Boydstun

Tad, I think I get your conception. I think it is incorrect to ascribe active or passive to existence per se. We can reflect on existence as such, and that is what Rand called metaphysics. Our reflection of course is an activity, a living one goal-directed. Existence, as I think it, has states of actuality and potentiality for any existent. (For only concrete existents really, in my vocabulary; in speaking of the susceptibility of a line segment in the Euclidian plane to bisection, we should shift from potentiality to possibility.) But the existence common to those states, actuality and potentiality, should not be thought of as having those states as traits nor as those states being equivalent to existence per se. Existence simply is and is singly that is across both those states, actuality and potentiality. Then too, the facets of identity such as specific passage and activities and standing in specific relations to other things should not be ascribed to existence most generally. Any existent has exactly the identity it has. The having of its specific identity and its being equivalent to its full complement of identities are not activities, I’d say, and are not any being-at-work in that having or in that being equivalent.

Thank you, Eiuol, for that layout. I won’t be ready to address Binswanger’s account in relation to Aristotle’s account until Part 3, but at this time, I want to register my own disagreement with the layout you gave insofar as its correctness for general metaphysics. Rand’s relevant remark in ITOE, 39, is a handy place to start: “If anything were actually ‘Immeasurable’, it would bear no relationship of any kind to the rest of the universe, it would not affect nor be affected by anything else in any manner whatever, it would enact no causes and bear no consequences—in short it would not exist.” I’d say in perhaps a little friction with Rand, the truth is: “If anything were actually ‘immeasurable’, it would bear no relationship of any kind to the rest of the universe—in short it would not exist.” Period. Then I’d be off to construct a proof or two of that proposition being necessarily true. “No relationship of any kind” suffices for not being in existence. The relationships do not have to be causal. They do not have to be the relationships of action, even taking the category ACTION very broadly so as to include not only dynamics, but kinematics and statics. They do not even have to be dependency relationships at all. That something bears no relationship of any kind to things not itself suffices to show it does not exist. (Existence taken as a whole is the exception in the sense that it bears no relationship to anything entirely outside itself. It yet has the relationship of a whole to its parts.) I endorse Rand’s thesis “Existence is Identity.” I go a fraction of an inch beyond that in saying that the existence of an existent is nothing more or less than the existence of its complete identity. My thesis contracted from Rand’s statement quoted above then says that some of the complete identity of an existent must be relationships to things not itself, relationships of some kind, whatever kind. (One relationship in which my left-hand glove stands is that upon spatial inversion it would fit my right hand. I mention this for an example of a standing in an external relationship that is not at root causal or action, but by morphism-character of space.) I take the sense of the concept existence to be univocal across its category divisions. That is, the term is not applied analogically across the categories. In Rand’s system, those categories are ENTITY, ACTION, ATTRIBUTE, and RELATIONSHIP. Instances of each of those can exist and in the same sense of exists throughout. ACTION, ATTRIBUTE, and RELATIONSHIP are so intertwined and not exclusive of each other in Rand’s metaphysics (though worth calling out distinctively nevertheless in tracing taxonomies up in highest reaches) it would not be plausible that the sense of exists could be not univocal across them all three. Then too, whatever ontological primacy we discern of ENTITY over its actions, attributes, and relationships: since existence is identity, it is not plausible that the existence of an entity should be not univocal with the existence of the other categories composing its identity, such as the existence of its external relationships, relationships of any sort. Existence per se, spanning all four categories, should not be cast as fundamentally characterized by any one of them, such as action. I think Aristotle errs in planting energeia in being (insofar as energeia means anything more than actuality as distinct from potential). In Rand’s system, or mine, we are of course dealing with only qualified being, which we term existence, and we acknowledge no more comprehensive being than that. So I should say as well, to be exact, that Aristotle errs in planting energeia in existence per se.

I just mean that Aristotle's metaphysics is false in this respect. Contra Aristotle, existence per se is not an activity or a being-at-work. Existing per se is inactive. I mentioned (cited) a nearby correct conception of Rand's that the existence of anything entails that it have some external relations. Many times those relations include causal relations. I add now, from my own metaphysics that 'existence is passage' (one strand in 'existence is identity'), but this passage is sometimes only succession in time (not, additionally causal), and most fundamentally, my category passage is succession through time. That error of Aristotle is one in his wider pattern of endowing some of his metaphysics with dynamics, which should be left purely at the level of natural science.

