PLATO’S EARLIER THEORY OF FORMS
things cannot itself be one thing among many: ‘Things that are
individual and numerically one are, without exception, not said of
any subject.’
Numerical distinctness, however, is a necessary but not a suffi-
cient condition for separation. At Categories, 1a, 24-25, Aristotle
remarks that ‘By “in a subject” I mean what is in something, not as
a part, and cannot exist separately (ywptc) from what it is in’. This
text, along with Aristotle’s subsequent remark that ‘Nothing
prevents [what is individual and one in number] from being
present in a subject’ (1b 7-8), suggests that separation implies
existential independence as well as numerical distinctness. This
independence must be construed as distributive, not collective;
for by ‘in a subject’ Aristotle means, not merely ‘cannot exist
apart from some subject’, but ‘cannot exist apart from the par-
ticular subject it is in’. In claiming that the Ideas are separate,
then, Aristotle means that they are individuals, and that they exist
independently of any given instances.* Since the existence of the
Idea is a condition for the existence of its instances, separation, so
defined, involves an asymmetrical relationship, that of ontological
priority :+
Some things are called prior and posterior... in respect of nature
and substance, i.e. those which can be without other things, while
1 Categories, tb, 6-7, trans, Ackrill.
* See. J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle's Categories and De Interpretatione, pp. 73-4. Professor
Owen has recently questioned this interpretation (Phronesis, X (1965, PP. 97-105),
but at the cost of collapsing the distinction between presence and predicability which
1a, 24-5, is meant to help explain; it is as true of what is said of a subject as it is of
what is in a subject that it cannot exist apart from some subject. What is not true is
that it cannot exist apart from this subject.
* Thus W. F. R. Hardic’s claim (A Study in Plato, p. 73) that “To say that a form is
“separate” is to say that there can be a form without there being particulars to
exemplify it’ is a mistaken account of Aristotle’s meaning. It further mistakes Plato,
since the evidence cited to show that this was Plato’s view is drawn, not from texts
implying lack of exemplification, but deficiency of exemplification. Plato may well.
ught, as a matter of economy \¢ universe, that the ¢3
has been cited as evidence for empty essences; it is in fact evidence that essences
such as justice are only deficiently realized, Sce also Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, Il,
92, by-12, Metaphysics, VII, 10310, 12 f.
* Metaphysics, V, 10192, 1 ff.
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Contemporary Hypnosis Volume 26 Issue 2 2009 (Doi 10.1002 - ch.378) Steven Jay Lynn Sean O'Hagen - The Sociocognitive and Conditioning and Inhibition Theories of Hypnosis