both to receive and to translate what we have received. But this translation is trans-lation, a form of passage “beyond” that Gadamer calls the “fusion of horizons” (Truth and Method). From this point on, inscribed within an encompassing comprehension, translation carries with it a passivity that refers back to the idea of a comprehension that is always other. In effect, if translation liberates by submitting to tradition, and this liberation is also a betrayal, then one can understand how “we understand in a different way, if we understand at all” (Truth and Method). Heidegger made the same claim, although in a less radical fashion: explication does not 3 Duhem-Quine: On the underdetermination of theory and the indeterminacy of translation 1. The underdetermination of epistemological translation In Pierre Duhem’s work on the philosophy of science, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, one encounters the word “translation” in its original epistemological meaning. It allows Duhem to formulate a conception of the relation between experiment and theory, which profoundly influenced the epistemology of the twentieth century (see EPISTEMOLOGY). Starting with a critique of the notions of observation and the “experimental method,” Duhem redefined the relation of scientific theory to facts using the idea of translation: The mathematical elaboration of a physical theory can be tied to observable facts only through a translation. In order to introduce experimental conditions into a calculation, one must make a version that replaces the language of concrete observation by the language of numbers; in order to make the results which the theory predicts into something observable, one needs a theme to transform a numerical value into an indication formulated in the language of experiment. (Aim and Structure of Physical Theory) The interest of Duhem’s thesis lies in the fact that it affirms that the nontransparency and asymmetry inherent in each of these two translations is subject to indetermination. The first translation (version) is a mathematical translation upon concrete things, linked to methods of measurement: “The methods of measurement are the vocabulary which render translation possible in both directions” (ibid.). Duhem continues: But he who translates also betrays; traduttore, traditore; there is never a perfect fit [adéquation] between the two texts that a version makes correspond to each other. Translation makes it possible to define the distance between theory and experiment, whose consequence for contemporary theories will be the underdetermination of theory in relation to experiment (the plurality or even empirical equivalence of theories that can account for the same facts), which will also lead to holism (the impossibility of assigning a specific experimental content to a theoretical point). From this, Duhem draws important methodological conclusions, which account for the posthumous reputation of Aim and Structure and its renown under the name of the Duhem-Quine thesis: an experiment cannot apply to an isolated hypothesis because there is a work of symbolization between a fact and its theoretical translation that is part of the work of theory: “a fact of practice does not translate into a single fact of theory,” and “an infinite number of theoretical facts can be taken as translations of the same fact of practice” (ibid.). Recourse to the idea of translation allows the formulation of an incommensurability between a fact and the theory applied to it. Long before Popper, Duhem developed a critique of the inductive method. He took the transition from Kepler’s laws to the Newtonian theory of gravitation as an example. Newton’s theory is not an inductive generalization of Kepler’s laws: on the contrary, it is incompatible with them. If Newton believed he had made a generalization based on Kep-ler’s laws, it is because he translated those laws. “For them to acquire this fecundity, they needed to be transformed, to be translated symbolically” (ibid). Once Kepler’s laws were “translated” into Newton’s theoretical framework, they gained new meaning: “The translation of Kepler’s laws into symbolic laws required the physicist to have already adopted a whole set of hypotheses” (ibid.). We can see the modernity of Duhem’s approach: in the translation of the laws, the adoption of a new theory entails a change in usage and meaning of earlier concepts and facts within a new paradigm. Duhem’s use of the word “translation” to describe the process of scientific constitution is thus neither metaphorical nor trivial: his affirmation of the nontransparency and asymmetry of any translation allows him to expose the indeterminacy between theory and experiment in a new light. Aim and Structure would have a considerable influence subsequently, both in epistemology through the ideas of paradigm and empirical influence (Kuhn, Feyerabend) and in the debates around Quine’s thesis on the indeterminacy of translation, which radicalized Duhem’s indeterminacy. 2. The indeterminacy of radical translation The thesis on the indeterminacy of radical translation set out by the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine in 1960 in his book Word and Object played a central role in the development of philosophy of language, as well as in the philosophy of mind and the epistemology of the twentieth century. Quine attacked the idea of shared signification between different languages and affirmed that in a situation of radical translation (without prior contact and with nothing in common between his language and the local language) a linguist could develop contradictory manuals of translation that would be compatible with the facts; in other words, there would be no basis on which to determine whether the translator was right or wrong. The radicalness of this thesis and Quine’s notion of a “conceptual schema” put his work at the center of the debate on relativism. It starts out with a “thought experiment”: a linguist “on the ground” goes into the jungle to discover a completely unknown language. How will he produce a translation manual that makes correspondences between the terms of the foreign language and his own without a dictionary or interpreter? The linguist goes for a walk with the native and sees a rabbit hop away in front of him. “Gavagai,” exclaims the native. What does this expression mean? Quine’s answer is to say that there is no sense in asking him, especially if one is wondering not only about the signification of the utterance but also what entity is designated by the word Gavagai (a stable object, a sensedatum, a spatiotemporal segment of rabbithood, an event—“he rabbits”; see SENSE). The thesis of indeterminacy, with its critique of signification, is a “philosophical point,” according to Quine: as soon as one leaves behind any linguistic community, synonymy becomes opaque. The point is also an anthropological one, since what is at stake in the question of synonymy is the very idea of a common core shared by several languages, such as one finds in Frege’s classical formulations. Quine calls the belief in such a common core, which is expressed differently by each language, the myth of meaning. We can compare this thesis to the idea of paradigm as developed by T. S. Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), a work that is contemporary with Quine’s. The question of the indeterminacy of translation is in fact the question of whether a form of thought, a meaning, or a reality can be held in common by all of humankind, or by all languages, even with different conceptual schemes. In a famous text, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Donald Davidson applies his critique of relativism to what he calls the “conceptual relativism” of both Quine and Kuhn (see EPISTEMOLOGY). The idea of conceptual scheme extends the problem of translation between utterances to the commensurability of conceptions of the world, to conceptual schemas, and to common sense (see COMMON SENSE). Translation is indeterminate, but not impossible; it is indeterminate because it is possible. “Indeterminacy means not that there is no acceptable translation, but that there are many.” Indeterminacy is the possibility of choice: “the freedom of conjecture, the field of free creation are both wide open” (“The Behavioral Limits of Meaning,” Quine, unpublished conference paper of 1984). The choice is settled according to criteria that behavior and experience cannot settle or decide. This is true of the attribution of logic or rationality. Attributing binary logic to the native is not the result of discovering it in his language, even less so in his thought: it is an invention. The thesis of indeterminacy means that one always translates within one’s own language, at home. It consists of “catapulting oneself into the foreign language” with the momentum of one’s own. According to Quine, we have nothing on which to be right or wrong. There is no fact of the matter (see MATTER OF FACT). This theme of radical skepticism paradoxically inscribes the question of the plurality of languages at the very heart of an analytic philosophy that has always tended to erase it. REFS.: Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–74): 5–20. Duhem, Pierre. La théorie physique: Son objet, sa structure. Paris: Marcel Rivière & Cie, 1914. Paris: Vrin, 1981. Translation by Philip P. Wiener: The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Quine, W.V.O. “Le mythe de la signification.” In La philosophie analytique, 139–87. Paris: Minuit, 1962. . “On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World.” Erkenntnis 9 (1975): 313–28. . Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. (continued) 4 Qur’ān [ان [ۊ ر The Qur’ān (or Koran, according to the usual English transliteration), the name of the Muslim holy book, comes from the verb qara’a, which means “to read,” “to recite,” or “to proclaim aloud.” Muslims believe that it is the very word of God revealed to the prophet Muhammad and through him to humanity. The Qur’ānic text, which is often self-referential, declares (97:1): “We have indeed revealed this [message] in the Night of Power,” an allusion to the “descent” of the word of God into this world, which Islamic tradition (hadith) narrates as follows. It was a habit of Muhammad, before he declared himself a prophet, to go to the top of Jabal an-Nūr, one of the mounts near the city of Mecca, to spend many days in solitary meditation in a cave known as Hirā’. This was during the month called Ramadan. The “Night of Power” (or “Night of Destiny,” as it is also translated) is a night during that month when he was visited in his solitude by the angel Gabriel, who commanded him: “Iqra!” (“Read!”), using the very word that would give its name to the message he brought: “the Reading.” After he had repeated three times in terror that he could not read (he was illiterate), Muhammad asked what he was supposed to read. Then the angel revealed to him the very first words of what would become the book of the Muslims: “Read! In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, who created—created man, out of a (mere) clot of blood. Read! And thy Lord is most Bountiful, He who taught (the use of) the Pen—Taught man that which he knew not” (96:1–6). After the experience was over, Muhammad ran home completely terrified and only gathered his spirits when his wife Khadija expressed her faith in him and in the truth of what he had been told by the angel: that he was the prophet of God chosen to proclaim His Qur’ān. The Message would then be revealed bit by bit during the twenty-three years that followed, during which the new religion founded upon it, Islam, started its expansion. It was only under the third caliph of Islam that the verses revealed by Muhammad and often known by heart by his followers were collected and put together into a book of 114 chapters classified by length, after the first one known as “The Opening.” As this narrative shows, at the core of Islamic belief is the notion that the Qur’ān is the miracle of a revelation by God to a simple man, Muhammad, and in a simply human language, Arabic, of a message He directly authored. Again, in self-referential statements, the Qur’ān declares that the evidence for its divine origin does not require any miracle further than its “inimitability” (Qur’ānic verses are called āyāt, which means “miracles,” or “signs”). Thus, chapter 17, verse 88 states: “Say: if the whole of mankind and Jinns were to gather together to produce the like of this Qur’ān they could not produce the like thereof, even if they backed up each other with help and support.” Does “inimitability” mean untranslatability, and what does the notion of a choice by God of a human language to carry His own word imply? These are important philosophical and theological questions. An early theological school in Islam, characterized by its rationalist outlook and known as Mu’tazilism, held the view that the Qur’ān is the word of God but created in a human language. One consequence of that view would be that the book, meant for human comprehension, is, de jure, fully understandable by human reason and translatable into all human languages. Conservative schools of thought would insist on the fundamental untranslatability of the word uttered by God Himself, parts of it being known solely by Him. Those schools would reluctantly accept translations of the Qur’ān only as a makeshift solution because the majority of Muslim populations do not speak Arabic and use it merely as a liturgical language. One important aspect of the issue of translatability is the meaning of the “election” of the Arabic language: is there anything special in that language that called for its election or, on the contrary, does the Qur’ānic miracle consist precisely in the fact that this is simply a human language, equivalent to and translatable into any other human language? Souleymane Bachir Diagne REFS.: Ali, Abdullah Yusuf. The Meaning of the Holy Qur’ān. Brentwood, MD: Amana Corporation, 1992. Asad, Muhammad. The Message of the Qur’ān. Bristol, U.K.: The Book Foundation, 2003. Berque, Jacques. Le Coran: Essai de traduction de l’Arabe annoté et suivi d’une étude exégétique par Jacques Berque. Paris: Albin Michel, 2002. Hamidullah, Muhammad. Le Coran: Traduction intégrale et notes de Muhammad Hamidullah. Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1959. Irving, T. B., The Qur’ān: The First American Version. Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1986. 