Entelecheia, Temporality, and the Task of Reconstructing Aristotle’s Physics of Being (original) (raw)
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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.
in: M. Leunissen (ed), Aristotle's Physics. A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press, 2015
Nature is difficult. As Aristotle reminds us at the opening of Physics I, the principles of nature are obscure to us, at least at the beginning, although they are clearer in their own right. So, Aristotle's preferred methodology in approaching the study of nature is to start with what is more familiar to us and to move from there to what makes more sense in its own right. Aristotle's use of the craft analogy is a well-known instance of this methodology. He begins with a miscellany of craft-related examples to elucidate the distinction between the four causes before moving to its application to nature, where the four causes are much trickier to disentangle. This paper sets out to show that Aristotle applies this methodology also to a fundamental aspect of the distinction between being and change. Broadly, Aristotle starts his physical enquiry by relying on a clear-cut distinction between being and change and by giving priority to being over change. Going on, approaching more and more nature's inner functioning and deep structure, and considering things from a different, more fundamental and more revealing perspective, Aristotle arrives at the conclusion that the substantial being (ousia) of natural entities is accomplished through a particular kind of change (eternal change), and hence that being in its primary sense is itself dynamic. 1 This is a major innovation by Aristotle within the Greek tradition of natural philosophy and of its treatment of the relation between being and change.
Aristotle’s second problem about a science of being qua being
Ancient Philosophy, 2017
There is a variety of interpretations of how, in Metaphysics Gamma 2, Aristotle argues for the possibility of a science of the essence of being-of what being is; of being qua being-and does so, famously, by introducing the claim that this kind, being, exhibits a πρὸς ἕν structure; that is, the claim that the different kinds of being are essentially dependent on a single kind that is primary. It appears that the several interpretations come in three main varieties. First, there are those who, following Owen's classic article of 1960, argue that Aristotle's primary aim is to obviate the danger that the term 'being' is simply ambiguous, in the way in which the word 'bank' is in English and the word κάλυξ in Greek. 1 This, these critics think, is a real danger due to Aristotle's theory of categories, understood as the view that there are different ultimate kinds of being which do not fall under a single genus and which, for all that theory tells us, may or may not be essentially related. For it is obvious that if 'being' is ambiguous in this way, then there cannot be a science of the essence of being. Secondly, some critics, challenging Owen's view that the theory of categories represents such a danger and arguing that the πρὸς ἕν structure is present already in that theory, argue that Aristotle's aim, rather, is to show that the possibility of a science of a subject-matter does not require that the different kinds of the subject must belong to a single genus (the so-called καθ' ἕν structure) but is likewise provided for by a πρὸς ἕν structure. According to these critics, the need to show this is due to Aristotle's, in the Posterior Analytics, having accounted for the unity of a science entirely in terms of the strict genus-species relation (καθ' ἕν structure); so that his aim in the Metaphysics is, in effect, to relax the Posterior Analytics' requirements for the unity of a science. 2 Thirdly, other critics argue that the πρὸς ἕν structure, invoked for the purpose of unifying a science, is present already in the Posterior Analytics, and that the aim of the Metaphysics is to extend this mode of unification of a science from the special sciences to the general science of being. 3 Our question in the present paper is this: Does Aristotle, in Metaphysics Gamma 2, think that the claim that being exhibits a category-based πρὸς ἕν structure is also sufficient to defend the possibility of a science of being qua being, or does he think that it is only necessary? 4 We
Aristotle, the Being, the Infinite and Physics
The purpose of this monograph is to show that Aristotle's revolutionary ideas are pertinent and current even in the twenty-first century and have not yet been fully understood. We shall start by explaining the concept of phenomenon, as understood in his time, but in the light of today's technologies. Next, we will show how Aristotle presents and develops the discussion about the Being, and how things arise from non-being, a discussion then ongoing for 400 years already. And we shall finally see, how he, with a genius' insight, engendered a totally original conception of the Cosmos. Analyzing the theories proposed by the philosophers who preceded him, Aristotle constructs a new relation between hylé and eidos, and modifies the idea of telos, introducing the revolutionary concepts of entelecheia (actuality) and dynamis (potential). To this end, using mathematical concepts, he analyzes the differences between real numbers and natural numbers, and develops, from this discussion, the application of apeiron to the physical world of actual bodies. Moreover, he rejects the concept of place and void as being a rigid space, a "little box" that remains after a body leaves it. Finally, he analyzes what is time and asks in what way it is infinite.
The Split Gaze of the Soul: Parts and Wholes in Aristotle's Model of Epagoge
All of Aristotle's science relies in the end on the whether or not his model of perception can provide an adequate grounding for the induction of essential forms. In other words, can the accounts of the acquisition of essential forms, from the De Anima, be completely reconciled with the functions that these forms will be required to fulfill in the Posterior Analytics and the Metaphysics.
