User’s Guide

In the sidebar, you can find a link to the “About” page to explain this blog.

Under that, you will find a link to an index of authors I’ve cited (or “saved”) so far. To find an author of interest, just click (at  lower right) on the initial corresponding to his or her last name.

Beneath the index, I have a few resources which I believe explain the perspective (i.e., “Artisthomistic” hylomorphism) from which I write, and which I believe the quotations here are rejecting or supporting (knowingly or not).

You can also do a keyword search in the tab at the top of the sidebar.

Have I left anything out?

Kk

De Koninck, Charles. “The Lifeless World of Biology“, chap. 3 in The Hollow Universe (Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 79–114. [page numbers refer to the PDF copy I found at scribd.com]

p. 1 – “…the biology I am talking about is resolved to be sternly empirical, while it can find nowhere any definite, empirically defined property able to separate, once and for all, the animate from the inanimate.”

p. 2 – “…it is assumed that physics is about the inanimate, and that it does not deal with living things, when everyone knows that it seeks to explain things like gravitation, and that the physicist himself is just as much subject to gravitation as a stone or a sack of potatoes. … Taking for granted our ordinary acceptance of ‘living’ and ‘non-living’, these [reductionist] writers, from the start, resolve to explain them in terms of the kind of life we know least about, that is, in terms of the so-called lowest animal forms.”

p. 3 – “…the man who hopes to arrive at some definition of life, enabling him to set life apart from non-life, should never begin with the study of what is alive very obscurely, if alive at all.”

p. 4 – “So far as I am concerned, ‘being alive’ means primarily to have sensations…. [W]e might then go on to the ancient definition of what an animal is, viz. a body endowed with power to sense. … [T]here is no reason why these [ambiguous] cases should disturb our own awareness of being alive as we use our senses.”

p. 5 – “…I do not know how far life extends. My certitude of touch as I sit here … [does] not imply clear knowledge of what this sensation is, though I manage to distinguish it from other kinds. … [M]y certitude is not diminished by ignorance  of the conditions of sensation” [and, in the same way, my certitude about being alive and alive being a meaningful term, is not diminished by ignorance of how far life extends before becoming non-life]. … Now, is it reasonable to argue that, because my numb hand cannot feel so well as my normal hand, that my normal hand cannot feel at all?”

p. 6 – “It is suggested … that the word ‘living’ is meaningless because there are cases to which nobody knows whether it applies, that is, things of which it is not possible to be sure whether they are living or non-living. But, if the denial of the distinction is to have meaning, we must understand the terms whose distinction we deny. So far as I can see, ignorance of where life begins or ends in the world of the microscope has nothing to do with my certitude of being alive, even though I may not know much about my own kind of life. … If the negation is to be meaningful, you must know what it is that you are negating.”

p. 7 – “It is one thing to know a thing well enough to name it; it is quite another to make fully explicit what it is that I name…. It was a typically Cartesian view that science must begin with  what is most basic in the things we study. … The assumption was that whatever is less complex ought to be more accessible than the complex. In physics there are no Cartesians left. … [W]hat we know first and foremost is not what is most basic to things themselves.“

p. 8 – “Although an immense over-simplification, the old Newtonian view was nevertheless a fascinating one.”

p. 8 – “Having been brought up to accept the fact of evolution, I would not find it easy now to doubt that it has happened, however uncertain I may remain about the value of any particular theory devised to explain how it happened. ±±” ±±

kkkkk

Oo

Oderberg, David S. “Teleology: Inorganic and Organic“, in A.M. González (ed.), Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008): 259-79.

p. 259 — “…a natural tendency to some kind of motion or behaviour characteristic of their essence….”

p. 259, n. 4 — “No one reading … Physics or On the Heavens … will find it easy to interpret Aristotle as holding that moving objects ’seek’ the place to which their movement natural tends. [cf. Phys. II, 192b ff. & De Cae. III.2, 300a ff.] Nor does on find it in Aquinas’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics.”

p. 260 — George Molnar in Powers speaks of ‘physical intentionality’ as “the directedness of a thing’s powers towards their fulfilment”.

p. 261 — “My general definition of life is that it is the natural capacity of an object for self-perfective immanent activity. Living things act for themselves in order to perfect themselves…. [I]mmanent causation … is a kind of causation that begins with the agent and terminates in the agent for the sake of the agent.”

p. 262 — “What makes [a process] transient [as opposed to immanent] is that the process terminates in something other than the cause itself. … [T]ransient causation terminates in the distinct thing on which the cause operates.”

p. 263 — “…final causation does not of itself import the idea of self-directedness.”

p. 263, n. 15 — “On my account, organisms use their parts to contribute to what is good for them [apparently or really]…. [Natural selection need not select for a beating heart because it aids an organism, but] the organism uses the heart to contribute to its own survival because it makes such a contribution. … [T]he organism does things for itself because they are good for it … [and] this is the explanation of why its heart beats, whatever the selection process. … [W]hy should we even say that the heart pumps blood because it contributes to the organism’s survival if it doesn’t do so because survival is good…? The appeal to natural selection will not help, since nature is supposed to work blindly — not only with no good end states in view, but with nothing in view, not even a contribution by anything to anything.“

p. 264 — “…we do not find any immanent causation in the inorganic world. Nothing inorganic does anything for itself.”

