Boydstun

In the December 1966 issue of The Objectivist, Ayn Rand wrote of her visit to an exhibition of José Manuel Capuletti’s paintings the preceding month in a midtown gallery. Rand wrote of his wife Pilar, who in that exhibit was his only female model (aside from portraits). His marriage with Pilar Lopez later ran aground. At a Mass in Frankfurt am Main, he met Iris Henrich. Paintings of Capuletti mentioned by Rand, of which I’ve got pretty good images to show below, are Le Mur (The Wall), The Last Hour of Lady Godiva, and Not Guilty. The exhibition Rand saw was his fourth in New York, and she noted that his earlier somewhat surrealistic juxtapositions of incongruous objects into thematically incomprehensible arrangements had vanished by this fourth show. She reported that Capuletti acknowledged Velasquez and Vermeer as his two teachers. Ellen Stuttle has mentioned to me: “I met Pilar twice, and sort of ‘talked’ with her—using gestures and Larry's help with some French/English translation. Both times were in early 1970, one at the Hammer Gallery exhibit where the Desnudo Rand bought was on display and one at Allan Blumenthal's recital, which Capuletti and Pilar attended. / He [Capuletti] spoke a bit of English. Rand and he mainly talked in French.”* Capuletti died in 1978. I’ll include Capuletti paintings also below of Pilar and of Iris. Also, Desnudo and one called Sleep.

Excerpts

“In granting this case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court takes us all the way back to the heart of the matter, to whether a state can skip all the rigmarole and just impose a flat-out ban on some—or all—abortions before fetal viability. “Do I think the court will use this case to permit states to ban abortion entirely? No, not directly and not soon; there’s no need for the new majority, handpicked for that very purpose, to go that far this fast. The question the court has agreed to answer, as framed by the state’s petition, “Whether all previability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional,” suggests but doesn’t require an all-or-nothing response. “[Presently] what a state can’t do at the end of the day is actually prevent a woman with the resources and will to get to one of the diminishing number of private providers . . . from terminating her pregnancy. “Once the viability firewall is breached, it’s hard to see what limiting principle the new majority might invoke even if so inclined. . . . “Limiting principles usually matter a great deal at the Supreme Court, and it’s common during oral argument for justices to demand that lawyers articulate one. The justices need to know: ‘If we buy what you’re trying to sell us, exactly what are we buying? What’s the next case in line after yours?’” —Linda Greenhouse—20 May 2021, NYT I expect readers here know what’s in the long and growing line from state governments where appeals to mystical metaphysics of the electorate have seated officials committed to the end of all previability abortions (a fortiori, all abortions) in America. (90% percent of US abortions are performed before the 13th week of gestation; present technology for support of a fetus outside the womb is good for effecting live deliveries at about 22 weeks and on up to full-term.)

These are some value-philosophy writings additional to ones shown in Books to Mind. The Moral Value of Liberty (1984) Khawaja (ARS 2007) Atlas Shrugged Sculpture

Yes. Terrible. On my machine, there is not even a slot appearing at their site for making a word search, and if I use Control-F, they take you to a page, but don't highlight the word. Far better, at least for now, on Google Books. volition

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization US Supreme Court decision likely in summer of 2022.

Some of the ballet excerpts I'd posted here have since become dead links. Such is the one for "Light Rain" that I've left up anyway, as there had been some conversation about it here.

Wheat threshers can be humans or machines. To reach a measurement-omission analysis of the concept wheat thresher, we would start with a definition of wheat thresher—say, mechanism capable of parting wheat grains from their straw—then look for physical dimensions, such as tensile or torsional strengths of the bindings to be broken, and the relevant strengths of the grains to be preserved. That would be enough for an amply analyzed concept of wheat thresher. In the case of the concept natural language (which I suppose is the focal concept of language from which various other things called language are tied or analogized), I’d expect its definition to be a functional one, as with wheat thresher, and its functions needing to have their dimensions and appropriate scaling identified to render an amply analyzed concept natural language. We learn how to translate natural language into its logical skeleton in elementary logic, and there we find logical constants, which I’ve on my list of priors for measurement theory. So some elements of language are definitely in my collection of things that are not appropriate for measurement-omission analysis. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ PS - personal notice: Fifty years ago today, 16 May 2021, I graduated from University of Oklahoma (Physics major, Philosophy minor).

