Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

Well, why throw stones at them?

1. Because it gives good and influential contrast that is hard to find so purely in a contemporary setting.

2. Because, as self-titled "classical" thinkers in some sense, Plato, Aristotle, and other dead thinkers are live interlocutors for us.

3. One does, indeed, find contemporary versions of if the view. I know this isn't a respectable case, but "creation science" people and to a lesser extent "intelligent design" people are inclined to identify each biological species as possessing a fixed form in some sense (they will often emphasize the word 'kind' in the biblical creation story, but their accounts are all clearly simple holdovers from the classic tradition). Gould also talks about people who take the view, and most versions of skepticism about speciation are of the type.

I also, anecdotally, have a mentor who may read this who is skeptical of evolutionary biology as a whole on grounds like this.

4. The very language involved tempts us to this view, and it's a lot of what motivates the thread itself. OP clearly thinks that it's either this view or a radically anti-esentiallist alternative, but by setting the view up as one merely classically common construal of the thought which can be refined rather than thrown out altogether, I give him a different way to frame the issue which can shift his naive association of Thomism with Thomas et al's particular way of construing essence in biology.

In other words, it's one thing to simply refute his bad arguments and it's another to lead him to a different path of thinking. This is one reason why Dawkins has never converted despite prefectly good refutations of his arguments: he might admit that this or that argument was bad, but he can see no other sensible way to see things. He will simply, if he bothers (and he doesn't) alwayse just produce more and more arguments *like that* rather than trying a different approach because he has found no way out of the picture that holds him captive.

Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

Still, in their defense both traditions, Greek and early Christian, accept that things do *not* reproduce themselves perfectly. And they tended to think things were decaying, not improving. (Even the cyclic 'boosters' thought their own age, obviously, was on Shiva's downswing.) Also, Augustine is often quoted with his doctrine of 'seeds' that are like, pardon the image, time-release potentialies. I think he never thought much about what that meant for the *eternal* Forms.

This is all true, but the former would not understand this "corruption" as a transformation into some properly distinct species but rather much as we understand the decay of an man into old age. He is still a man- just a now very poor case of one. Whereas modern birds are not, say, poor examples of their dinosaur predecessors, in this sense.

Augustine's view, however, is interesting. That might be sufficiently flexible to work more with the modern model.

Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

So am i hearing you right, you do not have a difficulty with essential forms. You foresee a problem with those who identify biological species with philosophical species. I think their difficulty is exactly on the level of people who worry about the fate of the feature 'solid' once it was discovered that 'really' mostly fields of force, not solidlike matter. We have independent evidence for solids; what they are made of doesn't erase that. I'm also a big believer in the reliability of our senses, including our half-conscious 'take' on the world.

I see part of the role of philosophy as being therapeutic and mediating in a restricted sense. Yes, indeed, it is possible to, after the fact to as Kuhn says "change our paradigm" such that it seems as though things were never understood elsewise, but looking forward, this changing of thinking looks hazardous and even irrational.

Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

Hm, nor need a merely temporary species-level form - mammal, say, which is a feature of many species - put individual forms in doubt. What's a mammal to a cat? What's important is that that cat, say Trip, is essentially a catty animal. Catness, or the what-it-is-to-be-a-cat, is taken care of - one way or another - through evolutionary pressure.

I think I'm in want of a better account of the relation of essence to various levels of particularity.

While I always sided with Plato with respect to the forms I didn't quite understand how to account for the infinite variety of 'triangularity' or the innumerable and sometimes strange variety of 'tree' & etc. Each thing does not have just its own form, since that's ultimately contrary to the one over many principle, but I'm not sure where the multiplication of essences is to stop or how that's to be determined. There may be no method of answering that except to say that 'we will come to know what we can know through discovery' but if that's the answer then we have to own it and give an outline of it.

Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

A lesson to us intellectuals, all. There he is, driving the wrong way, resolutely, angrily, cheerfully. Lo, the worsening landscape. Lo, his passengers' growing alarm. What a man of will - downright wilful.

Well, a lamentation is one way to talk about error. 

Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

I'm afraid i don't hanker for one. Metaphysics and biology are distinct fields that must pursue their subjects in *some* independence from each other. The way modern biologists talk about their species seems to me to neither support nor contradict form and essence.

That's a merely methodological point. Either biology is describing reality or useful fictions. If it's decribing reality, there is a metpahysically robust account of what it's describing.

Do, for instance, lions, tigers, housecats, and the last common ancestor of the three share the same essence? If they do, why? If they don't, why not?

Does reproduction relate to essence? If so, what is a metaphysically robust account of reproduction with reference to essence?

Whatever we might say about Aristotle, he was not lacking here. The male directly transmits his form by virtue of a principle in his semen and deviation in the process of development produces a differentiation of appearance of children. This kind of account stands in need of correction and expansion if biology is true.

Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

But Plato has a very famous explanation for that: nothing on this earth perfectly instantiates the Forms in which they participate. Given the imperfections of reproduction, over time it's no surprise to a Platonist that Forms of Dinosaur, Saber-tooth Cat etc. have vanished from the earth.

I'm well aware.

Here's where the confusion really gets started on the classical theory- corruption of from cannot produce another form. Indeed, nothing can produce a new form, since forms are eternal. The argument would go as following:

1. Children resemble their parents because they share the same form by way of reproductive transmission.
2. Children fail to resemble their parents insofar as their development is a corruption of their form.
3. Corruption cannot generate new forms.
4. Different species have different forms.
∴ Different species cannot be the result of reproduction.

It's also simply bizarre to claim that humanity is the product of the successive corruption of some single-cellular form. On the traditional view of corruption (one that's still, for instance, still implicitly used in arguments about abortion: for a vastly deformed fetus is still a human being), not only would this mean I am the same as my single-celled ancestor, but that I am massively and absurdly deficient with respect to my form- more so than a human being with 3 other human beings growing out of it would be with respect to human form.

The usual way of dealing with this is to ignore it and simply point out that there is no in principle contradiction with eccence and evolution whatever the more specific account might be. But that is simply an abdication of metaphysics that would speak of form but not how it actually works in things as we understand them.

Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:

So you are assuming that evolution means essences are being multiplied.

No. I was speaking more generally. To even being to talk about how evolution could relate to form, you would need an account whereby gradual changes in accidents could result in a change of essence. I'm asking about the proper account of the relationship of any set of particulars with respect to common forms.

I'm trying to get the paper mentioned therein:

R. Bernier, “The Species as an Individual: Facing Essentialism”, Systematic Zoology, Vol. 33, No. 4,(1984), 467.

And the book:

Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology

As they hopefully directly addresses the difficulty of the argument that follows from a classical understanding of corruption and reproduction.

I'm not worried about the truth of incompatiblism but the lack of a philosophy of nature that must follow if compatibalism is true. The only reason the incompatibalist arugments can get any traction is because such a philosophy of nature doesn't exist; it did in Aristotle. That's the point.

Form presumably makes a child the same as its parents but must also be said to give rise to something different in form over time- corruption from form is an insufficient concept for this account since it cannot also do the job of explaing inner-species variation and deformation (since both varients of X and deformations of X are still the same as X by virture of their form).

Edit: I'm also confused by the claim on page 23 wherin it is suggested that "epigenetic mechanisms" could be real essences. It seems to run together essential property and essence illigitimately. An epigenetic thing (e.g. some protien "flag") cannot be an essence anymore than my right arm is. They can have essences that they share with other such things, but they aren't them.

Last edited by iwpoe (3/29/2016 2:47 pm)

IW:
First, avoid using 'compatibilism' in this context. The word is usually used as a theory that claims our (illusiong of) free will is compatible with a world wholly governed by natural laws or natural chance.

iwpoe wrote:

Form presumably makes a child the same as its parents

No! His *parents*, not some form, make the child *like* them, not the same as them. And they don't do it *exactly* right. Thus we get genetic variance, the foundation of species evolving. A child's *own form* makes the child a 'substance', but not even his own form *made* him on its own.

Especially in the aristotelian tradition, substances do things, though they use their features as instruments. It is not the mind that weaves or builds houses, but a man using his mind, as Aristotle notes somewhere. And it's not some form that *made* or creates a child.

Chris-Kirk

Carrying on from the above, what "part" or at what "point" is a form finally or fully instantiated in something?

Let's take something simple, say a circle drawn with a red marker on a white sheet of paper. To Plato's and the materialist's point, someone might argue that it either is impossible or at least is virtually physically impossible (because of underlying atoms, say) to instantiate a real, perfect material circle - at least by art (perhaps some things in nature really are moving, say, in a perfectly circular motion or, at least, it's not impossible). But to both the point of Plato and Aristotle, we never really make a circle as such. We make a composite: a material circle or a circle-in/with-matter; and insofar as it is fashioned by art, then it will also be accidental to whatever the circle is made in and with. Any such thing will necessarily include things outside the essence of a circle; that it is a definite size and a certain colour, say, and moreover (also in this case) made of whatever the marker is; whereas, it just might have well been made with pencil or crayon or even more broadly, a circle made in/of any number of different materials, even in conjunction with each other. Now presumably the marker really just stains the paper so it could have been produced on different surfaces also affecting its material composition. These things being considered, it is clear that circles aren't really something we can actually materially instantiate as such. It will always include such things. Now per necessity, every substance will also have an essence. If we deny this, then things are only accidentally different from each other, which is problematic to say the least. At minimum, all living things share essentially in life - whatever we cash that out to mean. But I mean you are really pressing it to imagine that a giraffe is essentially no different than a blade of grass, say, or plankton.

Last edited by Timocrates (3/29/2016 7:10 pm)