barnes kahn essays on being

Essays on Being, by Charles H. Kahn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Pp. 227. H/b £30.

A subtitle might have read: ‘Some uses of the verb ‘einai’ and their pertin-

ence to early Greek philosophy’. For of the eight papers which make up the

volume, four are general in nature and give what Kahn calls his ‘theoretical

account of einai ’, and four are exegetical, discussing bits of Parmenides and

of Plato. Taken together, they do not make a consistent whole (for they were

written over a period of some forty years, and Kahn has more than once

modified his views); but they do make a coherent book — a book which

complements Kahn’s The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek.

The chief thrust of the work may perhaps be described like this. First, the

verb ‘einai’ had a multitude of values or functions — it is a mistake to invoke

‘the copula–existence dichotomy’ and a simple ambiguity. Secondly, the dif-

ferent values of the verb are mutually dependent, and they fit together to

produce a network or system. Thirdly, it was those linguistic facts about the

verb ‘einai’ which enabled Parmenides to construct and Plato to perfect a

certain concept of Being — and which therefore ‘permitted the metaphysicians

to state the problem of truth and reality in its most general form’ (p. 37).

Fourthly, if the problem of truth and reality ‘is a question worth asking, then

the ontological vocabulary of the Greeks, which permitted and encouraged

them to ask it, must be regarded as a distinct philosophical asset’ (ibid.).

How many values or functions does ‘einai’ possess? Perhaps eight or nine: it

is copulative, existential, veridical, stative-durative, locative, instantiational,

identificational, potential — and then there is the ‘is of whatness’. The func-

tions are not all on the same level: the first three in my list are the most

important; and since the existential and the veridical functions may be re-

garded as ‘transformations’ (in the technical jargon of the linguisticians) of the

copulative function (pp. 137–40), the primary or fundamental use, linguistic-

ally speaking, of the verb ‘einai’ is that of linking a subject to a predicate in a

simple sentence of the form ‘S e1 stin P’. Kahn at one point suggests that ‘the

copula is a strictly syntactic notion’ (p. 122); but in his considered judgement

the copulative ‘einai’ does have a sense. For ‘the basic meaning of the verb is

‘to be present, to be available’ (p. 136; cf p. 134), and in the copula there is ‘a

kind of shadow of the local sense in what linguists recognize as the stative

aspect of einai ’ (p. 135). So Kahn will speak of ‘the fundamental lexical value

of einai as a verb of state or station’ (p. 135): it is not just that ‘einai’ links a

subject and a predicate — it marks a state of affairs, rather than a process

(which might, I suppose, be marked by the copulative function of ‘gi#gnesuai’

or ‘become’). In addition — though Kahn does not discuss the matter — the

copulative ‘einai’ is tensed, and tenses sometimes signify times.

If the copulative function of ‘einai’ is linguistically central, philosophically

speaking ‘the decisive use of the verb in the creation of Greek ontology

is … the veridical use’ (p. 67). Or rather, ‘these three features — which I

Mind, Vol. 119 . 475 . July 2010 � Mind Association 2010

Book Reviews 811

at Rijksuniversiteit G

roningen on June 5, 2011m

ind.oxfordjournals.orgD

ownloaded from

http://mind.oxfordjournals.org/

call the veridical, the durative, and the locative (or locative-existential) values

of einai — although they do not directly account for every particular usage of

the verb, seem to point to what is most fundamental for its use in philosophy’

(p. 34). At one point indeed, Kahn was inclined to make the veridical value

linguistically fundamental too; for ‘both predication (with a copula use of ‘to

be’) and statements of existence (with an existential use of the verb) may be

regarded as special cases of the more general and more fundamental use of ‘to

be’ to express the content of a truth claim as such: the so-called veridical use to

affirm a propositional content or an objective state of affairs’ (p. 68). Or more

simply, ‘the veridical e1 sti# ’ may ‘be understood as a conjunction of ‘X exists’

and ‘X is F ’, for unspecified values of X and F ’ (p. 86, n. 18) — something

which ‘anticipates in a rather striking way the contemporary standpoint

which … takes the notion of truth for sentences as basic in any theory of mean-

ing and knowledge’ (pp. 73–4 — with references to Tarski and to Davidson).

However that may be, the veridical value is derived from something Kahn

calls ‘the veridical construction’. In its full form (p. 75, n. 1), the construction

may be illustrated by the sentence:

e!sti tay' ta oy2 tv o2 pv§ sy; le#gei§ tay' ta einai

Roughly:

These things are thus as you say that these things are

(‘Things are as you say they are.’) That gets abbreviated to

e!sti tay' ta oy2 tv o2 pv§ sy; le#gei§

(‘Things are as you say.’) And from that, with further abbreviation (see

p. 170), there comes the canonically veridical formula

e!sti tay' ta

— in which we may take the ‘e!sti’ to mean ‘is so’, ‘is the case’, or ‘is true’.

(‘That’s so’, ‘That’s true’.)

Kahn says that the veridical ‘einai’ is ‘statistically rather rare’ (p. 123); but

he also holds that all uses of ‘einai’ are in a way veridical. Aristotle had said

that ‘einai’ sometimes means ‘is true’. His illustrative example was not ‘e!sti

tay' ta’ but rather

e1 sti �vkra#th§ leyko#§

— ‘Socrates is pale’. (See Metaphysics � 7, 1017a31–5; cf. E 4 and � 10, where

however there are no examples.) And in Aristotelian vein, Kahn claims that

‘this sense of verity is actually implicit in every assertion, latent in every

predicative use of “to be” for a statement of fact’ (p. 26), so that ‘even

where the syntax is unambiguous, a copula use of the verb may bear a veri-

dical value’ (p. 76). To be sure, there is a truth claim implicit in every

declarative sentence, whatever its main verb may be; but the verb ‘einai’ is

‘a privileged signal’ for the truth claim (p. 77). So although the veridical

construction of ‘einai’ is rare, the veridical value of the verb is ubiquitous.


