>>23786109
Good move OP.

>>23785997 #
This is not at all clear, and again, assumed. Aquinas can be taken to mean the Biblical god when he refers to the unmoved mover, because he's writing works of theology for Catholic universities, and citing the Bible, while Aristotle seems to reject poetic and mythic depictions (see the citations in >>23785843 (You) #). Performing sacrifices means little more than that Aristotle knew enough to exercise prudence in following customs he thought were grounded in nonsense, as per, again, the citations I pointed to. And Aristotle could say "Even the god is content with receiving sacrifices that are in accord with our capacity," in the Eudemian Ethics without any conflict since, "because nothing is needed for a god," (Prior Analytics), there's also no harm in it.

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>>23786051
>Aquinas can be taken to mean the Biblical god when he refers to the unmoved mover, because he's writing works of theology for Catholic universities,
Yeah, and Aristotle was a pagan dude who commissioned idols in his will. That's how we know it's Zeus.
>Aristotle seems to reject poetic and mythic depictions
You're right, he had a problem with the popular mythology. But this doesn't mean he didn't believe in Zeus, he was more like a religious reformer. Lots of educated Greeks had problems with pagan mythology and popular religion without actually rejecting the gods.
>Performing sacrifices means little more than that Aristotle knew enough to exercise prudence in following customs he thought were grounded in nonsense, as per, again, the citations I pointed to
What citations? That some other anon pointed out that maybe, just maybe, the Eudemus is telling people what they want to think, while DA is the true dogma? He was just throwing out a theory dude. In Politics 7.4 Aristotle talks about the role of prayer to the pagan gods in relation to the ideal state, go and see what he says.

Did you know Aristotle actually wrote a work called On Prayer? What do you suppose it said? Let's find out together:
"They are such goods as these, health, strength, beauty, good condition, wealth, glory, political power… for through these things he [Aristotle] again showed what the chance goods are. For they are what we pray to the gods for… Prayer is petition for good things from the gods. These then are the goods that prayer is about." (Anonymus in Aristotelis Ethica Nicomachea)

So let's review: he makes casual references to the gods in his esoteric works without comment. His exoteric works are full-blown pagan and invoke the gods frequently. In his will, he stipulates that a dedication be made to Zeus and Athena. In Meta lambda, he says the gods as conceived popularly actually derive from some prehistoric philosopher who discovered the very system he's describing, the original philosophy being "dumbed down" into the popular religion.

The unmoved mover is Zeus, I'm sorry, this is where the evidence leads. He thought most people had a simplistic conception of Zeus, but that doesn't mean it isn't Zeus.

>Aristotle's logic is correct in every detail.

Meds.

>>23786186
I mean I'm writing in an obnoxious way on purpose, I know that he didn't actually discover the totality of logic, nor did he really set out to. But within the bounds that he sets (i.e. demonstrative science), the theory of syllogism is sound. What do you object to? Go on kid, debate me.

>>23786203
4x4=16. Make it a syllogism.

>>23786207
Multiplication is a function defined as such. If applied to the number 4 4 times over, the result is 16. So the middle term is the nature of multiplication. To say that there is a syllogism is simply to say that some conclusion is explainable, it doesn't rely on literal, grammatical predication.

>>23786171
>Yeah, and Aristotle was a pagan dude who commissioned idols in his will. That's how we know it's Zeus.
Aristotle's rejection of the mythologized gods is total. His separated substances could not be subsumed under the Olympian religion because the conception is completely different. He performed sacrifices and such because that's what you do. This is silly.
> he was more like a religious reformer.
lol
> for through these things he [Aristotle] again showed what the chance goods are. For they are what we pray to the gods for… Prayer is petition for good things from the gods. These then are the goods that prayer is about.
Just because he recognized that people pray for things doesn't mean that he believed in the pagan gods.

So let's review: Aristotle talks about the gods in his popular works, but that's what you would expect, because they were meant for mass consumption. He makes occasional passing references to pagan gods in the esoteric works but only for illustration (the Hermes in the stone etc). In Meta 12 he frames the popular gods as a distortion of the true gods, which are the ones he's writing about.

>>23786244
Not a syllogism.

>>23786171
>Yeah, and Aristotle was a pagan dude who commissioned idols in his will. That's how we know it's Zeus.
This doesn't follow. Firstly, to have stipulated in one's will that a man ought to commission an idol to a popular god is not the same as an identification of that popular god with the prime mover. Secondly, the will, being a legal document that mulptiple eyes will be set upon, and having an effect on family and close friends, is not a document for discerning one's private thoughts.

>You're right, he had a problem with the popular mythology. But this doesn't mean he didn't believe in Zeus, he was more like a religious reformer. Lots of educated Greeks had problems with pagan mythology and popular religion without actually rejecting the gods.
We agree then that he rejects the myths, thpugh I don't see him as a reformer more than as someone who privately rejects them part and parcel in favor of an almost wholly different understanding of what a god is. I still see no evidence that he recognized the prime mover as Zeus, only an assumption that he must've.

>What citations? That some other anon pointed out that maybe, just maybe, the Eudemus is telling people what they want to think, while DA is the true dogma? He was just throwing out a theory dude. In Politics 7.4 Aristotle talks about the role of prayer to the pagan gods in relation to the ideal state, go and see what he says.
The citations I pointed to at >>23785997, namely, Alpha 2 983a, alpha 3 995a, Beta 2 997b, and Beta 4 1000a, and the passage from the end of Lambda ch. 8 quoted there.
The Eudemus' assertion of full personal immortality isn't just "throwing out a theory," the dialogues were published with a view toward defending philosophy in the public sphere and attracting students to his school over the schools of others. The Eudemus is doing the former rather than the latter, and this was recognized early in antiquity by Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, and Lucian.
The Politics is exactly not indicative of his private thoughts, as evidenced by the wholly different anthropocentric treatment of teleology in that work compared to the theoretical works. That work falls under the same measure of precision he mentions in NE 1.3, namely, less than what's to be expected in the aforementioned theoretical works.

>Did you know Aristotle actually wrote a work called On Prayer? What do you suppose it said? Let's find out together:
What you leave out, because it's apparently unimportant to you, is whether it stands in relation to his theoretical works in the same way the NE and Politics do, or whether it's fully theoretical in itself. From the theological accounts given in the Physics, Metaphysics, and De Caelo, how and what do those gods concretely give us on account of our pleading?

>The unmoved mover is Zeus, I'm sorry, this is where the evidence leads. He thought most people had a simplistic conception of Zeus, but that doesn't mean it isn't Zeus.
It isn't, you're assuming this completely.

>>23786279
But it is a syllogism as far as Aristotle's logical theories go. The idea that Aristotelian syllogisms take the structure "white dilates sight, this is white, this dilates sight..." is a radical distortion of the theory he is actually presenting, which would go something like this:

Whenever you explain something, the explanation is under the thing explained and over the thing being explained. I.e., it must not be narrower in extent than the subject, it must not be broader in extent than explanandum. By breaking explanations down in this way, we can prove metatheorems about science that are universally true.

The Prior Analytics is part of the Posterior Analytics (in fact for A they were the same book), it has to be read in light of the Posterior Analytics. When you read it like this, it's a brilliant and elegant theory. When you read it as an account of logic in general, it's a failure, that's literally been known since Theophrastus and Eudemus.

>>23786290
>The citations I pointed to at >>23785997
Lol, correction:
>>23785843

>>23786290
>Secondly, the will, being a legal document that mulptiple eyes will be set upon, and having an effect on family and close friends, is not a document for discerning one's private thoughts.
You will never let go of this notion that Aristotle was a crypto- proto-Catholic, will you?
>only an assumption that he must've.
It's not an assumption, there were no other gods around. I'm not trying to annoy you, really, this just seems so obvious to me, and presumably to others.
>Alpha 2 983a
Because he says God isn't jealous that means he doesn't believe in Zeus? Top kek, this was a common sentiment among Greek pagans. Mythologically the gods are portrayed as jealous and so on, in reality they weren't. Not an outrageous or subversive view in A's day.
>alpha 3 995a
I love that passage because it's the one and only place where he half-way apologizes for his obnoxiously unhelpful and unfriendly writing style. I don't see anything there that has to do with the question at hand. The 'fanciful and puerile survivals' in law do not necessarily refer to religious rites, they could refer to all sorts of strange laws and legal fictions that existed in Greek city-states. And even if they do refer to religion - so what? I agree that A rejected popular religion, but that doesn't mean his God ain't Zeus.
>Beta 2 997b
Yes, he rejects the idea of gods in human form. I work with a li'l ol' Baptist lady who thinks of God as being in human form, but you could still be the same religion as her and think her conception was childish. That's exactly what A's relationship to popular religion is like, he was a philosophical pagan.
>Beta 4 1000a
More rejecting the myths. And I'll give you another one - Meta 4 (can't remember the chapter but it's toward the end) he ridicules myths about the gods. This does not mean his unmoved mover isn't Zeus, I'm sorry.
>The Politics is exactly not indicative of his private thoughts, as evidenced by the wholly different anthropocentric treatment of teleology in that work compared to the theoretical works.
The Politics is a popular work now? OK.

I'm going to quote the passage where he half-way apologizes for his writing style because I really like it:

"The effect of a lecture depends upon the habits of the listener; because we expect the language to which we are accustomed, and anything beyond this seems not to be on the same level, but somewhat strange and unintelligible on account of its unfamiliarity; for it is the familiar that is intelligible. The powerful effect of familiarity is clearly shown by the laws, in which the fanciful and puerile survivals prevail, through force of habit, against our recognition of them.Thus some people will not accept the statements of a speaker unless he gives a mathematical proof; others will not unless he makes use of illustrations; others expect to have a poet adduced as witness. Again, some require exactness in everything, while others are annoyed by it, either because they cannot follow the reasoning or because of its pettiness; for there is something about exactness which seems to some people to be mean, no less in an argument than in a business transaction."

You see this today in the way people dislike Aristotle, like all of his fine distinctions are pedantry and he's this boring dry thinker, unlike based Empedocles, who was an Initiate of the Lodge of Osiris no. 23 and a mystick wizard.

>>23786271
>His separated substances could not be subsumed under the Olympian religion because the conception is completely different.
You're right in that his separated substances couldn't possibly be subsumed under the myths of Homer and Hesiod and whatnot. They're too transcendent for that. But, as I keep saying, that doesn't mean it isn't Zeus. Why can't the myths be a watered-down version of his OWN, true view of the gods? Oh wait that's exactly the argument he makes in Meta 12.1074b:

"A tradition has been handed down by the ancient thinkers of very early times, and bequeathed to posterity in the form of a myth, to the effect that these heavenly bodies are gods,1 and that the Divine pervades the whole of nature.The rest of their tradition has been added later in a mythological form to influence the vulgar and as a constitutional and utilitarian expedient2; they say that these gods are human in shape or are like certain other animals,3 and make other statements consequent upon and similar to those which we have mentioned.Now if we separate these statements and accept only the first, that they supposed the primary substances to be gods, we must regard it as an inspired saying and reflect that whereas every art and philosophy has probably been repeatedly developed to the utmost and has perished again, these beliefs of theirs have been preserved as a relic of former knowledge. To this extent only, then, are the views of our forefathers and of the earliest thinkers intelligible to us."

So, in Aristotle's view, the popular religion is a sort of watered-down or bastardized version of what he is himself proposing. Ergo, the unmoved mover is Zeus.

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Some don't like Greek philosophy because it's all old white dudes arguing about nothing. But did you know that Aristotle gives a demonstration in Meta 10 that black people are people, too?

"The question might be raised as to why woman does not differ in species from man, seeing that female is contrary to male, and difference is contrariety; and why a female and a male animal are not other in species, although this difference belongs to "animal" per se, and not as whiteness or blackness does; "male" and "female" belong to it qua animal.This problem is practically the same as "why does one kind of contrariety (e.g. "footed" and "winged") make things other in species, while another (e.g. whiteness and blackness) does not?" The answer may be that in the one case the attributes are peculiar to the genus, and in the other they are less so; and since one element is formula and the other matter, contrarieties in the formula produce difference in species, but contrarieties in the concrete whole do not. HENCE THE WHITENESS OR BLACKNESS OF A MAN DOES NOT PRODUCE THIS, NOR IS THERE ANY SPECIFIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A WHITE MAN AND A BLACK MAN, NOT EVEN IF ONE TERM IS ASSIGNED TO EACH."

Did you know Aristotle freed many of his slaves upon his death? Maybe even a black one, who knows? Is there a black influence on Aristotle? Signs point to yes.

>>23786376
>You see this today in the way people dislike Aristotle, like all of his fine distinctions are pedantry and he's this boring dry thinker
But that's a sign of a vain and immature consciousness. A rational and sane adult doesn't need to be entertained constantly.

Why does Aristotle attract such autismo? You never see this kind of shit with Platonists, unless they're Straussian fags

>>23786109
>Aquinas' arguments for immortality don't actually make any sense.
I'm trying to be charitable with you anon but your attitude towards Aquinas is arrogant. Aristotle proved that the intellect is separable from the body, by which he meant that the activity of intellection cannot even in principle involve a bodily instrument, because the intellect can think anything, so it can't be anything in itself, because if it was anything it could not become that thing, and therefore it is in itself nothing, and therefore it is not a body. If it is not a body, it is separable from the body. You also like to insist that the Agent Intellect is God but I don't think you understand the role the Agent Intellect must play in psychology, because there has to be something active that causes things to be intelligible. With sight, hearing, etc, the media do this, but in the case of intellection, the agent intellect plays this role, so that it acts as light, not like Plato's light of the form of the good, but as our own internal psychological process which allows for intellection and understanding. Therefore everything Aristotle says about the Agent Intellect applies to our own soul. Furthermore, when Aristotle talks about the passive intellect being 'perishable', he's referring to our intellect as working on images, which is perishable because without the body there are no images. He's not saying that we ourselves are perishable, that's exactly what 3.5 is denying. I wish you would be more virtuous in the way you engage with Aquinas because you have been extremely unfair to him throughout these threads. Part of reading philosophy is being able to assume that whatever philosopher you are reading is not stupid.

>>23786472
>Why does Aristotle attract such autismo? You never see this kind of shit with Platonists, unless they're Straussian fags
Well there's not really that much there in Plato. You could summarize everything he says in all the dialogues in like 20 pages. With Aristotle, you have thousands of pages of very dense argument, so there's more to talk about, more to analyze, more autism.

>>23786427
>HENCE THE WHITENESS OR BLACKNESS OF A MAN DOES NOT PRODUCE THIS, NOR IS THERE ANY SPECIFIC DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A WHITE MAN AND A BLACK MAN, NOT EVEN IF ONE TERM IS ASSIGNED TO EACH

Based, I read this in MLK's voice.

>>23786290
You might like this anon:
https://www.aristotelophile.com/Books/Articles/Aristotle%20Prayer.pdf

>>23786474
I don't despise Aquinas, I'm sure he was a genius. I actually agree with him on 95+% of the important questions (he was an Aristotelian after all). I just don't think he was right on every point and this is one of them. I know my writing against Aquinas can be kind of bombastic, but you fags deserve it honestly. You treat me like some bomb-throwing renegade but these arguments are old as dirt and were made even by Catholic luminaries.

You are right that intellection does not involve a body. The problem with your reasoning is that you are making the intellect a substance in its own right, rather than what it is, a faculty of the soul. Vision is a faculty of the soul, but it involves physical changes in the eye - the light physically transmits color into the pupil. Intellection isn't like this. But, obviously, it does involve the body in some sense. For example, I can't think when I'm asleep. This is because the activity of the intellect necessarily involves images (in particular, it involves imagining words that are heard in the internal monologue which are signs of mental concepts). But you guys will say it is only the imaginative faculty that can decay, but this is obviously false, because when someone becomes senile it's their cognition that is screwed up, not only their imagination.

Note that by your argument there are, in a way, two intellects - the intellect in itself; and the intellect-as-working-with-images, which you agree is perishable. The problem for me is that the intellect in itself just IS the intellect-working-with-images. There is no other intellect.

There is no need for an agent intellect to "strip" forms from phantasms, the material intellect itself does this. This is not an act, but a receptivity, as the philosopher says. In not one single place does Aristotle maintain that there is some separate faculty of intellect responsible for "stripping" forms - not in Post An 2.19, nowhere in De Anima either except with your frankly crazy reading of 3.5.

I think there's a legitimate issue with A's psychology in its vagueness. He explained the fundamentals, he leaves many things unexplained. But I don't think you can bring in the agent intellect as a deus ex machina to solve them. I showed what's wrong with Aquinas' exegesis of this passage in the last thread, no Thomist could answer me, I don't feel like rehashing all of that. Instead I'll bring up a fresh point: it is a fundamental point of A's metaphysics that perishable and imperishable substances are absolutely different and separate from each other. It does not make sense for something immortal to be conjoined with a mortal body. It does not make sense for something conjoined with a body to exist apart from the body. How did the Thomist Feser put it? He says that when you die your intellect is sort of like a dog with all its limbs cut off - still a dog, just very deformed, a stump of a dog. That's lol to me.

>>23786360
>You will never let go of this notion that Aristotle was a crypto- proto-Catholic, will you?
What? I'm not one of the Thomists from last thread. I don't see how that would even follow from anything I said. It shouldn't be too shocking to say that sme of the philosophers disagreed with the popular understanding of the gods but were smart enough not to endanger themselves needlessly because of it.

>It's not an assumption, there were no other gods around. I'm not trying to annoy you, really, this just seems so obvious to me, and presumably to others.
It's an assumption, and the "other gods around" are those that Aristotle explicitly accounts for, which are not beings that dwell on Olympus or under the earth, and which are called gods because Aristotle defines a god as that which is immortal. He, again, refrains from taking the step of identifying them with Zeus.

With respect to the citations, you're moving from position to position in such a way as to ignore why they were cited, and what they were in support of, namely the rejection of what another anon called "the poetic sense" of the gods that they appeared to be asserting Aristotle held. You asked what citations I was referring to, and I shared them. They clearly support that Aristotle has various reservations, sometimes genteely expressed, sometimes vehemently, about the poetic and mythic understanding of things. They were not cited to specifically refute that the prime mover isn't Zeus, because the position that it is lacks any evidence, and some of the evidence you've pointed to, such as the will, relies on the mythic understanding of Zeus as Zeus the Saviour.

>The Politics is a popular work now? OK.
I said no such thing. The divide is between the dialogues meant for popular consumption, and the school treatises, but the divide is repeated somewhat by the differences between the practical and theoretical treatises; again, see NE 1.3, where Aristotle says that such subjects as those the NE and Politics take up admit of less precision, and this is seen evidently in how teleology is discussed in Politics 1256b, where it differs from treatment in the theoretical treatises.

>>23786395
>So, in Aristotle's view, the popular religion is a sort of watered-down or bastardized version of what he is himself proposing. Ergo, the unmoved mover is Zeus.
This is simply sophistical.

>>23786574
Eh I've been trolling you this whole time. I don't think Aristotle's unmoved mover is Zeus, I agree with you that it's retarded. I mean maybe in an extremely vague sense, that the concept of Zeus was a distant bastardization of the truth, but presumably you'd agree with me there. I was inspired by that anon trolling in the other thread who tried to "demonstrate" that the unmoved mover (who is Zeus mind you) must be the "largest mind in the smallest body". That was such a lel I decided to take up the thread of his arguments. But you were right the whole time, and secretly I agreed with you. You made good arguments, hope I didn't annoy you too too much, I enjoyed myself, maybe you'll do the same to me some day.

>>23786620
You got a hearty kek from me, anon

>>23786318
>the explanation is under the thing explained and over the thing being explained

Wut


Anyway, one of Aristotle's biggest failings was his acceptance of literal future indeterminates. But Hellenistic thinkers already tore him a new one for that, so it's old news I suppose.

>>23786478
>Well there's not really that much there in Plato
This is what Aristotelians actually believe.

>>23786688
Yeah, that's certainly not true.

>>23786671
> Wut
I explain it more clearly in the next sentence. For example, if I say "fire is hot because of such and such an internal process", if this internal process did not necessarily cause heat, it could not be the cause. And if fire did not exhibit this process as a whole, then obviously this process could not be the cause of the heat of fire. Boom, Barbara. Any causal reasoning fundamentally works in that way.
>Anyway, one of Aristotle's biggest failings was his acceptance of literal future indeterminates.
I might just not understand your argument because you haven't provided one or bothered to explain what you mean.

>>23786688
>>23786704
It's true though. If you strip away the dialogic form Plato hardly says anything. Now you'll say I'm a pleb, that the whole point of the dialogues is to lead you to think through questions yourself, etc. - granted. But meet me in the middle here. With the single exception of the Parmenides (favorite dialogue), are any of the others difficult to summarize at like 5% of the original length? Be honest with me now.

The questions are profound, and Plato has profound answers, and Aristotle is dependent on Plato, he is constantly echoing his language and taking up his themes, almost always without attribution. I like Plato as much as any right-thinking man. But for all that, Aristotle will say more in a paragraph than Plato will say in 40 or 50 pages.

>>23786710
Love all the
>such and such
because you don't know anything about science or math. Aristotle would be disappointed in you.

>>23786733
You are a pleb and in a more fundamental way than you suppose. Plato understood that philosophical writing can only ever be a representation of a representation of truth. The philosopher's own understanding is not the whole of the truth, and his writing is not even the whole of this understanding. He wrote as he did because he did not think that truth could be known discursively, that coming to know the truth involves transcending discursive thought. You have a big bag of arguments, Plato has wisdom.

>>23786733
Hm, I'm not sure about that. I feel like Aristotle could be shown up the same way by summary, and, in Plato's case, you have all these thorny points of difference between dialogues that complicate everything. I can understand the preference for Aristotle over Plato, since it feels like you're getting somewhere with all of these arguments presented without a scenario, but usually the scenario ends up being part of the arguments in Plato.

>>23786571
>Instead I'll bring up a fresh point: it is a fundamental point of A's metaphysics that perishable and imperishable substances are absolutely different and separate from each other. It does not make sense for something immortal to be conjoined with a mortal body.
C E L E S T I A L S P H E R E S

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>>23786813
based

>>23786710
>Boom, Barbara.
I'm really not seeing anything noteworthy here, sorry.

>I might just not understand your argument because you haven't provided one or bothered to explain what you mean.

The post was pretty simple: Aristotle believed in future indeterminacy in a literal/absolute sense. Thats a pretty big mistake. Were you under the impression he was right about this? If so, id love to hear what your understanding of aristotelean future indeterminacy is

Why do Thomists do this? Like, they pretend to care so much about Aristotle, but then they say that he was wrong about everything and that Aquinas was actually right about everything and that Aristotle actually meant what Aquinas wrote when Aquinas said that Aristotle was wrong. But why? Why care about Aristotle if you're just going to say that he was wrong? Like, the dude in this thread has been throwing a shitfit across two threads at minimum over the fact that Aristotle was a Zeus worshiping polytheist instead of roleplaying as a Catholic or whatever. But if you roleplay as a Catholic on the internet, why care about what Aristotel believed when you have Aquinas?

>>23786924
Thomists need to tie Aristotle and Aquinas together to give legitimacy to Aquinas in order to cover up the fact that he was a literal heretic and an innovator. That's literally it, it's purely to prop up Medieval Philosoper #47 from irrelevancy. If you just look at Aquinas as he is, he's just some Medieval dude who scribbled out some heresy because he was upset that the Muslims were laughing at the pisspoor excuse for theology that the Vatican had forced on Europe. He got caught being a heresiarch, was thoroughly refuted, threatened with excommunication, and recanted. There's no real reason to take him seriously as by his own admission his philosophy is entirely dependent upon the validity of Jewish revelation, and there's no reason to take that seriously given that every single Abrahamic prophesy has failed to come true.

But if you tie Aquinas to Aristotle (as if Aquinas had some special connection to him when ALL Medieval philosophy was just rehashing Aristotle) then he's this great understudied, underrated, underappreciated thinker that was misunderstood by all of those around him, carrying on an ancient tradition and thus, really, he's innovated nothing.

>>23786109
Oh, my retard ass made a new general by accident. Reposting my followup questions here:

>>23784850
Thank you for your thorough responses. I have some final thoughts I wanted to give, but honestly we might need a new thread for them.

>Good refers to ends and beings who act toward ends. So while agreeing with Thomists that the world depends on God, that God is good, that the world is good because it is moved by the good, etc, for good to be a transcendental, a concept like "right" or "4" would have to be "good", and I don't think that is so.
At the very least, beings in the sublunary plane act in such a way as to imitate the unmoved mover, and we can speak of goodness in that sense. Would it not be a transcendental then, in that goodness is tied to the highest being?
>As I said above "good" is not predicable of every being. I do not think a rock is "good" in itself because it is not an end, and it can't have the good because it doesn't act toward an end.
Two points. Goodness can be thought of as a magnitude of greater and less, and in that sense is in everything. And also, rocks do have natural ends according to Aristotle. Natural motion.
>>23784877
I agree with you here. According to Aristotle, natures deal with essence of individuals, and those natures are universal and not individual in themselves. I'm aware of Scholastics making a distinction between natures and universals (or make natures into a "general" and contrast generals and universals), but I have no idea how to situate that back within a broadly Peripatetic framework.

But my main question to you is... how do you keep nominalism and relativism separate? And if these natures are mere names, then how can we have knowledge of them?
>>23785040
Are you the same guy as here >>23784877 ? Because if you are, then your claims about forms here and in that post seem completely different. Idk if it's just a semantic issue here.
>>23785342
>If you demand that I demonstrate that an oak sapling is directed toward becoming an oak tree, I'd just point with my finger. If you said "but how do you know that this is an END??" I'd say, because it is acting to maintain and reproduce itself. If you said "oh but how do you KNOW that? How do you even know growing is GOOD for it?
It's more that there are multiple ends for living beings, and one of those ends is to die. And death is not always the worst thing in the world. Sometimes it's time for something to go and make space for the younger generations.
>If it was thinking, in some unified Platonic type way, a set of intelligible objects, it would be thinking something less than the best and would no longer be the best. (cont'd)
I always tried to think of it as the set of intelligible objects actually being a shard of the unmoved mover itself and not separate from it, and the unmoved mover is thinking of its own kaleidoscopic unity, but that might be more poetic than insightful.