Trisco Nuclear Fuel Delivery to NASA Nuclear Fuel Cell for Moon Colony Rolls Royce Reactor

EC, on July 3, you wrote: If I understand you correctly in your most recent post, you claim you are 100 per cent certain that BENEVOLENCE was an entry shown on the previous day at the online site of the Lexicon, but on 2 July it was not there. And it is not there now. Nor should it have ever been there, because it is not in the book itself. (I gave you relatives of such an entry in July, but you think it had shown simply an entry BENEVOLENCE.) And against such a bizarre sequence of events at such a site, you do not consider it the more likely that you had simply misremembered having previously seen an entry BENEVOLENCE; rather, you are 100 per cent certain you saw such a thing? Have you ever found that you have misremembered something? I have, and it is just one of the regular innocent errors of cognition. And I'm not insulted, let alone beyond insulted, when someone helps me to realize something in the past was not as I had remembered it. Good connection to reality requires continual self-correction, and whatever cue one can get from others in fidelity to reality is a boon.

Now dead

Alabama Trying for Power to Prosecute Facilitators of Travel Out of State for Abortion

Eric, The things you listed as missing from the site on that day last July are still missing from the site, because, as I explained in my response in July, they should be missing from the site. Because those items you were remembering from earlier are missing from the book. If in the privacy of your own mind you cannot see that on that July day you were misremembering what is in the book and not in the book, and therefore what should be at the site and what should not be at the site at any time, then no discussion like this can help you.

ISO Dark-Matter Stars

That response is a prestidigitation. I confronted you with a specific episode we happened to know about because it was on record here. Yet still you won't address the specifics and recognize that it was only your memory that was mistaken over the Lexicon online. I possess the original book, and as shown in the quotes above, I put in the effort to check out the deviations of text between what you thought had formerly been at the online rendition and what you were seeing in July. I looked and found the site was in perfect agreement with the text of the book, and the particular things you had remembered as formerly at the site simply were not in the book. So in July, in your episode with the Lexicon site, nothing was happening from the outside world to deceive you and everyone about text in the book, which has been accurately transcribed at the site. Why are you unable to say to yourself: "Oh, I was misremembering those particular texts and exactly what topics are in the Lexicon"? It is a routine experience. Often I find that some line I remembered through the years was inaccurately remembered, and my version (usually a condensed expression, really) is better than what had actually been written. Well, that's all I can help. I do see from your response to being confronted with this particular episode in July and the easy possible self-correction of your memory and easy possible notice that your memory had been in error, rather than plugging the episode into a general deception being pulled over on people from outside their own minds, indicates the help you need is in significant part a boost in thinking objectively about these personal matters, and you are not going to go for that and the self-corrections and satisfactions it can bring. Even though you are still capable of writing coherent sentences here and thinking about such things as causes of things in your life.

Remember this in July: What was going on with you in your thinking there? Your conjecture was not that you were misremembering what was in the Lexicon, but that there were intelligences manipulating the site's content, which formerly had been accurately reflecting what is in the book. What you said earlier about metacognition when being in a state of paranoia or hallucinations is partly correct in my experience. For both phenomena, there seems to a sliding scale of how far one is stuck in it and unaware of the possibility that one is in that disordered state. (I've had different degrees of superintendent awareness, also, during my complex partial seizures [which had become chronic with me until they got the right diagnosis and medicine]). In that mesoencephalopathy episode I mentioned earlier, I did not even think about the possibility of alternative explanations for my paranoid horrible story of what was going on behind the scenes of everyone speaking a united front of lies to me. Yet in the same episode, I could think about my hallucinations a bit, and though they could not be put out their attachment to some things in my routine perceptual experience, I could realize they were not real and quit worrying about them. Your situation, I know, does not involve hallucination; the phenomena you are experiencing seem perfectly real, the only thing being their causes and remedies.

Include in that also your own second opinion, a determinedly critical one, every day. I once suffered from paranoia for a couple of days (and other mental defects) due to metabolic encephalopathy, which in my case was due to a bladder blockage. To be sure you have not fallen into a paranoia, in the sense of a delusional belief that one is being persecuted in a systematic way, subject each negative thing going on to the critical possibility that it could be independent of the other negative things. For example, the theft of your auto. (By the way, when did that occur?) Regardless of whether these negative events are largely an organized attempt to get you, if they continue, you might consider moving away from there. I've moved far away from where I was born and educated through college, and again moved far away from the place I had my commercial-work part of life. One loses direct company of family and loved ones residing at those old places, but indeed one can make a fresh start. (In my first move, I was without any assets beyond the $84 dollars in my pocket and my ability to do unskilled labor and be dependable. It is possible, and it can be worth the change of your world.)

On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts

I have begun using Lennox's Aristotle on Inquiry here.

