Man, you're right, Aristotleanon. Christian apologists are the worst when it comes to anally raping the Aristotelian corpus beyond recognition. They don't fucking understand anything. They don't understand dunamis, they don't understand energeia, they don't understand Metaphysics Zeta, they don't understand syllogisms, and they definitely do not understand the four causes. I just had apologist tell me, definitively, that Palamas was a top scholar of Aristotle (lmfao), and that De Anima isn't about life at all, since according to Palamas, only human beings have life because you somehow need "intelligence" to be "self-subsistent" (fucking LOL). Even when you read Aquinas's commentary on passages like the controversial active intellect, you can see him at pains to make the active intellect cohere with the passive intellect into one united soul. And then he fails to do so. But then magically says "but it has to be the case, and so it is." I ask another apologist, is an intellect which becomes everything, something which changes or otherwise remains as it is? And obviously, they short-circuit. Because obviously, that's the kind of intellect that we have, and it can't be active in any pure sense. So Aquinas is wrong and our intellects are perishable in the sense that it is soul. Oh the horror!!! These fucks have absolutely destroyed Peripatetic commentary throughout history, and they polluted literally everything, especially the translations, with the most hamfisted articulations possible to the point where intelligent conversations with them are not possible. Their brains are wrapped in verbal poison. If you ever get caught up in it, you basically have to spend years unlearning Scholastic hackery as it pertains to the deepest parts of the Aristotelian thought to even have a CHANCE at beginning to understand its depths.
Another banger from an Orthobro. >"Animals" do not have essence, they only have act. I understand why you drink. Sorry for bothering you so much.
Nobody cares, you retarded faggot.
>>24947161IDK Anon, you could attack their takes, but you're the one who looks stupid here because neither of the people you mentioned are trying to communicate Aristotle, nor explain exactly what Aristotle meant as their main function. Aquinas is doing that a bit more in his commentaries, but if you'd read them in detail you'd know he is not doing anything like a modern treatment on "this is what Aristotle meant" (which is why he cited Saint Augustine and Saint Denys as authorities constantly). They are using Aristotle for their own Christian projects whose actual foundations were set by the Cappadocians, Origen, etc. (who also knew Aristotle, but never intended to simply copy him).Your critique is especially stupid in Palamas' case because he says of his education in Aristotle that Pagan learning is like a venomous serpent that one can make a medicine from, that must be carefully strangled and dissected.
>>24947161Also, if you think that Aristotle pseud has things right then I hate to break it to you, but "the true Aristotle" was already decisively ruined by Middle Platonism, because the ancient Greek Pagans didn't read Aristotle anything like modern reconstructions either. And you could say the same thing if the Muslims and Jews.But honestly, I think all these groups do interesting things with Aristotle and that the late Platonist synthesis (Pagan, as well as Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) is simply more coherent and complete in many ways. Also, the earlier ones very well might have had access to much Aristotle we don't have. It's even possible that what comes down to us is selectively biased, who knows.
>>24947161Palamas doesn't say any of that. You are either misinformed or getting your terminology mixed up. Only humans are a hypostasis. Only humans participate in the divine energies through the possession of a nous. Animals have an essence. There are logoi for animals. They participate in the Logos in the more limited way of the rest of nature. They are ensouled beings. They have merely natural participation/energies. So, you might get something like "Animals only act, only man truly lives," out of this, but you're profoundly misreading this or reading someone who has.
>>24947161>they polluted literally everything, especially the translations, with the most hamfisted articulations possible to the point where intelligent conversations with them are not possible. Their brains are wrapped in verbal poison.Not limited to aristotelianism, they're like this with everything intellectual. They are cancer.
>>24947178Anon, you're right that most commentators sought to repurpose Aristotle for their own projects. But it's another thing entirely for people to *not be aware* that they're diverging from Aristotle, and to not recognize that there are problems from diverging from the implied Aristotelian position, partisan solutions that are even worse than the aporias suggested by the original position. To treat everything as if it were all tightly-wrapped in a bow from Aristotle to Aquinas to fucking Palamas is just insanity to me. >>24947186I don't feel the direct impact of Middle Platonists, Arabs, and Jews on the vocabulary and thought-patterns utilized by Christian sophists. So it doesn't bother me so much. >>24947202Palamas:>The soul of each animal not imbued with intelligence is the life of the body that it animates; it does not possess life as essence, but as activity, since here life is relative and not something in itself. Indeed, the soul of animals consists of nothing except that which is actuated by the body. Thus when the body dissolves, the soul inevitably dissolves as well. Their soul is no less mortal than their body, since everything that it is relates and refers to what is mortal. So when the body dies the soul also dies. (Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred and Fifty Texts, 31)What am I supposed to make of that? This is abysmal, perhaps even retarded, especially if we're supposed to take this as some kind of Aristotelian commentary. If it's something different, then fine, be my guest, but this is like taking the entirety of Book II of De Anima and throwing it into the furnace. And even on those merits, it is bad, because nothing is truly self-subsistent except for God if we're going to play that game.
>>24947161As opposed to our brilliant era of "telos as a strongly emergent physical property" or a mere catagorical and an "Aristotleian" philosophy built solely off a few parts of the Ethics?Anyhow, what is your objection. Do you think Averoese got it more right? I'ma side with Plato here either way (and thus I guess with Palamas).
>>24947223First, you're presenting a strawman caricature. If anything, the tendency in the East is to underemphasize the influence of Pagan thought.Second, the Middle Platonists and Islamics profoundly shaped the reception of Aristotle in the West, so they definitely shape discourse up to this day. Indeed, a key reason why the Orthodox read Aristotle so differently is precisely because Islamic/Jewish thought had a far deeper influence on Scholastic thought. In the high scholastic period Aristotle was just "the Philosopher" but Avicenna was also "the Commentator.">What am I supposed to make of that?That animals don't have a nous or immortal soul. In context, this is explained in terms of different ways of participating in the divine energies.
Saint Gregory the Theologian addresses this in a poem.
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