This type of formal philosophy is a little above my pay grade. Most of the logic and technical terms I had to push through to get even a sliver of understanding. Nonetheless, since this is a short book and Kimhi is seen as such an influential contemporary philosopher, I tried to slog on. It helps that Kimhi grounds his thoughts in philosophical history, particularly the logic of Aristotle and the dialogues of Plato. Kimhi also uses Frege as a foil. Or better put perhaps, this book seems to be an attempt to show that Frege and his disciples’ conception of philosophy is completely wrong. Of the modern philosophers, Kimhi most often builds upon the foundations laid down by Wittgenstein to assert his own conceptions of the nature of being and thinking.
Kimhi begins by asserting that Parmenides’ poem “On Nature” is the first work of philosophy, “where this is to be understood as the logical study of thinking and what is (being)…. Philosophical logic, so understood, is a first-personal engagement from within the activity of thinking.” Much of Kimhi’s work deals with differences (and similarities) between judgment and truth. “The transition from a judgment to a truth-assessment of that judgment is not based on a recognition of any new fact. A proper philosophical account of this matter must allow us to say that the assessment of one’s judgment as true is internal to the very act of judging…. The overarching unity internal to any judgment is its compossibility with other judgements in a single consciousness…. Here, thinking, in the first instance, means judging or asserting that such-and-such is the case, or that such-and-such is not the case…. A major concern of this book is the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge—or even denied—the uniqueness of thinking in philosophy…. In coming to appreciate this difference between thinking and acting, we are able to detect the logical uniqueness of thinking.”
One of the differences that Kimhi keeps going back to is between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions. “A categorematic expression can be a component of a predicative proposition, whereas a syncategorematic expression cannot be a component of a predicative proposition. The basic syncategorematic expressions are predicative propositions themselves…. The difference between “p” and “I think p” (and hence the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness) is syncategorematic—and so too is the difference between p and not-p.” To put it another way, the basic difference between categorematic and syncategorematic expressions “can be described simply as the difference between expressions that can and cannot be functionally embedded as part of a larger significant expression…. Among the candidates for being classed as syncategorematic are logical connectives such as … and__, and …. or__, expressions of propositional attitudes such as … believes__, and truth-value predicates such as … is true and … is false. We can describe these expressions as propositional connectors, since they govern propositions that have other propositions as their subclauses…. A predicative proposition is a categorematic unit if something can be predicated of it, or if it can be predicated of something—in other words, if it can stand as a subject or a predicate in a proposition. A proposition is a syncategorematic unit if it cannot play a categorematic role, namely, if it cannot occur within a predicative proposition.”
Kimhi agrees with Aristotle’s conception of the nature of being. Kimhi asserts, “Aristotle singles out simple propositions as revealing something. In other words, only simple propositions are representations. They alone say—or display the judgment—that something is (or is not) the case. They alone reveal a being…. For Aristotle, the predicative form displays the assertoric act of predication, which he associates with the verb. Accordingly, in traditional Aristotelian logic, the verb (i.e. the predicate) in a simple proposition is marked as the locus of predication and thus the locus of assertoric force.” Finally circling back again to the nature of being, Kimhi, adds “the syncategorematic sense of being as being-true, and non-being as being false, is in fact the dominant sense.”
Kimhi ends his work by discussing the Stranger’s conversation with Theaetetus in Plato’s “Sophist”. Kimhi quotes the Stranger directly, “Whenever we speak of not being (so it seems), we don’t speak of something contrary to being, but only different…. So, when it is said that a negative signifies a contrary, we shan’t agree, but we’ll allow only this much—the prefixed word “not” indicates something different than the words following the negative, or rather, different than the things which the words uttered after the negative apply to.” Kimhi expounds, “the negation of a predicative proposition negates the predicate, i.e., the verb. The mistake that the Stranger identifies is that of supposing that the addition of “not” to a predicate yields an expression for the contrary of what is meant by the original predicate…. The negation sign, according to Plato, is attached to a predicate and thereby makes a new complete phrase, i.e., the Stranger emphasizes that the negated expression is one verb.” Plato also uses the term “Otherness”. Kimhi states, “the use of “Otherness” reveals that a particular X and not-X are not opposed as a pair of contraries…. The not-X is rather a construct, derived from the “X”.”
Kimhi goes on to contrast the two notions in “Sophist” of “the place of activity within being” of the Gigantomachia, the materialists, and the immaterialists, the friends of the forms. Kimhi states, “the exclusion of activity from being, and thus from knowledge, renders knowledge unintelligible…. Soul, knowledge, and form must be associated with a certain notion of activity in a way that will allow us to understand forms as immanent to the soul’s activity, rather than external to it…. The notion of a syncategorematic form allows philosophers to hold onto that which is—being—in both ways, as “both unchanging and that which changes.”” Finally, Kimhi asserts, “to recognize the validity of the syllogisms of thinking and being, we must come to see that the very same proposition occurs both when it is negated and when it is ascribed as a judgment: namely, in not-p and in A judges that p. This perspective is attained by combining the lessons of partition of knowledge and the partition of Otherness.”
Kimhi concludes his work with a lengthy statement worth quoting at length, “quietism does not seek to reduce not-being to being through an analysis of negation and truth- and falsity conditions, or to show that the point of view from which the use of negation appears unintelligible rests merely on a confusion about the actual use of words. Instead, the quietist seeks to render the unity of thinking and being (and non-being) self-evident by attaining clarity concerning the way logical unity is revealed through the occurrence of propositions or predicates inside and outside negations and other logical contexts…. Metaphysics—correctly understood—is quietism, by learning from within quietism, how to read the “meta-” of the “metaphysics.” The lesson of quietism is that “meta-” does not point toward a science that comes “after” physics, nor does it point toward supernatural entities such as divine substances, or a region of facts that lie “beyond” or “over and above” nature. Instead, we can conclude from quietism that the “meta-” is the beyond of the syncategorematic relative to the categorematic; in particular, it is the syncategorematic unity of simple contradictory pairs, the unity of determination and the nothing (or Otherness) of determination, which dominates the positive members of the pair. The philosophical logic that removes the Parmenidean puzzles and renders apparent the truistic unity of thinking and being must therefore be, in this sense, metaphysical.”
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