I agree that Rand switched back and forth between the substitution-unit aspect of concepts and the measure-value aspects of the various magnitude dimensions shared by members (substitution units) of a collection spanned by a concept. A concept, on the Rand-Boydstun conjecture is a dimensioned set (excepting concepts such logical constants and others I excepted above). Merlin’s example of Rand shifting from analysis in terms of measurements of items brought under a concept to simply denumerability of members falling under the concept—and then calling both sorts of features occasions for measurement-omission, because both are amenable to the some-any locution—is her infirmity of the distinction of substitution units (elements of a set, whether a set whose members have shared dimensions or not) with measure-value units (particular values on a scale). I do not invoke “‘substitution units’ when ‘measure values’ can’t be found.” Substitution-unit aspect of items that are subsumed under a concept is always at hand, and is uncontroversially at hand in all realist or nominalist theory of universal concepts, not only Objectivist theory of concepts. That aspect is there for all concepts, both those for which measure-value analysis can be found and those for which measure-value analysis is not appropriate. I have given my collection of the latter sort above, and I’m inclined to add Merlin’s example of language, written language (without which geometry, logic, and theory of measurement are nothing to write home about), as on the list of things for which measure-value analysis is inappropriate. In contrast, measure-value amenable concepts such as shape (for which Rand failed in her attempt to handle, landing herself failing to capture that shape is independent of size---though I'm not complaining, as I take what's good and promising and run with it with my better mathematical preparation). "

SL, Pages 107-12 of Onkar Ghate’s chapter “A Being of Self-Made Soul” sets out really well the Objectivist concept of free will, if you should ever like to get hold of the Blackwell book A Companion to Ayn Rand (2016) containing this contribution. The Objectivists take free will to be “the power to select among alternatives, with no particular selection necessitated by antecedent factors. Rand’s theory of free will, therefore, is a version of self-determination.” The geological earth is not a self-determining system. A forest fire or candle flame are not self-determining systems. Life and perhaps certain non-living machines invented by intelligent life can be self-determining systems, that is, systems organized with needs and powers for active self-maintenance of the system it is. Then, with that understanding as the proper context of application, we could define free will as a self-determination in which there is power to select among alternatives, with no particular selection necessitated by antecedent factors. Antecedent factors, internal antecedent factors, at what time before the instant of choice? If the event that is choice itself occurs over a tenth of a second, for example, it could remain an empirical question, it seems to me, how much contingency (159-62), thence continuing possible freedom in the choice there remains at half a second before the choice, three seconds before the choice, and so forth.

A worthwhile set of schematics to think with, I’d say, SL, at least to get started. I notice that internally, there are random processes that affect a human life in a deterministic way, such as the appearance of a cell mutation (truly random at first cell alteration) we call cancer. It could deterministically become, say, non-Hodgkins lymphoma. In the particular case of person having it, though in advance of therapies, we might say it’s a matter of chance whether the therapy will be effective in this case; that is just our ignorance, and when the particular outcome eventuates—say death from the cancer—we sensibly say that this outcome was a matter of objective, determined fact from the time the therapy had begun. With the same stage of cancer and the same age of life when the therapy would begin, different patients would make different yes-no choices over whether to undertake the therapy. Each patient could weigh all sorts of common and uncommon factors in coming to a decision. It might become clear enough to a patient which way she should go, or she might end very unsure and decide to let a coin-flip decide which way. But I’d say each person of mature sound mind freely comes to their decision. One thing that seems key in my current thinking about this is that alternatives as alternatives on what to do are not something merely out in the world without their being an agent confronting the world. The thinking agent is able to generate alternatives, and though they are drafted over what all is in the world, the more powerful at generation, the more free is the agent in the sense of having organized outputs more distant from, more deliberately organized than, immediate-emergency fight or flight response (I’ll pose the latter for William O’s deterministic case). And so long as the thinking agent’s conscious, purposive control system has been in the overall control, greater freedom seems also to go with greater distance from random acts, or anyway acts without large purpose, such as acts of someone who has lost their mind (which I’ll pose for William O’s randomness case).