>>23786571
poor doggo :(

>>23786318
>the explanation is under the thing explained and over the thing being explained
Is this the whole explanans/explanadum idea? Is the thing explained the explanadum? How can an explanation be over and under the thing being explained? I'm confused by that.
>I.e., it must not be narrower in extent than the subject, it must not be broader in extent than explanandum.
If you can't get narrower or broader than the subject, then aren't you only making "analytical" and "circular" statements? You aren't giving broader causes, and you aren't providing finer details, complications, and implications. Or maybe I'm not understanding this correctly.
>>23786710
Same issue here. I need you to unpack and stretch things out a little more.

>>23786671
>>23786860
Why does Aristotle think the future is indeterminate?

>>23787098
>Why does Aristotle think the future is indeterminate?
Yes, exactly, that's the question. He was a doofus. It all stems from his mishandling of being, I suspect.

>>23787193
Well, what did he say? Isn't this related to the sea battle paradox? This isn't exactly an easy problem to resolve.

>>23787220
Yes, in that book he clearly relies on literal future indeterminacy. Which is not a coherent position and therefore cannot serve as a legitimate answer to any problem. So in the spirit of the original thread that was linked to by OP, it's one of Aristotle's critical errors.

If OP or another aristotelean wants to explain how future indeterminacy is coherent or why Aristotle is right to assume that he can rely on something like this, then great. But otherwise I think it can be chalked up on the L side of the board with some others that were pointed out.

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>>23786109
I cannot accept that Aristotle was a nominalist. Surely he carves out a space between the extreme of Plato, on the one hand, and Ockham, on t'other.

>>23787544
You can’t have free will without accepting some limit of future indeterminacy. And very few people think free will is incoherent, at least not to the point of the disdain that you’re exhibiting for Aristotle right now.
>>23787825
Ockham wasn’t as much as a nominalist as he appears today. The names, or signs as he called it, still bore some connection to reality. He comes off less nominalist when the semiotic connection appears.

>>23786571
How come you guys never read the popular fragments? Too plebeian for you?

“Aristotle tells of the Greek king whose soul was caught up in ecstasy, and who for many days remained neither alive nor dead. When he came to himself, he told the bystanders of various things in the invisible world, and related what he had seen – souls, forms, and angels. He gave the proofs of this by foretelling to all his acquaintances how long each of them would live…. Aristotle asserts that the reason for this was that his soul had acquired this knowledge just because it had been near to leaving his body and had been in a certain way separated from it, and so had seen what it had seen.” – al-Kindi, cod. Taimuriyye Falsafa 55.

“The excellent Aristotle also gives the reason why the soul on coming hither from there forgets the sights it saw there, but on going hence remembers there its experiences here. We must accept the argument; for hi himself says that on their journey from health to disease some people forget even the letters they have learned, but that no-one ever has this experience when passing from disease to health; and that life without the body, being natural to souls, is like health, and life in the body, as being unnatural, is like disease. For there they live according to nature, but here contrary to nature; so that it not unreasonably results that souls that pass thence forget the things here, while souls that pass hence thither continue to remember the things here.” – Proclus, Comm. In Rem Publicam II 349.13-26

How do you square these and other similar fragments with your anti-immortality thesis?

>>23787098
>>23787019
Will have to answer you lads after work.

>>23788526
Oh great, two secondhand accounts that seem to contradict each other in mechanism. That definitely brings clarity to the subject.

>>23788526
>How do you square these and other similar fragments with your anti-immortality thesis?
The dialogues are meant for popular consumption. Their purposes are to defend philosophy in the popular sphere, and to persuade potential students to study at the Lyceum instead of the Academy or Isocrates' school or wherever. There's some minor overlap (one of the fragments of the Protrepticus shares a rhetorical argument that appears toward the end of the Nicomachean Ethics), but otherwise, the standard appears to be that the dialogues are less philosophical than the treatises in presenting more rhetorical arguments rather than dialectical or demonstrative arguments, and, as the Eudemus fragments make clear, sometimes the conclusions differ substantially from the school treatises, where full immortality of the personal soul is denied.

>>23786109
>Every action you take is, in fact, a practical syllogism, as the philosopher proves in Movement of Animals.
Explain how lifting weights or masturbating (the two last things I did) are syllogisms?

>>23787950
It's not about "disdain for Aristotle". I'm just saying that here is a part of philosophy that I think is extremely important and topical, and Aristotle really did a poor job of it. Free will, determinism, and necessity were recognised as issues in philosophy during his general time period, too.

If the Aristoteleans knew of a good work or argument by Aristotle on this subject, I'm sure they'd cite it. But it is what it is, and people interested in Aristotle should know how his thoughts falters here. It would be interesting to see if it is a direct result of what he has said about other topics (and therefore those positions are also tainted), but that's for someone else I suppose.

>>23789279
look at hair clippings
don't gaze at their origin
the shit-covered ass

>>23788786
Easy. You desired x, say some pleasurable sensation. You knew what series of actions would cause x. The series of actions are the middle terms, the end is the major extreme, and you are the minor. The point is that your actions are rationally explainable, in this case as directed toward an end. I guess to be strictly Aristotelian we should make eudaimonia the ultimate major. The same applies to the actions of irrational animals, even though they don't reason, because their actions are directed to ends just like ours are.
>>23786860
>I'm really not seeing anything noteworthy here, sorry.
If you don't think the theory of syllogism is noteworthy you're out of step with every logician in history. And these are logicians who largely, to my mind, are misunderstanding the theory to begin with. Understand the point of view I'm adopting isn't that of some random anon, it goes back to Kilwardby and Averroes.
>The post was pretty simple: Aristotle believed in future indeterminacy in a literal/absolute sense. Thats a pretty big mistake.
I did think that might be what you meant, but since it isn't a logical problem, thought it couldn't be. You are incorrect that Aristotle believed in future indeterminacy in a literal/absolute sense - just look at his discussion of indeterminacy in Meta 6.3. He understood that if, say, a leaf is moved by the wind, the wind is also moved by something else, and this chain extends back to the heavenly spheres or whatever started the chain of causation. His point was that there is a difference between this kind of determinacy, which is per accidens, and the determinacy that, say, the plant is what it is. When it came to humans, he thought we had free will, and gives an interesting proof that I never see talked about.

>>23786813
>C E L E S T I A L S P H E R E S
You haven't provided much of an argument but I'm going to assume you mean something like: "the heavenly spheres are moved by separate, divine substances; ergo we might stand in some similar relation to our immortal souls, undescended intellects, whatever." The problem is that A's separated substances never cause anything but locomotion in the heavens. His "ultimate cause" for human action is eudaimonia, not a separated substance. Also the separated substances must be separate from what they move, but as he demonstrates our soul is not separate from us. There's no true analogy here.

>>23788680
Yes. Also worth pointing out that the Eudemus was written as a consolatio mortis over the death of his friend, and a way to honor his memory. Not the time or the place to say "ackshually, he's dead." And Diogenes says that it was an early work, so it is quite possible Aristotle's mature views hadn't developed yet.
>>23789279
>I'm just saying that here is a part of philosophy that I think is extremely important and topical, and Aristotle really did a poor job of it. Free will, determinism, and necessity were recognised as issues in philosophy during his general time period, too.
He did write about it though man, in Physics 2 (the later sections on chance/spontaneity), in Meta 6.3, and obv in De Interpretatione. Because of the sketchiness of the texts I understand how someone could come away with the impression that Aristotle though "x is not necessary in the way a geometrical proof is necessary, but is accidental. Ergo, its being in this accidental state due to a chain of other accidental causes is not necessary." I really don't think that's what he was saying, though, rather that this is a different sort of necessity from the necessity that, say, a human generates a human.

The primary sense of necessity, for Aristotle, is "that which cannot be otherwise." And he would hold that some accidental happening, like the leaf being moved by the wind, is not necessary in this way.
>If the Aristoteleans knew of a good work or argument by Aristotle on this subject, I'm sure they'd cite it.
This wasn't a primary interest of his but I hope what I've cited suffices, even if you don't agree with him, to show that he was not unaware of these problems and did address them.

>>23787950
>Ockham wasn’t as much as a nominalist as he appears today.
Yeah, he turns out to be quite based, and not necessarily a protomodernist at all. He didn't deny essence, he denied that universal concepts were entities in any way shape or form, whereas Thomists slip them in through the back door with their theory of "natures". His criticisms of the Catholic 'demonstrations' of the existence of God are spot on. Thomists will say "every contingent thing has a cause, ergo there must be an unmoved mover and that's God." They don't understand the role of unmoved movers in A's physics, which is not divine, but actually explains all actions and motions. If I desire a bag of Chester's Hot Fries and then go to the bodega and buy one, this desire for Hot Fries is an unmoved mover. The essence of every natural substance is its own unmoved mover - in Physics 8 Aristotle doesn't apply this language to inanimate objects (because they move by necessity), but in Meta 7 he does. They don't understand that Aristotle's cosmological argument depends on ideas like "the world has always existed and always been in motion", and "only circular motion can possibly be eternal". But the argument got distorted over time because it has premises like the eternity of the world that Catholics can't accept. Occam points out, rightly, that their arguments do not establish the existence of God, only the existence of unmoved movers, which need not be divine, because to be a natural substance is just to have a principle of motion within oneself.

>>23787098
>Is this the whole explanans/explanadum idea? Is the thing explained the explanadum? How can an explanation be over and under the thing being explained? I'm confused by that.
The explanandum is the phenomenon that's being explained. The subject is that in which the explanandum inheres, obviously. The middle term is the explanation.
>If you can't get narrower or broader than the subject, then aren't you only making "analytical" and "circular" statements?
If the explanation was less in extent than the subject, i.e. if it didn't apply to the whole of the subject, then you wouldn't be explaining why the explanandum inheres in the subject, because your explanation would only apply to a part of the subject. Has nothing to do with giving broader causes or providing fine details, it's simply the logical structure of any explanation.

>>23787019
>At the very least, beings in the sublunary plane act in such a way as to imitate the unmoved mover, and we can speak of goodness in that sense. Would it not be a transcendental then, in that goodness is tied to the highest being?
Even if all substances are good, this wouldn't make it a transcendental in the original, Aristotelian sense of the idea anyway, because Aristotle's transcendentals (he doesn't actually call them that) are predicable of everything, like I said concepts like 'right' or '4'. Being and unity can be said of both, but not goodness.

But as to the thesis that all substance is good, you have some evidence here in Meta 12.10: "We must consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good or the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts. Probably in both ways, as an army does," etc. But that wouldn't really make it a transcendental in my opinion, and maybe I'm misunderstanding what the scholastics meant by a transcendental in the first place.
>Two points. Goodness can be thought of as a magnitude of greater and less, and in that sense is in everything. And also, rocks do have natural ends according to Aristotle. Natural motion.
Rocks have an end of their motion but that doesn't mean that the "good" of the rock is to be on the ground. If your dog gets sick and recovers, it makes sense to say it has passed from a bad state to a good one. But if a rock falls off a table, isn't it absurd to say that the rock now "has its good"? The motion of inanimate substances isn't teleological but by necessity - like, remember that passage in Physics 2 where he talks about how meteorological processes move by necessity, and actually contrasts this with teleological causation? And there's a bit in Post An 2, too, where he says that inanimate substances move by "necessity".

I'll go on a limb here and share a pet theory - in Post An 2 there's this odd passage, when he's talking about demonstration by causes, and as an example of "material causation" gives a short geometrical proof. A lot of commentators think there's something about the proof itself that is "material" rather than the usual "formal" causality you'd expect in math. I think he's saying that all absolute necessity, that isn't simply a matter of the definition of the substance (that's formal), is a sort of "material" causation, because this kind of necessity is like the "matter" of the whole essence of the subject. It's an extended sense of matter which he obv uses in the Metaphysics as well.

>>23790256
>>23790296
You said that by syllogism you intended a general meaning, and I found that general meaning to be less than noteworthy. I appreciate his major role in systematising logic, and that includes defining the syllogism in the sense the other poster assumed (which I think is also what those logicians you mention would assume by the term when praising Aristotle). Although Aristotle is not strictly alone in this systematisation, the process seems to have started a bit before him and was alive and kicking throughout the Hellenistic period.

But the part that relates to my comment is what Aristotle thought of indeterminacy. A poster mentioned the sea battle. Are you saying that Aristotle believed that the sea battle is determined, as are all future events/all of reality? That is not my understanding of him. I believed Aristotle held that tomorrows events are indeterminate, so it is not true to say that a sea battle occurs tomorrow, for that specific fact is not there to be pointed at. The most he thinks we can say is that a sea battle will or won't happen, but there is a magical "indeterminacy".

If you have a different understanding of Aristotle's position please let me know, I wouldn't mind cracking open the text again to that section and others. I am going off memory from stuff I read a while ago.

>>23787019
>But my main question to you is... how do you keep nominalism and relativism separate? And if these natures are mere names, then how can we have knowledge of them?
The philosopher addresses this question in Meta 10.1, in the context of a discussion of measures in general:
"Knowledge, also, and perception, we call the measure of things, for the same reason, because we know something by them, - while as a matter of fact they are measured rather than measure other things. But it is with us as if some one else measured us and we came to know how big we are by seeing that he applied the cubit-measure a certain number of times to us. But Protagoras says man is the measure of all things, meaning really the man who knows or the man who perceives, and these because they have respectively knowledge and perception, which we say are the measures of objects. They are saying nothing, then, while appearing to be saying something remarkable."

The formation of concepts in our minds can be likened to a sort of measurement. You start off with a broad notion of a thing, over time it is "measured" as if by parts and your conception becomes more precise. But what is "measuring" your conception in this way is the reality in the world outside your mind. Reality determines your concepts, not the other way around. And that's true regardless of whether there is some mysterious entity, Humanity, or instead particular humans, the concept of humanity being secondary.

>>23787019
>Because if you are, then your claims about forms here and in that post seem completely different. Idk if it's just a semantic issue here.
Same person, not sure what the issue is maybe I'm rereading it lazily but when I was describing what "natures" are I certainly wasn't describing my own view.
>And death is not always the worst thing in the world. Sometimes it's time for something to go and make space for the younger generations.
You're right. Aristotle himself makes this argument in (I'll cite it again lol) Meta 12.8: "All must at least come to be dissolved into their elements, and there are other functions similarly which share in the good of the whole." But A would disagree with you that death can meaningfully be said to be the "good" of the animal, speaking in general, since the nature of the animal is to keep itself in life. It might well be good in some particular instance to die, but it could only be in an accidental sense ('death is good because this illness is so painful', not in itself). The end of the plant oranimal is the life and flourishing of plant or animal, so even if death is necessary, or even if it might be desirable under some circumstances to some individual, it is not itself the end of the substance of a living thing. I even want to say I remember him saying somewhere that some pleasures are such that it would be better to die than undergo them, or something like that, but idk, I might be thinking of Plotinus.
>I always tried to think of it as the set of intelligible objects actually being a shard of the unmoved mover itself and not separate from it, and the unmoved mover is thinking of its own kaleidoscopic unity, but that might be more poetic than insightful.
Sometimes I think the reason Aristotle wrote so little on theology is because after a few very basic propositions all you have is metaphor, and he hated metaphors in philosophical writing. This is, imo, one reason he's such a dick to Plato, always interpreting him literally even when it's obvious he's being transfigurative. He just thought metaphor had no place in philosophy, which he views as a science. The only place I can think of when he falls into making "metaphorical" arguments is De Anima 3.5, which is theological.

>>23786109
If you understood Aristotle you wouldnt spend so much time talking about him, just saying

>>23790415
>Are you saying that Aristotle believed that the sea battle is determined, as are all future events/all of reality?
In the case of a sea battle, there are human factors so it would be a hard 'no' to determinacy. But if, say, one guy pushes a rock down a hill, and another guy dumps a bunch of water, and the water and rock must meet, and all inanimate causation must be mechanistic like that, he'd say it's necessary de dicto that the rock and water meet, but not de re. It IS necessary de re that they seek their natural place, in general. The necessity that the leaf is moved by the wind isn't the same sort of determinacy as the necessity that the leaf have the essence it has. So the world is "indeterminate" in two primary ways for Aristotle, on my reading:
1) Humans have free will
2) When a non-human natural substance experiences some change, this change could in principle have been otherwise and is in that sense indeterminate.

It's also relevant to note that Aristotle saw his system of dozens of celestial motors etc. as being responsible for the "eternal variety" of the sublunary world. He makes that argument in Meta 12.6, and also somewhere or other in De Gen et Corr.
> I believed Aristotle held that tomorrows events are indeterminate, so it is not true to say that a sea battle occurs tomorrow, for that specific fact is not there to be pointed at. The most he thinks we can say is that a sea battle will or won't happen, but there is a magical "indeterminacy".
De Int is a logical work. He's showing how a statement made now about something in the future could be neither true nor false without violating the principle of non-contradiction. If you had some way to know for certain what would happen in the future (as we often do), then the statement "x will be y" is true in the moment. But certainly the question of a sea battle is indeterminate? I mean if you want to argue for hard determinacy of all future events, I don't think I'm up for it right now, but it wasn't A's view, but there's nothing magical about it. (cont'd)

>>23790296
The only way I can really make heads or tails into this understanding of necessity is to think of Aristotle as an equilibrium-systems thinker.

>>23790415
>But the part that relates to my comment is what Aristotle thought of indeterminacy. A poster mentioned the sea battle. Are you saying that Aristotle believed that the sea battle is determined, as are all future events/all of reality? That is not my understanding of him. I believed Aristotle held that tomorrows events are indeterminate, so it is not true to say that a sea battle occurs tomorrow, for that specific fact is not there to be pointed at.
The way I look at it, there are two things to consider: the fact that 1) there needs to be indeterminism to allow for the space for free will to occur; and 2) there isn't an appropriate "epistemic" mechanism to allow for the prediction of specific events. Knowledge is of universals, not of particulars.

>>23790333
And the predicate is the explanadum? It's weird seeing the anatomy of a syllogism being used to explain explanations, especially since there are so many explanations that could "spool off" from a subject.

On a side note, what do you make of the difference between a definition and a (non-accidental) property? Properties are essential, they are tied to a definition, and yet they are superfluous compared to a definition.

>>23790495
>Same person, not sure what the issue is maybe I'm rereading it lazily but when I was describing what "natures" are I certainly wasn't describing my own view.
I can't tell if you're subscribing to the idea that the "form" in a primary substance's form and matter is unique to that primary substance or if it is a shared universal (e.g. a secondary substance like species). And if it's the former, idk, I just find it strange that Aristotle is seemingly closer to Duns Scotus than Aquinas, and I'd like to know why you see him as such instead of the typical explanation.

I know you've written quite a bit already, but I want to make sure that I lock into this insight before I leave. Because here I was, associating form with definition and matter with individuation and all that jazz, but now I have no idea how Aristotle would begin describing the form of a primary substance without listing all of the admittedly accidental changes that make that particular creature different from everything else in that species.

>>23790495
>The only place I can think of when he falls into making "metaphorical" arguments is De Anima 3.5, which is theological.
To be fair, even 3.5 is not that metaphorical. It's more like an analogy, where a certain kind of logical relationship is brought in to illustrate what was being conveyed. In any case, I think describing what is being thought as a "mere set" misconstrues a potential solution to the problem and obscures the more relevant question at hand: the problem of the one and the many.

>>23790442
But wouldn't the measures have to match something real? What is that real thing that is being measured, then? This doesn't seem that nominalistic at all anymore. It's also worth noting that the emphasis on measure adds a lot of weirdness, e.g. how Aristotle describes time as the measure of motion, how Late Plato embraces measurement which increasingly takes on the role of forms, etc.
>>23790559
So, essentially, as soon as you introduce an unmoved mover into the equation, the world stops being strictly determinate for Aristotle, outside of things obeying "natural laws" (for the lack of a better word). And the world is full of unmoved movers and even the celestial bodies is filled with unmoved movers.

>>23790559
Ok, thank you, it is good to know that I did understand him correctly. My conclusion remains the same. He thinks there is future indeterminacy re: events like sea battles and the like.

The distinction between human will and material laws can clue us in on where and how he made the error. But to be clear, he did believe that future events are indeterminate.

That brings in the question of presentism and eternalism, and unfortunately Aristotle falls on the presentist side. Because for Aristotle, ultimately the stuff that happens tomorrow "is not", and he is going to generate "what is not" into "what is" via some magical thinking. And of course this also makes him fall prey to paradoxes from zeno and others.

If it wasn't a hot issue in his time, we could forgive him easily enough. But it was a major topic, especially in the hellenistic period. Even 2300 years ago it wasn't sufficient to say "certainly the question of a sea battle is indeterminate". And it just reveals that his entire metaphysical/physical project is ultimately rotten in its core and should be abandoned.

>>23790584
>The way I look at it, there are two things to consider: the fact that 1) there needs to be indeterminism to allow for the space for free will to occur; and 2) there isn't an appropriate "epistemic" mechanism to allow for the prediction of specific events. Knowledge is of universals, not of particulars.

I think point 1 is a misstep. We don't "need" to have indeterminism if indeterminism is incoherent. Similarly, we don't "need" to have free will if free will is incoherent. The point should be set on its head: we need to consider what the term "free will" refers to, then when we establish that thing we can figure out what it involves and draw the rest of the picture like that. But if free will and indeterminacy are poorly defined and/or incoherent then I think the project is dead on arrival.

I'm fine with point 2 if we're just saying that people have limitations when predicting events.

This is a pretty interesting side of philosophy. It involves some very broad metaphysical concepts, but it also has huge ramifications for how we understand our lives and what expectations we form, it just bleeds into everything. Putting aside Aristotle's brilliance elsewhere, I think he is very weak here.

>>23790702
>Tweetophon is giving some begrudging respect to Aristotle
do my eyes deceive me?

>>23786207
That's 4^2.

I just realized that this thread on Prior Analytics existed, and I never got a chance to reply to it:
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23725760

>>23791530
>https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23725760
Replying in response to some key arguments here:

>The more, er, substantive objections have to do with challenges to individuality, or challenges to our thinking apparatus itself. So for example maybe the tree, an apparent substance, is ‘really’ only understandable as part of a much broader ecosystem, and my saying ‘hey that’s a tree, it’s a thing’ is a phantom of my own brain. Aristotle would say – yes, all of the ‘things’ we experience and talk about are part of larger systems, and in fact the whole universe is one coherent system. And individual people can’t be understood apart from their place in the broader society, for Aristotle. But things can’t be in relation without being things, just as things can’t be in a state of flux (which they doubtless are) without being things. We refer to all sorts of ‘things’ as ‘things’ – is the mountan-top a thing? If I say, ‘it’s snowy on the mountain today’, does that mean that the mountain-top is a metaphysical substance, or what? Where does the mountain-top begin and end? Couldn’t you say the same for any supposed substance, and isn’t this all then very muddled?
>A crucial passage here is Meta 10 when he talks about the various ways a thing can be ‘one’. When we say something is ‘one’ we may merely mean some vague whole, as in the ‘mountain-top’ above. But if you follow this vague substantiality ‘upward’, you end up with things that are continuous and have a distinct nature (for example, the mountain-top is composed of innumerable chemical substances which are still distinct), and ultimately to living things, which are ‘one’ and ‘substantial’ in the highest degree, because living things are continuous, move themselves, and act to preserve themselves. So while an Aristotelian can gladly admit that in ordinary usage our concept of what is a ‘thing’ is pretty vague, there is a core notion of ‘thingness’, present especially in living beings, and it can and should be analyzed as he does. A world without substances would simply be a world of nothing, because there would be nothing that anything could happen to. The fact that the world is highly complex and interconnected doesn’t change this.
This makes it seem like primary substances exist on a spectrum of being real, or perhaps even that the only thing that things happen to are living creatures and the gods. Would an inanimate universe filled with stars, planets, asteroids, supernovas, black holes, and other geological and cosmological events be a universe where nothing technically happens? Chudsters, take note of Aristotle.

(1/?)

>>23791530
>>23792215
>But if you're a Thomist, who thinks there's something called a 'nature' (not in Aristotle) which is 'neither particular nor universal' (wat) and 'grounds' both universal concepts and particular beings,
I'm glad I'm not the only one who realizes that the equivalent of secondary substance is given a strange treatment by Scholastics. I was actually looking into it this week.
>Anyone reading this who’s familiar with the rest of the corpus could say, ‘what about Meta 7? What about his saying the essence is prior to the composite?’ That’s a big can of worms, but tl;dr – the essence is particular, even if it is known by the universal, and the essence is not actual apart from matter. Remember in Meta 12 when he refers to particular forms? Remember early in Meta 7 when he speaks of the essence as ‘being you’ or ‘being Socrates’? Remember his discussion of particular causality in Physics 2? But it’s complicated and I understand that more Platonizing readings of Aristotle (like Aquinas’) have arguments of their own. But at least for me and people like me, Aristotle’s Categories is an accurate (if incomplete) account of his ontology, the primary substances in the natural world are actual, concrete beings, not universal concepts.
Ironically, that makes Duns Scotus a better heir to the Aristotelian tradition than Thomas Aquinas in many regards.
>Bivalent intellection, in the context ofc of Aristotle's defense of free will in Meta 9 or 10 (cannot recall). Basically, if we know something we also know not-that. You can't know a thing without also knowing its privation. So the knowledge that underlies our choices necessarily points in either or two directions. Therefore the will is free. I don't think this argument would actually Convince a determinist, it'd take more work to do that, but that's the gist of it.
How does that have anything to do with free will? That if we know the outcome of one choice, we know the outcome of another choice? I don't know why that be an argument for free will, in that we actually make such choices on our own.

