St. Thomas: "The First Way"

[Betterave]

I.e. then you assume a priori an ontology that whatever cannot be in the mind cannot exist in reality. You are just flip flopping back and forth here when it suits your fancy, with regards to “caused things” being uncaused (which is absolutely impossible); i.e. becoming or being coming from non-being.

Yes, TS, I have to applaud Exodus’ diagnosis here: you are the master of flipping and flopping when it suits your fancy.

 

[Touchstone]

That “the ball fell” at root expresses the mystery of being: change, potency, act, becoming, acquiring, losing… Possessing a state of existence, while almost simultaneously losing it. The inbetween of “was” and “will be,” like an instant which has both past and future as one momentary now.

And for all that, “the ball fell” is not improved or augmented by the rest that comes after it. A “state of existence, while almost simultaneously losing it” confuses the issue… ‘almost simultaneously losing it’? Compare that to “the ball fell”. Or insert a more detailed, but functional description: the ball fell from here to there, from time X to time Y.

If one concept is not real, no concepts are real, since all concepts are gained (on my view) the same way (the intellect abstracting from sense). It is merely arbitrary for you to say that the concept “water molecule” is real since it is “extended in space, etc.”

I said above that all concepts are real. The objects of those concepts may not be (imagine a unicorn, the concept is real, the unicorn itself is not), but a concept is as real as any other brain-state.

You wrangle me with being unclear about what “being” is; well tell me, what in the world is “space” or “extension”? Plumb the depths of those concepts for me.

“Plumbing the depths” is just an appeal to “essence”, which is the very concept I’m objecting to. I can go somewhere, and a functional, objective somewhere with “space” and “extension”, as to what that means, and how those concepts are grounded. But “being” or “essence”, I can’t get anywhere on, beyond what those words might steal from the same functional descriptions that give semantic weight to “space” and “extension”. I have no idea what would satisfy a request to “plumb the depths” of any of those concepts, and do not understand that to be a practical request. If you have an example of what that would look like – for any word – that would be helpful it is a request you suppose I might take up.

Concepts are on the same plane, because they underlie all language. Do you think because “water molecule” or “physical science” has been shouted from the rooftops of philosophy for the past 100 years that this changes how we fundamentally perceive reality? What is “physical”? What is “sense”? What can you tell me, without using a concept? What concept cannot be subject to such intense scrutiny that it becomes obvious that we cannot exhaust its meaning?

You misunderstand me. I’m claiming that very thing, that “exhaust its meaning” is not even a coherent concept. That’s the same error that the idea of “essence” trades on, that there is some “ultimate” level of description, apprehension, grasp, etc. This is meaningless language.

And that’s not a demand for “exhaustive meaning”, whatever you might mean by that. It’s just the observation that it has no grounding at all that can be identified. Just like we discussed with “rock”, given enough functional depth in my description, I can give me request to my son, a neighbor down the street, the cable guy coming to fix the cable router, etc. and they can put this meaning of rock to practical use. But “metaphysical essence” is not like that, and does not admit of meaning that translates like that.

But that does not mean that we invent these concepts!

Take your point of view far enough, and you will see what Nietzsche meant when he said, “I am afraid we are not yet rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”

I hold it as axiomatic that concepts are discovered, and not brought to the table.
Axiomatic??? Why would that be an axiom for you? Even if concepts are discovered, rather than created, that would be an a posteriori conclusion we come to based on the evidence, right? I’m not seeing why one would contemplate that as qualifying for an axiom, let alone adopt it as one.

But, if it’s an axiom for you, there’s not much to say. That’s why it’s crucial to be conservative and careful with what gets treated as an axiom. Axioms are true by definition, true by necessity, unassailable, or they aren’t axioms. So there’s no touching that one for you.

But this is impossible, because it would appeal to infinity. What about “the concept of a concept of a concept?”

That appeals to infinity no more than counting upwards by threes does – what about '3+3+3+3+3+…"? it’s just indirection and abstraction. The brain, as a finite machine, has limits to the depth of indirections it can sustain in practice, just as it cannot count to infinity. If your objection has merit, no indirection or abstraction could obtain!

No, it only need be the case that, we come to reality without any concepts, and our intellect, abstracting from the senses, and reflecting on various phantasms/memories (which were gained by sense–>abstraction) acquires them. It, likewise, acquires the concept of concept by reflecting on its act of apprehension.