My paper “Universals and Measurement” (U&M) was published in the spring of 2004 in JARS. In December of that year, there was a paper read and discussed at the session of the Ayn Rand Society, and that was the paper “Rand and Aquinas on the Problem of Universals” by Douglas Rasmussen.* The commentator on that paper was Robert Pasnau.* Prof. Pasnau stated that he had not studied Rand’s theory of concepts directly, so he was only working from what Prof. Rasmussen had related concerning Rand’s theory. Rasmussen’s paper was hefty, and you could get a good deal of Rand’s thought in the area from that paper. Rasmussen argued some problems for Rand’s theory and proposed they could be resolved with a little help from the moderate realism of Aquinas, or by a moderate realism in that vicinity. Rand had opposed her theory to realism in universals (moderate or immoderate), that is, she had rejected any sense in which universals are in the world apart from processing by mind of the world. That processing begins with perception and ends with concepts. Many contemporary philosophers, including Pasnau, question traditional accounts of that processing, accounts in which the processing is abstracting. Nevertheless, as Pasnau pointed out, the abstraction as process which Rand elaborated can be viewed also as the proposed structure of abstract, universal concepts in their standing to the mind-independent particulars as taken up in perception, regardless of whether the process by which the structure was arrived at resulted from the supposed abstraction process. This corresponds to my distinction in U&M between genesis and analysis. In her treatise, and as shown in U&M, Rand gives a measurement-omission analysis of concepts and additionally a measurement analysis of the similarity relations (and comparative similarity relations) between objects and relations given in perception. There is turbidity in Rand’s account, some of which I turn clear in U&M by keeping memberships sharply distinct from measure-values along a dimension, terming the former, the members, ‘substitutional units’ and the latter ‘measure-values’ (where some dimensions of themselves afford ‘measure units’ [in specifying their measure values] and ratio-measure scaling, and whether they do so afford that much structure of measurement scale or afford properly only scales with less structure is in the nature of the dimensions, not simply a matter of our scaling facility). Having gotten hold of in the mind dimensions in the world and some magnitude relations in the world, Rand has the mind in position to apply measurement-omission to particular measure values along dimensions and, in the same stroke, release of particular instances into interchangeable substitutional units, while not disconnecting abstract general concepts of things and relations given in perception from those things and relations as given in perception. Repetitions of same or similar things in the mind-independent world does not a universal already make; Rand and Aquinas evidently agree there are no readymade universals just lying there in the world. How close is Rand’s Objectivist account to Aquinas' of universal concepts such as sunrise or man, under my U&M lights, I dare not take on at this time in my studies. I just wanted to record here, partly for my own future return to it, that Pasnau has written a short study issued just this year under the title “Qualitative Change” as an entry in the collection The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, and it is highly pertinent to Rand’s measurement-omission theory of universal concepts (assimilation for us to do, not likely Prof. Pasnau). “Medieval natural science was largely conducted in imprecise, non-quantitative terms, in part because no one had a reason to suppose that quantitative precision could be fruitful, and in part because it was unclear how to measure, and so give meaningful numerical values to, the sorts of qualities that were fundamental to the theory. But once [in time for the fourteenth century] these qualities are conceived of as themselves complex, and built up out of an aggregation of modes, then in principle those modes can be measured. Once that happens, qualitative theories can be formulated in quantitative terms. . . . “Going beyond this historical context, the problem of qualitative change should have enduring relevance to philosophers today, given that what goes for qualities would seem to go just as much for properties or for any modern analogue of modes or forms. . . . Aristotelians . . . wanted such qualities to play an ineliminable causal role in natural philosophy. But the problem [of qualitative change] is very real for anyone who believes in such familiar properties such as whiteness or heat . . . .” (Pasnau 2021, 199)

