The Human Question

Did Aristotle think that only living things consist of many different parts? What would he say abiotic carbon molecules? How about the parts of a so-called atom? Are these embarrassments to his view of nature?

I can see how chemical reactions could seriously undercut or revise the sort of teleology Aristotle found in non-living things. For example, he might have thought of water as having a particular way of interacting with other things as its purpose. But water interacts very differently under different temperatures, pressures, etc. and with different things. Where's the sense of a unitary telos? Who is to say that water's acting as a solvent at a 1,000 atmowspheres pressure is not part of water's telos? Is it because it rarely acts that way? What if we discover that most water in the universe is at such a pressure? What, then, is accidental, i.e., the result of a chance encounter? Isn't every encounter equally natural? Of course, Aristotle didn't think of individual non-living things as having individuals purposes, but of the whole cosmos as having one purpose. Perhaps some sort of equlibrium at the cosmic level or other characteristic is a kind of goal of inte...

Just learned today about how quantum theory implies that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum. Very interesting as atomists had this duality of generic matter and pure void, while Aristotle rejected this duality....of course, you can't really come to a conclusive answer to a philosophical question, except perhaps to show sometimes that something what was once thought of as impossible is not only possible but actual.

Okay: this may be a hot idea, or it may be plain nutty--but here goes: Aristotle had the notion of the sublunar sphere and all within it being moved by the higher spheres. And the natural state of the motion of these spheres was motion rather than rest. We certainly don't have spheres any more, but from the point of view of physics (i.e., abstracting from biological questions) we do have a higher and lower. The higher has a kind of circularity about it. And a kind of simplicity about it (just as the movement of the spheres was thoguht to be circular. And the higher does drive the lower (at least until we get to questions of life). But the higher in this case is not above our heads. And it is not in any sense "macro" or large. Rather, it is micro. Yep, (at least if Stephen Barr is right) the smaller, less evident purely physical (i.e, apart from biological) processes have higher symmetry than the larger, more evident ones. Just as a marble (sez Barr) has more sy...

Thesis: Aristotle's notion that the upward motion of a projectile is against nature requires not only a teleological view of nature, but also a geocentric understanding of that teleology. A teleological view of nature, however, need not be geocentric: in which case, a teleological account of projectile motion need not be antiquated. Background: For Aristotle, the earth's center is the target of all bodies made of earth (air and fire, which are not made of earth, have the heavens as their target). If we simply release earthly things, they head toward that target with a rectilinear movement. They cease this movement only when they have encountered an impediment (or when they have reached their target, which would require, I suppose, digging a hole to the center of the earth, etc.). Heavenly bodies, on the other hand, have no targets, but they do have a purpose, which is to move. And these movements themselves are target-like inasmuch as one heavenly body moves in definite, ...

Thanks to Tim, I think I got an iddee biddee grasp of the curvature of time-space. It seems that Einstein's talk of "curved space" amounts an analogy between inertia and gravitational pull. That is, the Einsteinian recognition of the fact that things naturally accelerate toward each other as long as no (non-gravitational) force intervenes is analogous to the Newtonian recognition of the fact that things naturally move at a constant speed and in a constant direction with respect to each other as long no force intervenes. And just as a Newtonian would deny that a force is involved in inertia (F=ma means that when 'a' or acceleration equals zero, 'F' or force equals zero), so too an Einsteinian (that would be all of us) denies that a force is involved in gravitation. To make gravitation "look like" inertia, we might say that space/time is curved. That is, just as we expect a projectile (not affected by extrinsic forces) to move at a constant speed t...

Two questions regarding equilibrium: 1. What does equilibrium have to do with homeostasis? I.e., is the latter a kind of chemical equilibrium? 2. What does equilibrium have to do with the law of inertia/momentum? Does the hypothetical thing moving in a straight line at a constant speed in any way tend toward equilibrium? I don't think so. But isn't there is some law of equilibium that applies to all motion, or does it only apply to acceleration? If the latter, then wouldn't this underscore how moving at a constant speed etc. is an empty set? 3. And you know that example of a thing moving in a straight line at a constant speed? With respect to what? And how did it get started moving? Or was it always moving? If the latter, then why isn't it closer/farther than the other thing than it is now?

It's often complained that he thought the natural state for bodily things is rest, whereas we moderns know that it's movement. But of course, he thought the natural state for heavenly bodies was ongoing circular motion. And didn't he also think that fire naturally moves up, earth and water move down (and Air somewhere in between)? Granted, they rest when they get to where they were heading (more accurately, they rest when they are impeded from getting closer to where they are heading). These were limited motions, unlike the endless revolutions of heavenly bodies. But he didn't look for an efficient cause of such motions, at least not in the same way that he might for the cause of an arrow's moving sideways through the air, for stuff made of earth (such as the arrow) does not naturally move sideways, let alone upward (which would obviousy be contrary to its tendency). Shouldn't we say that the stuff of earth naturally moves downward until it reaches an impediment...

