Is there a difference between the concepts of reality and existence in Aristotle's philosophy?

Question

I'm reading a book on the history of philosophy and the author makes use of the word real-reality-really in such a way that is a bit confusing for me. For example:

Aristotle's knowledge theory searches the instruments that allow the knowledge of particular things, because they are the only and true reality.

Only the particular really exists.

Are reality and existence interchangeable? Did Aristotle have a conception of reality different from existence, or is the use of reality somehow anachronic in these passages?

As I understand it, the particular would have a material cause, and in the sense pointed above, "God" would exist but not be real.

I know that this author has marxist influence and I thought that perhaps there is an overlapping of the concepts of reality and materiality. One thing that came to my mind is that real could actually be meaning natural, but I don't have a clear definition of what would natural mean to Aristotle (possibly something like material existence).

Answer 1

This is best understood in contrast to Plato's theories.

For Aristotle, the passage is saying, only bare particulars exist, and not universals. This means, for example, that there are individual cows which actually exist, but the abstraction of cow-ness does not exist.

This is quite different than Plato, who claims not only that Cow-ness exists (as a Platonic Ideal), but in fact that these Ideals are more real than individual cows, which merely partake of the Ideal.

In other words, the passage that you quote is not about the material versus the immaterial, or the natural versus the artificial, but about the particular (cow) versus the universal (notion of cow-ness.)

Answer 2

Tames,

For metaphysics, in general, existence and reality are not the same.

As Michael Dorfman correctly pointed out above, each of Plato's four metaphysical worlds has a different degree of reality when compared to the others. The highest, most real being the Forms (Ideals).

In contrast, existence cannot have degrees. Something cannot more or less exist, it simply is or is not. For Plato, forms exist in the metaphysical world of Forms, just as numbers exist in mathematics. Neither can possibly exist in a material world.

Aristotle's rejection of Plato's metaphysical pluralism in favor of a single, universal (material?) metaphysics erases this distinction. As a consequence, there is no difference between reality and existence from within any Aristotelian philosophy.