Yes, I don’t have a problem with that. My point was, rather, that concept formation necessarily presupposes the concept of concept. It’s again a transcendental predicate, in the same way “word formation” presupposes language. That doesn’t mean we are born with exquisite (or even crude) knowledge of human meta-representational cognition. Instead, only that for us to discuss concepts presupposes the actuality of our capacity for concept formation and utilization.

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

This all boils down to our stances on how we grasp reality. I think we really can grasp something about it; some hard, concrete realness about it. Call that an “essence” if you like, but I know the term will be disparaged.

You, at times, seem to say the same, since you accuse me of polarizing/all-or-nothing language, etc. On the other hand, you reject the notion of essence (perhaps you are caricaturing it for some medieval anachronism which incites a distain for ignornace), and try to gloss over this problem by substituting “functionality” in its place. Thus you replace my term “essence” with your term “performance model” etc.

This is fine, so long as you realize you have not solved the problem. You have not got one step closer to saying whether or not we can really grasp something about reality. You’ve shuffled the terms around quite a bit, a spoke with eloquence here and there, but you’ve traded in poison x for poison y. Poison, I say, since on your view, there is no real graspable essence (I use this term in the sense of the first paragraph). But on my view, this is no poison at all, but a simple truth about us experiencing reality.

There still stands before you, behind the pragmatic, scientific, performative system, the dilemma: if we can grasp nothing at all, all our performative models are saying “a lot to do about nothing.” You have this machine here which, given an (name removed by moderator)ut, produces a result. But the result follows what is put in; and if you think we’re putting in an “ungraspable reality” it really makes no difference if the machine tells us all kinds of things about it.

 

[Touchstone]

This all boils down to our stances on how we grasp reality. I think we really can grasp something about it; some hard, concrete realness about it. Call that an “essence” if you like, but I know the term will be disparaged.

I’m not going to disparage it if I can understand it, if I can be provided some meaning for the word. I certainly agree that we really can “grasp something about it”. But that “something” in there makes all the difference. I can work with your definition – words mean whatever we agree on them meaning, after all – but it’s a bit like trying to adjust to someone calling “left”, “right”. To my understanding, “essence” is a term relating to fundamental nature (see here, for example). But “grasping something of it” is by definition to have something partial, to miss out on part, possibly a significant/crucial/fundamental part. I have no idea if the “something” part of the “rockness” I grasp is “all” or even “fundamental”. All I know is that it is what I grasp, and is functional effective for my purposes to some degree or other.

But like I said, I will try to invert my understanding of “essence”, and go with the non-fundamental/functional/something sense of the word as you use it.

You, at times, seem to say the same, since you accuse me of polarizing/all-or-nothing language, etc. On the other hand, you reject the notion of essence (perhaps you are caricaturing it for some medieval anachronism which incites a distain for ignornace), and try to gloss over this problem by substituting “functionality” in its place. Thus you replace my term “essence” with your term “performance model” etc.

Yes, but the performance or functionality of our usage isn’t all or nothing. Mileage varies. Sometimes our knowledge is fuzzy, our semantics vague, or even conflicted. Maybe that’s still sufficient to get the point across, to get the task accomplished. Then again, maybe not.

My disdain for “essence” obtains from its intractability, its semantic emptiness. It’s a word that serves as a placeholder for something that carries meaning, but does not bear the load itself. It’s as simple as saying “do I now have the essence?” and realizing there is no way to negate or affirm that in any meaningful, objective way.

This is fine, so long as you realize you have not solved the problem. You have not got one step closer to saying whether or not we can really grasp something about reality. You’ve shuffled the terms around quite a bit, a spoke with eloquence here and there, but you’ve traded in poison x for poison y. Poison, I say, since on your view, there is no real graspable essence (I use this term in the sense of the first paragraph). But on my view, this is no poison at all, but a simple truth about us experiencing reality.

My claim is that insofar as we have functional success, insofar as we can transmit meaning and effect understanding and change as desired, the problem (have I grasped reality, really?) becomes a non-problem. A moot question. You might say “But TS, you still don’t know if you have reality by the tail!”, and I would agree, in the technical sense, but wouldn’t care: “See, I can communicate, manipulate, comprehend and connect in practical function ways! What possible answer to your question could surpass this?”

There still stands before you, behind the pragmatic, scientific, performative system, the dilemma: if we can grasp nothing at all, all our performative models are saying “a lot to do about nothing.”

