And those who study
these properties err not by leaving the sphere of philosophy, but by
forgetting that substance, of which they have no correct idea, is
prior to these other things. For number qua number has peculiar
attributes, such as oddness and evenness, commensurability and
equality, excess and defect, and these belong to numbers either in
themselves or in relation to one another. And similarly the solid
and the motionless and that which is in motion and the weightless
and that which has weight have other peculiar properties. So too there
are certain properties peculiar to being as such, and it is about
these that the philosopher has to investigate the truth.-An indication
of this may be mentioned: dialecticians and sophists assume the same
guise as the philosopher, for sophistic is Wisdom which exists only in
semblance, and dialecticians embrace all things in their dialectic,
and being is common to all things; but evidently their dialectic
embraces these subjects because these are proper to philosophy.-For
sophistic and dialectic turn on the same class of things as
philosophy, but this differs from dialectic in the nature of the
faculty required and from sophistic in respect of the purpose of the
philosophic life. Dialectic is merely critical where philosophy claims
to know, and sophistic is what appears to be philosophy but is not.
Again, in the list of contraries one of the two columns is
privative, and all contraries are reducible to being and non-being,
and to unity and plurality, as for instance rest belongs to unity
and movement to plurality.
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