2046

An argument requires 3 terms

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seemed like he described "metaphysical possibility" as potentiality and didn't describe or definite "epistemological possibility" at all?

The two papers I posted treat different aspects of this. The first attempts to ground modal logic in the concepts of act and potency, arguing that a potency is a dispositional property and thus entails the existence of a possibility. The second is a part of a dissertation that criticizes the "logical possibility argument" that treats a possibility in terms of what can be imagined without contradiction.

Potency and modality.pdf logical possibility and necessary truth.pdf

Yes

Is form just "relation"? At first glance, I'd say no. In order for something to have a relationship with something else, it has to be that specific thing having that specific relationship with this specific other thing, ie., it has to have matter. Betweeness in the examples you have is a relationship between form-matter composites. But, that's not to say that it's entirely unrelated. The categories trace the way in which form and matter relate to substances and predicates, insofar as predication is our way of signifying different modes of being, and form and matter are two fundamental aspects of being. So the question of what relation "relation" has to form and matter is a valid one, and there must be some mode of being corresponding to each way of predication. The only passage I know of is in Aquinas' commentary on the Metaphysics where he says "quantity" flows from the matter, "quality" from the form. "Relation" is something different because it is not a consideration of the predicate "being in a subject," but a subject "with reference to something else" (V.9.890.) I don't know if there's very much work on how the categories relate to hylemorphism, but there's a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Aristotle (Studtmann, "Aristotle's Categorical Scheme") where he claims there's discrepancies between the two theories. The categories were developed early on when Aristotle was interested in logic, and still under Plato's influence for the concept form to an extent, but then hylemorphism came after he was interested in natural philosophy and gained a much more specific usage. In effect, the extreme view is that categorialism and hylemorphism represent two different theories of substances, and the latter was developed in response to the inadequacies of the first. It is only on what he calls the medieval approach that the two are made whole.

Just as he essentially agrees with the materialists that nature is mechanistic and reductionist (cf my post), he also must essentially agree with the ethical reductionists that punishment and reward is the only thing the good nominally subsists in. The full horseshoe.

Now to your second question: “Do those almost with us do more harm than 100% enemies?” I don’t think this can be answered with a flat “yes” or “no,” because the “almost” is such a wide term and can cover so many different attitudes. I think each particular case has to be judged on his own performance, but there is one general rule to observe: those who are with us, but merely do not go far enough, yet do not serve the opposite cause in any way, are the ones who do us some good and who are worth educating. Those who agree with us in some respects, yet preach contradictory ideas at the same time, are definitely more harmful than the 100% enemies. The standard of judgment here has to be the man’s attitude toward basic principles. If he shares our basic principles, but goes off on lesser details in the application of these principles, he is worth educating and having as an ally. If his “almost” consists of sharing some of the basic principles of collectivism, then we ought to run from him faster than from an out-and-out Communist.

Indeed that is the very essence of binary thinking Indeed, if they just made an honest argument for trade offs, I'd halfway respect them. But they're very dumb

The people he criticized literally and explicitly oppose individualism and say so themselves. In fact, they think teh lEfTiStS are the logical outcome of individualism, as they themselves say in the article.

