• The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    How does that 'suggestion' square against Aristotle using the word without that limitation??
    How does that change what is said in Reeve's translation given above?

    If you are interested in the Greek, the passage I quoted is here. The English translation is given by selecting that on the upper right-hand side of that page. I think Reeve's is better but the difference does not matter regarding the use of ousia that you refer to.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    Aristotle used ousia in numerous places regarding the 'immaterial',if you are suggesting they were always connected with matter.
    I don't like Reeve for some expressions, but he is extremely consistent. He never translates dunamis as 'activity' or subtance (ousia)
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    I am using Reeve's translation for convenience. Present one you like better.
    Or is your beef with Aristotle?
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    The idea that we have the same chemistry as stars is astonishing. The telescopes keep pushing the border of the 'sublunary' sphere further away. The disagreement between Glaucon and Socrates underscores how the view of what is 'immaterial' is not self-explanatory but is always a part of looking for explanations that reflect better than others. If the idea of the 'immaterial' has a job, the 'eternal' has one too. I read Aristotle to be unhappy with the divide between Glaucon and Socrates. The following supports that view:

    If there is something that is capable of moving things or acting on them, but that is not actively doing so, there will not [necessarily] be movement, since it is possible for what has a capacity not to activate it. There is no benefit, therefore, in positing eternal substances, as those who accept the Forms do, unless there is to be present in them some starting-point that is capable of causing change. Moreover, even this is not enough, and neither is another substance beyond the Forms. For if it will not be active, there will not be movement. Further, even if it will be active, it is not enough, if the substance of it is a capacity. For then there will not be eternal movement, since what is potentially may possibly not be. There must, therefore, be such a starting-point, the very substance of which is activity. Further, accordingly, these substances must be without matter. For they must be eternal, if indeed anything else is eternal. Therefore they must be activity. — Metaphysics, 1071b12–22, translated by C.D.C Reeve

    Saying: "if indeed anything else is eternal" puts the explanations into a hierarchy.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    Aristotle's astronomy tried to account for how beings found within the 'sublunary sphere' had anything to do with those observed outside of it. Now that we understand that they are not different kinds of beings, the view of all beings belonging to a single cosmos is strengthened by our increase in knowledge.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    I take Sachs' and Kahn's point regarding how the use of 'substance' is misunderstood as a translation of einai and ousia. It is not germane to the distinction Aristotle is making in the text I quoted. Aristotle does not have Russell's problem about whether universals are real. Aristotle is saying that they are so real that we are tempted to think they explain what they do not.

    Aristotle's objection to 'universals' understood as causes is its own objection to 'reification'. We encounter a world of beings and figure we have it all figured out by classifying those items properly. We have to classify and place things into relationships. We also have to find a way to find its limits while wondering what the heck is going on.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    But the salient point of the dispute is, is each individual an instance of a unique form? I say not, that the form 'man' is common to all men, that is why it is a universal.Wayfarer

    Qualities and parts all men share as attributes do not show us the cause of why we share them. That is how I read the text I quoted. Do you see another way to understand those words?

    It is clear that there must be a relationship between the "particular formation" of individuals and the way they can be recognized as members of a species. Otherwise, there would be no species or kinds. How to understand that is a major hot potato in Aristotelian scholarship. But we don't have to get that deep into the pool to see that Aristotle objects to the language of participating in Forms because it starts with a general attribute and circles backs to itself:

    " Of which, then, will it be the substance? For it is either the substance of none or of all. And it cannot be the substance of all."
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    I don't think that's what 'form' means. Socrates truly is the form 'man' but the form 'man' is common to all men. Likewise for forms generally.Wayfarer

    What we can determine is common to a species is not seeing what makes a substance become and maintain its being. As quoted before:

