- Shade Tree Philosopher
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
Either biology is describing reality or useful fictions. If it's describing reality, there is a metaphysically robust account of what it's describing.
My reading strongly suggests biologists *do* believe their talk of species as largely a useful fiction. Thus by their own admission, there's nothing to reconcile. But please, go on.
A note: What do you mean *exactly* by sharing an essence?
Does the last common ancestor of the three share the[ir] same essence? If they do, why? If they don't, why not?
I 'share' with lions the form of mammal. I share with plankton - that noble creature - the form of animal. And so on. If eventually cats cased to share, uh, pre-catness with the pre-cats, I really don't see the problem with that. Things corrupt, even as they thrive. Have you tried a strong dose of Plato's Parmenides?
I'm sorry if I'm being thick. But bear with me: if professional biologists believe that biological species are fictive, your concerns sound, well - fictional. for now, let that be my position in this thread. I'm the 'what, me worry?' metaphysician. Convince me there *is* a problem.
What is a metaphysically robust account of reproduction with reference to essence?
My claim is Aristotle's: individual 'primary' substances reproduce, not forms. If they 'misuse' or bumble their form, they don't do it by much, and the matter upon which they impose the form is in any case apt for that form - or forms very, very close to it.
Forms are like blueprints. Builders, not blueprints, build houses, though the house is in-formed by the blueprints. Builders rarely follow them exactly - but this is no problem for the existence of blueprints, or their relation to houses. Likewise for living things versus the forms they are to reproduce.
It's also simply bizarre to claim that humanity is the product of the successive corruption of some single-cellular form.
Corruption and generation. The old fails to hold, but new things take up the slack.
I am not an expert in these matters. I'm a philosopher of HPS, not a metaphysician. So I accept correction on this. But so far i see no problem. Living things, not their forms, reproduce - and thus we have already defanged the pseudo-problem of the relation of specific forms to change in biological species; living things do not reproduce perfectly because of their corruptions; most of these corruptions are small; along with corruptions are new generations (in more than once sense); there is no doctrine about the number of specific forms; ditto about whether they are eternally *instantiated*; and thus even if living species are natural, no trouble with why living species come and go.
Chris-Kirk
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
Well, forms vary in goodness and presumably power too. I don't think exchanging forms at random would even be good for any living thing especially at the higher order of complexity.
Some species of living things have powers that others totally lack and the lower forms could only acquire by extreme gradualism. Don't expect a tree to pop up growing a set of eyes anytime soon. Indeed, some things just presuppose other things (hence the necessity of gradual evolution). This is also true of our own biological development: we do not develop willy-nilly, we develop in a set order as certain things require other things before they can be. Flukes are by nature rare. Reason alone, certainly, has no reason to believe that flukes would predominate over what is usual or the norm.
There's nothing terribly incongruous about the idea of a primordial life form that in potency could diversify itself formally: embryonic cells in human beings, if I recall rightly, have wonderful powers to transform and diversify themselves. That doesn't mean the organs they end up becoming or the different cells aren't entirely distinct and, what is more, certain cells have a one-way ticket (they do not diversify further or change: they live and they die). To be sure, failures of nature or corruption is always possible. But all of the cells remain human: when something goes wrong the cells act and react according to their form and this explains the what or the why of what happened. We point out what the thing was trying to do/be or what it was intended for. Presumably in the process of trying to do or become something, something went wrong, and consequently it did such-and-such: but this is derivative of the organism's natural intention.
To use your blueprint analogy, every living thing will have a unique blue print. Different designs enable different functions, just as a warehouse is fit for one thing and a house or an apartment building for another. Now you can't build a reliable structure just willy-nilly. The foundation goes on the bottom, then the walls are erected, then the roof is placed on top: the more elaborate the structure and the more it must be relied upon to do or be used for, then the more important becomes the planning. There is increasingly less room for hazard or for chance. This is why I think it's quite crazy to hope that human beings are themselves also still undergoing a tendency to evolve toward something else: flukes are all the more likely to mess the whole structure up because of its intricacy and interdependence before we get any actual luck.
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- iwpoe
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
Shade Tree Philosopher wrote:
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.
1. It was the word used in Daniel's paper. -shug-
2. I'm well aware of basic jargon.
Analytic philosophy loves one word at a time jargon, but anything can be compatible or incompatible with anything else in some given respect, and in this context I'm perfectly well capable of remembering that it's the compatibility between essentialism and biology that's being asked about.
No! His *parents*, not some form, make the child *like* them, not the same as them.
You need to distinguish this claim from the usual materialist meaning it has. Even given your substance account, by virtue of what aspect of the substance is the generation of like-offspring accomplished? It's not the matter. It's not the motion. These simply aren't candidates for that by virtue of which a resemblance is accomplished. Perfectly well granted, it's an ensubstanced form, but you aren't rehearsing the pseudo-conflict between Platonism and Aristotelianism here with me. I don't mean that the cause of sameness is some disembodied form.
Moreover, I mean sameness as opposed to identity. I avoid 'likeness' for a number of reasons, but since I trust you to not to be naively a nominalist understand that 'same' probably means what you mean by 'like'. I mean same as in 'That tree is the same as other trees.' 'Sameness-amid-difference' is the classical gloss to separate it from identity, non-identity, and mere likeness.
