國立臺灣大學哲學論評

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The criticism of Plato most often leveled by Aristotle against Plato is that his philosophy is oversimplified. On his view, Plato shares the Socratic assumption about words and definitions. When asked “What is F?” (justice, courage, etc.), Socrates thinks that a single definition can always be found. However, Aristotle claims that some of the crucial words and concepts in his philosophy, such as “being,” “goodness,” “justice,” and “friendship,” are homonymous or multivocal (said in many ways). In his eyes, therefore, Plato oversimplifies the issue: Plato mistakenly ignores homonymy and simply supposes that the same word is always said in the same way. Put briefly, the Platonic accounts of “being, ” “goodness, ” and “justice” should be rejected because homonymy and multivocity are ignored.
However, Ch. Shields holds that two of the crucial concepts of the Aristotelian philosophy – “being” and “goodness” – cannot be shown to be homonymous; although Aristotle often issues special warnings against the homonymy of “being” and “goodness, ” all of his arguments fail. Shields claims that there is no defensible Aristotelian doctrine about the homonymy of “being” because this doctrine is false; he also thinks that the homonymy of * Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Soochow University. “goodness” cannot be established because it is inferred from the problematical doctrine of the homonymy of “being”. In this article, I shall show that Shields’ critiques of Aristotle’s arguments for the homonymy of “being” and “goodness” do not succeed. In this way, I shall reconstruct the basic framework of Aristotle’s attempt to establish the homonymy of “being” and “goodness”.