    But the universal too seems to some people to be most of all a cause, and the universal most of all a starting-point. So let us turn to that too. For it seems impossible for any of the things said [of something] universally to be substance. For first the substance of each thing is special to it, in that it does not belong to anything else. A universal, by contrast, is something common, since that thing is said to be a universal which naturally belongs to many things. Of which, then, will it be the substance? For it is either the substance of none or of all. And it cannot be the substance of all. — Metaphysics, 1038b9, translated by CDC Reeve

    To look for causes of substances composed of matter and form cannot be done by simply identifying components. Whatever is bringing them into existence, and maintaining them while they do, is a principle beyond those components:

    But in fact, as has been said, the ultimate matter and the shape are one and the same, the one potentially, the other actively, so that it is the same to look for what is the cause of oneness or what is the cause of being one.946 For each thing is a one, and what potentially is and what actively is are in a way one. And so there is no other cause here, unless there is something that brought about the movement from potentiality to activity. Things that have no matter, though, are all unconditionally just what is a one. — Metaphysics,1045b20, translated by CDC Reeve

    This unity is not what is meant by a universal that can be named. In so far as we can talk about substance that makes each unique. The need for analogy points to a limit of our experience:

    What we wish to say is clear from the particular cases by induction, and we must not look for a definition of everything, but be able to comprehend the analogy, namely, that as what is building is in relation to what is capable of building, and what is awake is in relation to what is asleep, and what is seeing is in relation to what has its eyes closed but has sight, and what has been shaped out of the matter is in relation to the matter, and what has been finished off is to the unfinished. Of the difference exemplified in this analogy let the activity be marked off by the first part, the potentiality by the second. — ibid. Θ 6 1048a35–b6

    We have been given some ratios to work with but are far from seeing how it works in individuals.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    I think that distinction works in the absolute terms of the De Anima, 408b passage.

    I read the focus on the actual compared to the potential in other contexts to point to a continuity of life despite the intermittent nature of some activities. To say "what is awake is in relation to what is asleep, and what is seeing is in relation to what has its eyes closed but has sight" is to look for a basis of continuity based upon something like the soul that keeps you alive through both phases.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    Thanks, the materials you provide are very informative. I wonder if in the above passage, 'mind' is the translation of 'nous'?Wayfarer

    It is. A lot of Aristotle's language is hard to decipher. Not this stuff.

    And again, even if Aristotle is not discussing the immortality of the soul, it is easy to see how this would appear to be so for the medieval commentators, Islamic and ChristianWayfarer

    The status of this Easy is a matter of much dispute. We and many others have argued about this on many threads. What is a preservation of an idea versus a distortion of it.? Does the new use of words cancel the old?

    (I'm very interested in the medieval conception of the rational soul, which seems very much aligned with these types of ideas.)Wayfarer

    I read Aristotle as a challenge to the idea of the person that many of the medieval conceptions of the rational soul are based upon. Perhaps this deserves its own OP.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    The active intellect in a living person is not a separate 'faculty' in the sense of a capacity that can be set side by side with another faculty of the intellect. What we experience as thinking cannot happen without the perishable and "passive" power to remember what is thought. We cannot observe the active principle as it is as itself. If we speak of active and passive powers, we need the structure of a soul (what makes living things live) to approach what the meeting of form and matter might entail for living things.

    It is not as simple as shaping a stone into a statue. Living things are not like shaping things once and you are done. They require a continuous process that cannot stop and start when it gets tired. That is why Aristotle distinguishes between changes like making a house out of stuff from the act of seeing, which is an activity that involves a potential you are born with.

    How to view this 'continuous process' is not brought up in the question of surviving death (as discussed in the Phaedo) but to explain the cessation of life. The 'continuous process' either stops because the active principle stopped or because of some defect in the perishable component. That is why I brought up this text when we discussed this last year:

