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The Theor y and Practice
of Ontolog y

Edited by Leo Zaibert

The Theory and Practice of Ontology
 Leo Zaibert
Editor

The Theory and

Practice of Ontology
Editor
Leo Zaibert
Union College Department of Philosophy
Schenectady, New York, USA

ISBN 978-1-137-55277-8    ISBN 978-1-137-55278-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55278-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957454

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and trans-
mission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or
dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover illustration: DNY59/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom
The contributors wish to dedicate this collection to Barry, in friendship and
admiration.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Leo Zaibert

2 
Ontologia Utens and Beings in Time 9
Peter Simons

3 Against Fantology Again 25

Ingvar Johansson

4 On Drawing Lines Across the Board 45

Achille Varzi

5 Social Reality, Law, and Justice 79

David Koepsell

6 Acts of Terror as Collective Violent Acts 95

Alessandro Salice

vii
viii Contents

7 Letter of Pharisaism 115
Maurizio Ferraris

8 Just Organic Wholes 135

Leo Zaibert

9 ‘Pain’ in SNOMED CT: Is There an Anesthetic? 157

Werner Ceusters and Jonathan P. Bona

10 The Structure of Standard Music Notation 187

Roberto Casati

11 Attitude: How We Learn to Inhabit the Future 203

Mariam Thalos

12 Parental Love and the Meaning of Life 223

Berit Brogaard

13 Foolishness and the Value of Knowledge 241

Kevin Mulligan

Index 269
 Notes on Contributors

Jonathan P. Bona State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, USA

Berit Brogaard University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA
Roberto Casati Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France
Ministère de la Recherche, Paris, France
Werner Ceusters University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo,
NY, USA
Maurizio Ferraris University of Turin, Turin, Italy
Ingvar Johansson Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious
Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
David Koepsell Comision Nacional de Bioetica & Universidad Autonoma
Metropolitana, Xochimilco, Mexico
Kevin Mulligan University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
Alessandro Salice University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Peter Simons Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Mariam Thalos University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
Achille Varzi Columbia University, New York, NY, USA
Leo Zaibert Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Historical subsumption hierarchy of the SNOMED

CT concept “405154001: level of suffering (observable
entity)”. Relationships are annotated with the period during
which they were active 173
Fig. 9.2 Partial historical subsumption hierarchy of the SNOMED
CT concept “102597005: unpleasant odor of feet
(finding)”182
Fig. 11.1 (a) Phase 1, the “I” in isotropic time; (b) grown-up phase,
“I” and others tracing arcs in anisotropic time 214

xi
 List of Tables

Table 9.1 Examples of SNOMED CT concepts related to pain 162

Table 9.2 Examples of historic relationships 164
Table 9.3 Historic information about three SNOMED CT concepts
for “pain” accumulated in the PHIS table 169
Table 9.4 Changes in semantic tags over different SNOMED
CT versions 174
Table 9.5 Evolution of semantic tags over different SNOMED
CT versions 175
Table 9.6 Semantic tag changes in SNOMED CT concepts in
whose FSN a pain term (or lexical variant thereof ) is
directly used, compared to semantic tag changes in the
SNOMED CT concepts contained in the PHIS table
not directly related to pain 176

xiii
 1
Introduction
Leo Zaibert

In one way or another—and often in various ways—all the contributors

are indebted to Barry Smith. Some of us were Smith’s students, and took
our first steps in academia in the context of collaborative work with him.
But even those who have never been, technically speaking, Smith’s stu-
dents, have nonetheless immensely benefited from his penetrating intel-
ligence. As a matter of fact, in connection to Smith, the categories of
“student”, “colleague”, and “collaborator”, exhibit remarkable overlaps.
All the contributors are equally grateful to Barry and they dedicate this
volume to him, in friendship and in admiration indeed.
In terms of number of publications, Smith is one of the most prolific
philosophers of his generation. In addition to his prodigious output,
the articles contained in this volume reveal another impressive aspect
of his career: the number of disciplines in which the influence of his
work has been felt: biology, computer science and informatics, cogni-
tive ­science, economics, genetics, geography, law, neurology, and phi-

L. Zaibert (*)
Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA
e-mail: lzaibert@gmail.com

© The Author(s) 2016 1

L. Zaibert (ed.), The Theory and Practice of Ontology,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55278-5_1
2 L. Zaibert

losophy itself. Smith has published important articles in all of these

areas, and he has also received prestigious awards by the professional
governing bodies of these diverse disciplines. He even holds profes-
sorships in six of these fields. Few scholars have ever materialized the
real value of interdisciplinarity in anything like the way Smith has.
The wide-ranging relevance of his work thus constitutes another,
­perhaps even more powerful, reason for publishing a volume such as
this.
Smith received his BA in mathematics and philosophy (First Class
Honours) from Oxford University in 1973—a degree which was subse-
quently converted to a MA in 1977—and his PhD in philosophy from
the University of Manchester in 1976, with a dissertation titled “The
Ontology of Reference: Studies in Logic and Phenomenology”. He has
held academic posts at the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, at
the International Academy of Philosophy (in Liechtenstein), and, since
1994, at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has been an
invited professor in dozens of universities across the globe, and he is a
member of the editorial board of dozens of peer-reviewed publications.
His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the
National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the European
Union, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation, to name a few. No philosopher comes close to Smith in
terms of the number of grants he has received, or in terms of the financial
significance of those grants.
Smith’s early interests, captured in the title of his dissertation, have
remained at the center of his investigations during his long and fruitful
career, and they are key in helping us understand how Smith has been able
to contribute to so many diverse disciplines, and indeed how his influ-
ence is to be appreciated in the contributions to this volume. Above all,
he has been preoccupied with the fundamental structure of the universe:
with what philosophers have traditionally called “metaphysics” or “ontol-
ogy”. Given the ebb and flow of human intellectual pursuits, and given
the progressive specialization of human knowledge and the subsequent
proliferation of different disciplines and sub-disciplines, this important
branch of philosophy became just that—a branch of philosophy, with-
out much connection to the sciences or practical affairs. Interestingly,
 1 Introduction 3

however, it was nothing other than metaphysics that, say, the early pre-­
Socratic philosophers thought they were doing—and they did not see
this focus as separate from their concern with what throughout different
periods in human history have been labeled “purely” scientific endeavors.
While in the Renaissance we witness efforts to emphasize the connections
between philosophy and the sciences, these connections were particularly
significant in the twentieth-century school of phenomenology, particu-
larly in the work of Edmund Husserl. Smith has been greatly influenced
by Husserl (he has published considerably on Husserl, and is the co-­
editor of the authoritative The Cambridge Companion to Husserl). Steeped
in this phenomenological tradition, Smith sees his investigations as at
once ontological (and thus philosophical) and scientific.
There is, of course, nothing objectionable about projects in, say, the
philosophy of medicine, or the philosophy of music, and so on. But it
is important to emphasize that this is not what Smith has done. Rather,
he has mobilized philosophical tools and methods so that he can con-
tribute to medicine itself, music itself, and so on. It is not that philoso-
phers, qua philosophers, are familiar with the specific facts of medicine
or music (etc.)—they are clearly not (hence the need for collaborative
approaches such as those which Smith often directs). But philosophers do
know better than physicians and musicians (etc.) how to conceptualize
some abstract features of these very disciplines, and how to understand
the relations between the different entities which fall under the purview
of these disciplines. Philosophy, in the sense Smith practices it, is not a
meta-discipline that hovers over other disciplines: it is, rather, the quint-
essential infra-discipline, which lives within these other disciplines.
That philosophers are better equipped to investigate and analyze the
fundamental structure of the universe than any other professionals or
academics has been Smith’s animating conviction throughout his career.
It is, after all, philosophers who are trained to deal with metaphysical
or ontological questions. And it is philosophers, too, who are trained
in formal logic, and thus likelier than others to approach these onto-
logical questions with the rigor and systematicity that logic presupposes.
So, in Smith’s opinion, it is precisely in virtue of their expertise with
those essentially philosophical tools that philosophers are so well-suited
to come to the help of other disciplines. Smith’s work shows that this help
4 L. Zaibert

