Dall’Uno al Nulla. Appunti per una nuova lettura di Arist. _Ph._ 189b19-25

In Ph. I 2.185b19–25, Aristotle puzzlingly challenges essence monism, arguing that, if all things have the same definition and essence, they are nothing at all. In his recent book on Aristotle and the Eleatics, Tim Clarke proposes a traditional reading: if essence monism were true, all opposite predicates would belong to all subjects at the same time, thus making all things self-contradictory and hence annihilating them. In this paper I contend that this standard reading, dating back to Cherniss and Ross, is mistaken. After a preliminary contextualisation of the passage at issue, I present Clarke’s reading and initially strengthen it by referring to a seemingly parallel passage from Metaph. I then discuss the difficulties surrounding the standard reading of these two texts, showing that both need to be interpreted differently. Building on this criticism, I finally set out the requirements that an alternative reading should meet, outlining some of its main features as well.