The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Revised Edition by Martin Heidegger

Author:Martin Heidegger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press

c) The being of the copula in the horizon of whatness (essentia) and actualness (existentia) in John Stuart Mill

Let us now attempt to delineate briefly John Stuart Mill’s theory of assertion and copula. In it a new problem regarding the copula greets us, so that the leading question about the interconnection between being and being-true becomes even more complicated. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) developed his theory of assertion and copula in his chief work, A System of Logic. The main sections relevant for our problem are to be found in volume 1, book 1, chapter 4, “On Propositions,” and chapter 5, “On the Content of Propositions.” John Stuart Mill was influenced philosophically by British empiricism, Locke and Hume, and further by Kant, but principally by the work of his father, James Mill (1773–1836), The Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. Mill’s Logic attained great significance in the first and second halves of the nineteenth century. It essentially affected all logical work, in France as well as among us in Germany.

In its design as a whole, Mill’s logic is not at all balanced with respect to its basic conviction, which is supposed to be nominalistic though not the extreme nominalism of Hobbes. Whereas we may indeed recognize a nominalism in Mill in the first book, which develops the theory of nominalism, nevertheless a view of things that is opposed to his theory and hence is non-nominalistic comes to dominate the fourth book, where he works out in practice his theoretical convictions in his interpretation of the methods of the sciences, so that he finally turns quite sharply against all nominalism as well as against Hobbes. Mill begins his investigation of propositions with a general description of this form of speech. “A proposition … is a portion of discourse in which a predicate is affirmed or denied of a subject. A predicate and a subject are all that is necessarily required to make up a proposition: but as we cannot conclude from merely seeing two names put together, that they are a predicate and a subject, that one of them is intended to be affirmed or denied of the other, it is necessary that there should be some mode or form of indicating that such is the intention; some sign to distinguish a predication from any other kind of discourse.”33 Here once more appears the approach according to which subject and predicate are put together as names. But a sign is needed that this juxtaposition of words is a predication.

This is sometimes done by a slight alteration of one of the words, called an inflection; as when we say, Fire burns; the change of the second word from burn to burns showing that we mean to affirm the predicate burn of the subject fire. But this function [of indicating predication] is more commonly fulfilled by the word is, when an affirmation is intended, is not, when a negation; or by some other part of the verb to be. The word

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