Category: Philosophy

  • Virtual existence

    It might not seem like it, but a proper understanding of virtual existence can be significantly helpful when trying to understand the structure of human communities. To this end, I’d like to spend some time thinking about this puzzling notion here. Substances and aggregates again You’ll recall that, in our discussions about substantial activities, we spent →

  • 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 →

  • 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, →

  • 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 →

  • 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; →

  • 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 →

  • 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, →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →

  • 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 →