5 No untranslatables! There’s nothing in Greek that can’t also be said in Latin. (Leonardo Bruni, On Correct Translation) It was through the Italians that translation as a theoretical enterprise was revived in the Renaissance. This was in large part thanks to Leonardo Bruni, erstwhile chancellor of Florence and indefatigable translator of Greek into Latin at a particularly heady moment in the history of humanism: the early fifteenth century, two generations after that other indefatigable humanist (albeit one ignorant of Greek), Petrarch. Indignant over criticism of his translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Bruni threw himself into De interpretatione recta (On Correct Translation) in the mid-1420s. His anger at a churchman whose critique revealed misunderstanding not only of Greek but also of his own “mother tongue,” Latin, produced a passionate statement about translation’s importance to the modern Western world. Bruni seems to be the first to have used traductio and traducere to mean “translation”: words that would come to replace interpretare, vertere, and convertere, as Remigio Sabbadini has noted, and thus words that insist on the act of transporting, and even transformation. Transformation is, in fact, at the heart of Bruni’s meditations: the “best translator will turn his whole mind, heart, and will to his author, and in a sense be transformed by him” (De interpretatione recta). But after losing his identity, the translator must regain it, and he can only do so if he is absolute master of his own language, dominating all in his power (“Deinde linguam eam, ad quam traducere vult, sic teneat, ut quodammodo in ea dominetur et in sua totam habeat potestate”; ibid., chap. 11). In this act of transporting, nothing must be left behind, and all that is carried across must be transformed into the new tongue: “Don’t go begging for words or borrowing them; leave nothing in Greek out of your ignorance of Latin. The translator must know with precision the exact value and efficacy of terms.” Not to translate is to remain a beggar, a mendicant, trapped in the no-man’s land between two languages and thus in exile. Bruni, utterly terrestrial and at war with the Scholastics who shoehorned Aristotle to fit their own theological and pedagogical ends, was far more interested in a cultural patrimony whose greatest works looked not to otherworldly Christianity but defined and defended one’s earthly homeland. Demosthenes’s orations as he stood at the gate of Athens and exhorted the citizens to take a stand against Philip of Macedon were some of Bruni’s earliest translations. Even Aristotle—despite his tutoring of Philip’s son Alexander—becomes a supporter of civic identity and independence, the very independence Florence was struggling to maintain in the early fifteenth century. But Aristotle (and along with him, Plato) becomes something else: a supreme and superb stylist, whose books possess “the splendor and clarity of a painting,” in a comparison that harks back to Horace’s ut pictura poesis from the Ars poetica. Bruni’s Latin was not the medieval Latin of the Scholastics— and hence of Aristotle’s prior translators. The closing chapters of the treatise are a tour de force, as Bruni lists examples of bad translations he had come across—sheer acts of “barbarism,” he calls them—and enumerates (continued) REFS.: Aristotle. De interpretatione. Edited by Richard McKeon. In The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House, 2001. Ashworth, Jenny. “Signification and Modes of Signifying in Thirteenth-Century Logic: A Preface to Aquinas on Analogy.” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 1 (1991): 39–67. Augustine, Saint. On Christian Teaching. Translated by R.P.H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. “Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers.” In Vol. 2.1 of Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. Translation: “The Task of the Translator.” In vol. 1 of Selected Writings, translated by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press / Belknap Press, 1996. Berman, Antoine. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. . La traduction et la lettre, ou, L’auberge du lointain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999. Bernofsky, Susan. Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Buridant, Claude. “Les paramètres de l’étymologie médiévale.” Lexique 14 (1998): 11–56. Cassin, Barbara. Aristote et le logos. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997. . L’effet sophistique. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. . “Le statut théorique de l’intraduisible.” In Vol. 4 of Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, edited by J.-F. Mattéi, 998–1013. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Brutus, On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, On Duties. Translated by Hubert M. Poteat, with an introduction by Richard McKeon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950. . On Academic Scepticism. Translated with introduction and notes by Charles Brittain. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006. . On Moral Ends. Edited by Julia Annas, translated by Raphael Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. . On the Ideal Orator. Translated by James M. May and Jakob Wisse. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. . Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945. Dahan, Gilbert. L’exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en Occident médiéval, XIIe-XIVe siècle. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1999. . “Saint Thomas d’Aquin et la métaphore: Rhétorique et herméneutique.” Medioevo 18 (1992): 85–117. Dahan, Gilbert, Irène Rosier, and Luisa Valente. “L’arabe, l’hébreu, le grec et les vernaculaires.” In Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, edited by Sten Ebbesen, 184–206. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1995. Davis, Paul. Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Duckworth, George, ed. The Complete Roman Drama: All the Extant Comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the Tragedies of Seneca. New York: Random House, 1942. Escoubas, Éliane. “De la traduction comme ‘origine’ des langues: Heidegger et Benjamin.” Les Temps Modernes 514–515 (May-June 1989): 97–142. Eusebius of Caesarea. Lettre d’Aristote à Philocrate. Translated into French by A. Pelletier. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1962. . Preparation for the Gospel. Translated from a revised text by Edwin Hamilton Gifford. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903. Fichte, Johann G. Fichtes Werke. 11 vols. Edited by Immanuel H. Fichte. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Langage et verité. Translated by Jean-Claude Gens. Paris: Gallimard, 1995. . Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated by David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. their many weaknesses. For one thing, these incompetent translators use words no one has ever used; thus “oligarchica sophistica legislationis”—a literally “Latinized” version of the Greek that means nothing in Latin. But the major reason for their “ignorantia ruditatesque loquendi”—their ignorance and rustic way of speech—is their lack of familiarity with Aristotle as a stylist: “and every writer has his own particular style” (cum singulis fere scriptoribus sua quedam ac propria sit dicendi figura; chap. 14). Bruni goes on to list Aristotle’s stylistic traits, marveling at one point that “a philosopher, in the midst of the subtlest discussion, should take such care for the way he wrote” (chap. 24): he is full of ornaments, elegance, and dignity. Philosophy thus becomes indistinguishable from style, as the way one writes becomes just as important as what one writes, and the pilfering of antiquity for presentiments of the Christian revelation a misguided and misleading occupation. In so focusing on style, on what he calls the “vim ac naturam verborum”—the force and nature of words— Bruni recasts Aristotle and Plato alike as writers and orators. Rescued from the theologians, their words sparkle with the rhetorical and literary efficacy denied them by “barbarous” translators. As Horace’s Ars poetica attests, Romans generally felt their civilization to be distinctly secondary to the Hellenic world they had nonetheless vanquished. The cry of Aeneas’s father, Anchises, in the sixth book of the Aeneid expresses Virgil’s sentiment on the matter: “Others, I have no doubt, will forge the bronze to breathe with suppler lines plead their cases better, chart with their rods the stars that climb the sky and foretell the times they rise” (6:976–80; Robert Fagles’s translation); the Romans could excel in the art of government alone. Translate everything! is Bruni’s response. In reveling over the “force and nature” of the Latin language, he turns Greek philosophy into Latin oratory and poetry, setting Plato and Aristotle alongside Sallust, Livy, and Cicero. It is thus through the act of translation that one recognizes the philosopher as an artist, an orator, a “stylist.” Far from being diminished with respect to his status as a philosophe, Aristotle gains something, as the discourse of philosophy is considerably broadened, no longer prey to the clutches of theologians. Philosophy once again becomes powerfully transformative, as it had been with Plato, prompting its readers to reflect on how they live and how they speak. One is reminded that for Bruni translation itself is a transformative act, as the translator transforms himself into the author and the author’s words are transformed into the translator’s tongue. Bruni closed the preface to his translation of Saint Basil’s letter to his nephews with “Et iam Basilium ipsum audiamus” (and now let us listen to Basil himself), as though Basil himself stood before us and the translator had vanished. Except it is a Basil—one who wisely counsels his nephews to read the great works of pagan, Greek philosophy—who speaks in Latin. Is not this dictionary, with its inclusion of “poetic” terms such as sprezzatura and leggiadria, “strength,” “to stand,” and thus terms from texts that are only marginally “philosophical” in the strictest sense, also a transformation of philosophical language into something broader: a way of speaking, or even a way of life? A philosophy for nonphilosophers? Jane Tylus REFS.: Bruni, Leonardo. Sulla perfetta traduzione. Translated and edited by Paolo Viti. Naples: Ligouri, 2004. Translation by James Hankins: On Correct Translation. In The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, translated by Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987. Sabbadini, Remigio. “Del tradurre i classici antichi in Italia.” Atene e Roma 3 (1900): 201–17. Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006. (continued) TORAH 1155 . Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2nd, rev. ed. London: Continuum, 2004. Hartog, François. Memories of Odysseus. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. . Off the Beaten Track. Edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. . Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. . The Principle of Reason. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. . Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? Translated by Henri Corbin. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. Hunt, Richard William. “The ‘Lost’ Preface to the Liber derivationum of Osbern of Gloucester.” In Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, by Richard Hunt, edited by G. L. Busill-Hall, 145–50. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980. Jerome, Saint. The Letters of St. Jerome. Translated by Charles Christopher Mierow, introduction and notes by Thomas Comerford Lawler. New York: Newman Press, 1963. Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings. Translated by Allen Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Kirk, Robert. Translation Determined. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986. Klinck, Roswitha. Die lateinische Etymologie des Mittelalters. Munich: W. Fink, 1970. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Lefevre, André, ed. Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1977. Libera, Alain de. “Logique et théologique dans la summa ‘quoniam homines’ d’Alain de Lille.” In Gilbert de Poitiers et ses contemporains, edited by J. Jolivet and A. de Libera, 437–69. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1987. Lusignan, Serge. Parler vulgairement: Les intellectuels et la langue française aux xiiie et xive siècles. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin; Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1987. Luther, Martin. “Ein Sendbrief D. M. Luthers. Von Dolmetzschen und Fürbit der heiligenn.” In vol. 30, pt. 2 of Dr. Martin Luthers Werke. Weimar: Hermann Boehlaus Nachfolger, 1909. Translation: “An Open Letter on Translating (1530).” In vol. 35 of Luther’s Works. 55 vols. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960. Momigliano, Arnaldo. Sagesses barbares. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne.” In vol. 1 of Kritische Studienausgabe, edited by Giorgio Colli und Mazzino Montinari, 873– 890. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1967–. Translation by Ladislaus Löb: “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In Nietzsche: Writings from the Early Notebooks, edited by Raymond Geuss and Alexander Nehamas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Philo of Alexandria. The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, translated by C. D. Yonge. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993. Plato. Cratylus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Translation by Catherine Dalimier: Cratyle. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1998. . Meno. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. . Protagoras. Translated by W.K.C. Guthrie. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. . The Timaeus, and the Critias, or Atlanticus. Translated by Thomas Taylor. 3rd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968. Plutarch. Fall of the Roman Republic: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero: Six Lives. Translated by Rex Warner. Rev. ed. New York: Penguin, 1972. Rochlitz, Rainer. “Le traduisible et l’intraduisible.” In vol. 4 of Encyclopédie philosophique universelle, edited by J.-F. Mattéi, 1013–27. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Rosier, Irène. “La grammatica practica du ms. British Museum V A IV. Roger Bacon, les lexicographes et l’étymologie.” Lexique 14 (1998): 97–125. . “Prata rident.” In Langages et philosophie: Hommage à Jean Jolivet, edited by A. de Libera, A. Elamrani-Jamal, and A. Galonnier, 155–76. Paris: Vrin, 1997. . “Quelques textes sur l’étymologie au Moyen Âge.” Lexique 14 (1998): 221–29. . “Res significata et modus significandi. Les enjeux lingistiques et théologiques d’une distinction médiévale.” In Sprachtheorien in Spätantike und Mittelalter, edited by Sten Ebeesen, 135–68. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1995. Schlegel, Friedrich. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe. Edited by E. Behler. Zürich: Schöningh, 1963. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens.” In vol. 2, pt. 3 of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s sämmtliche Werke, 207–45. Berlin: Reimer, 1838. Translation by André Lefevre: “On the Different Methods of Translating.” In Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig, edited and translated by André Lefevre, 67–89. Assen, Neth.: Van Gorcum, 1977. Seneca. Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. 2 vols. Translated by E. Phillips Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932. Sextus Empiricus. Adversus mathematicos. In Esquisses Pyrrhoniennes, translated by Pierre Pellegrin. Paris: Seuil-Points, 1997. Translation by R. G. Bury: Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Terence. The Eunuch. In The Complete Comedies of Terence: Modern Verse Translations. Translated by Palmer Bovie, Constance Carrier, and Douglass Parker. Edited and with a foreword by Palmer Bovie. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1974. LEX. TORAH [תוֹרה) [ ׇּHEBREW)/ ŠARĪ‘A [الشريعة) [ARABIC) law Fr. loi G. Gesetz, νόμος v. LAW [LEX], and DESTINY, DUTY, EUROPE, GOD, SOLLEN, THEMIS, TO TRANSLATE, WILLKÜR In European philosophical discussion, the word “law,” as it is developed in political philosophy, does not only derive from the Greek philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero—and the Roman jurists. It also has sources in the Bible, which have been the object of reflection by theologians such as Saint Augustine or Saint Thomas Aquinas. And it is an object for philosophical reflection as well, starting with Machiavelli’s project to read the Bible judiciously (Discourses on Livy, 3.30), and continuing with Hobbes and Spinoza, right up to Kant. The idea of law comes to modern Europe through Luther’s German translations (Gesetz) (RT: Die Bibel nach der Übersetzung Martin Luthers ) or through the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible. Both occur within a context already set forth by the Greek translation of the Septuagint (nomos [νόμος ]) and the subsequent Latin translation known as the Vulgate (lex), with the focus of the discussion most often set by the value of the “law” in the Epistles of Paul. We shall attempt to explore the intersections of the different vocabularies of the law, starting from the Hebrew and the Arabic. I. The Hebrew Vocabulary of the Law In Hebrew, torah derives from the root YRH [ירה ,[which signifies “to throw,” and in modern Hebrew, to “fire” with a firearm. It no doubt originally refers to “throws” of chance and their subsequent interpretation as expressions of divine will. The priests are known as the “keepers of the torah” (ṯōfesëy hat-tōrāh [הָ תוֹרַּה יֵשְׂתוֹפ ;[Jer 2:8). It is not a written text, but an oral teaching that applies to the domain of sacerdotal 1156 TORAH ordering principles, then a general code of conduct to adopt in Jewish life. II. The Arabic Vocabulary of the Law The Qur’ān contains few terms that can be translated as “law.” Some precepts of legislative value are called “commandments” or “laws of God” (2:183/187 and 229–30; 4:17/13; 58:5/4; 65:1). The word that is used, ḥadd [حد) [ ّplural, ḥudūd [حدود ,([suggests an idea of partition and delimitation, such that philosophers employ it to translate the Greek horos [ὅρος], in the sense of “definition.” In Muslim law, the word has gained a specialized meaning of “legal punishments”: stoning, crucifixion, mutilation, decapitation, flagellation. Šarī‘a [الشريعة [derives from the root ŠR’ [ع ر ش ,[which has been linked to ŠRB, “to drink.” The primary meaning is probably “the path leading to a source of water.” A Bedouin’s life depends on this kind of knowing, and the path that leads to water is the good path par excellence. In the Qur’ān, the verb šara‘a [شرع [is employed in speaking of a divinity who imposes a code of conduct. Thus: “(Allah) has established [šara‘a] for you, in matters of religion, what he prescribed to Noah” (42:13; cf. also 21). A substantive noun, šir‘a [شرعة ,[perhaps borrowed from the Ethiopian, indicates the path to follow. Thus: “We have given each of you a rule [šir‘a] and a custom [minhāğ (منهاج “[( (5:48)—this latter word is itself drawn from rabbinical Hebrew. This is the sense in which the Qur’ān has Allah say: “we placed you on a path proceeding from Order” (ălā šarī‘atin min al-’amri [االمر من يعة ٔ شر على) ([45:18). The šarī‘a has become the entire system of obligations and prohibitions drawn from a synthesis of the sources of Islamic law, in different proportions according to the main juridical schools (sometimes called “rites”): Qur’ān, traditions relating to the Prophet, customs of Medina, analogy. The word has become more narrowly specialized to designate a law given by divinity, not a human law. To refer to these laws, philosophers have simply transcribed the Greek nomos [νόμος], in the form of nāmūs [ناموس) [plural, nawāmīs [نواميس .([The word thus serves to “translate” the title of Plato’s Laws, or to designate apocrypha by the same title. When written in Arabic, medieval Judaism did not hesitate to pick up the word šarī‘a to refer to Jewish law. The primary meaning of sunna [ةّ سن) [plural, sunan [سنن ([is “habit.” In the Qur’ān, it refers to the customary behavior of Allah, especially in his punishment of the infidel of the past (8:38, etc.). Even before Islam, the word designated the normative custom, the precedent to refer to in judgment. With the constitution of an Islamic law, it designates the exemplary conduct of Allah, including his companions. Sunna can also refer to Allah’s “habits.” These take the place of the “laws” of nature, rendered unthinkable by the vision of the world of the Kalām [كالم) [the word of Allah) in its main current of interpretation, according to which things do not have a stable nature of their own, but are bundles of accidents held together at every instant by divine will alone. It was only later that the word came to refer to that tradition adopted by the main tendency of Islam, those who call themselves the people of the sunna, the “Sunnites.” Finally, there is also a series of terms designating the measures taken by governments without relying on religious law: competence: ritual questions about, for example, the pure and the impure (Hg 2:11–13), or what is the appropriate kind of sacrifice to offer (Zec 7:2–3). This teaching is reputed to be given by YHWH himself. Obedience to the priests is required—one should act “according to the torah they will teach you (yōrūḫā [יוֹרוּך ,([ ׇ and according to the judgment (mišpāṭ [טָפְּשִׁמ ([they will tell you” (Dt 17:11) The law is subsequently replaced during the exodus, thus becoming the Law of Moses, or more exactly, the Law of YHWH (1 Esd 7:10, etc.), transmitted through the intermediary