The Dogs Philosopher - The Rocks

Any static state which has any determinate character can only exist as the outcome of a continuous expenditure of effort, maintaining the state as it is. Thus even the rock, at rest next to the fish, is in activity: A rock at rest at the center is at work maintaining its place, against the counter-tendency of all the earth to displace it. The center of the universe is determined only by the common innate activity of rocks and other kinds of earth.

Nothing is which is not somehow in action, maintaining itself either as the whole it is, or as a part of some whole. A rock is inorganic only when regarded in isolation from the universe as a whole which is an organized whole just as blood considered by itself could not be called alive yet is only blood insofar as it contributes to the maintenance of some organized body. No existing rock can fail to contribute to the hierarchical organization of the universe; we can therefore call any existing rock an actual rock. Energeia , then, always means the being-at-work of some definite, specific something; the rock cannot undergo metabolism, and once the fish does no more than fall to earth and remain there it is no longer a fish.

The material and organization of a thing determine a specific capacity or potentiality for activity with respect to which the corresponding activity has the character of an end telos. Endelecheia means continuity or persistence. The use of the pun for the serious philosophic purpose of saying at once two things for whose union the language has no word was a frequent literary device of Aristotle's teacher Plato.

In this striking instance, Aristotle seems to have imitated the playful style of his teacher in constructing the most important term in his technical vocabulary. Entelecheia means continuing in a state of completeness, or being at an end which is of such a nature that it is only possible to be there by means of the continual expenditure of the effort required to stay there.

The word actuality as thus used is very close in meaning to the word life, with the exception that it is broader in meaning, carrying no necessary implication of mortality.

Smashwords – The Dog's Philosopher - The Rocks - A book by GW Pearcy - page 1

The answer is now obviously "no. A dog is not a puppy: We might have trouble deciding exactly when the puppy has ceased to be a puppy and become a dog at the age of one year, for example, it will probably be fully grown and capable of reproducing, but still awkward in its movements and puppyish in its attitudes, but in any respect in which it has become a dog it has ceased to be a puppy.

But our concern was to understand what motion is, and it is obviously the puppy which is in motion, since it is growing toward maturity, while the dog is not in motion in that respect, since its activity has ceased to produce change and become wholly directed toward self-maintenance. It seems that Descartes is right and Aristotle is wrong.

Now, this suggestion would be laughable if it were not what almost everyone who addresses the question today believes. Sir David Ross, certainly the most massively qualified authority on Aristotle of those who have lived in our century and written in our language, the man who supervised the Oxford University Press's forty-five year project of translating all the works of Aristotle into English, in a commentary, on Aristotle's definition of motion, writes: It is not translation or interpretation but plastic surgery.

Ross' full account of motion as actualization Aristotle , New York, , pp. There are authorities he could have cited, including Moses Maimonides, the twelfth century Jewish philosopher who sought to reconcile Aristotle's philosophy with the Old Testament and Talmud, and who defined motion as "the transition from potentiality to actuality," and the most famous Aristotelian commentator of all time, Averroes, the twelfth century Spanish Muslim thinker, who called motion a passage from non-being to actuality and complete reality.

In each case the circular definition is chosen in preference to the one which seems laden with contradictions. A circular statement, to the extent that it is circular, is at least not false, and can as a whole have some content: Descartes' definition amounts to saying "whatever motion is, it is possible only with respect to place," and that of Averroes, Maimonides, and Ross amounts to saying "whatever motion is, it results always in an actuality. There has been one major commentator on Aristotle who was prepared to take seriously and to make sense of both these claims.

Thomas Aquinas, in his interpretation of Aristotle's definition of motion, Commentary on Aristotle's Physics , London, , pp. Writing a century after Maimonides and Averroes, Thomas disposes of their approach to defining motion with few words: A passage, a transition, an actualization, an actualizing, or any of the more complex substantives to which translators have resorted which incorporate in some more or less disguised form some progressive sense united to the meaning of actuality, all have in common that they denote a kind of motion.

If motion can be defined, then to rest content with explaining motion as a kind of motion is certainly to err; even if one is to reject Aristotle's definition on fundamental philosophical grounds, as Descartes was to do, the first step must be to see what it means. And Thomas explains clearly and simply a sense in which Aristotle's definition is both free of contradiction and genuinely a definition of motion.

What else do we mean by saying that the puppy is growing, rather than remaining what it is, that the bronze under the sculptor's hand is in a different condition from the identically shaped lump of bronze he has discarded, or that the water is not just tepid but being heated? Motion is the mode in which the future belongs to the present, is the present absence of just those particular absent things which are about to be.

Thomas discusses in detail the example of the water being heated.

Assume it to have started cold, and to have been heated so far to room temperature. The heat it now has, which has replaced the potentiality it previously had to be just that hot, belongs to it in actuality. The capacity it has to be still hotter belongs to it in potentiality.

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To the extent that it is actually hot it has been moved; to the extent that it is not yet as hot as it is going to be, it is not yet moved. In Thomas' version of Aristotle's definition one can see the alternative to Descartes' approach to physics. Since Descartes regards motion as ultimate and given, his physics will give no account of motion itself, but describe the transient static configurations through which the moving things pass. By Thomas' account, motion is not ultimate but is a consequence of the way in which present states of things are ordered toward other actualities which do not belong to them.