This I do not deny, and have consistently affirmed here, and right on this thread, I believe. One either accepts the metaphysical proposition that performance, predictive success, empirical coherence etc. supports the idea that reality is real and those models reflect that to some degree, or one does not. It’s not a metaphysically falsifiable, or verifiable proposition at the root, because “metaphysically” as an adjective, renders all propositions inert in terms of true/false. There is no outer context by which to judge such propositions.

But, if you are inclined to accept that performance of models supports the reality of reality as construed by those models, one is indeed saying a lot about a lot of things.

You have this machine here which, given an (name removed by moderator)ut, produces a result. But the result follows what is put in; and if you think we’re putting in an “ungraspable reality” it really makes no difference if the machine tells us all kinds of things about it.

I do think we are putting in a partially (at least) graspable reality. But its not a proposition I can verify at the metaphysical level. I can only choose to believe that its not all an illusion. As it happens (assuming you do except evidence as probitive!), humans are hardwired to accept the reality of reality, and the primacy of (some) models that work as normative to their understanding of the world around them. As I am wont to remind people here from time to time, this is quite easily and vividly established by putting one’s hand over an open flame. Our physical platform forces our embrace of that paradigm, as the brain stem overrides and reflexively pulls one’s hand away from the flame.

-TS

 

[JDaniel]

Having gone round and round on this over many years now, and with many different people, my experience is that using kinetic motion as the example of Aquinas’ usage of ‘motion’ leads to all sorts of problems and confusion. Aquinas choice of on water being heated as an extended example I think may have been informed by the same experience; until one understands Thomist “motion” to be the union of actuality and potentiality with respect to the same aspect, that a pot of water that has been heated from 40 deg to 60 deg is moved and moving so long as the heat is being applied (motion with respect to heat).

Wow, you really did some work here! Thank you for the respect. I hope I can return it to you.

The thing about Aquinas is that he has clearly thought out motion. The pool ball rotating across a table is really a series of motions, not a singular motion. So, we must be concerned with each “motion,” not the “series” of motions. Also, St. Thomas defines motion as the “act of the potential precisely as potential.” The completed motion includes the beginning, when there was no motion, and the end, when the is no motion, so it is really that which is in-between, when there is actual motion. So, it’s not a union of potentiality and act; these terminate motion.

With billiard balls, it’s way easy to start talking motion-as-physics rather than motion-as-metaphysics.

Also, motion, for St. Thomas, is not metaphysics, per se. It is the beginning of his science of nature, but, in a beginning sort of way. He really doesn’t get much into any metaphysics at this point.

Now this is really a strong example of what I was cautioning about, above! For Aquinas (refining and clarifying (somewhat, anyway) Aristotle’s confusing and ostensibly self-contradictory definition of ‘motu’), motion is the conversion of potentiality to actuality, in this case, from "potentially moving (physical meaning of ‘moving’) " to "actually moving (physical meaning of ‘moving’). And even as the hit ball begins moving from the transfer of energy from cue ball, it still has “potentiality” that is not actualized – if another ball where to hit it a moment later, it may gain even more momentum, for example.

Again, think of the difficulty of trying to define motion without any circular references. You should realize that what is motion is the path, so to speak, between stop and stop, potency to act.

But this is to equivocate on “potential” in “potential energy”. Potential energy is NOT transferred from one ball to the other; that is kinetic energy, actual energy. Potential energy obtains with position of an object within a field. The balls on the table surface have more potential energy with respect to the floor than balls in the pockets, and that has nothing to do with their lateral impact, but the balls’ position in the earth’s gravity field.

See above.

Nevertheless, in Thomistic terms, we would say that the struck ball is “moving” simply because it had the potential to move and now is doing so; motion for Aquinas takes the form “has the potential for X and now is actual with respect to X (to some degree, it’s not necessarily all or nothing)”. Using kinetic motion here makes this really confusing, pedagogically.

See above.

It does, but only in a tautological way, so far as I can see. It’s a “separate beginning” only because we/you/I/Aquinas says it is. These discrete events are analytic only, not synthetic, to invoke Kantian terms, here, as shorthand. The reason that’s important is that it detaches Aquinas, and us, from the putative reliance on the senses, on observation. Aquinas consults his experience, say, to watch objects move each other around when they collide, but that’s all left behind when each change is discrete event.