of Moses. The word is subsequently expanded to the five books of the Pentateuch, and thence to the whole of the Bible, including the prophets and books of wisdom. It ends up encompassing the two aspects of the Law: the written Law and the oral Law, which was supposed to have been given in the Sinai. The meaning of “teaching” is taken up in the title of Martin Buber’s translation, with Franz Rosenzweig, of the Pentateuch: Die fünf Bücher der Weisung. Franz Rosenzweig translates it as Gesetzeslehre (doctrine of law) (Der Stern der Erlösung, 3.1 §321). Mitzvah [הָוְצִמ [signifies “order, commandment.” Initially, the word refers to every sort of injunction, but later comes to designate the precepts, both positive and negative, contained in the Torah. Efforts were made to distinguish them from each other and to enumerate them in an exhaustive manner; explanations were sought to explain all 613 precepts, and special attention was accorded the 365 negative precepts. In its extended sense, mitzvah can also designate the action that carries out a commandment, a meritorious action, and in the popular sense, a good deed. Mišpāṭ comes from the root ŠPṬ [פטּש” ,[ׁto judge, to direct.” The judgment is pronounced with authority by a director, a šōfëṭ [טֵשוֹפ—[ׁthe “judge” in the sense of the book of Judges or “suffète,” the highest Carthaginian magistrate. From this idea of “sentence” is derived the modern Hebrew meaning of “phrase” as well as the English sentence. ḤOQ [חוֹק) [plural, ḥuqqim [יםִקֻח ([comes from the root ḤQQ [קּח” ,[to engrave,” from which derives “to inscribe” and then “to prescribe.” The Hebrew word is related to the Arabic ḥaqq [حق” ,[ ّthe part that returns,” or “truth.” It refers to everything that is determinate and fixed. The feminine form ḥuqqāh [חָקֻח [can also designate the regularities of natural processes (Jer 5:24). These two latter terms took on technical meanings in the Talmud. Mišpāṭ designates those plausible seeming and easily universalized commandments (those that forbid idolatry, murder, incest, or rape). Ḥoq, on the other hand, designates those commandments whose meaning is not apparent (the ban on eating pork, or wearing fabrics that mix animal and vegetable fibers, etc.) (Talmud of Babylon, Yoma [VI], 67b). The justification of these latter commandments constitutes a genre of literature to which almost all Jewish thinkers have contributed—and even Christians, who call these commandments “ceremonial.” A great variety of methods and arguments are employed: allegory, the idea of a divine condescension adapting itself to the customs of a particular period, a correspondence with celestial reality, a concern for counterbalancing idolatrous practices, etc. The root HLḪ [הלך ,[which signifies “to go,” was in use since ancient times, but the substantive halāḫāh [הָכָלַה [ (halakhah) is not in the Bible. It spells out the rules to follow, whether in practice or only theoretically: first some specific TROPE 1157 Williams’s initiative, further extended by K. Campbell, is clearly unfortunate and all the more inexplicable in that the word “trope,” in English just as in French, refers to a figure of speech. But today it would be impossible to go against this usage, given the currency of the expression in the philosophical literature. The only exception is in German, with the term Moment, which was introduced by Husserl in the mereological analysis of the notions of ontological dependence and independence (Logical Investigations, III), and which referred to the sense of “dependent part,” as employed by B. Smith or K. Mulligan. With the ambiguity of the French meaning of moment added to the ambiguities in German, the substitution of this saturated term for the Franco-English “trope” fails to provide any decisive advantages. The reader of Husserl should still keep in mind that the Husserlian moments correspond to the “tropes” of Williams and Campbell. Concrete Particular/Abstract Particular. In the theory advanced by Williams, tropes are “the first constituents of the real world or of any possible worlds”: they are “the very alphabet of being.” According to this analysis, Socrates is a concrete particular; the wisdom of Socrates—a “component” of Socrates—is an abstract particular, or “trope.” The general wisdom of which any particular wisdom is a component or member forms an abstract universal. All creatures exactly identical with Socrates are part of or members of an abstract universal of a total “Socrateity” or “Socratesity.” Humanity as a universal is not the class of concrete human beings, but of abstract humanities. That is to say, it is not a class whose members are Socrates, Plato, and so on, but of the human trope within Socrates, the human trope in Plato, and so on. According to Williams, an individual is thus defined as a “sum of concurrent” or “co-present” tropes, that is to say, the wisdom of Socrates as a trope belongs to the “class of resemblance” of Wisdom. The proposition “Socrates is wise” [a est φ] thus signifies that the sum of tropes “concurrent to Socrates” includes a trope that is a member of the trope of “resembling wisdom.” The relation of “concurrence,” inherited from Whitehead and Keynes, corresponds to Russel’s “compresence,” Mill’s “coinherence,” Stout’s “concrescence,” and Goodman’s “togetherness,” and it is the “limit value” of localization; the relation of “precise or exact resemblance”; the “limit value” of resemblance traditionally known as “identity.” The distinction between abstract universal and concrete universal allows the clear expression of the difference between instantiation and exemplification: Socrates is a concrete “instance” of Wisdom. The component wisdom is an “abstract” instance (= exemplification) of Wisdom. In the current theory of tropes, trope bundle theory individuals are considered as “bundles of tropes,” “co-presence” and “exact resemblance” as secondorder “bundling relations,” and the notions of “individual,” “particulars,” and “universals” all follow Williams’s mode of definition, using the notions of “compresence classes of tropes” and “similarity classes of tropes.” The definition of an individual as a “mereological sum of a class of compresent tropes,” set forth by Williams in 1953, has been the object of various critiques. The most widespread of these consists in claiming that a “class of compresence” cannot account for the individuality of an object, because as Martin puts it in “Substance Substantiated”: “An object is not collectable out qānūn [قانون) [plural, qawānīn [قوانين ([is none other than the Greek chanôn [χανών] “rule”; niẓām [نظام [literally signifies “regulation” (Fr., ordonnance), and marsūm [مرسوم” ,[decree.” Rémi Brague REFS.: Buber, Martin. The Martin Buber Reader: Essential Writings. Edited by Asher D. Biemann. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Buber, Martin, and Franz Rosenzweig. Die fünf Bücher der Weisung. Vol. 1 of Die Schrift. Cologne: Hegner, 1954–62. . Die Schrift. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1992. Translation by Lawrence Rosenwald with Everett Fox: Scswripture and Translation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Translated with an introduction and notes by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. McAuliffe, Jane Dammen. The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’ān [قرآن .