Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science Book 17)

by William M.R. Simpson

Metaphysics Kit Fine, “Essence and Modality: The Second Philosophical Perspectives Lecture,” Philosophical Perspectives 8(1994):1–16. Kit Fine, “Things and Their Parts,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 23(1999):61–74. Ruth Groff and John Greco (eds.), Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (New York: Routledge, 2013). John Hawthorne, Metaphysical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Jonathan D. Jacobs (ed.), Causal Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Mark Johnston, “Hylomorphism,” The Journal of Philosophy 103(2006):652–98. Kathrin Koslicki, The Structure of Objects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Michael Loux, “Aristotle’s Constituent Ontology,” in Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in

Metaphysics, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 207–50. E.J. Lowe, The Four-Category Ontology: A Metaphysical Foundation for Natural Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Anna Marmodoro, “Aristotle’s Hylomorphism, Without Reconditioning,” Philosophical Inquiry 36(2013):5–22. C.B. Martin, “Substance Substantiated,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58(1980):3–10. Trenton Merricks, Objects and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). George Molnar, Powers: A Study in Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Daniel D. Novotny and Lukas Novak (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics (New York: Routledge, 2016). David S. Oderberg, Real Essentialism (New York: Routledge, 2008). Alexander R. Pruss, Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds (New York: Continuum, 2011). Michael C. Rea, “Hylomorphism Reconditioned,” Philosophical Perspectives 25(2011):341–58.

Tuomas Tahko (ed.), Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Philosophy of Science Alexander Bird, Nature’s Metaphysics: Laws and Properties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Nancy Cartwright, Nature’s Capacities and Their Measurement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Brian Ellis, Scientific Essentialism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Rom Harré and E.H...

Emergence P.W. Anderson, “More Is Different,” Science 177(1972):393–6. Terence W. Deacon, “The Hierarchic Logic of Emergence: Untangling the Interdependence of Evolution and Self-organization,” in B.H. Weber and D.J. Depew (eds.), Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 273–308. Carl Gillett, “Samuel Alexander’s Emergentism: Or, Higher Causation for Physical-ists,” Synthese 153(2006):261–96. Carl Gillett, “On the Implications of Scientific Composition and Completeness: Or, the Troubles, and Troubles, of Non-Reductive Physicalism,” in Antonella Corradini and Timothy O’Connor (eds.), Emerg...

a New Discipline (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 173–89. Kalevi Kull, Terrence Deacon, Claus Emmeche, Jesper Hoffmeyer, and Frederik Stjernfelt, “Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena to a Theoretical Biology,” Biological Theory 4/2(2009):167–73. Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe: Remaking Physics From the Bottom Down (New York: Basic Books, 2005). Michael Polanyi, “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry,” Chemical Engineering News 45(1967):54–66. Michael Polanyi, “Life’s Irreducible Structure,” Science 160(1968):1308–12. Mariam Thalos, Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of th...

David Charles (ed.), Definition in Greek Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Montgomery Furth, Substance, Form and Psyche: An Aristotelian Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Allan Gotthelf, “Aristotle’s Conception of Final Causality,” The Review of Metaphysics 30/2(1976):226–54. Allan Gotthelf and J.G. Lennox (eds.), Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Monte Johnson, Aristotle on Teleology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). J.G. Lennox, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). J.G. Lennox and Robert Bolton (eds.), Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). G.E.R. Lloyd, Aristotelian Explorations ...

In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, a great deal of theoretical work commenced on the problem of giving a fully quantum-theoretic account of measurement. This work comprises the programs of decoherence of W. Zurek 1982 and H. D. Zeh 1973 and the consistent histories approach of Griffiths 1984, Omnès1988, and Gell-Mann and Hartle 1990, 1993.

In recent years, the Many Worlds Interpretation has found a new home in Oxford, among both physicists and philosophers of science, including David Deutsch, Simon Saunders, David Wallace, Christopher Timpson, and Harvey Brown.

