Which brings to mind the Pinter analysis - that form is precisely what is brought to bear by cognition so as to navigate the environment — Wayfarer
Ironically, I had just read a book review in Philosophy Now magazine, before I noticed this post. The book author discusses the "neoliberal consumerist worldview", and the reviewer noted : "in postmodern culture the value of art is financial rather than aesthetic". The illustration showed a stainless steel sculpture by Jeff Koons, which sold for $91 million dollars in 2019. What did the buyer get for his financial fortune : a> a tchotchke to put on a shelf for the aesthetic amusement of his friends, or b> a steel object emulating a child's plastic balloon? Is "The Rabbit" merely a material thing (Hyle), or an aesthetic idea (Morph) in the form of a visual joke : steel art emulating plastic plaything?I think both form and content are missing from the blob Bob received. Can we take a closer look at the relationship between these things? — frank
We're able to impose form on it by way of analysis of the chemical composition, spectroscopic analysis, etc. But in another sense, there are vast clouds of interstellar matter that are formless.
Which brings to mind the Pinter analysis - that form is precisely what is brought to bear by cognition so as to navigate the environment.
But we imagine that if we had eyes small enough, we would see particles down there. It's not really formless, is it?
The non-living world subsists in itself as configurative phenomena.
Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations.
If the mind is imposing a form on "clouds of interstellar matter," that lack it, why does it impose one form over any other? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Clay, rocks, etc. are just bundles of external causes. — Count Timothy von Icarus
(That question is anticipated in the Parmenides, when Socrates asks if there are forms for hair, dirt and mud.) — Wayfarer
St. Gregory of Nyssa takes this up in "On the Making of Man." Apparently, a common argument at the time was to say that matter must be coeternal with God (a view based on the Timaeus) because God, as pure act, would lack the properties of matter (which must come from somewhere). But as St. Gregory points out, having removed all form, all whatness, from matter, one is left with nothing, no attributes at all—so there is nothing to "lack" in a "lack of potency." (This is also how Aristotle's Prime Mover(s) or Plotinus' One cannot be said to suffer from any privation through being pure act). — Count Timothy von Icarus
Now, if form is rather something created by/imposed by the mind, it almost seems to counterintuitively dislodge the phenomenological side of the understanding of eidos, since now the whatness of things is no longer essential to what they are but is rather something produced in one corner of the world, for some perceiving subject. — Count Timothy von Icarus
↪Joshs
The non-living world subsists in itself as configurative phenomena.
What does this mean? Are there non-configurative phenomena as a constant?
Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations.
"Agent" as the term is used in chemistry, e.g anything affecting change, or "agent" as the term is often used in the social sciences, as an entity that makes intentional decisions/choices? — Count Timothy von Icarus
If the mind is imposing a form on "clouds of interstellar matter," that lack it, why does it impose one form over any other?
— Count Timothy von Icarus
Because 'cloud' is a familar cognitive trope. But do clouds possess form at all? I think in the strict sense that it is questionable. They fall under this description:
Clay, rocks, etc. are just bundles of external causes.
— Count Timothy von Icarus — Wayfarer
In any case, the fact that forms are artefacts of the cognitive system, does not undermine their objective (or would that be transjective) reality. It doesn't say that they're solely the product of the mind, but that they arise in the relationship between observer and observed — Wayfarer
What is it we are doing when we split an observer off from an observed, and then go on to declare the observed as lacking any form in itself? — Joshs
If forms arise in the relationship between observer and observed, isn’t this also true of what supposedly lies outside of the experience of the observer? — Joshs
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