Two Notions of Grammatical Case in Aristotle

Despite the absence in the Aristotelian corpus of an established technical vocabulary as part of an explicit doctrine of cases, the use there of πτῶσις suggests that Aristotle was aware of the declension of nouns. This much is suggested by his discussion of the distinction between names (ὀνόματα) and cases of names (πτώσεις ὀνομάτων) at On Interpretation 16a32–b1, where the nominative is not a case but a name from which cases (that is, the ‘oblique’ cases) fall. However, at Prior Analytics 48b35–49a5, Aristotle lists the nominative form of a noun as an example of a word taken according to its case. This inconsistency raises a question about whether Aristotle has an internally consistent view of names and the nominative across the corpus. In particular, it is unclear whether the nominative form of a noun ultimately counts as a case for Aristotle. This article examines occurrences of πτῶσις in other Aristotelian texts, such as the Poetics, the Categories and the Topics, to argue that Aristotle uses this term in both a broad and a narrow sense. In its broad sense, any morphological change of any word, including a noun in the nominative, counts as a πτῶσις. In its narrow sense, only the oblique cases count as πτώσεις and not the nominative. The distinction comes down to a difference in the sphere of explanation. This reading renders Aristotle’s view of grammatical case consistent and makes sense of the claims about cases attributed to him by the later ancient commentators.