Free The Basic Works of Aristotle (Modern Library Classics) by Richard Mckeon Page A

are relative only in virtue of their genera; thus grammar is said to be the
knowledge
of something, not the grammar of something; similarly music is the
knowledge
of something, not the music of something.
    Thus individual branches of knowledge are not relative. And it is because we possess these individual branches of knowledge that we are said to be such and such. It is these that we actually possess: we are called experts because we possess knowledge in some particular branch. (35) Those particular branches, therefore, of knowledge, in virtue of which we are sometimes said to be such and such, are themselves qualities, and are not relative. Further, if anything should happen to fall within both the category of quality and that of relation, there would be nothing extraordinary in classing it under both these heads.
    9       [11b] Action and affection both admit of contraries and also of variation of degree. Heating is the contrary of cooling, being heated of being cooled, being glad of being vexed. Thus they admit of contraries. (5) They also admit of variation of degree: for it is possible to heat in a greater or less degree; also to be heated in a greater or less degree. Thus action and affection also admit of variation of degree. So much, then, is stated with regard to these categories.
    We spoke, moreover, of the category of position when we were dealing with that of relation, and stated that such terms derived their names from those of the corresponding attitudes.
    As for the rest, (10) time, place, state, since they are easily intelligible, I say no more about them than was said at the beginning, that in the category of state are included such states as ‘shod’, ‘armed’, in that of place ‘in the Lyceum’ and so on, as was explained before.
    10      The proposed categories have, (15) then, been adequately dealt with.
    We must next explain the various senses in which the term ‘opposite’ is used. Things are said to be opposed in four senses: (i) as correlatives to one another, (ii) as contraries to one another, (iii) as privatives to positives, (iv) as affirmatives to negatives.
    Let me sketch my meaning in outline. An instance of the use ofthe word ‘opposite’ with reference to correlatives is afforded by the expressions ‘double’ and ‘half’; with reference to contraries by ‘bad’ and ‘good’. (20) Opposites in the sense of ‘privatives’ and ‘positives’ are ‘blindness’ and ‘sight’; in the sense of affirmatives and negatives, the propositions ‘he sits’, ‘he does not sit’.
    (i) Pairs of opposites which fall under the category of relation are explained by a reference of the one to the other, the reference being indicated by the preposition ‘of’ or by some other preposition. (25) Thus, double is a relative term, for that which is double is explained as the double
of something.
Knowledge, again, is the opposite of the thing known, in the same sense; and the thing known also is explained by its relation to its opposite, (30) knowledge. For the thing known is explained as that which is known
by something;
that is, by knowledge. Such things, then, as are opposite the one to the other in the sense of being correlatives are explained by a reference of the one to the other.
    (ii) Pairs of opposites which are contraries are not in any way interdependent, but are contrary the one to the other. The good is not spoken of as the good
of the bad,
but as
the contrary of the bad,
(35) nor is white spoken of as the white
of the black,
but as
the contrary of the black.
These two types of opposition are therefore distinct. [12a] Those contraries which are such that the subjects in which they are naturally present, or of which they are predicated, must necessarily contain either the one or the other of them, have no intermediate, but those in the case of which no such necessity obtains, always have an intermediate. Thus disease and health are naturally present in the body of an