ET, concerning your original question of this thread, I notice that if one is looking at various objects and their actions or behaviors or if one is interacting linguistically (as here or as in the Turing Test setup), one knows by one's thinking sort of looking that one has some freedom in directing that inquiry. Then too, one's bodily movements, the ones the medical folk would call voluntary, seem to straddle the external and the internal. One might know little about how one is directing from the brain to one's finger movements on the keyboard, but one has at once direct access to both (the internal) the directing thoughts and a sense of some freedom in bringing them together and (the intimate external) the movements of one's fingers and appearance of text on the screen. I wonder if determining whether some entirely external object has free will necessarily requires, by hook or crook, determining its likeness to oneself.

ET, to learn something, it's better to read than to listen to podcasts.* The better we learn, the better we can explain in the organic weave of a conversation. I am one who prefers to communicate and exchange views in written text (such as this, or in print). With text, we can go deeper, notice our contradictions better, find gaps in our reasoning better, and make links to further drill-down literature. The written published work I mentioned in the ancestral thread to this one, the portion of he chapter by Ghate, with all its excerpts from and citations of earlier Objectivist writings on free will, is succinct and understandable. At least it is that to participants here, such as you. I do not agree that without adequate grasp of Aristotle "Objectivism is dead." Sure, for we endless scholars, we'll not find an adequate philosophy in what is set out in Galt's Speech without further study of philosophy and getting this new one set within them (and within some areas of psychology), and without filling its gaps and resolving its internal problems we notice by revisions or additions. Anyone with anything near the college-level interest in philosophy is in that boat. But the idea that Rand's philosophy as presented therein, in merely Galt's Speech, would get nowhere in the minds and hearts of numerous readers without its further explication that has occurred in non-fiction writings (with various levels of philosophic sophistication) since then seems mighty dubious.

SL, yes. However, in Rand's 1957 paragraph shown in the preceding post, she was presenting things in chronological order of human development. The sentence "The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he realizes that he has---and this is the day of his birth as a human being" is at an early stage of development. It is not about mere exercise, but realization, recognition. And it is not plausibly, in context, about volition as free will. It is about a more primitive sort of volition and recognition of it, as when I recognize that my live puppy has volition and my teddy bear does not. It is a necessary step along the way of developing free volition and recognition of free volition later on. Rand was simply getting unnecessarily crossed up by wording of this sentence as it is located in the unfolding of development in the unfolding of the paragraph. It's fine to speak of "volition" sometimes while not meaning "free volition" or "free will". But in this sentence, in it's paragraph sequence, she is speaking of a more primitive volition and recognition of that volition that I and my puppy shared at that stage, and she should not have got in a hurry and telescoped the eventual distinctively human volition (free volition) and its recognition into toddlerhood by taking the toddler recognition as distinctively human. Objectivist model of free will got more consistent and further developed when Rand and Branden thought on it further and wrote about it in their non-fiction of the early 1960's.