~Part 2~ I’ll divide Part 2 into two sections. This first section examines further Aristotle’s conception of teleology in natural phenomena, also his method for natural science. By early 5th c. BCE, Parmenides had figured out that the moon gets its light from the sun, that the earth and moon are spherical, and the morning star is identical to the evening star. Anaxagoras, from those insights, went on, by mid-5th c. BCE, to reason the moon was closer to earth than the sun and to correctly explain eclipses. Meteorites, such as the large one crashing in Greece about 466 BCE, added weight to the thinking of Anaxagoras that the moon was stone. These conclusions were argued by observable phenomena. They were famous and persuasive in Athens and across the ages to us. Empedocles (mid-5th c. BCE) adopted them. Greek astronomy was advancing, and gods were losing their jobs (Graham 2013, 228–41). Sophism resisted such winnings of the natural philosophers, and the piety police were on the ready. Plato (late 5th to mid-4th c. BCE) formulated a compromise by subordinating natural philosophy to “questions of how things are arranged for the best,” therewith bounding natural philosophy with humanistic and idealist frames.[1] Aristotle (384–322 BCE) looks at regular, dependable natural phenomena and poses some observed character of such phenomena as (i) the answer to what makes the observed thing the kind of thing it is and as (ii) a fundamental and irreducible natural power of that kind of thing, upon which science of the kind should be founded. Regular, dependable motion characters are the natural characters for that sort of moving thing, in his conception of them, and contrary motions of such things are forced. Aristotle anoints those natural distinguishing characters purported to be fundamental with a sort of perfection. Aristotle joins thinkers before him in trying, by reasoning, to determine what are the elementary material substances from which, by combination, all others are made. Before Aristotle in this endeavor, notably, had been Empedocles, with earth, water, fire, and air as the elements (Metaph. 985a31–33). Today the school children can tell us that those elementary kinds of which everything is made are the particle/waves known as quarks, leptons, and the force-carrier particle/waves. Those are what a line of ancient Greek thinkers had been after: simplest kinds of matter composing all matter and which themselves are not composed of other kinds of matter which are still more elementary (Metaph. 1014a26–27). Our school children can tell us—at a more useful level than particle physics—that the elementary material kinds are the chemical elements. One of the Greeks’ favorite materials to take for elementary was water, and the children now can laugh and reveal that water is H2O, not a single element. As I mentioned in Part 1, Aristotle takes it that the elements water and earth move downward towards the center of the cosmos. Of themselves they move thusly along a straight line. Two other elements, air and fire, naturally move upward, and in their simplicity, they move along a straight line. All motion “is either straight or circular or a combination of these two which are the only simple movements” (Cael. 268b17–18). A simple body, an element, moves of its own nature in a uniquely simple way: straight line or circle (269a1–2). I should say that simple elements moving in their uniquely simple way receives no explanation by saying it so moves on account of its nature. Such saying is no explanation, although, it may serve to give notice that one is at a most basic level of fact, where explanations should stop. There must be, Aristotle argues, simple bodies moving naturally of themselves in circular paths. Unlike straight lines, circles are complete. “The complete is naturally prior to the incomplete” (269a19). “It is clear that there is in nature some bodily substance other than the formations we know [earth, wind, air, fire], prior to them all and more divine than they” (Cael. 269a29–31). “The superior glory of its nature is proportionate to its distance from this world of ours” (269b15–16). The four earthly elements are observable or roughly so; mainly it is their elemental standing that needs argumentation.[2] Aristotle’s celestial element, whose natural motion is circular, is an element whose existence must be argued for by Aristotle. The outermost sphere (shell) of the heavens, the one carrying what we would call the fixed stars plainly moves them in a circular way over the earth, though the conveying sphere itself is invisible.[3] What has been called ether is the element making up that invisible rotating sphere (Cael. 270b20–24).[4] Aristotle reasons, with flailing contrariety-based dynamics, that the circular motion of that sphere is eternal. Moreover: “Everything that has a function exists for its function. The activity of God is immortality, i.e., eternal life. Therefore the movement of God must be eternal. But such is the heaven, viz., a divine body, and for that reason to it is given the circular body whose inherent nature it is to move always in a circle” (Cael. 286a8–11). Aristotle conceives of the sphere of the fixed stars well as those stars as being weightless. No effort of the sphere or upon the sphere is required for it to stay aloft. Though living, it requires no efforts nor a striving soul to keep it moving, unlike living things on earth (284a11–33). In Metaphysics Aristotle maintains the living nature of the primary sphere and its stars, but has that assembly not itself divine. Rather, in Metaphysics, he has a divine unmoved mover towards which elements are drawn by their natural motions, as towards goodness. That would seem to confer some (other) kind of teleology on all the natural motions. “Everything that has a function exists for its function” is in need of an argument (I think it is an overgeneralization). That sentence implies that if something does not exist for some function, it does not have that function. To deny, then, for example, that the eye comes to exist for the sake of vision would be to deny that the eye serves the function of vision. The patent falsehood of the consequence is then taken for proof of the antecedent “exists for some function”. This argument, based on the false premise that “everything that has a function exists for its function,” is a showing on the cheap of Aristotle’s non-conscious-life teleology. That a component of a living thing truly serves a function does not entail immediately that the component exists for that function.[5] I should stress in the preceding passage from Aristotle that the immortal god is taken as a living thing, for mortality is pertinent only to living things.[6] I say, contrary the conception of an immortal life: You cannot have it both ways. If a thing lives, then it is mortal; if a thing exists forever, then it is not a living thing. Aristotle reasoned that the fixed stars, which are embedded in the farthest celestial sphere, have a spherical shape. A mass of such shape has no features for action, such as limbs or wings. We should nonetheless “conceive them as enjoying life and action” (Cael. 292a20–21).[7] They perpetually attain their good without having to themselves take action. They are carried in the way that is their good by that outermost heavenly sphere, whereas lowly life here on the earth requires effort to accomplish its good and completeness.[8] That is all backwards, of course. I say in tune with Rand that struggle is essential to the thing that is life, that value enters the cosmos right here, and the stars in their effortless cycles are not the tops of existence, but are badged with any worth only by needs and desires in earthly, animal life, namely, by the human being. Our school children will want to point out also that the stars do not make a diurnal circuit around the earth (at some faster-than-light speed); rather, the earth is spinning (cf. Cael. 296a24–297a8). The superiority of circle to straight line by the former’s completeness, as we have seen, suits divinity of the outermost celestial sphere and its motion, in Aristotle’s view. “Human affairs go in a circle, as do the other things that have a natural movement [as distinct from chance movements or from interventions against natural movement] and coming to be and passing away” (Phys. 223b24–26). Humans and other life are not among the basic elements of the earthly domain, but they have natural movements all the same, whose teleology, perfection, and completeness are signified by their circular quality. As for the earthly basic elements, some teleological causality might be awarded raindrops by their nature of heading toward the center of the cosmos. A tad more teleological causality in their falling might be awarded by noting their fall is part of a larger whole: the repetitive cycle of evaporation and condensation. Aristotle displayed some coarse knowledge of that cycle (e.g. Mete. 346b16–31), bearing a sort of completeness.