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You may feel the need to know at the outset what Metaphysics is: or are.
They are a collection of problems, including the problem of how all the others can be sensibly addressed, if at all.
We will be trying to think about most of these problems in the module, so you only have to run your eye down the list to see what they are:
Many of them if not all are varieties of this question: what is there? or what are there?
Does this make metaphysics sound like a coherent field - studying a range of problems which belong together?
Maybe.
| To be fair Aristotle's own reference to the topics covered as 'First Philosophy' suggests a very special significance. Roger Woolhouse, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, p.4. |
Meta means in Greek something like 'beyond'. So we could think: physics deals with this world; metaphysics deals with issues to do with questions that go beyond this world, or, slightly different, we could think: metaphysics deals with questions which cannot be dealt with by physics.
Both lines of thought are very attractive to people who seem to want there to be questions beyond the reach of physics - who want some kind of vindication of the idea that physics has its limits and/or that this world is not the only 'dimension of reality', something like that.
But we should just remember this: the term 'metaphysics' orginated as the way of referring to those books of Aristotle that came after the book called Physics. It was just a way of referring to where certain books could be found.
There are plenty of people who think that in the end there is nothing that is essentially beyond 'physics' - if we understand physics as the scientific study of the universe. And plenty of others who think that if there is something beyond physics we can't expect to find out anything about it...
It could be really off-putting to be told that the subject we are about to embark on might not be a subject at all! Fortunately, there is a compensation: the issues raised in metaphysics, bogus or not, are terrifically interesting!
It might be logical to pursue this question of what metaphsics is, and whether it is valid, right at the outset, but it will actually make more sense at the end, or in the middle, when we have thought hard about some of the problems that it tries to pursue.
I want to start in now and consider a particular problem.
It is the little problem that goes under the name of 'substance'.
One suggestive way of getting into the issue of 'substance' is to think of it as raising the question What exactly is a thing?
And one way of getting to think about that is to try and recapture a way of thinking about 'things' which is accessible to us but still really different from the one we have today.
What I want to put on the table is the way of thinking which ruled among academics anyway in the period in the West that ruled before the rise of modern science. It's called hylomorphism, and it was developed, out of Aristotle, by the medieval scholastics. It was this conception that was overthrown by early Modern thinkers such as Descartes and Locke and what these thinkers came up with is in part at any rate still part of the furniture.
The core concept of hylomorphism is the form. The jizz is this. Take as an example an animal. According to hylomorphism, an animal is an amount of ‘stuff’ (but see below) – for example, flesh, bone – possessing (a) an organisation and (b) a drive to develop in a certain direction. The conception was that the ‘stuff’ embodied a form, and it was the form that carried out the organisational and directional functions.
So - the Scholastics thought a horse was matter under a certain form.
What was matter?
Aquinas (and Aristotle) had the notion of ‘prime matter’ (materia prima). It was a notion that helped articulate the fact that sometimes a thing of a particular sort could change into a thing of another sort - a jug of cream into butter, to borrow an examples used by Anthony Kenny in his marvellous book Aquinas on Mind, p.23. In such cases as these, the need was felt for some way of reflecting the fact that something in these cases appeared to remain the same throughout the change. There needed to be a concept for 'something' that could be one sort of thing, and then another - ie of 'something' that had one form at one time and another form at another time. Aquinas called "stuff-which-is-first one thing-and-then-another-without-being-anything-all-the-time by the name ‘prime matter’ (materia prima)” (Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, p.25.)
'Prime matter' always existed under some form or other, but it was thought of as capable of ceasing to embody one form and starting to embody another.
Things capable of change – ie almost everything you can think of – were therefore thought of by the Scholastics as composed of prime matter, but of prime matter organised by a form.
Did the Scholastics think of prime matter then as some kind of completely unstructured – ie formless - goo out of which everything (almost) was made? No. Prime matter was something that could not exist prior to acquiring a form – could not exist independently of form. It existed only as ordered by some form or other.
Accordingly, it doesn’t make sense, unless you are very careful, to speak, as one is very tempted to do (I'm sure Kenny of all people does this on page 23 of Aquinas on Mind ("... a parcel of stuff changes from being one kind of thing to being another kind of thing..."), of an 'amount' of prime matter organised by a form. This way of talking almost irresistibly erects the suggestion that there could be a parcel of prime matter without a form, and that would be to misunderstand what Aquinas meant by ‘prime matter’. In fact, as Kenny explains, prime matter is best understood not as something capable of being parcelled up but as a ‘potentiality’:
“[W]hen air is turned to flame, this shows that the air has the potentiality of turning into flame. The matter which is common to air and flame is precisely capacity to turn into each other. But the potentiality of being flame is not what has the form of air: it is the air that has the form of air, and the air that has the potentiality too.” Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, p.27.
I know that to attempt to summarise so quickly the notion of ‘form’ and 'prime matter' in the way that I have done is unsatisfactory as well as incomplete. Incomplete because it says nothing about how things other than animals were thought of under hylomorphism (it’s easiest to get a clear and consistent understanding of ‘form’ as it related to animals). Unsatisfactory because a short summary offers no scope to articulate the network of other to us alien notions from which ‘form’ and 'prime matter drew much of the complexity and subtlety of its sense.
But still the bottom line is valid: the notion of matter as a basic stuff out of which things are made is not there in scholasticism, which maintains that every thing and every stuff has a form.
| You might want to note that although the scholastics had no room for the notion of stuff without form, it is found in Aristotle. For Aristotle 'materia prima' is 'a sort of substrate that does not itself have any qualities but in which any form can inhere'. (James, Passion and Action, p.31) It was Aquinas who found this notion unacceptable and adopted the position that to exist 'prima materia' had to have form. (James, p.49.) |
'Materia prima' then is the scholastic notion of 'matter'. What of the concept of matter that became established with the collapse of scholasticism?