    The case of the mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. If it could be destroyed at all, it would be under the blunting influence of old age. What really happens in respect of mind in old age is, however, exactly parallel to what happens in the case of the sense organs; if the old man could recover the proper kind of eye, he would see just as well as the young man. The incapacity of old age is due to an affection not of the soul but of its vehicle, as occurs in drunkenness or disease. Thus it is that in old age the activity of mind or intellectual apprehension declines only through the decay of some other inward part; mind itself is impassible. Thinking, loving, and hating are affections not of mind but of that which has mind, in so far as it has it. That is why, when the vehicle decays, memory and love cease; they were activities not of mind, but of the composite which has perished; mind is, no doubt, something more divine and impassable. That the soul cannot be moved is therefore clear from what we have said, and if it cannot be moved at all, manifestly it cannot be moved by itself.
    — De Anima, 408b, 18, translated by J. A. Smith
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    That idea is going to have a hard time getting past what I just quoted upthread:

    Since, then, they cannot share in the everlasting and divine by continuous existence, because no perishable thing can persist numerically one and the same, they share in them in so far as each can, some more and some less; and what persists is not the thing itself but something like itself, not one in number but one in species.

    So, less a matter of 'absorption' and more like swallowing a balloon filled with cocaine to get it through customs.
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being

    Thank you. He still is kicking my ass.

    I did not bring him up as a rebuttal to any thesis here but only to note that Aristotle is not keeping the peas from touching the meat the way Kant likes his supper.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    I never canceled the agent intellect. I recognize the agent intellect as an extremely important concept. I just understand it in a way different from you. And that's not at all surprising because the proper way to understand the agent intellect has always been a matter of debate.Metaphysician Undercover

    What became difficult for me to understand then and since then is:

    As we proceed through Bk2 and 3, an explanation is provided. This is the actual/potential division. The way that the soul moves the body is by means of the powers, which are potentials. The potentials are not naturally active, they need to be actualized. So I do not think it is the case that we consider one to be a part of the other, but they exist in this relationship which is the active/potential relationship of hylomorphism, matter/form.Metaphysician Underground

    You seem to be putting the active principle outside of the combining of matter and form. The potentiality is somehow existing independently of what turns them on. This proposed separation runs afoul of how actuality and potentiality is used by Aristotle. As far as I can make out, you have nested one hylomorphism into another. The problem of the Third Man gets doubled and we are now up to Six of them. The antidote is to consider what Aristotle says is not potentiality and actuality:

    What we wish to say is clear from the particular cases by induction, and we must not look for a definition of everything, but be able to comprehend the analogy, namely, that as what is building is in relation to what is capable of building, and what is awake is in relation to what is asleep, and what is seeing is in relation to what has its eyes closed but has sight, and what has been shaped out of the matter is in relation to the matter, and what has been finished off is to the unfinished. Of the difference exemplified in this analogy let the activity be marked off by the first part, the potentiality by the second. — ibid. Θ 6 1048a35–b6

    If we could say exactly what this element is in each case, we would.

    There are only potential powers when there are actual ones nearby.

    All the instances where the analogy does a job involve situations where the potential is sometimes not activated. This condition does not apply to as quoted above: "Things that have no matter, though, are all unconditionally just what is a one."

    This permits Aristotle to speak of an active principle that is immortal to directly activate what is not one:

    In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal. (But we do not remember because this is unaffected, whereas the passive intellect is perishable, and without this nothing thinks. — Aristotle, De Anima, 430a18, translated by DW Hamlyn
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    It is the formal cause and not a concept that does the work. The formal cause, what it is to be a man, is what each and every man is. This is by nature not by concept.Fooloso4

    Before Aristotle discusses actuality and potentiality in Book Theta, the problem of universals as causes is discussed in Book Zeta. Starting with:

    But the universal too seems to some people to be most of all a cause, and the universal most of all a starting-point. So let us turn to that too. For it seems impossible for any of the things said [of something] universally to be substance. For first the substance of each thing is special to it, in that it does not belong to anything else. A universal, by contrast, is something common, since that thing is said to be a universal which naturally belongs to many things. Of which, then, will it be the substance? For it is either the substance of none or of all. And it cannot be the substance of all. — Metaphysics, 1038b9, translated by CDC Reeve

    The discussion continues with:

    If we get our theoretical grasp on the issue on the basis of these considerations, then, it is evident that nothing that belongs universally to things is substance, and that none of the things that are predicated in common signifies a this something but a such-and-such sort. If not, many other difficulties result, and especially the Third Man. — ibid. 1038b30

    This argument touches on the distinction Joe Sachs makes between abstraction and separation in the language of the Physics:

    If we are abstracting from tangible bodies, then they must in the first place be
    made, in part, out of objects of thought. This is what I meant by saying that our usual idea
    of abstraction is not tenable. It makes the thinkable things unmysterious only by doing just
    the opposite to the visible things. It ends up claiming that our eyes see the invisible and our
    hands hold the intangible, because it tells us that when we think one of those invisible and
    intangible things, we have extracted it out of a body like a tooth. The idea of abstraction
    answers no question, but only goes around in a circle and gets dizzy. Anything it gives us,
    we already have; anything we don't already have, it can't give us.
    Joe Sachs, The Battle of the Gods and the Giants, page 8
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being

    Aristotle has got your back:

    It is also worth inquiring how time is related to the soul and why time is thought to exist in everything, on the earth and on the sea and in the heaven. Is it not in view of the fact that it is an attribute or a possession of a motion, by being a number (of a motion), and the fact that all these things are movable? For all of them are in a place, and time is simultaneous with a motion whether with respect to potentiality or with respect to actuality.
    One might also raise the problem of whether time would exist not if no soul existed; for, if no one can exist to do the numbering, no thing can be numbered. So if nothing can do the numbering except a soul or the intellect of a soul, no time can exist without the existence of soul, unless it be that which when existing, time exists, that is if a motion can exist without a soul. As for the prior and the posterior, they exist in motion; and they are time qua being numerable.
    — Physics, 223a15, translated by HG Apostle

    We look for the Nous against the background of where we cannot find it. We stick out like a sore thumb.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    But it is not clear whether you think you are explaining Aristotle or abandoning him.Fooloso4

    I have not heard this interpretation from any other commentator, ancient or modern. In the discussion last year, I realized that I was never going to be able to visit his planet when he said this:

    Now, It is clear from the passage I quoted from De Anima, that Aristotle rejects this idea of the mind moving itself through eternal circular motion. He attributes this idea of the mind moving itself to Plato's Timaeus, and he rejects it, for the reasons given in the quoted passage. The description is spatial, and that which is immaterial cannot be described in spatial termsMetaphysician Undercover
    .

    This comment was said to cancel the description of the agent intellect:

    In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal. (But we do not remember because this is unaffected, whereas the passive intellect is perishable, and without this nothing thinks. — Aristotle, De Anima, 430a18, translated by DW Hamlyn

    To understand Aristotle you will have to ignore Aristotle.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    There is nothing to indicate that the world might be eternal. and everything indicates that there is potentiality and actuality. So that possibility, that the world is eternal and there no potentiality or actuality is easily excluded as unreal.Metaphysician Undercover

    Potentiality only refers to substances composed with matter:

    But in fact, as has been said, the ultimate matter and the shape are one and the same, the one potentially, the other actively, so that it is the same to look for what is the cause of oneness or what is the cause of being one.946 For each thing is a one, and what potentially is and what actively is are in a way one. And so there is no other cause here, unless there is something that brought about the movement from potentiality to activity. Things that have no matter, though, are all unconditionally just what is a one. — Metaphysics,1045b20, translated by CDC Reeve

    The matter is potential only in relation to what a substance actually is:

    It is evident that even of the things that seem to be substances, most are capacities (dunami), whether the parts of animals (for none of them exists when it has been separated, and whenever they are separated they all exist only as matter) or earth, fire, and air (for none of them is one, but instead they are like a heap, until they are concocted and some one thing comes to be from them). — ibid. 1040b5

    Living things are not eternal:

    Hence, we must first speak about nourishment and reproduction; for the nutritive soul belongs also to the other living things and is the first and most commonly possessed potentiality of the soul, in virtue of which they all have life. Its function in living things, such as are perfect and not mutilated or do not have spontaneous generation, to produce another thing like themselves--an animal to produce an animal, a plant a plant---in order that they may partake of the everlasting and divine in so far as they can; for all desire that, for the sake of that, they do whatever they do in accordance with nature. (But that for the sake of which is twofold--the purpose for which and the beneficiary for whom.) Since, then, they cannot share in the everlasting and divine by continuous existence, because no perishable thing can persist numerically one and the same, they share in them in so far as each can, some more and some less; and what persists is not the thing itself but something like itself, not one in number but one in species. — De Anima, 415a26, translated by DW Hamlyn

    Primary causes are eternal:

    But if there is something that is eternal and immovable and separable, it is evident that knowledge of it belongs to a theoretical science—not, however, to natural science (for natural science is concerned with certain movable things) nor to mathematics, but to something prior to both. For natural science is concerned with things that are inseparable but not immovable, while certain parts of mathematics are concerned with things that are immovable and not separable but as in matter. The primary science, by contrast, is concerned with things that are both separable and immovable. Now all causes are necessarily eternal, and these most of all. concavity is without perceptible matter. If, then, all natural things are said the way the snub is (for example, nose, eye, face, flesh, bone, and, in general, animal, and leaf, root, bark, and, in general, plant—for the account of none of these is without [reference to] movement, but always includes matter), the way we must inquire into and define the what-it-is in the case of natural things is clear, as is why it belongs to the natural scientist to get a theoretical grasp even on some of the soul, that is, on as much of it as is not without matter. That natural science is a theoretical science, then, is evident from these considerations. Mathematics too is a theoretical one, but whether its objects are immovable and separable is not now clear; however, it is clear that some parts of mathematics get a theoretical grasp on their objects insofar as they are immovable and insofar as they are separable. But if there is something that is eternal and immovable and separable, it is evident that knowledge of it belongs to a theoretical science—not, however, to natural science (for natural science is concerned with certain movable things) nor to mathematics, but to something prior to both. For natural science is concerned with things that are inseparable but not immovable, while certain parts of mathematics are concerned with things that are immovable and not separable but as in matter. The primary science, by contrast, is concerned with things that are both separable and immovable. Now all causes are necessarily eternal, and these most of all. For they are the causes of the divine beings that are perceptible. — Metaphysics, 1026a10
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being

    Is that how Kant would have looked at it? That was my question.

    Your observation made by Jung is interesting.
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being

    Unless you believed that those beginnings implied influences that were deemed demonic afterwards.
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being

    Myths are an essential element of Jung's concept. Thinking about them near Kant reminds me of how staunchly Kant opposed superstition.(exept, of course, the mystery of his personal belief) The interest Jung took in Alchemy would be close to dark magic from that perspective.

    One of things I find interesting in Jung is that some portion of the 'scientific method' has a parent people are uncomfortable talking about.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    The point being, we should not, as is commonly assumed, read Aristotle as a rejection of Plato.Fooloso4

    Your point is well taken.

    I do think it is fair to say that Aristotle has no patience for the 'likely stories' and the devices of myth and poetry employed by Plato. If you are going to be an account, it has to do some work. The endoxa (previous opinions) Aristotle starts so many of his works sometimes are oppositions to ideas but other times a decision that "this does not help me."

    When one reads the academic debate over the last two hundred years over what Aristotle meant, there are many disagreements that are alive today. One element is never disputed in my recollection: This guy was looking for the right map, not a collection of possible maps.
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being

    That is an interesting idea. I feel it is incumbent upon you to compare them side by side. Otherwise, my response would be a rebuttal in search of a thesis.

