[Serious] Book reports

[GrandizerII]

Reading (re-reading, actually) Twain's 'Following The Equator'.  While actually a travelogue, he spends roughly a third of the book discussing the religious practices of the various cultures he encounters, particularly India.

He concludes that, 'True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.'

Boru

Sounds like a book I would love to eventually read.

So, just got done reading the bit about act and potency in the first part of the second chapter of Feser's "Aquinas". Generally speaking, the way Feser explains "act" and "potency" makes sense, and examples are provided to illustrate these notions. I still wonder if Aquinas (and by proxy, Feser) hold to the view that "potentiality" is something that almost spookily "waits" for certain conditions to actualize it ... as opposed to being incidentally actualized because a set of conditions occurred that naturally leads to the actualization. When he writes of the "gooeyness potential" of a rubber ball, does he mean there is this inactive tendency that actually exists and is ready to be actualized if/when the ball is subjected to heat? Or does he simply mean that when the rubber ball is subjected to heat, it will melt and become gooey, and in this sense the "gooeyness potential" was actualized? The bit I've read so far doesn't make clear enough to me what he's really saying in regard to this question, though he does make clear that potency cannot exist on its own and without reference to the corresponding act FWIW.

A bit of an aside, I think I'm more on the side of Parmenides with regards to whether change is ultimately an illusion or not. But the reasoning made by Parmenides, as described by the author of this book, does seem to reflect the mind of an ancient thinker who had to put in great mental effort to come up with views that, in this day and age, many of us take for granted as either intuitively true or intuitively false. In other words, they had to think hard about various "simple" topics so that "we wouldn't have to". Well, we still have to think hard about philosophical topics, but we at least are able to make reference to a wide variety of past philosophical views that help to set a foundation for our modernized intuitions.