On Interpretation:
>there are three kinds of things
>the immaterial things are the realest thing, the primary substances.
>ACKSHUALLY forget everything I said about hylomorphism.
>Socrates, that horse, this rock... you thought those were all individuals and primary substances?
>kek, those things aren't really real. maybe partially real.
>you know what that means? only the unmoved mover AKA the agent intellect AKA God is real, and everything else is just an illusion.
>also that last kind of thing, I prove to not be real later in the Metaphysics (kek prima materia?)
>also if you just think like me, in contemplation, maybe you'll be like God as in actually real, and you get to clown on everybody else who is just a fictional construct in the divine matrix
is Aristotle a practical joker who has been pranking philosophers for 2 millennia now? can't seem to keep his story straight regarding the foundations of his philosophy.
Not hard to solve. Prinary substances are still material, they just don’t have potentiality because when you perceive them the act has already been imposed on the form. Clearly he did not mean that primary substances were immaterial when he said they had no potentiality.
>the act has already been imposed upon the form
On the matter*
If the primary substances had no potentiality then they could not change, ever. Never ever ever ever ever. You're either confusing the first class for the second class (and thus have to explain why he even bothers with the distinction, since the second class is where hylomorphism begins) or sorely misunderstanding the concept of actuality vs. potentiality.
The primary substance doesn’t change. Only its accidents do. The act of Socrates is his soul. His body is an accident. It says this in categories
>The primary substance doesn’t change. Only its accidents do. The act of Socrates is his soul. His body is an accident. It says this in categories
You're describing something of the second class. His body is still made of matter, and Socrates could not be Socrates without the body he has. It's a dishonest argument to claim that someone's whole material being is a mere accidental property, as if they could have had a different body as easily as they could have moved from one location to another. Especially beings which are created and then die, like humans. If that isn't change, then I don't know what is.
The primary substance is just the subject of a predication. No matter what happens to Socrates’s body, you still say “socrates” in the subject. Even when he dies you still say “Socrates”. Socrates didn’t change even if he doesn’t exist anymore, there is still one substance that receives various changing predicates. The fact that I am still referring to Socrates as if I am talking about the same thing as some random greek infant born thousands of years ago even though that infant doesnt even exist anymore proves that socrates never changed. Therefore, primary substances don’t change.
That's just reviving Plato's petty theory of forms like young Socrates scoffs at in the dialogue Parmenides (e.g. the form of "hair-ness") and reduces being to mere names. To put it another way, if everything that ever happened in Socrates's life is an accident, then the "being of Socrates" is indeterminate and can't be validly predicated whatsoever.
>To put it another way, if everything that ever happened in Socrates's life is an accident, then the "being of Socrates" is indeterminate and can't be validly predicated whatsoever.
This sounds like your own ideas mixed with the explanation.
Yes, the other anon is basically saying that Socrates is his soul and essence and that his body is inconsequential to what that is.
As I understand it, he says that Socrates would have been the same regardless of the events in his life, what you think of that doesn't really matter, since you aren't discussing your thoughts on it's validity, but the meaning of the ideas posed.
If you want to talk about the effects of the circumstances in Socrates's life on his essence, then that's different. You could say that the actions of Socrates would have changed depending on the happenings of his life, but Socrates would always be the same being, regardless of where, when and how.
>This sounds like your own ideas mixed with the explanation.
This is my own understanding of the implications of the ideas. And I haven't seen anything in your post that addresses it. Besides, it seems that the difference between essential property and accidental property is not well understood. I've seen Socrates's wisdom described as both an essential property (Socrates would not be Socrates without his wisdom) and as an accidental property (it's a manifestation of his physical presence while alive).
>If you want to talk about the effects of the circumstances in Socrates's life on his essence, then that's different. You could say that the actions of Socrates would have changed depending on the happenings of his life, but Socrates would always be the same being, regardless of where, when and how.
What makes Socrates, Socrates then?
This all amounts to a good argument for process over substance as fundemental. And indeed, everywhere in the sciences we have seen process replace substance. Heat was once thought to be the substance caloric, now we know it to be average motion. We thought atoms were the fundemental building block but now we say particles are simply useful abstractions, in truth a particle can only be described in terms of the field of which it is a part (the abstracted part in terms of the whole that defines it). Fire is no longer seem as a substance, but rather a chemical process. Life is no longer a substance, no elan vital, but a process.
The mistake is to think, "ah this means there is just one primary substance that combines into anything. Mass energy must be the ticket!"
Nope. Information is essential to explaining physics. Many physicists argue it is ontologically basic, what matters and energy emerge from, while moderates still put it on par with mass and energy. But information is essentially relational, it is not a property of anything of itself nor can it be a substance. Information only exists in terms of difference. It's about correlations, what X tells you about Y.
Formal cause can be recovered through information theoretic methods in thermodynamics. In the life sciences, it becomes clear that what IS NOT present becomes essential in causation, and this is fundementally not a problem for information ontology.
A string of nothing but 1s holds no information. Every measure is a 1 with probability 100%. A string of 1s and 0s can hold all classical information.
To think of reality as defined solely by substance was always a mistake, largely one embarked upon due to Parmenides' language games around the Greek equivalent of "nothing."
