Blog Archive

  • Goods, basic goods, and faculties

    We’ve mentioned before that the goodness of some thing is relative to that thing’s nature. It is good for a human to have two legs because our biology is structured in such a way that having two legs is conducive to our flourishing. By the same token, it is not good for a cat to have two legs. Now, these various goods can be grouped together and structured hierarchically: colour sensitivity, amoung other things, is a good which is subsumed under the good of seeing. Good seeing is itself subsumed under the goods of sensing, which in turn is subsumed…

  • Actualisation of potentiality as such

    While we’re on the topic of confusing things Aquinas said, we can talk about his analysis of change, which he in turn gets from Aristotle. We’ve noted before that the first step in analysing change is the realisation that it involves the actualisation of a potential: When a hot cup of coffee gets cold, for example, what is happening is that the cup’s potential for the being cold is actualised by the coldness in the surrounding air… When I pick the cup off the ground and place it on the desk, I am actualising the cup’s potential to be a meter…

  • On the homogeneity of measures

    In Summa Theologica II-I Q96 A2 corp. Aquinas says “a measure should be homogeneous with that which it measures”. While I could gather roughly what he was saying from the context, I must admit that this phrase confused me a bit. But what he’s saying isn’t really that confusing or complicated when we consider common examples of measures. For instance, a ruler can’t measure length unless it too has length, and a clock can’t measure duration unless it persists through some duration. So that’s the first sense in which a measure is homogeneous with that which it measures: it must…

  • Substantial and aggregate activities

    In the Physics Aristotle gives his famous definition of a substance, which he refers to as a thing that “exists by nature” or as a “natural object”: Some things exist by nature, others are due to other causes. Natural objects include animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies like earth, fire, air, and water; at any rate, we do say that these kinds of things exist naturally. The obvious difference between all these things and things which are not natural is that each of the natural ones contains within itself a source of change and of stability, in respect…

  • Joy and hope

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    In a previous post, I took joy to be happiness with respect to our ultimate good. We also spoke about two ways in which happiness is achieved: through the acquisition of a good or the continued possession of a good. The Aristotelian inside me was unsatisfied with this, for we usually take happiness to be identical with the ultimate good. Clearly in the earlier post I was using the term in a less precise sense. After thinking about it a bit more I realised that what I actually meant by happiness was “pleasure” or “delight”. But then what is delight? Aquinas…

  • Analogy at the foundations of mathematics

    Consider the Benacerraf identification problem in philosophy of maths: there are multiple different ways of “defining” natural numbers in terms of sets, so there is no way of determining which definition is the “correct” one. This is not just a problem about natural numbers but they’re a useful notion to introduce the problem with. In fact, it’s not even just a problem with sets, since there are even multiple foundations from which to choose to define the natural numbers (I’m thinking about type theory and category theory here, considered as foundations). Now, I’m broadly Aristotelian about mathematical objects: we abstract quantity…

  • Why it’s called “motion”

    I can’t believe it took me so long to realise this. Aristotelians sometimes (read: often) use the word “motion” to refer to change of any kind. Thus it is much broader than how we might use the word today. It’s certainly broader than mere change in location, but even we use it in a broader sense that. But why? Why would you call change, in general, motion? Good question. One of the questions Aristotle had to grapple with (and which we tend to ignore these days), is how change is possible and what it is. He realised that any instance…

  • The good of others

    Previously we discussed the general notion of natural goodness, and saw that the natures of things determine what is good or bad for them. In particular, our nature as humans determines what is good or bad for us. We also saw that with humans our actions take on a moral significance to the extent that the ends or means willed in them are good or bad for us. For us; but what about others? The answer, simply put, is that it is natural for us as humans to enter into various unions (or “communities”) wherein our well-being involves the well-being of others. We already saw a limited example of…

  • Crutches and culture

    I was thinking about silly claims like “religion is a crutch” or “people are religious because of their culture.” It seems to me that these claims are either uninteresting or false. If taken as a claim that many religious people are religious because of perceived psychological benefits or cultural bias, it is uninteresting, at least from for the person interested in the veracity of religious claims. In many areas of life the vast majority of people hold the positions they do for non-intellectual reasons. The real question is whether there are good reasons for a position (religious or not), not…

  • Links on living well

    I’ve come across two different links today that speak to the broad question of doing this whole “living” thing well: A blog post by Lydia McGrew in which she reminds us that “An irresistible urge to follow every ephemeral fad is not the mark of a life well-lived.” A TED talk by Barry Schwartz in which he reminds us that rules and incentives are not sufficient for living properly. What we really need is the virtue of wisdom. He closes with the words, “In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing — to do right…

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