Well it has been a few weeks since my last post and for that I am sorry. I will post about Aquinas today, but first, here is some stuff about my personal research.
I am currently taking a seminar on analytic metaphysics with Robert Garcia here at TAMU, and it is a great class. The main topic is properties, although God and universals has been all the rage of late. I am working on a paper in which I investigate one contemporary metaphysician's (DM Armstrong) treatment of natural kinds.
David Malet Armstrong, or DMA, claims to follow Aristotle on immanent universals--where universals exist in the things in which they are instantiated--while denying the existence of natural kinds. However, I find DMA to not follow Aristotle very much at all, other than ascribing to immanent universals.
DMA is a self-proclaimed naturalist who believes that science will give us (someday) the "fundamental book of physics" in which is laid out the primary divisions in nature. I think that DMA's view runs into issues when he has to deal with everyday examples in metaphysics.
If there are no natural kinds, then, according to DMA, the "kinds" in nature merely supervene on the ontologically fundamental categories of being--namely properties and bare particulars. But then it seems like all we can say about the difference between a human being and a polar bear is that each "state-of-affairs" is alike insofar as it is the combination of a bare particular and properties, and therefore the properties alone differentiate us from the polar bear. Furthermore, a fetus or a mentally handicapped person both are human beings for an A-T (Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas) theorist; for DMA, if we differentiate based on properties then it seems like the fetus or the mentally handicapped person is not the same "kind" as the healthy human being since they lack many of the properties of the latter .
Property talk is often misguided in contemporary metaphysics. It is often assumed that any "thing" is a bundle of properties plus a bare particular; but for the Scholastic following Aristotle, a property is a proper accident flowing from the essence of a thing.
Directly related to this discussion is that of possible worlds in metaphysics. This tradition traces back to the Rationalist Liebniz and is all the rage today. The basic idea is that when trying to decide what is possible for any given thing--say a dog--we ask ourselves if there is a possible world in which the dog has this different property. Now, it is obviously more complicated than that, but this is the basic point.
But, as Edward Feser and others have pointed out with great clarity, possible world talk gets things backwards. Possibility is logically related to what is actual--in order to discuss what might be possible for the dog, we have to know about dogs. Seems obvious, right?
For example, the possible worlds lover might say that it is not possible for a dog to write a book because in no possible world do dogs write books. On the flip side, one might argue that in fact it is possible that a dog write a book since there are infinitely many possible worlds and therefore there must be one in which a dog writes a book.
Think about this reasoning.
The first response presupposes an understanding of the essence or nature of dogs--and therefore possibility is grounded in the actual dog, meaning that, given the nature of a dog, certain things are possible. The second response is just wrong.
Possible worlds talk might be useful when discussing the intrinsic and extrinsic potentialities of a thing, but it is only useful when the thing in question is understood.
Possibility is not grounded by possible worlds, but rather it is grounded in the nature or essence of things, and therefore it is ultimately grounded by God, since He is the Creator of all things.
So as you can see, I like Feser, dislike possible worlds for the grounding of possibility, and I don't think that DMA is very Aristotelian. Cheers.
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