ARISTOTLE AND THE REHABILITATION OF HOMONYMY

Abstract

This text is an authorial presentation of Marco Zingano’s Aristotle and the Rehabilitation of Homonymy: A Metaphysical Journey Through Words and Things (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2025), prepared at the request of Aristotelica. It aims to introduce the scope, structure, and main lines of argument of the book, in order to situate it within current research on Aristotle’s metaphysics and related areas. The book offers a systematic investigation of Aristotle’s notion of homonymy, arguing that it plays a central and constructive role in his metaphysics, ethics, and natural philosophy. For Aristotle, homonymy does not merely signal conceptual confusion or linguistic ambiguity; quite the opposite, Aristotle develops a sophisticated account of homonymous notions to address a fundamental philosophical difficulty: the absence of generic unity in the most basic domains of scientific inquiry. The study argues that Aristotle’s response to this problem consists in a progressive ‘rehabilitation’ of homonymy, under the pattern of what the book calls attenuated homonymy: a form of homonymy mitigated by definitional overlap, which allows for conceptual unity without recourse to the genus-species model. Contrary to a widespread position on this issue, which ultimately rests on Alexander’s interpretation of focal meaning as the only intermediary between pure homonymy and total synonymy, the book’s central claim is that Aristotle employs a plurality of non-generic unifying devices, each suited to a different philosophical context. These include hierarchical forms of unity (such as focal meaning, serial order, and subordination), but also non-hierarchical forms (analogy and resemblance). Overall, the book contends that attenuated homonymy is not only compatible with scientific discourse but is, in certain domains, indispensable to it, at least as Aristotle conceives of it.