[9] I notice that in claiming these motions are in some sense teleological is to import something not manifest in the phenomena themselves. That is a requirement for causal explanation: For A to be the cause of B, one requirement is that A be something not exactly B. Alan Gotthelf, we should notice, takes on the challenge of refuting the traditional interpretation of Aristotle as holding that final causality is at work in inanimate earthly things such as the falling rain (2012, Part I). Joe Sachs writes: “Aristotle’s ‘teleology’ does not impose the human idea of purpose onto non-human nature, but recognizes that all natural beings are whole and act so as to preserve that wholeness and fulfill its potencies. Final causality governs the action of formal causes, and thus characterizes the whole realm of nature.” (2011, 58) Aristotle’s idea that non-living natural things act so as to preserve their unity or self-continuation, I say, is out of bounds, the bounds of the living and artifacts of the intelligent living. Additionally, Aristotle’s picture in which, in all domains, potencies have a striving for actuality is a foul. In Aristotle’s understanding, falling raindrops are in their intrinsic motion to their own natural end. Under evaporation and condensation, they are part of a cycle, a completeness composed of two elements: water and air. The elements also make up the complex cyclic formations that are life. Living things have their own overall ends, which are not the “ends” of the earthly elements composing an organism. The overall ends of living things are to live and reproduce. The living parts of a living thing have functions supporting those overarching ends. We can concur with Aristotle in those propositions and in this one as well: without the ends of continued life and reproduction, functional parts of the organism would not exist (GA 742a28–36). Where I should part company with Aristotle is in going on to infer that the overarching ends cause the enabling parts to exist; not every because is a causal because. A pure potential, such as a potential organism, does not bring forth enablers to its actuality. The evolution-absent and biochemistry-absent context of Aristotle’s knowledge requires his over-rating the power of pure potentials to support his notion of vegetative teleological causes.[10] We might stress in defense of Aristotle that the parents giving rise to an offspring-organism are actual, not purely potential, and that indeed there will be no offspring without actual parents. That is confusion of Aristotle’s position, a blurring over of his way of having final causes of the particular individual organism enable the bringing about of its own functioning parts. “The soul is the first actualization of a natural body which possesses life potentially” (de An. 412a28). That is a thesis from Aristotle’s report of the “common account” of the soul. He does not dispute that account; he bolsters it. Soul is the essence of bodies that possess “a principle of movement and standing still within itself,” which is to say, the essence of living bodies is soul (412b17). “The soul is the cause and principle [archē, starting-point, source] of the living body. But cause and principle are spoken of in many ways, and the soul is, accordingly, a cause in the three senses that have been distinguished [efficient, final, formal]: it is the cause as the source of the movement, as that for the sake of which, and as the substance of animate bodies. It is clear then that the soul is a cause in the sense of substance. For substance is the cause of the existence of all things, and for the living things to exist is to live, and the soul is their cause and principle.” (de An. 415b8–14) In no body whatever is its matter its essence (Metaph. 1029a27). Then in no living body is its matter its essence. Matter is what form and essence come to be in. The essence of the compound of matter and form, an enformed matter, is form, not matter. The substance of a thing is its form [11]. The substance of a living thing is its form, that is, its soul. “The soul . . . is the form in its role as final cause” (Lennox 2021a, 230). I do not see that postulation of soul in anything living and taking it thrice over as cause of distinctively living actions—thrice over cause of each: nutrition-pursuit, perception, and reproduction—is explanatory at all unless soul has some meaning independent of being that form of a living thing which is its final cause. To define soul as formal causal explanation or any explanation at all of the distinctive dynamic characteristics of the living is merely to conceive those characteristics of the phenomenon that is life in a wider metaphysical framework of formal causation. Without a preexisting meaning of soul—say, a clipped edition of human psyche in animals and an additionally clipped edition in plants[12]—and an argument for identification of that with form in living things, the posit of soul explains vegetative teleology no more than form of the living, which is to say, not at all. Aristotle should be commended for recognizing a phenomena: all living things naturally engage in pursuit of ends, even though they do not possess intelligence under which the pursuit of ends is directed. His attempt at explanation of the phenomenon is a failure, and he shows no inkling of the scientific progress, in any area of science, that could be made beyond his era. Life explained in terms, specific terms, of the organization of earth, air, fire, and water, where the material organizing structure is also explained by those earthly elements, would be a right form of “A is explained by B,” where B is not simply a posit or a mere restatement of the phenomena to be explained. Explanation for living action along that line could not have any success until humans conceived and accomplished such things as modern chemistry and biochemistry.[13] We cannot fault Aristotle for not having those things in hand, but we can and should fault him for his wrong metaphysical views (e.g. hylomorphism, dynamism of being and potency per se, and inalterability of the species) and their poisonous intermingling with science of nature. He should be blamed at the same time for his wrong model of how natural science should proceed. James Lennox points out that for Aristotle, the form of a living thing is “that complete action or way of life for the sake of which the living body is organized as it is” (2021a, 234). It is no reinstatement of Aristotle’s conception of formal causality in living things to call nucleotide sequence and its role in producing proteins a formal cause.[14] Whether the perspective of Binswanger 1990 amounts to a modern cashing of Aristotelian formal, ends-directed causal explanation of living action or amounts to a replacement for such explanation remains to be seen. Work of James Lennox has persuaded me that it is incorrect to interpret Aristotle as holding that essences, stated in definitions of natural things, always, as essences, act directly as causes. Rather, capture of essence in a definition gives an inquirer the spot for investigating causes that can yield causal essences, for definitions that can be used in syllogistic causal demonstrations, the makes of science (Lennox 2021b, 1–64). Definitions remained important in modern science. The definition of force in Newton’s second law of mechanics, as it is learned by the physics student today, is crucial. Force is therein general cause of acceleration, stated in mathematical relations between magnitudes of the two. Into the slot of that general force, must be placed a specific mathematically expressed force, say, Hooke’s law for suspended weights pulling within the elastic zone of a spring. Particular solutions satisfying the specific force-acceleration equation will then be the specific and particular time course of locations of the accelerating body in its situation of being subject to the specific constraining force against free fall in the earth’s gravity. But before all that, human beings had to get to Newton’s first law, attained thanks to Newton and (before his specific conception of force, less exactly by Galileo, improved by Descartes), which law enshrines the circumstance that not all sorts of motion of a body across space need a cause of their continuing motion, and exactly which kind does not. Aristotle did not know that. Additionally, contrary Aristotle’s general method of scientific inquiry: embedding definitions and causal relations in a premise in a demonstrative syllogism accomplishes nothing in the domain of what we call classical mechanics. What matters to those inquiries and understanding of nature are only the relations—come to mind by induction and by abduction—among physical parameters and the passing of empirical tests of implications, mathematically expressed, from such relations. The probative value of formality in mechanics is not from wielding syllogisms and refining essences in the definitions of things, but from mathematical proofs among relations of mathematical elements standing for natural, physical characteristics.