Information is essentially process. You don't need change over time but the relational nature requires change over some dimension. Even the simplist toy universe, a one dimensional line, must have difference. One point must vary from another in its coordinates (see Floridi's Philosophy of Information for a proof).
Basically, we done goofed by ignoring Heraclitus and following Parmenides. Substance emerges from process. Cause is roughly analogous with computation, the rules of state progression in nature with Stoic Logos Spermatikos.
I would go further and say this supports the contention that reality is essentially semiotic in nature.
On a mystical note, this is interesting in that Saint Augustine maps what is essentially the Pierciean semiotic triangle to the Father (object), Son (Logos/word/symbol), and Holy Spirit (Ātman/Interpretant).
Nagarjuna has a similar interpretation coming from the Buddhists perspective and Rovelli has one from modern QM ("entanglement is a dance for three").
We are created in the image of God and have this tripartite nature (De Trinitate explores this is a psychological dialectical reminiscent of Hegel centuries later).
Reality itself has this tripartite structure. From Augustine's perspective, this is obvious. "God is within everything, but contained in nothing."
There are some neat parallels here with Terrance Deacon's work in biosemiotics and complexity studies and disaptive systems in general, along with Hegel, who is in many ways a progenitor of complexity studies and information theory. It's no accident that electrical engineering/philosophy classic the Laws of Form, a classic in mathematical logic, begins similarly to the Greater Logic.
Substance and properties then are emergent from stabilities within process. Note that process does not presuppose time, only information, variance across some dimension. This is a basic prerequisite of any metaphysics. A universe of just one unchanging thing can be defined in comparison to nothing. It is contentless, sheer immediacy, it falls victim to Hegel's collapse into nothing.
You also see this in explorations of category theory, and the ways in which one objects existence implies another.
I like the general thrust of your philosophy, but I loathe it when you just copy-paste your shit over and over again instead of directly engaging with the topic, the terminology of the thread, and the debate which has been going on. I want to see the thread evolve, but these kinds of copypastas only break the continuity with the thread with little hope of resolution. It's lazy posting, and you're capable of doing better.
It's not copy paste. Sorry, I figured critiques against substance in general for a discussion on substance, because, As
mentions, the topic is full of confusion and I think it's because it simply comes from the wrong direction. I mention modern attempts to recover Aristotle's other causes because his philosophy doesn't make a lot of sense if you collapse everything into efficient cause. But at the same time it doesn't make sense to speak in terms of the other causes it you think scientific inquiry have effectively eliminated them (it hasn't, but it's not unpopular to pronounce that it has), except as a sort of intellectual exercise.
A lot of Aristotle we have is thought to be notes compiled by students. So, even aside from the fact that philosophers change their minds or contradict themselves by accident sometimes, we have that.
It's not unlike the issue in contemporary metaphysics of tropes/universals attaching to bare substratum, pure haecceities, of entities being fully defined by their properties.
It's worth noting on this front that haecceities are rejected in fundemental physics for a variety of reasons, some epistemic. Thus, John Wheeler suggested once that we think of one electron that is in many places at once instead of there existing many electrons.
>A lot of Aristotle we have is thought to be notes compiled by students. So, even aside from the fact that philosophers change their minds or contradict themselves by accident sometimes, we have that
As a sidenote, they weren't notes in the contemporary sense, they were texts compiled by the students, revised by Aristotle and his top disciples, and placed in the Lyceum for everyone to read. As such we should treat them as authentic texts by Aristotle
Aristotle never cared how dry they were to read?
Aristotle did believe in the Platonic forms dumbass, he was just testing people with his arguments.
Matter IS potentiality in quantitative mode. Anything with matter has potential, not everything with potential has matter (in Aristotle, the celestial gods fall under the latter category, in Christianity they are replaced with angels).
You might think it a waste of time to get reccs on secondary lit about Aristotle's other writings that don't directly pertain to what you're reading right now, but I suggest reading Bruell's book on the Metaphysics and Bolotin's book on the Physics. You're noticing something very few readers of Aristotle pick up on, and those two can help you make sense of that.
Would add Edward Halper’s One and Many
>You're noticing something very few readers of Aristotle pick up on, and those two can help you make sense of that.
What exactly am I noticing? What exactly do those commentators say? I'm just trying to make the pieces fit together.
Well, I just mean, if you're the same anon who's been making threads on Aristotle on praxis and theoria, phronesis and sophia, and asking about passages in the Analytics, that you've been noticing that Aristotle makes strange dialectical arguments where the doctrines or teachings we expect (that phronesis and sophia don't involve each other, that the active and contemplative lives are either equal in standing or unclear w/r/t what's better, that demonstration is the surefooted accessible way to knowledge) seem to not bear out or transform or get qualified by other passages, and Bolotin and Bruell both do a fine job of showing you more such passages, and of offering some accounts for what Aristotle might be doing, which you may find amenable to how it seems you already read Aristotle (subjecting him to close scrutiny).
I'll give an example of how playful and intentionally deceptive Aristotle can be. So, Plato's Republic--it culminates in philosophers ruling, and makes a big ado about philosophy as part of an education for the rulers, right? If we look at Aristotle's critique of the Republic in bk. II of the Politics, we find him focusing on roughly bks. II-V of the Republic, the result of which is that if you've never read Plato's Republic or heard about it, reading Aristotle would never give you the impression that there's any culmination in the rule of philosophers. And one point, he says something like "It's bizarre of Socrates to not introduce philosophy or common meals into the education of the rulers." (1263b) Now, if you've read the Republic, you know that both of these things are in fact in there, so it seems like Aristotle is just stupid, forgetful, or malicious. And a few pages later (1265a), in comparing the Republic with the Laws, while he still is silent about the presence of philosophy, he admits that common meals are a part of both regimes. So in a span of a few pages, he looks like he doesn't know what he's talking about. But if one starts asking why he might downplay philosophy and the philosopher-kings, and how his critique transforms if one adds those elements back in, one starts to see how much more he agrees with Plato in certain respects.
>But if one starts asking why he might downplay philosophy and the philosopher-kings, and how his critique transforms if one adds those elements back in, one starts to see how much more he agrees with Plato in certain respects
I don't know how relevant it is, but it might be a nice hook, given the idea of rule by philosopher-kings. My political philosophy professor was a hardcore Straussian and fleshed out an interesting narrative in our modern political philosophy course, paraphrased roughly here. It's been years since I graduated, I wasn't as philosophically mature back then as I am now, and I wasn't that careful of a reader... I only cared about the ancients, Rousseau, and Marx at the time and just phoned it in through the other thinkers. But I'll do my best to paraphrase it.
The general trend, from Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke and onward, was to "soften" the aims of philosophy and politics, to sideline philosophy as the aim of the greatest men, to rebel against the "controlling" nature of the ancients, etc. "Old school" philosophy back then was portrayed as something that was used to "control" people, like something out of Plato's Gorgias, (at least due to the association of Aristotle with the Church). The course reached a humorous climax with Kant's Perpetual Peace, where he opened the work cynically and smugly saying that he could say whatever he want because nobody cared about what philosophers had to say anymore (right on the eve of the upheaval of the French Revolution).
Having recently completed ancient political philosophy with the same professor, I kept asking the same kind of question over and over again "but clearly that isn't a fair characterization of Aristotle, is it?" But I suppose that the point went over my head at the time.
That's interesting. I love me my Plato and Aristotle, but I think there's something to the charge that they come across as elitists even as they're trying in their own ways to make philosophy appear to be useful and harmless to political life. Comparison of those two with Xenophon has been very instructive for me, personally, which might incidently be why no one really reads him today: his Socrates, on close scrutiny, isn't really different from Plato's, but Xenophon really prevents him from being a figure of hero worship, just a deeply sensible man wrongly put to death. With Plato and Aristotle, it comes across to me that their hope of preventing Alcibiadeses and Critiases from abusing philosophy is to set the standard very high and hope that enough brushes with aporia will humble such people, but history does seem to kind of show that such individuals can dumbly trudge through aporias and keep doing their "I'm pretty awesome, so I'm going to try to rule" thing.
>With Plato and Aristotle, it comes across to me that their hope of preventing Alcibiadeses and Critiases from abusing philosophy is to set the standard very high and hope that enough brushes with aporia will humble such people, but history does seem to kind of show that such individuals can dumbly trudge through aporias and keep doing their "I'm pretty awesome, so I'm going to try to rule" thing.
Pretty much. The course was centered on a few themes: the meaning of modernity ("that man is alone and owes nothing to what came before"), the idea of "rational control", and eventually searching for standards of some kind (e.g., God, then man, then nature, then... uhhh...). Once we finished Nietzsche and finished the course, our professor offered only an uncharacteristically soft, brief, and anti-climactic conclusion, a conclusion I saw coming from a mile away, that modernity was a mistake.
Lol, incredible, but hard not to conclude. If you don't mind my asking, who was the professor?
He's a big fan of one of the philosophers I mentioned so far in this thread. That's all I'll say.
Fair enough, not tryna get you to powerlevel, just curious. (My guesses though are Velkley or Pangle.)
I've run into a Pangle. Not THE Pangle though.
Checking out some book reviews:
>Bolotin on Physics
seems interesting
>Bruell on Metaphysics
seems incredible
Do you think their readings gel with what other philosophers have been "picking up", like, for example, Heidegger?
>Do you think their readings gel with what other philosophers have been "picking up", like, for example, Heidegger?
Hmm, I suppose there's a similarity in the way Bolotin and Bruell make Aristotle come alive and feel relevant today, and I think they loosely agree on Heidegger flavored phrasings like "the what it was to be" for "ti to en einai" (instead of "essence"), and I suppose they interrogate the texts with a similar intensity, but I'm not sure that they're otherwise too comparable. I can say that for Bolotin's book, he also engages with On the Heavens and the Meteorology a great deal, though most of that comes out in the endnotes for each chapter, and both he and Bruell squeeze as much out of Aristotle's phrasings as possible, so they're keenly attentive to every qualification, repetition, possible inquiry that's raised then never brought up, etc. If I'm not sure they're right about everything, they at least provide an incredible challenge to received interpretations that act as incredible exercises for working out Aristotle's texts.
checked
>"the what it was to be" for "ti to en einai" (instead of "essence")
Could you briefly recap what is meant here? Is essence not a good enough individuating principle, or did its colloquial meaning corrupt the term in some way?
