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Full Thesis FINISHED 4-20-09 BEING IN PLACE: ON UNITY AND BODY IN ATISTOTLE A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Robert Samuel Leib May, 2009 i Thesis written by Robert Samuel Leib B.A., Mount St. Mary’s University, 2005 M.A., St. John’s College, Annapolis, 2007 M.A., Kent State University, 2009 Approved by _______________Gina Zavota_____________, Advisor _______________Polycarp Ikuenobe________, Acting Chair, Department of Philosophy _______________Timothy Moerland________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………...iv INTRODUCTION……………………………………………..…………………….1 Chapter I. Context...………...........................................................................................8 1. The Physics: Nature and Change…………………………………..8 2. The Task of the Physicist………………………………………….16 3. Place and Things…………………………………………………..19 4. The Boat Puzzle……………………………………………………23 II. Benjamin Morison’s On Location...............................................................33 1. Kinds of Containment……………………………………………...33 2. The Maximal Surrounder……………...…………………………..37 3. Problems with Morison’s Interpretation…………………………...41 4. Place is Not Location…………………...…….……………………45 III. Unity and Body..........................................................................................54 1. Is the Universe a Body?...................................................................54 2. Oneness, Unity, and Parts………………………..………………..61 3. Heaps, Wholes, and Physical Unity……………...………………..67 4. Definitional Unity………………………………...…………….....75 5. Ontological Unity…………………………………..……………..80 6. The Universe is Not a Body………………………...……………..86 IV. Place...........................................................................................................90 1. Telos and Eidos………………………………………..…………..90 2. The Forms of the Elements……………………………..….………94 3. Necessity and Function…………………………………...………106 4. Place and Actuality………………………………………...……...113 5. Vessels…………………………………………………….……...117 6. Answering the Boat Puzzle………………………………….……123 WORKS CITED………………………………………………….…………………129 iii Acknowledgments I would most of all like to thank Amber for her support and understanding during the time in which I carried this project around with me like a great weight. She, more than anyone, shared that weight with me, and I love her for that. I would also like to thank my advisor, Gina Zavota, for her support and guidance during the process, but perhaps, even more, for the freedom she granted me to follow my lines of thought to their conclusions. iv Introduction 1. Motivation My motivation for a study of Aristotle’s Physics can be summed up nicely by a passage from Edward Schiappa’s work, Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. The passage occurs at the point where he is attempting to parse out the various viewpoints from which contemporary scholars can approach the ancient Greek worldview through a study of their texts. Concerning the assertion made by certain scholars that the fifth-century Sophists’ primary concern was an understanding and dissemination of ‘rhetoric,’ Schiappa says: Such interpretations of the Sophists are misleading because they assume that the status and function of rhetoric was as obvious and given in the fifth century as some might believe it is today. Not only is the conceptual creativity and intellectual breadth of the Sophists thereby missed or underestimated, but whatever picture of the Sophists is left is prejudiced by pejorative preconceptions concerning the value of rhetoric.1 The term ‘rhetoric,’ he argues, was, in fact, a neologism coined by Plato to describe what he saw as the common concern among the teachers of speech who lived a generation before his time, with whose projects his own teacher, Socrates, took great issue.2 Thus, this retroactive history fails to give us a good understanding of what the Sophists 1 Edward Schiappa. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. 2nd ed., (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 55. 2 Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 45. 1 2 themselves may have seen themselves doing. Therefore, Schiappa argues, a more legitimate and ultimately more fruitful approach to understanding the character of this varied group of men would be to look at the way in which they tended to understand their work through the words of which they made the most use. He comes to the conclusion that, “[s]ophistic theorizing about [what we now call] rhetoric is best understood not as a collective answer to the question “What is rhetoric?” but as a process of asking questions about logos and the world.”3 Quoting Eric Havelock, Schiappa goes on to assert that, “[m]uch of early Greek philosophy so-called is a story not of systems of thought but of a search for a primary language in which any system could be expressed.”4 Contemporary scholars within the context of a much more highly developed and specialized dialogue about the nature of those matters that were first expressed in ancient Greece around the fifth and fourth centuries BCE are constantly in danger of projecting both the concepts and vocabulary of their contemporary discussion back onto these originary thinkers in a way that threatens to obscure the struggle those thinkers underwent to speak about the world in a new way. Despite the fact that it is widely accepted that these ancient Greek thinkers are the progenitors of many of the discussions we regard as residing at the very heart of philosophy today, accepting this lineage is no guarantee that we continue to speak their language, as it were. This is particularly true, I think, in the realm of so-called ‘natural philosophy,’ which, since the time of Aristotle, 3 Schiappa, Protagoras and Logos, 71. Emphasis added. 4 Eric A. Havelock, “The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics,” Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Kevin Robb (LaSalle, IL: Hegeler Institute, 1983), quoted in Edward Schiappa. Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric. 2nd ed., (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 71. 3 has undergone a tremendous metamorphosis, becoming, if anything, the discipline of modern science. Thus, I believe that the contemporary scholar of Aristotle, even more so perhaps than the contemporary scholar of ancient rhetoric, can easily fall into the mindset of thinking of Aristotle’s Physics as a first attempt at a subject that has since outgrown him in very nearly every respect. Assuming the continuity of ‘natural philosophy’ from Aristotle down to the more recent centuries, however, might tend to give one the impression that Aristotle was, through his discussion of ‘nature,’ anticipating what has come to greater fruition, for instance, in the works of the fathers of modern science, such Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. However, to view Aristotle, as some have, as a sort of proto-Newtonian has the effect of obscuring many of the assumptions under which Aristotle labored but which have since been disregarded under more modern systems of physics. Aristotle’s notion of change, for instance, is widely thought to refer really to locomotion. His notion of body is thought to refer to really mere extension, or magnitude. But perhaps what is most important for our purposes here, however, is that his notion of place has been frequently made subject to the language of Newtonian space as re-cast as really a concept of location. This need not be the case, however, and I will argue that reading the history of natural philosophy/science retroactively in this way is counter-productive for achieving an understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy in general. Through a careful study of his works on nature, and by refusing the temptation to equate Aristotle’s notions with their (distantly related) cousins within more modern scientific discourse, we can, I think, attain toward an understanding and recovery of the worldview 4 that Aristotle was encountering when he wrote that “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize” (Met. 982b11).5 In fact, it from this very passage near the beginning of Aristotle’s Metaphysics that we find, perhaps, the greatest affirmation of our assertion that there exists a merely distant relationship between how Aristotle viewed natural philosophy and the way in which those concerned with the natural world in more contemporary settings approach science. He continues several lines later, “a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant…therefore, since [the first philosophers] philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end” (Met. 982b17). Simply put, Aristotle did not assume, as we do today, that our engagement with the natural world ought to be an essentially practical, or productive, endeavor. Rather, he saw the study of nature [φύσις] as theoretical in that it 5 Aristotle, “Metaphysica,” Trans. W.D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 682-926. See also AP I.3 (72b18). Met. hereafter. All passages from Met. are from this edition. A note about citing Aristotle: Because Aristotle has been published in so many editions over time, passages in Aristotle’s works are cited using their “Bekker numbers” rather than pages numbers. Bekker numbers remain constant throughout all editions and allow even scholars reading Aristotle in different languages to refer
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