I don’t see how I’m appealing to any grand narrative. I am just making the simple observation that stars are identified (can only be identified) as something distinct because they already are something distinct prior to being identified by men. Indeed, how could men identify them if they weren’t already such that they could be distinguished from their background? This is akin to how we distinguish between ants and bees because they were already different, prior to any of man’s “doings.” It’s a simple argument about temporal and causal priority; an effect is not prior to its cause.
Again, there would be nothing to determine our “doings” one way as opposed to any other if the world and man were not already both something determinate.
If you aren’t, then good. But hylomorphism does appear to fit the bill.
Of course they are - always, already interpreted.
But does that lead us to hylomorphism - to the separation of substance and form? No. Suppose we have a description of the substance of the star, including its mass and how that varies over time, its luminosity and chemical composition and rotation and so on. What is its form, apart from or in addition to, the description of the substance of the star? What is added by ascribing a form to it?
What differentiates ants and bees is their anatomy, their behaviour, their use; once we have that, what more is needed, that we might call their form?
Now you might suppose that these descriptions already invoke form, that hylomorphism just is these differences. But then form becomes just the properties of the item, and not something in addition to the item; and again, hylomorphism fails.
Hylomorphism either adds nothing or reduces to the mere truism that a thing is what it is.
Stars are not a good example of the explanatory power of hylomorphism, as they are indeed the kinds of things for which a completely comprehensive account can be given in physics alone. But organisms are different because organisms are not just physical systems that happen to be complex. They are systems that are intrinsically directed toward an end — their own characteristic form of life, growth, reproduction, homeostasis. That directedness is real and causally efficacious, and it cannot be captured by any purely physical description however complete. Furthermore that is true both of the whole organism, and its parts: each organ within an organism is directed towards the maintenance of the integrity and well-being of the organism as a whole.
Consider the difference between a crystal and a cell. Both are highly organised physical structures. But the crystal’s organisation is reducible to — explained in terms of — the physical-chemical properties of its constituents — the structure follows necessarily from the nature of the molecules involved. There is no sense in which the crystal is trying to be anything, maintaining itself against disruption, repairing damage, developing toward a characteristic form.
The cell does all of these things. And crucially — the same physical constituents, arranged differently, would not do them. Reduce an animal to its constituent elements, and there is no way to restore it back to the form of the original organism. The form is not just the sum of the physical properties. It’s the organising principle that determines how those properties function as a whole, what counts as damage, what counts as normal functioning, what the system is for.
This is what final causation means in biology — not a mysterious force added to the physical, but the irreducibly teleological character of living systems that makes purely mechanical description insufficient. You can describe every chemical reaction in a developing embryo and still not have explained why those reactions reliably produce this organism rather than a random aggregation of molecules.
Aristotle identified this distinction between the living and the non-living as fundamental. Contemporary biology — particularly the work on morphogenetic fields and bioelectric signalling — keeps rediscovering why he was right.
Think first of a living dog, then of a decomposing corpse. At the moment of death, all the living processes normally studied by the biologist rapidly disintegrate. The corpse remains subject to the same laws of physics and chemistry as the live dog, but now, with the cessation of life, we see those laws strictly in their own terms, without anything the life scientist is distinctively concerned about. The dramatic change in his descriptive language as he moves between the living and the dead tells us just about everything we need to know.
No biologist who had been speaking of the behavior of the living dog will now speak in the same way of the corpse’s “behavior.” Nor will he refer to certain physical changes in the corpse as reflexes, just as he will never mention the corpse’s responses to stimuli, or the functions of its organs, or the processes of development being undergone by the decomposing tissues.
Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary.
The corpse will not produce errors in chromosome replication or in any other processes, and neither will it attempt error correction or the repair of damaged parts. More generally, the ideas of injury and healing will be absent. Molecules will not recruit other molecules in order to achieve particular tasks. No structures will inherit features from parent structures in the way that daughter cells inherit traits or tendencies from their parents, and no one will cite the plasticity or context-dependence of the corpse’s adaptation to its environment.
@Banno@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus - notice this formidable Bibiography of Contemporary Hylomophism (pdf file). I personally have not, and probably never will, even scratch the surface of his compendium of readings, but it does reassure me that hylomorphism (despite the extreme ungainliness of that word) retains considerable advocacy in today’s philosophical landscape.
This is outside scope for this thread, but what this is getting into is simply teleological causation, or final causes - that for the sake of which something happens. And organic life is always bound up with that, as everything that organisms do, is done for the purpose of survival and propogation. Have a look at my essay On Purpose.
If I understand your essay correctly, your main objection to a materialist theory of mind is the inherent circularity. But any complete, coherent theory will have circularity.
There’s a broader issue: metaphysical materialism entails a material grounding for mind. It’s an assumption, of course, but a parsimonious one. As long as mental activities are consistent with materialism, why entertain an alternative?
I’ll answer that: we should entertain an alternative that is superior in some way. So what alternative do you propose, and in what ways is it superior?
All living things presuppose an environment, if that’s what you’re asking.
Thank you for your comments.
The circularity objection to physicalism isn’t just that it’s circular in the trivial sense that any theory is circular. It’s that physicalism must use rational judgment to establish the primacy of the physical - but rational judgment is precisely what it’s trying to reduce or explain. ‘Mind is what brain does’, the basic claim of identity theories of consciousness, is a judgement - but no neuroscientist will ever be able to identify a judgement in the data about the brain. Any causative relationship will rely on judgements -‘this data shows that’ or ‘this finding means that’ … all of which appeal to the very faculty which is supposedly to be explained.
