Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aristotle

  • The Aporetics of Primary Substance

    I am nothing if not self-critical. And so a partial retraction may be in order.  In A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind, I opened with: 1) A primary substance (a substance hereafter) is a concrete individual.  A man, a horse, a tree, a statue are stock examples of substances.  A substance…

  • Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?

    Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation.  Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are…

  • Morality Public and Private: On not Confusing Them

    With a little help from Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Hannah Arendt. Substack latest. By the way, I learned that Arendt had ten books by Carl Schmitt in her library. We will have to look into their relationship. Is that a cigarette holder she's using?  A Randian touch. It would not be fair to call Ayn Rand…

  • Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?

    Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter.  A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience.  We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both…

  • A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind

    Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available.  I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have. The problem I want to discuss in this installment is whether  an Aristotelian-Thomistic…

  • What is Potentiality?

    Substack latest. An exploration of a much-misunderstood notion.

  • I Get a Rise out of Aristotle

    Substack latest. Is the political life the highest life?

  • Norms in Nature? Some Doubts

    Substack latest. It opens like this: Our friend Malcolm Pollack, riffing on some complaints of mine about Michael Anton's talk of natural rights, wrote the following: Rights are normative in their essence, while Nature simply is. Therefore, I see only two possibilities: 1) “Natural” rights flow from an intrinsic source of normative authority. Since brute and indifferent Nature…

  • A Battle of Titans

    Substack upload. It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians.  What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification.  Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2. Jung does not properly source the…

  • Democrat Election Skulduggery

    The Dems are now a hard-Left party. For a leftist, the end justifies the means. If you have to cheat to win, then you cheat. And so they cheat.  Case in point: Arizona election fraud. See here, here, and here.  When caught, leftists lie about their cheating and about their lying. Do leftists ever tell…

  • Animal Awareness: Aristotle, Galileo, Kant

    This just over the trans0m from Edward Buckner. I have added my comments in blue. Aristotle: Even if all animals were eliminated and thereby all perceptions (since only animals perceive), “there will still be something perceptible—a body, for example, or something warm, or sweet, or bitter, or anything else perceptible.” BV: Evaluation of the above…

  • Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Divine Simplicity

    Dominik Kowalski has a question for me about footnote 3 in Peter van Inwagen's "God's Being and Ours" in Miroslav Szatkowski, ed., Ontology of Theistic Beliefs, de Gruyter, 2018, pp. 213-223. (Van Inwagen's essay is right after my "Does God Exist Because He Ought to Exist?, pp. 203-212. I managed to upstage van Inwagen, but…

  • Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity

    The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a  contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment.  The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical.…

  • ‘Political’ is not a Dirty Word

    Years ago I heard a man on C-Span whose name and the name of whose organization I have forgotten. The man headed an outfit promoting a strict interpretation of the U.S. constitution. Throughout his talk he repeated the remark that his organization was not political, not political, NOT POLITICAL!   Nonsense, say I. What the…

  • After MacIntyre: On Deriving Ought from Is

    Are there any (non-trivial*) valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions:  (i) The premises are all purely factual  in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative?  Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55): 1. This watch is…