In all, I appreciate the extensive writeup on Prior Analytics, mixed modal logic, and the commentaries. I ended up saving the archives as a PDF as a guide for later in a few months, when I plan on going through Prior Analytics paragraph by paragraph. I barely know my Barbaras and Borocos, so it was hard to follow with any motivation.

(2/2)

>>23790584
>The only way I can really make heads or tails into this understanding of necessity is to think of Aristotle as an equilibrium-systems thinker.

Thinking it over last night, I think there's a better way to explain what A meant. Say you're a meteorologist, and you have a perfect knowledge of everything in the world, such that you can perfectly predict whether there will be a blizzard tomorrow, and if you make a mistake in your calculations, some other meteorologist could say 'no, it's actually false, because you forgot to carry the 2' or whatnot. Aristotle wouldn't have an issue with the prediction of the blizzard being true or false in the moment.

But say we don't have a perfect knowledge of meteorology and can't predict the future with that much exactness. In this case, the statement "there will be a blizzard tomorrow" cannot really be true or false, at least as far as we're concerned, when it is made, but becomes true or false retroactively after the blizzard, and the point of De Int 9 is to defend the logical possibility of this indeterminacy. Obviously a sea-battle is different because human choice is involved, I've hammered that point enough.

So for Aristotle the necessity he's interested in is the scientific necessity that relates to extratemporal universals. He's making a contrast between the hard necessity, grounded in essence, of what such and such a substance does and how it behaves generally, and the "soft", per accidens necessity that there will be a blizzard tomorrow because various factors are coming together to produce one. So the future is not determined in the "hard" sense of necessity grounded in essence and what a thing is. I don't have time to reply to everything before work but hopefully will after work if the thread is still alive.

As far as free will goes, Aristotle's argument comes down to the nature of human cognition. To know anything, even to have an opinion about particular states of affairs, is also to know not-that. Because knowing what something is involves also knowing everything that it is not and being able to distinguish one from the other. Free will follows from the bivalence of cognition. Without this bivalence, our actions would be sort of like those of a cat or a dog - a sensation arises, it's fearful, we flee, it's pleasant, we pursue, we imagine what we desire and then pursue it, etc. But human actions just aren't like that, we deliberate. (Also Aristotle certainly didn't view animals as mere 'machines' like Descartes, he thought they had consciousness, emotions, etc., just no cognition and no truly free will). I can't remember exactly where he makes this argument, I think it's meta 9 or 10.

(cont'd) Free will is a big league problem for materialists because they reduce everything to 'blind', inanimate causes like atoms or sub-atomic particles. And how could a bundle of atoms be conscious? But Aristotle's view of nature better allows for the emergence of qualities that could not be present in the mere substrate. He would say there's nothing more absurd about the form of an animal (i.e. the complex organization of the matter, the parts, etc.) being conscious or having sensation, than there is in a bunch of quarks and gluons making water or fire.

>>23792215
>This makes it seem like primary substances exist on a spectrum of being real, or perhaps even that the only thing that things happen to are living creatures and the gods. Would an inanimate universe filled with stars, planets, asteroids, supernovas, black holes, and other geological and cosmological events be a universe where nothing technically happens? Chudsters, take note of Aristotle.
There's a spectrum of substantiality. The mountain-top isn't a substance to the same degree that an individual vein of homogeneous stone within the mountain-top is a substance, because substances like the mountain-top ("heaps", as Aristotle calls them) depend on the primary substances (the individual veins of homogeneous material, even though there would be billions of them in light of modern science).

When something happens "to the mountain-top", there is a sense it is true, but there is also a sense in which something is happening to the vast array of primary substances that actually make up the mountain-top. So I would disagree that a world with nothing animate would be a world where nothing happens, because there are homogeneous inanimate substances in Aristotle, a forerunner of modern chemistry. And these homogeneous inanimate substances can form heterogeneous ones ("heaps" like an asteroid with properties of its own). The "heap" asteroid is a substance in a sense, but it depends for its being on primary substances. That's how I read him anyway, Aristotle wasn't very interested in inanimate things.

>>23792263
>(cont'd) Free will is a big league problem for materialists because they reduce everything to 'blind', inanimate causes like atoms or sub-atomic particles. And how could a bundle of atoms be conscious? But Aristotle's view of nature better allows for the emergence of qualities that could not be present in the mere substrate. He would say there's nothing more absurd about the form of an animal (i.e. the complex organization of the matter, the parts, etc.) being conscious or having sensation, than there is in a bunch of quarks and gluons making water or fire.
So, if I understand this argument, it's an argument against strict determinism, but not necessarily one for choices, since it makes the stimulus-response indeterminate. Because for rational creatures, we are not presented with just mere sensations, but knowledge of things, and all knowledge of things come with knowledge of not that thing, which is akin to being given the stimulus for multiple possible reactions. Thus, you can't necessarily determine the reaction.

>>23790256
>The series of actions are the middle terms, the end is the major extreme, and you are the minor.
ok so:
>all gym sessions are satisfying
>I am going to the gym
>I am satisfied

but some people fuckin hate going to the gym. To make it coherent I have to turn the major term as "the habit of going to the gym is satisfying for me" because i sometimes have off days where my workout is not the best...

I think this is the flaw with saying that all action are syllogisms, because a lot of actions are reasoned out in relation to private caprices, quirks, and whims, rather than universal principles. How much mean spirited gossipis there out there, that serves no end, and is really just motivated by a passing velleity to paint someone else in an embarrasing or diistasteful light?

I havent read aristotle, but im just trying to engage with the ideas here, not tomake an argument about exactly what he meant. I'm sceptical of the idea that all actions can be derived from syllogisms.

bump

>>23792563
What about long-term satisfaction?

>>23790584
>Knowledge is of universals, not of particulars.
I'd qualify this just a hair, and this is something you probably already know yourself but worth mentioning. Aristotle did recognize scientific knowledge of particular happenings, as for example predicting an eclipse.
>And the predicate is the explanadum? It's weird seeing the anatomy of a syllogism being used to explain explanations, especially since there are so many explanations that could "spool off" from a subject.
Yeah, the thing that's being explained is the major extreme. Teleological demonstrations are kind of different because the end itself is the major extreme. Between the thing being explained and the subject there can be many middle terms.

As for explanations "spooling off", this is something that could happen, side-chains of reasoning. And there's a passage in Post An 1 where A discusses extending a science in this way. But it doesn't matter how complex a subject is, it's still ultimately syllogistic, even if the nests of syllogisms would be extremely complicated, and no one would actually sit there and "analyze" it into first figure affirmatives, besides maybe Aristotle, who does speak of doing this in Prior An.

We already know how to reason. People don't make formal fallacies much at all except for second figure affirmatives. The Analytica aren't about teaching people to reason; there's a passage in the Rhetoric where he says something like "most ordinary people can syllogize just fine".

I never understood how Platonists and Peripatetics argue that matter is nothing. Matter is not nothing. It has an indeterminate identity, sure, in that it can be many possible things, and that when we look at matter as matter, we're looking at something that isn't any of those possible things. But if we look at matter as matter, or better yet, if it's possible to deconstruct an object so that its form is utterly obliterated and blocked from receiving any new form (as much as this might be impossible), we would still see it actualized insofar as it is matter. It has the "form" of matter. Even if "being" is mostly filled and structured by things that are actualized, even if we reason that potential things are somewhere "between actual things and nothing", that still makes matter a something that is not a nothing.

I'm not sure how Aristotle reasons about the being of the elements of matter, e.g. his four element theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were substances with their own form and corresponding properties, especially when they're not being subsumed into some greater substance (or at least heap, structure, etc.). And it wouldn't be that crazy of a stretch to have anyway. Almost everything (maybe everything? I hear conflicting thoughts about the celestial spheres and the unmoved mover(s) desu) in Aristotle's ontology has two aspects of energeia and dunamis, so why would the elements be different? Maybe they're far more dunamis than energeia, but they're not missing energeia completely. If they had no energeia, then they would have no dunamis.

>>23793601
>I'd qualify this just a hair, and this is something you probably already know yourself but worth mentioning. Aristotle did recognize scientific knowledge of particular happenings, as for example predicting an eclipse.
I don't understand how that fits into the whole picture though. That's been a big question mark for me.

>>23790584
>On a side note, what do you make of the difference between a definition and a (non-accidental) property? Properties are essential, they are tied to a definition, and yet they are superfluous compared to a definition.
That's a great question, I'm not confident in my answer here; it's something I've wondered about too. But I think a mere definition, as a definition, is simply a verbal sign of our grasp of what the thing is. Even though I'm not sure Aristotle explicitly says this (besides his consistently referring to definitions as "signs" of the essence), it's Aquinas' position too. Discovering definitions, the taxonomical procedure of composition he develops in Post An 2, isn't really about Grasping the Essence, it's more a matter of knowing what your subject is and how it is related to similar subjects. To truly Grasp the Essence of a thing in the full sense, you would have to know all about it, because forms are unities. Plotinus makes this point a lot too as a way of contrasting human cognition from divine cognition (i.e. his gods grasp everything "all at once" in a totality, while we reason bit by bit).

On this interpretation, the difference between a definition like "rational animal" (Aristotle prefers featherless biped btw), and a property like "risible" would be more a matter of logic than ontology. The thing, as a thing, is all its essential properties all together in a unity.

>>23790584
>I can't tell if you're subscribing to the idea that the "form" in a primary substance's form and matter is unique to that primary substance or if it is a shared universal
The former.
>I just find it strange that Aristotle is seemingly closer to Duns Scotus than Aquinas, and I'd like to know why you see him as such instead of the typical explanation.
Why should it be strange? Plotinus too believed in forms of particulars and criticized Alexander's theory (grandfather of Aquinas'), albeit not in a peripatetic way (i.e. not trying to defend himself via quotes in Aristotle). I've cited tons of passages to back up this reading over the course of these threads. Here's one at perfect random, Meta 7.4: "The essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of *itself*. For *being you* is not being musical... What, then you are in *virtue of yourself* is your essence." This is truly not a fringe way to read Aristotle, I'd say it's the only way that really makes sense, either philosophically, or in light of his actual words. The entire Metaphysics, from start to finish, is full of arguments against the theory that universals could be substances, or that particulars somehow "depend" on universal intelligible entities.

But there is a contrast in Aristotle between the form of the individual, and the "logos in its generality". You can see this in Aquinas' De Esse et Essentia where he has two essences. I'd just deny that the second essence is really an essence at all, but a concept derived from essence, secondary to particulars. That's how just a few lines down from the passage I quoted you have him saying:
"Nothing, then, which is not a species of a genus will have an essence." Sometimes when he speaks of "form" he means intelligible form; sometimes he means particular form; hence all the confusion and argument over the centuries. We all agree on the particular-form/universal-form dichotomy on some level, we disagree on how these two ideas are related to each other. (For Aquinas, for example, the particular is the nature+matter). The interpretation I'm advocating definitely does not depend on only this passage lol.

>>23790584
>but now I have no idea how Aristotle would begin describing the form of a primary substance without listing all of the admittedly accidental changes that make that particular creature different from everything else in that species.
You couldn't. Individuals as individuals aren't definable. The concepts that stand behind definitions and scientific understanding are always universal. Even our concepts of particulars are universal in a way (like your concept of your brother, while of a particular, is not a concept of your brother at this exact moment in time). One of the ways this whole school of thought develops is trying to fill in the gaps about our cognition of particulars, because A is so focused on universals (to the point that you have people like Avicenna denying that God could have knowledge of particulars). But for all that you can have a concept of your brother, you can't define your brother, because definitions apply to many things by nature, but if your brother was cloned or whatever, would the clone actually be the numerically identical person, even though he fell under your definition? Of course not.

So we understand these ultimately primary, and ultimately non-understandable particulars by means of universal concepts derived from them.

If you're used to reading Aristotle in a moderate realist way, it seems strange. Read the Metaphysics again, you'll see evidence everywhere. I spent a lot of time vacillating back and forth between the two.

>>23790584
> In any case, I think describing what is being thought as a "mere set" misconstrues a potential solution to the problem and obscures the more relevant question at hand: the problem of the one and the many.
Agreed.
>But wouldn't the measures have to match something real? What is that real thing that is being measured, then? This doesn't seem that nominalistic at all anymore.
Nominalism is a vague term, but denying that universals are entities is definitely a kind of nominalism. The measures are actual extramental beings, they match themselves. The thing being measured is our concept which is formed by experience with the particulars. The concept does not, in itself, refer to anything real, but is a mode of knowing particulars. (That's Aquinas' view too btw, Aquinas just thought there had the be a Nature to underpin and "mediate" between the particulars on the one hand and our universal concepts on the other).
>So, essentially, as soon as you introduce an unmoved mover into the equation, the world stops being strictly determinate for Aristotle, outside of things obeying "natural laws" (for the lack of a better word). And the world is full of unmoved movers and even the celestial bodies is filled with unmoved movers.
Na that's not what I meant. The fact that the world is moved by a set of unmoved movers allows for variety (if there was just one unmoved mover, in A's view you'd just have the outermost sphere of the heavens revolving and nothing else, or perhaps a sublunary world but it would be uniform because it's only ultimately being moved in one way); but it also probably allows for determinism of non-human events, strictly speaking, if you had super-human knowledge, because it is "mechanistic" (wouldn't want to lean too hard on that word because it's obv more primarily teleological). Aristotle never actually addresses the question of whether non-human events are determined, mind you, but this seems to be the implication. When he's criticizing determinism he always uses human examples (he was murdered because he went to the market, and that because he wanted to buy some oil, etc.)

>>23792236
>How does that have anything to do with free will? That if we know the outcome of one choice, we know the outcome of another choice?
No, but because our action is rationally directed at ends, and in knowing the end, I know the not-end. I can't rationally choose to turn left if I couldn't have also chosen to turn right, or I wouldn't have really known "turning left" in the first place, see?
>>23792563
>a lot of actions are reasoned out in relation to private caprices, quirks, and whims
All of these things are easily expressed in a syllogism. Saying our actions are analyzable syllogistically doesn't mean we walk around thinking in syllogisms or always make rational choices, or even considered choices for that matter. Even an involuntary action is explainable and hence syllogistic. It sounds like some trollish put-on but really it's not crazy at all. Explanations are syllogistic; ergo if something is explainable (and an important point for A's epistemology is that not everything is), it is a sort of syllogism, or better could be known by a syllogism.

>>23793634
Post An 1.8 is the most relevant passage. Because knowledge is of eternal universals, the knowledge by which you predict the eclipse is properly scientific, but the statement "there will be an eclipse tomorrow" in itself, and as referring to particulars, is a particular that is under the scientific universal. That particular proposition would not occur in the demonstrations of the science in itself. Even if of course a writer or teacher might use a particular example for illustration, the particular has nothing to do with the astronomical science, properly speaking; Aristotle would say that predicting the eclipse is not really an act of science because you're not explaining something new, you're just applying your knowledge to a particular circumstance. But it's not opinion either, because you know for sure it will happen.

Just like if a geometer encounters a triangle, he knows the properties of the triangle, but his knowing the properties of that particular triangle isn't really part of the geometrical science, when an astronomer predicts an eclipse it's like that.

"It is evident too that, if the propositions on which the deduction depends are universal, it is necessary for the conclusion of such a demonstration and of a demonstration simpliciter to be eternal too. There is therefore no demonstration of perishable things, nor understanding of them simpliciter but only accidentally, because it does not hold of it universally, but at some time and in some way. And when there is such a demonstration it is necessary for the one proposition to be non-universal and perishable - perishable because when it is the case the conclusion too will be the case [and not otherwise], and non-universal because its subjects will sometimes be and sometimes not be - so that one cannot deduce universally, but only that it holds now.... Demonstrations and sciences of things that come about often - e.g. eclipses of the moon - clearly hold always in so far as they are of such-and-such a thing, but are particular in so far as they do not hold always. As with the eclipse, so in the other cases."

But I can see how this account too would be confusing (don't sciences rely on knowledge of particulars? Don't scientists often deal with particulars? etc.) I gotta go pre-game this debate though. Maybe the thread will still be around tomorrow.

>>23793629
>I never understood how Platonists and Peripatetics argue that matter is nothing.
Neither of us think that matter is nothing bro; Platonists emphasize the "ultimate subject" aspect of matter (like in the Timaeus matter is a "receptacle" and "place" for images of the Forms), Peripatetics emphasize the "potentiality" aspect of matter, but neither of us think it's nothing.
>It's possible to deconstruct an object so that its form is utterly obliterated and blocked from receiving any new form (as much as this might be impossible), we would still see it actualized insofar as it is matte
As a thought experiment you can do this, Aristotle famously does this early on in Meta 7, but because matter is simply potency, the dominant view is that it can't exist on its own. (Scotus is a notable dissenter). For us, matter isn't the ultimate metaphysical substrate of predication (that's substance), but is rather the potentiality of the thing, and Aristotle's "material substratum", such as what "underlies" the change from water to air, is potentiality. "Cause, in the sense of matter, for the things which are such as to come to be, is that which can be and not be; and this is identical with that which can come to be and pass away, since the latter, while it is at one time, at another time is not.” (De Gen et Corr 2.9). says “we should not say without qualification, if we looked at things carefully, even that a statue is produced from wood or a house from bricks, because its coming to be implies change in that from which it comes, not permanence.” (Meta 7.7) Again, “the proximate matter and form are one and the same thing, the one potentially, the other actually” (Meta 8.6).
>I'm not sure how Aristotle reasons about the being of the elements of matter, e.g. his four element theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were substances with their own form and corresponding properties
Yeah that's his view. And when they're composed into some other substance, they exist potentially instead of actually, just like the hydrogen exists potentially in the water.
> Almost everything (maybe everything? I hear conflicting thoughts about the celestial spheres and the unmoved mover(s) desu) in Aristotle's ontology has two aspects of energeia and dunamis
The celestial unmoved movers are purely energeia, everything else has some dunamis, at least for change of place in the case of the heavenly bodies, which is to say it is a composition with matter. (But the celestial matter is special)

>why would the elements be different? Maybe they're far more dunamis than energeia, but they're not missing energeia completely. If they had no energeia, then they would have no dunamis.
There aren't really degrees of dunamis and energeia in relation to each other. There are different matters (like I said celestial matter is different), there is also a sense in which fire is "more formal" than the other elements (because it contains the positives of the primary contrarieties), but as he says in the Categories, one substance is no more substance than another. And energeia is just the activity of substance. Most of his arguments for the four elements theory are in De Caelo and De Gen et Corr.

>>23793874
>one substance is no more substance than another.
That is, things that are really substances and not only heaps. Also there's a sense in which animals are more substantial than inanimates I was talking about above, but it's not like they literally "have more form" somehow, they just transcend unity/continuity/common nature by having these extra attributes. That's a frustrating thing with Aristotle, his language is ambiguous. Because as I say he speaks of fire as being "more formal" than earth, but he doesn't really mean that it is more of a thing than earth in the absolute sense, etc.

Thank you all for replying to my questions, some probably dumb but others hopefully stimulating. I can tell there are fantastic replies, but I won't have time to get through them all today.

I can tell there's a massive time zone difference between us. I'll try to start reading the replies throughout the day and keep the thread alive in the meantime.

>>23794115
To be clear, I meant that my questions were dumb and sometimes stimulating. Not the replies!

>>23792285
Yet, this line of argumentation is not responsive to determinism and cannot explain actual indeterminacy. It's more about describing the limitation of people's perception.

Ancient ideas of determinism can be reached in at least two ways. We have the line of reasoning that treats reality like a clockwork device where one state necessarily follows the previous, sufficient state in an unwavering manner (the stoic/atomist reasoning for determinism). We also have the line of reason that because reality is complete, it follows that the timeline is also complete, that generation/destruction is impossible, etc (the Eleatic reasoning for determinism). These positions can both explain why indeterminacy is impossible, but for distinct reasons. Also, the former argument could be deployed by a presentist, while the latter couldn't (and I personally believe in the latter).

At any rate, the topic involves both indeterminacy per se and whether reality is complete. If Aristotle cannot coherently define or explain the supposed idea of "indeterminacy", ie that a future event neither is nor is not, and/or he can be made to admit that reality is complete, presentism collapses and with it any version of free will that relies on it. Its a major defeat for aristotelean metaphysics to the point that I think his system should only be studied as a historical curiousity and limited intellectual exercise.

>>23794366
Ancient sources say he had squinty eyes, thin legs, a gay haircut, and spoke with a lisp. People can see the start of Diogenes Laertius' Life of Aristotle if they want a source, and don't get me started on other stuff we find in the source material. Please give us a historically accurate squinty eyed dweeb aristotle.

bump
>>23794249
I have to be honest, while the bivalent intellection argument is an interesting argument (and it reminds me of both some Platonic ideas and of Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics), I'm struggling to see where it leads to a defense of free will. It just sounds like it illuminates the possibility of choices, but it says little about what goes into actually making a choice.

thread is so good but I am le tired. hope it's still around in the morning

>>23795052
> It just sounds like it illuminates the possibility of choices, but it says little about what goes into actually making a choice.
Aristotle would say that the whole soul is a unity. So when you make a rational choice there is both an appetitive side (a desire, whether that's for knowledge, or some pleasure, a good deed, whatever) and a cognitive side that knows the end and knows how to reach the end. For lower animals there is probably nothing but sheer appetite, sheer imagination, memory without recollection, emotion without any cognitive check on that emotion; but our appetites involve cognition. You can't really make a neat and total separation of appetite and cognition in us, just like you can't make a total separation between perception and cognition (i.e. unless there's something seriously wrong with your brain, you don't "just" perceive without also understanding what you perceive on some level). So the different faculties of the soul are both one and many - he says they're like a point in the center of a circle with lines. The point is one, but it's also many as being the terminus of different radii. But you can't really talk about a single one of the lines as being wholly separate from the others, even if they have different natures and in that sense it is meaningful to contrast one faculty with another. (Example, Aristotle thinks that whether your flesh is hard or soft has some effect on how intelligent you are. But the hardness/softness of flesh is obv not due to the material intellect.)

So this is how he can say that if cognition is bivalent, choice must be too, because choice and cognition are two sides of one coin.

Still patiently waiting for a moderate realist to put up a fight about the whole nominalism thing besides "that's not how Aquinas read it". They do have arguments in their court.

bump

>>23792248
>In this case, the statement "there will be a blizzard tomorrow" cannot really be true or false, at least as far as we're concerned, when it is made, but becomes true or false retroactively after the blizzard, and the point of De Int 9 is to defend the logical possibility of this indeterminacy.
It seems like we're accepting a split between speech and reality here, or at least we're accepting it in the face of epistemic uncertainty. But if you take away that vantage point of uncertainty, doesn't the statement have an underlying truth value that simply gets revealed to us later?
>Because knowing what something is involves also knowing everything that it is not and being able to distinguish one from the other. Free will follows from the bivalence of cognition. Without this bivalence, our actions would be sort of like those of a cat or a dog - a sensation arises, it's fearful, we flee, it's pleasant, we pursue, we imagine what we desire and then pursue it, etc.
I'm struggling to see how this opens the floor for deliberation. Doesn't an animal also have "bivalent intellection", at least at a primitive level? A mouse "knows" that a cat is "predator" and "not-food" and runs away from it. Obviously, humans have a lot more "bivalent" horsepower, which gives us more options, but that's not enough to explain how or why we deliberate, or if this deliberation is self-determined. This is why I've been focusing on the "self-mover" aspect of Aristotle's ontology, since that seems to explain the the gist of free will better, or at least provide something to latch on to that gives free will the "space" to exist.

>>23793601
>As for explanations "spooling off", this is something that could happen, side-chains of reasoning.
I'm imagining something like a minor term having many, many middle terms that can exist under it. Or maybe middle terms that perhaps flow into each other "horizontally" (assuming we look at explanations as being "vertical", from the minor to the major through the middle). Also, feel free to correct me if I make a beginner's mistake, Analytics is my sketchiest subject in Aristotelian philosophy).

>>23793601
>I'd qualify this just a hair, and this is something you probably already know yourself but worth mentioning. Aristotle did recognize scientific knowledge of particular happenings, as for example predicting an eclipse.
But then at the same time, we have the divide between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom in Nicomachean Ethics. To me, it's never been quite clear whether this divide is "soft" or "hard."

(1/?)

>>23793635
>But I think a mere definition, as a definition, is simply a verbal sign of our grasp of what the thing is. Even though I'm not sure Aristotle explicitly says this (besides his consistently referring to definitions as "signs" of the essence), it's Aquinas' position too. Discovering definitions, the taxonomical procedure of composition he develops in Post An 2, isn't really about Grasping the Essence, it's more a matter of knowing what your subject is and how it is related to similar subjects. To truly Grasp the Essence of a thing in the full sense, you would have to know all about it, because forms are unities.
That makes a lot more sense. While the definition is linked to the essence and strives to capture it in its entirety, in reality, that's an impossible task. Why? Because the essence is in a sense unlimited, the relevant differentia being spoken about are qualities, yet the definition is speech, and speech is a form of quantity. It's like trying to approximate an incommensurable sum—at best, you're capturing a "good enough" fragment.

I think there's a point of discussion where Aristotle admits that definitions can be in flux depending on new discoveries which could make old differentia "obsolete" and no longer a sufficient distinguishing feature. So, differentia seems to be subjective in a way, at least relative to what we know (and otherwise being objective).
>Plotinus makes this point a lot too as a way of contrasting human cognition from divine cognition (i.e. his gods grasp everything "all at once" in a totality, while we reason bit by bit).
The Dominicans made a great introduction to angelic thought with this idea too (time stamped below):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwJNi-f1NPc&t=166s
>On this interpretation, the difference between a definition like "rational animal" (Aristotle prefers featherless biped btw)
So, Aristotle accepts the parody that the Eleatic Stranger comes up with in the Statesman? Why?