    At the very least, would you accept the idea is completely foreign to Kant?
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    I have read some articles suggesting that Kant and Schopenhauer anticipate Freud's discovery of the unconscious - which seems fairly obvious when you think about it. For Kant, much of what we think we know is determined by categorial structures that lie beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. For Schopenhauer, transcendence can be sought through art as a symbolic form of the Sublime. Whereas Hegel attempts to explain everything, to make it all explicit, but in so doing, 'projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created.' It seems a sound analysis to me.Wayfarer

    Yes, Kant and Schopenhauer presented an underlying scaffold that undergirds conscious experience. On the other hand, they would have shot beer through their nostrils if told there was a collective unconscious.

    I think there is a truth in Jung's criticism of Hegel. With some aspects of Jung's psychology, I wonder if he is not guilty of the same charge. I also wonder if there is a way to see that Hegel established a framework that permits the logos of Jung. The master's appentice.....
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    As long as you think that by potentiality and actuality Aristotle means a representation you will remain hopelessly confused.Fooloso4

    It confuses me at any rate. If a map is being made, it should help navigate the territory. And that is what Aristotle was demanding in his challenge to Plato: "What do the Form contribute to the eternal beings among the sensibles or to those which are generated and destroyed? For they are not the cause of motion or change in them."

    Is there a map of a territory which is the map of a territory beyond that? I fear the approach of an infinite circular motion.
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being

    I meant to say he is departing from the domain of rationalist explanation but not negating them. He rejects Nietzsche's rejection of 'laws of nature', for instance. So, Jung does talk like Descartes in many registers but is exploring what is underneath him at the same time.

    Jung cannot speak of 'psychologists in disguise' without philosophers who aren't doing that. Perhaps he is trying to have his cake and eat it too.
  • Consciousness is a Precondition of Being
    Strange that Jung of all people accepts such a standard metaphysical view.Mikie

    I think that Jung makes that statement in the context of seeing psychology as a departure from the framework of 'rationalist philosophies'. In On the Nature of the Psyche, he wrote extensively upon the resistance against accepting models of the mind involving unconscious processes. Here are some of his remarks concerning German Idealism:

    The soul was a tacit assumption that seemed to be known in every detail. With the discovery of a possible unconscious psychic realm, man had the opportunity to embark upon a adventure of the spirit, and one might have expected that a passionate interest would be turned in this direction. Not only was this not the case at all, but there arose on all sides an outcry against such an hypothesis. Nobody drew the conclusion that if the subject of knowledge, the psych, were in fact a veiled for of existence not immediately accessible to consciousness, then all our knowledge must be incomplete, and moreover to a degree that we cannot determine. The validity of conscious knowledge was questioned in an altogether different and more menacing way than it had ever been by the critical procedures of epistemology. The latter put certain bounds to human knowledge in general, from which post-Kantian German Idealism struggled to emancipate itself; but natural science and common sense accommodated themselves to without much difficulty, if they condescended to notice it at all. Philosophy fought against it in the interests of an antiquated pretension of the human mind to be able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps and know things outside the range of human understanding. The victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason and to the further development of the German and, ultimately, of the European mind, all the more dangerous as Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created. We know how far Hegel's influence extends today.....

    Hegel offered a solution of the problem raised by epistemological criticism in that he gave ideas a chance to prove their unknown power of autonomy.They induced that hybris of reason which led to Nietzsche's superman and hence to the catastrophe that bear the name of Germany. Not only artists, but philosophers too, are sometimes prophets.....

    The peculiar high-flown language Hegel uses bears out this view: it is reminiscent of the megalomanic language of schizophrenics, who us terrific spellbounding words to reduce the transcendent to subjective form, to give the banalities the charm of novelty, or pass off commonplaces as searching wisdom. So bombastic a terminology is symptom of weakness, ineptitude, and lack of substance. But that does not prevent the latest German philosophy from using the same crackpot power-word and pretending it is not unintentional psychology.
    — Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche, 358

    Okay, Carl, now tell us how you really feel.