>Could you briefly recap what is meant here? Is essence not a good enough individuating principle, or did its colloquial meaning corrupt the term in some way?
The history of the terms used for translating Aristotelian nomenclature is really messy; ousia, for example, was initially translated by essentia and queentia, but at some point essentia was used for to ti en einai as well, and sometimes reserved for secondary uses for ousia, while substantia, which was originally reserved for hypokeimenon (that which is underlying), came to replace essentia as the word for ousia in its primary senses. By the point Emglish translations were being done, there wasn't strict agreement on which terms to use for what, and so you'll still find translations from about a century ago preferring essence for ousia, and so on. There's an in depth chapter long account of this in Joseph Owen's "The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics", and at least some of Heidegger's influence was on rethinking to some degree the contimued use of Latinate terminology in favor of slightly more literal renderings. Essence sometimes accidentally carries over some of ousia's senses, just from the messiness of how it's been used, so I imagine someone like Bruell just wants to keep it simple and point back at how this phrase with an interrogative particle gets translated as a technical term.
Not especially helpful, better to have not even encouraged a reading of Lambda if you're going to spoil your preferred answer, "there is no answer"; it's not like reading does frick all at that point.
>queentia
entia?
>to ti en einai
I suppose individual essence makes more sense here?
>entia?
An invented word just for ousia, possibly from queo, the Latins complained about it and essentia as harsh sounding.
>I suppose individual essence makes more sense here?
I think that's probably fine.
>An invented word just for ousia, possibly from queo, the Latins complained about it and essentia as harsh sounding.
Oh okay. I never saw the word and it looked like a typo to me. Maybe it's the key to a classics revival in a progressive academic atmosphere.
I do find him to be pretty malicious at times. I really love Plato, and Aristotle has this confusing habit of writing comebacks to dunk on his teacher, but in a way where he actually just misquotes or misunderstands the dialogue in question. It seems like he just lies about what Plato wrote to make himself look better, and occasionally takes credit for Plato's ideas and frames them as a critique of Plato. And people treat him like a god for it. I just... I think he was a bit misguided, and certainly a bit overrated. In ancient times he was often seen as a wayward student of Plato.
>Aristotle has this confusing habit of writing comebacks to dunk on his teacher, but in a way where he actually just misquotes or misunderstands the dialogue in question.
Nta but I got the same impression when reading him respond to presocratics.
Aristotle knew what Plato actually taught, which is different from what is in the dialogues. To think you know better than him from reading what Plato published is silly, when Plato explicitly says in the seventh letter that he never wrote his philosophy down - this doesn't mean it was "super sekrit", he would give lectures on it (which anecdotally most people couldn't follow and talked a lot about geometry and astronomy). But Aristotle knew the system inside and out. It's hard to imagine someone as intelligent as Aristotle, who studied with Plato for twenty years and spent most of his time with him, would grossly misunderstand Platonism. Much more likely that modern people don't understand it because the relevant sources are irretrievably lost. The best source left for what Plato actually taught is Aristotle. Further, your vague characterization that "in ancient times" he was seen as a "wayward student" of Plato is demonstrably false - opinions about how Aristotle and Plato related varied widely from total harmony (e.g. Simplicius, Iamblichus) to near total opposition (e.g. Alexander of Aphrodisias) to something inbetween (e.g. Plotinus, Porphyry). Those who saw him in total harmony would interpret all his criticisms of Plato as being criticisms of shallow readings of the dialogue - so Plato becomes a character in Aristotle just like Socrates is a character in Plato. Kind of hard for me or anyone to see them as being in total harmony, but I think they were on to something there, and in some passages I like to think that is what's going on.
Aristotle comes across as an odd bird to me. He downplays the role of philosophy in the Republic in bk. II of the Politics, and gives this partial account of it that looks more like the partial summary Socrates gives at the very start of the Timaeus, but to what end is a bit obscure, since presumably his students could just read the Republic and see that there's something else going on, where it's emphasized that it's not supposed to be a practically likely regime. At least until the Enlightenment, it was taken for ganted that he had a double teaching (Lucian makes reference to it in one of his satires, and both Peripatetic commentators like Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Neoplatonists agree explicitly with that assessment, disagreeing only in the details), so that could be a factor, but then he does seem combative; he was apparently close with Xenocrates, but his critiques of number ideals in the Metaphysics hammer on each variation posited by Plato, Speussipus, AND Xenocrates. His references to the dialogues sometimes seem like he's going by memory (so when he discusses the chora in the Physics, he uses a different word for it), and at least one anonymous author among the Oxyrhyncus papyri argues that Aristotle's comments about Plato and his dialogue format in the Poetics are wrong, and that the main speakers are meant to be different figures dramatically understood (but this then has to be weighed against Aristotle's direct experience of Plato and the Academy). That's before even addressing the mess of his surviving corpus, and our not being able to sufficiently establish what's stitched together from different writings and what's supposed to be what it presents itself as.