Newton's third law (that every action has an equal and opposite reaction), seems to me to describe two aspects of the same whole, for the action and reaction occur during at the same time. Our ability to note how two things are contemporaneously interrelated via this third law totally belies Hume's crude conception of antecedent/consequent events as the only knowledge we can have of causality. (On the other hand, a Humean can object that this law is an example of superimposing a mathematical conception of objects [which involves a kind of simultaneity] onto the data of experience.) If they are simultaneous, however, then why do we call one the "action" and the other the "reaction"? Such language misleads us into imagining that one occurs before the other. The answer might be that in our experience, one of the two things exerting equal and opposite forces usually seems to initiate the process: e.g., when I run on a track, I initiate this process, even thoug...

To push is to push toward, to pull is to pull away from. Pushing and pulling are originally given in a cognitive/affective/operational whole. The push and pull of physics is an abstraction from this original giveness.

If Newtonian physics is necessitarian, the it is not the necessity that one finds in the relationship between two sides of an equation expressing a law of nature, for no concrete material thing is entirely determined in its movement by the forces encompassed in a single natural law. Rather, each concrete movement is the result of a composite of forces, each of which is describeable by a law. In this way, each law is an abstraction: none of them describes entirely on its own the process that actually transpires in nature. And in this way, no law on its own says what must happen. Rather, each law tells part of the story of why what does occur happened in the way that it did. That is, laws describe the natural influences on movement rather than necessities of nature. Or rather, the necessity that laws do convey is of how things necessarily influence each other. But since none of these influences excludes other influences, it follows that none of the laws describing any one (or partial) ...

F=MA expresses a simultaneously changing relationship between different variables. There is a kind of causal relationship between them. An increase in mass causes a decrease in acceleration (where force is constant). But it is not the sort of cause and effect described by Hume. Rather, it is an interrelation between two aspects of the same whole... more like per se causality as described by Aristotle rather than Humean characterization of causality as essentially a relation between antecedent and consequent events. In this way it is ironic that Hume sought to emulate Newton by identifying a psychological analog to universal gravitation.

Infinite regress arguments are all over the place, not just in old fashioned places, like Aquinas's first way. In fact, Galileo's proposal that an already-rolling marble rolling down an infinitely long flat and frictionless plane would continue to do so infinitely... is an infinite regress. But it is by thinking of such infinite regresses that we come up with many novel concepts, insights.

To say that a car is presently going 60mph is usually to say a counterfactual: one who says this means that if it did travel for an hour (even though it hasn't yet done so), then it would have traversed 60 miles. And this counterfactual goes beyond what has been experienced. For the measured speed in question is really the disposition to go 60 miles in an hour. But a disposition as such is beyond the reach of an empiricist. We simply don't sense "60mph": rather, we interpret something as having a disposition to traverse a certain distance. This interpretation, in going beyond experience, is just as metaphysical as causality, for like causality, disposition goes beyond experience in interpreting it.

The conventional story of physics is that natural place was a naive teleological notion that was replaced in classical physics. But aren't the purported examples of movement toward natural place (air going up and water going down, etc.) examples of the tendency to seek equlibrium? And isn't equilibrium a kind of telos in classical physics? Or perhaps not just a telos but the telos?

This thought is really a diamond in the rough... or perhaps zirconium in the trash. One can think of matter as an inert, pure extension, as a kind of Ding an sich to be acted upon by either laws (a kind of materialism that is really a dualism, inasmuch as laws are not themselves material things) or by an immaterial principle (dualism, properly speaking, with matter as a reified prime matter) Or one can think of matter as the proximate capacity of the concrete individual to exist and hence operate differently than it is now operating (i.e., proximate matter in hylomorphism) Here comes the analogy with theories of intellection: to conceive of sensation as a purely inert substratum upon which intellection must work is either to invoke a psychological dualism in which the intellect is super active (as in innate ideas or forms of judgment or reminiscence) in ordering sensation or to suppose that intellection is really the sum of sensations, which sum can be understood to arise in a la...

Every abstraction occurs within a narrative--including this statement! This is true even for science, for it begins and ends with a story, i.e., the story of past discoveries, of how you learned to DO science, the expectation of where science will lead us, the expectation of where we are going anyways (which includes cosmology).

The quantitative approach, inasmuch as it becomes a kind of sola scriptura (sola mathematica?), can understand ligher levels of being only as higher levels of complexity, for it cannot grasp the one that unites the many.

If you think that scientific discoveries can falsify folk metaphysics, then you must also grant that later discoveries can falsify the earlier falsifications.

The efficient cause par excellence is a human agent acting deliberately and skillfully (I am speaking epistemically not ontologically: i.e., the prime example by which understand all other cases). "Lower level" causes must be understood by subtracting attirbutes from the human prime analog. For example, "force" involves an analogy with the kinaesthesis involved in intentional acts. Ditto with energy. A little fuzzy here: If our understanding of "lower level" causes were not arrived at in the manner just proposed, then you certainly could not explain human action (trying to move, wishing, perceiving, judging, etc.) by adding together the lower level actions... or at least not without sweeping the problem under the carpet by using homuncular descriptive language. A mechanism does not cognize, desire, try to act.