goes much farther than conceptual clarity. The use to which Smith has
put the philosophical tools afforded by ontology and logic in the service
of other disciplines has been truly revolutionary.
Chronologically listing the title of some of Smith’s influential publica-
tions provides hints as to why the preceding assertion is not hyperbolic
at all. “The Ontogenesis of Mathematical Objects” (1975), “Logic, Form
and Matter” (1981), “The Substitution theory of Art” (1986), “Textual
Deference” (1991), “Putting the World Back into Semantics” (1993),
“Formal Ontology, Common Sense, and Cognitive Science” (1995),
“Geographical Categories: An Ontological Investigation” (2001), “The
Metaphysics of Real Estate” (2001), “Husserlian Ecology” (2001),
“Quantum Mereotopology” (2002), “Do Mountains Exist? Towards
an Ontology of Landforms” (2003), “Biomedical Informatics and
Granularity” (2004), “On Carcinomas and Other Pathological Entities”
(2005), “Referent Tracking for Digital Rights Management” (2007),
“Framework for a Protein Ontology” (2007), “Foundations for a Realist
Ontology of Mental Disease” (2010), “Towards an Ontology of Pain
(2011), “How to Do Things with Documents” (2012). As can be sur-
mised from the titles above—some of which have appeared in leading
publications outside of philosophy—Smith has contributed concrete, in-­
house advancements in many disciplines.
In addition to the indirect evidence we could glean from these titles
and from the sheer output of Smith’s work, consider one example of the
sort of strategy which Smith has employed in bringing philosophical
tools to bear on other disciplines: the case of medicine, and in particular
through the lens of the work of the Institute for Formal Ontology and
Medical Information Science (IFOMIS), which Smith founded in 2001,
after he was awarded the two million Euros attached to the Wolfgang
Paul Prize, with which the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation hon-
ored him. Imagine a team of physicians who undertake to collate and
systematize data surrounding a certain disease, in order to, for example,
develop software that may render the diagnosis and treatment of this
disease more efficient. It is of course common knowledge that physi-
cians cannot undertake this project alone—computer scientists would be
needed in this enterprise. What is not commonly acknowledged is that a
 1 Introduction 5

team of physicians and computer scientists working together would still

need ontologists—that is, philosophers.
Neither physicians nor musicians (etc.), after all, are likely to under-
stand—and at any rate are not trained to understand—the sometimes
subtle but nonetheless important differences between the sorts of relations
that may obtain between the fundamental entities with which their dis-
ciplines deal. For example, there are important differences between parts
and proper parts; and there are important differences between something
being either a part or a proper part of something else, on the one hand,
and it being caused by that something else, on the other; between two
entities overlapping and two entities underlapping, amongst many oth-
ers. Smith’s efforts in this area have both highlighted the ways in which
philosophically uninformed approaches to medicine have failed, and have
helped his team of researchers develop conceptual apparatuses better able
to capture the ontological foundations of medicine. The results of Smith’s
efforts at the helm of IFOMIS can be appreciated not only by looking
at the many academic publications that the institute has produced, but
by the fact that other organizations—form the Volkswagen Foundation
to the National Institute of Health—have continued to support his proj-
ects in this area, to the tune of many millions of dollars.
This volume is not conceived only as a celebration of Smith’s work. It
is also a stand-alone testament to how genuinely fruitful the work has
been, and how the contributors take insights or interests prompted by
his work in different directions. While not all of the contributions are
about Smith’s work directly, they all resonate well with topics to which
he has devoted attention. The general theme that pervades the volume is,
of course, connected to ontology. But the range of specific topics covered
herein reflects the dizzying breadth of Smith’s own career, and of the
value of ontology. Preferring to let them speak for themselves, I shall only
offer one-line summaries of the chapters, merely in order to offer at once
a glimpse on the richness of the volume.
The volume opens with Peter Simons’s “Ontologia Utens and Beings in
Time”, and with his investigation of the connections between “ontology”
in the classical Aristotelian sense and the sort of novel applied realms to
which Smith, above all, has put it to use. In “Against Fantology Again”,
Ingvar Johansson takes on Smith’s attacks on a widespread assumption in
6 L. Zaibert

contemporary philosophy whereby the fundamental elements of ontol-

ogy track the fundamental aspects of logical syntax. Achille Varzi, in “On
Drawing Lines across the Board”, turns our attention to the implications
of Smith’s work on the distinction between fiat and bona fide boundaries,
not only regarding geography itself but regarding the surprisingly many
other general areas of investigation in which it applies as well.
In “Social Reality, Law, and Justice”, David Koepsell further highlights
the scope of Smith’s ontology by exploring its connection to some central
worries of jurisprudence and to the burgeoning field of social ontology.
Some of these concerns are further explored by Alessandro Salice’s “Acts
of Terror as Collective Violent Acts”, in which an analysis of the elu-
sive notion of terrorism is advanced. Maurizio Ferraris, in his “Letter of
Pharisaism”, discusses the implications of Heidegger’s Nazism (particu-
larly in light of the recent publication of the Black Notebooks). In “Just
Organic Wholes”, Leo Zaibert pays attention to the ways in which what
Smith has dubbed the tradition of “Austrian Philosophy” may offer an
unusually penetrating lens through which to look at the problem of the
justification of punishment.
In “‘Pain’ in SNOMED CT: Is There an Anesthetic?” Werner Ceusters
and Jonathan P. Bona offer an example of the sort of practical applications
to which ontology can be put to use by examining the ways in which the
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine—Clinical Terms deals with pain.
Similarly, in his “The Structure of Standard Musical Notation”, Roberto
Casati discusses both some principles that govern the representation of
time in standard music notation, and some cognitive consequences of
such notation. In her “Attitude: How we Learn to Inhabit the Future”,
Mariam Thalos offers a phenomenological account of the perception of
time, and of how humans experience it at different stages of their lives.
In her “Parental Love and the Meaning of Life” Berit Brogaard discusses
some unsavory aspects of motherhood, by considering how mother-
hood conflicts with other valuable aspects of existence such as autonomy
and welfare. And in “Foolishness and the Value of Knowledge” Kevin
Mulligan closes the volume by presenting an analysis of foolishness in
which it is importantly distinguished from stupidity, and in which it is
seen as a form of an intellectual vice.
 1 Introduction 7

As it turns out the last note of the last article in the volume can be put
to use in concluding this brief introduction as well. For not only does
it appropriately conclude Mulligan’s piece, but it offers an invitation to
consider some of the multifarious ways in which Smith’s seminal work on
ontology—both theoretical and applied—yield fruit in the contributions
contained herein.

This tribute to Barry Smith has touched on only a few of the topics he has
illuminated over a long and extraordinarily productive career, a career
driven by an unusually large range of strong interests pursued in a very
determined fashion. Barry Smith, his friends and admirers all agree, is in
many ways an epistemic hero.
 2
Ontologia Utens and Beings in Time
Peter Simons

1 Useful Ontology
Ontology, despite the relative newness of its name, goes back to Aristotle’s
principal definition of metaphysics as the science of being as being.
Christian Wolff divided metaphysics into ontology or general metaphys-
ics on the one hand and three branches of just slightly less general special
metaphysics on the other. Husserl renamed the two sides as formal ontol-
ogy (general) versus regional ontologies (special), while Donald Williams
called the former analytic ontology and the latter speculative cosmology.
Amid this terminological plethora it is sensible to stay with ontology as the
name for the general part. But as the most general part of the most gen-
eral discipline, how could ontology ever be useful? To see how useful it
indeed is when understood sensibly and deployed as a general framework
for database ontologies, it suffices to look at Barry Smith’s work, not only

P. Simons (*)
Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: psimons@tcd.ie.

© The Author(s) 2016 9

L. Zaibert (ed.), The Theory and Practice of Ontology,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55278-5_2
10 P. Simons

his philosophical articles but more particularly his impassioned advocacy

of realist philosophical ontology as the best framework in the construc-
tion and conceptual structuring of databases in all manner of subjects
from genetics, medicine and other biomedical sciences to geography and
the military. To achieve this penetration, Smith brought decades of work
and experience in philosophy and its history, all conducted from a robust
realist perspective and drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of scien-
tific philosophy from the last 150 years, including many of its less well-­
known corners.
It would be otiose to add further injunctions to take scientific ontol-
ogy seriously and apply it as Smith has done to all of his well-argued
articles. Those who have benefitted from the sensible and well-designed
Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) can attest to the improvements wrought
by taking this tool in designing computer ontologies. Since Smith and I
agree on nearly all important philosophical matters and likewise on the
need to apply ontology in the interest of clean and efficient data, in this
paper I shall focus on one area in ontology in which we have a (fairly
minor) difference of opinion, namely the relationship between objects
that persist in time, continuants and occurrents.