>>23793675
>Why should it be strange?
It's only strange because of the prevailing "Scholastic" interpretations of Aristotle throughout the age, and they've become a staple. Your arguments make sense however. At minimum, Aristotle is a lot more qualified on the topic. At maximum, like Duns Scotus. What I don't understand is, however, why did Aquinas struggle to refute Averroes's unity of the intellect? Aquinas presumably had access to all these intellectual resources that preserve the form of the individual.
>Sometimes when he speaks of "form" he means intelligible form; sometimes he means particular form;
>For Aquinas, for example, the particular is the nature+matter).
As in, the particular form for Aquinas consists of nature + matter? I thought that would be the essence of a particular substance. Idk. I feel like there's several philosophical "objects" being thrown around here, and sometimes it's too easy to mix and match them and lose meaning, if that makes sense.

(2/?)

>>23793733
>Nominalism is a vague term, but denying that universals are entities is definitely a kind of nominalism. The measures are actual extramental beings, they match themselves. The thing being measured is our concept which is formed by experience with the particulars. The concept does not, in itself, refer to anything real, but is a mode of knowing particulars. (That's Aquinas' view too btw, Aquinas just thought there had the be a Nature to underpin and "mediate" between the particulars on the one hand and our universal concepts on the other).
So, is this measurement like an emergent being in itself, being a self-moving or at least a self-contained web of relations? I've sometimes likened a species, genus, etc., to being a complicated statistical model, complete with distributions for a vast sum of qualities. The reason I would have to go the extra step to say that it is real is because this "measure" in many cases is self-moving, especially in living creatures. To reuse the model, animals reproduce themselves according to the parameters of said statistical model.

>>23793755
>All of these things are easily expressed in a syllogism. Saying our actions are analyzable syllogistically doesn't mean we walk around thinking in syllogisms or always make rational choices, or even considered choices for that matter. Even an involuntary action is explainable and hence syllogistic. It sounds like some trollish put-on but really it's not crazy at all. Explanations are syllogistic; ergo if something is explainable (and an important point for A's epistemology is that not everything is), it is a sort of syllogism, or better could be known by a syllogism.
I pointed out earlier that epistemic access seems to be a problem for syllogisms, and I pointed out to that poster in particular that time is also not always considered (e.g. the difference between feeling good now and feeling good in the long-term). But I digress. Syllogisms in decision-making is a powerful framework but it certainly needs qualification.

>>23793792
That does seem to make more sense, the difference between demonstration and application (one could perhaps say, techne?). It's still interesting how often in Aristotelian philosophy that "particulars" seem to be both "the foundational floor" and also "a dropping off into the abyss", if that makes sense. Primary substance is like that in Categories, particular forms are like that in Metaphysics, knowledge of particulars is sort of like that in Posterior Analytics, etc.

>>23793874
Thank you for clarifying matter, dunamis, and energeia. I suppose the "prima materia = nothing" is a caricatured opinion, or only one of many opinions. But isn't energeia also tied closely to the being of a substance (and not merely its activity)? I know Sachs focuses on energeia/entelecheia/etc. in Aristotle's work, and it also touches upon the brief tangent about final causes and whether it "begs the question of substance" in the recent Aristotle threads.

(3/3)

>>23796772
>It seems like we're accepting a split between speech and reality here, or at least we're accepting it in the face of epistemic uncertainty. But if you take away that vantage point of uncertainty, doesn't the statement have an underlying truth value that simply gets revealed to us later?
Yeah I am; and I think it's a valid move because Aristotle consistently distinguishes between being-in-our-minds vs being-in-reality, and De Interpretatione is certainly concerned with being-in-our-minds. "Falsity and truth are not in things... but in thought." (Meta 6.4). So it would make sense to speak of a thing being absolutely true or false in the moment, while being uncertain for us, as in the "blizzard" scenario. A lot of people read De Int 9 as being about the problem of determinacy/contingency on the level of physics (including that incorrigible eleatic guy earlier in the thread), but imo it's a misreading, it's primarily about the logical problem of how indeterminacy meshes with the principle of non-contradiction. The question is, "does the pnc mean the future is determined, because any proposition is either true or false?" and A's answer is of course "no". But his thinking on determinacy/contingency in itself, as opposed to as a logical problem, is expressed elsewhere. (cont'd)

>>23796772
>I'm struggling to see how this opens the floor for deliberation. Doesn't an animal also have "bivalent intellection", at least at a primitive level? A mouse "knows" that a cat is "predator" and "not-food" and runs away from it. Obviously, humans have a lot more "bivalent" horsepower, which gives us more options, but that's not enough to explain how or why we deliberate, or if this deliberation is self-determined. This is why I've been focusing on the "self-mover" aspect of Aristotle's ontology, since that seems to explain the the gist of free will better, or at least provide something to latch on to that gives free will the "space" to exist.
I wouldn't by brash enough to give a hard "no" to the question of animal cognition, just to be clear. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that some of the higher animals might have a very attenuated amount of rationality. But yeah assuming that animals have no reason whatsoever - if the cat sees the mouse, wants to get the mouse, moves after the mouse, it is *only* seeing the mouse, it's not also seeing not-mouse. Which is as much as to say, it doesn't have an intellectual understanding of the mouse. So it couldn't see the mouse, think "oh I've been gaining weight, I'll let this one go", because to make a judgment like that involves weight alternatives (eating-the-mouse vs not-eating-the-mouse), grasping concepts and not simply reacting to stimuli. But the structure of our thought itself opens up the possibility of choice, just as in thinking something we can affirm or deny, because our grasping of the affirmation implicitly involves the grasping of the negation. But if you are seeing a white log, you can't not-see the white log as you are seeing it, your eye is simply responding to a stimulus, and intellect isn't like that. That's how I'd try to argue it anyway.

The self-mover aspect doesn't really come into play here imo because all natural substances "move themselves" in a sense (ofc A is careful to distinguish, and say that things don't strictly speaking move themselves, because the essence only moves itself accidentally, i.e. if I walk my soul isn't really moving itself, it's moving my body, or better the whole composite "me" is moving itself in virtue of the soul, which being an abstract form is only moving accidentally). "[Any natural substance] has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness."

>>23796772
>I'm imagining something like a minor term having many, many middle terms that can exist under it. Or maybe middle terms that perhaps flow into each other "horizontally" (assuming we look at explanations as being "vertical", from the minor to the major through the middle). Also, feel free to correct me if I make a beginner's mistake, Analytics is my sketchiest subject in Aristotelian philosophy).
Yeah this is basically kosher. The subject of one syllogism could, in fact, be a middle with the chain extending "downward", and they propositions can also be extended "laterally".

"A science increases not through the middle terms but by additional assumptions, e.g. A of B, this of C, this again of D, and so on ad infinitum; and laterally - e.g. A both of C and of E (e.g. A is definite, or even indefinite, number; B is definite odd number; C odd number; therefore A holds of C. And D is definite even number; E is even number; therefore A holds of E.)" (Post An 1.12)

But it is important to understand (and you might already understand it idk) that the middle is what really "matters", the middle is the explanation, you begin with the "conclusion" of the demonstration (some natural phenomenon, say) and discover the middles. Science can increase downward (dividing the minor term further, for example); it can increase horizontally as you say (the major applies not just to one subject but to two, as if some disease had two separate causes); but "it is by interpolating a term inside and not by taking an additional one that what is demonstrated is demonstrated" (Post An 1. 22).

When you talk about middle terms *flowing* into each other though I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but it's def. crucial to draw a clear distinction between the syllogism/theory of demonstration, as explaining how explanations formally work, and our actual process of thinking things out, which is fluid and not particularly syllogistic at all. In a complete explanation, as an explanation, there shouldn't be any flowing; if there's something indefinite about the explanation or the nature of the thing being explained, that would be reflected and subsumed within the ultimate syllogistic "demonstration". The translation "demonstration" is extremely misleading though as you have probably noticed.

>>23796772
>But then at the same time, we have the divide between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom in Nicomachean Ethics. To me, it's never been quite clear whether this divide is "soft" or "hard."
I agree he is vague. I mean, say you're a physicist who knows all about electricity, one day the lights go out and you're able to figure out what's wrong because of your knowledge. Did your theoretical knowledge just "flip" into practical knowledge? Or say a doctor is treating a patient whom he knows well and has experience with. Wouldn't his treatment be a hopeless muddle of 'knowledge' and 'experience', that would be impossible to totally sort out? So I'm inclined to say it's a soft distinction. Practice vs. theory, experience vs knowledge is a useful dichotomy in general, but I don't think it needs to be an absolute division.

Aristotle himself is only concerned with Science, with universals, and this very division is an instance of that kind of scientific thinking, and accordingly it may not be neatly applicable in particular circumstances.

>>23796815
>That makes a lot more sense. While the definition is linked to the essence and strives to capture it in its entirety, in reality, that's an impossible task. Why? Because the essence is in a sense unlimited, the relevant differentia being spoken about are qualities, yet the definition is speech, and speech is a form of quantity. It's like trying to approximate an incommensurable sum—at best, you're capturing a "good enough" fragment.
Yeah, I'd say the essence really is "unlimited" in the sense that the true primary essence is the essence of the individual, and your universal concept may not apply to that individual. Like if you told someone to exercise because it's good for them, then it turns out they had a heart defect and their jog is fatal. Aristotle would say that this is accidental; the proposition "exercise is good for health" is really true, and necessarily true, and even eternally true, but by accident it was bad in this particular instance. The differentiae are just part of taxonomy, they don't have an ontological role. It's not like the concept "rational" is actually somehow the most essential, primary quality that goes into man (although in a way I suppose it is; but having so many chromosomes, having a heart, these are altogether part of the essence of man, taken universally). Speech being mentioned as "quantity" doesn't enter into it for me though, when Aristotle says speech is a quantity he's talking about measures of continuities (as 'long' and 'short' of the syllable), using "speech" as a stand-in. So measures of length would be right there with speech. And that's a very old interpretation of that passage, not something I'm making up, I got it from Averroes. Speech considered in itself and properly he defines as a "symbol of affections in the soul" (De Int 1), and he gives similar definitions elsewhere.

>>23796815
>I think there's a point of discussion where Aristotle admits that definitions can be in flux depending on new discoveries which could make old differentia "obsolete" and no longer a sufficient distinguishing feature. So, differentia seems to be subjective in a way, at least relative to what we know (and otherwise being objective).
I can't remember him actually saying that (it may be in the biological works which I only skim desu), but I def. think he would agree with the sentiment. It's necessary that our definitions and taxonomies will change as we learn new things.
>The Dominicans made a great introduction to angelic thought with this idea too (time stamped below):
They make solid videos, even if I might autistically disagree about some things. One of the churches where I live is Dominican, I've had good experiences with them.
>So, Aristotle accepts the parody that the Eleatic Stranger comes up with in the Statesman? Why?
The definition that Aristotle seems to give from his own mind is "political animal", but then again googling a bit it turns out he referred to bees and wasps as "political" animals as well. Leaving that question alone, he will often use notions from the Platonists or Pythagoreans simply for illustration, "featherless biped" being ofc Academic. Like there's a bit in Prior An 1 when in an example syllogism he makes numbers substances. So I think "featherless biped" is a stand-in like that. Now I'm flipping around in History of Animals trying to see if he ever even discusses the definition of man but that book is long.
> At minimum, Aristotle is a lot more qualified on the topic. At maximum, like Duns Scotus.
I wouldn't draw the comparison too far though. As I understand him, Duns Scotus conceives of the relation of Bob to Man as being just like the relation of Man to Animal. But Aristotle draws (imo) a total distinction between particulars like Bob and universals like Man.

>>23796815
> What I don't understand is, however, why did Aquinas struggle to refute Averroes's unity of the intellect? Aquinas presumably had access to all these intellectual resources that preserve the form of the individual.
I don't see him as struggling, doesn't mean he didn't, would be interested to hear your thoughts. To me Aquinas' arguments against Averroes on this question seem solid. I like Averroes a lot, but on psychology it's like he stared at the De Anima and reread it so many times that he lost touch with reality a little bit. Not to be too dramatic... the question of the unity of intellect isn't exactly related to the problem of particulars vs universals - Averroes (and Aquinas too) agreed that each individual has his own individual form ("then wtf are you arguing with Aquinas over?" the nature of that individual form, whether it's secondary to Aquinas' natura or in fact primary in every way, whether it differs from other forms in itself or only on account of matter). Averroes had a lot of arguments for his view, one would be "Alexander and the OP of this thread are wrong, the intellect must truly be separate from the body, ergo it can't be part of any one individual, because the soul is the form of the individual living body." Aquinas said "no, the intellect is not really separate from the body, and this fits well with my beliefs in the general resurrection btw, but it can in a way exist apart from the body, and Alexander was wrong to say we are mortal."
>As in, the particular form for Aquinas consists of nature + matter? I thought that would be the essence of a particular substance. Idk. I feel like there's several philosophical "objects" being thrown around here, and sometimes it's too easy to mix and match them and lose meaning, if that makes sense.
It's like, if you make three tables, but one has black wood, one white, one rotting wood, they are one in Nature ("chairness") but the particular form of each is different because of the exigencies of the matter, and from each being in different matter. The matter of a thing is "in" its logos, as A says, so in this way Aquinas (and Avicenna, Averroes, Alexander) thought that a Nature like "chairness" could be individualized.

>I pointed out earlier that epistemic access seems to be a problem for syllogisms, and I pointed out to that poster in particular that time is also not always considered (e.g. the difference between feeling good now and feeling good in the long-term). But I digress. Syllogisms in decision-making is a powerful framework but it certainly needs qualification.
Oh you're very much right about that. It would be ridiculous to say that the syllogism was all you needed to know about human action and decision-making. You might as well say that syllogistic logic was all you needed to know to understand geometry (which btw cannot actually be rendered as 'a is b' syllogisms, but ofc that's not how I conceive of his theory to begin with).
> It's still interesting how often in Aristotelian philosophy that "particulars" seem to be both "the foundational floor" and also "a dropping off into the abyss", if that makes sense. Primary substance is like that in Categories, particular forms are like that in Metaphysics, knowledge of particulars is sort of like that in Posterior Analytics, etc.
This is the big kahuna, that tension right there. I haven't had time to answer everything, and I want to say more about this in particular but other things too. Probably won't be able to until tomorrow, though.

>>23797148
No worries. I'll do my best to keep the thread alive in the meantime, and hopefully some other anons will be kind and bump things. I'll see if I have any energy after work to read through everything.

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>>23798012
>>23798509
Ari schlomo stotle is for fags

>>23796874
>So, is this measurement like an emergent being in itself, being a self-moving or at least a self-contained web of relations?
That's another great point and another I'd hesitate to answer definitely because Aristotle doesn't address it. He did important work on epistemology/psychology but he never really gets into the weeds, as this question does. Like, take an example from real life rather than speculation, you start a new job and are feeling out the personalities/dynamics of the work-place. You get new data every day by experience and then are able to have a mental model, more or less accurate as the case may be, of what's going on. So the "measure" is as you say the events, your daily experiences. Aristotle would say this exists in memory/imagination. But how, exactly, does the intellect derive concepts/ideas from this bundle of events? A doesn't have a theory of how, he just knows that it happens and describes the basic preconditions for this to be. The "measure" of the concepts wouldn't be self-moving; as a cause of conception, it would be a mover (in a way); but as objects in the memory, it would be something moved (by our experiences). It does seem right to say it's a web of relations, though, because a huge part of cognition is ordering things - that's how we know what they are and how they relate to other objects; and also that it's a web of relations because there'd be this complex web of (syllogistic!) logical, causal chains.

>>23796874
>I've sometimes likened a species, genus, etc., to being a complicated statistical model, complete with distributions for a vast sum of qualities.
Yeah that's how Aristotle characterizes taxonomy in Post An 2. Plato thought you could start with some highest genus and then divide down, mostly or exclusively in even divisions. Aristotle says "no that's retard; you have to learn as much as you can about the things you want to define, figure out all their essential characteristics, and then see what essential characteristics they have in common, and form your tree that way." And in History of Animals you end up with a big chunk (all the terrestrials iirc) hardly separated into genus, it falls almost immediately into species, whereas he found aquatic animals formed more of a classical "tree" structure.

>The reason I would have to go the extra step to say that it is real is because this "measure" in many cases is self-moving, especially in living creatures. To reuse the model, animals reproduce themselves according to the parameters of said statistical model.
Do they reproduce themselves according to the parameters or do we know the parameters by observing their behavior? Is the parameter itself a cause, or is it the animals? I'd say the latter. Aristotle gives dozens and dozens of separate arguments against this line of thinking.
>But isn't energeia also tied closely to the being of a substance (and not merely its activity)? I know Sachs focuses on energeia/entelecheia/etc. in Aristotle's work, and it also touches upon the brief tangent about final causes and whether it "begs the question of substance" in the recent Aristotle threads.
When I say activity I mean energeia, for me they're the same word. The difference between entelechy and energeia can be very overstated ("one means in-the-end, the other means in-working" etc), in fact they're near synonyms.

"Those who passionately love philosophical arguments and have tasted the pleasure that derives from them with their fingertips, having said farewell to all of life’s concerns, are evidently pulled towards these arguments by some kind of madness and in their souls evoke the love for them by the knowledge of the things that are. As we shall learn with God’s help, philosophy is just this knowledge. Now, since wise love and great desire have driven us into this struggle, let us tackle the divine struggle of philosophy without regarding the task before us as difficult; rather in looking towards the end of the divine promise of philosophy, we shall regard any effort as inferior and secondary to it." - David the Invincible (7th c.)

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I'd respond but I have to do some retard wrangling this morning. Hopefully the thread stays alive along enough for me to give it a thorough response later.

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I'm gonna chunk the replies into topics instead of addressing them one by one

>>23786128
>Performing sacrifices means little more than that Aristotle knew enough to exercise prudence in following customs he thought were grounded in nonsense
I still don’t get why he would pray if he didn’t believe

>>23802459
because he'd literally be killed if he didn't?

>>23802459
More or less >>23803859, but I'd add that a good defense of the respectability of philosophy may require such harmless concessions if you don't want it stamped out. (Mildly related: such concessions are why Aristotle probably couldn't do what Russell demanded and just count his wife's teeth, and took hearsay as acceptable. We might be able to count people's teeth today in the name of scientific study, but in Aristotle's time, what seems to us utterly trivial would've crossed lines considered totally unacceptable. Ergo, just do the fucking sacrifice, even if the stated theology is that the gods lack nothing and so don't benefit from them.)

>>23803883
>such concessions are why Aristotle probably couldn't do what Russell demanded and just count his wife's teeth
Bullshit. I get your point, and it's not your fault, but it's time to annihilate this idiotic talking point. Russell was just being a fractal retard, as usual. That's all there is to the story.

Genetically, and by genetically I mean strictly in terms of developmental morphology, women are *supposed* to have the same amount of teeth as men. However, for other biologically gendered reasons, they often *don't* have the same amount of teeth as men. Their wisdom teeth have a tendency not to grow in as often as men's, and their higher estrogen levels tends to increase tooth decay. This is a fact that is readily acknowledged by dentists across the world. Women do tend to have less teeth than men on a statistically significant level. It is extremely plausible that Aristotle could have counted his own wife's teeth and found less of them.

So, Aristotle was right, at least at a surface level. He was wrong about our developmental "template", but are we supposed to fault Aristotle for not understanding genetics? That sounds ridiculously uncharitable. Ironically, Russell never bothered to do his own research and contemplate the myriad of factors involved in health. All he did was made idiotic assumptions, taking advances in knowledge such as genetics for granted, and then smugly bathed in the stench of his own farts. Per usual.

>>23804059
I actually agree with you on that; women lose calcium through pregancy, and, among other things, weak teeth that can be lost is a result, especially in an age before modern dental health. Nonetheless, I think it's also worth recalling how weird it would be to inspect women's teeth in an age when they still largely couldn't go out into the agora or see plays. Male relatives and relations would find a request like that extraordinary.

>>23804059
>>23804096
That is, I bring it up to highlight the differences in customs then and now to show how controversial it would've been to count women's teeth, let alone not take part in customary worship practices.

>>23803859
>>23802459
This is a silly argument that only started as bait. Pagans didn't think about religion the way Christians/Muslims/etc. do. Aristotle probably had no problem believing in his philosophical God, and also performing religious rites, even if not exactly believing in their efficacy, or even if he knew they were human inventions, as a way of honoring the divine. Aristotle is critical of myths; so were many of his contemporaries, and they still considered themselves pagans. All we know for fact is:
1.) Aristotle had a conception of God radically different from the popular one, but so did other philosophers.
2.) Aristotle criticized myths, but so did many or even most of the other philosophers.
3.) Aristotle still honored "the gods", as is clear in his will and works like On Prayer. How he squared this with his own views is hard to say, but it's doubtful that he was merely pretending to be a pagan, especially since his own philosophy is polytheistic.
His attitude toward popular religion isn't "look at these deluded FOOLS! I must keep my true beliefs secret or they'll kill me!" it was more like "this is a simplistic and childish mode of belief that is a bastardization of true theology" - that is exactly how he frames it in Meta 12. And ofc people were killed for atheism, again this doesn't mean Aristotle's day-to-day piety was some sort of lie or subterfuge. Plato is highly critical of myths and religious rites but there's still a standard pagan religiosity throughout the dialogues, many reverent references to the gods. Was this all make-believe or pretend? I don't think so, no. It would be anachronistic to assume that.
>>23803883
Christians think God lacks nothing but they still pray to God. Pagans themselves accepted that the gods lacked nothing. Again, Aristotle wrote a work On Prayer.
>Aristotle took hearsay as acceptable
He also did extensive experimentation, dissections, observation of weather, tasting his own urine. This idea that Aristotelian science is all about unicorns is complete bullshit, for the time it is extremely advanced. Also, it would not have been "unacceptable" to count teeth.
>Russell never bothered to do his own research and contemplate the myriad of factors involved in health.
Yup, and worse he never bothered to seriously read the premodern philosophers he criticizes. (Or the modern ones for that matter)

>>23804096
Slaves.

>>23804110
>or even if he knew they were human inventions
I meant "even knowing they were human inventions".

>>23804110
>Christians think God lacks nothing but they still pray to God. Pagans themselves accepted that the gods lacked nothing. Again, Aristotle wrote a work On Prayer.
We're not talking about prayer, but animal sacrifices, which are not necessarily always accompanied by prayer, and which are depicted in myths and poems as things the gods desire, i.e., lack. Re:, On Prayer, I observe that Simplicius has a different line then what was quoted in one of these threads, and that one might consider, alongside these topics, his On Divination in Sleep, which is skeptical.

>He also did extensive experimentation, dissections, observation of weather, tasting his own urine. This idea that Aristotelian science is all about unicorns is complete bullshit, for the time it is extremely advanced. Also, it would not have been "unacceptable" to count teeth.
It absolutely would've been unacceptable, otherwise Aristotle would've *done* it, instead he reports what someone else he trusts says. Women (including slave women, >>23804115) were property or under the care of the men of their households, they couldn't speak to other men without permission, for instance; women like Aspasia were uncommon and deeply controversial.

>Yup, and worse he never bothered to seriously read the premodern philosophers he criticizes. (Or the modern ones for that matter)
No disagreement there.

>>23796772
>Yeah I am; and I think it's a valid move because Aristotle consistently distinguishes between being-in-our-minds vs being-in-reality, and De Interpretatione is certainly concerned with being-in-our-minds. "Falsity and truth are not in things... but in thought." (Meta 6.4).
>The question is, "does the pnc mean the future is determined, because any proposition is either true or false?" and A's answer is of course "no". But his thinking on determinacy/contingency in itself, as opposed to as a logical problem, is expressed elsewhere. (cont'd)
Should we be asking even deeper questions here? e.g. whether the object of the proposition is a subset of, snapshot of, attribute subsumed, etc., of reality? It seems a bit silly, but doesn’t it make sense to view nature as operating with its own propositions? It would then become a question of whether our propositions match those of nature. It seems like Aristotle is only saying no because we rarely have enough information to make these precise predictions (along with other aspects like free will demolishing these aspects entirely).

>>23796934
I see now. It’s clicking for me. It’s the fact that animals tend to lock in on what is presented before them, not have a fully robust sense of bivalent intellection, and lack the layers, complexity, and diversity of association of thought that comes with human thought. That makes sense. To me, this still suggests that the issue is about “possible choices” and not the aspect of deliberation itself, but this at least grants the possibility of meaningful deliberation in the first place. As to the self-mover aspect, could we perhaps locate “self-moving” in respect to the soul qua intellect?

>>23796980
>as an explanation, there shouldn't be any flowing; if there's something indefinite about the explanation or the nature of the thing being explained, that would be reflected and subsumed within the ultimate syllogistic "demonstration"
By flowing into each other, I mean something along the lines of how definitions tend to imply properties, or how one explanation can blend into another explanation (e.g. a triangle has 3 sides, a closed 3 sided-figure has 3 angles, these 3 angles equal 180 degrees, etc.). I understand that an ideal “science” tend to have explanations condensed into the fewest, most unique, and yet powerful points possible (e.g. factor analysis), but this rarely occurs in practice, and even the best explanations seem to imply each other to some degree.
>The translation "demonstration" is extremely misleading though as you have probably noticed.
What would be your choice of translation, if you had to make one? Feel free to mash words together, Sachs-style.

(1/3)

>>23797026
>Speech being mentioned as "quantity" doesn't enter into it for me though, when Aristotle says speech is a quantity he's talking about measures of continuities (as 'long' and 'short' of the syllable), using "speech" as a stand-in. So measures of length would be right there with speech. And that's a very old interpretation of that passage, not something I'm making up, I got it from Averroes. Speech considered in itself and properly he defines as a "symbol of affections in the soul" (De Int 1), and he gives similar definitions elsewhere.
Could you expand on this? I thought I was cooking with the way I related “speech as quantity” to quality, and now I'm understanding that "speech as quantity" was only meant in the way that musical notation measures quantity (because, abstracting away the other qualities, playing music is about the measure, counting, etc., of a magnitude, sound).