He definitely uses the word "χώρα" in the relevant part of the Physics where he's talking about the Timaeus, I'm looking at the section right now (II.2 209b11ff). I think your memory is misleading you (which happens to me often enough too).
He does say that Plato identified τόπος and χώρα, but this is a reference to "the so-called unwritten teaching", so I guess we can't know for sure. This is of course to forestall the objection that Plato was talking about the internal space of the object and not at all the place that Aristotle was interested in here.
Sorry that's of course meant to be IV.2 not II.2.
Ah, you're right! My mistake. Now I have to figure out what I'm confusing that impression with.
Have you guys seen my Timaeus thread? I'm talking about khora over there.
The problem with identifying chora/topos with matter (as Aristotle claims Plato did, but since there's no identification of chora and topos in his writings, we have to take his word on it) is that a thing changes place while its matter is basically the same, or not different in the relevant way anyway.
But it's important to realize that Aristotle didn't think place was solely the boundary of what a thing is in, but the motionless boundary. So it's more abstract than that. Like if you're sitting in your chair and the air shifts, you're still in the same place, because you're in the same motionless boundary. But that boundary is always occupied by something because Aristotle didn't believe in the void.
>that a thing changes place while its matter is basically the same, or not different in the relevant way anyway.
Why are we trying to view change through the lens of the thing (which doesn't change) and not through the substrate which does change (matter)? I think this is a mistake.
Change of place of course involves matter because it involves the hylemorphic compound, a natural substance. But place in itself can't be matter, because the matter is part of the thing, but the place is not part of the thing, and a thing can change in place without changing in itself - unless you want to maintain with the sophists that Coriscus in the market place is a different thing from Coriscus at the temple.
All change has reference to something that doesn't change. For example, in an alteration from black to white, the form "white" is not changing. Only natural substances can change. Similarly, for there to be change of place in a meaningful way, there has to be something unchanging (the motionless boundary) to which the change is referred.
I am certain that his Metaphysics was butchered firstly by Islamic schoolars and then christian monks to fit the narative.
I think it is after 7th or 8th book of Metaphysics where he stops being methodical and just starts inserting opinions out of no where. I allways wondered if someone else noticed that? Maybe i am just imagining it.
We still have commentaries by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, and Syrianus that show that what we have predates Islamic contact and most Christian commentaries.
Hmmm that makes it even more wierder then..
Yes for example. It follows this nice string which you hold and then just goes *frick it no more string*
>It follows this nice string which you hold and then just goes *frick it no more string*
nicely said
i have seen people argue that those books connect to the previous ones and i could be the one that got filtered, but it does seem to me like the final part of "metaphysics" doesn't go anywhere
the latter books do seem disconnected, e.g. the one related to numbers
There's an initially wonky but then strong progression up through Theta and Iota, Kappa seems to be a summary for people confused by that point, Lambda is for people disappointed in everything prior, and Mu and Nu seem to be cold water meant for thinkers still wedded to the ideas and mathematicals and who don't accept anything prior.
Aristotle here is confusing things here. It is true that actuality precedes potentiality, for all potentialities must be the potentialities of actually existent actuals. After all non-existence has no potential to produce phenomena in time. This is essentially what he is saying. But potentiality is not the same as possibility. Possibility is a more fundamental factor than either potentiality or actuality. After all, nothing is actual or actualizable if it is not already by necessity possible. All necessities are possible and none are impossible. Potentiality differs from possibility in that Potentialities are the set of achievable states an entity may achieve in time given certain conditions. Possibility however is the existence of conditionality in the first place.
Aristotle didn’t speak english
And? All languages are more or less semantically interchangeable on a basic level.
Then go translate Finnegan's Wake into Piraha.
Possibility and potentiality mean the same thing.
homie he says the same in his Metaphysics. If materiality is tied to potentiality, and the first cause must be a pure actuality, then it will also be immaterial. This doesn't contradict hylomorphism, at best it reframes it as an ontological theory of objects containing any kind of potentiality.
Most of the individuals he describes are of the second category. So there's a bait and switch going on.
Most of the individuals he describes are of the second category because every individual apart from one is of the second category. That's just a consequence of the unicity of the First Mover (on which all the unmoved movers and the moved movers depend). No bait and switch is going on here
I don't think you understand the controversy. Individuals are supposed to be interchangeable with primary substances. They are the basis of hylomorphic metaphysics, the things which are actually things in the purest sense of the word. Again, as I shitposted in the OP, with the quote from On Interpretation, it sounds like Aristotle is saying that only God exists and everything else is something lesser (and perhaps not even real things in any meaningful sense).
>Individuals are supposed to be interchangeable with primary substances.
Yes.
They are the basis of hylomorphic metaphysics
Yes, but hylomorphic metaphysics is not the basis of the ontological theory of individuality (since it pertains only to individuals that have both actuality and potentiality)
>the things which are actually things in the purest sense of the word.
Definitely not, for the reason stated above. I think you just made some presuppositions, and assumed that they were present in Aristotle's philosophy.
>Again, as I shitposted in the OP, with the quote from On Interpretation, it sounds like Aristotle is saying that only God exists and everything else is something lesser (and perhaps not even real things in any meaningful sense).