[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. The Qur’an. Translated by M.A.S. Abdel Haleem. Corrected ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Rosenzweig, Franz. Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988. First published in 1921. Translation from the second edition of 1930 by William W. Hallo: The Star of Redemption. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1985. First published in 1971. MODUS. H. P. Grice was using ‘mood’ freely, until Moravcsik told him his ‘mood’ has nothing to do with his ‘mood.’ So Grice started using ‘mode,’ instead. This translates “modus,” which translates “tropos.” Thus, Hare, who prefers his roots Hellenic, uses ‘tropic’ (along the clistic, the neustic and the phrastic). TROPE GERMAN Moment v. ABSTRACTION, ANALOGY, COMPARISON, CONNOTATION, ESSENCE, IMPLICATION, MOMENT, PROPERTY, SUPPOSITION, UNIVERSALS In classical language, the word “trope” designates a figure of rhetoric (“tropus loquendi”). This is the sense understood by Condillac in his “Art d’écrire” and by Dumarais in his celebrated “Traité des tropes,” VII, 2,when he writes that “one should not think that tropes”—in other words, figurative expressions— “were only invented out of necessity, because of the deficiencies and scarcity of proper names.” “τϱόπος” designates a “modus” in the sense of modal logic, viz. a syncategorematic expression that transforms an utterance into a modal expression, in other words: necessary, possible, impossible, contingent (the aletheic modes or “modalities” of true and false do not give rise to modal expressions). In modern philosophical usage, the word “trope” has a completely different meaning, unrelated to previous ones. It designates a specific instance (Fr. instance, Ger. Einzelfall) of a property or relation. Introduced by D. C. Williams in the sense of the “occurrence of an essence” (in contrast to an earlier use of the term by Santayana as the “essence of an occurrence”), “trope” has become generally understood in Oxonian philosophy as the equivalent of the expression “abstract particular” employed by Stout in 1921. “Trope” is synonymous with what are called: “concrete properties” (Küng, Ontology and the Logistic Analysis of Language), “quality instances”/“relation instances” (D. C. Long, “Particulars and Their Qualities”), “unit properties”/“unit relations” (Matthews and Cohen, “The One and the Many”), “quality bits”/“relation bits,” “individualized forms,” cases or aspects (Wolterstorff, On Universals), and “particularised qualities” (Wilson, “Statement and Inference”; P. F. Strawson, Individuals and Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar). “common” properties. In this sort of theory, it is the bundling (Fr. rassemblement) that is particular, not what is bundled. The individual is first and foremost a primary substance in the Aristotelian sense of the term, constituted by an essential form, added to which is a “bundle of individualizing qualities,” an object of “description.” In the twelfth century, Abelard will maintain that there are as many determinate species within the animal genre as there are different particular forms of rationality. By reducing the properties in common to differences all predicated on the species de voce, Abelard considers the specific differences of the sort that establish de re the singularity of individuals to be attributed to the name of the species. If the species seems to admit “bundled particulars,” its ontology does not go so far as to define an individual as a “bundle of compresent particulars.” Instead, it rejects the thesis claimed by “some” that (1) this particular man is not the result of accidents, whereas Socrates is; and (2) Socrates is the product of the ensemble of accidental properties not as a man, but as Socrates. Abelard mentions three versions of this theory, depending on whether the name “Socrates” is considered to designate all the accidental properties of Socrates, be they separable or inseparable, or only those accidental properties that are inseparable from Socrates, or only the “proper form” of the accidental properties of Socrates, which are called “Socraticity.” Some maintain that all the accidental properties of Socrates, both separable and inseparable, are included in the name “Socrates,” but that this name was “imposed” in such a way that whenever it is invoked, “Socrates” refers to all the accidental properties that Socrates possesses at that moment. Thus the meaning of “Socrates” “varies quite often,” depending on the variability of accidental properties of Socrates. Abelard indicates that the adherents of this latter variant call the complete collection of the accidental properties of Socrates “Socraticity.” For them, “Socraticity” is not a “single fact of nature,” but a “composite individual.” This medieval formulation of the doctrine of individuum compositum is no doubt the closest to the tropic theory of individuation. REFS.: Abelard, Peter. “Glosses on Porphyry from His Logica ‘ingredientibus.’” In Five Texts on the Mediaeval Problem of Universals. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994. . Logica “ingredientibus.” In Peter Abaelards philsophische schriften. Edited by B. Geyer. Münster, Ger.: Aschendorff, 1919–27. Armstrong, David M. Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. Buridan, Jean. Sophisms on Meaning and Truth [Sophismata]. Translated by Theodore Kermit Scott. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1966. Campbell, Keith. Abstract Particulars. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. . Logical Investigations. Translated by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Chrudzimski, Arkadiusz. “Two Concepts of Trope.” Grazer philosophische Studien 64 (2004): 137–55. Küng, Guido. Ontology and the Logistic Analysis of Language. Dordrecht, Neth.: Reidel, 1967. Long, D. C. “Particulars and Their Qualities.” In Universals and Particulars, edited by M. J. Loux, 310–30. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1976. Martin, Christopher B. “Substance Substantiated.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (1980): 3–10. of its properties or qualities as a crowd is collectible out of its members.” According to Armstrong, every theory of tropes makes claims to the state of affairs (see SACHVERHALT): “States of affairs are required as part of the ontology of any trope theory.” A Loaded Genealogy D. W. Mertz has proposed a genealogy of the notion of tropes going back to Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Avicenna, Averroës, Thomas of Aquinas, Duns Scottius, Buridan, Suárez, Leibnitz, and Russel (in his early writings). This overview can be further specified—as far as Buridan (and Ockham) are concerned—by a certain interpretation of the distinction between absolute terms and connotative terms (see CONNOTATION). For Buridan, in fact, a term like “album” (a concrete accidental term according to common terminological usage) presupposes an individual, a singular composite of substance-quality, and connotes a singular quality that is “adjacent.” A specific white, this white here, has all the characteristics that one expects from a trope. In the first sophism of chapter 4 of the Sophismata, Buridan specifically discusses the proposition that “Socrates