But, that’s only because we have come to see it that way. Motion, at its most fundamental level, is the act of the potential precisely as potential, but, to us, it is the series of acts of the potential precisely as potential. (Tough to define even this way! )

more to follow . . .

 

[JDaniel]

continuation . . .

Anyway, here’s my question/illustration that has me writing this post:

Isotope decay events. In terms of statistics, decay events are marvelously pedictable over large ensembles. Per Aquinas, we would say that Thorium-232 “moves” to alpha particles and Radium-228. 232Th has “potentiality” for decay which becomes “actuality” (motion!) with each decay event. But while can look at neutron/proton ratios as unstable in 232Th, we might understand the ‘background potential’ for any subsequent decay. But the decay events themselves, so far as we can tell, at length, are uncaused, and probabilistic as to their timing of occurrence.

Potential, for Aquinas, does not mean kinetic. Aristotle and Aquinas use the word in its older meaning, as meaning the privation of act; act being a perfection attained at the end of motion. As I mentioned, someplace, a radioactive particle is like a being in that it has parts. Secondly, it is an unstable material. This simply means that highly volatile energy within it causes the particle decay. But, there’s enough cohesion in the molecule(s) to keep the thing partially stable. So, there is a cause and that cause is whatever makes the molecule(s) unstable. There’s instability also in burning wood. And, there’s randomness.

I’m not looking for a dispute on the “uncausedness” per se of the decay event, just here, but rather want to use that as a test. If we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that such decay events are just as uncaused as they appear to be, Aquinas would still impute “potentiality”, causation, as his metaphysics run right over any observation or physics. If such events were fundamentally uncaused, he’d have no way to tell, because he imputes cause in backward fashion, as a matter of definition.

All of which to say, if one defines (not observes, but defines) “change” as “result of cause” or “potentiality in superposition with actuality”, one is trafficking in definitions, and does not need, and does not use, any (name removed by moderator)ut, validation or testing from the real world.

Well, I think there is not necessarily the problem you suggest. Think about what I said herein and reiterate any problems you have with it.

Again, this is not a metaphysics. Unfortunately, people have been saying that it is. It’s not. It is simply a general science of nature. Also, it’s not a philosophy of nature.
It is defining motion and mobile beings from first-hand viewings of nature. As a general - not confined by specificity - science of nature, it presupposes the more specialized sciences and does not have their field of view. It is like the beginnings of the specialized sciences…

God bless,
jd

 

[Touchstone]

Wow, you really did some work here! Thank you for the respect. I hope I can return it to you.

Hi jd, thanks for the reply, here.

The thing about Aquinas is that he has clearly thought out motion. The pool ball rotating across a table is really a series of motions, not a singular motion. So, we must be concerned with each “motion,” not the “series” of motions.

Do you have a link to some Aquinas on that issue. For others, that might be a “busy work” request, but I think maybe you might have something relevant handy to point me to, based on your familiarity with the Doctor.

Isn’t inertia a problem for Aquinas, here? Maybe you could say that time is quantized (I know some theories propose this) which would break motion into “quantum movie frames”, each of which we might say is a discrete movement event. But the physics we have is that a body in motion stays in motion unless something else interacts with it. This produces something like the opposite of what Aquinas, earthbound as he was, observed – a billiard ball in outer space just keeps going and going from the initial knock of the cue ball, and nothing at all adds to the setup to keep that motion going.

That is, continued motion is a non-event in that case.

Conversely, a rock lying motionless on the ground, an object which Aquinas would call “at rest” (kinetic sense of motion), is accelerating constantly towards the center of the earth. It requires the constant intervention of the ground to keep it from moving toward the center of the earth. So, what Aquinas would see as a lot of “each” motions, is actually stasis, equilibrium, and what Aquinas saw (and you and I see) as “at rest” is actually in a state of dynamic change, of constant disequilibrium.

In any case, what would Aquinas (or you) use as the “time slicer” here? That is, why wouldn’t we just understand that a knock from the cue ball to the 8 ball in outer space is a single event that provides indefinite motion, with nothing else needed or extant as “motive events”? This seems to be a very nice case of human intuition being problematic, and productive for superficial and misleading interpretations of what is really happening around us.

Also, St. Thomas defines motion as the “act of the potential precisely as potential.” The completed motion includes the beginning, when there was no motion, and the end, when the is no motion, so it is really that which is in-between, when there is actual motion. So, it’s not a union of potentiality and act; these terminate motion.

