Likeness and Difference of Rand with Aristotle in Metaphysics


Guyau

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Recently landed on my desk:

Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics

T. E. Tahko, editor (Cambridge 2012)

From the back cover:

Aristotelian (or neo-Aristotelian) metaphysics is currently undergoing something of a renaissance. This volume brings together fourteen new essays from leading philosophers who are sympathetic to this conception of metaphysics, which takes its cue from the idea that metaphysics is the first philosophy. The primary input from Aristotle is methodological, but many themes familiar from his metaphysics will be discussed, including ontological categories, the role and interpretation of the existential quantifier, essence, substance, natural kinds, powers, potential, and the development of life. The volume mounts a strong challenge to the type of ontological deflationism which has recently gained a strong foothold in analytic metaphysics.

Formal Causes

Definition, Explanation, and Primacy

in Socratic and Aristotelian Thought

M. T. Ferejohn (Oxford 2013)

From the back cover:

Michael T. Ferejohn presents an original interpretation of key themes in Aristotle's classic works. The principal historical thesis of this work is that Aristotle's commendation of the historical Socrates for "being the first to pursue universal definitions" is explainable in part by his own attraction to the "formal cause" (or definition-based) mode of explanation as providing justification for scientific knowledge. After exploring the motives behind Socrates' search for definitions of the ethical virtues, Ferejohn argues that Aristotle's commitment to the centrality of formal cause explanation in the theory of demonstration he advances in the Posterior Analytics is at odds with his independent recognition that natural phenomena are best explained by reference to efficient causes. Ferejohn then argues that this tension is ultimately resolved in Aristotle's later scientific works, when he abandons this commitment and instead evinces a marked preference for explanation of natural phenomena in terms of efficient as well as so-called final (teleological) causes.

This tension between formal and efficient cause explanations is especially evident in Aristotle's discussions of events such as thunder and eclipses in Posterior Analytics B 8-10. In the later chapters of the book Ferejohn defends a novel interpretation of Aristotle's manner of treating these phenomena that depends on his fourfold classification of scientific questions and the presupposition relations he believes to hold among them. The final chapter turns to the role of definition in Aristotle's mature ontology. Ferejohn argues that in Metaphysics Z 17 he proposes a treatment of kinds of composite substances parallel to that of thunder and eclipses in the Posterior Analytics, and that this treatment is a crucial element in his sustained argument in Metaphysics Z and H that such kinds are definable unities.

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Dan, although Rand did not think essential characteristics were such without their standing as concepts, she thought their warrant for being selected to be the essential (though conceptualized) characteristic was by reflection of objective dependency relations in the concrete world.

No, I was not inclining towards Aristotle away from Rand on the point of truth including the saying of a thing what it is. That Rand held that as part of what truth is was in no doubt, and I concur with her. What was apparently in some doubt with me, in that iteration of the essay (#1 in this thread), was whether I was correct in taking Aristotle to include within truth saying of a thing what it is. If I were correct in that interpretation of Aristotle, then it seemed that because essence for him was more like a single, recurring Platonic form that could make things in the world of concretes to be what they are, it might put more unity among concrete things than would be proclaimed in a Randian essential characteristic. Rand, like other moderns, rejected the idea that there are any such forms making or moving anything in the (metaphysically given) world. Explanatory power of essential characteristics under Rand’s conception derives ultimately from what causally makes what other things possible in the concrete world. The concrete world and what makes and moves it consists entirely of concrete identities at play on their own without supervision of mental forms.

The entry for Definition in the Index to the Complete Works of Aristotle (Jonathan Barnes, editor) lists about fifty places scattered through Aristotle’s texts, notably, in Posterior Analytics, Topics, On the Soul, and Metaphysics, but in others as well. A great collection of essays, including much on Aristotle, is Definition in Greek Philosophy (David Charles, editor); one of the essays on Aristotle is by James Lennox, who is one of the directors of the Ayn Rand Society.

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Brant,

It is clear that among readers of Rand’s works, some are interested in her metaphysics. Looking at the stats on my Corner series “Randian Axioms and Postulates in Metaphysics,” we calculate the averaged number of reads-per-post to be about 300. Those are likely readers who get into metaphysics itself and have a fine time there, while letting most practical and political ramifications of metaphysics recede from attention, at least for a while.

Among people I’ve personally known with somewhat friendly interest in Rand’s writings, and are people who have read her, all have some interest in metaphysics in the way it is brought into Galt’s speech. All have some interest in that metaphysics, and it often has some overlap with their own metaphysical views so far as they have expressly formed them. Not every such person is interested in how Rand’s metaphysics confronts and attempts to confound other traditions on the most basic nature of reality and the place, competence, and freedom of mind in it. Not everyone is interested in arguing with Democritus, Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, or their intellectual descendants concerning those matters. However, I have the impression that metaphysics which readers adopt from Rand, or recognize as what they had themselves thought without so articulating it, does form a framework for one ubiquitous intellectual engagement with their fellows. That concerns the existence of God and immortality of the soul. Advocacy of those views (which sometimes gets into politics, as in the related RC doctrines on abortion) is something folks not especially into metaphysics itself are subjected to in this society. Getting to thinking or communicating about that circle of issues takes Objectivist types, like everyone else, back into their metaphysics.

I’ll let Rand’s way with it get in here too, beyond allusion to Galt’s speech, by a nice summary from Leonard Peikoff:

Thinking in terms of fundamentals is not an independent aspect of Ayn Rand’s method; it is an inherent part of thinking in principle. If one ignored the issue of fundamentals, his so-called principles would be merely a heap of disconnected, random claims—like a catalog of divine commandments—and they would be of no help in understanding the world or guiding one’s action. One would not be able to prove or even retain the items in such a heap; they would be nothing but floating abstractions. Only ideas organized into a logical structure can be tied to reality, and only such ideas, therefore, can be of use or value to man; and that means principles based on antecedent principles and going all the way back ultimately to the fundamentals of philosophy. (“My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand” – 1987)

Stephen

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