To continue our discussion on the ways form and matter might be understood to apply to philosophical problems, there is another way you can see these abstract, technical theories undergird pop or folk philosophies of nature. One recent example is the dialogue between Prager and Biddle. (If you don't know who these people are, or are uninterested in them, the point I'm making isn't really about them. If you want to debate about different aspects of their interaction, please ignore this post.) There is something in political discourse called "horseshoe theory," according to which different versions are claiming different, mostly spurious, things, but there is a plausible version that says often times what are perceived as fundamentally opposing viewpoints actually share some more fundamental premises, and that these premises are what give rise to and motivate the opposition in the first place, which upon further inspection, turns out to be surface. An example from OPAR (146) that people might be familiar with is that subjectivism is ultimately intrinsicism and intrinsicism is ultimately subjectivism. An historical example is Nazi and Communists in Weimar Germany. There are various reasons to why this might be, but not important here. Next, we must understand the Prager Argument. Prager's method is to proceed as follows (all actual Prager-quotes at various times which I have done my best to reconstruct into a syllogism): If you're an atheist, you're a materialist. If we are only matter, I am the product, and everything I do is the product, of [the matter.] But where am I in this equation? That's just insane! Therefore god exists. Biddle's unfortunate response was to not reply that there are material and formal causes, but there is matter and consciousness (and that's not something even that materialists necessarily have to deny), and to juxtapose those two as "separate things," which can lead one to assume he is endorsing (or that Ayn Rand endorsed) substance dualism. Later Prager makes an intelligent design-type argument appealing to "complexity." He is amazed that animals urinate. He is amazed about the universe and life and the planets. How can you not believe in God? Do you think this all just happens randomly? No of course not, that's inconceivable. This is his primary "evidence" (as opposed to proof.) This type of argument is ancient, but most influentially the watchmaker analogy of William Paley is employed to argue that design implies a designer. So we have two primary means of moving forward: materialism bad, intelligent design good. But notice the problem here. In this whole scheme of things, in both materialism and theistic design-type arguments, there is the underlying notion that whatever whole were talking about is always emerging just from the parts. The relationship between the parts and whole is that the parts give rise to the whole (reductionism) particularly their position and motion (mechanism.) Take this paradigmatic quote from Carl Sagan, a noted atheist and materialist: "I am a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan." This is not very different from the watchmaker analogy of Paley, who was trying to invoke God as the cause of the universe on the basis of the complexity of the beings arranged therein. If you were to stumble upon a watch in the forest, you would have to say oh clearly there's a watchmaker, look at this complex assembly of parts into a functioning system. The main difference between Sagan and Paley is who is whether there is a conscious being that is a watchmaker, or is the watch assembled "randomly" (in Prager's words), thus obviously the clear deduction is theism. But in both cases, from the standpoint of Aristotelian concepts of form and matter, as we were discussing at the beginning of this thread, the notion of an artifact is there. For Paley/Prager, the world to include the "I" that is Prager himself, is an Aristotelian artifact assembled by God, and to Sagan it is not (perhaps operating through the "blind watchmaker" of evolution.) For Descartes, similarly, the laws imparting motion to the corpuscles were provided by Divine providence. The Paley-style appeal to complexity and intelligent design is a theistic reductionistic mechanism, but a reductionistic mechanism nonetheless, with the main point that nature is viewed as an artifact. Both the materialist and mechanistic theist share a commitment to concerning natural substances. All natural substances are mechanical things whose parts ultimately explain the whole. The objection of the theist is not any of these things, but that "randomness" is too inadequate to explain the matter in motion. But the Aristotelian would not think this way, and Aristotelian hylemorphic theists do not endorse these kinds of arguments for theism. Under this type of view, there is a lot to say, and a lot more than just in this post, but the bottom line is the distinction between an artifact and a substance. An artifact has "accidental form," whereas a genuine natural substance like a bacterium, or a giraffe, or a person has "substantial form" and the latter is the principle of unity. The substantial form actualizes the whole, including each part of the whole, and so explains the unity of the substance. Aristotle starts using these concepts to explain change, but in Physics 1.7-8 he employs the concepts of form and matter also in explaining how we are able to distinguish a mere aggregates of parts from a unified whole, like living organisms.

https://youtu.be/AiOxnSyP_nA Good New Ideal article out criticizing at least one branch of religious conservatives. Mentioned supra: Hazony, Lowry, Brog, DeMuth, Dineen, Orban.