That line from Galt’s Speech is within a paragraph sketching human cognitive development from infancy. “The birth of [a baby’s] mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is the curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has—and this is his birth as a human being. . . . The [later] day when he grasps . . . [that] his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives—that is the the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.” (1957, 1041) Rand wrote further: “The pre-conceptual level of consciousness is nonvolitional; volition begins with the first syllogism” (1961, 15). At times Rand seems to have used syllogism in a super-broad, rather emblematic way to mean simply any logical inference, deductive or inductive. (The first definition of syllogism in my American Heritage Dictionary is as in any elementary logic text. The second definition is: “Reasoning from the general to the specific; deduction.” The definitions are very like these in my Webster’s Unabridged. Pellegrin points out that at 92a28 of Post An. “the term syllogism is taken in a broad and non-technical sense” (2010, 131n15).) I rather think volitional thinking, with action- and image-schemata, is in the repertoire before attaining first uttered word (at about one year), which word is co-referential and incorporated into schemata (and later into sentences). As for the 1957 statement, I’d say that coming a day of realizing that matter has no volition and that oneself does have volition is not distinctively human; rather, it is shared with higher animals. By the time I realized my teddy bear was not volitional and that me and my puppy were, my puppy also had realized that, pretty sure. In that 1957 sentence, I doubt Rand was thinking of that dawning of volition as the volition at hand in free will. With development of the Rand/Branden formulation of the Objectivist conception of free will in the early 1960s, as we have seen, the crucial ability is self-regulation of one’s explicit conceptual consciousness, including setting the general aim of attaining truth. Surely that ability arises before ability to make inferences. I wonder if it might be developing as one is learning explicit rules of grammar—for speaking and writing—expressly learning to follow them. That is an extensive self-regulation closely related, I imagine, to self-regulation of conceptual consciousness. On the learning and teaching of grammar from ages 5 to 7, there is this. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Lennox, J. G., and R. Bolton, editors, 2010. Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle – Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf. Cambridge. Pellegrin, P. 2010. Definition in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. In Lennox and Bolton 2010. Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House. ——. 1961. For the New Intellectual. Signet.

The following is from a presentation of the Rand/Branden model of free will, by Onkar Ghate in the Blackwell A Companion to Ayn Rand. “Rand rejects any theory of volition that roots free will in a choice between particular items of mental content: whether to walk or ride the bus to work (selection between envisioned physical actions); whether to order the vanilla cheesecake because one is hungry or the bowl of mixed berries because one is on a diet (selection between desires or motives that will govern one’s physical actions); whether to admire Mother Teresa or Bill Gates (selection of values); whether to accept the psychological theories of Freud or of cognitive psychologists (selection of ideas). For Rand, all such matters are secondary and derivative: at root, free will is the power to activate one’s conceptual faculty and direct its processing or not. ‘All life entails and exhibits self-regulated action’, writes Branden in presenting Rand’s theory.” “An individual becomes both capable and aware of his power of conscious self-regulation as his mind develops. ‘It must be stressed’, Branden writes, ‘that volition pertains, specifically, to the conceptual level of awareness. A child encounters the need of cognitive self-regulation when and as he begins to think, . . . to reason explicitly. . . .” (“The Objectivist Theory of Volition” TO 5(1), 23) Rand and Aristotle remarked that higher animals are able to perceive more in sensory perception and to remember more than are lower animals. In modern psychology, the development of perceptual and memorial competencies in childhood has been greatly illuminated. I’d add to the Rand/Branden idea that the human conscious self-regulation emergences with the onset of conceptual abilities in children, add that: self-regulation of memory is also critical for the distinctly human abilities. “Remember this” we say to ourselves. Since the invention of sticky pads, I riddle my books with little strips of them. “The choice to ‘think or not’ is not man’s only choice, according to Rand: it is his primary choice. This choice sets a mind’s regulating goal. Sub-choices then arise to the extent that there is such a goal, and are the means of implementing it.”

