(1) Now a “descriptive definition” is a blend of substantial and accidental [terms]. For example, ‘Man is a rational animal, walks upright [and] has broad nails’, according to Damascene as above.1 From this it follows that one kind of discourse is made up of [terms] predicable per se in the first mode, and that is a definition. Another kind [is made up] of what are not predicated per se in the first mode, and sometimes that is a description. Another kind is made up of both, and it is a descriptive definition. Yet because every definition and every description and every descriptive definition is a discourse, therefore no such [definition, description or descriptive definition] is really the same as the defined or the described, although they signify the same.
Translation by Paul Vincent Spade, CC BY 4.0. Source: Indiana University ScholarWorks. Changes: format conversion only (PDF to Markdown; footnotes, italics and paragraph numbers kept; margin line numbers and page headers dropped).
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Footnotes
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See n. 163 above. ↩