2 Continuants and Occurrents:

The Distinction
Consider objects in time. Perhaps there are some that exist instanta-
neously, for example a particularly shaped shadow cast by two objects
that cross in front of one another in the sun, but aside from these, all the
objects we encounter (and any of whose existence we can be sure) last
for a period of time, even if a very short one. We shall confine attention
to these. Following W.E. Johnson, we make a fundamental distinction
between two ways in which objects that persist are in time. Some persist
by getting longer and longer in temporal extent. These are occurrents, so
called because their typical exemplars are events and processes, which
occur or happen or go on. A popular kind of occurrent is a race, of which
there are many kinds, involving humans, animals and machines: exam-
 2 Ontologia Utens and Beings in Time 11

ples of these three genres are respectively a marathon, a greyhound race,

and a Formula One motor race. A race lasts for a certain time, from the
moment when the competitors are set off to the moment the last com-
petitor to complete the course does so, and the winner is, of course, the
competitor that completes the course in the shortest time. That stretch
of time gives the clue to the nature of a race: it has a beginning, lasts for
a period after that, and comes to an end. The temporal interval from
beginning to end is its duration, and this can be subdivided into shorter
sub-intervals, such as the first five seconds, or middle third, or the second
half. Some of these sub-intervals are arbitrarily like these, others may
be determined by physical features of the race, for example the period
between the leader starting and completing a certain lap. Races are some-
times abandoned before they finish, for a variety of reasons, and when
this happens, the incomplete or abandoned race itself has a duration,
which is shorter than would have been the duration had the race pro-
ceeded to completion. All of this is well known, but the point is to illus-
trate the fundamental property of occurrents: that they last for a certain
time, or, as Smith and his collaborators say, they span an interval of time.
Ontologies dealing with such items are called by them SPAN ontologies.
Because occurrents span intervals, they have longer and shorter parts
which span sub-intervals of the total interval. Another way to put this is
to say that occurrents have temporal parts, that is to say, parts of the total
occurrent which last a shorter time than the whole but which, when they
are occurring, comprise all of the occurrent as then happening. A salient
example is the first half of a football match, which comprises everything
that happens in the match before the half-time interval. This is to be
contrasted with the play that occurs throughout the game in one of the
halves of the football pitch, which is a spatial part of the game. There
are of course parts of the game which are neither spatial segments nor
temporal segments like these, for example the part played by a particular
player in the game, which may or may not endure throughout the whole
game but which certainly does not take up the whole volume of the game
at any time.
In addition to temporal parts that occupy a sub-interval of an occurrent,
there are two other candidates for temporal parts. The first are topologi-
cally disconnected temporal parts, for example the play in the five min-
12 P. Simons

utes either side of half-time in a football match. These are o­ ccasionally of

practical and theoretical significance. In many sports there are interrup-
tions because of injuries and time-outs, but despite these we consider the
event as a whole despite its intermittent nature. Similar remarks apply to
say musical performances with short pauses between numbers of move-
ments. The other case concerns the temporal boundaries of occurrents:
the moment of beginning, the moment of ending, the half-way moment,
and so on. Assuming we treat these as genuine items in our ontology,
and nothing we have said either includes or precludes them, they are best
treated as limiting cases of occurrents, because they are approximated by
extended occurrents of arbitrarily short duration. As stated above, we
shall not be much concerned with such cases.
The other basic kind of object in time are continuants, so called because
they continue to exist for a period. Examples of continuants are famil-
iar and legion. The earth, the heavenly bodies, geographic features, the
organisms on the earth, including ourselves, our many artefacts such as
buildings and means of transport, bodies and masses of matter, and much
else that interests us are continuants. They comprise what Aristotle called
substances and what are often called just things or objects, if inanimate,
and animals, plants etc. if living. They include the parts of these things,
such as the rock strata of a mountain, the organs and tissues of an animal,
the bricks of a house, the wheels of a car, etc. They also include social
and collective things like families, clubs, orchestras, firms, governments,
nations and dynasties, as well as their individual members, officials and
so on. They comprise enduring qualitative and quantitative properties of
continuants, the white color of this wall, the mass of this apple, the shape
of this vase, and so on. Since these are items which are also in time and
which depend for their existence on the substantial whole to which they
belong, these are individual accidents, moments or tropes, not the univer-
sal kinds to which they belong.
Whereas occurrents endure by acquiring later stages or temporal parts,
continuants endure by simply “hanging in there”, remaining in existence.
Of a continuant we may be able to state when it came into existence,
how long it existed for, and when it went out of existence. For instance
Napoleon Bonaparte was born on August 15, 1769 and died on May 5,
1821. Leaving aside by convention the months when he was develop-
 2 Ontologia Utens and Beings in Time 13

ing in his mother’s womb, we count the period of Napoleon’s existence

as being between these dates, though with greater strictness and accu-
racy we should take the developmental period between conception and
birth into account. We do not in ordinary parlance and ways of thinking
regard continuants as having temporal parts or phases like occurrents.
Thinking of Napoleon, while we might say he has spatial parts like his
left arm or his top half, we do not say he has a first half or a middle third.
That to which we refer such talk is not Napoleon himself but his life,
which does have temporal parts, for example the part when he attended
the École Militaire, or the part spanning the period of his marriage to
Joséphine de Beauharnais. There is of course a uniquely intimate relation
between Napoleon and his life, as attested by biographies, which consist
in descriptions of both the man and the events in which he participated.
The same goes for other continuants. Stretching the term somewhat, we
may call the temporal whole consisting of all the events, states and pro-
cesses intimately involving the continuant that continuant’s life, or, if we
prefer, its history (to use the BFO term). This is not alien terminology: we
often hear about the life of a star, a building, an institution, and everyone
recognizes the metaphor as appropriate without being led to think that
stars, buildings and institutions are ever literally alive. A continuant’s life
goes on when and only when, and for as long as, it exists. Provided we do
not confuse an object’s history qua events involving it with the story or
account of its history, that terminology is equally apt.

3 Some Consequences
Both continuants and occurrents vary across time. A party which started
quietly gets louder, the fall of a body gets more rapid, a tree which is bare
in winter puts forth leaves in spring and loses them in the fall. In the
case of continuants like the tree we call this variation change. Typically
there are three components to change. One is the thing that changes. The
other two are characteristics or properties that it has before and after the
change. For this to be a change, and not just variety, the properties have
to be analytically incompatible, such as being quiet and being loud, or
being leafless and being leaved, but more importantly, there is the ques-
14 P. Simons

tion whether that which varies itself changes, in that the very same thing
has first one property then another, or whether the incompatible proper-
ties can be ascribed to parts of the whole thing. A river which is swift and
narrow near its source but sluggish and broad near its outlet does not
itself change from being narrow to being broad; rather, different parts of
the river are narrow and broad. Likewise, a party which starts quietly and
ends noisily varies in that early phases of the party are quiet while later
phases are noisy. It is true that we may use the same word, “change” for
both kinds of alteration, but in the case of continuants, since they lack
temporal parts, there is nothing but the continuant itself to which the
properties can be ascribed. For that reason only continuants change in
the strict sense, occurrents vary over time but do not change.
As a result of the difference, predications about continuants and predi-
cations about occurrents differ in the way they treat time. Because con-
tinuants themselves exist and have properties at different times, when we
talk about them and their properties, we generally need to specify the
time at which the continuant has the property, and we do this using tense
and/or some other temporal specifier, for example

Sally was happy yesterday but is unhappy today

Hong Kong was a small trading post in 1850 but a huge metropolis in
1990

By contrast, since an occurrent extends over time, predications ascribing

different properties at different times can be referred to temporal parts:

The first half of the game was dull but the second half was exciting
The battle started with artillery exchanges but moved to massed infantry
assaults

There is in particular a radical asymmetry concerning location. While a

continuant can be first here, then there, an occurrent which “moves” does
so only in that different phases are in different places. When a wedding
starts in church but ends in a marquee it is the guests that move, not the
wedding.
 2 Ontologia Utens and Beings in Time 15

4 The Problem
It appears then that we have a fundamental distinction between these two
kinds of entities in time, but there are also clear and intimate connections
between them. As a biography demonstrates, the person and the events
which constitute his or her life are inseparable. The person cannot exist
without at least some occurrents going on in their life, namely those vital
processes which constitute being alive, and conversely, no occurrent in
which the person is involved or is a participant would be the occurrent
it is were they not to be so involved. The involvement can be peripheral,
as being a spectator at a tennis match, or it can be essential, as being one
of the players in the match. It is questionable whether there are any clear
cases of occurrents which do not involve some continuant as a partici-
pant. Fluctuation and propagation in fields such as electromagnetic or
gravitational fields may be candidate cases. In such cases it might be said
that the field is the requisite continuant bearer of changes, but again it
is not clear whether fields should be reified in this way. At all events, the
majority of continuants and occurrents with which we are concerned
come together in reality.
That raises the question as to the nature of the relationship between
occurrents and continuants, and whether one category is essentially
dispensable, or whether both are required, and if so, whether one has
ontological priority over the other. That gives us a total of five possible
positions, metaphysically speaking:

1. There are only continuants and no occurrents.

2. There are only occurrents and no continuants.
3. There are both, and neither is prior to the other.
4. There are both, and continuants are prior to occurrents.
5. There are both, and occurrents are prior to continuants.