The Hermeneutic Problem of Potency and Activity in Aristotle
2017
Of Aristotle's core terms, potency (dunamis) and actuality (energeia) are among the most important. But when we attempt to understand what they mean, we face the following problem: their primary meaning is movement, as a source (dunamis) or as movement itself (energeia). We therefore have to understand movement in order to understand them. But the structure of movement is itself articulated using these terms: it is the activity of a potential being, as potent. This paper examines this hermeneutic circle, and works out a strategy for reading Aristotle based on his conception of our epistemological predicament. This hermeneutic approach helps us gain access to the phenomena of movement and its sources (potency, and energeia). The paper closes with a review of the conceptual resources we deploy to think about movement: homogeneity, space and time, impulse, relativity, the blend of sameness and difference, and being and non-being. Showing that Aristotle uses none of these clears the landscape for a fresh inquiry into his account of movement. To get underway in the study of dunamis and energeia it is necessary to examine movement. Aristotle devotes book IX of the Metaphysics specifically to dunamis and energeia, yet it is not possible to start the study there, for the argument of that book begins with the sense of dunamis proper to movement, its primary sense, and with the sense of energeia that is movement, and from there works out how they from there extend to other things. Thus, to understand dunamis and energeia it is necessary to understand movement, and their function in movement. When we turn to Aristotle's account of movement, however, we do not find an explanation of these words through an appeal to movement. Instead, we find a proof of the existence of movement through an appeal to them. After all, Aristotle defines movement as the being-at-work (energeia) of a potent thing (tou dunamei ontos), as such. Thus, he expresses the structure of movement using the very terms we hoped movement would clarify; instead of making the meaning of any of these, more obvious, Aristotle brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by PhilPapers seems to make it less accessible by referring them to one another, making of them a kind of circle. We cannot undertake the understanding of dunamis and energeia without movement, but movement is not grasped through concepts that are readily available to us: it can only be grasped through understanding dunamis and energeia. The turn to movement, therefore, is not merely preliminary to the study of dunamis and energeia: to study one is to study the other. This circle, however, is not a closed circle. Three things hold it open: the words dunamis and energeia themselves, the experience of movement, and the differences and relationships between the words, as expressed in the structure of movement. After some general remarks on why this hermeneutic circle is not closed, we shall work out more precisely both this difficulty and how to get out of it. §1: Why This Hermeneutic Circle is Open The first reason, then, that movement (kinēsis) does not form a closed circle with dunamis and energeia is that dunamis, energeia, and entelekheia have meanings that we can partly recognize. One cannot suppose that the meanings of these words are those of ordinary Greek: consider Aristotle's complex relationship with inherited opinions (endoxa), and consider also that he created the words energeia and entelekheia from ordinary Greek words. Nevertheless, though we have reasons to say that the common meanings of each of these words are of limited usefulness, they nevertheless would have made some sense on their own. Thankfully, Aristotle goes out of his way to say something about their meaning, though not much, as we shall see. So while it will not be possible to grasp their meanings solely on philological grounds, it will be possible to gain some insight this way. The complex relationship between Aristotle's terms and ordinary Greek has a loose resemblance to the relationship between these terms and our English translations: what he tries to communicate is and can be expressed in ordinary Greek or in ordinary English, but only roughly. 1 For us this means that in many cases key terms should remain untranslated, except where elucidation would be very helpful; such elucidation, while it can be accurate, is usually provisional and will not survive being generalized or removed from its context. The distinctions Aristotle makes between them, and the relationships between them, however, are more likely to apply elsewhere, though here too one must be cautious. The second reason that it could actually be helpful to put kinēsis, on the one hand, and dunamis and energeia on the other, into a circle of inquiry, is that we have ample experience of movement. This experience is continuous, unrelenting; it is unclear at first whether there is anything to be distinguished from it, because it seems as though the whole of the cosmos moves. Even what appears to have ceased moving and be resting is in its most basic character something that moves. To be motionless, therefore, has two relevant meanings: to be at rest, and to be beyond movement and rest altogether. For rest has its meaning only as a moment of a moving thing, as "a deprivation in what admits of motion," (Physics V.2 226b10-18). But it is not at all obvious whether or not there is anything that transcends movement and rest altogether. The matter is complicated by our own natural constitution: we are living things, and for us to live is (also) to move: if nothing appears to be moving, nevertheless our hearts beat, our blood circulates continuously. If we grasp eternal ideas, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we do so as moving things, whose minds will soon turn to something else. If movement seems to be indeterminate or difficult to grasp, it is in part because it is difficult to distinguish from anything in our experience. 1 Take, for example, the ongoing disagreement over how to translate entelekheia, e.g. as complete reality, full actuality, being-atwork-staying-itself, being-in-its-end, and being-at-its-end. A similar disagreement over how to translate energeia-sometimes it can only be translated activity, and other times actuality, e.g. NE VII.12 1153a12, Pro III.5 204a20, III.6 206a14-led Beere to argue against translating it at all. Cf. the introduction to Jonathan Beere, Doing and Being: An Interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009).
Being, Substance and Form in Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Philosophy and Progress, 2019
The concepts of ‘being‘, ‘substance‘ and ‘form‘ are central to Aristotle‘s metaphysics. According to him, there are different modes of being, and of all these different modes of being, substance is the primary mode of being, and First Philosophy is especially concerned with the mode of being which belongs to substances. Again, he tries to give an analysis of what a substance is in terms of the concept of form, and claims that it is essence or form that may be called substance in the truest and fullest sense. Thus we see that the concepts of ‘being‘, ‘substance‘ and ‘form‘ are intimately related. This paper is an attempt to analyze clearly what Aristotle means by these three important concepts. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#61-62; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2017 P 43-52