Kinetic motion is again, problematic here, so I’ll use heat and water to make this point; Water being heated, and having a current temperature of, say, 60 deg F, represents the superposition of actuality (its current state of heat) and potentiality (the remaining potentiality for heat – it will be at at 70 deg F in a couple minutes, then…).

Which, by the way, raises another logical problem for Aquinas, regarding heat – he was just born many centuries too early to benefit from the relevant science: if water at room temperature has any potential at for “hotness”, than it has infinite potential for hotness, as while there is a hard limit on coldness (lack of heat) at 0 deg K, there is no upper limit on heat. This means, I think, that per Aquinas’ idea of “hotness potential”, any object that has this potential is an actual infinity. Insofar as that potential is an actual something at all, it is an infinite actual something.

If actual infinites obtain, you know what happens to a whole bunch of Aquinas’ arguments.

Stopping here, for now. Thanks.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Also, motion, for St. Thomas, is not metaphysics, per se. It is the beginning of his science of nature, but, in a beginning sort of way. He really doesn’t get much into any metaphysics at this point.

OK, I have to be extra flexible around here regarding terms, I know, and I can do that. But here we have Aquinas describing the nature of motion in non-physical terms. That’s metaphysics in my book, but fine.

Again, think of the difficulty of trying to define motion without any circular references. You should realize that what is motion is the path, so to speak, between stop and stop, potency to act.

True, but all the more reason to look askance at a medieval philosopher just intuiting his way to the fundamental propositions, no? Motion and time are tricky and counterintuitive for modern science to talk about meaningfully. I can grant Aquinas lots of leeway for his various conjectures based on his observations, but this is all informal, and again, subjective.

If I draw a series of dots in the shape of, say, a circle, for my son, he will identify it as a circle, even when it is just dots. Why would he do this? He, like you and me, constructs the lines after the fact with his mind, “inferring the arc” that makes the dot patterns into a circle.

Similarly, if you talk a look, frame by frame, at a movie of a thrown baseball, you will find no actual motion at all. Each frame is perfectly still! How do we see motion? Like the lines of a circle, our mind synthesizes the “in betweens”, and manufactures a “path”.

It’s interesting to consider what Aquinas makes of this, inferring the path, but we there is no physical path, of course. The “path” is only physical as part of our brain state(s).

But, that’s only because we have come to see it that way. Motion, at its most fundamental level, is the act of the potential precisely as potential, but, to us, it is the series of acts of the potential precisely as potential. (Tough to define even this way! )

more to follow . . .

OK, now I’m confused. Is the billiard ball going from point A to point B across the felt one “motion event”, or many (and if many, how many?)?

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Potential, for Aquinas, does not mean kinetic. Aristotle and Aquinas use the word in its older meaning, as meaning the privation of act; act being a perfection attained at the end of motion.

OK, don’t get me started on that – that’s just nuts. Let’s just focus on motion.

As I mentioned, someplace, a radioactive particle is like a being in that it has parts. Secondly, it is an unstable material. This simply means that highly volatile energy within it causes the particle decay. But, there’s enough cohesion in the molecule(s) to keep the thing partially stable. So, there is a cause and that cause is whatever makes the molecule(s) unstable. There’s instability also in burning wood. And, there’s randomness.

To be precise, though, in your view, in Aquinas’ view perhaps I should say, that randomness is necessarily “randomness-in-waiting”. There really is a “something” that catalyzes the creation of an alpha particle at that precise point. And it’s not “instability”, because that instability existed all the same a minute more, and yet the alpha particle was not issued until now. No, there is something else, that is just unknown (and per QM, unknowable), that we nonetheless know was causal.

How do we know this? Not from physics, not from observation. Not from anything drawn from the actual event or actual physical frame, there. We know this because it simply MUST be true, as it offends Aquinas’ intuitions for it to be otherwise. Fine, he can have his beliefs, but here is the “source of weakness” for such arguments – all of this just hinges on Aquinas’ telling nature how it must be, and what it must be like, or else! Not because nature has given him warrant, but because it’s objectionable to suppose otherwise. And yet, others, including many who have pushed real knowledge about isotopes and atoms to levels Aquinas could never have imagined, don’t find this objectionable, and in fact find such objections themselves absurd, self-indulgent, and weak minded.

It’s just a massive over-reach, that randomness, even at the quantum level, cannot be random. Aquinas must assert this, no matter what the evidence indicates, no matter how “random in principle” the timing of a decay event is.