This excludes two other positions, neither of which is I think to be

taken seriously. The first is that there are, ultimately, neither continuants
nor occurrents; the other, that both are reducible to or posterior to some
third neutral category. As far as I know, this last option has not been
taken, while the former only makes sense for sceptics, monists, or other
16 P. Simons

philosophical extremists. In this chapter I shall not address answers 1 and

4, although they have been upheld. They are minority positions usually
associated with some form of Aristotelian substantivalism. By far the most
commonly supported views in contemporary metaphysics are answers 2,
3, and 5. In his insistence on the indispensability of both continuants
and occurrents, and the equally important suggestion that reality is too
complex for a single theory or perspective to capture all its aspects, Smith
is a supporter of answer 3. My own preference is for answer 5. Answer
2 will be considered because it is perhaps the most favored view among
contemporary metaphysicians. We consider it first.

5 Process-Only Philosophy
For a variety of reasons, philosophers have concluded not only that occur-
rents exist, but that, of objects that persist in time, only occurrents exist.
Often called by the not especially helpful name “four-dimensionalism”,
this is a kind of process philosophy in which one of two similar attitudes
is taken in regard to continuants, namely

2a. There really are no continuants, there are only processes and other
occurrents.
2b. What we consider continuants are, in fact, occurrents: they have tem-
poral parts.

It is hard to make a clear distinction between those two positions. It may

turn on matters of rhetoric, as when someone says, “There are no trees,
there are only tree-processes”, in which case they are exponents of 2a;
or whether they say, “Of course there are trees: they are just very slow-­
moving dull processes”, in which case they uphold 2b. We might call 2a
Continuant Eliminativism and 2b Continuant Revisionism. The differ-
ence may also turn on whether the proponent thinks we could paraphrase
talk of continuants into talk of occurrents (2b) or should for metaphysi-
cal purposes get rid of talk of continuants altogether (2a). I am skeptical
in regard to the possibility of eliminating continuant-talk and equally
skeptical in regard to being able to reduce it or paraphrase it by suitable
 2 Ontologia Utens and Beings in Time 17

occurrent-talk. I am one with Smith in thinking that ontology must, if it

is to be taken seriously and do a useful job, maintain its contact with the
language and practice of science, which is thoroughly saturated with both
continuant and occurrent talk. For that reason I shall not even consider
language revision. But for the same reason I do not think there can be
any clear separation between what the people and the scientists, engi-
neers, doctors etc. say, and what the metaphysicians say. If metaphysi-
cians are happy to talk with the vulgar outside the Philosophy Room but
talk a wholly different and disconnected idiom inside it, they are already
undermining their own subject and turning it into an irrelevant glass-­
bead game that deserves all the scorn of positivists.
For practical purposes, then, there is little to choose between 2a and
2b, so let us consider whether there is any sense in holding that stars,
planets, islands, plants, animals, bacteria, houses, and aircraft have tem-
poral parts. If we do so hold, we will have to admit this would entail a
radical linguistic revision, but maintain that it can “in principle” be car-
ried out. The question is rather whether it makes metaphysical sense to
embark on the revision.
The attraction of a process-only metaphysics is that it reduces the
number of basic categories of entity. Its disadvantage is the mentioned
disconnection from extant ways of speaking and conceptualizing. Most
proponents seriously underestimate the amount of upheaval required to
revise our thought in this way, but if the metaphysical payoff were worth
it, that would not be a final obstacle.
Perhaps the major shortcoming of the non-eliminativist position 2b
is that it collapses the distinction between a continuant and its life. If
Napoleon is a long drawn-out process extending from 1769 to 1821,
then the biography has only one kind of subject: Napoleon-processes,
their parts such as his marrying Joséphine, or his right-hand-process;
and the wholes of which they are part such as Austerlitz, which is itself
already an occurrent, but also France between 1769 and 1821, which
would have to be a larger nation-process. No one should seriously deny
that Napoleon existed, the question is, what was he?
It would be easy if we could somehow show that the assumption that
Napoleon has temporal parts is simply analytically contradictory. For
example, we may claim that Napoleon was present himself, as a whole, at
18 P. Simons

the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino, while only parts of the Napoleon-­
process were compresent with Austerlitz and other parts with Borodino.
The proponent of four-dimensionalism will however adjust the talk so it
is right to say that parts of the total process were present first here, then
there, but that because they are both parts of the greater whole we can
say, if in a somewhat Pickwickian sense, that the whole process was also
around at both Austerlitz and Borodino. Parts of it weren’t. If that is
being Pickwickian, since we can equally well say that parts of the whole
process were neither at Austerlitz nor at Borodino, we have no clear rea-
son to think Napoleon himself as a whole was at either, or indeed any-
where else, provided he moved around. So was Napoleon himself present
at both battles? The reasons given to say he was are also reasons to say he
was in many other places as well. This falls just short of holding that he
both was and was not at Austerlitz (without qualification), and so falls
short of a contradiction. It may be awkward, but is not inconsistent. The
problem turns on how to interpret not especially helpful terms such as “as
a whole” or “himself ”, and the different interpretations, favoring oppos-
ing positions, might be considered question-begging.
Likewise, saying, for example, that Napoleon has a childhood part and
a twenties part may be barbarous, inelegant or out of keeping with how
we ordinarily speak and think, but that is precisely what is at issue. Later
we shall see that with a theory of how continuants are related to occur-
rents we can give a constructive account of why such talk jars, but again it
is hard to find an independent reason to prefer this view to alternatives. I
conclude that it is hard to convict position 2 of any cognitive defect worse
than being radically revisionary.

6 Continuant–Occurrent Dualism
By contrast, the view that continuants and occurrents are coeval, equally
basic categories, upheld by Smith and favored by myself in earlier times,
is positively straightforward. We call it continuant–occurrent dualism. It
emerges in the requirement enshrined in BFO that both a SNAP ontol-
ogy (dealing with continuants at a time) and a SPAN ontology (deal-
ing with occurrents over time) be part of an ontology with any serious
 2 Ontologia Utens and Beings in Time 19

applications. There have to be both categories in any serious ontology

applicable to the real world, because we have to meet people, especially
scientists and practitioners, where they conceptually are, and they are
using modes of thought in which both continuants and occurrents are
vital. Precisely because it is conservative rather than revisionary, it raises
fewer questions of principle.
But not none. The main question is how continuants are related to
the occurrents in which they participate or are involved. There are here
terms used to describe the relation. Continuants “participate in” events
and other occurrents, these “happen to” or “happen in” them, they “are
involved” in them. Napoleon participated in, was involved in, the Battle
of Austerlitz, as of course were many others, his various breaths and heart-
beats during the battle happened in him, his actions and orders involved
him as agent, and so on.
The standard view of involvement (as I shall preferentially call it) is
that it is a sui generis, indefinable primitive. It is hard to see what other
option there is for a dualist. Indefinable or primitive relations are not in
themselves bad: there have to be some indefinables in metaphysics of all
sciences. On the other hand, if there is an alternative theory in which the
supposedly indefinable primitive is defined or explicated, and in a way
which preserves and/or explains its principal characteristics, that is—on
that count—preferable. In this case, I think there is a better alternative,
and to that we proceed.

7 Existence at a Time
Together with Smith, Kevin Mulligan and numerous others, I consider
that one way to approach metaphysical questions is by considering truth-­
makers for various salient propositions. The basic idea is that contingent
truths about the real world are in some way answerable to that world,
they do not float free. That does not mean, as truth-maker maximalists
hold, that every truth has a truth-maker, but it does mean that there has
to be an account of why contingent propositions are true or false which
turns on what there is or is not in reality. A truth-maker for a proposition
p is an object or objects A such that p is true because A exist. The true
20 P. Simons

statement “RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg on April 14, 1912” is

true because of the existence (occurrence) of a collision at 23:40 ship’s time
on that day between the ship and one particular iceberg. That the sentence
uses the past tense is because we are speaking about it afterwards: some-
one who correctly predicted such a collision would use the future tense,
while someone describing it at the time would use the present tense.
Because of the nature of the truth-making relation, one between an
entity in the world on the one hand and a truth-bearer on the other, the
most straightforward and indeed almost trivial case of truth-making is
one that pertains between an entity and a truth-bearer to the effect that
that entity exists. So the famous collision makes it true that that colli-
sion as referred to exists (using the verb here in a non-tensed sense) and
so, by the principle that what makes something true makes any logical
consequence of it true, makes true that such a collision exists, and that is
equivalent to the true statement above, modulo the use of the past tense.
An event like a collision has its time of occurrence built into it, it
essentially occurs when (and where) it occurs. But when we are talking
about a continuant, to say it exists is to say it exists at some time, but
not necessarily at this or that time. If we wish to be more specific about
when a continuant exists, we have to bring in the time explicitly, so we
say Napoleon existed (i.e., was alive) on December 2, 1805, as also later
on June 18, 1815. That he did so was in neither case necessary or essen-
tial to him: he might easily have died earlier of a childhood disease or at
some previous battle. But the force of truth-making is that the existence
of the truth-maker necessitates the truth of the truth-bearer in question:
it cannot be the case that the truth-bearer exists, and the truth-maker
exists, but the truth-bearer is not true. Clearly Napoleon himself does
not necessitate that he be alive on December 2, 1805, since he might
have died earlier. Therefore something else must be the truth-maker for
the temporally specific proposition “Napoleon existed on December 2,
1805”. Occurrents have their time built into them, so if we can find an
occurrent or occurrents from December 2, 1805 which make it true that
Napoleon exists then, we have our truth-maker. And there are such: they
are the vital processes which sustain Napoleon on that day. They are not
Napoleon, but they are essential to his existence then, and can thus serve
as truth-maker to the temporally specific singular existential proposition.
Another random document with
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apotheosis of womanhood, sketched by Guido Guinizelli, is
developed with mystical fullness, and there is even perhaps a hint of
some future work in honour of Beatrice that will deal with the world
beyond the grave. The two sonnets that follow are a kind of
supplement; the first:

Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa,

“Love and the gentle heart are one same thing,” gives a definition of
love, elaborating the Guinizellian doctrine; the second:

Ne li occhi porta la mia donna Amore,

“Within her eyes my lady carries Love,” pursues the conception

further, to represent Beatrice herself as the creatrix of the divine gift
of gentilezza by which the heart is capable of noble love. Two
sonnets on the death of Beatrice’s father lead up to a veritable lyrical
masterpiece, the canzone:

Donna pietosa e di novella etate,

“A lady pitiful and of tender age,” the anticipatory vision of Beatrice’s

death—the “Dante’s Dream” of Rossetti’s famous picture. The
following sonnet, in which Beatrice and Cavalcanti’s lady, Primavera
or Giovanna, appear together, is the only place in the Vita Nuova
where Dante calls her whom he loved by the name by which she
was actually known—“Bice.” Love now no longer appears weeping,
but speaks joyfully in the poet’s heart. All that was personal in
Dante’s worship seems to have passed away with his earlier
lamentations; his love has become a transcendental rapture, an
ecstasy of self-annihilation. This part of the book culminates in the
two sonnets:
 Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare,

“So noble and so pure seems my lady,” in which a similar sonnet of

Guinizelli’s is easily surpassed, and

Vede perfettamente onne salute,

“He seeth perfectly all bliss, who beholds my lady among the ladies”;
sonnets which are flawless gems of mediaeval poetry. Then abruptly,
in the composition of a canzone which should have shown how Love
by means of Beatrice regenerated his soul, the pen falls from his
hand: Beatrice has been called by God to Himself, to be glorious
under the banner of Mary, “How doth the city sit solitary that was full
of people!”
Some falling off may be detected here and there in the third part of
the Vita Nuova (xxix. to xli.), which includes the prose and poetry
connected with Beatrice’s death, the love for the lady who takes pity
upon the poet’s grief, his repentance and return to Beatrice’s
memory. A stately canzone:

Li occhi dolenti per pietà del core,

“The eyes that grieve for pity of the heart,” is a companion piece to
the opening canzone of the second part; the poet now speaks of
Beatrice’s death in the same form and to the same love-illumined
ladies to whom he had formerly sung her praises. More beautiful are
the closing lines of the shorter canzone, written for Dante’s second
friend, who was apparently Beatrice’s brother. After the charming
episode of the poet drawing an Angel on her anniversary, the “gentle
lady, young and very fair,” inspires him with four sonnets; and his
incipient love for her is dispelled by a “strong imagination,” a vision of
Beatrice as he had first seen her in her crimson raiment of childhood.
The bitterness of Dante’s repentance is a foretaste of the confession
upon Lethe’s bank in the Purgatorio. The pilgrims pass through the
city on their way to Rome, “in that season when many folk go to see
that blessed likeness which Jesus Christ left us as exemplar of His
most beauteous face, which my lady sees in glory” (V. N. xli.); and
this third part closes with the sonnet in which Dante calls upon the
pilgrims to tarry a little, till they have heard how the city lies desolate
for the loss of Beatrice.
In the epilogue (xlii., xliii.), in answer to the request of two of those
noble ladies who throng the ways of Dante’s mystical city of youth
and love as God’s Angels guard the terraces of the Mount of
Purgation, Dante writes the last sonnet of the book; wherein a “new
intelligence,” born of Love, guides the pilgrim spirit beyond the
spheres into the Empyrean to behold the blessedness of Beatrice. It
is an anticipation of the spiritual ascent of the Divina Commedia,
which is confirmed in the famous passage which closes the “new life”
of Love:
“After this sonnet there appeared unto me a wonderful vision:
wherein I saw things which made me purpose to say no more of this
blessed one, until such time as I could discourse more worthily
concerning her. And to attain to that I labour all I can, even as she
knoweth verily. Wherefore if it shall be His pleasure, through whom is
the life of all things, that my life continue for some years, I hope that I
shall yet utter concerning her what hath never been said of any
woman. And then may it seem good unto Him, who is the Lord of
courtesy, that my soul may go hence to behold the glory of its lady:
to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who gazeth gloriously upon the
countenance of Him who is blessed throughout all ages.”[10]
From the mention of the pilgrimage, and this wonderful vision, it
has been sometimes supposed that the closing chapters of the Vita
Nuova were written in 1300. It seems, however, almost certain that
there is no reference whatever to the year of Jubilee in the first case.
When Dante’s positive statement in the Convivio, that he wrote the
Vita Nuova at the entrance of manhood (gioventute being the twenty
years from twenty-five to forty-five, Conv. iv. 24), is compared with
the internal evidence of the book itself, the most probable date for its
completion would be between 1291 and 1293. It should, however, be
borne in mind that, while there is documentary evidence that some of
the single poems were in circulation before 1300, none of the extant
manuscripts of the whole work can be assigned to a date much
earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century. It is, therefore, not
inconceivable that the reference to the vision may be associated with
the spiritual experience of 1300 and slightly later than the rest of the
book.[11]
The form of the Vita Nuova, the setting of the lyrics in a prose
narrative and commentary, is one that Dante may well have invented
for himself. If he had models before his eyes, they were probably, on
the one hand, the razos or prose explanations which accompanied
the poems of the troubadours, and, on the other, the commentaries
of St. Thomas Aquinas on the works of Aristotle, which Dante
imitates in his divisions and analyses of the various poems. His
quotations show that he had already studied astronomy, and made
some rudimentary acquaintance with Aristotle and with the four chief
Latin poets; the section in which he speaks of the latter, touching
upon the relations between classical and vernacular poetry (xxv.),
suggests the germ of the De Vulgari Eloquentia. The close of the
book implies that he regarded lack of scientific and literary
equipment as keeping him from the immediate fulfilment of the
greater work that he had even then conceived for the glory of
Beatrice.
In the Convivio, where all else is allegorical, Beatrice is still simply
his first love, lo primo amore (ii. 16). Even when allegorically
interpreting the canzone which describes how another lady took her
place in his heart, after her death, as referring to Philosophy, there is
no hint of any allegory about quella viva Beatrice beata, “that
blessed Beatrice, who lives in heaven with the Angels and on earth
with my soul” (Conv. ii. 2). When about to plunge more deeply into
allegorical explanations, he ends what he has to say concerning her
by a digression upon the immortality of the soul (Conv. ii. 9): “I so
believe, so affirm, and so am certain that I shall pass after this to
another better life, there where that glorious lady lives, of whom my
soul was enamoured.”
 Those critics who question the reality of the story of the Vita
Nuova, or find it difficult to accept without an allegorical or idealistic
interpretation, are best answered in Dante’s own words: Questo
dubbio è impossibile a solvere a chi non fosse in simile grado fedele
d’Amore; e a coloro che vi sono è manifesto ciò che solverebbe le
dubitose parole; “This difficulty is impossible to solve for anyone who
is not in similar grade faithful unto Love; and to those who are so,
that is manifest which would solve the dubious words” (V. N. xiv.).