The following is a pair of letters and replies between me and a professor who has criticized intelligent design as being "operationally vacuous," i.e., not even having the possibility of a research program. Hello Dr. G I am an adjunct professor at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore and am presently enjoying your ... lectures ... on [s]cience... It occurred to me that intelligent design need not be operationally vacuous: suppose three researchers look at the same phenomena with three different agendas. The first believes that the neo-Darwinian understanding of evolution is sufficient to explain the origin of present life forms; the second believes that evolution could not have occurred unless extra-terrestrials intervened; the third is Michael Behe. It seems conceivable to me that the three could engage in research that might support each of their respective theses. The evidence for ET (#2) would be first of all the improbability that things evolved as they did without inter...

The following is a selection of interesting points in Behe's Edge of Evolution: The main planks of his understanding of the controversey are 1.) a complete acceptance of descent with modification, but combined with 2.) a rejection of the sufficiency of natural selection/random variation to explain that modification; 3.) a fine tuning hypothesis to account for radically improbable mutations (this fine tuning is a kind of extension of the anthropic principle to biology). The most helpful argument was in chapter 7, where he said that 1.) the formation of new macromolecular structures in the cell would require two or more protein molecues to become joined through modifications in the amino acids of their respective binding sights; 2). the mutations to these binding sights must result in their being complementary with respect to shape and chemical properties, 3). such complementarity is extremely improbable-- about one in ten to a hundred million. 4). such complementarity must occur in...

A positivist can be a fundamentalist in a manner somewhat analogous to a Bible-only Christian. If the former takes the categories of logic, math and the philosophical scientific method as ahistorical and univocal truths, he is like a Bible-only Christian who reasons as if the King James Bible fell out of the sky.

Causality cannot be conveyed simply in terms of a logical relation. Causality is a term (i.e., subject or predicate, not a relation between propositions. For example, “the water is poured by me” “is poured by me” is a term. “By me” makes it causal. *** If those who are fond of wielding Ockham's razor are looking for a big target, then I propose that they dispense with the necessity ascribed to the laws of nature. Why? because we do not perceive or measure their necessity, nor do we necessity in iself. That is, we perceive neither necessity in nature nor semantic necessity. Nor do we perceive contingency. So let those who would replace metaphysics and religion with science take their own medicine. And they will find that they have rendered science vacuous. *** The recognition of non-measured characteristics is a necessary condition for measurement. Measurement is always the “measurement of” something. Inasmuch as the characteristic is that by which we measure, awareness of it c...

The following analogy occurred to me as plausible but also greatly in need of clarification: it is between organism/mineral, animal/organism and human/animal. Regarding organism/mineral: the law of entropy is nowhere to be broken. But the following non-exception to this law is, after a fashion, exceptional. That is the fact that plants increase the amount of order that is going on within a small scale. One can point out correctly that the whole constituted by organism/environment is in accordance with entropy. But only organisms seem to increase the amount of order per unit of space as it were. The second point regards animal/organism: Here two are laws that admit of no exception (i.e., the laws of inertia and gravitation), yet animals do seem exceptional in this regard. If one were to look at the relations of force between parts, MF=A and similar laws would obtain. Yet the animal as a whole doesn't rest/move in the same way that simpler, more basic beings do. If it were a ...

You objected to what I had said before with the following words: This statement makes no sense to me! According to logical positivism, logical necessity is the only necessity there is regarding statements about nature since empirical science consists only ofpatterns in experience and the deductive (logically necessary (analytic aprior) relations that follow from them. The logical positivists/empiricists believe that is the only necessity pertaining to statements in science (since they (Hume/Leibnitz/but not Kant) deny synthetic apriori judgments.) Then you go on to say that science cannot tell us whether events happen necessarily. I'll take that as a rehash of the Empiricist/Logical Positivist position that there can be no synthetic aprior judgments . You can't have your cake and eat it too. Knowlege is possible in science! [Incidentally, I do believe as Kant did that synthetic apriori knowledge is possible. I would replace the transcendentally ideals of space and time (wh...

Here is an excerpt from an email I sent to David B., arguing that "event" determinism is opposed to rationality. Hello David: I will argue against your conclusion with a math argument requiring knowledge of only basic arithmetic. I argue that to deny that we have free will on the basis of physical determinism is to imply that we are not rational, i.e., that we are not capable of knowing universal and necessary truths as such. But such an implication undermines the very math and science David uses to establish the thesis that we are predetermined. Hence David, your argument, when brought to its conclusion, is self-defeating. Why? because if every event, including everything that we think is determined by a previous event, then it seems that our thinking that we really know that 2+2=4 is predetermined by previous event(s) as well. But if we are forced into thinking that the above equation (which is a stand-in for all claims to universal knowledge) is true, then it is also conce...