Literally nowhere in that passage Aristotle claims anything of that sort. I don't even know from which sentence would you even begin to formulate such a blantant misreading.
I missed a > before the "they are the basis of hylomorphic metaphysics", my bad
>Yes, but hylomorphic metaphysics is not the basis of the ontological theory of individuality (since it pertains only to individuals that have both actuality and potentiality)
I feel like you're not getting me, so I'm going to ask you a few questions. What does primary substance refer to, then, and can hylomorphic individuals be primary substances? Aren't primary substances and individuals identical? If they're not primary substances, then what are they?
YES THIS GUY HAS KILLS IM SO FRICKING SICK OF MORONS WHO JUST GO ON AND ON ABOUT HOW GREAT THIS GUY WAS
Just. Read. Aquinas.
he gets the agent intellect wrong
How so?
Aquinas, like many other commentators, interprets the meager chapter of DA 3.5 too broadly. The agent intellect has nothing to do with human thinking and is rather just a "capstone" of a taxonomy of animating principles (e.g., it's the highest level, above locomotive, sensible, nutritive, etc., so it deserves a cameo). The agent intellect isn't necessary to explain any functions of the mind at all, as that's covered by the senses, common sense, imagination, intention, and the possible intellect (which is a description of the soul as a whole). Name any role that is traditionally ascribed to the agent intellect, and you'll find that Aristotle has already prescribed the function to another organ of the mind. Furthermore, Aristotle describes thinking as mediated only through images, meaning that it will always require processing sensible objects in order to "filter out" potential intelligible objects, which means that the agent intellect cannot play a role due to its metaphysical status. Finally, Aristotle's description of the agent intellect is not only immaterial, unmixed, and separable etc. (so it can't be associated with the body, e.g. human beings), but it is also completely identical with Aristotle's description of the unmoved mover in Metaphysics. Aquinas, unfortunately, is too wedded to the considerations of faith to fully recognize this problem.
oh so you think you're smarter than Aquinas? name 10 angels
Michael
Raphael
Gabriel
Uriel
Jackie Chan
Maybe Aristotle was just wrong bro
yeah, maybe he was
This hurts my brain.
Can we just, like, kill Aristotle or something?
Aristotle has a powerlevel of at least 3,000,000 in philosophy, it's not so simple.
Okay but how many teeth DO women have?
>when a israelite uses a fake pen name to write a book made of fake and moronic and pointless arguments and pseudo-intellectualism to stir controversy and make the goys waste their entire life span debating the pointless shit that has no real meaning so he can enslave them while they are busy debating bullshit
Aristotle was a crypto-advaitin
This is literally one of the easiest god DAMN things in the entire Organon to comprehend. On Interpretation was one of the first books in the Organon anyway, why doesn't anyone ever post the thought provoking logical arguments in the Organon later on?
Like either of the Analytics?
How is it easy to comprehend when Aristotle defines substance in multiple ways and in ways that doesn't seem to make sense?
State the main differences between how he defines substances and why. I can't parse or debate an argument you aren't posting, and honestly, me trying to do so would probably be a petito principii with this limited information.
(with reference to the three classes given in the OP)
Aristotle defines substances as in the second class in works such as Physics, Biology, etc. He defines substances as the first class in Metaphysics and On Interpretation. And then there are works that reference neither class like Categories (substance is what is spoken of) or both classes like De Anima (we have material intellects and immaterial intellects). Plus, we have the boilerplate understanding of Aristotle's metaphysics as being, for all intents and purposes, hylomorphism.
When you say 'class' are you referring to 'accidentals' or 'species'?
Because that's usually the problem people have with Aristotle's classifications.
No, I meant the three definitions of things provided in the OP, in the On Interpretation excerpt.
Yeah but you can't base your entire definitions on an excerpt. If you read the book and based your definitions on the reading that is typically more important.
You might actually benefit from reading Metaphysics... something eternal is prior, to that which is terminable.
The second and third classes mentioned are similar to the principle of potential/kinetic energy in physics, where there is potential energy to be disbursed. If your movement has the end in mind, as per Aristotle's Physics, then the second act would be comprised of all things that will eventually be actualized by all potentialities, as the end to which the movements are directed.
The difference between this and the third class is just the end of the movements, or the end of the actions directed.
Man, I'm getting a little bit frustrated trying to communicate what I mean to you.
>Yeah but you can't base your entire definitions on an excerpt.
I was just saying that all three of Aristotle's provisional definitions of what thinghood is happen to be present in this excerpt, which is rare. And here, he chooses one of them as *the* crowning definition, at least for the scope of On Interpretation. Usually, Aristotle rolls with one of the definitions or another for a particular work, so it's impossible to figure out what he really believed or how these definitions of thinghood interact with each other.
>I was just saying that all three of Aristotle's provisional definitions of what thinghood is happen to be present in this excerpt, which is rare.
Not really, most things that are genera, can be the species of something else. It is actually very rare for Aristotle to state this is not the case, except when talking about the monad.
