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Re: Social Animal
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Paul Bullen
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Nov 05, 2006 11:33 PST
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| | | | JL's translation is accurate. But a colleague and I have argued
that Aquinas is right in pointing out that Aristotle does not
follow our linguistic convention for differentiating genus and
species --
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I didn't realize we had such a linguistic convention.
| | which is the way Searle is speaking about Aristotle: the genus is
"social"; and one species of social animal, man, is "political."
However, since Aristotle's species are often hierarchically
related, in contexts where he wants to indicate that one species
exhibits the highest specific actualization of a generic quality,
he also speaks of the lower species as participating to a lesser
degree in that quality (here political-ness) that is the defining
difference of the highest species (here man). -- EG
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On the linguistic convention, I think I have figured out what you
meant. As a result of how biologists use the terms "genus" and
"species" for classification purposes, there has come to be a common
general use of those terms that roughly follows the biologists' use.
So in interpreting Aristotle we have to be careful not to use "our"
common meanings of those words. So for us there is he presumption
that all members of a species are equally members, whereas for
Aristotle there may be one member that is the paradigmatic one, while
the others are only members to some lesser extent.
I believe Thomas Aquinas had a name for this. It is used in
discussion of the virtue of justice, among other places.
--Paul
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