and [this] white are the same thing,” a sophisma that he proves thus: if he points to Socrates with his finger, it is true to say that “this is Socrates” and the same holds for “this same thing [hoc idem] is [this] white,” thus “Socrates and [this] white are the same thing.” This sentence makes it clearly understood that this white and Socrates, the individual possessing the same whiteness, are the same thing “by virtue” of the “identity of reference” between “this is Socrates” and “this same thing is [this] white”— which Buridan calls material termini. Once he establishes the identity of Socrates and this white, that is to say, “once posited that Socrates is the same thing as [this] white,” he goes so far as to infer, “by virtue of the matter” (= supposition, in opposition to the forma termini = connotation), that both “Socrates and this white exist and even that they are beings, since Socrates consists of beings—given that he is made up of parts.” In addition to this mereological of the individual (made up entirely of a substance and tropes), we can also add that the notion of “bundle” is present in the porphyrian idea of “gathering up proper characters” (athroisma idiotêtôn [ἄθϱοισμα ἰδιοτήτων]) referred to in the Isagoge to determine what makes an individual an individual. To state what constitutes the particular substance (literally, “the property of the subsistence”) of an individual, the Commentary on Categories of Simplicius employs the expression sundromê sumbebêkotôn [συνδϱομή συμϐεϐηϰότων], “syndrome of accidents”— concursus accidentium in the Latin translation of Guillaume de Moerbeke. The source of Simplicius’s theory is the porphyrian one, which integrates the Stoic “individual quality” (idiôs poion [ἰδίως ποιόν]) and Aristotle’s ontological schema of subject-object, with the aid of the notions of “concurrence” (Fr. concours) (sundromê [συνδϱομή]) and “description” (hupographê [ὑπογϱαφή]). The porphyrian and Simplician theory of the “syndrome of qualities” (sundromê poiotêtôn [συνδϱομή ποιοτήτων]) is a mixture combining what D. M. Armstrong called the “substance-attribute view” with a “bundle theory” (these being, according to him, the two main types of theories of tropes); nonetheless, the properties that enter into the “syndrome” are not tropes, that is, abstract particulars, but in the alliance between human beings and God and confidence in its promise, which makes the term semantically analogous to the English “truth.” The Greek paradigm alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] constructs truth as an elimination of the hidden, of the forgotten (alpha privative, then lanthanô [λανθάνω], which signifies “being hidden” and at times “forgetting”—which is why Martin Heidegger constantly renders alêtheia as Unverborgenheit, “unconcealment”). The Latin paradigm veritas, which is the determining one for most modern vernacular languages, is normative: it designates the correct and the proper foundation of the rule; it is a juridical truth that “locks up” (Fr. verrouille—the etymological relationship is sometimes considered), that “guards” and “conserves” (like Wahrheit, based on wahren in German) a legitimate institution. These three paradigms do not necessarily exist in isolation from each other: thus the tradition of the New Testament, linked to the translations of the Bible, ties together the meanings of ’èmèt- , alêtheia, and veritas in truth understood as divine self-revelation, with the arrival of God the Son fulfilling the promise of the Father, in the institution of the church. But the differences between the three paradigms, forged in prephilosophical times but inherited by the philosophical treatment of truth, still give “truth” an analogical character that is often underestimated and enable us to illuminate some of its antinomies or instabilities. I. The Different Paradigms According to Pavel Florensky, who was one of the first to undertake a comparison of the paradigms of truth, ’èmèṯ [תֶמֱא [is the imprescriptable promise of God. It is a “historical” notion that derives from theocracy; as for the truth of orthodoxy (istina [истина]), it is ontological, while alêtheia [ἀλήθεια] is gnosiological, and veritas is juridical. Nonetheless, according to the orthodox theologian, these notions can be conjugated as pairs: The Russian istina and the Hebrew ’èmèṯ refer primarily to the divine content of truth, while the Greek alêtheia and the Latin veritas refer to its human form. On the other hand, the Russian and Greek terms have a philosophical character, while the Latin and Hebrew terms have a sociological character in the Russian and Greek understanding, truth has an immediate relation to every person, whereas for the Romans and Hebrews, it is mediated by society. (Florensky, Pillar and Ground) These observations, with their occasionally summary and cavalier formulations, call for further exploration. A. ’Èmèt- and ’èmūnāh The Hebrew root ’MN [אמנ ,[the direct source of the exclamation Amen!, which has passed into all the Western liturgies, also yields two related words: ’èmūnāh [הָונּמֱא [and ’èmèṯ (from *am(i)nt). It is this latter word that the Septuagint most often rendered by alêtheia, “truth.” The primary meaning of the Hebrew root seems to be “solid,” not so much in a concrete sense of “hard” or “resistant,” but more in the sense of “durable, stable”—with the temporal dimension of something one can count on into the future, like the German word zuverlässig. If one “plants a stake in a nè’èmān [מןֱ ָאֶנ [place” (Isa. 22:23), one can count on its still being there when one comes back. To he who “lives in heights, whose residence is a Matthews, Gareth B. and Marc S. Cohen. “The One and the Many.” Review of Metaphysics 21, no. 4 (June 1968): 630–55. Maurin, A-S. If Tropes. Dordrecht, Neth.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Mertz, Donald W. Moderate Realism and Its Logic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Mulligan, Kevin, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith. “Truthmaker.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44 (1984): 287–321. Simons, Peer. “Particulars in Particular Clothing: Three Trope Theories of Substance.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 553–75. Smith, Barry, ed. Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology. Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1982. Stout, George Frederick. “The Nature of Universals and Propositions.” In The Problem of Universals, edited by C. Landesman, 154–66. New York: Basic Books, 1971. . “Are the Characteristics of Particular Things Universal or Particular?” In The Problem of Universals, edited by C. Landesman, 178–83. New York: Basic Books, 1971. Strawson, Peter F. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen, 1959. . Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar. London: Methuen, 1974. Williams, D. C. “The Elements of Being.” Review of Metaphysics 7 (1953): 3–18, 171–92. . “Of Essence and Existence and Santayana.” Journal of Philosophy 51 (1953): 31–42. Wilson, John Cook. Statement and Inference, with Other Philosophical Papers. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926. Wolterstorff, N. On Universals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

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