What is potentiality/ actuality?

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On second thought I’m pretty sure you’re right about all of the above but then, what I meant about chemistry/physics was that they explain things by the things themselves and don’t use aristotle’s 4 reasons. So what I meant is that natural scientists don’t see being as perfectly as they could and because of this, those who use the 4 causes and those who don’t will always equivocate on terms. Actuality and potentiality for instance, would never be as meaningful explanations without formal causes, etc. which obviously don’t factor into modern science.
 
Fakename,

ok, I see what you were getting at, and, likewise, I agree with all you’re saying. This reminds me, have your ever read E Gilson’s From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again? Your arguments here seem similar to his in that book.
 
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NowAgnostic:
Why not? Why can’t God turn an acorn into a sheep? A few changes in the DNA at the right spots, and voila!! We’ll probably have this ability ourselves before long. A synthetic genome has already been produced.

Now of course, even if the acorn is a sheep in potentiality, it is still an acorn in actuality. Thus the potentiality/actuality distinction is true in itself. Where metaphysicians have overreached IMHO is pretending to know the limits of potentiality deductively, whereby in fact it was merely inferred from observations - and it also seems to put limits on God’s power.
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I’m happy to agree that God can turn an acorn into a sheep if He so chooses. After all, Jesus can turn water into wine. These examples, however, are instances of the miraculous. The potentiality/actuality discussion is usually reserved for natural things, but I suppose there can be a fine line between natural and supernatural.
 
NowAgnostic said:
Now of course, even if the acorn is a sheep in potentiality, it is still an acorn in actuality. Thus the potentiality/actuality distinction is true in itself. Where metaphysicians have overreached IMHO is pretending to know the limits of potentiality deductively, whereby in fact it was merely inferred from observations - and it also seems to put limits on God’s power.
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NowAgnostic:

I know that you know that there is a distinction and definite definition of the potentiality/actuality contraries. For one, they are uni-directional, not backward and forward and forward and backward at whim. The becoming of an acorn is a completely different exigency than is the becoming of an oak tree. What is being spoken of here is the acorn-(in potency)-existentiality moving toward the tree-(in act)-existentiality. There was an earlier existentiality → existentiality exigency, but, it is related to its previous exigency purely by the need to protect and nourish the seedling by growing a cover.

Then you say that Metaphysicians are overreaching by pretending to know the limits of potentiality. How so? A humanly modified acorn is like a work of art, not the original/natural gamete set that came to be by nature. It is, in a sense, a freak. This does not turn a deduction into an induction or some other type of argument. Men can sit and watch acorns become oak trees day after day, month after month and year after year, millions of times. The becoming of an oak tree is the norm, not just merely inductive truth.

As far as we humans are aware, God has not seen fit to use alchemy to change the acorn gametes into something else. Man might be able to someday.

jd
 
Magnanimity said:
Fakename,

ok, I see what you were getting at, and, likewise, I agree with all you’re saying. This reminds me, have your ever read E Gilson’s From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again? Your arguments here seem similar to his in that book.
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In fact I haven’t read E Gilson at all. Is he recommended?
 
fakename said:
In fact I haven’t read E Gilson at all. Is he recommended?
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Quite so. Very prominent Catholic historian/philosopher of the 20th century. You would be doing yourself a favor to encounter his writings. Other than the book I mention above, in which he offers similar lines of argument to yourself, God and Philosophy and The Unity of Philosophical Experience are tremendous.
 
Potency and Act is a philosophical/metaphysical, not a theological or scientific, concept to explain how things come to be. A thing which is not but can or will be is described as having potency to become and when it does so it is said to be in act. A boy is a man in potency. When he becomes man he is man in act and no longer in potency. If man was not in potency in the boy, then the boy would perhaps be a fly in act, a sunflower or a man or a stone but he would be such purely by chance which is contrary to our experience.

If you deny potency in the boy then you have to explain how he becomes man in every case and not something else. But remember, you now have to do that without recourse to cause and effect which again is a concept contrary to our experience. God, who is perfect being and immutable has no potency. He is pure act.
 
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