Rola negacji w opisie wiata wed ug arystotelesowskiej Metafizyki

The notions of being” and non-being” have entered philosophical language, forming thebasis of ontology and meontology, as the counterparts of the Greek expressions to o]n and tomh o]n (nominalised forms, affirmative and negative, of the participle of the verb ei)=nai).Originally, however, these expressions did not have any objectifying meaning, but played therole of meta-language names, representing the copula ei)=nai in all its forms, most generallyin its affirmative and negative forms. The copula itself, which in later philosophy took on theexistential meaning, had functioned only as a semantically empty connective of predicates.Over time the participle o]n has been used as a universal name of all predicates.The above-mentioned expressions became central in Greek philosophical terminologythanks to the debates, initiated by Parmenides, on the role of negation in the description of theworld. Parmenides himself proposed a complete excision of negative sentences as describing byelimination, and created a positive-monistic system which abandoned multiplicity, divisibility,and variability. Later philosophers defended negation, fighting back against the paradoxesformulated by the Eleatics and later by the Sophists.Plato observed that without negation it is impossible to describe the multiplicity of things.He also distinguished a relative negation which does not eliminate anything but makes it possibleto confront some things with others. According to the atomists, the divisibility of physicalthings forces us to accept that they consist of a positive element in the form of an impenetrablebody, and of another element lacking any characteristics, i.e. the void. Finally, Aristotle, whenanalysing the process of change, justified the consistency of the statement that something comesout of “not being” and “being”, under the assumption that the former is understood as beingactual, and the latter as being potential. In all these conceptions there is nothing non-existent,there are only proposals of how to identify the aspects of reality whose explanation justifiesthe use of negation.The affirmative and negative forms of the above expressions have also provoked reflectionon the problem of truth and falsity. It has been observed that they are used in everyday language not only to state an agreement or disagreement with the actual facts of the matter, but also toaffirm or deny something.