    The separation Jung is making here is surely worthy of being challenged. I brought it up to note that he explicitly acknowledges what he is departing from rather than making a replacement narrative.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    I think Aristotle is framing eternity as a limit that we cannot approach without seeing our condition as unable to think about it past a certain point. In Physics, he says:

    It is also worth inquiring how time is related to the soul and why time is thought to exist in everything, on the earth and on the sea and in the heaven. Is it not in view of the fact that it is an attribute or a possession of a motion, by being a number (of a motion), and the fact that all these things are movable? For all of them are in a place, and time is simultaneous with a motion whether with respect to potentiality or with respect to actuality.
    One might also raise the problem of whether time would exist not if no soul existed; for, if no one can exist to do the numbering, no thing can be numbered. So if nothing can do the numbering except a soul or the intellect of a soul, no time can exist without the existence of soul, unless it be that which when existing, time exists, that is if a motion can exist without a soul. As for the prior and the posterior, they exist in motion; and they are time qua being numerable.
    — Physics, 223a15, translated by HG Apostle

    So whatever 'eternity' is, it is not simply an infinite amount of what we have a little bit of. That conceptual boundary is touched upon in the De Anima passage I quoted explaining we can have no memory of the agent intellect as itself. Our thinking requires both the active and the passive working together.

    The limit is also expressed in Aristotle saying:

    Actual knowledge is identical with its object. But potential knowledge is prior in time in the individual, but not prior even in time in general; for all things that come to be are derived from that which is so actually. — De Anima, 431a1

    Our experience of potential knowledge is exactly not what is suggested by Anamnesis in Plato:

    Above all, one might go over the difficulties raised by this question: What do the Form contribute to the eternal beings among the sensibles or to those which are generated and destroyed? For they are not the cause of motion or change in them. And they do not in any way help either towards the knowledge of the other things (for the are not substances of them; otherwise they would be in them) or towards their existence (for they are not present in the things which share them). — Metaphysics, 1079b11, translated by HG Apostle

    I don't know if this approach toward an eternal being is a theology or not but it is clearly different from a creation story which gives us a beginning to measure time with or a 'chain of realities' as depicted by Plotinus.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    Perhaps you meant this:
    Ousia
    The term οὐσία is an Ancient Greek noun, formed on the feminine present participle of the verb εἰμί, eimí, meaning "to be, I am"
    Fooloso4

    That leads me to think that my instincts were correct, and that the notion of origin is based upon a convention of the lexicon rather than a thesis regarding parts of speech in respect to how the word was actually used.
  • Anybody read Jaworski

    I am glad that Pantagruel brought this up because it has been bugging me for decades.

    One response I have gotten when I complained about academic publications is surprise that I cared. "Why do you want to know about what is happening in the context of our dialogue?"
    There are many who do know why but I figure the surprise is part of the status quo..

    That makes it similar but different than issues of copyright in music and literature.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    I understood the quoted passage to be saying that the Latin word existere was too much like gignesthai (coming to be) for it to express the sharp contrast to that word given through the use of einai in Greek.

    In Liddel and Scott's lexicon, the third use given for the word is: "to be as opposed to appearing to be, as esse to videri, τὸν ἐόντα λόγον, the true story, Herodotus." I think that captures the emphatic quality Kahn is talking about.

    Which "etymological dictionary" are you referring to? In Liddel and Scott, verbs are given according to their form as 1st person singular, active voice, in the present tense unless there is a reason not to do that. I don't know why the convention was established. The groovy new Cambridge lexicon (which I do not possess) uses the same convention but lists some parts of speech separately when it clarifies a specific use. The idea that one part of speech is more 'original' than another in the use of a verb is new to me. I am keen to see that argument in action if you can cite the source of it.

