Furthering Philippa Foot

[Leontiskos]

@Jay

Quite simply, specifying something is not the same thing as defining it. Consider family resemblances: We can specify what makes something part of a category without finding any one thing that everyone in that category must possess.

As @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus pointed out, your use of “definition” is equivocal and based in hostile/uncharitable translation. In it’s most basic sense, a definition is what someone knows about something. It is not a matter of necessary conditions. So if Billy thinks that a zebra is but a horse with stripes, then Billy’s definition of ‘zebra’ is ‘a horse with stripes’. The strawman at the bottom of your idea of “definitions” is the idea that some people claim that they have exhaustive knowledge of, say, zebras. That just isn’t the case, and Aristotelians are explicit about this.

@Jay

apart from noting that we use “human” to identify H sapiens

You’ve said this twice now. By the way, it’s “homo sapiens,” not “H sapiens.” What do you think it means to identify humans as homo sapiens? Do you think you’ve said something tautological or non-tautological when you make such a claim?

@Jay

Moreover, if the idea of “definitional” is shedding more heat than light, I’m happy to drop it. Perhaps there is a better way to characterize an approach that begins from asserting what X is, and goes on to talk about what it is natural for it to be, designed to be or supposed to be or should be. That’s the target of my concerns, not the terminology so much.

Again, @Tom_Storm has already raised this issue, in good faith:

@Tom_Storm

I don’t claim to understand Foot fully, but there does seem to be an idea presented that what humans are can ground what we ought to be. The difficulty I see is that human nature contains cruelty, bigotry, marginalisation, conflict, war, and barbarism possibly just as much as it contains other traits. So who gets to decide which parts of “human nature” count as normatively significant? Why is “flourishing” privileged as the standard rather than, say, “power”?

And I have pointed to Foot’s text:

@Leontiskos

…Anscombe is pointing here to what she has elsewhere called an ‘Aristotelian necessity’: that which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it.[19] We invoke the same idea when we say that it is necessary for plants to have water, for birds to build nests, for wolves to hunt in packs, and for lionesses to teach their cubs to kill. These ‘Aristotelian necessities’ depend on what the particular species of plants and animals need, on their natural habitat, and the ways of making out that are in their repertoire. These things together determine what it is for members of a particular species to be as they should be, and to do that which they should do.[20]

(Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 15)

So when Foot says that plants need water she is saying something about the definition (i.e. that which marks out the “what-it-is”) of a plant:

1. Plants need water
2. Therefore, access to water is part of what it is for plants to be as they should be, and to do what they should do

Foot is inevitably saying something about the essence of a plant here, and therefore she is involved in defining plants. So what is her error, on your view?