(January 24, 2018 at 11:32 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: I see where you are coming from on the idea of intelligibility, but, to me, Polymath's description (on the whole) is more coherent. Isn't coherency important when speaking of intelligibility? These criticisms of the Aristotelian view did not originate with Polymath. The debate is long in the tooth now, and you can't blame him for adopting the modern syntax.
Yes, the arguments are old but worthy of being revisited. Some analytic philosophers are even starting to toy with Scholastic concepts although they are careful to avoid Medieval nomenclature and adopting terms like "dispositional properties." Also despite their nuance, there is still some untapped distinctions within final cause that the Scholastic did not feel necessary to tease out (or perhaps I just haven't read deeply enough yet see how they resolved those ambiguities).
As is stands, Polymath's response is "so bad it isn't even wrong." The problem is that a his approach is actually consistent, not coherent. Meaning he (or she, I don't know which) has made the existential choice to consistently view the world as serendipitous. People who take this stance believe 1) that reality is accidentally ordered and 2) reason can only construct passive interpretations of subjective experience that may or may not coincide with reality as it actually is. This stance cannot produce coherent results. Or as I usually say, such people deny that reality is intelligible and the efficacy of human reason.
As I stated earlier, the common belief is that modern theories of causality have displaced the Aristotelian causes. That simply is not true. They are complimentary because they are about completely different things. Modern causality is all about sequential states and events. Prior states or events are called causes and subsequent states or events are called effects. For example, Marlboro man smoking is the cause of his getting cancer. Aristotelian causes concern what makes any given thing the kind of thing that it is. What is the nature of Marlboro man, his origin and dispositions, etc. Indeed, there are sequences of events and we can look to those to give us scientific insight into the relationships between prior states and subsequent ones BUT events must be linked to objects that manifest them and changing states most be associated with common objects. For example, Polymath doesn't consider the acorn and the mature tree the same oak. Unless there is a common object undergoing a change of state, nothing binds any particular 'before' to a specific 'after'. If the scientific enterprise is truly about understanding the nature of objective reality, then Polymath's approach undermines that goal.