p. 265 — “By this is meant that no inorganic entity has an intrinsic telos, a principle of natural fulfilment. … In the non-living world, we do not find any entity operating for the purpose of doing anything for some other, any more than we find one operating for its own purposes, that is immanently.”

p. 267-268 — [In non-living cycles and processes, neither order per se, nor complexity per se, nor systematicity, nor periodicity justify teleological talk, but, rather the concept of function.]

p. 269 — “…a function is any natural  specific activity of a power or capacity of a thing. … My case does not … require that any natural movement or behaviour of anything be essential to it — only that some things behave in a sufficiently regular and predictable way for their behaviour to be called functional. … It just looks like certain inorganic processes have functional parts. And if they have functional components, the components perform functions [i.e., contribute instrumentally to the completion of said process].“

p. 271 — “…I contend that the mere stability and recurrence of certain processes such as the rock and water cycles license teleological talk in terms of functions and roles going beyond mere causation.”

p. 272 — “Combustion [in contrast to, say, the rock or rain cycles]  happens everywhere, all the time, but there is no integration of parts into a well-defined, stable, particular process that is the proper object of scientific investigation.”

p. 273 — If inorganic teleological talk really “were just causal talk, we would not be able to separate the relevant from the irrelevant causal relations.”

p. 275 — “I take the concept of smooth and efficient functioning, and its variability within a process, as being analogously for inorganic teleology what the concept of acting well (suitably interpreted) is for organic teleology. … The question [for a non-teleological critic] remains as to why a putative fiction [i.e., the intentional stance] might be useful. … Maybe the reason such teleological talk is both useful and common is that it represents something true.”

p. 276 — “…one does not have to recognize any such [extrinsic] purpose [which imposes a sort of teleology on a process] in order to recognize the appropriateness of inorganic functional [instrumental] talk and hence of inorganic teleology.”

p. 278 — “…I think the alternative [to inorganic teleology] is far more bizarre: that there should be full-blooded teleology in the organic world, while the rest of the universe was a blooming, buzzing realm of wholly non-functional events. … The contrast between the two [forms of teleology] is stark, yet the existence of both militates against a Cartesian-style dichotomizing of the universe.“

ooooo

Hh

Hulswit, Menno. “A Short History of Causation” (University of Nijmegen)

p. ? [sect. 4.] – … Aquinas went further than the Stoics by relating efficient causality to natural necessity and to law-like behavior; things belonging to the same type act similarly in similar circumstances. … [P]aradoxical as it may seem, it was precisely this concept of formal cause that came to play an important role in the development of the new conception of efficient cause, according to which efficient causes were simply instances of general laws, which in turn were general, mathematical principles. But to a large extent, the concept of law of nature was the inheritor of the concept of formal cause; both concepts were meant to explain the stability of the world. The main difference is that, whereas the formal cause was thought to explain the stability of the world by explaining the structure of things, the laws of nature were thought to explain the stability of the world by expalining the relations between things.” 

hhhhhh

Rr

Randall, James F. “Quantum Miracles and Immortality” (Transvision 2004 Conference, August 2004, University of Toronto)

p. ? – Strong AI adopts the Aristotelian-Thomistic view of the soul, as the ‘form’ of a conscious being. The form of a thing is, in modern terms, the in-form-ation required to completely describe (or simulate) the thing. The formalistic conception of the soul was the most widely accepted view of the soul in the Roman Catholic Church at the end of the Middle Ages. The Christian doctrine of resurrection of the body is based on it: God can resurrect you because he is omniscient and knows your form.

Ross, James F. “The Fate of the Analysts: Aristotle’s Revenge” (Plenary Address at American Catholic Philosophical Association Meeting, Toronto, 1990.) [Must be cited only from printed edition in Proceedings of American Catholic Philosophical Association 1990]

p. ? –  [W]e can predict six features of philosophy–and of science too–: (1) reinstatement of a theory of inherent forms: that there are dynamic explanatory structures inherent in matter (but inseparable except in thought, from matter, though variously realizable in matter)[17]…; that (2) such dynamic structures explain, indeed ARE … the continuous regularity of behavior, say, of protons; (3) that the natures of things (the materialized structures) and the abstractable laws, are NOT simply the local aggregations of matter, the way a pile is resultant from the grains of sand[18] but that there are, as yet undiscovered, principles of emergence– principles of what Aristotle called “eduction of forms for matter”…, by which stable, causally specialized structures (e.g. cell structures) develop from more general ones (.e.g. [sic], molecular ones); (4) that human intelligence is the active ability to discern and to recognize dynamic structures in nature (and their consequences, even hypothetical ones), irrespective of the indeterminacy of hypotheses or the undertermination of reference; and (5) that the objective of science is comprehension … –to be streetwise in the universe–and that scientific comprehension of physical reality has to be expressed, and aided, with mathematized abstractions, with formal models, and with technology.