    I don't know if there is an initiation into a 'gnosis' in Parmenides' thinking. It is interesting that Socrates refused to disparage him the way he kicked Heraclitus and Protagoras around in Theaetetus. Be that as it may, Parmenides is a poster child for Kahn's point about the strong separation between the language of Being from the language of Becoming:

    Necessarily therefore, either it simply Is or it simply Is Not. Strong conviction will not let us think that anything springs from Being except itself. Justice does not loosen her fetter to let Being be born or destroyed, but holds them fast. Thus our decision must be made in these terms: Is or Is Not. Surely by now we agree that it is necessary to reject the unthinkable unsayable path as untrue and to affirm the alternative as the path of reality and truth. — Parmenides, Way of Truth,7, Wheelwright collection (Emphasis mine)
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction
    it appears like you never got to the point of understanding the consistency the way that I do.Metaphysician Undercover

    That is certainly one possible explanation.
  • Anybody read Jaworski

    I am torn in this regard. People work and they should get paid.
    There are particular points of entry that get charged a certain amount. I have not seen a rent version where one could access all the sites carte blanche.
  • Do we genuinely feel things
    If you have not had this experience through doing meditation, what does it being reported by another person require from you?
  • Spinoza’s Philosophy

    This distinction between potential and actual should be considered through Spinoza's actual statements:

    I also want to say something here about the intellect and the will that we commonly attribute to God. If intellect and will do belong to the eternal essence of God, we must certainly mean something different by both these attributes than is commonly understood. For an intellect and a will that constituted the essence of God ​would have to be totally different from our intellect and will and would not agree with them in anything but name – no more in fact than the heavenly sign of the dog agrees with the barking animal which is a dog. I prove this thus. If intellect does belong to the divine nature, it will not be able, as our intellect is, to be posterior (as most believe) or simultaneous by nature with what is understood, since God is prior in causality to all things (by p16c1). To the contrary truth ​and the formal ​essence of things are ​such precisely because they exist as such objectively in the intellect of God. That is why God’s intellect, insofar as it is conceived as constituting God’s essence, is in truth the cause both of the essence of things and of their existence. ​This seems to have been noticed also by those who have maintained that the intellect, the will and the power of God are one and the same thing. — Spinoza: Ethics, Scholium to proposition 17, translated by M Silverthorne and MJ Kisner
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    I looked for support for your idea in the paper and did not find it. Perhaps you could point to what appealed to you.

    The essay is interesting and I will quote the part I think speaks to Aristotle's project:

    To put the matter in a nutshell, the ontological vocabulary of the Greeks lead them to treat the existence of things and persons as a special case of the Bestehen von Sachverhalte. It is remarkable that not only onta but every other Greek word for "fact" can also mean "thing", and vice versa:-(Cf. chremata = pragmata in the fragment of Protagoras; ergon in the contrast with logos: "in fact" and "in word" gegonota as the perfect of onta, etc.) This failure on the part of the Greeks (at least before the Stoics) to make a systematic distinction between fact and thing underlies the more superficial and inaccurate charge that they confused the "to be" of predication with that of existence.
    It may be thought that the neglect of such a distinction constitutes a serious shortcoming in Greek philosophy of the classical period. But it was precisely this indiscriminate use of einai and on which permitted the metaphysicians to state the problem of truth and reality in its most general form, to treat matters of fact and existence concerning the physical world as only a part of the problem (or as one of the possible answers), and to ask the ontological question itself: What is Being? that is, What is the object of true knowledge, the basis for true speech? If this is a question worth asking, then the ontological vocabulary of the Greeks, which permitted and encouraged them to ask it, must be regarded as a distinct philosophical asset.
    — Charles Kahn

    If I had been in Kahn's class as this lecture unfolded, I would have asked about how this feature of the language should be understood against the background of Aristotle's specific statements about predication and demonstration in his Metaphysics and elsewhere.
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    I don't agree with the way you characterize the differences between agencies in Aristotle.

    We argued about this extensively last year after you posted your thesis.

    I still have to say what I said then:
    "When I piece together what you ascribe to Aristotle, I don't understand it as a thought by itself."
  • The Hard Problem of Consciousness & the Fundamental Abstraction

    Leaving aside your detractors in the past, I have trouble matching your distinction between ontology and epistemology with Aristotelian and Platonic texts.

    Is there some portion of that text that does that for you?