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Aristotle - Metaphysics
Atec Февраль 16 2008 19:57:08
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. This is
why, while most of the philosophers and the earlier among them thought
that substance and being were identical with body, and that all
other things were modifications of this, so that the first
principles of the bodies were the first principles of being, the
more recent and those who were held to be wiser thought numbers were
the first principles. As we said, then, if these are not substance,
there is no substance and no being at all; for the accidents of
these it cannot be right to call beings.
But if this is admitted, that lines and points are substance
more than bodies, but we do not see to what sort of bodies these could
belong (for they cannot be in perceptible bodies), there can be no
substance.-Further, these are all evidently divisions of body,-one
in breadth, another in depth, another in length. Besides this, no sort
of shape is present in the solid more than any other; so that if the
Hermes is not in the stone, neither is the half of the cube in the
cube as something determinate; therefore the surface is not in it
either; for if any sort of surface were in it, the surface which marks
off the half of the cube would be in it too. And the same account
applies to the line and to the point and the unit. Therefore, if on
the one hand body is in the highest degree substance, and on the other
hand these things are so more than body, but these are not even
instances of substance, it baffles us to say what being is and what
the substance of things is
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