Revisiting Aristotle's Noun

The Philosopher, Volume 101 No. 1

Centenary Conference Special Edition 1913-2012

by Thomas O. Scarborough 

 

---

What is a noun? This has been the subject of intense study and debate since the ancient Greeks. In a sense, the answer is simple. A noun, it is said, is a word that names a person, place, or thing - a king, for instance, or a town, or an amulet. But then, what should one do with nouns that signify events or ideas - a dance, for instance, or an ideology? The question becomes increasingly complex - and so it is said that perhaps rather, a noun is something that a sentence, in a special way, cannot do without - which is to say, one focuses on syntax or morphology.

Yet there is a problem with these kinds of answer. Such approaches look at the noun's place in various classifications, its role in various structures - and though they may do this in great detail sometimes, still the essence of the noun would seem to remain largely opaque. One might say, metaphorically, that one has examined how the atom (the noun) binds to form molecules, yet one has not much peered inside the atom.

Far from being a trivial consideration, the question as to what a noun is may hold within it many secrets of our common life today - to the extent of defining the social construction of modern life. The answer to the question 'What is a noun?' may include within it the key to understanding semantic change, the variability of grammars, the problem of meaning, the fact-value gap. In fact, considerably more.

But let us begin at the beginning - with the noun.

In modern times, one has sought to understand the noun in static terms - in atomic, mechanical, structural terms. The textbooks typically speak of components, categories, features, elements, constituents, properties, units. The various metaphors, too, which have been applied to the noun in itself, have tended to be static: a capsule, a package, a chess piece, a unit of currency - items which in themselves are invariant. Yet this modern conception of the noun is not the same as the ancient one. The ancient Greeks viewed the noun quite differently. They viewed it as something dynamic - organic, synthetic, relational.

It was Socrates who first suggested that the noun may hide important secrets within. In Plato's Cratylus, a noun (example: anthropos, or 'human being') may represent a sentence While Socrates' train of thought seems whimsical, the seed is planted: It was once a sentence, and is now a noun. Here we find the tantalising suggestion that a noun may serve as a kind of wrapper for all that a sentence contains. Further, in Plato, a noun is seen to be something which 'distinguishes things according to their natures'. Yet what are their natures? Such fleeting suggestions foreshadow Aristotle, who, in his Metaphysics, further explores these notions.