Powers in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period
According to the Aristotelian world-view, the natural world abounds with powers. They are necessary requirements for change, which Aristotle famously characterized as an actualization of a form. Scholastic philosophers were happy to adopt Aristotle’s theory of change and thus did not doubt the existence of powers. However, they debated about their ontological status: are powers distinct entities that engage in causal operations or are they rather ways in which substances operate? Many early modern philosophers, by contrast, were reluctant to accept bodily powers in the first place and thus sought for strategies to explain natural changes without appealing to (irreducible) bodily powers. In the first session of my teaching block we will discuss Thomas Aquinas’s version of the Aristotelian theory of change, his reasons for thinking that the powers of the soul are really distinct from the essence of the soul, and look at William of Ockham’s arguments against Aquinas’s view that powers are distinct entities.
In the second session we will canvass a range of famous early modern objections against the Aristotelian assumption of powers and see how Descartes, Malebranche and Leibniz tried to explain bodily changes without appealing to irreducible bodily powers.
Teaching bloc 2: Ludger Jansen
Wednesday, 19th August 2015
Powers and other causal properties in Aristotle
There is a tradition, according to which Aristotle's theory of powers is something quite mysterious and not adequate for sober, empirically minded, modern philosophers. My aim is to proof the opposite. I will showcase the wide range of flavours of causal properties which Aristotle distinguishes, explain how they fit into his wider ontological framework and, finally, argue that it is, actually, still a good theory.
Teaching bloc 3: Kristina Engelhard
Thursday, 20th August 2015
Dispositions, Powers and Modality
One of the strongest reasons to accept dispositional essentialism or a powers ontology is its explicative force for important natural modalitites. Alexander Bird thinks that powers, or in his terms potencies, somehow ground the laws of nature. His view „takes properties to be the primary entities and laws to be derivative. According to this picture, properties have relationships between them, that are essential to the natures of those properties. Laws just drop out as consequences of those relationship(s).“ (Bird: Monistic Dispositional Essentialism (MS)). Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum take powers as fundamental for a theory of causation (Mumford/Anjum 2011). Vetter (2015) has worked out a general theory for grounding modality in dispositions. However, this project has been contested: Recently Jaag has claimed that this suposed advantage of disposional essentialism over its rivals is fallacious, since the grounding claim for the natural modalities is at odds with the core claim of dipsositional essentialism.
Jaag’s discussion of the problem is illuminating for the entire project of dispositionalism. In the first part of this teaching block we will examine Jaag’s critique. In the second part we will highlight and discuss possible ways out of the problem.