Well, I think there is not necessarily the problem you suggest. Think about what I said herein and reiterate any problems you have with it.

Again, this is not a metaphysics. Unfortunately, people have been saying that it is. It’s not. It is simply a general science of nature.

Really, I think it’s an exercise in tautologies, in “how we think about this stuff”, rather than “how stuff works”. That’s not really a problem for Aquinas per se, but Aquinas ends up using that to support the conclusion that a real god exists! Like Anselm, a confusion about language, supposing that we can define God into existence, or that we confer the structure of nature on nature by our definitions.

I refer you to my “proof of ‘gravitessence’” above as example of how superficial, how unattached to extra-mental reality such a “general science” is/can be, and how local it is to the subjective devices of our language.

Also, it’s not a philosophy of nature.
It is defining motion and mobile beings from first-hand viewings of nature. As a general - not confined by specificity - science of nature, it presupposes the more specialized sciences and does not have their field of view. It is like the beginnings of the specialized sciences…

God bless,
jd

It’s odd that the more you go from the “general science” to the “specific science”, the more the specifics conflict with the general. Potentiality is post-dictive: whatever happens, the potential for it to happen is imputed, retroactively.

And for motion, Aquinas’ casual approach, and ours, is highly misleading. I talked about the billiard ball in space and the rock on the ground in a previous post. There, the “moving” billiard ball in space is actually the one dynamically at “rest”, and the “at rest” rock is the one fighting out a continual battle between the resisting force of the matter that makes up the ground and the accelerating pull of gravity toward the center of the earth – the rock as constantly “in motion”, dynamically.

But even beyond that, physics shows that all is motion and in motion. There is no “at rest”, anywhere. Forget that the earth is hurtling around its orbit around the sun at astonishing speed, and our solar system is spinning through the galaxy, which in turn is moving at unimaginable speed away from our neighbor universe (in 10 billion years, the science denialists will refuse to believe any other galaxies exist, for by then, spacetime will have expanded so much and so far that no light or information from anything beyond our galaxy will be detectable from earth, ever again).

The glass of water on Aquinas’ table, “perfectly still”, is actually teeming with frantic motion. Every molecule doing a Brownian motion “random walk”, constantly moving, never resting.

Our observations and intuitions are well suited to survival in our environment, but they are crude tools on their own toward the question of the nature of nature. Aquinas’ is peering at the world through a dirty-lensed periscope, that only moves back and forth a few degrees. He thinks hard about what he sees, but he doesn’t have much to work with, especially without an epistemology and a method that allows him to “see beyond the periscope”. And when science does that, we find the sober conjuectures of Aquinas, like Aristotle before him, almost embarrassingly crude, and at odds with what instrumental models reveal about nature. It’s not so embarrassing, really, as neither Aquinas’ and Aristotle can be faulted for living at a time when their “periscopes” were so humble. But even so, Aquinas here, supposes his feeble periscope to be an oracle of some kind, no?

-TS

 

[Betterave]

Our observations and intuitions are well suited to survival in our environment, but they are crude tools on their own toward the question of the nature of nature. Aquinas’ is peering at the world through a dirty-lensed periscope, that only moves back and forth a few degrees. He thinks hard about what he sees, but he doesn’t have much to work with, especially without an epistemology and a method that allows him to “see beyond the periscope”. And when science does that, we find the sober conjuectures of Aquinas, like Aristotle before him, almost embarrassingly crude, and at odds with what instrumental models reveal about nature. It’s not so embarrassing, really, as neither Aquinas’ and Aristotle can be faulted for living at a time when their “periscopes” were so humble. But even so, Aquinas here, supposes his feeble periscope to be an oracle of some kind, no?

-TS

Ah, so you think you have a magic periscope that is fundamentally different from Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s? It’s a cute story, but it seems to be pure fiction as it stands. When we look at your little periscope, when you try to talk about your beloved ‘science’, it seems that your periscope is extremely dirty, far dirtier than those of our two aforementioned ancient and medieval friends. Your periscope is so embarrassingly crude, it seems, that you are unable to see your own embarrassingly crude intuitions at work; also so crude that it is well nigh impossible to get an intelligent response from you on even a very obvious point about the nature of scientific hypotheses, something about which you try to present yourself as knowing a great deal.

 

[JDaniel]

Hi jd, thanks for the reply, here.