The dominant views in 20th century philosophy of science has been backed by materialism and nominalism. We are familiar with that views challenges to cognition, intentionality, free will, personal identity, and normativity. That view however has been seriously challenged by failures and inability to integrate with new discoveries in the quantum revolution and biology. Another branch of philosophy that the concepts of matter and form can illuminate is philosophy of mind. The two main dominant views in philosophy of mind have been some form of materialism and dualism. But they both have principal objections that have proven intractable. Materialists say that what is real is nothing but matter. What we call mind is just a way that some matter somehow behaves, and different types of materialists take that "somehow" to be or imply different things. The dualists from whom the materialists took matter to be the first substance, say that in addition there's a second kind of substance called that has different mind-y properties. Different types of dualists break out over what those substances turn out to be. The main problem* with materialism is the causation problem. Once you get down to the quantum level, things look less deterministic and mechanistic. The idea of irreducible fundamental particles don't have the same kind of explanatory power they were supposed to have, in addition to being unable to explain the phenomenology of conscious experience. The main problem with dualism is the interaction problem. If the mind is a self-subsisting object (what a substance is supposed to be) that is immaterial and unextended, has no size, mass, motion, etc., How then does mind act on, or get acted on by the body? On the Aristotelian view there isn't a kind of causation problem because since a substance is a composite of form and matter, there can be fundamental causal powers at the level of whole organisms that are not reducible to primitive physical simples. And there isn't the kind of interaction problem because you don't really have two separate substances interacting, you have a whole human being with an essence and identity. Bringing back in the concepts of matter and form to human beings in ways that can avoid some of these problems. Roughly, we can treat them the same way we treat other theories in science, like say, "quark" or "gravitational field." Their value is based on their ability to integrate and explain the perceptual data. *In saying these are main problems, I am putting forth a condensation of common threads within an array of common objections. There are many possible objections and counter-objections, I am here merely describing what I take to be the main ones.

That was the best part of Atlas Shrugged when John Galt had to convince the majority before doing what he wanted

There is no law so obscene that Republicans will not enforce it, to include lockdowns, caging children, and mass murder.

Nope

That's because any sarcasm was accidental and not essential to our discussion on hylemorphism. While we're on the subject of Gotthelf, his festschrift Lennox and Bolton (2010) is also a good source of information about teleology, namely the first chapter by Sedley. This brings up a great point: that there is not even one "thing" called teleology. There are all sorts of versions and interpretations of it, and even in Aristotle he does not always consistently speak of teleology or the causes or form in the same way. Another good source on the connection between the four causes and hylemorphism is Bostock (2006) Space, Matter, Time, and Form. He goes through the text parsing out a lot of different ways Aristotle uses each of these concepts, not always in coherent ways. But in the chapter on form, he spends a bit of time talking about the connection between form and the concept of a telos: getting to a goal is a way of explaining fulfilling some standard, and form is the principle that aims, or directs, what any sort of end would count as (Physics II.8 spends a lot of time on this.) In other words, achieving a purpose is the actualizing a form. This is also the basis of a notion of perfections of being, that you were talking about earlier.

The 115s are, generally speaking, literally unable to perceive their interactions as unwanted, they have no idea why anyone would react that way

I am well known for my goal to describe things in ways others will find acceptable

Whatever answer causes you to stop engaging with me

What's all these numbers mean I don't get it can you explain

Given that James Lindsay is a left liberal how odd that he would attack his own collectivist determinist Marxist postmodernist etc belief system

Noted

Indeed, even inanimate things like mineral substances have final causes in Aristotle's physics. Anything with form and matter, act and potency, has final causes. In the case of rocks, its final cause may be something from an intelligent agent like to be kicked or picked up and thrown, or it may be due to external, but non-intelligent, agency like its participation in the rock cycle or its undergoing lithification. Or it may be due to its own internal nature, like achieving a relative position of stability like sitting on the ground or sinking to the bottom of a lake, which Aristotle (300a28-31, 300b6-8) calls its achieving rest in its natural place.

Thanks man can you recommend and books like which philosophers talk about teleology