(2/3)

>>23797111
I wouldn't draw the comparison too far though. As I understand him, Duns Scotus conceives of the relation of Bob to Man as being just like the relation of Man to Animal.
That, for Duns Scotus, it’s universals all the way down, and that the haecceity is a universal of one?

>>23797142
I don't see him as struggling, doesn't mean he didn't, would be interested to hear your thoughts. To me Aquinas' arguments against Averroes on this question seem solid. I like Averroes a lot, but on psychology it's like he stared at the De Anima and reread it so many times that he lost touch with reality a little bit.
What do you think was actually at stake in the debate, then (besides the obvious fact of Aristotle’s acceptance in Europe?) Why did anybody view it as a controversial matter? From what I could remember, the way I’ve read some of Aquinas’s arguments against Averroes (and maybe I was imbibing a lot of Leo Strauss at the time), it seemed like he just restated Averroes claims in his own words, and that the original claims were either obscured enough in Thomistic vocabulary to come across as a “refutation” and not a limp, begrudging acceptance, or that Aquinas simply defers to the authority of scripture. I think maybe the fact that Aquinas prioritized the intellect over the will might play another role. With the will at the highest rung on the hierarchy, suddenly the unity of the intellect does not seem so bad, nor crucial for understanding the fate of souls.

(3/3) (I have more to say that I will respond to in about a couple hours, have some prior obligations first)

>>23799091
>That's another great point and another I'd hesitate to answer definitely because Aristotle doesn't address it. He did important work on epistemology/psychology but he never really gets into the weeds, as this question does. Like, take an example from real life rather than speculation, you start a new job and are feeling out the personalities/dynamics of the work-place. You get new data every day by experience and then are able to have a mental model, more or less accurate as the case may be, of what's going on. So the "measure" is as you say the events, your daily experiences. Aristotle would say this exists in memory/imagination. But how, exactly, does the intellect derive concepts/ideas from this bundle of events? A doesn't have a theory of how, he just knows that it happens and describes the basic preconditions for this to be. The "measure" of the concepts wouldn't be self-moving; as a cause of conception, it would be a mover (in a way); but as objects in the memory, it would be something moved (by our experiences). It does seem right to say it's a web of relations, though, because a huge part of cognition is ordering things - that's how we know what they are and how they relate to other objects; and also that it's a web of relations because there'd be this complex web of (syllogistic!) logical, causal chains.
Still, the problem is two-fold.

1) What is a measure, exactly? In a loose sense, it is the act of comparison. In a stricter sense, it's the act of comparison via number, to allow for precise and generalized comparison. But in these scenarios, what are we actually measuring, what is the basis for the measurement, and to what extent is this concept of measure even applicable, given that the substrate measured is often not easily subjected to quantification?

2) To what extent is the "phenomena" being measured a thing in itself? Is it a provisional unity (like a heap), or does it have its own inherent unity (like a substance)?

This is why the measurement metaphor becomes tricky. Take the company for example. There are many things that can be quantified. The daily work schedule. The frequency, intensity, and rhythm of conversation between key individuals. The volume of product being generated. The ebb and flow of consumer demand throughout the year. etc. But what about the enduring "vibe" of the company? The roles, spoken and unspoken, of its employees? The politics that take place? Its place in the economy? Sure, some of these things can be measured, but measurement, especially in a strict sense, seems to never capture the full thing. And the loose sense of measurement is ultimately ineffable.

(cont.)

(1/3)

>>23805008
>>23799091
(cont.)
This is why I'm more sympathetic to Scholastic attempts to make species (of living creatures at least) a more "concrete" universal by calling it a common nature, a general, etc. Because, to a great extent, it is a "host" that its individuals necessarily draw from for their own identity. It cannot *not* be real to some extent. Whatever mental model we have of species, no matter how broad it is, has to be a direct reflection of something real out there.

We are still "drawing" sensible forms from the outside environment, making it intelligible through the process of sense-perception, imagination, and intellection, and then we are storing the intelligible forms in the memory. If it isn't a nothing, if it isn't a particular, and if it isn't something that can't be measured, then what it is? It has to be concrete universal.

Perhaps I'm committing great violence to Aristotle here, but I'd like to see how far I can bridge Aristotle and this viewpoint, and what needs to be overcome to harmonize Aristotle with a stronger realism.

>>23799110
>Do they reproduce themselves according to the parameters or do we know the parameters by observing their behavior? Is the parameter itself a cause, or is it the animals? I'd say the latter. Aristotle gives dozens and dozens of separate arguments against this line of thinking.
I would have to quarrel with Aristotle and say that the unified parameters (or whatever unifies the parameters as part of a statistical model), from which the individuals participate in and sculpted from, are the essence. Living creatures exist, in some degree, as part of a shared host.

>>23797148
>This is the big kahuna, that tension right there. I haven't had time to answer everything, and I want to say more about this in particular but other things too. Probably won't be able to until tomorrow, though.
That's why I love philosophers like Charles Sanders Peirce who, in their own right, can be considered successors of Aristotle in method (or at least some kind of systematism that seeks to "carve out the joints" of reality) yet take a fundamentally opposite approach (given Peirce's extreme realism). It's my opinion that philosophy ought to be able to be able to go down to the abyss, up to the heavens, and then meet back in the middle plane of existence, in terms of sheer explicability of the whole picture. Someone like Aristotle or Peirce gets you most of the way there.

(2/3)

>>23799110
>Plato thought you could start with some highest genus and then divide down, mostly or exclusively in even divisions. Aristotle says "no that's retard; you have to learn as much as you can about the things you want to define, figure out all their essential characteristics, and then see what essential characteristics they have in common, and form your tree that way."
See, this is what confuses me about Aristotle. Plato makes all kinds of critiques against boilerplate Platonism, especially in Late Plato. But then Aristotle adopts them and wields them against the man who seemed to have originated them. Third man argument? That comes from Parmenides. Being and unity go hand in hand? Also in Parmenides. Equivocity of the good? That comes from Statesman. Diairesis can't be made in blind faith? Also in Statesman. Bivalent intellection? Found in Sophist as a way of refuting the Eleatic-inspired sophists.

I can't tell what's going on here. It makes no sense to me. And we know that Aristotle had access to the works and supposedly that his students would have also had access to the works so how did he think he would get away with such bad faith lifting of Plato's arguments and treating his works with such ironic straw men?

(3/3)

>>23805042
>I can't tell what's going on here. It makes no sense to me. And we know that Aristotle had access to the works and supposedly that his students would have also had access to the works so how did he think he would get away with such bad faith lifting of Plato's arguments and treating his works with such ironic straw men?
I don't have citations at hand, but I recall Harold Cherniss discussing this in his books on Aristotle and Plato. Apparently, there was quite the back and forth between Aristotle and Plato's immediate successors, Speusippus and Xenocrates, with the latter two responding that Aristotle, while correct in seeing that they both in their own ways depart from Plato, misunderstands both Plato's principles and their own. Cherniss himself isn't innocent of polemic against Aristotle, but it's sometimes hard not to suspect that Aristotle might've been malicious sometimes about his mentor. The use of the third man as if it wasn't Plato's own argument, and the weird claim that Socrates never introduces philosophy into the guardian education in the Republic make me wonder if he's doing some odd Straussian thing, or just more of an asshole than we'd otherwise want to credit him for being, given how sober his writings are.

>>23805079
How didn't Aristotle's reputation not implode from blatant misrepresentations of Plato, though? Like, you could point to the text and see, in most cases unambiguously, that Aristotle is using Plato's argument against a straw man of Plato.

Perhaps there's a good reason why the Lyceum declined fairly quickly after Aristotle's death. It may have had elements of a personality cult, and it may have taken a couple centuries of allowing the interpersonal drama to die down before the texts could be examined on their own merits again. Idk, just spitballing here.

>>23805118
It does seem that Aristotle was a successful force during his lifetime, but he also had the protection of the Macedonian governor of Athens and perhaps Macedonian support in other ways. Whether or not the "I won't let Athens sin against philosophy twice" story is true, that he had to flee upon Alexander's death during his last year alive might indicate how precarious things actually were for him, and the hard and immediate decline of the Lyceum after Theophrastus does lend support to the thought that those two were rare personalities that could keep things working. (But then, that was also the period when rival philosophy schools sprouted up everywhere, so competition must've been stiff, and that coincides with a peculiar period for the Academy as they had slighter figures leading them until the Skeptical Academy was established.)

It does seem as if Aristotle's reputation did suffer, though it's hard to say whether it's on account of his treatment of Plato or the Academy, but his writings go mostly unremarked upon until Cicero and Plutarch, and he's otherwise only really talked about by the Hellenistic philologists.

Funny enough, there is a story that was passed around (I forget the source, maybe Aelian or Aulus Gellius), where Aristotle and his comrades were said to abuse old Plato in such a way that Plato stopped making his rounds about the Academy and stuck to his garden until either Speusippus or Xenocrates came to the rescue. Ridiculous and spurious, but it seems there was a feeling that such an etiological tale was needed to explain their relationship.

>>23805213
>Funny enough, there is a story that was passed around (I forget the source, maybe Aelian or Aulus Gellius)
It's Aelian, quoting because it's so absurd:

>Of the dissension between Aristotle and Plato.
>The first dissension betwixt Aristotle and Plato is said to be thus occasioned : Plato did not approve of his life and habit, for Aristotle wore rich garments and shoes, and cut his hair after a manner not used by Plato : He also wore many rings for ornaments ; he had a deriding kind of look, and was peremptory in discourse : all which mis-became a Philosopher. Plato seeing this rejected him, and preferred before him Xenocrates, Speusippus, Amyclas, and others ; to whom he shewed respect, and admitted them to his conversation. On a time, Xenocrates being gone into his Country, Aristotle came to Plato, accompanied with a great many of his Disciples, of whom was Mnason the Phocian, and the like : Speusippus was then sick and unable to be with Plato : Plato was fourscore years old, and through his age his memory much impaired. Aristotle assaulting and circumventing him by propounding arrogantly some questions, and arguing with him, discovered himself injurious and ungrateful. Hereupon Plato retiring from his outward Walk, walked privately with his friends. After three months Xenocrates returned from his Journey, and found Aristotle walking where he had left Plato, and seeing that he and his Disciples went not from the walk to Plato, but directly to the City, he asked one of the Walk where Plato was, doubting that he was sick. He answered, He is not sick, but Aristotle troubling him hath made him quit the Walk, and now he teacheth Philosophy privately in his own Garden. Xenocrates hearing this went presently to Plato, whom he found discoursing with such as were present, who were young men of eminent quality, and some of the Noblest. When he had ended his discourse, he saluted Xenocrates kindly, according to his usual manner, and Xenocrates did the like to him. When the company was dismist, Xenocrates, without speaking a word to Plato, or acquainting him with it, got his friends together, and sharply reproved Speusippus for having yielded the Walk to Aristotle. Then to his utmost he opposed the Stagirites, and so farre proceeded the contention, that at last Aristotle was thrown out, and Plato restored to his former place.

bump

>>23806111
Your bump has trips. I was going to call you a fag again and make an off-colour joke about how you don't have a penis so you don't have an opinion and let you and the Aristotle anons work that one out. If you guys want a good Aristotelian chuckle you lot are more than welcome to do so either way. Here is an answer to the OP put in language anyone can understand:

Aquinas and all the rest of those lot needed centuries to understand Aristotle. Then they tried to incorporate it and shit themselves.

>Aristotelian system posits that in order to know there has to be an accounting for cause of some sort.
>Aristotle comes up with a phantasm to flick the first domino.
>Aristotle can now say his system meets accountability requirements.
>Centuries of subsequent thought show this to be a farce. The parts of Aristotle that are able to survive continue.
>Hume says it's all a giant shit.
>Kant says no one can know noumena and then incorporated what survived. Met the accountability requirements with an assist from Epicurus.
>Hegel says there are no beginnings and we can still know. The process for this is demonstrable. Hegel met the accountability requirements and incorporated, also used an assist from Epicurus.

There you have it, centuries of being unable to get past Aristotle were solved by incorporating Epicurean thought. Now quit harassing the Aristotle anons because you can't figure it out.

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>>23806158

>>23804180
>Should we be asking even deeper questions here? e.g. whether the object of the proposition is a subset of, snapshot of, attribute subsumed, etc., of reality? It seems a bit silly, but doesn’t it make sense to view nature as operating with its own propositions? It would then become a question of whether our propositions match those of nature. It seems like Aristotle is only saying no because we rarely have enough information to make these precise predictions (along with other aspects like free will demolishing these aspects entirely).

Right, that's what I'm getting from this thread. To the extent I interpret the relevant sections as asking the metaphysical question, Aristotle is woefully inadequate. To the extent he is commenting on the practical limitations of man, he is a no-show on the bigger question. I hardly think he was completely unaware of the metaphysical discussion re: determinacy, so this is a huge indictment of Aristotle imo.

So my take away from the thread is the above, and the earlier agreement that Aristotle was incapable of engaging with other thinkers in good faith. I also don't see why Aelian's story is obviously "ridiculous and absurd", but maybe there's something specific about the history of that text and author that would make it clearer.

>>23807225
>So my take away from the thread is the above, and the earlier agreement that Aristotle was incapable of engaging with other thinkers in good faith. I also don't see why Aelian's story is obviously "ridiculous and absurd", but maybe there's something specific about the history of that text and author that would make it clearer.
Aelian's a 2nd-3rd century author who shares gossip without much concern over the sources of that gossip. It's totally unattested by anyone prior in what's available, to my knowledge, and the fact that Plutarch, who's a Platonist through and through with strong reservations about Aristotle, never alludes to the story should be enough to dismiss it as of the caliber of stories about Plato being fathered by Apollo through a virgin birth. Additionally, Xenocrates, who figures in the story as the savior of Plato against Aristotle, was friends with Aristotle at the time of Plato's death; in fact, when Speusippus became the head of the Academy, Xenocrates left with Aristotle to visit a fellow pupil of Plato, Hermias of Atarneus. This would be hard to reconcile with the story.

>>23807347
But doesn't your account of the relationship between xenocrates and Aristotle also depend on Roman era source material? Also from people who could be described as rumour mongers and gatherers of popular positions/accounts (Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero)?

I think you are right to warn us against Aelian and other latter day accounts, to be clear. I would just stick Plutarch and others in the same category. The wild card is that we know that very ancient texts were still extant in late antiquity, so they could have had access to a reputable source that had the authority to declare Aristotle a massive faggot. I guess we'll never know.

>>23807669
>But doesn't your account of the relationship between xenocrates and Aristotle also depend on Roman era source material? Also from people who could be described as rumour mongers and gatherers of popular positions/accounts (Plutarch, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero)?
The specific source is Strabo, who, while a 1st c. B.C.E. Roman at some distance in time, is otherwise reliable as an historian. I see your point about the need for some skepticism regarding the others you mention, though I'd say they all tend to be trustworthy when they mention their sources (though Diogenes in fact might be trustworthy *only* when he mentions sources). It's true that their writings have to be bracketed somewhat by a broader view to what they're doing (Plutarch is interested in history, but he's nore interested in providing models of lives to think about, and Cicero’s dialogues tend to be like Plato's in not always saying what he thinks openly).

>I think you are right to warn us against Aelian and other latter day accounts, to be clear. I would just stick Plutarch and others in the same category. The wild card is that we know that very ancient texts were still extant in late antiquity, so they could have had access to a reputable source that had the authority to declare Aristotle a massive faggot. I guess we'll never know.
Surely. I think a massive point against the historicity of Aelian's story is that the Academic (Cicero), Platonist (Plutarch), and gossip (Diogenes) never mention it. Aelian's a lot of fun to read, but it's hard to take much of the stories he relates as anything but later etiologies.

>>23807888
>I'd say they all tend to be trustworthy when they mention their sources

On this particular point, I have an axe to grind with Plutarch. Specifically, his claim that the Spartan ephors declared war on the helots and the crypteia went around slaughtering them. He cites Aristotle, but this appears nowhere in his currently extant works, despite it being something he would certainly mention when criticising sparta. Also, we do have a later, still-ancient summary of Aristotle's works which contains known errors (ie, it says Aristotle's text says one thing, but our extant copy says another), which says the ephors did declare war on the helots (but not the bit about the crypteia iirc). So to be charitable to the Boeotian rumour monger, maybe he read the summary and was quoting that, assuming it was truly representing Aristotle, and somehow also mixed in the crypteia (again, all details that Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, etc, fail to mention in any of their extant works, despite talking about Sparta and even the crypteia specifically). Also, Plutarch is the source for other potential errors/lies, such as the idea that kinds didn't go through the agoge (a claim that seems to be directly contradicted by an earlier cynic work).

Sorry for the massive digression I just don't trust Boeotians. But otherwise I appreciate your post.

>>23808039
I'd presume that'd be from the lost Constitution of the Lacademonians, right?

>>23808124
Yes, he and I guess his followers generally wrote up a bunch of such accounts. But I'm absolutely certain that Plutarch is either (a) full of shit/quoting by memory and making a mistake, or (b) relying on a faulty summary/cliff notes like the one I described. Because it's inconceivable to me that Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle, and others, frequently discuss and praise/criticise Sparta in the texts we have, but somehow forgot to mention this extreme detail. Even when literally discussing helots, ephors, and/or crypteia.

>>23808232
I'd be hard-pressed to say Plutarch misquoted or misremembered, he's pretty reliable as far as relating others goes. He cites Aristotle's Constitution of the Boetians elsewhere, and, since Aristotle's surviving writings barely mention Lycurgus, the likelihood of it being from the lost Constitution of the Lacademonians seems probable. Plato’s only reference to it is put in the mouth of an old Spartan that wants to persuade an old Athenian of the educational merits of it, and goes into no further detail, while Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacademonians, product of an already tacit and tight-lipped writer who aims for polite depictions, refrains from even using the words Messenian or Helot, just using "slaves," and barely at that (slaves and slavery are mentioned seven times). It might be that the crypteia is misunderstood, but probably not from malice or a mistaken reading on Plutarch's part.

>>23808360
Nope, you should apply the same reasoning you did earlier. Here is an extreme detail of the Spartan state (a topic examined and debated by multiple contemporary sources), and none of them say anything about declaring war on helots and indiscriminately slaughtering them. Yet here's Jonny come lately, a literal Boeotian, many centuries after the period in question, and... He's the first source we have for this incredibly extreme detail about Sparta that would have been extremely relevant to countless prior discussions of Sparta? And it's not in any extant essay we have, and is only half (the bit about the ephors) contained in a summary that we know to be in error about other details and maybe from more than one source (not just Aristotle)? No fucking way, no fucking way. If this is true then Aelian is true and Aristotle is a massive faggot (who also forgot this important detail about Sparta in all the extant works we have where he does mention and criticise Sparta and helotry).

What does it mean if something (let's say, a living being) is "separable" from its accidents?

>>23808432
I'm not talking about Plutarch's lives as strict history (about which, I already conceded that he has to be taken with caution at >>23807888 and left as an open matter whether the report on the crypteia was historically wrong at >>23808360), but only as a construer and citer of other authors or texts.

>Here is an extreme detail of the Spartan state (a topic examined and debated by multiple contemporary sources), and none of them say anything about declaring war on helots and indiscriminately slaughtering them.
Thucydides is our first extant source with an explicit account of two thousand Helots being killed in secret by the Spartans, Plutarch, in fact, brings up this very story when he mentions the crypteia, and a simple comparison of Thucydides' own account with how Plutarch renders it is a good example of how reliable a reporter Plutarch can be, whether the subject itself is true or not.

>If this is true then Aelian is true and Aristotle is a massive faggot (who also forgot this important detail about Sparta in all the extant works we have where he does mention and criticise Sparta and helotry).
Lol I know you're playing devil's advocate, but, for the sake of the argument, Xenophon lived near Sparta and barely even refers to the Helots at all, you would never know it was a population outnumbering the Spartioi themselves.

There was another good thread about a month ago that I never got a chance to talk about: https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23685147
>One lightbulb moment was realizing how in book 7 when he's talking about how you can't define "white surface" and "snub" he isn't just talking about accidents, he's talking about particulars and essences. So an individual person, Bob, is both the actualization of matter by the definable essence, and is also the actualization of the essence which can only exist in matter. The essence "man" inherently involves particularity in the same sense that a color inherently involves a surface. And as he says later in Book 7 the composite, "Bob", comes to be and passes away, but the essence in its generality does not, and this exists in the gods.
What the hell is this poster talking about here regarding Aristotle's thought, especially in the beginning and towards the end? You can only define species/genera + individuals must exist in matter + the essence of an individual exists in God's mind? Sounds like crazy Platonism to me.

>>23808487
I'll stop the digression, but actually Thucydides actually reveals Plutarch's Lies to be utter nonsense.

Specifically, what does Thucydides actually say? It is not an explicit account; he doesn't know how they were done away with. He has heard a rumour about how helots were tricked into coming forward, and then nobody heard of them again, and nobody knows what became of them. The presumption being they were executed in a time of weakness/danger for Sparta.

So I take this to be rumour related by an Athenian/outsider, who admittedly doesn't know the specifics. BUT, there's another layer to this onion: Thucydides relates this story as an extreme step the Spartans went to... which is direct evidence that Plutarch is full of shit.

If the Spartans were yearly declaring war on the helotry and having the youths indiscriminately slaughter them, then this example of a single, possible mass-execution WOULD BE CHILD'S PLAY. It would not be put forward by Thucydides as an extreme act by the Spartan state if the Spartan state was yearly declaring war on the helots and mass-murdering them!

And again, as pointed out, how amazing that in these discussions of the helots, again mentioned numerous times in contemporary and near-contemporary sources, INCLUDING THUCYDIDES, it's never mentioned. Even when Thucydides is talking about extreme policies re: eliminating helots. Un-fucking-believable.


NEVER, EVER, EVER TRUST A BOIOTIAN. There is a reason why the word means IDIOT and their cultural legacy is (a) inviting foreign invaders and (b) raping children. Spartans were good boys and did nothing wrong.

digression over from my end feel free to have the last word on Plutarch's Lies.

>>23808675
There's a lot of flaws in this, many of which amount to hopping from position to position in order not to be pinned down in any of them. The briefest summary: Claim that Plutarch lies/invents a report by Aristotle -> acknowledge a lost work, but flee to claiming Plato and Xenophon don't talk about the phenomena -> both get shot down by accounting for why they don't discuss it, scoot to claiming Plutarch is the first source at all of the Spartans slaughtering the Helots -> acknowledge Thucydides talks long before Plutarch about it, ignore that the argument was about Plutarch reporting anyone else accurately and so ignoring the fact that Plutarch cites Thucydides clearly and without exaggeration that would otherwise lend credence to him citing an Aristotelian work now lost, move to claiming Thucydides' report undermines any account of the crypteia.

Formally interesting, maybe instructive for a third part, but not interesting enough to continue. Enjoy your thread.

>>23808711
I know I said I would have the last word, but actually I just outright think you are incorrect on all those points and I want that to be clear, because I think you have strawmanned/misrepresented me every step of the way.

I am especially annoyed that you would twist what I actually said about plutarch being our first source; I specifically said he's our source for the yearly culling of the helots by the crypteia. Obviously there are older sources that mention helots dying in other circumstances (ie, thucydides). I am right to point out that in relating the tale of a single mass-killing (which is considered extreme and shocking), Thucydides is simultaneously revealing that the yearly mass-killings of Plutarch are ridiculous (because if Spartans were yearly doing it, Thucydides would not consider the story of a one-off killing to be unusual and extreme).

Anyway, in replying I have shown myself to be untrustworthy like Plutarch, for I said you would have the final word. So for that I can be blamed. If there is a thread some day that is about helots then maybe we will run into each other again, thank you for your time.

>>23808675
>ancient Greek racism
KEK

>>23808479
>>23808531
>S: "But how can an animal be a thing? All it is is what it is, the sum of its properties, as Leibniz would say."
>A: "If it was the sum of all of its properties it would be infinite and hence not be anything at all."
>A: "You think being infinite means being something vast and grand. Really, in this context, it would mean being nothing. Without limit nothing can be. Being is being limited."
How can substance be both limited in being but unlimited in properties?

bump

I credit Aristotle with laying out the groundwork for the scientific method but there's a part of me that's always felt like he's overhyped and is the patron saint of pseuds

>>23786109
>The true interpretation of the Metaphysics is a sort of nominalism. Aquinas' theory of "Natures", in which a particular man is a sort of mysterious "fusion" of the nature Man with matter, does not make sense. Occam was right and particular substance has absolute ontological priority

Ridiculous

>5.) Aristotle's God is maybe Zeus?

Even more ridiculous. I have to assume you are just the same anon who keeps pushing this nonsense.

>>23790605
>doesn't seem that nominalistic at all anymore

Yes, OP is doing the thing, so common in academia because being "provocative" and "novel" is important to "muh tenure" and "muh citations," of stating something rather trivial in radical terms.

It's even beneficial at times to say something in blatantly stupid terms because then people cite it boatloads as an example of something implausible (everyone know the old cite two extremes, then chart the reasonable middle path meme, one Aristotle likes too). Bonus points if you are actually just saying something mainstream so that you can defend yourself against charges of aCtUaLlY saying something dumb.

So we get "Aristotle is a nominalists," with the argument being really more "Aristotle was an immanent realist," which or course is generally considered to be a standard reading of Aristotle (the term is created for him). And to do this "realist" is reimagined to refer specifically to a sort of "two worlds Platonism" that is hard to find in Plato, and which really had its heyday in modern Protestant polemics against Platonism (consider the shallow view of Plato Nietzsche inherits for example).

>>23790442
If knowledge is of universals and universals are just something like statistical ensembles tied to observations, existing only in the mind, then it seems like we are very much turning Aristotle into modern representationalism, maybe even a Donald Hoffman lol. We end up knowing our ideas and not things.