Do you have a link to some Aquinas on that issue. For others, that might be a “busy work” request, but I think maybe you might have something relevant handy to point me to, based on your familiarity with the Doctor.

TS: Actually, I don’t. Everything I have relative that is in book form, and not on line, and not where I am located.

Isn’t inertia a problem for Aquinas, here?

In a way, yes. Not that it matters much here, but, so does Newton. Really, all he has is a dialectical induction. There is no place to test his axiom, even though it is without doubt useful.

Maybe you could say that time is quantized (I know some theories propose this) which would break motion into “quantum movie frames”, each of which we might say is a discrete movement event. But the physics we have is that a body in motion stays in motion unless something else interacts with it. This produces something like the opposite of what Aquinas, earthbound as he was, observed – a billiard ball in outer space just keeps going and going from the initial knock of the cue ball, and nothing at all adds to the setup to keep that motion going.

Well nothing, at least, that we can “see.” But, when we think of a hand moving rectilinear, from your left to your right, we clearly see the arm doing the moving. However, if the hand were to be pushed with great force from left to right, we might even feel the sensation of it seemingly moving on its own, even though it is still attached to your arm. Force is a quantity to be reckoned with. The greater the initial force, the more apt is the subject of motion to travel further. In essence, the initial force is still in this picture all the way until the subject reaches its conclusion.

But, there may be more to it than that. Gravity postulates “gravitons,” which have never been seen, but, still postulated (not proven to exist). And, the electrical is sound. Increase the bonding charges of particles and decrease the repulsive changes. The graviton may be a particle that when added to a matrix of equal positive and negative charges just might tip the balance towards increasing mass. Now, if this can work for gravity, it may also work for the antecedents of force. Not a “graviton,” per se, but, perhaps a like quantum entity with the same or similar properties. Anyway, that certainly is not my expertise.

That is, continued motion is a non-event in that case.

Maybe not. We don’t know.

Quite so.

Conversely, a rock lying motionless on the ground, an object which Aquinas would call “at rest” (kinetic sense of motion), is accelerating constantly towards the center of the earth. It requires the constant intervention of the ground to keep it from moving toward the center of the earth.

Or, at least in proximity to the earth’s center. The rock might slow to a stop relatively short of it. We don’t know.

So, what Aquinas would see as a lot of “each” motions, is actually stasis, equilibrium, and what Aquinas saw (and you and I see) as “at rest” is actually in a state of dynamic change, of constant disequilibrium.

But, such specific and antecedent motions still must take into account what is more fundamental to “motion.” That being those contraries it consists of. Now, I know you don’t like the words, but, the best we can say, is privation and act. At least, at the general, if not the specific, level.

In any case, what would Aquinas (or you) use as the “time slicer” here? That is, why wouldn’t we just understand that a knock from the cue ball to the 8 ball in outer space is a single event that provides indefinite motion, with nothing else needed or extant as “motive events”?

Again, that’s purely a postulation. It might work, but, we don’t know and may never know, as it assumes a perfect, transfinite vacuum.

This seems to be a very nice case of human intuition being problematic, and productive for superficial and misleading interpretations of what is really happening around us.

I see it rather as a harmony of early/general knowledge —> later/specific knowledge. Kind of like “learning.”

Which, by the way, raises another logical problem for Aquinas, regarding heat – he was just born many centuries too early to benefit from the relevant science: if water at room temperature has any potential at for “hotness”, than it has infinite potential for hotness, as while there is a hard limit on coldness (lack of heat) at 0 deg K, there is no upper limit on heat.

Except that water, or any liquid we know of, becomes not-water at 212° F.

This means, I think, that per Aquinas’ idea of “hotness potential”, any object that has this potential is an actual infinity. Insofar as that potential is an actual something at all, it is an infinite actual something.

Not so. Even if you were correct, since one can, supposedly, add one more degree to the cauldron . . . it is still a potential infinity.

If actual infinites obtain, you know what happens to a whole bunch of Aquinas’ arguments.

So far, I don’t think it has.

Stopping here, for now. Thanks.

God bless,
jd

 

[Liinus]

William A. Wallace in the Modeling of Nature gives and excellent analysis of the Prima Via. This is available on line at least. Just google William A Wallace and click Modeling of Nature. Etien Gilson also gives and excellent treatment in Elements of Christian Philosophy and in the Philosopy of St Thomas Aquinas. And you might also see Edward Feser.