One could build on such an account a physics of forces, that is, of those directed potentialities which cause a thing to move, to pass over from the actuality it possesses to another which it lacks but to which it is ordered. Motion will thus not have to be understood as the mysterious departure of things from rest, which alone can be described, but as the outcome of the action upon one another of divergent and conflicting innate tendencies of things.

Rest will be the anomaly, since things will be understood as so constituted by nature as to pass over of themselves into certain states of activity, but states of rest will be explainable as dynamic states of balance among things with opposed tendencies. Leibniz, who criticized Descartes' physics and invented a science of dynamics, explicitly acknowledged his debt to Aristotle see, e. From Leibniz we derive our current notions of potential and kinetic energy, whose very names, pointing to the actuality which is potential and the actuality which is motion, preserve the Thomistic resolutions of the two paradoxes in Aristotle's definition of motion.

But though the modern science of dynamics can be seen in germ in St.

The Dog's Philosopher - The Rocks

Thomas' discussion of motion, it can be seen also to reveal difficulties in Thomas' conclusions. According to Thomas, actuality and potentiality do not exclude one another but co-exist as motion. To the extent that an actuality is also a potentiality it is a motion, and to the extent that an actuality is a motion it is a potentiality.

The two seeming contradictions cancel each other in the dynamic actuality of the present state which is determined by its own future.

But are not potential and kinetic energy two different things? A rock held six feet above the ground has been actually moved identically to the rock thrown six feet above the ground, and at that distance each strains identically to fall to earth; but the one is falling and the other isn't. How can the description which is common to both, when one is moving and the other is at rest, be an account of what motion is?

It seems that everything which Thomas says about the tepid water which is being heated can be said also of the tepid water which has been removed from the fire. Each is a coincidence of a certain actuality of heat with a further potentiality to the same heat. What does it mean to say that the water on the fire has, right now, an order to further heat which the water off the fire lacks? If we say that the fire is acting on the one and not on the other in such a way as to disturb its present state, we have begged the question and returned to the position of presupposing motion to explain motion.

Philosophical skepticism

Thomas' account of Aristotle's definition of motion, though immeasurably superior to that of Sir David Ross as interpretation, and far more sophisticated as an approach to and specification of the conditions an account of motion would have to meet, seems ultimately subject to the same circularity. Maimonides, Averroes, and Ross fail to say how motion differs from rest.

Thomas fails to say how any given motion differs from a corresponding state of balanced tension, or of strain and constraint. The strength of Thomas' interpretation of the definition of motion comes from his taking every word seriously.

By Thomas' account, motion is the actuality of any potentiality which is nevertheless still a potentiality. It is the actuality which has not canceled its corresponding potentiality but exists along with it. Motion then is the actuality of any potentiality insofar as it is still a potentiality. This is the formula which applies equally well to the dynamic state of rest and the dynamic state of motion. If the clause is understood adverbially, then, the sentence must mean something like: Whatever that might mean, it could at any rate not be a definition of motion.

Thus the clause must be understood adjectivally, and Thomas must make the relative pronoun dependent upon a word with which it does not agree in gender. He makes the sentence say that motion is the actuality of the potentiality in which there is yet potentiality. The beginning of this entry says that Aristotle's definition of motion was made by putting together two terms, actuality and potentiality, which normally contradict each other. Thomas resolved the contradiction by arguing that in every motion actuality and potentiality are mixed or blended, that the condition of becoming-hot of the water is just the simultaneous presence in the same water of some actuality of heat and some remaining potentiality of heat.

Earlier it was stated that there was a qualifying clause in Aristotle's definition which seemed to intensify, rather than relieve, the contradiction. The Thomistic blend of actuality and potentiality has the characteristic that, to the extent that it is actual it is not potential and to the extent that it is potential it is not actual; the hotter the water is, the less is it potentially hot, and the cooler it is, the less is it actually, the more potentially, hot.

Aristotle's definition of motion applies to any and every motion: In contrast, Diogenes embraced virtue as the goal of life, rejected laws and customs nomos , and sought to live according to the laws of nature physis. He embraced poverty and hardship, lived as a beggar, and slept in a tub. Diogenes embraced these principles, as well as the ascetic lifestyle of a Cynic.

Diogenes believed that people were not really concerned about how they acted, but were simply following conventions. By living a simple life and rejecting those things which the Athenians considered important, he sought to show them the folly of their ways. Diogenes stands in direct contrast with traditional Athenian values. While Socrates was the first to call himself a citizen of the world cosmopolitan , he also considered himself a citizen of Athens.

In contrast, Diogenes did not identify with any city. He slept in a tub in the marketplace and embraced poverty as a virtue. Like Socrates , Diogenes was critical of the Sophists, those who claimed to be able to teach virtue for money. He considered their teachings absurd, responding to the claim that motion is impossible by walking around. As a Cynic, Diogenes truly lived his philosophy and therefore held in contempt those philosophers and teachers of virtue who merely spoke words.

But you take no notice of the practice of virtue and study only those who write about it. Diogenes actively defied social conventions. When approached by a potential student, he told him to follow him around carrying a tuna fish. Diogenes was known for his cutting satire.