17041
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Natural objects include animals and their parts, plants, and the simple elements [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
Natural objects include animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies like earth, fire, air, and water.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 192b09)
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A reaction:
Interestingly, he seems to include lives, and elements, but nothing in between, like planets or stones.
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16172
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Substance is not predicated of anything - but it still has something underlying it, that originates it [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
The only thing which is not predicated of some underlying thing is substance, while everything is predicated of it. But the same goes for substances too: there is something underlying them too, which they come from. Plants from seeds, for example.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 190b01)
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A reaction:
[compressed] I presume 'substance' here is 'ousia'. Aristotle's quest is to pin down 'that which lies under', but this shows that if he identified it, he wouldn't have located what is ultimate. The explanation of a plant extends beyond the plant.
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16623
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We only infer underlying natures by analogy, observing bronze of a statue, or wood of a bed [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
The underlying nature is an object of knowledge, by an analogy. For as bronze is to a statue, wood to a bed, or matter and the formless before receiving form to any thing which has form, so is the underlying nature of substance, the 'this' or existent.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 191a08)
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A reaction:
Scholastics were perfectly aware of this cautious approach. It is only the critics who jeer at Aristotelians for claiming to know all about the essences of things. Essence is like the Unmoved Mover, inferred but unknown.
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16174
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A nature is related to a substance as shapeless matter is to something which has a shape [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
What it is to be shapeless is different from what it is to be bronze. …An underlying nature is related to substance as, in general, matter (which is to say, something shapeless), before it gains shape, is to something with shape.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 190b39-)
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A reaction:
This is an interesting take on the modern problem that the bronze seems to be a separate 'object' from the statue. If bronze is amorphous stuff, it has no shape, presumably because it has no significant shape.
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17043
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Form, not matter, is a thing's nature, because it is actual, rather than potential [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
Form is a more plausible candidate for being nature than matter is because we speak of a thing as what it actually is at the time, rather than what it then is potentially.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 193b07)
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A reaction:
Note that matter remains potential, even when it is part of an actual thing. This seems to be the obvious point that a statue isn't potentially anything else, but its clay is potentially other objects. Does Aristotle think clay is thereby less real?
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16970
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A thing's form and purpose are often the same, and form can be the initiator of change too [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
In many cases, the last three of the causes [aition] come to the same thing. What a thing is and its purpose are the same, and the original source of change is, in terms of form, the same as these two. After all, it is a man who generates a man.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 198a24)
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A reaction:
One of the few illuminating remarks about what the 'form' in hylomorphism is supposed to do. This may be the key to virtue ethics - that the form of man, which we learn elsewhere is the psuché, is also man's drive and man's very purpose.
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9071
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We first sense whole entities, and then move to particular parts of it [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
We have to progress from the general to the particular, because whole entities are more intelligible to the senses, and anything general is a kind of whole, in the sense that it includes a number of things which we could call its parts.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 184a22)
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A reaction:
This is the first step in the process of abstraction, which Aristotle describes further in Posterior Analytics. It is common sense that a child will be aware of a horse before it is aware of its hoof, or its colour, or its strength.
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16691
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A day, or the games, has one thing after another, actually and potentially occurring [Aristotle]
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Full Idea:
When we say 'it is day' or 'it is the games', one thing after another is always coming into existence. …There are Olympic Games, both in the sense that they may occur and that they are actually occurring.
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From:
Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 206a22)
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A reaction:
This is, according the Pasnau, the origin of the scholastic concept of an 'entia successiva'. I haven't seen much discussion of this in modern metaphysics, but in what sense does a day exist?
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