Second, parsimony is a methodological attitude, not a metaphysical principle. An explanation can be parsimonious and be wrong.
The alternative is a form of Platonic realism — the understanding that intelligibles are real and fundamental rather than derivative from physical processes. Its advantages are threefold: it doesn’t face the recursion problem just described; it accounts for the necessity and universality of mathematical and logical principles, which physicalism struggles to accomodate; and it doesn’t require explaining away the very faculty — rational judgment — that any theory, including physicalism, must employ in its own construction.
This doesn’t mean retreating to a ‘ghost in the machine’ or positing a separate immaterial substance. It means recognising that intelligible principles — the laws of logic, mathematical relationships, the concept of equality — are real without being physical objects. Real, but not existent in the phenomenal sense. The ability to grasp them is the faculty of reason (nous in Greek philosophy).
For me there are three beings (categories) in a person, the animal (the organism), the creature (the entity) and the being (the human).
Philosophy only seems to address the third of these and seems to be blind to the other two.
When I am contemplating a person, I take into consideration all three, I also relate them to other organisms as a way of differentiating them. All three have their own teleology and the person is an amalgam of all three. Otherwise a person (as just the third of category) would be a purely intellectual being, rather like an AI device. We mustn’t forget the creature (the second category), who we can identify when in a fight or flight, or mating scenario. Or the organism (the first category), which we see when a wound heals, or when we become fit through training and run a marathon, for example.
A person is all three, as one being and this can also be seen in varying degrees in all other life forms.
Oh I don’t know. As this thread starts with one of Plato’s dialogues, consider the Chariot analogy from the Phaedrus. The image is of a charioteer driving a pair of winged horses. One horse is noble, white, well-bred, responsive to the charioteer’s guidance — representing the spirited part of the soul (thumos), the noble emotions, honour, righteous indignation. The other horse is dark, unruly, deaf to commands, straining downward toward earthly appetites — representing the appetitive part of the soul (epithumia), desire, pleasure-seeking, the pull of the physical.
The charioteer represents reason (nous or logistikon) — the governing faculty that tries to direct both horses toward the ascent toward the Forms, toward the supercelestial realm where the soul beholds beauty, wisdom and truth in their pure forms.
Mind you a lot of water under the bridge since Plato.
Yes, I was thinking more of the modern empiricist and post modern philosophies. I should have been more specific.
That’s an interesting reference, there must have been a period when the animal aspects of a person became disregarded. Also I wasn’t addressing the soul, or transcendent elements of a person (in which case I would have had four of five categories).
We might say that we enact “equality enough” when we bite a second apple because the first was delicious and didn’t make us sick. The second apple is “categorized” as an apple by our hands and teeth. Also, yes, by the sounds we learn to make as children.
It seems to me that the issue is whether we should presuppose “the dualism of the sign,” which invokes the word-sound as a “vessel” for an “immaterial content.”
For context, I completely reject physicalism as basically empty. Or, to the degree it’s not empty, it’s a pointless ingredient ontology, derived from dualism by trying to reduce on magical primary substance to another.
I find Plato’s unwritten doctrine relavent here. The sensible is the sensory. This I read into “the dyad,” which looks to me like a ( formless) “qualitative continuum.”
The “one” is of course the intelligible. Instead of a chaos of sensation, we encounter a world of objects enmeshed in states of affairs. As I read Plato, his point is that the “one” and the “dyad” are not found in the world at all. Instead they are speculatively generated “poles,” the results of a proto-phenomenology.
Instead of “constituting” the identity of things, such identities are “just there,” basically because we are “thrown” into a communal articulation of the world which is not “internal mind stuff” but a way of being in the world. And, at the same time, a way of the world’s being. IMV, “mental constructions” is too dualist and too committed to the metaphor of the subject as a container. The world is “logically” between us rather than inside each of us. The tendency to insist on an inside-ness seems to be a less than optimal inference from the warranted belief that we can’t see through one another’s eyes, etc.
As I see it, we don’t need a (metaphysical) faculty called “reason,” and we don’t need to “invent” sensation as some “internal stuff” ( qualia, etc.) which is primarily ineffable or inarticulate. We can start instead from a “full” perception of objects that doesn’t “mutilate” that object. The dog is brown. We don’t mean, I claim, that the inside of our “mind” is brown.
Blockquote
It means recognising that intelligible principles — the laws of logic, mathematical relationships, the concept of equality — are real without being physical objects. Real, but not existent in the phenomenal sense. The ability to grasp them is the faculty of reason
This sounds consistent with materialism.
Independent of any theory of mind, it’s uncontroversial that equality is an actual relation that exists, and that we are capable of judging.
But water and sunlight are external and contingent upon the seed. The final cause could not come about without the introduction of elements external to the individual or thing to which the final cause applies. Therefore, the final cause (the plant, the tree) is also contingent. Otherwise, we would have to say that the sun and water, the Earth’s distance from the sun, and so on, exist so that the seed may become a plant, which contradicts the fact that the sun existed long before organic life, just as water and the Earth’s distance from the sun did.
Instead of falling into this problem, we should think of the seed and the plant not as an implicit teleology but as a simple series of conditions, both internal and external, where there is an encounter that gives rise to the plant and subsequently the tree. Without teleology.
If I explain English phonology to you, I’m pretty likely to use English to do so. Does that vitiate my explanation? Does it make it circular? It does not. I’m not explaining English phonology by assuming English phonology and relying on it in the explanation. I’m just using it. If I explained French phonology to you, in English, I wouldn’t be explaining French phonology in terms of English phonology.