2. The “Rime”
The Rime—for which the more modern title, Canzoniere, has
sometimes been substituted—comprise all Dante’s lyrical poems,
together with others that are more doubtfully attributed to him. In the
Vita Nuova were inserted three canzoni, two shorter poems in the
canzone mould, one ballata, twenty-five sonnets (including two
double sonnets). The “testo critico” of the Rime, edited by Michele
Barbi for the sexcentenary Dante, in addition to these accepts as
authentic sixteen canzoni (the sestina is merely a special form of
canzone), five ballate, thirty-four sonnets, and two stanzas. Dante
himself regards the canzone as the noblest form of poetry (V. E. ii.
3), and he expounded three of his canzoni in the Convivio. From the
middle of the fourteenth century onwards, a large number of MSS.
give these three and twelve others (fifteen in all) as a connected
whole in a certain definite order, frequently with a special rubric in
Latin or Italian prefixed to each; this order and these rubrics are due
to Boccaccio.[12] It has been more difficult to distinguish between the
certainly genuine and the doubtful pieces among the ballate and
sonnets, and the authenticity of some of those now included by Barbi
in the canon is still more or less open to question. The Rime, on the
whole, are the most unequal of Dante’s works; a few of the sonnets,
particularly some of the earlier ones and those in answer to other
poets, have but slight poetic merit, while several of the later canzoni
rank among the world’s noblest lyrics. In the sexcentenary edition
the arrangement of the lyrics is tentatively chronological, with
subsidiary groupings according to subject-matter. While following the
same general scheme, I slightly modify the arrangement, as certain
poems regarded by Barbi as “rime d’amore” appear to me to be
more probably allegorical.
(a) A first group belongs to the epoch of the Vita Nuova.
Conspicuous among them are two canzoni. One:

La dispietata mente che pur mira,

“Pitiless memory that still gazes back at the time gone by,” is
addressed directly to a woman (in this respect differing from Dante’s
other canzoni), who is probably the second lady represented as the
poet’s screen. The other:

E ’m’ incresce di me si duramente,

“I grieve for myself so bitterly,” seems to give fuller expression to the

first part of the Vita Nuova with an alien note—the image of the little
maiden has yielded to that of the woman whose great beauty is the
object of unattainable desire. At times a lighter note is struck; Dante
is apparently simply supplying words for composers to set to music,
or revealing a spirit of playfulness of which there is no trace in the
Vita Nuova.[13] Besides sonnets in honour of Beatrice, we have a
few relating to other women, and in two ballate even their names are
given: Fioretta and Violetta. One delightful sonnet:

Sonar bracchetti e cacciatori aizzare,

“Beagles questing and huntsmen urging on,” reveals the poet taking
part in sport and appreciating a jape at his own expense. A number
of correspondence sonnets belong to this epoch, a small series
addressed to Dante da Maiano (of which no MS. has been
preserved) being probably earlier than the first sonnet of the Vita
Nuova. A note of pure romance is struck in the charming sonnet to
Guido Cavalcanti, in which the younger poet wishes that they two,
with Lapo Gianni and their three ladies (Dante’s being the first lady
who screened his love), might take a voyage over enchanted seas in
Merlin’s magic barque. Several admirable sonnets, now included in
this group, were formerly attributed to Cino da Pistoia.[14]
(b) The tenzone with Forese Donati forms a little group apart. Its
date is uncertain, but may be plausibly taken as between 1290 and
1296. These sonnets, though not free from bitterness which is
perhaps serious, may be regarded as exercises in that style of
burlesque and satirical poetry to which even Guido Guinizelli had
once paid tribute, and which Rustico di Filippo had made
characteristically Florentine.
(c) Next comes a group of poems, connected with the allegory of
the Convivio, in which an intellectual ideal is pursued with the
passion and wooed in the language of the lover who adores an
earthly mistress. “I say and affirm that the lady, of whom I was
enamoured after my first love, was the most beautiful and most pure
daughter of the Emperor of the Universe, to whom Pythagoras gave
the name Philosophy” (Conv. ii. 16). By some, not entirely
reconcilable, process the donna gentile, who appears at the end of
the Vita Nuova, has become a symbol of Philosophy, and the poet’s
love for her a most noble devotion. The canzone:

Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete,

“Ye who by understanding move the third heaven” describing the

conflict in Dante’s mind between this new love and the memory of
Beatrice, deals again with the matter of one of the sonnets of the
Vita Nuova; but the allegory is perhaps an after-thought. It is
commented upon in the second treatise of the Convivio and quoted
in Canto viii. of the Paradiso. The other poems of this group seem
purely allegorical: “By love, in this allegory, is always intended that
study which is the application of the enamoured mind to that thing of
which it is enamoured” (Conv. ii. 16). At first this service is painful
and laborious; and the mystical lady seems a cruel and proud
mistress, as she is represented in the “pitiful ballata”:

Voi che savete ragionar d’Amore,

“Ye who know how to discourse of love,” which is referred to in the

third treatise of the Convivio (iii. 9). But the defect is on the lover’s
own part, and in her light the difficulties which sundered him and her
are dispersed like morning clouds before the face of the sun. This
mystical worship culminates in the supreme hymn to his spiritual
mistress, whose body is Wisdom and whose soul is Love:

Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,

“Love that in my mind discourses to me of my lady desirously,” which

is the second canzone of the Convivio (quoted in V. E. ii. 6), the
amorous song that Casella was to sing “met in the milder shades of
Purgatory.” It is one of Dante’s lyrical masterpieces. Hardly less
beautiful is the canzone, likewise cited in the De Vulgari Eloquentia
(V. E. ii. 5, II):

Amor, che movi tua vertù dal cielo,

“Love that movest thy power from heaven”; with a mystical

comparison of the workings of love to those of the sun and striking
lines on the supernatural power of the illumined imagination. This
allegorical group may be regarded as closed by the canzone:

Io sento si d’Amor la gran possanza,

“I feel so the great power of love,” in which Dante represents himself
as too young to obtain his lady’s grace, but is content to serve on,
finding the quest of philosophic truth its own reward. This poem has
two commiati (the commiato, or tornata, being the stanza or part of a
stanza, or a few independent lines, added as an address or farewell
at the end of a canzone); both seem to imply that philosophic verse
may be the instrument of political or social reform.[15]
(d) Dante originally held that Italian poetry should only be used for
writing upon love, and therefore, in his younger days, a philosophical
poem would naturally take the form of a love ode. In the Vita Nuova,
he argues “against those who rhyme upon any matter other than
amorous; seeing that such mode of speech was originally found for
speaking of love” (V. N. xxv). His views naturally widened before he
wrote his later canzoni (cf. V. E. ii. 2); but when, lacking inspiration
for a higher lyrical flight or baffled by some metaphysical problem, he
turns to set erring men right in didactic canzoni on some humbler
ethical subject, he represents himself as so doing because out of
favour with his lady or deserted by love. Thus, “The sweet rhymes of
love, which I was wont to seek in my thoughts, needs must I leave”—

Le dolci rime d’amor, ch’i’ solia

—opens the canzone on the spiritual nature of true gentilezza

(inspired in part by Guinizelli), which is expounded in the fourth
treatise of the Convivio, and, although somewhat unequal, contains
one ineffable stanza upon the noble soul in life’s four stages. A
companion poem:

Poscia ch’Amor del tutto m’ ha lasciato,

“Since love has left me utterly,” deals with leggiadria, the outward
expression of a chivalrous soul, and shows the influence of the
Tesoretto of Brunetto Latini. These two canzoni, which contain
transcripts from the Aristotelian Ethics, only here and there become
poetry. In the larger proportion of short lines in the stanza, Dante
seems feeling his way to a more popular metrical form and a freer
treatment, as well as a wider range of subject. The second has
satirical sketches of vicious or offensive types of men, with whom he
will deal more severely in the Commedia.
(e) There are certain lyrics of Dante’s which can hardly admit of an
allegorical interpretation, but are almost certainly the expression of
passionate love for real women. Most notable among these are a
group of four canzoni, known as the rime per la donna pietra, which
are characterised by a peculiar incessant playing upon the word
pietra, or “stone,” which has led to the hypothesis that they were
inspired by a lady named Pietra, or at least by one who had been as
cold and rigid as Beatrice had been the giver of blessing. The
canzone of the aspro parlare:

Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro,

“So in my speech would I be harsh, as this fair stone is in her acts,”

shows that Dante could be as terrible in his love as in his hate, and
has a suggestion of sensuality which we hardly find elsewhere in his
poetry. It is indirectly referred to in the Convivio, and quoted by
Petrarch. The other three canzoni of this “stony” group show very
strongly the influence of the Provençal Arnaut Daniel in their form,
and all their imagery is drawn from nature in winter. The sestina:

Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra,

“To the short day and the large circle of shade have I come,” is the
first Italian example of that peculiar variety of the canzone which was
invented by Arnaut (V. E., ii. 10, 13). It gives a most wonderful
picture of this strange green-robed girl, her golden hair crowned with
grass like Botticelli’s Libyan Sibyl, in the meadow “girdled about with
very lofty hills.” Less beautiful and more artificial, the canzone:
 Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna,

“Love, thou seest well that this lady cares not for thy power,” is
likewise quoted with complacency, for its novelty and metrical
peculiarity, in the De Vulgari Eloquentia (ii. 13). And the passion of
the whole group is summed up in the poem on Love and Winter:

Io son venuto al punto de la rota,

“I am come to the point of the wheel,” where, stanza by stanza, the

external phenomena of the world in winter are contrasted with the
state of the poet’s soul, ever burning in the “sweet martyrdom” of
love’s fire. It is the ultimate perfection of a species of poem
employed by Arnaut and other troubadours; another lyrical
masterpiece, anticipating in its degree the treatment of nature which
we find in the Commedia. These four poems were probably
composed shortly before Dante’s banishment, but another canzone
of somewhat similar tone was certainly written in exile—the famous
and much discussed “mountain song”:

Amor, da che convien pur ch’io mi doglia,

“Love, since I needs must make complaint,” apparently describing an

overwhelming passion for the fair lady of the Casentino; its pathetic
close, with its reference to Florence, has been already quoted. The
striking sonnet to Cino da Pistoia about the same time:

Io sono stato con Amore insieme.

