These are the notes I'll be using this morning to introduce my MCCC Western Philosophy students to Aristotle's metaphysics.
ARISTOTLE
Questions:
1.
Explain
Aristotle’s idea of “form” and “matter.”
2.
How
does Aristotle explain “change?”
3.
How
does Aristotle’s reasoning provide an alternative to Parmenides?
1.
Explain
Aristotle’s idea of “form” and “matter.”
A “form” is what a thing really is. “Matter” is not what
a thing really is.
o
For 3 reasons:
·
Your physical being (“matter”) could not be
what it is to be you. For three reasons.
1) Matter
is always going in and out, always changing.
E.g., you change your material constituents a lot without
stopping
to be yourself. E.g., you cut your hair.
2)
Something can remain what it is even if we replaced bits of matter on it. E.g.,
we could take a house, tear out some rotting boards, and replace them with
different kinds of boards.
§ As
long as it stayed that same continuous functional structure, serving the
function of a house, we would still have the same thing or entity on our hands.
3)
Matter is not definite enough to be what a thing really is.
§ Matter
is just a lump or heap of stuff, so we couldn’t say you are some stuff or other.
§ It’s
only when we’ve identified the structure the stuff constitutes that we can even
go on to say something intelligent about the stuff itself.
Forms are non-material. But not in some abstract Platonic
Realm of Ideas.
o
Aristotle thought we actually cannot go
coherently beyond our experience. The only thing we can do is the
investigating, the mapping, of the sphere of our experience.
o
E.g. – Raphael painting
Immaterial forms exist in physical things.
“Form” makes things belong to a certain kind. E.g.,
“dog.” Matter makes them individuals of that kind. E.g., “This German
Shepherd.” Or: “My dog.”
“Matter is the principle of individuation in material
things. This means, for instance, that two peas of the same size and shape,
however alike they are, however many properties or forms they may have in
common, are two peas and not one pea because they are two different parcels of
matter.” (82-83)
EXAMPLE: These two dry erase
markers have the same form. But they are two individual markers, because of
matter.
“Forms are logically incapable of existing without the
bodies of which they are the forms. [This is against Plato.] Forms do not
themselves exist, nor come to be, in the way in which substances exist and come
to be. Forms, unlike bodies, are not made out of anything; and for a form of
A-ness to exist is simply for there to be some substance which is A; for horseness to exist there simply are
horses.” (83)
So? This chair is a form-matter composite.
2.
How
does Aristotle explain “change?”
In our experience we contact things that are changing.
E.g., a leaf unfolds, is green, turns yellow, then withers.
A child is born, matures,
grows older, then dies.
Now the question is: If we
are to talk about changing things, there still must be some “It” that stays the
same while all the attributes of it are changing.
Otherwise it will be hard to talk about change at all.
Change, paradoxically, requires stability.
E.g. – I cannot say “You
have changed since I last saw you” unless there is some stable, unchanging
“you.”
The question Aristotle asks
is: what are the more continuous, persisting things on which we can anchor our
discourse about change, things which themselves persist while properties or attributes
are changing?
This is the “What is it?” question. E.g., Who are you, really?
E.g., “you.” Which among the
many properties of you that impress themselves on my senses are the most
fundamental ones, the ones you couldn’t cease to have without ceasing to be
yourself?
You could change your
jacket. But obviously you would still be you.
Aristotle’s question about
identity is the search for the parts or elements in the thing which play that
very fundamental role, which are what it
is to be that thing.
Two questions:
#1 – What are the
characteristics of an object that are fundamental and indispensable, in that
they make the object what it is?
#2 – What are the
characteristics of an object that persist through change, so that the object,
though changing, remains the same object?
(For Plato it’s the Forms.)
For Aristotle, there are two kinds of change:
o
Substantial change
§ When
a form/substance of one kind turns into a form/substance of another kind.
§ “Matter”
takes on a different form.
§ E.g.,
when you shake a bottle of cream and it changes into butter.
o
Accidental change
§ When
a form stays the same but the matter gets reconfigured.
§ E.g.,
when you put a new roof on a house.
·
What a substance is, is its actualities (e.g., this piece of wood); what a substance
can be or change into are its “potentialities” (e.g., a pile of ash).
o
Potentiality – the capacity to undergo a
change of some kind. (82)
o
‘Forms’ – the actualities involved in
changes.
§ E.g.,
a bottle of cream can change into butter.
§ E.g.,
a piece of wood can change into a pile of ash.
o
‘Matter’ – that which has the capacity for
substantial change.
§ Matter
can take on different forms.
·
E.g. – a piece of wood is actually cold but
potentially hot; actually wood but potentially ash.
o
“The
actualities involved in changes are called ‘forms’, and ‘matter’ is used as a
technical term for what has the capacity for substantial change.” (82)
3. How
does Aristotle’s reasoning provide an alternative to Parmenides?
- Kenny,
83
Parmenides denied that change was real, because Being
cannot come from Unbeing, since Unbeing cannot be thought (is nothing).
For Aristotle change is explained like this:
·
Matter
is eternal.
·
Matter
cannot exist without form.
·
Change is explained by either: 1) matter
taking on a different form; or 2) a form/substance changing accidentally.