The functional properties can be identified with the result of Ramseyfying ([Ramsey 1929]) our ordinary folk ontology and our special sciences (including, perhaps, classical mechanics) in the language of pure quantum-mechanics (infinite Hilbert space, unitary Schrödinger evolution). There are three historical precursors to the kind of functionalization of the manifest image that Wallace has in mind: the phenomenalistic project, as typified by John Stuart Mill and the early Carnap, Bertrand Russell’s functional-structural account of physics in The Analysis of Matter [Russell 1927], and the late-20th-century, behaviorism-inspired accounts of the mind, especially the Analytic Functionalism of David Lewis [Lewis 1966, 1972, 1980]. The ideal formal machinery for each attempted functional reduction is F. P. Ramsey’s account of scientific theories [Ramsey 1929], well explained by Lewis in Lewis 1972.

If we have—as I think we do—independent reasons to accept such a strong Aristotelianism, the addition of a dynamics for forms to the base MWI story is a necessary addition and hence not a serious cost to the theory.

This sentence is both a relief because care for the actual fact of the matter pokes through and chilling because it casually states explicitly that there is a game of paying costs for the interpretation wanted.

a house’s form is found in the mind of the architect.

That's a shocking revelation to me. I have to pick up Aristotle myself, clearly.

On this version, the formless branches have no particles at all, just a wavefunction.

This does not seem at all thought through.

On Bohmian interpretations, there is an uncollapsed wave-function, with many branches, but only one branch has real particles (often called “corpuscles” in the Bohmian literature) with fully defined positions,

Wow, that's nuts.

The motion of the particles then is governed by the wavefunction through a “guiding equation”. This guiding equation is carefully chosen so that if the arrangement of the particles initially satisfies some statistical constraints, the evolution of the system will match the Born-rule predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics. Traditionally, the particular guiding equation that is chosen is also deterministic. However, the constraint that the evolution of the system should match the empirical predictions of orthodox quantum mechanics appears to be consistent with other guiding equations, and Bell has given an indeterministic one (Bell 1987: 173–80). An indeterministic Bohmian interpretation has a certain advantage over a deterministic one:

Most curious.

none of these particles have forms.

What the hell could that even...!?!?

But if formless particles have physical behavior indistinguishable from that of formed particles, it may seem needlessly complex to saddle some particles with form,

This is where we badly need to consider what form even is for ordinary matter.

There is, however, a further question about particles. Particles with forms are substances. But Aristotelian metaphysics holds that no substance has substantial parts. Are there, then, particles that are parts of macroscopic substances like donkeys and oaks?

Surprised to see us tackling an issue this substantive.

precisification

Just... No.

If that is so, it is hard to see how such constraints could avoid committing Humeans to objectively modal facts, in the form of objectively modal relations,

Something interesting is going on in this article, but it is hidden behind, inter alia, this term "modal."

spatial-cum-causal relation

That's the second time in two screens. I'm about to skip this paper for tendentious language alone.

As it happens, precisely what those commitments are is widely disputed, even among its adherents.

No shit.

independent

Distinct is fine. Independent is too much.

One reason is practical: in my view, providing an empirically robust hylomorphic account of the nature of a biological entity—a starfish, for instance—is a complex and complicated affair, requiring a perhaps unappreciated amount of philosophical subtlety.

And because hylomorphism denies the very possibility of the existence of unin-formed matter, or immaterial form,

Thomas' does not.

So on this score the by-now stale derision of substantial forms that we have inherited from Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume et al. can be seen to be far less compelling than most philosophers, raised in these post-scholastic world views, have thought.

the early modern rejection of substantial forms owes more to anti-scholastic prejudice, in my view, than to irresistible philosophical critique.19

And, to paraphrase Richard Swinburne’s Principle of Credulity, things usually are the way they appear to be.23

Another response is the Johnsonian one:24 the existence of twilight does not mean we cannot distinguish between day and night.

carving nature at a privileged joint.

OH MY GOD I HATE THIS STUPID EXPRESSION SO MUCH

Now there is an important literature on ontological independence, but I have no space or need to enter into a technical discussion of its definition.30

Specifically, we should consider the category of ‘constituent parts’ or the ‘stuff’ that makes up a whole: whatever we call it, these do not cause the whole to exist in the same way that the whole causally organizes or spatially arranges them, in a very precise way, specifically as parts.