Ascent to Volitional Consciousness - John Enright (1990) Critical Faculty

SL, Aristotle was trying to supply an account of change that would apply to all cases of change. He was also trying to solve puzzles composed by earlier philosophers. Parmenides had had it, for example, that change is not possible because it would require being to come out of not-being (and, to boot, the later being could not come out of being because being already is). Aristotle was trying to give a more nuanced and sound-sense view of the world, and as well he was aiming for an all-encompassing view of things. Parmenides would have it that fire could not come out of air because air is air and not fire. Having air come out of fire would be tantamount to having being come out of not-being. Aristotle would reply that fire does not come out of air as air, but it can come out of air which is not yet fire but has a potentiality to become fire. (Today we do not take air and fire to be rock-bottom elements as had the Greeks, but we could say along Aristotle’s lines---though with less urgency over Parmenides and his conundrums---that fire can come to be out of the potential of oxygen plus certain materials for becoming fire. Or getting down to our own elementary items in the world, we could say that radiation that is pure energy can come about from states of motion certain bodies that have potential for those states of motion and radiation production [e-m radiation from acceleration of an electron] or can come about from bodies with potential for conversion into pure-energy radiation [gamma from electron-positron pair annihilation].) By his act-potency division, Aristotle can have things A come out of things not-A without being subject to the charge from the Parmenides set of committing the error of thinking something can come from nothing. But further argument with the Parmenides crowd has to run a few more rounds, which Aristotle runs, and by the end of the match, Aristotle will have had to introduce distinctions between form, matter, and privation and more generally between act, potency, and privation. Aristotle’s positions beget new apparent puzzles, the exact puzzles and possible solutions (within Aristotle or confronting him with our own understanding) shifting some with differences in interpretation of Aristotle’s texts taken together. Today, too, philosophers take up puzzles and positions taken in the past of this 2600-year intellectual adventure on the trail of what is. Puzzles and new challenges for placing all things in a comprehensive framework arise today also from advances in the sciences and the formal disciplines of the last couple of centuries. Some philosophers are still attracted to puzzle origination and to modern response to classical puzzle-makers such as Zeno. I’m set more on puzzles arising naturally in structuring an all-encompassing framework. The deliciousness is in the creative reasoning and the vista. It is not obvious generally to the educated public why philosophers are thinking about the things they are thinking about and discussing and why they are using the special terminology they are using. It is better as we come to know what was in the philosopher’s culture (supposing the philosopher is not from our own culture) and what philosophers and science and religious views they were working among. With whom exactly is Hume arguing? What were their specific views? Why is his use of rational so much narrower than our common use today (and why from us: “and you care so much about that rational/irrational why?”), and why was there no need for him to explain such a narrow usage among the philosophic minded in his day? Nowadays scholars have opened to light of day more on whom Hume was arguing and on whom Kant or Descartes were arguing than had come to light when I began to study philosophy 54 years ago. The little paper I wrote in my first philosophy course freshman year was titled “Change and Consciousness in the Experience of Time.” We were free to choose our own topic and study for the term paper. It was not a topic that had come up in this introductory course, and that was fine with our professor. He was a Thomist and had introduced us to the concepts of “prime matter” and “substantial form” that I’m lately learning anew and more about. But I want to mention that for main paths down from Aristotle, including for Thomist philosophers, there is an approach to philosophic concepts and questions much in keeping with your sort of concerns for Why these philosophic concepts and issues? Our professor had come to the point in his lectures when he would set forth an elaborate version of first-cause argument for the existence of God (a proof he thought right), but he began in this unforgettable way: he held up his hand and told us his proof would begin by crooking his little finger, which he did. Then it was on to explanations and causes for what had just transpired, covering bases all around, on back to the existence and some basic nature of God from only a natural, rational basis (not on basis of authority or feeling). So as with Aristotle, the philosophy enterprise in metaphysics and epistemology takes off for these Catholic philosophers with natural everyday phenomena, then on to sophisticated questions and answers and satisfactions (or not) with them. Though I don’t remember them now, I’m sure our professor began his introduction to such concepts as prime matter with questions and answers concerning things in ordinary experience.

