Aristotle

Aristotle says, in effect, that humanity (mankind) it's not "present" in a person because one person does not contain humanity. That is to say the existence of humanity is possible separate from a single individual. A colloquial interpreter would claim that this excludes the individual from participation in the class of humanity. This is the sort of quibbling that brought about the entire realism versus nominalism debate of scholasticism. Yet, in Aristotle's case it was not so much quibbling as putting some sort of brake on Platonic other-worldliness. So then mankind is predicated of the subject this man. This would seem to be a much better example of a statement wherein the predicate is contained within the subject than the statement "sugar is

sweet" or the object of football is to score goals. In respect to the possibility of a priori synthetic judgments, we may be doing no more than treating words and concepts as shuttlecocks in a semantic game of badminton. The question remains whether, when we design a conceptual construct for the purposes of theory, are we ever doing anything else. From the categories of Aristotle, "Now the same relation which subsists between primary substance and everything else subsists also between the species and the genus: for the species is to the genus as the subject is to the predicate, since the genus is predicated of the species, whereas the species cannot be predicated of the genus.” First: primary substance, is this the ontological predicate? Is being a being or is being a thing? Is existence a phenomenon or are phenomena an aspect of existence? or merely its image? Which subject and which predicts which is object or, if you will, which is genus & which species? If the species cannot be predicated from the genus, where does that leave Natural Theology? Is God not present in creation because creation does not contain God? The existence of God is possible separate from creation. Creation is excluded from Divinity.