:
Aristotle - Metaphysics
Atec Февраль 16 2008 19:57:08
Книга только для ознакомления
.
And this is obvious also by induction. For every contrariety
involves, as one of its terms, a privation, but not all cases are
alike; inequality is the privation of equality and unlikeness of
likeness, and on the other hand vice is the privation of virtue. But
the cases differ in a way already described; in one case we mean
simply that the thing has suffered privation, in another case that
it has done so either at a certain time or in a certain part (e.g.
at a certain age or in the dominant part), or throughout. This is
why in some cases there is a mean (there are men who are neither
good nor bad), and in others there is not (a number must be either odd
or even). Further, some contraries have their subject defined,
others have not. Therefore it is evident that one of the contraries is
always privative; but it is enough if this is true of the first-i.e.
the generic-contraries, e.g. the one and the many; for the others
can be reduced to these.
5
Since one thing has one contrary, we might raise the question
how the one is opposed to the many, and the equal to the great and the
small. For if we used the word 'whether' only in an antithesis such as
'whether it is white or black', or 'whether it is white or not
white' (we do not ask 'whether it is a man or white'), unless we are
proceeding on a prior assumption and asking something such as 'whether
it was Cleon or Socrates that came' as this is not a necessary
disjunction in any class of things; yet even this is an extension from
the case of opposites; for opposites alone cannot be present together;
and we assume this incompatibility here too in asking which of the two
came; for if they might both have come, the question would have been
absurd; but if they might, even so this falls just as much into an
antithesis, that of the 'one or many', i
: