Genus, species and ordered series in Aristotle

Abstract

A RiSrOThE claims that when objects have an order of priority their common predicate or universal is not something apart from them. It will be convenient from time to time to refer to such objects as terms, for they are terms of an ordered series; and for a similar convenience the groups containing them will be called P-series. Aristotle's claim is expressly used as the premiss of more than one argument in his works; and the Neoplatonists made very interesting comments on it. I wish to ask and to suggest an answer to the questions what Aristotle meant by it and why he made it. The matter was expounded some fifty years ago by Cook Wilson, not for the first time but in a way of his own which has been repeated (among others) by Sir David Ross., Their interpretation is, I feel sure, quite misleading and I believe it to be just wrong. Apart from that there are more questions to be asked about the Aristotelian passages than it was Cook Wilson's purpose to ask and perhaps more than he recognised. Thirdly the ancient commentators' arguments, which he ignored, are both to the point and worth considering for their own development of Aristotelianism. Some of them are echoed in the criticisms of modern idealists. These arguments are concerned with the logical relationship of species to genus. I shall try to shew that Aristotle's thesis about P-series raises the crucial problem how an is to be distinguished fronm any apparently defining characteristic; and to solve this is to discover how the relation of a species like man or dog to the genus animal differs from the relation of a quasi-species like male or female. This last problem occupies the last part of this article, and one or two remarks about the method of dealing with it are best made before we come to it. I shall suggest that classification in genera and species (which I sometimes call division, without implying dichotomy) is primarily concerned with material substances, that for a certain differentia to be appropriate or not is for certain steps to belong or not to belong to a certain causal process, and that the type of cause which is relevant is the

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