By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
I should say, using my terms, that the question Aristotle addresses in his metaphysics is, What is the concrete as concrete? Or what is meant, properly, by the abstraction "concreteness"?
Of course, this is to use "concrete" (as well as "concreteness") as I use it, and this means, as Aristotle himself uses οúσíα—namely, to refer to "a complete fact," to what, as he says, requires nothing but itself in order to exist, and what everything else requires in order to exist.
Aristotle's answer to his question is, The concrete in the sense of "a complete fact" is a substance, or, as I would translate, "an individual." My answer, on the contrary, is, The concrete in the sense of "a complete fact" is not a substance, or an individual, but an event.
12 May 2009; rev. 15 October 2009
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