Relations et relatifs : les stoïciens contre Aristote

Abstract

Aristotle’s chap. 7 of the Categories include two successive definitions of relatives - according to the first, all that is said of something else is a relative, and, according to the second, a relative is something whose entire being consists in “a certain relation to something else”. The Stoics made use of these two definitions not only in the commentaries of Aristotle’s Categories by Athenodorus and Cornutus (Ist century BC / Ist century AD), but also in debates inside the school on the unity of virtues and on causality. The Stoics drastically limited their relatives to the ones whose all being consists in a relation, which they call πρός τί πως ἔχοντα (“relatively disposed towards something”), and rejected the possibility that such relatives may be qualities or substances, while Aristotle left these two possibilities opened. The Stoics also seem to admit that some differentiated qualities may be relative to external objects, for instance sweet and bitter, but such relatives do no not belong to the same category. Taking into account Aristotle’s apories and choosing between alternatives left undecided by Arisotle, the Stoics proposed a powerful alternative to the aristotelian doctrine of relatives.