ethical decisions are not wholly based on reason.

Finally, he distinguishes ethical knowledge from legal, psychological

and sociological knowledge, and argues that in ethics one may often claim
the right to be sure that one’s judgments are correct; so one may speak of
knowledge, though this is not to be assimilated too closely to (e.g.)
empirical knowledge.
This is a stimulating and original book, and the discussion of the role
of experience in ethics is specially valuable. But Kupperman vacillates
between saying that ethical knowledge has no objects (is not about any-
thing) and that it is sometimes verifiable (which implies that it is quasi-
naturalistic, giving knowledge of objects, seen in a certain light). If one
speaks of judgments as correct, there must be something which makes them
correct. In ‘knowing-how’, this may be the end one is pursuing in one’s
activity; in mathematics, one may say it is the fundamental rules of
procedure, or possibly some principle of thought, a principle to which
thinking should conform. Is ethical knowledge about such ends or
principles, about objects, or what? It seems to me that it is necessary to ask
‘what is knowledge about?’, though different sorts of answer may be
possible to the question. Moreover, some explanation of how and why
‘moral outlooks’ differ is desirable, together with some explanation of why
most of them are presumably committed to incorrect ethical judgments.
I suspect that if one distinguishes those facts which are outlook-neutral
(physical facts) from those which are not (so as to allow for different
people evaluating the ‘same’ facts differently), the old ‘natural/non-natural’
distinction will recur in different dress. At any rate, without some comple-
ment of ontology, preposterous or not, any account of ethical knowledge
remains incomplete. But Professor Kupperman has still written a very
worth-while book.
KEITH WARD

LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS I N ARISTOTLE by Walter Leszl.

Padva : Editrice Antenore, 1970. xvif601 pp. L.g.000.

Most students of Aristotle today agree that he recognised at least four kinds
of case in which the same expression is applied to a number of different
things. These are the cases of (i) synonymity, where the things have a
common nature or accord with a single idea, (ii) focal meaning, where the
things are all related in different ways to some single thing, (iii) analogy,
where the things are related in a single way to different things, (iv) chance
homonymity, where there is no rational ground for using the same
expression. Mr Leszl’s book deals with Aristotle’s view of the second and
third cases. Its title echoes that of a paper by Prof. G. E. L. Owen
(Aristotle and Pluto in the mid-fourth century, edd. I. During and G. E. L.

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Owen, pp. 163 - I~o),and a great deal of it is philippic against Owen
which is not free of that repetitiveness to which philippics are liable; but
Leszl also criticises other scholars, such as H. Cherniss, J. Hintikka, J.
Owens and G. Reale, at considerable length.
According to Owen, Aristotle asserts in Metaphysicsr, after denying in
Eudemian Ethics I, the possibility of a universal science of being, because
between composing the two works he recognised that ‘being’ has focal
meaning, that all things called onlu (beings) are so called because they
either are or are related in various ways to substances, and hence that
statements about non-substances can be reduced to statements about
substances. If this account were correct, Leszl argues, Aristotle must have
regarded focal meaning as a special case of synonymity. But the thesis that
things are called ontu synonymously (which in Leszl’s hands becomes a
form of monism) is untenable in itself and explicitly rejected by Aristotle.
Here the reader may agree but wonder if Owen would wish to defend the
monistic interpretation Leszl tries to father on him: Owen may suggest it
by colourful obiter dicta but hardly advances it in a formal way.
Leszl’s positive account rests on the ideas that for Aristotle words
other than proper names and syncategorematic terms have meaning in
isolation and designate or signify essences; that they are used synonymously
or univocally insofar as they signify the same essence, homonymously or
equivocally if in different applications they signify different essences; and
that there is no tertium quid. He argues for these ideas in the first two
parts of the book, but not too convincingly. He dismisses in a single para-
graph (pp. 118 - 9) the suggestion that the recognition of focal meaning
and analogy involves a departure from the semantic assumptions he has
described. Yet that seems the natural view to take. To recognise that e.g.
pinkness in the cheeks is called healthy because it is a sign of health is
surely to recognise that it is inappropriate to ask what essence ‘healthy’
designates when applied to the colour of someone’s cheeks: if we ask
anything it should be what essence the colour is supposed to be a sign of.
Similarly to recognise that A is called the cause or the matter of B because
it stands to B as something else to something else is to recognise that the
expressions ‘cause’ and ‘matter’ do not designate essences at all.
Proceeding, however, to focal meaning, Leszl claims that the word
‘medical’, which Aristotle says is applied to an instrument when the
instrument is one a doctor might use, designates, when applied to an
instrument, features or an ‘essence’ which the instrument has in itself,
independently of anything else, but which may be defined not only per
genus et diflerentiam but also in functional or relational terms, sc. as
features which render it serviceable to doctors. I am inclined to suspect
that underlying this unattractive account is some such piece of reasoning
as the following. ‘Medical’ as applied to a knife means ‘handy for doctors’;
a knife is handy for doctors if it is short-bladed; so ‘medical’ as applied to
knives means ‘short-bladed’.
 Leszl gives a similar account of the application of ‘man’ to pictures
and corpses, a use which he thinks with Owen, (though not, it appears, with
Aristotle), exemplifies focal meaning, and of ‘being’ in its predicative use,
which, again following Owen, he wants to distinguish both from its copula-
tive and from its existential use. Holding that the categories are summa
genera and that items in all of them have essences, he is able to say ‘is’
applied e.g. to the colour black signifies its essence which, since it is that
of a quality, is that of something in fact dependent on a substance (see,
e.g. p. 309). The general conclusion is that calling qualities and substances
onta is no less an equivocation than calling numbers and parts of plants
roots, but in the one case the equivocation is intentional while in the other
it is an accident of language.
As for analogy, Leszl hold that this too has been wrongly taken by
commentators as a case of synonymity. In fact it is a form of metaphor and
hence a case of homonymity. Expressions like ‘matter’ and ‘form’ have a
‘normal or primary’ application to substances (p. 314)~and are applied
to non-substances metaphorically. T o the important question whether they
are applied synonymously to substances Leszl gives no answer. It is
awkward to claim that hylC (matter) is applied synonymously to wood and
metaphorically to other materials, and Leszl might prefer to say it is used
synonymously. He says, at least, that if such terms are defined simply by
means of the relationship on which the analogy is based they are used
synonymously (pp. 323 - 6). The trouble here is that, as Aristotle says
(Metaphysics 8 1048~ 35 - 7), the relationships are indefinable and have to
be gathered from the cases which exemplify them.
Leszl writes for the philosopher as well as for the scholar, and tries to
defend not only the Aristotelian authenticity but also the philosophical
soundness of the accounts he proposes. It is not clear that he has the
technical expertise for this latter task. He is often careless or arbitrary and
sometimes wild. Thus he says that ‘imaginary men. . . are whatever objects
one may imagine to be men. They are, say, trees.’ It is hard to see how
Mr Pickwick could be a tree.
English is not Leszl’s first language but apart from some barbarisms
he writes it well. Only one sentence (p. 436 ll. 3 - 11) is hopelessly
incoherent. A number of single letters are misprinted and the order of
ll. 33 - 4 on p. 415 should be reversed. The references which I checked
were all accurate. There are full indices to passages discussed, Greek
expressions, subjects and persons.
W. CHARLTON

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