Kitap 4
8
and further if the substance of each thing is one in no accidental sense, and similarly is of its very nature something which is—then there are just as many species of Being as of Unity. And to study the essence of these species (I mean, e.g., the study of Same and Other and all the other similar concepts—
9
roughly speaking all the contraries are reducible to this first principle; but we may consider that they have been sufficiently studied in the Selection of ContrariesIt is uncertain to what treatise Aristotle refers; in any case it is not extant.) is the province of a science which is generically one.
9
And there are just as many divisions of philosophy as there are kinds of substance; so that there must be among them a First Philosophy and one which follows upon it.
10
For Being and Unity at once entail genera, and so the sciences will correspond to these genera. The term philosopher is like the term mathematician in its uses; for mathematics too has divisions—there is a primary and a secondary science, and others successively, in the realm of mathematics.
11
Now since it is the province of one science to study opposites, and the opposite of unity is plurality, and it is the province of one science to study the negation and privation of Unity, because in both cases we are studying Unity, to which the negation (or privation) refers, stated either in the simple form that Unity is not present, or in the form that it is not present in a particular class; in the latter case Unity is modified by the differentia, apart from the content of the negation (for the negation of Unity is its absence); but in privation there is a substrate of which the privation is predicated.—
