Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Physics', 'Interview with Baggini and Stangroom' and 'The Disorder of Things'

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19 ideas

9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 1. Unifying an Object / a. Intrinsic unification

17041	Natural objects include animals and their parts, plants, and the simple elements [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: Natural objects include animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies like earth, fire, air, and water.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 192b09)
	A reaction: Interestingly, he seems to include lives, and elements, but nothing in between, like planets or stones.

9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 2. Substance / a. Substance

16172	Substance is not predicated of anything - but it still has something underlying it, that originates it [Aristotle]
	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.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 190b01)
	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.

16623	We only infer underlying natures by analogy, observing bronze of a statue, or wood of a bed [Aristotle]
	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.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 191a08)
	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.

9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / c. Statue and clay

16174	A nature is related to a substance as shapeless matter is to something which has a shape [Aristotle]
	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.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 190b39-)
	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.

9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 2. Hylomorphism / a. Hylomorphism

17043	Form, not matter, is a thing's nature, because it is actual, rather than potential [Aristotle]
	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.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 193b07)
	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?

9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 2. Hylomorphism / c. Form as causal

16970	A thing's form and purpose are often the same, and form can be the initiator of change too [Aristotle]
	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.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 198a24)
	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.

9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 2. Hylomorphism / d. Form as unifier

16104	Unity of the form is just unity of the definition [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: Being one in form is just another way of saying one 'in definition'.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 190a16)
	A reaction: I take this to be highly significant in understanding Aristotle. The crucial notion of form is tied to the way in which we understand the world, and does not refer to some independent fact about how it might really be.

9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 3. Matter of an Object

11255	In feature-generation the matter (such as bronze) endures, but in generation it doesn't [Aristotle, by Politis]
	Full Idea: There is a fundamental distinction between feature-change and generation. ..Materials such as bronze cannot by themselves explain why they are the particular material things they are. But matter which generates things does not endure.
	From: report of Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE]) by Vassilis Politis - Aristotle and the Metaphysics 2.4
	A reaction: This very nice distinction is rather undermined by our modern understanding of generation, but it still might work at a lower level. Transmuting an element by bombarding it is different from reshaping the stuff.

9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 8. Parts of Objects / c. Wholes from parts

16791	There is no whole except for the parts [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: There is no whole over and above the parts.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 210a16)
	A reaction: Pasnau says Aristotle contradicts this at Met. 1041b12, where the syllable is more than its elements.

9071	We first sense whole entities, and then move to particular parts of it [Aristotle]
	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.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 184a22)
	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.

9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 8. Essence as Explanatory

17390	Natural kinds don't need essentialism to be explanatory [Dupré]
	Full Idea: The importance of natural kinds for explanation does not depend on a doctrine of essences.
	From: John Dupré (The Disorder of Things [1993], 3)
	A reaction: He suggest as the alternative that laws do the explaining, employing natural kinds. He allows that individual essences might be explanatory.

16972	The four explanations are the main aspects of a thing's nature [Aristotle, by Moravcsik]
	Full Idea: Aristotle sees as the main types of aitia (explanation) those that are also to be construed as the main aspects of the physis (nature) of anything.
	From: report of Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE]) by Julius Moravcsik - Aristotle on Adequate Explanations 1
	A reaction: Interestingly, this suggests that having rejected the Four Causes in favour of the Four Explanations, we might even consider them as the Four Natures, which ties explanation very closely to essence.

5084	A thing's nature is what causes its changes and stability [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: The nature of a thing is a certain principle and cause of change and stability in the thing.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 192b20)
	A reaction: A helpful contribution to the discussion, as most thinkers just boggle when asked to specify the core of something's identity. Aristotle's proposal links identity to causation, which is very appealing to a physical account of all of reality. Cf 5086.

9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 10. Essence as Species

17388	It seems that species lack essential properties, so they can't be natural kinds [Dupré]
	Full Idea: It is widely agreed among biologists that no essential property can be found to demarcate species, so that if an essential property is necessary for a natural kind, species are not natural kinds.
	From: John Dupré (The Disorder of Things [1993], 2)
	A reaction: This uses 'essential' to mean 'necessary', but I would use 'essential' to mean 'deeply explanatory'. Biological species are, nevertheless, dubious members of an ontological system. Vegetables are the problem.

17389	A species might have its essential genetic mechanism replaced by a new one [Dupré]
	Full Idea: Contradicting one of the main points of essentialism, there is no reason in principle why a species should not survive the demise of its current genetic mechanisms (some other species coherence gradually taking over).
	From: John Dupré (The Disorder of Things [1993], 2)
	A reaction: I would say that this meant that the species had a new essence, because I don't take what is essential to be the same as what is necessary. The new genetics would replace the old as the basic explanation of the species.

9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 2. Objects that Change

16173	Coming to be is by shape-change, addition, subtraction, composition or alteration [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: Things that come to be without further qualification do so either by change of shape (a statue) or by addition (growing things) or by subtraction (a carving) or by composition (a house) or by alteration (things changing their matter).
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 190b06)
	A reaction: [compressed] Aristotle observes that in each case there is clearly some 'underlying thing'.

17042	Natural things are their own source of stability through change [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: The obvious difference between natural and non-natural things is that each of the natural ones contains within itself a source of change and of stability, in respect of either movement or increase and decrease or alteration.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 192b14)
	A reaction: This is the reason why Aristotle places so much emphasis on lives, though elements also have persistence in a similar way. We now have atoms and molecules as well.

9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 6. Successive Things

16691	A day, or the games, has one thing after another, actually and potentially occurring [Aristotle]
	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.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 206a22)
	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?

9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 10. Beginning of an Object

16574	Coming-to-be may be from nothing in a qualified way, as arising from an absence [Aristotle]
	Full Idea: We agree that nothing can be said without qualification to come from what is not, …but it may in a qualified sense. For a thing comes to be from a privation, which in its own nature is not-being - this not surviving as a constituent in the result.
	From: Aristotle (Physics [c.337 BCE], 191b13)
	A reaction: Not sure I understand this, but it seems to say that genuine creation from nothing at all is impossible.