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. Therefore with such men there is no
reasoning. But as for those who are perplexed by the traditional
difficulties, it is easy to meet them and to dissipate the causes of
their perplexity. This is evident from what has been said.
It is manifest, therefore, from these arguments that contradictory
statements cannot be truly made about the same subject at one time,
nor can contrary statements, because every contrariety depends on
privation. This is evident if we reduce the definitions of
contraries to their principle.
Similarly, no intermediate between contraries can be predicated of
one and the same subject, of which one of the contraries is
predicated. If the subject is white we shall be wrong in saying it
is neither black nor white, for then it follows that it is and is
not white; for the second of the two terms we have put together is
true of it, and this is the contradictory of white.
We could not be right, then, in accepting the views either of
Heraclitus or of Anaxagoras. If we were, it would follow that
contraries would be predicated of the same subject; for when
Anaxagoras says that in everything there is a part of everything, he
says nothing is sweet any more than it is bitter, and so with any
other pair of contraries, since in everything everything is present
not potentially only, but actually and separately. And similarly all
statements cannot be false nor all true, both because of many other
difficulties which might be adduced as arising from this position, and
because if all are false it will not be true to say even this, and
if all are true it will not be false to say all are false
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