[15] To be continued: The next section of Part 2 will trace the fate of Aristotle’s final and formal causes and his picture of teleology in natural vegetative life in pre-Darwinian lights: Suarez, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Part 3 will take all this home in tracing and evaluating Binswanger’s post-Darwinian theory in The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. Notes [1] Cf. Kant’s move here. [2] In Aristotle’s understanding, the element fire is a warm and dry thing, a fine particle, very fast in rising, and flame is more like the element fire than burning coals are like the element fire. [3] Like Aristotle, Eudoxus before him had taken the heavens to be a series of nested spheres (shells) conveying by their motions the motions of stars, planets, the sun and the moon. Many of the Presocratics had taken the heavenly bodies to be simply freely moving without such carriages. [4] See further, de Groot 2014, 290n474. [5] See for examples, Garson 2013. [6] I’m pretty sure the translator’s capitalization of god is inappropriate under our present style conventions, since, when capitalized the term god is a proper noun, the name of the Judeo-Christian deity, to which Aristotle could not be referring. [7] Lennox 2021b remarks that Aristotle mentioned a number of times in De Caelo that the heavenly spheres are ensouled (176). I have not been able to find any statement of that in the only translation of that book of Aristotle’s I possess. I had hoped to find such a thing, a literal statement, for the text might then give some notion of soul independent of the notion in its connections with living things on earth. I’m getting the impression that ensoulment of the heavenly spheres by Aristotle is an inference readers have made from his verdict that they are alive, and it is only what he says about soul in life down here that can give us his account of what soul is. [8] Aristotle knew that stones fall from the sky, such as the storied, huge one at Aegos Potami in about 466 BCE, eighteen years before his birth.* [9] See further, Johnson 2005, 150–58. [10] Cf. Gotthelf 2012, 367–69. [11] See Cohen and Reeve 2020, §§5–11. [12] Bremer 1983, 125–31. [13] Water serves “as the solvent for essentially all cellular chemical reactions. It also serves as a thermal buffer and, to a lesser extent, as a pH buffer” (Fox 1988, 80). Entropy changes in water have an explanatory role to play in molecules recognizing each other and aggregating into complexes and even into membranes. Such character of water and the cellular unit of life were of course unknown to Aristotle. Molecular morphogenesis and molecular control mechanisms beget the life of the cell. “Once the subunits are synthesized, their thermal motions bring them together, whereupon they spontaneously link by means of multiple specific weak bonds. The structures they form and the unexpected properties of those structures are examples of emergent properties, which are observed to attend all transitions in a structural hierarchy. A key emergent property is the capacity for control, or regulation” (ibid. 83–84). On mechanism in contemporary biological explanations more generally, see Bechtel 2011. [14] Contra Terzis and Arp 2011, xxiv, xxvi; Moreno and Ruiz-Mirazo 2011, 162–64, 172n9. Formal causation is able to bear some non-zero explanatory load in our contemporary informational accounting of organisms (Moratalla and Cerezo 2011, 192–93). This formal cause, however, does not coincide with Aristotle’s formal cause for living action, namely, the organism’s way of life (for the sake of which the living body is organized). A sweeping role of formal causality in contemporary biology is attempted in Austin 2021. This relies on features of a dynamical-systems representation of the ontogeny of (whole) organisms. But to maintain that structure in likelihoods of the various states in a state space of organismal development is a formal cause is to say such structure in an abstract space is a cause. We might as well say that the ellipse of the dynamical states of a pendulum in its abstract phase space is the cause of the time course of that pendulum’s positions in concrete physical space, which is absurd. And even were such a formal cause as Austin envisions operative in ontogenesis, the form is not Aristotle’s formal cause for a living thing’s alterations: the organism’s way of life (in maturity). Furthermore, state space structure of states in ontogenesis (like the phase space of a pendulum) is not even an explanation of phenomena, only a redescription. [15] That is not to say that physical phenomena are explained by only mathematics. Mathematics of electromagnetism could help establish that light waves are electromagnetic waves, and mathematics of gravity could help establish that a previously unknown planet exists and perturbs the orbit of some known planet. But identity of light and electromagnetic waves and the existence of Neptune beyond Uranus are physical facts merely uncovered, importantly, by employment of mathematics. Consider further, Kuorikoski 2021. On continuing pursuit of causal relations in contemporary physics, see Frisch 2014. On usefulness of mathematics in measuring causal specificity, see Griffiths et al. 2015. More comprehensively, on uses of mathematics in modern science, see Pincock 2012. References Aristotle [c. 348–322 B.C.E.] Physics. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye, translators. In Barnes 1984. ——. On the Heavens. J.L. Stocks, translator. In Barnes 1984. ——. Meteorology. E.W. Webster, translator. In Barnes 1984. ——. On the Soul. F.D. Miller Jr., translator. 2018. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——. Generation of Animals. A. Platt, translator. In Barnes 1984. ——. Aristotle Metaphysics. C.D.C. Reeve, translator. 2016. Indianapolis: Hackett. Austin, C.J. 2021. Formal Causation and Biology. In Jansen and Sandstad 2021. Barnes, J. editor, 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bechtel, W. 2011. Mechanism and Biological Explanation. Philosophy of Science 78(4):533–57. Binswanger, H. 1990 [1976]. The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts. Marina del Rey: Ayn Rand Institute Press. Bremer, J. 1983. The Early Greek Concept of the Soul. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cohen, M.S. and C.D.C. Reeve 2020. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. De Groot, J. 2014. Aristotle’s Empiricism – Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing. Fox, R.E. 1988. Energy and the Evolution of Life. New York: Freeman. Frisch, M. 2014. Causal Reasoning in Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garson, J. 2013. The Functional Sense of Mechanism. Philosophy of Science 80(3):317–33. Gotthelf, A. 2012. Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology. New York: Oxford University Press. Graham, D.W. 2013. Science before Socrates– Parmenides, Anaxagoras, and the New Astronomy. New York: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, P.E., A. Pocheville, B. Calcott, K. Stoltz, H. Kim, and R. Knight 2015. Measuring Causal Specificity. Philosophy of Science 82(4):529–55. Jansen, L. and P. Sandstad, editors, 2021. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Formal Causation. New York: Routledge. Johnson, M.R. 2005. Aristotle on Teleology. New York: Oxford University Press. Kuorikoski, J. 2021. There Are No Mathematical Explanations. Philosophy of Science 88(2):189–212. Lennox, J.G. 2021a. Form as Cause and the Formal Cause. In Jansen and Sandstad 2021. ——. 2021b. Aristotle on Inquiry – Erotetic Frameworks and Domain-Specific Norms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. López-Moratalla, N. and M. Cerezo 2011. The Self-Construction of a Living Organism. In Terzis and Arp 2011. Moreno, A. and K. Ruiz-Mirazo 2011. The Informational Nature of Biological Causality. In Terzis and Arp 2011. Pincock, C. 2012. Mathematics and Scientific Representation. New York: Oxford University Press. Sachs, J. 1995. Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Terzis, G. and R. Arp, editors, 2011. Information and Living Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Continuing the preceding post, Help at SEP: Evolution Evolution and Development