But if we want to head in this direction it might make sense to say that universals exist fundamentally in nature but not actually (which is often how Aristotle's position is described vis-á-vis time). A properly triadic understanding of the doctrine of signs/semiotics perhaps corrects the problem as well, but this doesn't develop until long after Aristotle. But this is also a realist view.

But I don't think the lable nominalism is at all helpful for Aristotle. In the Physics Book V when Aristotle talks about substantial change being instantaneous, being between contradictories as opposed to contraries (e.g. man and not-man) he is clearly talking about motion not our "mental representation of motion" or something of that sort. The change is not in the mind.

>>23804151
>It absolutely would've been unacceptable, otherwise Aristotle would've *done* it, instead he reports what someone else he trusts says.
Regardless of whether he made the experiment or not (I doubt that he did), as numerous other anons have pointed out it is, in fact, true that women have fewer teeth than men.
>>23804180
>As to the self-mover aspect, could we perhaps locate “self-moving” in respect to the soul qua intellect?
Na, Aristotle denied that anything is, strictly speaking, self-moving. The animal is "self moving" in the sense that it is moved by an unmoved mover, the soul, which does not move itself, but is moved accidentally in moving the body. This is part of his critique of Plato who did describe the soul as a self-mover.
>What would be your choice of translation, if you had to make one? Feel free to mash words together, Sachs-style.
For apodeixis? "Scientific explanation" seems much better than demonstration.
>Could you expand on this? I thought I was cooking with the way I related “speech as quantity” to quality, and now I'm understanding that "speech as quantity" was only meant in the way that musical notation measures quantity (because, abstracting away the other qualities, playing music is about the measure, counting, etc., of a magnitude, sound).
I mean I think you understand it, and 'speech' is metonymous for all units that measure continuities. (Number is, for Aristotle and other Greeks, whole number).
>That, for Duns Scotus, it’s universals all the way down, and that the haecceity is a universal of one?
I think so. I might be full of shit. I have never read Duns Scotus in the original, but reading SEP articles etc. that's what I've pieced together.
>What do you think was actually at stake in the debate, then (besides the obvious fact of Aristotle’s acceptance in Europe?) Why did anybody view it as a controversial matter? From what I could remember, the way I’ve read some of Aquinas’s arguments against Averroes (and maybe I was imbibing a lot of Leo Strauss at the time), it seemed like he just restated Averroes claims in his own words, and that the original claims were either obscured enough in Thomistic vocabulary to come across as a “refutation” and not a limp, begrudging acceptance, or that Aquinas simply defers to the authority of scripture. I think maybe the fact that Aquinas prioritized the intellect over the will might play another role. With the will at the highest rung on the hierarchy, suddenly the unity of the intellect does not seem so bad, nor crucial for understanding the fate of souls.
Eh I just have to disagree here. Aquinas studied Averroes' Long Commentary and responds to all of his central theses. I don't think intellect/will comes into it here, it's simply the question "Is the intellect one common thing that we all share and think by, like the sun, or do we each have our own?" with Aquinas defending the latter.

>>23805008
>And the loose sense of measurement is ultimately ineffable.
A measure divides things part by part and is a way of grasping something that is so divisible.
>To what extent is the "phenomena" being measured a thing in itself? Is it a provisional unity (like a heap), or does it have its own inherent unity (like a substance)?
Great question, not one that Aristotle addresses. Granted that the dynamics of the company is in a way a "thing", what sort of "thing" is it? I think Aristotle would say that ultimately things must be referred back to primary substances (that is to say, the dynamics of the company are ultimately referrable to the actions and qualities of individual people).
>>23805023
>Because, to a great extent, it is a "host" that its individuals necessarily draw from for their own identity. It cannot *not* be real to some extent. Whatever mental model we have of species, no matter how broad it is, has to be a direct reflection of something real out there.
It is a reflection of something real, in a way it IS something real, the question is what it is and how it relates to particulars.
>If it isn't a nothing, if it isn't a particular, and if it isn't something that can't be measured, then what it is? It has to be concrete universal.
How about a concept?
I guess I just don't see "man" being a concept secondary to particulars as being as problematic as you do, is what this comes down to.
>Third man argument? That comes from Parmenides. Being and unity go hand in hand? Also in Parmenides. Equivocity of the good? That comes from Statesman. Diairesis can't be made in blind faith? Also in Statesman. Bivalent intellection? Found in Sophist as a way of refuting the Eleatic-inspired sophists.
I don't think Aristotle found Plato's attempts to solve the third man argument in the "deductions" actually convincing, that's a big topic. But I agree with you in general that Aristotle is 1.) very unfair to Plato, and 2.) uses Plato's ideas without attribution. Don't have time to give these points the attention they deserve rn unfortunately.
> but it's sometimes hard not to suspect that Aristotle might've been malicious sometimes about his mentor.
Agreed.

>>23808479
Socrates is Socrates whether he's wearing shoes or not.
>>23809068
There are essential properties, and then there are accidental properties.
>>23809746
>Ridiculous
Calling him a 'nominalist' is a bit provocative, because he certainly DID believe that universals like "man" or "health" were meaningful and in some sense real. But if you think Aristotle thought substance was essence and that means substance is the secondary species, you haven't read the Metaphysics. Aristotle denied that universals were beings, and positing a "nature" to fill in a perceived gap is a serious distortion of his philosophy imo. Being means being particular. I know Aristotle often talks about universals as being "prior by nature" - well, that's a technical term, and he is not saying that they are ontologically prior. Look at the discussion of priority/posteriority in Meta 7.
>Even more ridiculous. I have to assume you are just the same anon who keeps pushing this nonsense.
Yeah I said that as a jest.
>Yes, OP is doing the thing, so common in academia because being "provocative" and "novel" is important to "muh tenure" and "muh citations," of stating something rather trivial in radical terms.
I'm just trying to get (yous) and interesting replies by being a bit obnoxious, it worked too this thread has been excellent.
>with the argument being really more "Aristotle was an immanent realist,"
No, he was not, he attacks immanent realism multiple times in the Metaphysics (specifically Eudorus' theory that Forms could be 'in' particulars). You keep calling me dumb but I don't think you know what you're talking about.
> "two worlds Platonism" that is hard to find in Plato
Seriously? What about the demiurge taking patterns from the Ideal Animal? What about the gazillion passages in the dialogues where particulars are described as "participating in" or as "images of" transcendent Forms? I know modern neoneoplatonists like to say it ain't there, but it is absolutely there. Their whole MO is to take arguments from neoplatonists and restate them in the language of modern scholarship. Then someone like you comes in and, as if "everybody knows it", proclaims that Plato didn't have a "two worlds" metaphysics. Lol.

>>23809841
>If knowledge is of universals
We don't have knowledge "of" universals, we have knowledge of particulars by means of universals. All universal concepts are in potency to particulars, as Aristotle discusses in Meta 13.10.

>>23811144
>>23811176
I thank you for yet another extensive reply and it deserves a more thorough response. But I'm too busy to address them all. I'll pick out the most troubling replies for me:
>Na, Aristotle denied that anything is, strictly speaking, self-moving. The animal is "self moving" in the sense that it is moved by an unmoved mover, the soul, which does not move itself, but is moved accidentally in moving the body. This is part of his critique of Plato who did describe the soul as a self-mover.
Are you trying to point out that the soul only "moves" itself in a roundabout way, never directly? Or are you distinguishing unmoved as different from self-moved here? None of the above?
>How about a concept?
The thing that bothers me about relegating universals to concepts is the fact that pointing out that it is a concept often obscures the underlying metaphysical questions. What is it a concept of? How does the concept relate "structurally" to the conception?

These are fundamental questions that Aristotle tackles in De Anima. The Scholastics tended to see thought as following the "like is like" principle, in that the thought is structurally like the thing it represents in a virtual sense. There is an identity of form between the mind and the object, even if it is only form qua form. It's not difficult to understand why when we see how Aristotle describes cognition as the apprehension of sensible forms until they become intelligible objects.

It then becomes a question of what is the nature of the intelligible object. In the case of particulars, it is fairly straightforward. But of universals? If it is again essential, then it is again, straightforward. But if it is actually a heap or some other kind of provisional unity, then we have nothing to explain what makes the concept united (outside of being a certain coincident bundle of properties, measured appropriately). For those universals which we want to admit is greater than a name but less than a substance, we are even in worse shape, because it fails to explain why some things/thoughts/etc. have a "focal unity" (or whatever scholars are calling it, I'd love a better name).

Don't even get me started on the mind's ability to craft provisional unities at will and view them as intelligible.

>>23811216
>What about the gazillion passages in the dialogues where particulars are described as "participating in" or as "images of" transcendent Forms?

What about them? These are all covered in detail. You are obviously unfamiliar with the position you're attacking if you think this is something that is ignored. Vertical reality doesn't imply two worlds, you see the same sort of thing in Hegel.

Also, you seem to be doing this weird thing is setting up Aristotle as a representationalist ( he isn't) and using Platonism as a foil, when in fact Platonist readings of Aristotle always had strong strands that looked at particular forms.

For example:
>Does this mean that Italos understands the genera in the particulars as referring to forms which are particular? In other words, does this mean that he interprets Aristotle’s immanent forms as particular rather than universal? The pedigree of such an interpretation is not negligible; both Proclus in his Elements of Theology as well as his teacher Syrianus in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics viewed the immanent forms as particulars, without implying in any way that on this point they disagreed with Aristotle. And although Ammonius is not clear on this subject, there is no reason to believe that he was not here in agreement with these other Neoplatonists. This, of course, does not mean that such an interpretation of Aristotle’s theory has to be the right one. But it is reasonable to think that, by Italos’ time, treating Aristotle’s immanent forms as particulars was an acceptable, if not the standard, interpretation.

The claim that Aristotle is definitely not an immanent realist is particularly bizarre when he is the paradigmatic example, what the term is literally coined to describe.

>>23812288
>Also, you seem to be doing this weird thing is setting up Aristotle as a representationalist ( he isn't) and using Platonism as a foil, when in fact Platonist readings of Aristotle always had strong strands that looked at particular forms.
How is Aristotle not a representationalist? The imagination literally copies from the sense-perception to create a virtual re-presentation of what was sensed.

>>23809805
Isn't "immanent realism" what most nominalists fall into, anyway?
>>23809841
How would you combine triadic semiotics with Aristotelianism? Deeply interested here.

>>23811144
>I mean I think you understand it,
The thing is, what I initially posited, and what you explained afterwards, seems very different to me to the point that I think I was speaking too loosely. I don't know if we're on the same page here, and I want to make sure I don't leave with some crazy take on the link between speech and the categories.
>and 'speech' is metonymous for all units that measure continuities. (Number is, for Aristotle and other Greeks, whole number).
As in, we can apply it to anything that behaves like magnitude? Bigger, smaller, hotter, colder, brighter, duller, (now this gets even trickier), smarter, dumber, any of the extremes to the mean featured in NE, etc.?
>it's simply the question "Is the intellect one common thing that we all share and think by, like the sun, or do we each have our own?
I just don't understand the drama then. The soul isn't just the intellect, so if we share an intellect, what's the big deal? We still have our own potential intellect in either system.

>>23811216
>There are essential properties, and then there are accidental properties.
Are you treating essence as a bundle of essential properties here? And even then, how does that explain why one side is limited and the other side is unlimited? Why can't they both be limited or unlimited? Why not the other way around?
>I know Aristotle often talks about universals as being "prior by nature" - well, that's a technical term, and he is not saying that they are ontologically prior.
What does prior "by nature" mean, then? Is this another potency distinction being pointed out, said a different way?

bump

High-effort, high IQ thread.
Have a bump.

>>23812703
John Deely is probably the best place to start on semiotics.

For how it ties into Aristotleanism "Four Ages of Understanding" might be best, but it's also a history of all of Western philosophy so it's a bit long. You could skip around the key players though, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, the late medieval, John Poinsot, Pierce.

Deely is great but he is not good at summarizing the relevance of his work or really putting the big picture into focus and he tends to be fairly technical. His "Red Book" is short but also focuses on the "ethics of terminology," even if it is a decent intro to signs. He has a more accessible dialogue pitching signs to a "realist," which you can find online or a shorter version acted on YouTube, but it's just an intro for the skeptic.

Nathan Lyons "Signs in the Dust," is another good one, but that mostly focuses on Poinsot, Cusa, and St. Thomas.

I have never seen anyone try to do semiotics as directly applied to Aristotle but rather to the Aristotlean Latin tradition that reaches its culmination in Poinsot in the early modern period and then gets ignored until CS Peirce.

I think there is a wonderful opportunity for someone to look at signs through a more Neoplatonic lens though, going back to Augustine as the "father of semiotics."

Deely is not very friendly to Neoplatonism and his chapter on it in Four Ages is skippable.

>>23812703
If the secondary substance doesn't exist prior to the mind then it would seem to be something the mind creates. But this sets up all the problems of correspondence theories of truth when wed to representationalism, which have been pointed out down the ages from Plotinus to Hegel.

For one can never "step outside experience" to see if one's ideas correspond to reality. But this is a modern problem, very far from something like the ancient identity theories of truth and the Doctrine of Transcendentals that would grow out of Aristotle.

Indeed, what could we even say if all we know, all the intelligibility of the world, is something constructed by the mind and that what is present to us is not ontologically prior to the mind's construction.

Here, it's instructive to look at Aristotle's conception of time and place. Obviously, Aristotle had the subtlety to work around this problem here, and didn't turn into Kant. I don't see any reason to suspect he lacked this subtlety when it came to secondary substances. The soul is potentially all things, not potentially able to craft likenesses onto all things.

When Aristotle says that secondary substances are not "in" particulars this is hardly an hands down endorsement for something like Locke's view where all we can know are ideas. Indeed, much in De Anima speaks directly against this.

Robert Sokolowski does a good job brining modern philosophy of language, science of cognition/perception, and phenomenology to bear on this issue through an Aristotlean lens in The Phenomenology of the Human Person. The key metaphorical insight is that it is better to speak of the sensory system and mind as a lens, something looked through, then as a Cartesian theater, an image generator.

>>23812671

>Aristotle repeats his distinction between the two kinds of truth in De Anima,
III 6. In passages before and after Chapter 6, he makes another point.
He repeatedly says that the mind that succeeds in thinking is identical
to the things that it thinks. He says, for example, “For the mind somehow
is potentially what it thinks (ta noe¯ta)” (III 4, 429b30–1). He also
says, “Knowledge that is activated is thus the same as the thing” (III 5,
430a19–20), and again, “Thus, in general, the mind that is active is the
objects” (III 7, 431b17). Speaking of the thinking power of the human
being as a part of the soul, he declares, “We say again, the soul is somehow
all things” (III 8, 431b21). In these and other passages he expresses what
we could call an identity theory of knowledge as opposed to a represetrepresentational one. In this view, the knowing power does not have a copy or
a representation of the thing known; rather, it becomes cognitively
identified with the thing that is known.

Aristotle explains how this happens by saying that the form or the
“look” (eidos) of the thing known comes to exist in the knower, but without
the matter in which the form or the look is embodied in the thing itself.
Cognitive powers are able to take on and take in the forms of things.
Aristotle agrees with the description of the human soul as the “place of
forms, topos eido¯n” (III 4, 429a27–8), but he adds that this feature applies
to the soul not as a whole but only in regard to its noetic power.

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>>23813942
>For one can never "step outside experience" to see if one's ideas correspond to reality. But this is a modern problem...
Because each individual's concepts would be based solely on their experience, and no two experiences are alike, right? Then the question becomes "What is the basis for making the two concepts identical in any way?" Are we supposed to accept that a Japanese man and a Namibian man have the same basis for the concept of man, even though we're positing that no such undergirding exists?
>Doctrine of Transcendentals that would grow out of Aristotle
To what extent does the doctrine of transcendentals emerge out of Aristotle? I know that he would probably posit "unity" and "being" as a transcendental, but that's about it.
>The soul is potentially all things, not potentially able to craft likenesses onto all things.
What do you think the difference would be between "becoming all things", "having likenesses of things", and "crafting concepts"? The word "likeness" seems to create wiggle room between apprehending the thing itself and knowing only concepts.
>The key metaphorical insight is that it is better to speak of the sensory system and mind as a lens, something looked through, then as a Cartesian theater, an image generator.
Tbh, De Anima seems to support both ideas, at least as distinct faculties of the mind working in tandem. e.g. sense-perception apprehending and uniting sensible forms, the imagination copying and mixing these sensible forms, etc.

>>23814097
>“We say again, the soul is somehow all things” (III 8, 431b21). In these and other passages he expresses what we could call an identity theory of knowledge as opposed to a representational one. In this view, the knowing power does not have a copy or a representation of the thing known; rather, it becomes cognitively identified with the thing that is known.
... the soul does not become what it senses. You, your mind, etc., does not literally become the red firetruck when you sense it in accordance to Aristotle's De Anima. Whatever your soul becomes, is lacking in corresponding matter. What your mind *actually* becomes is a virtual copy. How is that not a representation?

This is why I keep saying that Aristotle seems like he's a representationalist. The only difference is that there is no creation happening, only form "translation" from the outside world into the inside world. It's simply a stronger form of representation than what we're accustomed to from early modern thinking and beyond.

>>23815054
"Representation" is a sloppy way of speaking. It presupposes someone to look at the representation, a Cartesian theater, etc. A painting doesn't know what it is a painting of, rocks do not know things through having a likeness of a thing carved into them.

So clearly, "the soul making representations" of things is insufficient to explain knowledge. Presumably you need something to view said representations or some such. But then representations aren't necessary, since things are already likenesses of themselves (something St. Thomas among others points out). Descartes needs likenesses because he has to bridge the gap between sui generis mind stuff and extended stuff, but that is one of the worst parts of his thought.

Anyhow, since representing isn't knowing we need some part of the soul to view the representation. But then we only posited a representation in the first place because we couldn't have something outside the knower being directly known. So now we need a second mental representation inside our Cartesian homunculus, and presumably a third and a fourth and so on, since we have decided that we must separate representing and knowing, but also that what is known must be re-represented in the knower. Why though? Things are perfectly good likenesses of themselves.

From the standpoint of doctrina signorum this seems to be mistaking the sign vehicle/representumen for the sign. You the up with the sign vehicle as an unbridged gap between the object and the interpretant, rather than the very thing unifying then in an irreducibly triadic relationship.

>>23815227
I still feel like we're talking past each other, but we're making more progress.

So, what you seem to be saying is that the more there is "direct apprehension" within a theory of mind, the less we have to worry about an infinite "homunculus" regress, because the buck stops somewhere? In that case, I can agree that Aristotle is not a representationalist, in the sense that there is an underlying "structure" that is apprehended by the mind in De Anima (e.g. forms), even if it is in a "virtual" "RE-presentation" (emphasis on "re" and the fact that it is presenting to the mind "something").

It is hard to deny, though, that Aristotle does not also incorporate something that is like modern representationalist theories in describing how the imagination works, in addition to speaking about direct apprehension.
>From the standpoint of doctrina signorum this seems to be mistaking the sign vehicle/representumen for the sign. You the up with the sign vehicle as an unbridged gap between the object and the interpretant, rather than the very thing unifying then in an irreducibly triadic relationship.
Could you reword this please? The second sentence has some critical typos. Also, isn't the sign vehicle the same thing as the sign, in that it is a signifier? I'm confused, unless you meant to say that the sign must include all three parts: representamen, object, and interpretant.

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hopefully some people will bump this while I'm asleep =/

>>23815268
>It is hard to deny, though, that Aristotle does not also incorporate something that is like modern representationalist theories in describing how the imagination works, in addition to speaking about direct apprehension.

Not really that hard; lots of scholars do it. The closest Aristotle is to representationalism is on the issue of phantasms, but this isn't really all that like indirect realism because the phantasm isn't the target of sense perception but of the intellect. And while Aristotle sometimes uses the language of image here, it's pretty clear that the intelligible isn't represented in the way sensible images are, as visual. For instance, Aristotle's God is not thought as a stream of visual sensation. Rather, the intelligible "image" is the likeness of the thing known qua intelligible. It is not the full intelligibility of a thing, but neither is it some sort of sui generis manufactured intelligibility.

So things are directly sensed, and the "image language" comes in for intelligibility and judgement. And this is where we get the scholastic doctrine that there cannot be error in the senses, (error as in falsity, "asytheta" for Aristotle, propositional knowledge). With sensation we are dealing with "adiareta,' knowledge of wholes whose opposite is ignorance, not falsity. Hence, there isn't the same issue you see in direct realism of being unable to ever discover if the "image" in the mind is actually a likeness of the "image" out there. Indeed, there is a strong sense of the identity of thinking and being throughout Aristotle that is at odds with early-modern empiricists.

>>23811612
>Are you trying to point out that the soul only "moves" itself in a roundabout way, never directly?
Yup, that's exactly Aristotle's point. All natural things are moved by an unmoved mover (re: inanimates he has two overlapping views, I'll pass that by since it's complicated, but these too are in one way or another moved by unmoved movers). The unmoved mover can't be a body and hence is only moved accidentally - just as the "nature" of your pet cat, its essence, is something non-bodily.
>are you distinguishing unmoved as different from self-moved here?
This, too, with Aristotle saying that self-motion is not strictly speaking possible.
>The thing that bothers me about relegating universals to concepts is the fact that pointing out that it is a concept often obscures the underlying metaphysical questions. What is it a concept of? How does the concept relate "structurally" to the conception?
These are certainly questions, but not ones that Aristotle addresses directly. The intelligibles are in objects not actually (as immanent realists are forced to say) but potentially, as A says in De Anima 3. That is to say, they're something our intellect grasps from the particular, specifically by comparing and having experience with many particulars (as he says in Post An 2.19).

I'll use this analogy: say there are a bunch of chairs, which differ in many ways, but are all chairs. What's the relationship between the concept "chair" and the actual chairs? Realists say that the concept "chair" is in some way substantialized and is a cause of the being of the individual chairs. This doesn't have to be in any naive way, just look at how Plotinus handles Form, the point is the universal abstraction is in some way prior to the individual chair. That may sound quite reasonable... simple objects are clearly intelligible, and how could they be what they are without an intelligible structure, and how could this not be prior to composites that come to be and pass away, and which are nothing without that intelligible structure? (cont'd)

>>23811612
But Aristotle says, "no, the concept 'chair' is only understandable as referring TO particular chairs. It's not more real, it is actually less real. Someone who makes chairs doesn't make 'chair' but any number of particular chairs. A universal like 'chair' is actually in potency to real chairs. You guys have it backward, and here are 85 arguments against the thesis that any universal concept could possibly be substance or a cause of substance.

But even though a universal concept like 'chair' is less real than the particular (a point he makes several times, including in Post An 1 toward the end), and even though it is not a thing at all, it is a principle of understanding, and in that sense it is real. And by understanding the intelligibility of the world we participate, in a sense, in the divine understanding which understands only itself. Knowledge is good, and more abstract knowledge is better because it explains more things. But even metaphysics depends on particulars, all science is a reflecting on particulars at the last analysis. Being is NOT the same as human thinking, rather human thinking is secondary to being, which is necessarily individual.

Platonists grossly misread Aristotle when they take his saying, in De Anima, that the soul "becomes" forms as meaning the soul is cognitive identified with some divine Idea in the Supernal Intellect. The mind becomes forms in the sense that your sensorium becomes colors and sounds.

>>23811612
> But if it is actually a heap or some other kind of provisional unity, then we have nothing to explain what makes the concept united (outside of being a certain coincident bundle of properties, measured appropriately)
It's certainly not a heap since not a substance or substances at all, but an "affection of the soul". It is a unity - all concepts are unities. The question you should ask yourself is - if the intellect works by "abstracting natures" from sensible phantasms, how come different people have different understandings of the same objects? Are they seeing different sides of the one nature, or what? And what is this "nature"? It can't be universal because that would be logically contradictory. It can't be particular because then it wouldn't be common. So is it, as Aquinas says, neither universal nor particular? What could something that's neither universal nor particular even be?

And if there is a common nature "man" behind all the individual men, what makes the particulars particular? Because if you say "each has its own particular form", well that form is a unity, and there is now no "man" there at all, because "man qua Socrates" is different from "man qua Callias", just as "animal qua terrestrial" is a different "animal" from "animal qua aquatic". This is an orthodox Aristotelian argument btw not some crackpot jibe. Predicates are limited in meaning by their subject. So if the subject is ultimate, there cannot be an independent "man", and the concept "man" would be secondary.

Or, say that all men are in fact one in Form, in being man, but differ because of their matter. How can matter cause a difference in form, then, I mean the differences between Callias and Socrates? If I make one ball of lead, one of plastic, I still have two balls. But Callias and Socrates clearly differ in form as well as matter, as Plotinus argued.

If each particular has its own particular form, the universal is secondary to the particular. This would not be the case with all natural substances obviously (copper is copper).

>>23812288
>What about them? These are all covered in detail.
I am aware that Neoplatonists reinterpreted every line of Plato to fit their philosophy. It is strange to me that you assume on faith that people writing 600 years after Plato had a more accurate understanding of him than Aristotle and it's annoying that you think this interpretation is absolutely canonical and impervious to criticism.
>Also, you seem to be doing this weird thing is setting up Aristotle as a representationalist ( he isn't) and using Platonism as a foil, when in fact Platonist readings of Aristotle always had strong strands that looked at particular forms.
Niggie I've been citing Plotinus in these threads for two weeks now. I don't think it's as simple as "Aristotle good, Neoplatonists bad", I do think the Neoplatonist reading of Aristotle is pretty bad in many places, and have given arguments to that effect. All you have done is parrot what you've read. You're just as bad as one of the wiki-Thomists.
>Also, you seem to be doing this weird thing is setting up Aristotle as a representationalist ( he isn't)
I'm saying that Aristotle denied that universals (mental concepts) were entities or primary. This is an argument he makes from the very first page all the way to the last, over and over again, from multiple angles.
>The claim that Aristotle is definitely not an immanent realist is particularly bizarre when he is the paradigmatic example, what the term is literally coined to describe.
Immanent realism in the sense of a "common nature" that is the cause of the being of particulars starts with Alexander of Aphrodisias. I know it's an influential interpretation, especially because it helped the harmonizers, but it's not a unanimous interpretation at all, and in fact there is overwhelming evidence against it. If by "immanent realism" you mean "our universal concepts are grounded in particulars and in that sense immanently real" - yes, that's the philosopher's view. If you mean "there is this metaphysical, intelligible entity that causes the being of particulars" - no, again he argues against this extensively. You'd know that if you ever bothered to study him.

