History
and Philosophy of Logic,
16 (1995), 169-196.
The
paper is a study of the logic of existence, negation, and order in the
Neoplatonic tradition. The central idea is that Neoplatonists assume a logic
in which the existence predicate is a comparative adjective and in which
monadic predicates function as scalar adjectives that nest the background
order. Various scalar predicate negations are then identifiable with various
Neoplatonic negations, including a privative negation appropriate for the
lower orders of reality and a hyper-negation appropriate for the higher.
Reversion to the One can then be explained as the logical inference of
hyper-negations from mundane knowledge. Part I develops the relevant
linguistic and logical theory, and Part II defends Wolfson and the scalar
interpretation against the more traditional Aristotelian understanding of
Whittaker and others of reversion as intensional abstraction