Aristotle, inesse, Leibniz

Abstract

On several occasions, Leibniz draws on Aristotle’s authority to corroborate his thesis of truth as the inherence of predicate to the subject of proposition. It is not, however, clear to what extent the Aristotelian philosophy could offer support to this claim. Indeed, it is generally agreed to Aristotle a different conception of truth, as a correspondence of the proposition to the reality that it is intended to describe. Without discussing the well-known theory of truth as correspondence, this work is dedicated to investigate to what lengths the writings of Aristotle endorse Leibniz’s claims. To that end, this investigation will be focused on Prior and Posterior Analytics, works in which Aristotle lays out his theory of reasoning and demonstration. The aim is to ascertain whether, and under what conditions, the notion of inherence we find there can be assimilated to Leibniz’s notion of inherence.