The new notion of 'matter' is there (in one form) in Descartes' notion of the plenum. Descartes speaks of the whole universe as being one single extended thing - the plenum:
"Let us conceive of matter, he says, as a real, perfectly solid body which uniformly fills the entire length, breadth and depth of ... space" (quoted from Descartes' Le Monde by John Cottingham in his brilliant guide Descartes, p.87; the bibliographical details of Le Monde are complicated but can be pursued via Cottingham's book, p 11 and following). The individual physical 'objects' of ordinary experience - boulders, trees, the bodies of horses and of human beings - are simply local disturbances in the plenum, like whirpools or eddies - or groups of these - in a river.
'From what has already been said, we have established that all the bodies in the universe are composed of one and the same matter, which is divisible into indefinitely many parts, and is in fact divided into a large number of parts which move in different directions and have a sort of circular motion.' (Decartes, Principles, II 46, according to Cottingham's Descartes p.92, but I'm still trying to check this ...)
The detail of this adventurous conception of Descartes' did not gain general acceptance, but in articulating it Descartes adumbrates the notion of 'matter' as the basic stuff of which everything else is constituted. What we call 'physical things' are according to this theory local movements of the plenum - and everything 'material' is being thought of by Descartes as being out of 'the same stuff'.
So - if you are committed to the thesis that there is one thing that is material, namely the plenum, you have no difficulty with the idea of a single stuff out of which everything material is made.
But not all the new people thought that bodies were local disturbances in a single plenum. Others thought that instead of one body there were in fact lots of very small bodies out of which bigger ones were formed through agglomeration.
We must be careful to note that Descartes himself thought it was useful to think of everything being made of particles - so long as you thought of those particles as themselves consisting of vortices in the plenum.
Boyle, actually the person most identified with 'corpuscularianism', maintains exactly the same position:
"I agree with the generality of philosophers, so far as to allow that there is one catholic or universal matter common to all bodies, by which I mean a substance extended, divisible, and impenetrable. - Selected Philosophical Papers of Robert Boyle, p18.
But what of the type of corpuscularianism that was an alternative to the continuum theory? This was the theory, as defended by Galileo with precise geometrical argument (which it needed, you may think), which maintained that a material thing consisted of an infinite number of 'indivisible, and infinitely small components' Galileo, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, 1638; English Translation by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, Macmillan, 1914; on-line presentation of this edition thanks to Michael Fowler, p.41. (Galileo's defence starts at page 21.) What sense can we attach to 'matter' as the stuff of which things are made by such a conception as this? I suggest: not a lot. The posited corpuscles are each and every one individual things. What is the basis for speaking of them as one thing, namely matter? They are material things, certainly. But the many of them do not comprise any kind of unity. Matter for the anti-plenum corpuscularian is just the set of material things. You could be a corpuscularian and still hold that each thing - ie each corpuscle - was form-with-matter: this is in fact the position of Leibniz, vividly articulated in his claim that the universe is a pond full of fish. |
It was around the 'corpuscularianism' of Boyle (and, as we have seen, actually, Descartes) that the consensus settled at the end of the 17th Century. The universe is conceived of as consisting of an enormous (or infinite) number of solid discrete particles, each of them a definite size and shape.
There are, according to the corpuscularian, a limited variety of types of corpuscle. All they have in common are the properties essential to material objects (lists of these varied; Descartes has just the one member. Boyle had one or two:"...since the true notion of body consists either alone or in its extension, or in that and impenetrability together, it will follow that the differences which make the varieties of bodies we see must not proceed from the nature of matter - of which, as such, we have but one uniform conception - but from certain attributes, such as motion, size, position, &c. ... " Selected Philosophical Papers pp. 203-4.)
The indivisible particles were thought of as subject to 'forces' of various kinds (the number and kinds varying from one theorist to another), and as a result they sometimes combined, it was thought, to form complexes. The things of everyday experience - a table, a fence - were thought of as composed of the elementary particles, either as individuals or clustered into sub-complexes.
The properties of objects were thought of as arising out of the properties possessed by their component corpuscles. Here for example is Galileo explaining the basis of a thing's taste:
'Perhaps the origin of two other senses lies in the fact that there are bodies which constantly dissolve into minute particles, some of which are heavier than air and descend, while others are lighter and rise up. The former may strike upon a certain part of our bodies that is much more sensitive than the skin, which does not feel the invasion of such subtle matter. This is the upper surface of the tongue; here tiny particles are received, and mixing with and penetrating its moisture, they give rise to tastes which are sweet or unsavory according to the various shapes, numbers and speeds of the particles. And those minute particles that rise up may enter by our nostrils and strike upon some small protuberances which are the instrument of smelling; here likewise their touch and passage is received to our like or dislike according as they have this or that shape, are fast or slow, and are numerous or few. ...
'To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements. I think that if ears, tongues, and noses were removed, shapes and numbers and motions would remain, but not odors or tastes or sounds. The latter I believe are nothing more than names when separated from living beings, just as tickling and titillation are nothing but names in the absence of such things as noses and armpits. '
Galileo, The Assayer, 1623, translation by Stillman Drake, p.274-7
If that is the early Modern conception of a thing, what is ours?
And how would be the best way to pursue the question: Is the conception we have now the one to stay with?
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