Author : Z. Bechler
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 33,44 MB
Release : 1995-01-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780791422397
This is an attack on Aristotle showing that his misplaced drive toward the consistent application of his actualistic ontology (denying the reality of all potential things) resulted in many of his major theses being essentially vacuous.
Author : Charlotte Witt
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 174 pages
File Size : 36,32 MB
Release : 2018-05-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1501711504
Charlotte Witt continues her highly regarded exploration of Aristotle's metaphysics in a book devoted to the ontological distinction between potentiality and actuality. She focuses on Metaphysics book ix, which provides the most sustained discussion of this distinction. Witt rejects the conventional reading of this key text—that Aristotle differentiated between the two concepts solely to further the investigation of substance. Instead, in an original interpretation of his work, she argues that his development of the distinction between "being x potentially" and "being x actually" allowed Aristotle to develop an intrinsically hierarchical and normative vision of reality.For Witt, Aristotle's views about being shed light on his puzzling use of gender language in his descriptions of reality. This language has become an important issue for feminist scholars who have noted that in Aristotle's metaphysics of substance form is sometimes associated with the male, and matter with the female. Witt's interpretation that Aristotelian reality is intrinsically hierarchical and normative, but not intrinsically gendered, offers a new, important understanding of a controversial aspect of Aristotle's metaphysics.
Author : Theodore Scaltsas
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 18,83 MB
Release : 2010
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780801476358
In this book, Theodore Scaltsas brings the insights of contemporary philosophy to bear on a classic problem in metaphysics that stems from Aristotle's theory of substance. Scaltsas provides an analysis of the enigmatic notions of potentiality and actuality, which he uses to explain Aristotle's substantial holism by showing how the concrete and the abstract parts of a substance form a dynamic, diachronic whole.
Author : Christian Pfeiffer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 31,54 MB
Release : 2018-07-12
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0191085308
Christian Pfeiffer explores an important, but neglected topic in Aristotle's theoretical philosophy: the theory of bodies. A body is a three-dimensionally extended and continuous magnitude bounded by surfaces. This notion is distinct from the notion of a perceptible or physical substance. Substances have bodies, that is to say, they are extended, their parts are continuous with each other and they have boundaries, which demarcate them from their surroundings. Pfeiffer argues that body, thus understood, has a pivotal role in Aristotle's natural philosophy. A theory of body is a presupposed in, e.g., Aristotle's account of the infinite, place, or action and passion, because their being bodies explains why things have a location or how they can act upon each other. The notion of body can be ranked among the central concepts for natural science which are discussed in Physics III-IV. The book is the first comprehensive and rigorous account of the features substances have in virtue of being bodies. It provides an analysis of the concept of three-dimensional magnitude and related notions like boundary, extension, contact, continuity, often comparing it to modern conceptions of it. Both the structural features and the ontological status of body is discussed. This makes it significant for scholars working on contemporary metaphysics and mereology because the concept of a material object is intimately tied to its spatial or topological properties.
Author : Alexander R. Pruss
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 26,27 MB
Release : 2011-05-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1441142045
Actuality, Possibility and Worlds is an exploration of the Aristotelian account that sees possibilities as grounded in causal powers. On his way to that account, Pruss surveys a number of historical approaches and argues that logicist approaches to possibility are implausible. The notion of possible worlds appears to be useful for many purposes, such as the analysis of counterfactuals or elucidating the nature of propositions and properties. This usefulness of possible worlds makes for a second general question: Are there any possible worlds and, if so, what are they? Are they concrete universes as David Lewis thinks, Platonic abstracta as per Robert M. Adams and Alvin Plantinga, or maybe linguistic or mathematical constructs such as Heller thinks? Or is perhaps Leibniz right in thinking that possibilia are not on par with actualities and that abstracta can only exist in a mind, so that possible worlds are ideas in the mind of God?
Author : Aristotle
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 13,39 MB
Release : 2006-08-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0198751079
"This addition to the Clarendon Aristotle series comprises a new translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Book [Theta], an introduction to the basic notions and problems around which the book is structured, and a detailed chapter-by-chapter critical commentary. Makin's aim throughout is to present Aristotle's text in as accessible a manner as possible, and to encourage and enable readers to engage critically with Aristotle's arguments. Metaphysics Book [Theta] is an extended discussion of the distinction between the actual and the potential, a distinction which is important both for Aristotle's own thought and for later philosophers. Aristotle starts by considering the relation between capacities and changes, and then expands his discussion to cover the notions of matter and substance, which are at the heart of his ontology. Among the topics covered in detail in the commentary are the distinctions between two-way and one-way capacities, and between rational and non-rational capacities; arguments against reductive views of possibility and impossibility; Aristotle's treatment of capacity identity and his account of the exercise of capacities; Aristotle's answer to the question 'what is it to be potentially such and such?'; his defence of the idea that actuality is prior in various ways to potentiality; and his brief comments on the evaluation of potentialities and actualities, the role of the actual-potential distinction in geometrical knowledge, and his treatment of truth and falsity." --Book Jacket.
Author : Erick Raphael Jiménez
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 39,19 MB
Release : 2017-07-06
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : 1107194180
A fresh interpretation of this important and widely misunderstood concept as an acquired ability to make principles and essences intelligible.
Author : Dean Moyar
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 881 pages
File Size : 12,86 MB
Release : 2017
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0199355223
Features original articles by some of the most distinguished contemporary scholars of Hegel's thought, The most comprehensive collection of Hegel scholarship available in one volume, Examines Hegel's writing in a chronological order, from his very first published works to his very last, Includes chapters on the newly edited lecture series Hegel conducted in the 1820s Book jacket.
Author : Pavlos Kontos
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 287 pages
File Size : 23,12 MB
Release : 2018-02-22
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1107161975
Provides the first full study of Aristotle's notion of evil and sheds light on its content, potential, and influence.
Author : Michael Frede
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 394 pages
File Size : 27,26 MB
Release : 2000
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780198237648
A distinguished group of scholars of ancient philosophy here presents a systematic study of the twelfth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Lambda, which can be regarded as a self-standing treatise on substance, has been attracting particular attention in recent years, and was chosen as the focusof the fourteenth Symposium Aristotelicum, from which this volume derives. At the Symposium, each of Lambda's ten chapters was taken in turn as the subject of a session at which a specially written paper was read to and discussed by the assembled symposiasts. (The ninth chapter commanded twosessions by dint of its particular difficulty.) The papers have been revised in the light of discussion, and are now offered to a wider audience as a discursive commentary on points of particular philosophical interest covering all of Lambda. Michael Frede's extensive Introduction aims to give abroader view of Lambda as a whole and the problems it raises, and thus to provide the context for the discussion of each of the chapters. This volume will be a resource of great value and interest for anyone working on ancient metaphysics and theology.