I said 22 days ago that it should be only about 3 days more until I could deliver Part 2 of the paper I'm composing for this thread. Again more study than I estimated has been required. Looks now that I can deliver tomorrow. Meanwhile, I've come across and would like to register a contemporary defense of evolutionary biology that claims to be accessible to the educated public: Why Evolution Is True (Repelling junk) (Intelligent conversation)

I suspect the candidate on our right has the better chance to beat the Democrat Presidential nominee in 2024.

HRSD, I responded above to your request for inputs on your personal situation. This post's curly-que I quote from your rumination in the root post is an interesting theoretical question, and I'd like to respond to it rather in separation from your personal situation. There are different senses of being able to do things, as noticed by Aristotle. I am able apparently to learn any mathematics I set my mind to. In that sense, we could say I am able to learn all of mathematics discovered to this point. But in a sense embedded in real life, I'd run out of lifetime (and I'd be forfeiting other treasures even higher for me), so I'm not able to learn all of the mathematics that has been discovered. Again, there are philosophy books in French and in German on one of my shelves. I know how to read those languages, having had courses in them, but the ability is not readily available and requires getting out my dictionaries and grammar books and taking a lot of refresher time and look-up time to attain the reading. In a way, I have the ability to read those books, and in a different way, I do not. One thing that Rand shared with William James was the idea that one's direct and important control of life is one's choosing to think. Another thing they had in common was the idea that having learned a skill, we come to automatize it with repeated execution. It becomes second nature, borrowing again from Aristotle. (This James is Principles of Psychology [1890].) Against the view of Socrates, strictly speaking, Rand thought people can directly choose evil, but mostly that Socrates would be right in claiming that if one fully knows the evil, one would not choose it, indeed one virtually could not choose it. My "mostly" means most people. Each has formed a repertoire of second-nature character; it is automatized for most people to tell the truth in usual circumstance, for example, or not even think about damaging other persons or their property. That surely goes to for Rand's constructed fictional paragons of good persons. Some people can form second natures of evasion, subjectivity, shunting of critical rationality, and self-bolstering rationalizations. For such a person, choosing what is objectively evil is a readily available ability, even though they have an inkling it is actually wrong. Developmentally, Rand thought of the seeds of later moral concepts of right and wrong as planted in early experience of pleasures and pains (OE, and from there, in OE, she continues with more developed mind with complex emotions and thought), and she thought one forms normative assessments of things alongside acquiring concepts of things, starting in childhood (probably in "Art and Cognition"—I should not take time to look it up just now). (Though she did not write about it, she long supposed that every thought has motive, which had occurred to me also maybe sixty years ago (LP mentions that notion of hers in the book Understanding Objectivism. I asked him when he first heard that from her, and he estimated maybe 1955. I forget just now, and should not take time just now to look up, why the date was of some particular import to me.])