Interesting. Seems Aquinas was getting himself an additional layer of analogical thinking beyond Aristotle. Thanks for notice of Aquinas’ prime/functional distinction. I do not buy that potentiality can be a substratum of change. (And down from Galileo-Descartes and Newton [and Einstein’s version], I take inertial motion as brute, requiring no cause nor substrate, only matter [non-zero mass], actual matter, and spacetime.) Potentials belong to and are followers on actualities, and they are delimitations on alterations of actualities. The notion of form that I find useful from philosophy (mine—the paper coming in July) for most promising account of distinction between and relations of science, mathematics, and logic is not complement of actualities (as potentialities are complements to actualities). Let me put my hand on the table. The spaces between the fingers of my left hand are less than the number of fingers. That is a formality belonging to a concrete actuality, but it is not complement to actuality, rather to concreteness. That feature of multiple fingers or of musical staffs is a formality in the empirical world. They follow on concretes. Like potentials, they cause nothing (they're followers, not drivers.) Concrete actuals have the causal powers. We have other mathematical formalities not in the world independently of intelligence in the world, but as our toolkit improving our facility with the formalities belonging to the world, and these stand as analytic geometry to synthetic geometry. This is a big paradigm shift from Aristotle (or Kant). Alien to be sure outside my longtime shop. I’ll be studying much further the next couple of years the matter-form scheme of Aristotle, the descendant Arab and Scholastic schemes, and the matter-form scheme of Kant and how they treat science, mathematics, and logic within those schemes (within their complete theoretical philosophy schemes). I aim find out (follow-on paper) if better and how is mine for comprehensive frame for the modern age of the hard sciences, mathematics, and logic. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I leave in this post for future handiness a taxonomy of interpretations of the Aristotle texts pertaining to matter and substantial change, gotten from the 2018 dissertation by Ryan Miller (a taxonomy originated in a paper by others). (α) The persisting substratum of substantial change is something which has the nature of pure potency. This is ‘the standard prime matter reading,’ commonly associated with Aquinas. (β) The persisting substratum of substantial change is something which is not pure potency. (i) If the something is featureless and omni-potent, this is the ‘prime matter’ position of most late Scholastics, including Ockham, Scotus, and Suarez (with variations), now defended by Christopher Byrne. It is closely related to the Averroistic solution to the Problem of the Mixt, because it presumes that there can be sub-substantial subjects. (ii) If the something has no actual features, but a somehow specified potency, this is the position of Richard Rorty (1974) and (tentatively) John MacFarlane. (iii) If the something is what is actually generically true of the elements, which are not themselves composed, then this is the anti-prime-matter position of Hugh King and Robert Sokolowski. (iv) If the something is a relatively simple homoeomerous substance with normal properties or an assemblage thereof, this is the anti-prime-matter position of Daniel Graham and Christopher Shields. (v) If the something is a property, then this is the ‘Weak Revisionary Interpretation’ of Mary Louise Gill and Montgomery Furth. It is closely related to the Avicennian solution to the Problem of the Mixt, because it presumes that properties can transfer between substances. (γ) The persisting substratum of substantial change is pure potency, not something. This is the position suggested by Aquinas in De Principiis Naturae and defended by Dermot O’Donoghue, Friedrich Solmsen, Joseph Owens, Patrick Suppes, Patrick Toner, and Anna Marmodoro. It is also the position taken by Richard Rorty in his dissertation, Christine Korsgaard in an unpublished paper, and with somewhat different auxiliary assumptions by Mary Krizan. (δ) The substratum of substantial change does not persist through that change. This is the ‘Strong Revisionary Interpretation’ of Barrington Jones, William Charlton, Sarah Broadie, and Michael Rea. (ε) Substantial change occurs without a substratum. This is the position that both Aristotle and the Eleatics regard as unintelligible. (ζ) Substantial change does not occur. This is the Eleatic position in its Empedoclean guise.

