Arguments Against Thomistic philosophy

[polymath257]

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.

On the contrary, the scientific method is just about the *only* way of understanding the universe around us. We find patterns and make hypotheses based on those patterns. We may or may not be correct, but we *test* to see if those patterns are maintained and *that* is what gives us confidence (not surety) in our understanding of physical laws.

And where there is no 'objective reality', the scientific method can still help us determine the possibilities.


But, yes, I do not consider *collections* to have an 'inherent nature', although it is possible to say that fundamental particles do. It is better, even there, to simply say they interact with other particles in certain ways and forget about concepts like 'what makes a thing what it is'. Fundamental particles are *defined* by how they interact. Collections of such particles (i.e, everything else) are defined by arrangement and composition (and maybe things like phase differences in the fundamental particles).

There is a causal link between the acorn and the oak and we do, for convenience, call them the same, but it is clear they are NOT the same (different masses, different structures, etc). You can point to DNA if you want, but that is hardly the 'essence' of either the acorn or the oak. We say they are the same because when we plant an acorn, it is often the case that an oak will grow there and that oak will have the same genetics. But that usage of language is a convenience. if we were interested in other aspects of that acorn, (like size, or composition, or edibility), it would be clear the two are quite different.

As to there not existing a 'binding' between particular 'before' and 'afters', you are correct: there often isn't. At a fundamental level, there are probabilities, not necessities. And no, things to NOT have well-defined properties at all times. Yet another basic mistake.