I'm not OP, but I think OP's question isn't without merit, nor can it so simply be addressed with "read book X", since he already seems to be familiar with how substance is spoken of elsewhere, nor does it seem fair to characterize OP as only taking his bearing from an out of context excerpt, since he's been clear above that he's been reading through On Interpretation and was struck by the passage he screenshotted. You do seem to have helpful things to say, but let's be clear that it's not just people new to philosophy who have trouble with substance, since it's practically a cottage industry in academia to write about how to reconcile the discussions of substance in the Categories and Metaphysics, so this has been a question for people who've presumably spent more time than us smallfries working this out. And the classical commentators made no less of a big deal about the difficulties of putting Aristotle's statements together, since the openings of their commentaries almost inevitably to address why Aristotle seems to obscure.
Personally, I hate the formulaic idea of asking the same questions in philosophy however. It seems like it's the same thing again and again.
I wrote a whole effortpost but then my browser tab crashed, I lost everything, and then I hurt my hand out of rage.
tl;dr philosophy is hard, philosophers are biased, and we have had too many resets that makes it impossible to "inherit" the progress we've made in each respective tradition.
sorry if that sounds too moronic lol, it was a better post but I'm fricking too angry and hurting to type
>Aristotle defines substances as in the second class in works such as Physics, Biology, etc. He defines substances as the first class in Metaphysics and On Interpretation.
Do you mean matter here? That which has physicality, aka terminability?
Because there are things that are not eternal, but this is only counter to something that is eternal. So in that sense, and that sense alone, there has to be eternal substance, or matter, before everything else is defined.
>Do you mean matter here? That which has physicality, aka terminability?
Only in the first class. Sometimes Aristotle defines primary substance as immaterial things, sometimes he defines primary substance as composite things. It's difficult to grok if the composite things are truly "things" in an ontological sense, it's difficult to see how the two kinds of substances interact with each other, and it's difficult to see why Aristotle vacillates between the two without having problems like I spelled out in the OP.
I don't know how that has anything to do with what I'm talking about. Taxonomy is completely irrelevant to the problem.
>Taxonomy is completely irrelevant to the problem.
But clearly Taxonomy is not what we're dealing with here. The problem of philosophy has always been people assuming far too much. You are assuming that all I meant to do to alter the argument was introduce the terms species and genera, while in reality it has the entire argument within it, I've solved your problem and you're going to overlook it -- face it, your issue is a problem of categorization. You are saying...
If A AFFECTS B THEN B is fundamentally different from A.
Whereas B's existence was presupposed by the action of A, and everything that came before A that caused A to exist. Hence IF CAUSE OF A THEN B is also appropriate. And here we see that IF A THEN B is a species of that greater genera.
So therefore, the motive, primary substance, or monad would be the causitive force of most of what you would deal with in reality, the prime mover.
So you are just thinking they are always going to be substantive but substantivity is always relative.
Sorry, but I largely don't understand what you're trying to say. I'll bite though:
>Whereas B's existence was presupposed by the action of A, and everything that came before A that caused A to exist. Hence IF CAUSE OF A THEN B is also appropriate. And here we see that IF A THEN B is a species of that greater genera.
If you're trying to say that composite substances are a species of a general immaterial substance, then we run into the differentia problem. Remember, differentiae are how Aristotle "branches out" species from genera, seeking what is different from the base genus yet still compatible with it. The problem is that the quality of "material" not only can't be derived from the immaterial (it is wholly separate), but it also leads to a paradox (the thing is both material and immaterial).
This leaves us with two options:
1) consider "two trees" of genera, species, etc., one with material and one with immaterial. then, somehow, we "cross" the two (like Aristotle does in making his chart of the regimes in Politics) to come up with composite substance.
2) wipe out "material" as not differentia, not a thing, etc.
>So therefore, the motive, primary substance, or monad would be the causitive force of most of what you would deal with in reality, the prime mover.
>So you are just thinking they are always going to be substantive but substantivity is always relative.
So was my formulation in the OP correct? Only the prime mover is real? Everything else is less real? There are no other things? Then how can we speak about the parts of reality as a whole? It sounds like a great way to collapse the whole project of philosophy.
I think this problem could be solved somewhat by mathematics. Lets assign some variables.
A = You
B = Eating an Apple
C = Apple
You do not have an apple so you must grow one in order to consume it.
C = .1A + .9E
We will call E the environment. The set of environmental variables required to grow an apple.
B = .1C + .9E
And so on and so forth. In the end, you are a part, a component, of the action of you eating the apple. Regardless of the fact that it is a participle (and so has no substance), in essence you, and your characteristics, philosophies, viewpoints, et al. are imbued in the act of you eating that apple.
Now if the action you had in mind was to grow the apple to eat it, you are the primary reason you are eating the apple. It does not matter that you compose .01 of the apple and the other 99% is environmental factors. The sheer fact alone that you had the end in mind of eating an apple makes you the agent creating an 'actuality' out of a 'potentiality'.
Oftentimes, two things will occur.
Either
1) C was not the end in mind when you acted, but was a meer possibility given the variables available at the time
or
2) Given that 99% of the factors are environmental your end in mind never came to fruition.
These BOTH would result in the so called potentialities that never actualized.
Bro, I have no idea how to even parse this. Sorry man. I really tried for that last post too.
Is that a compliment? I guess this is getting pretty technically complex.
