2008-2-PHI130.Week05
PHI130 Week 5: Aristotle
Lecture 9: Aristotle's physics
Critique of Plato's doctrine of forms
Substance (ousia) versus ideas and forms (idea and eidos)
Actuality vs potentiality
Priority of actuality over potentiality
Lecture 10: Aristotle's physics (cont.)
Implications for physics
Towards Descartes: The Galilean challenge
Readings
Aristotle, Metaphysics
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Theta, sections 6, 7 and 8.
Aristotle, Physics
Aristotle, Physics, II, 3, 194b15-195a3; III, 1, 200b10-201b15.
Shapin, Scientific Revolution
S. Shapin, The scientific revolution and the origins of modern science (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.14-29
Reading Questions
Aristotle, extract from the Metaphysics
- What is Aristotle's distinction between actuality and potentiality?
- What is Aristotle's distinction between an action done for the sake of some end outside itself and true or complete actions?
- What does Aristotle mean by saying that actuality is prior to potentiality:
- in formula?
- In time?
- In substance?
Aristotle, extract from the Physics
Aristotle identifies four causes, which can be thought of as four ways we might explain why a certain thing is as it is.
- Give an example of each of Aristotle's four senses of "cause":
- material cause
- formal cause
- cause of change / efficient cause
- final cause
- Give examples of the four kinds of motion or change identified by Aristotle:
- alteration
- increase and decrease
- coming to be and passing away
- locomotion
S. Shapin, extract from The Scientific Revolution
- Why were Galileo's views a challenge to Aristotelian physics?
- Why were Galileo's contemporaries unwilling to accept that the sun was 'blemished'?
- What did Ptolemy's geocentric system have in common with ancient Greek views of nature (such as that expressed in Plato's Timaeus?