>>23812703
>As in, we can apply it to anything that behaves like magnitude? Bigger, smaller, hotter, colder, brighter, duller, (now this gets even trickier), smarter, dumber, any of the extremes to the mean featured in NE, etc.?
Yup, any number that's continuously divisible is what he means metonymously by "speech". I'm not sure what Averroes' source was here or if he even though it up himself, but it's an ingenious interpretation since without this genus his division would be incomplete. I'm pretty sure it's not in Porphyry because it isn't in Boethius.
>I just don't understand the drama then. The soul isn't just the intellect, so if we share an intellect, what's the big deal? We still have our own potential intellect in either system.
If the intellect isn't ours, then we aren't immortal, for one thing, according to the logic of either of them. And this is a question of the nature of cognition.
>Are you treating essence as a bundle of essential properties here?
It's not a bundle, it's a unity, as Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics. It only becomes picked apart into a "bundle" when it's understood by an animal like us, in itself it's all one. Neoplatonists like to think Aristotle's "intelligible matter" is ontological but it isn't, it's logical.
>What does prior "by nature" mean, then? Is this another potency distinction being pointed out, said a different way?
It means you can't know the posterior without knowing the prior, but you can know the prior without the posterior, and the prior is often of greater extension than the posterior.

>>23813942
>If the secondary substance doesn't exist prior to the mind then it would seem to be something the mind creates.
Nope, not for Aristotle anyway. See above when we were talking about how man is not the measure of all things but is measured by all things. You might as well say that you "create" the color of the flower because it only occurs in relation to your vision. You keep calling me a "representationalist", this is straight Peripateticism, and there is no correspondence problem, because your mind isn't cobbling together an intelligible copy of things, but understanding them conceptually as they are qua intelligible. My point is that the universal concepts do not and cannot exist in the things or be some metaphysical aspect of their being, but that they are secondary.
>For one can never "step outside experience" to see if one's ideas correspond to reality. But this is a modern problem
And it isn't a problem for Aristotle or for me.
>Indeed, what could we even say if all we know, all the intelligibility of the world, is something constructed by the mind
>constructed by the mind
There you go again. You can't grasp that denying that universals are substances or exist somehow "in" particulars does not mean making them constructions generated by the human brain.
>>23814097
You are such a pseud quoting secondary literature when you have no familiarity with the primary, doubly a pseud for quoting Perl. The thesis that the mind becomes super-natural essences which are the cause of the being of the particulars is neoplatonism, not Aristotle, and it's denied repeatedly by Aristotle that such entities could even exist.

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>mfw Perl cites Parmenides on the identity of thought and being, when Aristotle offers his own quotation in Meta 4 showing that Parmenides had a pre-socratic understanding of cognition in which it is nothing but a sort of sense
He does this because Plotinus does it, obviously, and that's his Authority.
>mfw Perl claims Aristotle thought his divine intellect was just like Plotinus' nous, even though Aristotle denies that there is any composition or complexity in his God
Again, he's repeating what Plotinus said uncritically. Plotinus can be just as unfair to Aristotle as Aristotle was to Plato.
>mfw Perl thinks Aristotle's view on form is the same as Plato's but for putting them all in one intellect, which is what Plato meant to do all along anyway
Kek, maybe if you squint your eyes and stand on your head while you read the Metaphysics
>mfw Perl denies that Plato believed in the immortality of the soul
Fucking LOL

So in review:
Aristotle's fundamental criticism of Plato is that he understood the separated substances (divinities, Forms, etc.) by analogy to our own experience of the world. This is how you end up with Forms or Ideas, whether in an intellect or apart from it, which are the True Causes of all their particulars, even IF you modify this theory along the lines of Sophist to allow for Forms of Individuals as well, which are under the first Form. For Aristotle, the intellect that causes everything is not thinking Forms but only itself, else it would not be simple and first - just like Plotinus' One, in fact, which Plotinus describes as thinking itself (katanoesis) in such a way as to transcend any subject/object dichotomy. Aristotle denies that there is any need for a 'one over many', like Man, in any way. The only reason you have pseuds arguing with me on this point is that they mostly know Aristotle at second-hand via Platonists and Platonizing "scholars" like Perl. The mode of causation of Aristotle's God is, in fact, not so far from Plotinus', because Plotinus' emanationism is ripping off Aristotle without attribution. The Gods cause the heavenly spheres because they are ends, the spheres playing a similar role to Plotinus' Intellect in that they are secondary to and desire the Firsts. And the sublunary world is analogous to Soul.

When we cognize something, we do cognize that thing insofar as it is cognizable. That's an important qualification because particulars are not really intelligible at all, because they are not universal or eternal. Where Plato and Plotinus make particulars "images" of supernatural Forms, Aristotle makes these unintelligible particulars the paradoxical ground of intelligibility. But all being is intelligible, and Aristotle is not saying that our concepts are MERE representations, again they are secondary to real particulars. "Hurr how can my conception of man be real? Isn't it just a model?" Yes, nignog, it isn't real, there is no such man as "just man", but it is real in that it derives from real things, and it allows us to understand real things to the extent that we can understand them.

Platonists think "well Aristotle believed in eternal knowledge, like geometry, so I guess that means he believes in eternal Intelligible Beings in a Divine Intellect :)" but it's bullshit, this is exactly the view he's arguing against. The fact that the world makes sense is indeed due to a primary intellect, but it isn't thinking about triangles.

Some cool sites for Aristotelians:
The Quantum Thomist at https://www.quantum-thomist.co.uk/:
Author of site is a quantum physicist, great stuff here, the main aim is showing how Thomist (i.e. Aristotelian) philosophy works with quantum physics better than modern philosophies do.
The Smithy at https://lyfaber.blogspot.com/:
Great blog by a Scotist, Franciscan friar and one other author. His "How to Be a Metaphysician" is top shelf and ought to be posted in every 'how do I into philosophy?' thread. The authors like to lampoon the Radical Orthodoxy movement and, in general, the anti-Scotist and anti-Occamist tendency within the Catholic Church, but most posts are fairly technical.
https://www.metafysica.nl/:
Site made by a highly educated oddball interpreting Aristotle in a generally naturalistic way. Delightful stuff even if you don't agree with everything.
Theory and History of Ontology: https://www.ontology.co/index.htm
This is a golden site. It's about the history of the development of both logic and metaphysics in the West, not exclusively focused on Aristotle at all, but there is a lot about Aristotle as there'd have to be in such a treatment.
Another one to check out, Hegel's treatment of Aristotle in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hp/hparistotle.htm). Hegel understands the particularism of Aristotle's ontology, i.e. the same view the OP has been defending for the past two threads, so that's nice. He says Aristotle is the greatest of the ancient philosophers and that he is widely misunderstood. "One reason for treating of Aristotle in detail rests in the fact that no philosopher has had so much wrong done him by the thoughtless traditions which have been received respecting his philosophy, and which are still the order of the day, although for centuries he was the instructor of all philosophers. For to him views are ascribed diametrically opposite to his philosophy." Preach it.

>>23818262
Hegel also says that Plotinus owes more to Aristotle than he does to Plato, which is certainly true.

wonderful responses but I literally won't have the time or energy to respond for like 36 hours. hopefully it'll still be up by then.

>>23786109
>these conclusions
This is why I lost interest in philosophy. It's stupid dead people making stupid arguments about stupid shit that doesn't matter.

>>23818262
>The Quantum Thomist
interesting. quantum physics + Thomist ontology is what Wolfgang Smith said was the solution in correcting modernist scientism

bump

>>23817633
That isn't Perl. That's Robert Sokolowski. Not every Aristotle scholar is the same two guys whose names you know and keep repeating (as obviously trash, compared to your enlightened 4chan poster opinion where Aristotle is basically Kant and thinks God is Zeus).

>>23817633
Also:
>Ya gotta use the primary source
>He himself has retard tier understanding of it but acts as an absolute authority while spouting off shit most Aristotle scholars explicitly deny.

Literally any retard can come to a translation, pick an opinon, and jump around the text cherry picking shit to defend it. People do this with the Bible all the fucking time despite having hardly any real understanding.

It's very easy to pile up quotes as a sophist to create a smoke screen that will perhaps confuse the novice, but just shows you are engaging in sophistry, arguing about shit you don't really understand for the sake of arguing, for anyone else. This is classic sophistry.

That you can't tell Deely from Perl from Sokolowski convinces me that you aren't even an arrogant graduate student talking about Aristotle, but some undergrad, probably not even parroting your own position.

>>23817364
>The closest Aristotle is to representationalism is on the issue of phantasms, but this isn't really all that like indirect realism because the phantasm isn't the target of sense perception but of the intellect.
How come the instrument makes a difference here? Both sense-perception and intellect are "engines" of sentience. You'd think both could cause a homunculus infinite regression. I'm also not versed in the terminology being used here, "indirect realism", "direct realism", etc., so you'll have to forgive me if I'm asking questions that seem answered already.
>And while Aristotle sometimes uses the language of image here, it's pretty clear that the intelligible isn't represented in the way sensible images are, as visual.
One thing that has bothered me is what "sensible" and "intelligible" meant in De Anima. Are they metaphysical "signposts", indicating external objects versus internal objects (objects being comprehended), or do they indicate completely different ontological aspects? Where and when in the "mechanism" of cognition does the intelligible come into play? Sense-perception or imagination (where)? Common sense or the calculative faculty (when)? What else?

>>23817470
>This, too, with Aristotle saying that self-motion is not strictly speaking possible.
Not even for the celestial bodies or *the* Unmoved Mover? I always thought that self-moved and unmoved were the same thing, especially when thinking about Aquinas's argument for there being a cause by the virtue of its own essence (I know Aquinas is not Aristotle, but still).

>>23817470
>>23817500
So, the key takeaway is that Aristotle's act versus potency distinction is active here, correct? The way I'm reading this, it's that genera/species/etc., are always in potency to instantiated individuals, so they can't be fully cognized as acts the same way individuals are. They are only cognized as broader potencies. And a potency, while not being nothing, is also not a something. You know, I'm kind of liking Aristotle's intellection of universals as the grasping of a pleroma of potentiality.
>Being is NOT the same as human thinking, rather human thinking is secondary to being, which is necessarily individual.
To what extent does Aristotle reject the world being intelligible, both in a soft sense (not grasping acts bot potencies) and in a hard sense (being completely unintelligible, without any reconciliation)?
>Platonists grossly misread Aristotle when they take his saying, in De Anima, that the soul "becomes" forms as meaning the soul is cognitive identified with some divine Idea in the Supernal Intellect. The mind becomes forms in the sense that your sensorium becomes colors and sounds.
We're referring to the famous Bk3Ch5 here, right?

That's all I have time to ask for now. Thank you the insight. I'll be back later if I can.

>>23817775
>but that's bullshit
A thought thinking of itself is indeed bullshit, congratulations you suck at ontotheology.

>>23817523
I'm back.
>It's certainly not a heap since not a substance or substances at all, but an "affection of the soul".
Well, heaps aren't substances IIRC. So I think that would be apt to apply here, seeing that it is united but not on an intrinsic and self-standing basis (and thus not a substance).
>So is it, as Aquinas says, neither universal nor particular? What could something that's neither universal nor particular even be?
I'm not familiar with Aquinas's exact verbiage on this specific topic, but I've always likened it to be somewhere in-between a particular and a universal. Granted, I don't think that's coherent, but I'm not giving him the fairest shake here.

>And if there is a common nature "man" behind all the individual men, what makes the particulars particular? Because if you say "each has its own particular form", well that form is a unity, and there is now no "man" there at all, because "man qua Socrates" is different from "man qua Callias", just as "animal qua terrestrial" is a different "animal" from "animal qua aquatic". This is an orthodox Aristotelian argument btw not some crackpot jibe. Predicates are limited in meaning by their subject. So if the subject is ultimate, there cannot be an independent "man", and the concept "man" would be secondary.
To what extent can we allow subjects to be in potency? Almost every subject has act and potency. If the problem is that man is in potency to Socrates, well, Socrates isn't lacking in potency either. I know this goes deeper (the so-called "floor" of the Categories), but we have to ask ourselves why the "floor" matters.

>>23817577
>If you mean "there is this metaphysical, intelligible entity that causes the being of particulars" - no, again he argues against this extensively. You'd know that if you ever bothered to study him.
I'm not part of that conversation but it seems like Aristotle argues for that, at least in the sense that the Unmoved Mover is responsible for intelligibility, and that it moves things accidentally in that all things strive to be like it.

(1/?)

>>23817592
>Yup, any number that's continuously divisible is what he means metonymously by "speech". I'm not sure what Averroes' source was here or if he even though it up himself, but it's an ingenious interpretation since without this genus his division would be incomplete.
Wait, Averroes' division of the Categories? Why would it be incomplete without it? I mean, I would have simply put most of those topics under Quality, Relation, or something along those lines.
>If the intellect isn't ours, then we aren't immortal, for one thing, according to the logic of either of them. And this is a question of the nature of cognition.
I personally do not understand why the intellect being immortal is an issue. If it's something that all participate in as a unity, then it's merely a non-factor. The question becomes then if there's anything about the soul that is immortal, something higher or lower than the intellect (e.g. the will), or the soul as a whole. I assume this is because of the importance thinkers here placed on the intellect, which I imagine is something that other Scholastics would not have had a problem with.
>It's not a bundle, it's a unity, as Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics. It only becomes picked apart into a "bundle" when it's understood by an animal like us, in itself it's all one. Neoplatonists like to think Aristotle's "intelligible matter" is ontological but it isn't, it's logical.
Okay, so essence as in particular form. Got it. But the limited/unlimited part is still perplexing to me.

Also, when somebody says there's an "logical, not an ontological" distinction, is this more of a psychological "understanding aspects/parts/etc. but not the whole" issue here? It's hard *not* to associate something logical with the ontological, especially when it has some grounding in reality.

>>23817742
This is kind of related, but what do you think of Plotinus's critique of Aristotle's Categories? IIRC Plotinus wanted to slash Aristotle's Categories to like, 4-5 lol.

>>23817775
>even IF you modify this theory along the lines of Sophist to allow for Forms of Individuals as well, which are under the first Form.
This is an interesting twist. What do you think of Late Plato's tweaking of the theory of forms to be both individual and under several "great forms"?

>>23818262
Fantastic links, anon. Thank you for saving them!

(2/2)

>>23818262
>The authors like to lampoon the Radical Orthodoxy movement
meh, the anti-Scotus obsession in RO seems like a case of refusing to admit a mistake and doubling down, but I like Milbank apart from that, mainly because I like Hart lol.

>>23818262
>Radical Orthodoxy
What is that? Is that like trad Ortho larping or what? That's weird because Orthos tend to be a lot friendlier to Scotus than other Catholic figures like Aquinas.

>>23822259
Anglicans.
They're pretty close to the resourcement movement basically, denial of pure nature, that sort of thing.
David Bentley Hart (who's an orthodox, although definitely not "trad" nor a larper) is not part of radical orthodoxy per se but he has a lot of common ground with Milbank.

>>23818262
> "One reason for treating of Aristotle in detail rests in the fact that no philosopher has had so much wrong done him by the thoughtless traditions which have been received respecting his philosophy, and which are still the order of the day, although for centuries he was the instructor of all philosophers. For to him views are ascribed diametrically opposite to his philosophy." Preach it.

lol, people with very varied takes on Aristotle or Plato will say this shit and not realize they sound just as stupid as Christians each arguing about how their sects particular reading of the Bible is "totally the recovery of the real authentic meaning bro!" It's actually stupider because they can't even appeal to divine revelation.

As if such a thing is even verifiable and worth claiming. "Actually, all these people who grew up in a similar cultural context and spoke the language of the texts as a native language, they didn't understand it at all. Totally wrong. Whereas I have recovered the original message despite the language being dead and me speaking it as a second language having never converted with anyone fluent in the dialect (because it is extinct). And yes, I can tell all this despite only having access to texts whose exact composition and text are unknown to me and which might in large parts have been penned by other people entirely."

I mean, the straightforward explanation for shit like contradictions between books 5-6 of the physics and then book 8 is that they were written at different times or might very well have been written by different students. They are collated at a far later date and plenty could have happened to them in between.

It's stupid. Either the ideas hold weight or they don't. There is no point appealing to the authority of the "real Aristotle." A bad reading would be a bad reading even if Aristotle actually had ideas of that sort (which is unknowable).

>>23822395
That's quite the diatribe. Hegel's saying something eminently reasonable. He gives an example:

"Quite false views respecting Aristotle even now exist in France. An example of how tradition blindly echoes opinions respecting him, without having observed from his works whether they are justified or not, is the fact that in the old Æsthetics the three unities of the drama – action, time and place – were held to be règles d'Aristote, la saine doctrine. But Aristotle speaks (Poet. c. 8 et 5) only of the unity of treatment, or very occasionally of the unity of time; of the third unity, that of place, he says nothing."

That is, the tradition by Hegel's day was such as to remain satisfied with such characterizations. That this is eminently a reasonable and plausible criticism can be seen in how often the same happens to Hegel's work, re: "thesis-antithesis-synthesis".

>I mean, the straightforward explanation for shit like contradictions between books 5-6 of the physics and then book 8 is that they were written at different times or might very well have been written by different students. They are collated at a far later date and plenty could have happened to them in between.
>It's stupid. Either the ideas hold weight or they don't. There is no point appealing to the authority of the "real Aristotle." A bad reading would be a bad reading even if Aristotle actually had ideas of that sort (which is unknowable).
I don't see how this is less speculative, since you need to assume that the text is made up of student notes, or the notes of multiple students, or that Aristotle would take leave of a piece of writing and come back later to add to it something he's totally changed his mind about, or assume multiple things about how ancient texts were edited or collated, etc. And certainly Aristotle's intent must matter. As discussed above in this thread, this is an author who wrote a public work affirming full personal immortality of the soul, and a school work denying, and who in his works of practical philoso0hy, by his own measure being lesser than theoretical philosophy, discusses teleology in a way totally at odds with his discussions of teleology in the theoretical works. I don't see how that's more convoluted to take in hand when interpreting him than postulating the Aristotelian equivalent of the Documentary Hypothesis. We moderns differ in our canons of coherence than the ancients. Even granting your second paragraph, the ancients regularly thought he was double-speaking, contrary to what your preferred explanation by the end.

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>>23823357
>>23824910
>>23825392
>>23825909
it's over faggot, give it a rest

>>23826236
kill yourself nigger, it's over when I say it's over

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>>23822240
what do you think of this? https://www.degruyter.com/database/WPR/entry/wpr.28298978/html

>>23820418
You haven't cited Aristotle one single solitary time in this entire thread. You just repeat "everyone knows Aristotle is an immanent realist" and "Aristotle said the intellect becomes forms" over and over again, that and ad homs, and the argument in your quote is definitely one that Perl (and every other Platonist) makes. It is obvious to any third party reading the thread that you are out of your depth.

>>23822218
>Well, heaps aren't substances IIRC
No, but they are heaps of substances.
>I've always likened it to be somewhere in-between a particular and a universal. Granted, I don't think that's coherent
You're right, it isn't.

I have to point out once again that the view that Aristotle thought that universals were grounded in particulars is a perfectly mainstream view within academia. That one anon just hasn't heard of it and hasn't read enough Aristotle to realize why it's a viable interpretation.

bump

>>23827031
NTA but you should try googling "immanent realism," because it is indeed a fact that this label was created/is primarily used for Aristotle (per conventional interpretations) and Aristotleans. It's in all the search results, AI knows it, it's in introductory logic texts (the ones that even bother mentioning the relevance of metaphysics at least), it's in introductions like the Routledge Contemporary Introduction To series, etc. That claim at least is not dubious.

>>23822218
>>23822240
bump since a lot of conversations have yet to be carried forward
>>23827043
>No, but they are heaps of substances.
True, but the only thing that exists are substances anyways. The problem is that the concept is not a thing since a heap is not a thing and thus there's a question as to why we are able to perceive a "unity" between the collected substances at all. What is the object that the concept is mapping onto or grasping to identify a unity, even a provisional one such as a heap? If it is not a thing, then there can't be a unity, since being and unity go hand in hand.

>>23829083
Perhaps it's not a unity per se, but ...co-aggregates. https://lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com/35816.html

File: Ma nigga.jpg (39 KB, 492x623)

39 KB JPG

A "heap" is pretty much just positive substance, just like "void" is negative substance.

>>23829212
The switch to "co-aggregate" is not helpful because many of the objects that we are relegating to "mere concepts" are also not just "mere aggregates." Whatever boundaries they have, and however they may be different in relation to the minds of multiple knowers, those boundaries are not arbitrary. If there weren't "boundaries associated with unity" in the first place, then these concepts could not be something of a whole but rather a robust collection of principles that could be chosen at any whim. How is it even possible to aggregate things at all, let alone to speak of things that have "focal unity" (so, not quite unrelated, but not quite a substance either), is still a mystery to me.
>>23829257
I hate that gigachad edit on Hegel. It is profoundly ugly and carries brainrot connotations.

>>23829257
A void is an intangible condition of the absence of everything, it is the state of nothingness but not truly nothing in itself, for it abstains from objectivity which exists independently of any knower as a well formed concept that can be known by any other minds and souls without needing to cite the first person to have used the term void. Aristotelians refuse to acknowledge the existence of intangible forms that doesn't objectively exists so heaps in a sense, also doesn't exist for them as they are immament substance reductionists that makes things-in-themselves only be exclusively of the physical thing-in-itself and all non-physical things-in-themselves are denied, as too "multiple things that are not themselves" which is also a non-physical form(or a conglomeration of forms which is also still a form in Platonism or a being in naive "Parmenideanism" just as the form of a horse and a table is too, a Platonic form) that may lack a particular primacy and instantiation, but Aristotelians can't handle how things that normally doesn't exist to suddenly exist or vice versa, for the intangible form of the deceased Dodo species never was tangible to anyone currently alive, and Black Swans that didn't thought to ever exist were discovered in Australia, as in, falsification isn't permitted in Aristotelianism, which his theories on how gravity works has been falsified and lead to the scientific renaissance movement. All that the obnoxious Aristotlefag (comparatively to the other Aristotelians lurking) can say is that basedence is wrong and are pseuds and everyone else are pseuds for not thinking the same way in the most anal retentive display of butthurt that is on par with Tweetophon and Sankarafag in the top three people who should truly shut the fuck up. Nevertheless, Aristotle was full of hypocritical double speak and so a sign of a muddled, mentally perturbed, and self-incoherent gardener and biologist that only invokes a flair of deep profundity when taken out of context makes him seems better than any cohesive reimagining of his system. The form of confusion doesn't exist to the confused mind that cant realize when a concept is fundamentally, irrevocably ill-formed.
>>23829282
"Brainrot" is a stand-in for neurosyphilitic psychopathy, as Nietzsche was a syphilitic moronic faggot, and their sycophantic Neo-Straussian Twitter-core Vitalists that are most likely homosexuals gay rights and everything terrible in Neoconservatism. Nothing is being conserved in conservatism other than a regression towards LARPing as members of the Platonic Academy having faggy Symposium tier same sex tension.

>>23829389
touch grass

>>23829869
eat shit, shit eater

>>23830163
boo get a real philosophy

>>23830340
It sure ain't Aristotelian to say the least, and Plato also didn't get what was number but nobody sees the heaps in the aggregation-in-itself just as nobody really sees the screen when images appear on the computer monitor. Mimesis is not quite Soma but not quite Idea either, it is somewhere in between. Plato already had a tripartite gradation of the forms but most people obsess more on the divided line instead. Heaps are Imitation of the Ideas Imagined and are Subjectively Real to the Beholder of Heaps, it is a subjective form and not completely true nor completely false, for it is after all an opinion.

https://metaphysicsjournal.com/articles/10.5334/met.4

". Aristotle is usually classified as a Moderate Realist, but his view is actually a version of Nominalism, in the sense that Aristotle’s account denies the existence of ante rem (or in re) universals (universals that ground the character of their instances). For Aristotle, universals exist only as intentional objects of the intellect (post rem). For Aristotle, everything real is particular. (This is, of course, a controversial interpretation. Those who (like me) take Aristotelian forms (both substantial and accidental) to be particulars include Witt (1989), Frede (1987, 72–80), and Irwin (1988, 248–276, 569n1).)"

See, it is a mainstream position. And you can find more than them defending it. You guys assume that I'm denying that universal truths are real, grounded in sensible things, eternally true, etc, and that anyone who accepts that they are must be a realist. But this isn't true, I've explained the differences between the positions ad nauseam. Anyone who doesn't recognize this is not familiar with Aristotle scholarship and not familiar with Aristotle himself. If they were, they would recognize the strengths and weaknesses of this position and be able to raise an intelligent attack that's not "if you ask chatgpt it says Aristotle was a moderate realist."

Of course in a way he was a moderate realist. The issue here is the metaphysical status of universal concepts in themselves - is Bob actually caused by a nature, Humanity, in matter, or is our concept of Humanity secondary to individuals? That is what is at issue. But you keep assuming I'm a Kantian or a "representationalist" because you don't understand the debate or the faultlines in the corpus itself.