“I have been in company with love since the circling of my ninth sun,”
affords further testimony that, at certain epochs of his life, earthly
love took captive Dante’s freewill.
(f) To the earlier years of Dante’s exile belongs the noblest and
most sublime of his lyrics, the canzone:

Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute,

“Three ladies are come around my heart and are seated without, for
within sits Love who is in lordship of my life.” They are Justice and
her spiritual children; Love prophesies the ultimate triumph of
righteousness, and the poet, with such high companionship in
outward misfortune, declares that he counts his exile as an honour.
While recalling the legend of the apparition of Lady Poverty and her
two companions to St. Francis of Assisi, and a poem of Giraut de
Borneil on the decay of chivalry, the canzone echoes Isaiah (ch. li.).
Its key may be found in the prophet’s words: “Hearken unto me, ye
that know Justice, the people in whose heart is my law; fear ye not
the reproach of men, neither be ye afraid of their revilings.” It was
probably written between 1303 and 1306; its opening lines have
been found transcribed in a document of 1310.[16] To about the
same epoch must be assigned the powerful canzone against vice in
general and avarice in particular:

Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire,

“Grief brings daring into my heart,” which is cited in the De Vulgari

Eloquentia (associated with another poem of Giraut de Borneil) as a
typical poem on rectitudo, “righteousness,” “the direction of the will”
(V. E. ii. 2). These two canzoni are the connecting link between the
Rime and the Commedia; the first contains the germ of Dante’s
prophecy of the Veltro, his Messianic hope of the Deliverer to come,
who shall make Love’s darts shine with new lustre and renovate the
world; in the second, we already catch the first notes of the saeva
indignatio of the sacred poem. With the exception of the “montanina
canzone” and some sonnets to Cino da Pistoia, Dante wrote few
other lyrics at this period[17]; indeed, one of the sonnets seems to
imply that he had finally turned away from such poetry (da queste
nostre rime) in contemplation of his greater task:

Io mi credea del tutto esser partito,

“I deemed myself to have utterly departed from these our rhymes,

Messer Cino, for henceforth another path befits my ship and further
from the shore.”

