A Dynamic Ontology: on How Aristotle Arrived at the Conclusion that Eternal Change Accomplishes Ousia (original) (raw)

Aristotle's Ontology of Change

Northwestern University Press, 2020

This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reex¬amination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics.

Aristotle: Movement and the structure of being

2012

This project sets out to answer the following question: what does movement contribute to or change about being according to Aristotle? The first part works through the argument for the existence of movement in the Physics. This argument includes distinctive innovations in the structure of being, notably the simultaneous unity and manyness of being: while material and form are one thing, they are two in being. This makes it possible for Aristotle to argue that movement is not intrinsically related to what is not: what comes to be does not emerge from non-being, it comes from something that is in a different sense. The second part turns to the Metaphysics to show that and how the lineage of potency and activity the inquiry into movement. A central problem is that activity or actuality, energeia, does not at first seem to be intrinsically related to a completeness or end, telos. With the unity of different senses of being at stake, Aristotle establishes that it is by showing that activity or actuality is movement most of all, and that movement has and is a complete end. Thus, it is movement that leads Aristotle to conclude that substance and form are energeia, and that unity of being is possible.

Entelecheia, Temporality, and the Task of Reconstructing Aristotle’s Physics of Being

The task of reading across Aristotle's extensive corpus in the hopes of drawing a connection between his Physics and the greater task of Metaphysics might start us off in a fundamental misreading if we begin with a contemporary eye. Operating with the definitions of motion offered by modern science, we modern readers often find ourselves missing Aristotle's working with ancient categories in tying together of motion to its end (rest), in light of the Galilean and Newtonian understanding of inertia as a not-existing (Balaban 8-9). On the other hand, the systematic breadth of both Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics, as they encroach on and weave through the complexities of being as being and being in its particular motional aspects, seem in their scope to problematize the selective, thematic, -picking apart‖ approach of the analytical tradition, which reduces Aristotle to an -interesting‖ -ordinary language philosopher‖ (Halper 117-118). Even more erroneously, the contemporary continental theorist Giorgio Agamben has introduced imagined categories of -zoe‖ and -bios‖ in his own political readings of Aristotle in Homo Sacer (Finlayson). In what ways can the reading of Aristotle's philosophy be opened to a proper contemporary understanding, one that is both true to Aristotle's own categories, exhaustive systematic method, and anti-Platonic -realist‖ stance?

Elemental Transformation in Aristotle: Three Dilemmas for the Traditional Account

Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (ISBN 978-3-86838-146-7), 2012

According to the traditionally held interpretation of many texts in Aristotle, that which plays the role of substratum for elemental transformation is a matter with no essence of its own, prime matter. I argue that the traditional account of elemental transformation, in its appeal to prime matter, conflicts with three doctrines which many commentators would take Aristotle himself to endorse. First, it conflicts with that variety of essentialism according to which everything that exists has an essence which marks it out as what it is. Second, it conflicts with actualism. And third, it conflicts with the view that Aristotle’s four elements are to be understood in accordance with that version of the constituent ontological strategy according to which one constituent of a whole serves as subject and the other serves as predicate. I argue that these three conflicts are such that satisfactory resolutions of them would involve controversial metaphysical commitments not usually associated with the traditional account. My aim is not to undermine the traditional account, but rather to show that it should not be regarded as a general framework that can be shared by many widely variant accounts of elemental transformation and of the place of prime matter in Aristotle’s ontology. The traditional account is far more theory-laden than it is often taken to be.

The Concept of Change in Aristotle’s Physics

FLSF Felsefe ve Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2021

This study aims to investigate change (kinesis) as it is handled by Aristotle in Physics. With this aim, it analyzes the basic concepts which constitute the ground of this definition. In Physics, Aristotle starts with what is prior to us and moves to principles and causes. Thus, first, he elaborates on the things which are subject to change and he introduces the idea of categories. Substance (ousia) as the first category is what underlies the change. Other categories are the properties that are applied to substance. Then he claims that the thing which underlies change functions as matter (hypokeimenon) and the property which is predicated of substance at the end of change functions as form (eidos). Thus, change is described as having a form of a matter. In other words, in change, the matter is determined by the form. But this determination can only be possible if the matter has the capacity to be determined in a specific way. It is called potential. When the form determines the matter, its potential is actualized. In Physics Book III, Aristotle defines change as the actualization (energeia) of a potential (dynamei). Some scholars argue that in the definition "actualization" refers to a process while others argue that it refers to having an end. In this study, considering Aristotle's examples of actuality and potentiality, it is claimed that change involves both.

Aristotle’s Conceptual Pillars About Natural World

2016

It was an adventure to read Marco Solinas' newest book, a journey through history that encompasses twenty-four centuries of the study of living beings. Quite originally, it offers a bird's eye view of this long period, focusing on three philosophical pillars sustaining Aristotle's conception of natural world: fixism, essentialism, and teleology. Aristotle's fixism is related to the immutability of species, its lack of history. His essentialism is related to the uniformity of species, its lack of random variation. His teleology is related to the motto 'nature does nothing in vain', everything has a function to preserve the species. Hence, the book creates the feeling that it is a biography of each member in this conceptual family. In this sense, the reader is offered the birth, infancy, turbulent adolescence, adult life climax, and finally, elderly decline and death of each basic pillar. The first part of the book covers the first four 'life history' phases and the second part covers the last two phases. By focusing on the core concepts, the author makes the long history comprehensible, and helps the reader make sense of the direction taken by modern science in a broader context. Thus, overall, this book presents a didactic union between historic and philosophic approaches that will be of interest to