>>23829083
>The problem is that the concept is not a thing since a heap is not a thing and thus there's a question as to why we are able to perceive a "unity" between the collected substances at all.
No, a concept is not a thing, it is an affection of the soul, as Aristotle says.
>What is the object that the concept is mapping onto or grasping to identify a unity, even a provisional one such as a heap?
The object is an intelligible which exists potentially in the particulars. It becomes actual when it is understood. You're writing as if 'after all there must be some sort of THING actually there in the particular for me to know it', but this not so, in fact a "thing" in the sense of an intelligible could not, in principle, exist within a particular. Aristotle rejects this view over and over - I've cited other examples earlier, consider too in Meta 13 when Aristotle denies that mathematical universals exist "in" particulars. Understand I'm talking primarily about living things here, which do differ one from another as individuals (they are not identical in "primary substance" but only specifically).
> If it is not a thing, then there can't be a unity, since being and unity go hand in hand.
You're conflating substance and being. The concept is a "thing" in the sense that it is a being, it is not a thing in the sense of substance. Nor can it possibly be a substance because it is 'predicable of many' and substances are particular.

>>23822395
>lol, people with very varied takes on Aristotle or Plato will say this shit and not realize they sound just as stupid as Christians each arguing about how their sects particular reading of the Bible is "totally the recovery of the real authentic meaning bro!" It's actually stupider because they can't even appeal to divine revelation.
Well this is a shitpost but I'll respond anyway. There's arguing about what Aristotle meant, and this is interesting to some of us even if not to you; and then there's arguing about philosophical truth, claiming that Aristotle actually said x and that x is true, which is what I've been doing. That's why I've given both independent arguments and citations. It's not really like religious debate at all because it is logical. If you think it's a waste of time, go on and do whatever you think is valuable friendo.
>As if such a thing is even verifiable and worth claiming. "Actually, all these people who grew up in a similar cultural context and spoke the language of the texts as a native language, they didn't understand it at all. Totally wrong. Whereas I have recovered the original message despite the language being dead and me speaking it as a second language having never converted with anyone fluent in the dialect (because it is extinct). And yes, I can tell all this despite only having access to texts whose exact composition and text are unknown to me and which might in large parts have been penned by other people entirely."
The view I'm defending goes back to the Greeks, the origin really is Plotinus vs. Alexander on individuation, even if Plotinus was a Platonist. If you think this is something wacky you just don't know what you're talking about.
>I mean, the straightforward explanation for shit like contradictions between books 5-6 of the physics and then book 8 is that they were written at different times or might very well have been written by different students. They are collated at a far later date and plenty could have happened to them in between.
People lean on developmentalism too hastily. Most of the time, views in different books are compatible, not contrary. Give me some examples of where you suppose Aristotle's thought has developed and I will explain them, but I don't think you could do this.
>Either the ideas hold weight or they don't
Agreed.

Another issue is simply language - terms like nominalist and realist are vague. When I say Aristotle is a nominalist, I mean that he denied that concepts were substances (everyone agrees on this) and also deny that he believed in a Nature that is prior to particulars and universals (this is what's more controversial). But I've been consistently clear about what I mean. The two sides here are like this:

1.) Particular things are the absolute grounds of concepts and are prior to intelligibility. Particulars are not "made of" thoughts or secondary to intelligibles.

2.) There's this third entity that is neither thought nor particular which is the cause of the formal being of particulars and also the universality of concepts.

That's backdoor Platonism, and I'd say it's impossible to conceive of this "Nature" (which is not in Aristotle btw) in a way that avoids A's criticisms of universals as being substance. No one has even explained to us how an entity can be neither particular nor universal, just "REEE everyone knows Aristotle was a moderate realist!"

>>23830457
"Opinion" is, in general, a terrible rendering for what Plato is getting at here. We have to be careful about projecting modern subject/object dualism back onto the ancients, particularly the idea of the "subjective" as constituting its own discrete realm that has an arbitrary relationship to reality.

The appearances of a thing are still the appearances OF that thing. Reality can't be set up as over and against appearances in Plato, something like the "view from nowhere" constituting knowledge of reality, but rather the absolute, in being properly absolute, includes all appearances, all relative good, etc.

>>23829389
>A void is an intangible condition of the absence of everything
No. You're making void the same thing as privation, where void is an absence of body in space.
>it is the state of nothingness but not truly nothing in itself
How can the state of nothingness be other than nothing? If it isn't nothing, it isn't a state of nothingness. "Oh you don't understand, it IS nothing, therefore it is not NOTHING absolutely, because it IS!" Yawn, 'being' is an equivocal.
>for it abstains from objectivity which exists independently of any knower as a well formed concept that can be known by any other minds and souls without needing to cite the first person to have used the term void.
This sentence is unintelligible as written.
>. Aristotelians refuse to acknowledge the existence of intangible forms that doesn't objectively exists so heaps in a sense, also doesn't exist for them as they are immament substance reductionists that makes things-in-themselves only be exclusively of the physical thing-in-itself and all non-physical things-in-themselves are denied, as too "multiple things that are not themselves" which is also a non-physical form(or a conglomeration of forms which is also still a form in Platonism or a being in naive "Parmenideanism" just as the form of a horse and a table is too, a Platonic form) that may lack a particular primacy and instantiation, but Aristotelians can't handle how things that normally doesn't exist to suddenly exist or vice versa, for the intangible form of the deceased Dodo species never was tangible to anyone currently alive, and Black Swans that didn't thought to ever exist were discovered in Australia, as in, falsification isn't permitted in Aristotelianism, which his theories on how gravity works has been falsified and lead to the scientific renaissance movement.
On the contrary, Aristotle does believe that universals are absolutely extratemporal. So a statement about a dodo bird, as referring to something intelligible, is as true now as it was then, because universal/scientific concepts are not concerned with the existence of particulars, which fall under doxa just as in Plato. However this concept of the dodo bird derives from actual dodo birds and is not prior to the birds, each of which has its own essence, as he demonstrates in Meta 7. You, like others ITT, do not understand how you can deny that the abstract concept world "dodo bird" is a substance while simultaneously allowing that true propositions can be made of this abstraction. It's baffling that so many people are tripped up by this. Aristotle absolutely DOES talk about how forms pass in and out of existence (like points or other limits, not by a process of becoming/perishing).

>All that the obnoxious Aristotlefag (comparatively to the other Aristotelians lurking) can say is that basedence is wrong and are pseuds and everyone else are pseuds for not thinking the same way in the most anal retentive display of butthurt that is on par with Tweetophon and Sankarafag in the top three people who should truly shut the fuck up.
I respond rudely to people who are rude to me, yes. I've been making legitimate arguments and having good conversations with plenty of people, but when someone just says "no no you're wrong, I heard Aristotle was a realist, omg you're so wrong bro" without any arguments or knowledge of Aristotle, it is annoying.
> Nevertheless, Aristotle was full of hypocritical double speak and so a sign of a muddled, mentally perturbed, and self-incoherent gardener and biologist that only invokes a flair of deep profundity when taken out of context makes him seems better than any cohesive reimagining of his system. The form of confusion doesn't exist to the confused mind that cant realize when a concept is fundamentally, irrevocably ill-formed.
Do you have any arguments or what? I'm not calling anyone who disagrees with me a pseud, understand. I could write good arguments against my own view with citations in the texts. But I never get that, just seethe, cope, schizobabble, etc. Is there even one person here who has read all of A's works even once or twice, let alone over and over again? Why do people get so confused about basic points of categorialism and hylemorphism?

This site is 99.9% composed of pseuds and I don't know why I bother posting. The average age is about 19. Enjoy your Hindoo threads, your Guenon threads, your Crowley threads.

When I look at threads like this, it's blatantly comprehensible why Leibniz dreamed of a characteristica universalis and Peirce proposed Pragmaticism.

>>23830791
I hesitate to confirm whether you answered my question or understood what I was getting at here. Even if the intelligible principle within a particular grasped by the intellect was only a potential and not an act of the particular, it still provides the boundaries necessary for the unity of thought which allows for the concept to be of something in particular. Though, I think we might be in agreement here?
>You're conflating substance and being. The concept is a "thing" in the sense that it is a being, it is not a thing in the sense of substance. Nor can it possibly be a substance because it is 'predicable of many' and substances are particular.
Being, existence, act, potency, and unity. Does potency have being and unity even though potency is not the direct means by which anything exists?
>>23830849
>Another issue is simply language - terms like nominalist and realist are vague. When I say Aristotle is a nominalist, I mean that he denied that concepts were substances (everyone agrees on this) and also deny that he believed in a Nature that is prior to particulars and universals (this is what's more controversial).
To caveat on your point, I think people fail to recognize how much work the act/potency distinction does to bridge the ontological gaps in Aristotle's philosophy and enable a more harmonious system of philosophy that otherwise functions like a realist philosophy. It's only a hardcore nominalism if you deny the work the potency seems to be doing in thought.
>1.) Particulars are not "made of" thoughts or secondary to intelligibles.
But don't particulars have forms? And isn't the form what is grasped by the intellect? I suppose the more important question is, aren't thoughts pure forms (and whatever the intellect is made of as it moves between forms)?
>2.) There's this third entity that is neither thought nor particular which is the cause of the formal being of particulars and also the universality of concepts
Well, I brought up how that might be the case here: >>23822218.
>>23830905
>It's baffling that so many people are tripped up by this. Aristotle absolutely DOES talk about how forms pass in and out of existence (like points or other limits, not by a process of becoming/perishing).
Is the form passing in and out of existence only by act, not by potency? The potency is probably what prevents us from saying that the form has fully been created or destroyed.
>>23830922
>This site is 99.9% composed of pseuds and I don't know why I bother posting.
Ignore the pseuds. What you and other Aristotelian anons have been doing lately has been skyrocketing the Aristotle IQ of the board lately. I last read Aristotle in college, and that was mostly NE/Politics/Rhetoric/Poetics for pol phil. and literature classes + some Categories/De Anima/Metaphysics as part of a survey course. But now I decided to order the Organon, Physics, and Metaphysics and plan on reading it once they arrive. You are changing this board for the better.

Opinions are not strictly without truth nor lies not is it excluded as a middle, but it is the tendency for neurotic folks to treat things as pure truths or pure lies. There is a "true opinion" to someone that isn't certain about some falsehood. Its basis is both true and false, its dependent upon someone's mind and so cannot really be a well formed concept that exists independently of someone's mind, whereby the intangible form of the Dodo and the intangible form of the Black Swan both can be entertained as an image in one's imagination. The horned rabbit which the Indians denied that exists technically does exists as an effect of a virus that infects a rabbit, forming keratinous growth growing out of its head despite the argument that it can't ever exists is akin to Hegel's declaration that there are only seven planets in the solar system. We must acknowledge the limitations of our frame of reference to being limited and will always be as such, the expansion of this frame is always limited and never unlimited, so an unbounded truth cannot be known, contrary to those that put infinity-in-itself and nothing-in-itself on a pedestal. Infinity is finitely spoken or named but cannot be infinitely reified, it doesn't have an attribute that it can be bounded to, it self contradicts itself if it is treated as something finite, and it is dependent upon the minds of fools that believe in the concept of infinity is by any means well defined when it is not. Infinity is still a concept and not a percept. The condition of nothingness as an intangible nothing is actualized positively by the absence of everything tangible, it exists independently from us by abstaining from objectivity. Nothing-in-itself however, is spoken as something, self referential despite technically not being nothing, nothing can't contain nothing, the act of thinking "nothing is" depends on a mind that exists besides nothing. The attributes of nothing makes it something and not nothing, it can't have attributes in a positive manner unlike void which is devoid of everything in an intangible manner. The deflation of the distinct, different meaning of void into and as nothing-in-itself is a sign of a weak minded fool, I could had easily substituted the attribute of the void from condition of nothing to empty space and it will still be valid as an attribute that the void positively possesses. The well formed concept of void is really not that different from a "tabula rasa" but of course in a different framework altogether that adheres to the reality of both tangible and intangible "things-in-themselves". The conceptualization itself presumes a given, that is, a mind that differentiates percepts by comparison whereby it formulates concepts of the objects of perception. Heaps are a mind-dependent concept and denying its well-formedness does not negate its status as a concept as too all other concepts, but it is known by what it lacks in a negative sense, one knows they don't know for a reason.

>>23831518
He can spew a bunch of things but just result to peddling Aristotle's opinions as a strict Aristotelian will just reiterate that there is no intelligible beings in the mind, yet the form of our disdain of Aristotelian inconsistencies lives rent free in his mind, thinking he has refuted something but only in some way forced to admit a stance that ends up mimicking Tweetophon's stance that generation and death does not negate the being, contrary to what is being observed phenomenally, that it in some way exists independently from the destruction of its instantiation, but the explanation of it is of course ends up reiterating or just reaffirming the previously cited stance of the consensus, contributing nothing of value that hasn't already in some way pre-regurgitated since he tries very hard not to inject his true thoughts on Aristotle mixed in with what Aristotle says, lamenting by how Leibniz and Peirce had done what they had simply because Aristotle's very nuanced points just get lost extremely fast because of many tensions that he sets up deliberately does not get resolved even if they have "read" through Aristotle, they won't understand him until they read modern commentaries on the nuanced takes and so the Aristotlefag LARPing as Aristotle for the love of philosophy, put on the mask for you because he's a big guy that wants everyone to know that Aristotle is the greatest philosopher of all time, despite being co-opted by Catholicism to justify indulgences and fearmongering that all of philosophy in an Aristotelian lens points towards the Christian God because the Church saith so. I can't help but to think he is not right in the mind since he is going against his own sanity, or perhaps, it is his self-projection of misery onto others through knowing admittedly obscure interpretations at least to the wider world. All you do however is trying to have a more satisfactory Neoplatonic compromise in making him explain more as to why it is wrong to the Aristotelians to even suggest the Intellect of the Soul is in the Intellect beyond the Soul, which they would just default to their hard stance that the Soul is not the Intellect that thinks of beings and that those thoughts are not the beings unto themselves because they refuse to acknowledge any mystical reunion of the Intellect of the Soul to the Intellect or even higher as none other than the Platonic-Plotinian One that is neither One nor Not-One. Aristotelians are critical of any immortal soul doctrine, but Plotinus does affirm the souls of humans in reincarnation can turn into lesser animals and plants and back as humans again, despite how lesser animals and plants lack the Intellectualizing activity. The emulation of the activity of the Intellect does not entail becoming the Creator Intellect, yet the Created is from the Creator, therefore we have an Intelligible being of ourselves in the mind of the Creator but it is distinct from our Intellect in some manner...

>>23831775
>>23831935
bro... paragraphs are your friend. I promise you that good formatting isn't "redditposting"

>>23831775
>>23831935
I'm sitting on the sidelines reading this thread, and much has been good, but shit like this meandering word-vomit is tedious and bad. Your posts are birdshot, scattered and of varying effect, and the resulting mess is such that there's no good reason to think you've hit any of your targets, since everything that ought to have been discrete and specific blends into each other as general assertions lacking any argument.

>>23832359
I am not really a Neoplatonist (despite using much of their terminology) nor an Aristotelian nor a Platonist, nor a Presocraticist, nor any of the Greco-Roman schools nor the numerous Western and Eastern schools, for all of them disagree with the understanding that I have acquired in a rigorous manner. Much of the arguments done by me and everyone else here are really generally irrelevant, mostly talking past each other at this stage because everyone has their minds made up already with their mental concrescence, just I'm more self aware of that which is why I am not bumping this thread whenever I post, I come along when I had enough of a thread, saying what I want before leaving whenever I want (but don't forget, you're here forever).

I generally do agree more with Aristotelians but up to a specific point of digression that denies "paranormal" activity which Platonism does affirm if you haven't read Phaedo as much, you might want to brush up a little bit on, though again, I disagree with Plato in the goal of being what's basically a "force ghost" is by any means an ideal state for the soul, no, it is a state of torment for a soul to lack a body. Aristotelianism just does not have an adequate ontological hierarchy to reconcile these things, and all the gizmos in the modern era only increases so called superstition with harder to refute evidence, but most everyone here are too lazy to look for it themselves and are overly skeptical to a self-detrimental degree.

One of my main points that I'm more concerned with is on the Early Neoplatonic cope, they must point towards a divine unity to justify that the form of the temporal-spatial individual eternally exists within the ontological intellective realm as the higher undescended soul that is just a personified, divided aspect of the undivided all encompassing Intellect existing beyond Space and Time, and any accidents of the instantiated form of individuals within phenomena is not the higher soul but of the lower mortal soul. The Noetic Cosmos is not really within any specific minds, not even the mind of any creator which there can be many minds and many uncreated mental scapes as varied as dreams and nightmares are. It however isn't fully the Eternal Eidetic paradigm that ultimately has its form from the Formless One. The Intellect after all comes from One analogously like an emanation strictly as an analogy but it is not done in space nor time.

The Late Neoplatonists like Proclus and more so for Damascius in some vain tried to appeal to Henads as sort of like activities of the Ineffable One in potential totalities prior to distinct instantiated unities and compositional totalities. Partless Unities of Totalities in Potential (as Hen-Panta, Panta-Hen, Henomenon) does not really require any creator beings nor being of beings (Soul Hypostasis) that engages in parts and manifold participation of parts (ensouled) and the composite of all parts in participation (manifold totality). (cont.?)

>>23831775
>>23831935
>>23832536
can you stop shitting up my thread you spastic retard? make your own thread. I have conversations that I want resolved before it hits the bump limit.

>>23832536
To answer the whole heaps question without further elaboration on the undifferentiated unity, I'll end that semi tangential late neoplatonic diatribe with this: Heaps are actual and not potential, it isn't a part nor many parts of the same type, it is more like with phenomenal totality or whole comprised of many parts of different types that lack a shared unity of types but are still a unity of its co-aggregation/collection. Although this may not be a satisfactory claim for some, the weaker definition ends up appealing to subjectivity which in some sense is permissible within a Platonic hierarchy as it isn't really reducible to mere appearances and pointing towards the mind that perceives undifferentiated perception and conceptualizes it as an heap.

A bunch of mechanical tools is a mess of mechanical tools, but say, a chaotic heap contains at least two or more types of particulars with no perceptibly apparent total unity of types even though there are innumerably many conceptual distinctions of types of objects in any porphyrian tree. Of course, this may also not be satisfactory as heaps of a single type like say, rice grains are arbitrarily a heap when one does not want to measure how much rice grains there are in that heap, and a single rice grain is not really a heap yet two rice grains can be, so where is the measure of an heap threshold? The appeal to Neoplatonic Henads does not work in this case no matter how I think about it.

This is a matter of the nature of measure and the measurer. Although a heap for it to be limited and knowable is finite and accountable when counted, it is when one does not feel the need to count the individual grains and defer to a different metric of measurement like weight and mass where individual measuring is made irrelevant, that is where a heap may come in. Choosing a different standard of measurement that does not require individually counting out each every thing in itself is a way to deal with such things as heaps.

>>23832671
this is just a retarded circular definition that doesn't even get to the root of the question. learn to think, then learn to write. in the mean time, see yourself out of the thread goofy.

>>23832686
Many will fail to grasp the nuances of a level magnitude, and "heaps" as the so called area under a section of a curve are measured through the leveling and redistribution of all the lines, geometrically on top of it all, no epsilon-delta proofs are required too.

>>23832734
bro just go back to your new calculus shithole, I can spot your schizophrenia from a mile away. this thread is not the thread for it.

>>23832793
All you will ever have are vain assertions without proof of why it is "circular", for a level magnitude measure is ultimately a non-numerical, magnitudinal measure. It also have distinct types and distinct units. Heaps are never measurable by number but they can be known magnitudinally. This isn't mere algebraic division, although division is the closest "arithmetic" operation, it is much deeper than you would ever realize by yourself.

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>>23831518

hate it when threads die so close to completion. have you ever been like, there's just one or two more things I want to finish talking about and then I'm GOOD, and then it never happens? shieeeet

>>23835403
On the contrary, I love to see shitty threads die off a long death when it had ran its course due to a clear lack of interest.

>>23835628
You're a real cunt of a person, you know that right?

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>>23831935
I couldn't follow this stream of conciousness ramble, but I'd just point out that all good reasoning—reason itself—necessarily points back to the Logos, the Divine Word, the uncreated Son, light from light, true God from true God.

>>23830849
First, Aristotle refers to things having natures and how their natures shape what they are and what they do right at the outset of the physics, so I don't know what you mean by Aristotle never mentioning "nature."

For Aristotle, all beings has a nature. Not all things are beings. Beings are most properly plants and animals, and the ordered cosmos as a whole, which have natures and ends that determine their movements.

Second:
>1.) Particular things are the absolute grounds of concepts and are prior to intelligibility. Particulars are not "made of" thoughts or secondary to intelligibles.

Particulars have a form. If they are to be anything at all they possess eidos. Not all things have natures, correct. Aristotle speaks specifically of "those things that exist according to nature," and those that exist "according to causes." A rock exists by causes, it is a bundle of external causes. It lacks unity. Break a rock in half and you get two rocks. Break a cat in half and the cat ceases to be, substantial change.

But there is no matter without form. Matter always comes with form, eidos, intelligibility is always there.

I am not sure how this is controversial, he says as much. Particulars being "prior" to intelligibility sounds like matter without form, which doesn't exist.

If a thing has a form, it has intelligibility. Matter doesn't exist without form. Neither is prior.

>>23835968
BTW, Sachs' translation of entelecheia as "being-at-work-staying-itself" is instructive here in that it obviously doesn't make sense for something to be at work staying itself if "what it is," its intelligibility, can be said to be anterior to its being.

Act before potency, yadda yadda.

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>>23831518
last bump

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I have recently started reading the 2 volume Aristotle by Jonathan Barnes, and am beginning with the Organon because I took a Logic 101 class years ago in Community College, so it just feels right, and I think that's where people traditionally start. I read through Categories and On Interpretation pretty quickly, but I'm getting bogged down at about Chapter X of Prior Analytics. I am doing exercises on paper. Does anyone have study aids they can recommend or anything like that?

>>23838321
Iirc that is about where he goes into modality. So for the purposes of determining validity such that when and where necessary is applicable. You may be moving too quickly, try going back to his portions on the 3 types and the aspects of when demonstration is applicable and when it is not. It is also helpful to keep in mind that necessary already contains assertorial.

For 'all' of any variables used:
A is not equal to B (nec)(neg)
A is equal to C
B is not equal to C (nec)

In some cases such as aff and nec premiss the conclusion won't be necessary. As far as aids go you can find logic charts and tables that delineate these sorts of derivations. These generally fall under demonstrable, which is to say you can always try them out and they will either work or they won't.

>>23838438

>But if one premise is affirmative, the other negative, whenever the universal is both negative and necessary the conclusion also will be necessary. For if it is not possible that A should belong to any C, but B belongs to some C, it is necessary that A should not belong to some B. But whenever the affirmative proposition is necessary, whether universal or particular, or the
negative is particular, the conclusion will not be necessary. The proof of this by reduction will be
the same as before; but if terms are wanted, when the universal affirmative is necessary, take the terms 'waking'-'animal'-'man', 'man' being middle, and when the affirmative is particular and
necessary, take the terms 'waking'-'animal'-'white': for it is necessary that animal should belong
to some white thing, but it is possible that waking should belong to none, and it is not necessary
that waking should not belong to some animal. But when the negative proposition being
particular is necessary, take the terms 'biped', 'moving', 'animal', 'animal' being middle.

This is at the end of Chapter 11. I felt like I understood what was going on. At least, the syllogisms made sense even when the wording wasn't 100% clicking.

If A necessarily is no C,
and if B is some C,
then A necessarily is not some B

^ this makes sense to me. If some of the Cs are Bs then that section of Bs which belong to Cs cannot belong to the As which do not belong to any Cs.

For the rest I feel like I need an interpreter. What am I missing lol

>>23838639

stupid pdf i copied from butchered the green text

>>23838321
>>23838438
>>23838639
have you seen some of the recent threads on prior analytics? there's some extensive ones in the archive.

>>23838870
i don't see any

>>23839057
not in warosu?

>>23838639
>>23838642
I don't remember his wording verbatim but this reads appropriately. Aristotle's logic was subjected to a number of developments afterwards and most people who are interested in philosophy have likely encountered it after a refinement was made. In the primary text these particular derivations are almost more of a kernel. If you are grasping the derivation method then you may not necessarily be missing anything but rather have not had sufficient practice. If this is your first formal encounter with Aristotelian logic then you may not yet possess the confidence to assess whether you have missed something or have not missed something. I am inclined to say you can continue with no major detriment and the worst that could happen is that you have to go back and reference something which is more common than you may realize even amongst the practiced, and I'm including myself in that statement. You can also likely find online quizzes to perform a knowledge check. Practice is the best method I am aware of though, so in this case I am speculating that based on your previous statement in which you have said you are doing exercises on paper you likely feel as though you are performing redundancies or perhaps it feels more tedious than you have expected it to feel. Both of these would be justified and could certainly leave one feeling as though something is missing. The demonstrations Aristotle provides at this point are usually perfunctory and mundane, they are just to demonstrate method. Once you have become practiced your confidence will get a boost and you will be sifting through material and performing these operations and may not even realize you are doing it. After you have grasped Rhetoric you can also use this logic to make compelling arguments of your own. The importance of demonstration is not something that can be adequately conveyed at this point, it doesn't seem as though you are missing anything yet but rather just lacking in the experience needed for confidence. There is no shortcut to this that I'm aware of, I would say keep going and keep practicing. Most people never grasp just how powerful, versatile, and convertible this logic actually is. I would go so far as to say everyone who has learned it has felt similar sentiment at some point.

>>23839057
nigga not THAT archive

I did find some threads in the archive and they recommended I use the Cambridge Aristotle Companion book so I am doing that. We'll see if it helps with clarity. I managed to move forward to Chapter 14 and felt I still understood what was going on. Actually, it got a little easier to understand possibility vs necessity.

>>23839057
Prior Analytics Threads:
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23699127
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23714959
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/23725760

>>23841199
these are excellent threads, thank you

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>>23834491
>>23837625
that "Aristochad" nigga must have been scared off lol

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>>23841199

is the guy posting Greg Sadler lol? who else could it be