3. The “Convivio”
The Convivio, or “Banquet,” bears a somewhat similar relation to
the work of Dante’s second period as the Vita Nuova did to that of
his adolescence. Just as after the death of Beatrice he collected his
earlier lyrics, furnishing them with prose narrative and commentary,
so now in exile he intended to put together fourteen of his later
canzoni and write a prose commentary upon them, to the honour
and glory of his mystical lady, Philosophy. Dante was certainly not
acquainted with Plato’s Symposium. It was from the De Consolatione
Philosophiae of Boëthius that the idea came to him of representing
Philosophy as a woman; but the “woman of ful greet reverence by
semblaunt,” who “was ful of so greet age, that men ne wolde nat
trowen, in no manere, that she were of oure elde” (so Chaucer
renders Boëthius), is transformed to the likeness of a donna gentile,
the idealised human personality of the poetry of the “dolce stil
nuovo”:
“And I imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady; and I could
not imagine her in any bearing save that of compassion;
wherefore so willingly did the sense of truth look upon her,
that scarcely could I turn it from her. And from this imagining I
began to go there where she revealed herself in very sooth, to
wit, in the schools of religious and at the disputations of
 philosophers; so that in a short time, perchance of thirty
months, I began to feel so much of her sweetness, that her
love drove out and destroyed every other thought” (Conv. ii.
13).
The Convivio is an attempt to bring philosophy out of the schools
of religious and away from the disputations of philosophers, to
render her beauty accessible even, to the unlearned. “The Convivio”,
says Dr. Wicksteed, “might very well be described as an attempt to
throw into popular form the matter of the Aristotelian treatises of
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.” Dante’s text is the opening
sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to
know”; which he elaborates from the commentary of Aquinas and the
latter’s Summa contra gentiles. He would gather up the crumbs
which fall from the table where the bread of Angels is eaten, and
give a banquet to all who are deprived of this spiritual food. It is the
first important work on philosophy written in Italian—an innovation
which Dante thinks necessary to defend in the chapters of the
introductory treatise, where he explains his reasons for commenting
upon these canzoni in the vernacular instead of Latin, and
incidentally utters an impassioned defence of his mother-tongue,
with noteworthy passages on the vanity of translating poetry into
another language and the potentialities of Italian prose (Conv. i. 7,
10).
In addition to this principal motive for writing the work, the desire of
giving instruction, Dante himself alleges another—the fear of infamy,
timore d’infamia (Conv. i. 2): “I fear the infamy of having followed
such great passion as whoso reads the above-mentioned canzoni
will conceive to have held sway over me; the which infamy ceases
entirely by the present speaking of myself, which shows that not
passion, but virtue, has been the moving cause.” It would seem that
Dante intended to comment upon certain of the canzoni connected
with real women, and to represent them as allegorical; it may be that,
consumed with a more than Shelleyan passion for reforming the
world, he chose this method of getting rid of certain episodes in the
past which he, with too much self-severity, regarded as rendering
him unworthy of the sublime office he had undertaken. And, by a
work of lofty style and authority, he would rehabilitate the man who,
in his exiled wanderings, had “perchance cheapened himself more
than truth wills” (i. 4).
Only the introductory treatise and three of the commentaries were
actually written: those on the canzoni Voi cite ’ntendendo, Amor che
ne la mente mi ragiona, Le dolci rime d’amor. If the whole work had
been completed on the same scale as these four treatises, a great
part of the field of knowledge open to the fourteenth century would
have been traversed in the ardent service of this mystical lady, whom
the poet in the second treatise—not without considerable
inconsistency—represents as the same as the donna gentile who
appeared towards the end of the Vita Nuova (Conv. ii. 2). As it is, the
movements of the celestial bodies, the ministry of the angelic orders,
the nature of the human soul and the grades of psychic life, the
mystical significance and universality of love, are among the subjects
discussed in the second and third treatises. The fourth treatise is
primarily ethical: nobility as inseparable from love and virtue, wealth,
the Aristotelian definition of moral virtue and human felicity, the goal
of human life, the virtues suitable to each age, are among the
themes considered. Under one aspect the Convivio is a vernacular
encyclopaedia (like the Trésor of Brunetto Latini), but distinguished
from previous mediaeval works of the kind by its peculiar form, its
artistic beauty, and its personal note. From the first treatise it is
evident that the whole work had been fully planned; but it is not
possible to reconstruct it with any plausibility, or to decide upon the
question of which of the extant canzoni were to be included, and in
what order. From iv. 26, it may be conjectured that the passionate
canzone, Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro (Rime ciii., O. canz.
xii.), was to be allegorised in the seventh treatise; while, from i. 12, ii.
1, iv. 27, it appears fairly certain that the canzone of the three ladies,
Tre donne intorno al cor (Rime civ., O. canz. xx.), would have been
expounded in the fourteenth, where Justice and Allegory were to
have been discussed; and, from i. 8 and iii. 15, that the canzone
against the vices, Doglia mi reca (Rime cvi., O. canz. x.), was
destined for the poetical basis of the last treatise of all. It is thus clear
that the Convivio would have ended with the two canzoni which form
the connecting link between the lyrical poems and the Divina
Commedia. For the rest, it is certain that there would have been no
mention of Beatrice in any of the unwritten treatises. In touching
upon the immortality of the soul (Conv. ii. 9), Dante had seen fit to
end what he wished to say of “that living blessed Beatrice, of whom I
do not intend to speak more in this book.” There seems also good
reason for supposing that the canzone for the beautiful lady of the
Casentino (Rime cxvi., O. canz. xi.), which may be of a slightly later
date than the others, would not have formed part of the completed
work.
Witte and others after him have supposed that the Convivio
represents an alienation from Beatrice; that the Philosophy, which
Dante defines as the amorous use of wisdom, is a presumptuous
human science leading man astray from truth and felicity along the
dangerous and deceptive paths of free speculation. There is,
however, nothing in the book itself to support this interpretation,[18]
and, indeed, a comparison between the second canzone, Amor che
ne la mente mi ragiona, and the first canzone of the Vita Nuova
points to the conclusion that the personification of philosophy is but a
phase in the apotheosis of Beatrice herself. The Convivio is the first
fruit of Dante’s labours to fulfil the promise made at the end of the
book of his youth; his knowledge of literature and philosophy has
immeasurably widened, his speculations on human life and nature
have matured, and his prose style, in its comparative freedom and
variety, its articulation and passages of spontaneous eloquence,
shows a vast progress from that of the Vita Nuova.
There are passages in the Convivio which appear to be
contradicted in the Divina Commedia. One of the most curious is the
treatment of Guido da Montefeltro, who, in Conv. iv. 28, is “our most
noble Italian,” and a type of the noble soul returning to God in the
last stage of life, whereas, in the Inferno (Canto xxvii.), he is found in
the torturing flames of the evil counsellors. Several opinions are
directly or indirectly withdrawn in the Paradiso; but these are to be
rather regarded as mistakes which, in the light of subsequent
knowledge, Dante desired to rectify or repudiate; such as the theory
of the shadow on the moon being caused by rarity and density,
based upon Averroës, and a peculiar arrangement of the celestial
hierarchies, derived from the Moralia of St. Gregory the Great. And,
in the Purgatorio, the poet discards his “dread of infamy,” when he
dares not meet Beatrice’s gaze in the Garden of Eden; he casts
aside the allegorical veil he had tried to draw over a portion of the
past, and makes the full confession which we find in Cantos xxx. and
xxxi. In the fourth treatise, an erroneous sentence attributed to
Frederick II. (in reality a mutilated version of the definition of nobility
given by Aristotle in the Politics) leads Dante to examine the limits
and foundation of the imperial authority, the divine origin of Rome
and the universal dominion of the Roman people, the relation of
philosophy to government; a theme which he will work out more fully
and scientifically in the Monarchia. The result is two singularly
beautiful chapters (iv.-v.); a prose hymn to Rome, an idealised
history of the city and her empire. It is the first indication of the poet’s
conversion from the narrower political creed of the Florentine citizen
to the ideal imperialism which inspires his later works.
It has sometimes been held that portions of the Convivio were
written before exile. Nevertheless, while two of the canzoni were
composed before 1300, it seems most probable that the prose
commentaries took their present shape between Dante’s breaking
with his fellow-exiles and the advent of Henry VII. A passage
concerning Frederick II., “the last emperor of the Romans with
respect to the present time, although Rudolph and Adolph and Albert
were elected after his death and that of his descendants” (Conv. iv.
3), shows that the fourth treatise was written before the election of
Henry VII., in November 1308; while a reference to Gherardo da
Cammino, lord of Treviso (iv. 14), seems to have been written after
his death in March 1306. From the mention of Dante’s wanderings in
exile through so many regions of Italy (i. 3), it has sometimes been
argued that the first is later than the subsequent treatises. It is
tempting to associate the breaking off the work with Boccaccio’s
story of the recovery of the beginning of the Inferno. Be that as it
may, the advent of the new Caesar, Dante’s own return for a while to
political activity, probably interrupted his life of study; and, when the
storm passed away and left the poet disillusioned, his ideals had
changed, another world lay open to his gaze, and the Convivio was
finally abandoned.
 FOOTNOTES:
[10] Io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto
d’alcuna: dicer (dire) and detta, have here (as elsewhere in
Dante) the sense of artistic utterance, and more particularly
composition in poetry, whether in Latin or the vernacular. Cf. V. N.
xxv.
[11] Livi has shown that the first documentary evidence of the
existence of the Vita Nuova as a book is found at Bologna in June
1306.
[12] The Sexcentenary Dante admits as authentic one canzone
not included in this series: Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce
(Rime lxviii., O. canz. xvi.*); which is evidently an early
composition.
[13] Cf. Rime xlviii., lvi., lxiii. and the later xcix.; O. son. xlviii.*,
ball. viii., son. I.*, son. xxxvii.*
[14] Note especially Rime lix., lxvi.; O. sonnets lv., xxxviii*.
[15] To this group I would assign the sonnet, Chi guarderà già
mai sanza paura, and the ballata, I’ mi son pargoletta bella e
nova, without attaching any special significance to the fact that
“pargoletta” (“maiden” or “young girl”) occurs also in the canzone,
Io son venuto al punto de la rota, and in Beatrice’s rebuke, Purg.
xxxi. 59.
[16] Cf. G. Livi, Dante suoi primi cultori sua gente in Bologna, p.
24.
[17] Barbi adds to the Rime written in exile the impressive
political sonnet, yearning for justice and peace, Se vedi li docchi
miei di pianger vaghi (of which the attribution to Dante has
sometimes been questioned), and the sonnet on Lisetta, Per
quella via che la bellezza corre, a beautiful piece of
unquestionable authenticity, but which may, perhaps, belong to an
earlier epoch in the poet’s life.
[18] But cf. Wicksteed, From Vita Nuova to Paradiso, pp. 93-
121.
 CHAPTER III
DANTE’S LATIN WORKS
1. The “De Vulgari Eloquentia”
In the first treatise of the Convivio (i. 5), Dante announces his
intention of making a book upon Volgare Eloquenza, artistic
utterance in the vernacular. Like the Convivio, the De Vulgari
Eloquentia remains incomplete; only two books, instead of four, were
written, and of these the second is not finished. In the first book the
poet seeks the highest form of the vernacular, a perfect and imperial
Italian language, to rule in unity and concord over all the dialects, as
the Roman Empire over all the nations; in the second book he was
proceeding to show how this illustrious vulgar tongue should be used
for the art of poetry. Villani’s description of the work applies only to
the first book: “Here, in strong and ornate Latin, and with fair
reasons, he reproves all the dialects of Italy”; Boccaccio’s mainly to
the second: “A little book in Latin prose, in which he intended to give
instruction, to whoso would receive it, concerning composition in
rhyme.”[19]
Book I.—At the outset Dante strikes a slightly different note from
that of the Convivio, by boldly asserting that vernacular in general
(as the natural speech of man) is nobler than “grammar,” literary
languages like Latin or Greek, which he regards as artificially formed
(V. E. i. 1). To discover the noblest form of the Italian vernacular, the
poet starts from the very origin of language itself. To man alone of
creatures has the intercourse of speech been given: speech, the
rational and sensible sign needed for the intercommunication of
ideas. Adam and his descendants spoke Hebrew until the confusion
of Babel (cf. the totally different theory in Par. xxvi. 124), after which
this sacred speech remained only with the children of Heber (i. 2-7).
From this point onwards the work becomes amazingly modern. Of
the threefold language brought to Europe after the dispersion, the
southernmost idiom has varied into three forms of vernacular speech
—the language of those who in affirmation say oc (Spanish and
Provençal), the language of oil (French), the language of sì (Italian).
[20] And this Italian vulgar tongue has itself varied into a number of
dialects, of which Dante distinguishes fourteen groups, none of
which represent the illustrious Italian language which he is seeking.
“He attacks,” wrote Mazzini, “all the Italian dialects, but it is because
he intends to found a language common to all Italy, to create a form
worthy of representing the national idea.” The Roman is worst of all
(i. 11). A certain ideal language was indeed employed by the poets
at the Sicilian court of Frederick and Manfred, but it was not the
Sicilian dialect (i. 12). The Tuscans speak a degraded vernacular,
although Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni and another Florentine
(Dante himself), and Cino da Pistoia have recognised the excellence
of the ideal vulgar tongue (i. 13). Bologna alone has a “locution
tempered to a laudable suavity”; but which, nevertheless, cannot be
the ideal language, or Guido Guinizelli and other Bolognese poets
would not have written their poems in a form of speech quite
different from the special dialect of their city (i. 15). “The illustrious,
cardinal, courtly, and curial vulgar tongue in Italy is that which
belongs to every Italian city, and yet seems to belong to none, and
by which all the local dialects of the Italians are measured, weighed,
and compared” (i. 16). This is that ideal Italian which has been
artistically developed by Cino and his friend (Dante himself) in their
canzoni, and which makes its familiars so glorious that “in the
sweetness of this glory we cast our exile behind our back” (V. E. i.
17). Such should be the language of the imperial Italian court of
justice, and, although as far as Italy is concerned there is no prince,
and that court is scattered in body, its members are united by the
gracious light of reason (i. 18). This standard language belongs to
the whole of Italy, and is called the Italian vernacular (latinum
vulgare); “for this has been used by the illustrious writers who have
written poetry in the vernacular throughout Italy, as Sicilians,
Apulians, Tuscans, natives of Romagna, and men of both the
Marches” (i. 19).