812 Book Reviews




ownloaded from


I wonder. First, I doubt if the point can have anything to do with

the peculiar genius of the Greek verb ‘einai’: if ‘e1 sti �vkra#th§ leyko#§’

makes a truth claim, then so too, I should think, do ‘Socrates is pale’ and

‘Socrate est pale’. Nor, secondly, can the ‘sense of verity’ be particularly

connected to the declarative use of the verb: if ‘e1 sti �vkra#th§ leyko#§’

makes a truth claim, then surely ‘e1 sti �vkra#th§ leyko#§;’ asks a truth

question, and so on.

And thirdly, I am not sure that ‘S e1 sti P’ means the same as ‘S truly e1 sti P’

or ‘It is true that S e1 sti P’ — and neither is Kahn. For he says that the

veridical ‘einai’ is ambiguous (pp. 25, 105): sometimes it means ‘is true’,

sometimes it means ‘is so’ or ‘is the case’ — and those are two different

meanings. But why speak of ambiguity within one value of ‘einai’? Why

not rather distinguish between a genuinely veridical value (‘is true’) and a

factual value (‘is the case’)? Then instead of saying say that ‘the primary

veridical notion is that of fact or state of affairs’ (p. 198), we might suggest

that veridical ‘einai’ is derivative from factual ‘einai’.

Or we might wonder whether veridical ‘einai’ is not a phantom. After all,

you cannot say, for example, ‘oy| to§ o& my' uo§ e1 sti#n’ and thereby mean ‘This

story is true’; and neither of the occurrences of the verb ‘einai’ in the full

veridical construction

e!sti tay' ta oy2 tv o2 pv§ sy; le#gei§ tay' ta einai

is veridical. Nor, come to that, is the verb used factually in that construction;

and what answers there to the English ‘is so’ is not ‘e1 sti#’ but ‘oy2 tv§ e1 sti#n’.

Indeed, if veridical ‘einai’ does not exist, factual ‘einai’ is (I suspect) rare —

and limited to a small range of idioms (‘kata; to; o!n,’ ‘tv /' o!nti’, ‘le#gein to;

o!n’, … ).

But the factual function may nonetheless have been of fundamental philo-

sophical importance. Kahn says that ‘Parmenides developed a philosophical

conception of Being for the first time’, and that ‘what he started from was the

pretechnical use of to be ’ (p. 169) — and in particular, from the veridical or

factual use of the verb. When Parmenides claims that only one of the ways

of inquiry is walkable, namely the way ‘that it is and cannot not be’,

he designates the way of truth or of fact — the way according to which

things are so and cannot not be so. To be sure, that is only Parmenides’

starting-point (see p. 170), or his ‘entering wedge’ (p. 176); and when we get

to the heart of the matter, the verb ‘einai’ ‘takes on an existential value’

(p. 176), so that Parmenides is centrally concerned with the question of

what must hold of any entity or existent thing whatsoever. But the verb

can move from the factual to the existential value without any equivocation

or fallacious glissando; for ‘the veridical e1 sti# of B 2 directly entails both

existential assertion and predicative construction’ (p. 181).

Those matters are nothing if not controversial. For my part, I continue

stubbornly to opine that Parmenides’ entering wedge is the existential and


Book Reviews 813




ownloaded from


not the factual value of ‘einai’. Moreover, although the factual function

certainly needs to be recognized in a number of philosophical texts, and

notably in a number of Platonic texts, I cannot see that it is philosophically

fundamental — nor that we poor anglophones should lament patrii sermonis

egestatem.

Kahn’s Essays on Being are always engaging and often provocative. It is

both instructive and entertaining to argue with them; and if sometimes they

seem to me to advance questionable claims, I am far more often inclined to

make use of the full veridical construction: ‘These things are thus as he says

these things are’.

JONATHAN BARNESCeaulmont

France

doi:10.1093/mind/fzq054 Advance Access publication 11 October 2010

The Nature and Structure of Content, by Jeffrey C. King. Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. 240. H/b £37.50, P/b £17.99.

In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeff King presents a view of prop-

ositions as worldly facts whose structure derives from the structure of sen-

tences. A lot of the discussion about propositions by semanticists in recent

years has revolved around whether objects can or cannot be propositional

constituents, as part of a general debate in semantics between the proponents

of theories of direct reference and the proponents of some form of descrip-

tivism. Although King assumes a Russellian approach to propositions, the

view he defends is intrinsically neutral as regards what kinds of entities prop-

ositional constituents are.

After an introductory and partly historical chapter, King devotes chapters

two and three to the presentation and defence of his approach. In chapters four

and five King addresses some objections to structured propositions, and some

arguments against the existence of propositions. Those chapters do not depend

on the peculiarities of King’s account and can be read as an independent de-

fence of the existence of propositions qua non-Platonic structured entities. In

chapter six King turns his attention to a purely semantic issue: the treatment of

tense, location, and modality. The last chapter takes up again the thread of

chapters two and three, to argue that one of the features of the proposed

conception of propositions provides the basis of a solution to the paradox of

analysis.

Throughout the book the writing is extremely clear and the level of detail

in the presentation of the view and the treatment of potential objections

remarkable.

According to King the proposition expressed by a sentence such as (1) ‘Julia

is two inches taller than Paul’ is the fact that Julia, the number two, whatever


814 Book Reviews




ownloaded from


barnes kahn essays on being

Documents