Aristotelian Categories and the Contracts Doctrine of Mistake
To be clear, I don’t much care for Aristotle. Not one bit. As a result, I know and understand very little of Aristotle’s philosophy but, as the Supreme Court once said of pornography, I know it when I see it.
And I always see it when I teach mistake, because the old chestnuts, Sherwood v. Walker and Wood v. Boynton, seem to me to be based on Aristotelian distinctions between accidental (value) and essential qualities. But both seem to me to get the analysis exactly wrong. I am happy to have discovered that I am not alone in remarking on the Aristotelian nature of the inquiry. Robert Birmingham did so in a philosophical reflection in the form of an essay in 1987. In a 1999 article, Nascent Modernity in the Case of Sherwood v. Walker — An Intertextual Proposition (35 Willamette L. Rev. 315), Alani Golanski expressed my view precisely. These courts engaged in Aristotelian terminology but got the analysis completely wrong.
[T]he Sherwood court misused the Aristotelian vocabulary. In those terms, it was precisely the “substance” of the thing for which Sherwood and Walker had bargained about which there was no mistake. In other words, as understood by Aristotle, examples of substance are “man,” “horse,” or “cow.” The parties in Sherwood knew they were dickering over a cow and therefore fully appreciated the Aristotelian substance of the thing.
. . . In Aristotle’s scheme, an accident may or may not belong to a given thing. For example, a horse may be “awake” or “asleep.” “Likewise also whiteness; for there is nothing to prevent the same thing being at one time white and at another not white.” More to the point, a cow may be at one time “barren” and at another “fertile.”