Gg

Gilson, Étienne. From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)

pp. 3–5 – … Heterogeneity of parts is required for the very possibility of that causality operating on itself which characterizes the growth of living beings.

For the same reason it is necessary that the heterogeneous parts of the living being make up a certain order. The notion of order is inseparable from that causality, which is itself an order of dependence. That which is cause under a certain aspect can be effect under another. The ability of a living being to move itself, even though it be only to assimilate and grow, involves therefore the organization of heterogeneous parts of which it is composed. This is why one says of living bodies that they are organisms or that living matter is organic [organiseé]. The finalism of Aristotle is an attempt to give a reason for the very existence of this organization.

Aristotle is often reproached for his anthropomorphism, that is to say, for his habit of considering nature from man’s point of view. If to do so is an error, the reproach is justified, but Aristotle’s attitude in this regard had nothing naive in it. He was conscious of it, just as he was of the reasons for adopting it. At the moment he begins the study of the parts of animals, he declares straightforwardly: “to begin with, we must take into consideration the parts of man. For, just as each nation reckons by that monetary standard with which it is most familiar, so must we do in other matters. And, of course, man is the animal with which are all most familiar [History of Animals, 491a].”

At first sight there is something disconcerting in this naivete. It seems far too simple to evaluate the parts of other animals in terms of those of the human body…. Upon reflection, however, is something to be said in favor of this proposition, for in a certain sense it is true. It is not necessarily that man may be better known to us than the rest [of creation], but, to begin with, whatever object is considered, the knowledge that we have of it is human knowledge which expresses itself in some human language; and, next, the knowledge which man has of himself, imperfect as it may be, is by nature privileged. In knowing himself man knows nature in a unique way, because in this unique case the nature that he knows, he is. In and through the knowledge which man has of himself nature knows herself directly; she becomes conscious of herself in him, self-conscious one might say, and there is strictly nothing else that man can hope to know in this way. Even other men … remain for him parts of the “external world.” In fact, all the rest of the universe is and remains for him the external world. Since then there is no other knowledge for each of us other than our own knowledge, things known exist for us only in relation to ourselves, and among these things there is only one that we can apprehend directly in itself, and that is what we are and what each calls “I,” “me.”

… To explain heterogeneous parts by the same principles which explain homogeneous parts is to leave deliberately unexplained the heterogeneity of the heterogeneous.

p. 97 – …we should repeat that man is a part of nature, that he is a unique case in nature, a nature which knows itself from within, and that through man who is part of nature she knows herself directly from within. Everything happens as if, in producing man endowed with reason, nature continued, under the form of the production of the artisan, the work which she performed until then physiologically. It is a mistaken anthropomorphism to reason as if the two finalities worked in the same manner, as if nature fashioned an eye in the same manner that an optician fashions a telescope. But it is perhaps a legitimate anthropomorphism to think that two series of operations of analogous structure, and leading to comparable results, are in the last analysis of the same nature. Human craftsmanship continues the works of nature, and at times completes it, by entirely different means.

p. 134 – Compared to generalizations such as the principle of least action, economy of thought, and other similar ones, the notion of natural teleology cuts a modest figure.  It can be reproached with being anthropomorphic, but in a science which is the work of man what is not?  Furthermore, the important thing is to know whether or not it expresses a fact given in nature, for if we object to final causality as an explanation, it remains a fact to be explained.  It is true that if we make room for it, further problems of a different order than that of natural science and philosophy present themselves.  But, first of all, nothing obliges anyone to pose them; and, next, their solutions are not given in advance; and, finally, it would not be reasonable to take exception to so sensible and manifest experience so as to render impossible in advance the pressing of certain metaphysical problems, problems that would be susceptible to answers so undesirable under this scheme that one might consider it more prudent not to ask them.

gggggggg

Ff

Feser, Edward. The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008.)

p. 194 – …material systems, [advocates of modern Mechanistic Philosophy] tell us, are utterly devoid of final causality; but the mind is the clearest paradigm of final causality [viz., intentionality and rational desire]; hence the mind cannot possibly be any kind of material system, including the brain.

fffff

Aa

Ashley, Benedict M., OP. Book review of John Deely’s The Four Ages of Understanding in The Thomist (Jan. 2003), p. 134.

If Peirce had known Aquinas and what Poinsot made explicit in Aquinas rather than Scotus, and if in this new century Thomists can escape their Neoscholastic or Transcendentalist dead-ends, Post-Modernism will be saved from Modernism’s destruction of philosophy. The reason that St. Thomas’s philosophy of being remains fundamental even in this semiotic age is that it was he who showed us that the primum cognitum, the primary object of intelligence, is “being” in a sense that transcends mind-independent being and mind-dependent being. Only in this way does it become possible to establish the principle of contradiction by which real objects, which cannot contradict themselves, are distinguished from what human thought in its efforts to deal with real objects necessarily or arbitrarily projects on reality. … This fundamental epistemological position of Aquinas was based on Aristotle’s distinction between sense cognition and intellectual cognition and the dependence of the latter on the former.

aaaaaa