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George Walsh - “If you talk about the glass merely in terms of the macroscopic level, then don’t you need some concept of ‘dispositions’?” Rand - “In what way? How?” Walsh - “Because the glass is not acting now, it’s not breaking into pieces.” Peikoff - “Well, what’s wrong with the Aristotelian concept of ‘potentiality’? An entity has the capacity to act because of its nature.” Walsh - “Well, the reason I was bringing this up was because I thought you rejected the concept of ‘potentiality’.” Rand - “No. . . .” Walsh - “I have memory or a misremembrance of someone saying that Objectivism does not accept the Aristotelian concept of ‘potentiality’.” Rand - “Specifically, that wasn’t me. Unless it was in some context of what Aristotle makes of it, as in regard to his matter-form dichotomy.” ITOE Appendix 285-86 ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A good help on the Aristotelian metaphysical distinction in being between matter and form is here.

Huh? My writing "gibberish," which was flippant, referred to the numbers in the following.

Gibberish to some people. Are you one of them?

Aristotle, Generation of Animals 5.8, 789a8–b15 Aristotle, Physics, 2.8, 199b27-9

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.

On a slight tangent: Idiot of the Week: Quaker Oats "What’s next, that Coca-Cola might change its name because it is cocaine-based and could be accused of drug abuse? That Lacoste might be associated with animal cruelty because crocodile skin is used to make handbags and shoes? Or perhaps Quaker Oats itself should consider changing its name because it is related to the Quaker religious community, potentially offending other religions or atheists? "What is clear is that the dictatorship of political correctness, promoted and used by the left to silence its critics, only succeeds in sweeping history under the rug, trying to sweep away anything they find annoying, trivializing the underlying debate on issues such as, in this case, racism. Gotta love the rabbit holes.

In his dissertation, Leonard Peikoff runs through various ways (compatible with each other) in which an Aristotelian can understand the following syllogism representing particulars in two different ways in its two premises. All A is B. (major) This is an A. (minor) Therefore, this is B. One of those ways is to see the major premise as about form separated from the particulars and to see the minor premise as about form in the matter of a particular. “This apprehension of form in matter which FOLLOWS the apprehension of the separated structure, is to be distinguished from a quite different apprehension of the form-matter amalgam which PRECEDES the apprehension of separated structure, viz., the initial sensory perceptions of particulars qua particulars which occur as the prerequisite of the performance of the abstracting process. There are thus actually three stages in the process for Aristotle: a) Sense-apprehension of the particular qua particular prior to any abstracting process. This is an undiscriminating apprehension of the form-matter amalgam as a whole, and thus ‘accidentally’ of the formal element of the particular . . . . (The apprehension of form at this stage is ‘per accidens’ because, although we are in fact perceiving a form-matter amalgam and ‘a fortiori’ are in some sense perceiving form, we have not yet reached the stage of being able to discriminate the two elements nor thus to discern the form IN the matter. b) At some point, after repeated experiences and memorial retention, we come to discriminate the form from the matter and ‘separate it out’ in thought; we are then able, by contemplating the separated structure, to apprehend the necessary connections among its features. This is the level of rational cognition. c) Finally, we return to the particular and reintegrate the form with the matter, once again, as in stage a, perceiving the form-matter amalgam as a whole. Only we are now able to apprehend the form IN the matter; i.e., to apprehend it as a distinctly discerned structure IN this particular stuff. The perception of form in matter at this stage is thus authentic, not accidental; and we are thus able to apply to the particular the knowledge of necessary connections gained in stage b.” (134-35 n62) Turning to the law of noncontradiction, the Aristotelian has it a truth about formal structures, which are logically correlative with matter and ontologically inseparable from it—the existence of form or matter entailing the existence of the other. “Thus, the truth of the general Law of Contradiction logically entails, according to the Aristotelians, the existence of a world of empirical particulars.” (138) The demise of logical ontologism of the Aristotelian stripe was historically coincident the demise of Aristotle’s form-matter metaphysical amalgam (demise in Locke and others to today). (213-16, 236, 245-48) I think Ayn Rand’s theory of universal concepts based on objectively grounded essential characteristics and on the circumstance that concepts put into the slots A and B and This, above, are possessed of objective magnitude structures and particular loci in them is the bridge to right logical ontologism, right with our world and our minds in it.

Note: Please familiarize yourself with the Objectivist position on abortion before participating on this thread. A good starting point is the Abortion article on the Objectivism Wiki. - GC I find the views of certain members of The ARI, such as Peikoff and Brook, on the topic of absortion to not be rational. I will brefly here present my pro-life, objectivist standpoint and invite anyone who cares to to try and find a contradiction in my arguement. The views of Peikoff, and likely many other objectivists, is that people are only endowned withe rights of a human beings after they are born. Before conception, it takes an act of will to create a fetus. A fetus will develop into a rational human being unless another act of will is responcible for the termination of that fetus. The fact that the life exists within the body of another is irrelevant. In the near future we will be able to allow a fetus to develop entirely outside of a human body, this does not mean that person is not human because they where never actually born in the traditional sense. As a correlary it is also clear that very little is different about a fetus/human being in the moments before it is born and those immediately afterwards. I say then that assigning a fetus the human right to life only 'after it is born' is being arbitary, and hense, not rational. As there is no objective measure for consiousness aside from human/non-human I say that stating any cutoff between when a fetus is endowned with the rights of a human other than conception is unreasonable.