Just say material and formal cause for God's sake.

‘When Aristotle describes the soul as the form of the body (e.g., in De Anima II.1, 412a19–21), he clearly means more than just an arrangement or relationship among the parts of the body. A form (morphe) of a body is not analogous to the harmonious relations among a set of strings (De Anima I.4, 407b)’ (2014: 152).

Mind-body problems strike at the conceptual foundations of psychological science.

carve nature at its joints,

OH DEAR GOD STOP USING THAT PHRASE ALL OF YOU

To help illustrate the hylomorphic notion of structure I’ll use a simple example; we can call it the squashing example. Suppose we put Gabriel in a strong bag—a very strong bag, since we want to ensure that nothing leaks out when we squash him with several tons of force.

Hylomorphic structures are powers to configure (or organize, order, or coordinate) things. What sets hylomorphic structures apart from other powers is that they cannot exist unmanifested. They are manifested essentially. Structured individuals are essentially and continuously engaged in configuring the materials that compose them. I configure the materials that compose me, and you configure the materials that compose you. Our continuous structuring activity explains our unity and persistence through the dynamic influx and efflux of matter and energy that characterizes our interactions with the surrounding world. This is what it means to say that structure counts: it explains the unity of composite things.

An individual living thing does not configure the same materials for very long;

Routinely overstated. The turnover rate is pretty slow.

to exchange some of the bs for other things.

There being sharp restrictions on the suitable new b's.

structured individuals have non-redundant causal powers that mere spatial arrangements of physical materials do not have.

This is where all the questions I have for this scheme focus. Can this actually be true?

By contrast, the squashed contents of the bag have the same mass that Gabriel has despite losing Gabriel’s human structure. Mass is thus a structure-independent property.

The problem is the needed distinction between structure and "mere spatial arrangements" which is pointedly lackIng in this example.

As a result, hylomorphists do not need an account of how lower-level systems generate emergent properties.

Rather, they do not need one apart from the central riddle of what the hell structure even is.

reduced to, or paraphrased in favor of lower-level descriptions and explanations.

Reduced is particularly inapt here as what would happen is an expansion in the lower order terms.

Socrates the Younger was wrong in always comparing an animal with the circle and bronze… [I]t supposes that a man can exist without his parts, as a circle can exist without the bronze. But in fact, the two cases are not similar, for an animal… cannot be defined without reference to parts in the right condition. (Metaphysics 1037a22–31; cf. On the Soul 403a3-b15 and Physics 194a1–27)

Scholasticism did not know how to draw from its principles the physics which could and should flow from them. So our first duty today is to be more faithful to the demands of realism than the Middle-Ages were, and giving each order of reality its due. In each order, the reality of the form should be preserved, since without it one cannot account for structures, and it remains the principle of reality’s intelligibility. Etienne Gilson, Methodical Realism, 103

The parts act and interact with one another in such a way that the whole is literally not a mere sum of its parts.

Once again the whole project hinges on clarifying and substantiating this claim.

Jaworski (2011: 269). Roughly, staunch hylomorphists can be divided up into minimalists and substantivists about the way formal organization transforms the ontological identity of material components. Minimalists, like Jaworski (and perhaps pluriformists like Avicenna and Duns Scotus), hold that the formal identity of the materials remain fundamentally the same whether they exist in the wild or as integrated material parts that depend upon the organization of the whole. Radical minimalists about formal transformation of materials go so far as to say that sometimes these material parts, say fundamental physical particles, are individual substances integrated within more complex substances. Minimal-ists argue substantivists cannot account for the continuity of the substrate that is required for change. Substantivists deny that material components—even the ground-floor physical stuff—can actually remain what they are when they are incorporated into the organization of an inclusive whole: electrons are transformed into animated material components when integrated into the life of an animal. Substantivists contend the minimalist view undermines the integrity, unity, and identity of the organized whole, since parts of a whole cannot possess their own central or substantial formal identity. Radical Substantivists about the formal transformation of materials hold that there cannot be any actual parts in hylomorphic individuals, only potential parts. I leave the debate here.