HRSD, Sympathy with your situation. I have not been in your situation. Firsthand, I know only bits of it. When I was almost 45, during a long interval in which I was single, I flipped, over a dear friend of mine. That was a bit surprising to me for that age, but there it was: flipped, fever, emotionally consumed by her. We had been great friends, especially in mutual sharing of our creative labors, which were outside of commercial employment and which were the core passions and self-purposes of our lives. I declared, and she rejected squarely, in some grief of the need for that. Three days later I got a boost in recovering from that giant ensuing pain in an odd way I did not understand: There was a physical emergency of an enormous downpour of rain through which I was driving on the highway, rush hour, slowly advancing home, necessarily under stress and non-stop effort for hours. I think on that occasion I succeed in fording the water that accumulated in the underpass of Lakeshore Drive, rather than stalling out in the pool; but in either case, I noticed that weirdly I was a step better. Your romance situation was different than this overture one, but I want you to know I have some sense of your pain over that, and I sympathize. Keep stepping, soldier. We are able to step following our thinking while still under serious loads of loss, even death of most precious loved one (I say from personal experience). In your present situation, I think it is most urgent to find a job. This is a good time for it. Be ruthless as to what job you will take on. Most anything. Willing to relocate. After earning a degree in physics, I became unemployed, then eventually worked for seven years as an unskilled laborer. It was right and kept me right. Outside work, the mind can still learn in its real interests and create there. I found that with further investigation on how I could make better money, and with some additional education to that end, I reached better employment and a routine in which it was feasible to spend more time in life pursuing the non-commercial passionate projects. Somewhere in Dagny's story, she's in a situation of "act first, feel later." I've found that goes in real life. Act and motivation seem to be a hand-over-hand sort of thing.