Aristotle is my favorite thinker ever bro. Everything is relative for him, even the causes of things, that's all I'm really trying to say.
Maybe? Although you did fail in showing an apparent connection to what I was talking about.
>Everything is relative for him, even the causes of things, that's all I'm really trying to say.
I'm starting to suspect that too in some qualified way.
Go read Metaphysics Lambda, and then read it again.
You're not going to get an answer to your question, there is none. We don't have the complete works of Aristotle, we have notes. You didn't read Metaphysics Lambda, go read it, and you'll get it. There are portions of his philosophy where "Term A" actually means "Term B" because they're being shortened or abbreviated. We're dealing with an incomplete picture.
I'm not going to do anything you say if you're going to be that flippantly (and unjustifiably) dismissive.
are his political and literary works bad? like i think they would be alright for understanding why people seize power, or why dramatic or comedic events happen- or can it all be explained in his physics?
Aristotle's works on comedy have been lost to time
forget everything I said about hylomorphism.
Aristotle never "said" anything about "hylomorphism." "Hylomorphism" was not a term Aristotle ever used or coined. That was retroactively applied to him by modern philosophers, you're likely thinking Aristotle is a "hypocrite" because you made the mistake of reading secondary literature first. Not all secondary literature is bad, but most of the modern stuff is. Aristotle never once asserts that "being" or "substance" requires matter categorically.
checked
>hylomorphism is le fake conspiracy
Am I supposed to believe that thousands of years of commentators were wrong?
>Aristotle never once asserts that "being" or "substance" requires matter categorically.
Bait aside, I recognize this. Yet we still have different presentations of "individuals", "substances", etc., throughout Aristotle's corpus. How do we rectify this? Some questions include: do immaterial substances interact with composite substances? Which kinds of substances are "more real"? Why do we have this weird "underlying stuff" dualism present and how do we reconcile it?
>not everything with potential has matter (in Aristotle, the celestial gods fall under the latter category, in Christianity they are replaced with angels).
Don't the celestial gods have quintessence (a type of matter)?
>Don't the celestial gods have quintessence (a type of matter)?
Quintessence is a goofy kind of element.
>bro... what if there was a FIFTH element above fire
>trust me bro, even though I'm borrowing the word for fire, it's not fire
redpill me on the quintessence
platonic bump
One of the things that makes Aristotle difficult for the careless reader is that he uses the words "primary" and "prior" in two senses that are almost exactly opposed.
Sensible things are prior in relation to us, because they're what's most apparent and also how we come to know anything abstract.
But abstract objects are prior by nature, because the being of the sensible depends on the abstract. So, the abstract triangle is prior to the triangle you drew on the wall of a bathroom while trying to poo.
Some modern "scholars" think the passage you cite is an interpolation by a later Platonist copyist/glossist, but that's idiotic because he says the exact same thing in Physics II, throughout Post An, and in many other places.
Aristotle isn't saying that sensible substances aren't real, just that they're posterior. In the same way (to use one of his favorite examples) a triangle's having angles that sum to 180 degrees is posterior to its being a trilateral figure, because the latter causes the former.
And obviously Aristotle didn't think that the abstract forms actually existed in some third realm a la Plato, but they were still prior. I'm really not sure myself how he saw them as existing yet, it's a controversial subject even today.
It's not that God is the only thing that's real but he's the principle of everything real, in that sense he is more real. Likewise the intermediary divinities that move the heavens are more real.
Prime matter isn't real in the sense that it's separable in reality, but it's still a principle of real things, even if it's completely abstract and can't exist on its own.
Nice troll OP you made me respond.
If abstract objects are prior by nature, but sensible things are only prior in relation to us, then are sensible objects "located" somewhere "below" abstract objects but "above" us? Is there an ontological priority thing going on here?
>I'm really not sure myself how he saw them as existing yet, it's a controversial subject even today.
What are your thoughts? Feel free to sketch them out broadly and with reservation.
>It's not that God is the only thing that's real but he's the principle of everything real, in that sense he is more real.
Well, if we start admitting gradations in being, then we start running into problems of figuring out what "is", because either things are or they are not.
>Nice troll OP you made me respond.
You should respond to Aristotle threads more often!
>What are your thoughts? Feel free to sketch them out broadly and with reservation.
I have more problems than thoughts. The forms seem to be in the divine intellect, but the relation between that and the different heavenly spheres, how they are "passed down" to the sublunary world, etc, I have no idea dude, I'm not an Aristotle expert and I don't understand the Metaphysics yet. And anyone who thinks they do understand the Metaphysics after reading it two or three times is full of crap. Avicenna said he read it so many times he had it memorized word for word, and still didn't think he really understood it until he read al-Farabi's commentary.
>Well, if we start admitting gradations in being, then we start running into problems of figuring out what "is", because either things are or they are not.
They're "one in substratum" as Aristotle might put it - something is or is not, and in that sense there is no difference, and God is in the same way as anything. But that one thing is that on which others depend for their being, in that sense and in that sense alone one thing "is" in a higher degree. That's how I understand it, anyway. So the dyad and the monad both "are", but the monad is prior and in that sense "is" in a higher degree, because the dyad depends on it.