Kistler deals with Heisenberg 1958. I can't get back to it just now. But I certainly intend to get back to it. On discussions of 'prime matter' as finding a home in modern physics, I'll yet be looking at Nicolescu's "Hylemorphism, Quantum Physics, and Levels of Reality" and Oderberg's Real Essentialism. No, I wasn't comparing energy to form. Only mass-energy (the whole bundle) to Aristotle's matter for his matter-form. 2046, I greatly enjoy your inputs. None of my physics professors (about a dozen) nor I thought of particles as having no nature. They have certain distinct natures and potentials. Are you thinking that to have a nature a particle must have an end, like the root of a plant or nerve of an animal? The Democritean or Epicurean turn during the Scientific Revolution was supplanted by the Chemical Revolution, thermodynamics, electromagnetic theory, statistical mechanics, quantum physics and chemistry, solid state physics, and so forth. The atoms of the old philosophers, and their fans such as Boscovich, Descartes, or Newton yielded little to no advance, and they have been kept rightly distinct from and are in fact irrelevant to modern physics, chemistry, and other contemporary science pertaining to matter. (I mean physical science that is gotten hold of by the physics, chemistry, biology, or engineering majors.) I agree that taking matter-fields (mass-energy) as acting according to principles we have discovered of it in physics is perfectly compatible with the sequence of micro-events that yield gravitropism (of any sort) of certain sorts of uprooted plants (and perfectly compatible with any devices we engineer). Those roots have their own distinctive natures at their own level, as does the diesel engine. We do have real, distinctive powers at all levels, and so far as I’ve gotten into these books and papers on Aristotle so far, it seems we do it all just fine in our modern scientific understanding, do it sufficiently, with full integration and without the Aristotelian (varieties of) hylomorphism.

Does matter in Aristotle’s matter-form metaphysical composite coincide with mass-energy in our contemporary physics? Aristotle’s metaphysical matter is not the same as the Greek elements earth/water/wind/fire nor the contraries such as heat and cold that can be possessed by some of those elements and their combinations. His metaphysical matter is substratum receptive of all coming to be or passing away and of all contrarieties. He thought potentials to be real and matter in his metaphysical sense to be potential that with form is become determinate actuality. We sensibly say today that an electron and a positron have the potential (a reality) to come together and transform into two gamma rays. The electron and the positron have non-zero mass, and such items we customarily call matter. Electromagnetic radiation, such as gamma photons have no mass, and we call them pure energy, and we call them field particles in contrast to matter (for elementary matter, chemical elements and their particle components, or to the Greeks, earth/water/wind/fire). My question is whether what we call mass-energy in physics takes the modern role of Aristotle’s metaphysical matter in his matter-form composites. It takes the substrate role, but obviates need for the potency role. Unlike Aristotle’s metaphysical matter, mass-energy is quantified and it continues under transformations between mass and energy in a definite constant quantity. But this character of mass-energy would seem not itself opponent to Aristotle’s matter of the matter-form composite. That quantification might be taken for merely a modern improvement on Aristotle’s (metaphysical) matter. Rather, the problem for identifying Aristotle’s concept with our mass-energy concept is that mass-energy is not fundamentally a pure potential in the world. Mass-energy is a fully determinate actual thing and any further specifications of the actual things in which it obtains do not make mass-energy more fully actual. Of what need or usefulness is an Aristotelian concept of metaphysical matter or its combine matter-form in our physics-comprehension of the world? It would seem the concepts of potentiality and actuality are all we need keep from this work table of Aristotle for physics: electron-positron pairs are potentially gamma pairs; eigenstates of a quantum system in a state of superposition of those eigenstates—eigenstates to which the system can pass upon its encounter with a measuring device—are potentials of that actual superposed state; and so forth. Actual mass-energy is adequate as substrate of electron-positron annihilation and gamma generation. No need here for Aristotle’s receptive potency as substrate of physics-transformations so far as I presently see.

Biden's Plan Promises Permanent Decline That is the title of an article on 3 May 2021 in the New York Times by Bret Stephens. The few candidates who tried running for President in the 2020 race and who brought fiscal responsibility to the top priority in their platform—such were Independent Howard Schultz and Republicans Mark Sanford and Bill Weld—got no traction with the voters. The old Republican issue of balancing the budget was far from top priority in the Republican general election Presidential campaigns of 2016 and 2020. While the Republicans had the Presidency and both chambers of Congress early in that interval, they failed to deliver a balanced budget or make it the priority of the day. Realistically, we’ve days of deficit and peril ahead, on and on, made possible by the two Parties keeping so much of the public attending to culture wars, failing to champion balancing the budget as top priority for security of the country.

Measurement Standard for Mass —from comparison of artifacts to place of mass in E=mc2 and E=hν.