"Force of arms" is not restricted to firearms. American Republic Forever

Jan 6 Attackers – Individual Cases (Scroll down for summaries, charges, and outcomes.)

Tad, Shortly after Mr. Trump was elected President, my husband received a mailing from the Democratic Party asking for financial contribution. He asked me if we should do that. I thought a minute, and said "No. Let's contribute to the ACLU." That has indeed proven an important force for preserving the constitutional republic in which civil liberties and personal liberties are protected. More generally, in my view, the great bulwark that preserves our form of government against ignorant, parochial, mob-to-dictatorship rule is the American legal profession and the wide peaceful acceptance and embrace by the citizens of judicial process. I know it is a long tradition that derides lawyers in general, and I know some do things worthy of being disbarred or prosecuted under the law. But I'm of the view and will tell, contrary the usual opinion: God bless the legal profession. Anyone getting through law school and passing the bar has learned what our law really is and how reasoning goes into judicial decisions as to having law in this land. Mob lawyers are not the usual. Hillary Clinton is a Democrat, and, for many of their policies concerning genuine issues, I don't support the Democrat program. HC earned a law degree from Yale, and from her performance in debates, especially with Mr. Trump, it wouldn't surprise me to learn she had some training in appellate advocacy. She was smeared continuously by Fox News on a personal level as it was thought she might come to succeed Obama as President (having strong preparation and skills and being a woman, I suppose, since, after all, a given Party seldom wins a third term in the White House, which is a non-warrant for all that advance smearing of a possible 3rd-term candidate; years earlier the Republican Party seemed to have a similar focus on and anxiety over Sen. Edward Kennedy). Repetitions of smears or gossip does not carry weight with me. Years of National Enquirer headlines presuming an affair between JFK and Marilyn Monroe adds up to nothing above zero with me. It is plausible that H. Clinton lost the election crucially because nine days before election day, the FBI reported that they were reopening an investigation into her use of a private server for emails because they had found there were tracks of them in a machine they did not have available earlier. They cautioned that there might not be any new information therein, which ultimately proved to be the case. But meanwhile voters had time to reflect: "Not another administration rife with scandal and under investigation!" (contrast with quiet on that score with the Obama terms). I was so concerned that would be he effect among voters—and indeed her poll numbers plummeted—that I switched to voting for her to give my trivial help to preventing Mr. Trump getting our electoral votes here, whereas, until those last few days, I had planned to vote for the Libertarian. (I think that candidate would have gotten double the votes he got had the FBI announcement not come up at the last minute.) I'm reasonably sure that only the Clinton's know why she used that private server. And she is the one knowing whether the decision had been worth the ultimate cost of her not becoming President in 2017 and the consequent undermining of many citizens' confidence in the constitutional republican form of government and in law enforcement that ultimately resulted from the ravings against them by our former President Trump. To do my bit to stop Mr. Trump from winning the electoral votes of my state in 2024, I'd vote for H. Clinton again were she the opposition candidate. That's enough election stuff for this participant on this thread in the Law subsection.*

6 November 2020 13 January 2021