Introduction

The previous chapter shows that core-related homonymy presupposes a theoretical framework that is well established by the time of its appearance in Meta. Gamma 2. Two main examples of systematic homonymy, namely, the medical and the healthy, serve as bases in Gamma 2 for Aristotle's most philosophically challenging claim, that being itself is homonymous. The present chapter aims to elucidate this claim and, more broadly, to investigate the kind of analysis that homonymy implies. As I have developed the argument in chapter 3, systematic homonymy can function as a method of inquiry enabling us to move beyond the rudimentary stage of detecting multivocity to the stage of clarifying the causal relations holding among homonymous things. Considered as a formal procedure, the method consists in three sequential steps: first, we establish a lack of synonymy of the common predicate, then we demonstrate the association among its uses, and finally, we exhibit the interrelations between the primary, or core, instance and the secondary instances. At the last stage, the homonymous predicate must display the kinds of causal relationships between the primary and secondary instances that have been discussed in chapter 3.

It should be pointed out that whereas the method of core-dependent homonymy may be analyzed in abstraction as consisting in a three-step procedure, the exemplary cases of core-dependent attributes that Aristotle observes, such as the medical or the healthy, do not reflect this ordered sequence.