Heidegger

Reply to Errors, Misrepresentations and Irrelevancies

5. is/am or be?

>>JP: if you have suddenly decided that ‘is/am’ is not a copular verb
>>(as has been thought for centuries); then, you have created a new
>>rule of grammar.

>ME: Insofar as ‘be’ has been “thought for centuries” exclusively as “a
>copular verb”, thinking has failed to think.

it would be an error to observe that ‘is/am’ has been considered a
copular verb for centuries and then to conclude that ‘be’ has been
“thought for centuries” exclusively as “a copular verb”

I’ve dealt with the error as to exclusivity in another post. here I will
deal with the independent error of converting ‘is/am’ into ‘be’ when
discussing the copula (or copular verbs generally).

the OED (Shorter Edition) has this to say about about the etymology of
‘be’”

“An irreg[ular] and defective verb, the full set of forms of which is
made up of the surviving inflections of four bases: (i) the
Indo-European verb with stem base also of Sanskrit as-, Greek -es, Latin
es-, s-; (ii) the Indo-European verb with stem base also of Sanskrit
vas-, Gothic wisan to remain; (iii) the Indo-European verb with stem
base also of Sanskrit bhu-, Greek phu, Latin fu-. Old English beon
become; (iv) the old Germanic perfect formation, base are, of unkn[own]
origin”

given this composite nature of the verb ‘to be’ it is not necessarily
the case that one can assume that every (or any) meaning associated with
the last three of these can automagically be attributed to the copula
‘is/am’ which clearly derives from the first of these roots.

Joe

–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda

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Posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
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