Also I'm sourcing Aristotle himself on the matter- not that anyone still reads The Generation of Animals. Similarity and dissimilarity of offspring to the parents follows upon the substantial form and processes of corruption in development on the view and corruption is a failure with respect to substantial form. It is not a sufficient principle for the making of anything else. Corruption, as such, at its most active gets you a crappy version of an animal and at its least gets you a variation of the same kind. If we are to account for the difference between a deformed animal and a new kind of animal some broader account of reproduction and corruption than the classical one is required.
I'm following Thomism also, but less directly since neither Thomas nor the Thomist tradition has adequately thematized basic natural processes. I must imply it from certain other arguments. Consider, for instance, a certain line of argument against abortion:
1. The conceptus shares the human form of its parents necessarily.
2. What shares a forum with X is a case of X.
3. The conceptus is a human being.
4. To kill a human being is murder (with certain provisos).
5. Abortion is the killing of a human being.
∴ Abortion is not permitted.
1 arises from a view of reproduction and the transmission of form. 1 has implications. It implies that at no point can a human being properly speaking ever produce a non human being. But this is clearly implied by evolutionary theory. Gradualist accounts won't fix the issue either. You'd need to weaken 1, but if you weaken 1 you're going to lose a lot that's important in the stance. Moreover, it's not at all clear how you can weaken it if you think that reproduction involves a transmission of form from parent to child.
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.
Yes, I too took 'Introduction to St. Thomas' ridiculously bad reading of Platonism and the People who Believe Him' my use of form does not imply whatever Platonic caricature you have in mind: my form is "substantial form" or whatever you need it to be to feel better.
It is not the mind that weaves or builds houses, but a man using his mind, as Aristotle notes somewhere.
On the Soul round about 408b11-18:
...yet to say that the soul gets angry is as if someone were to say the soul weaves cloth or builds a house. For it is better, perhaps, not to say that the soul pities or learns or thinks things through, but that the human being does these things by means of the soul, and this not in the sense that the motion is in the soul but that it sometimes goes up to the soul and sometimes comes from it; for example, sense perception comes from these things here, but calling something back to memory goes from the soul to the motions or stopping places in the sense organs.
The point was never a pseudo-Platonic point about the activity of disembodied form, but rather about the relation of parent to child as a one of form by means of the transmission of form. It is not an accident that a child resembles its parents nor a merely highly probable coincidence, but on accounts of the formal cause coming by way of the parent.
This is not incompatib... err out of bounds with evolutionary theory, but nor is it straightforwardly in harmony with it.
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- iwpoe
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
My reading strongly suggests biologists *do* believe their talk of species as largely a useful fiction. Thus by their own admission, there's nothing to reconcile. But please, go on.
I understand them to be doing this largely on anti-essentialist grounds which are false. This is the main topic of Daniel's linked paper (which unfortunately didn't cover reproduction as well as I like). But if you were to follow them on this it would have to imply things, for instance, like 'Strictly speaking, there is no essential difference between a dog and a cat (since species are merely useful fictions and do not mark differences in real kinds).'
It would also mean that, strictly speaking, "Socrates is a man." is a fiction.
A note: What do you mean *exactly* by sharing an essence?
I mean what one means when one says you and I are the same insofar as we are both men. Our substances share the same formal cause.
Have you tried a strong dose of Plato's Parmenides?
Yes. More than you.
I'm the 'what, me worry?' metaphysician.
Which means not a metaphysician.
I cannot help you if you're perfectly happy with 'that's just the way things are' in philosophy of nature.
My claim is Aristotle's: individual 'primary' substances reproduce, not forms. If they 'misuse' or bumble their form, they don't do it by much, and the matter upon which they impose the form is in any case apt for that form - or forms very, very close to it.
By virtue of what is it imparted a different form than its parents? What is the formal cause of the new form that arises? Can't be in the parents because they have a different form. Whence then?
You may hold that, really, the arising of a new species is not the arising of a different form from parents (which is what I think species being a fiction would imply), but this must be stated and given an account rather than vaguely gestured at because it's more compatible with what biologists tell us to think. If species are a fiction shouldn't it be right, as I pointed out, so say that it's false to claim "Socrates is a man." or that you and I are both men and not dogs or apes or etc?
Forms are like blueprints. Builders, not blueprints, build houses, though the house is in-formed by the blueprints. Builders rarely follow them exactly - but this is no problem for the existence of blueprints, or their relation to houses. Likewise for living things versus the forms they are to reproduce.
It would be odd on this analogy to say that the blueprint of a house formally caused (and I take this to be Tim's point) a skyscraper by means of corruption. The builders simply weren't even following the blueprint and had recourse to some other formal principle of construction, even if they claim otherwise.
Corruption and generation. The old fails to hold, but new things take up the slack.
First parent is C1 which transmits its form to reiterate itself in C2 followed by C3 ... Cn. Corruption marks the generation of a Cn that is still a C but which varies from C accidentally. Failure to produce a C isn't even generation on the classical view. Production of a non-C still requires a formal cause. Since a non-C is still some kind of thing, still has a form, if it is said to be anything at all. The formal cause must be a principle of some substance. What is that principle?
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- Dennis
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
Hi Chris-Kirk,
Corruption and generation. The old fails to hold, but new things take up the slack.
This is precisely what's in question. I think you would agree, that even if this is a fact, this isn't free metaphysical ticket for explanation. This really needs to be explained, and I think this is what iwpoe is looking for. I don't think anyone would contend that we need a far more determinate, clear and coherent account of what's going on. But I think this issue cannot be done away with re-stating the problem again.
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
Let me see if I can rephrase Poe's question with some light categorial analysis and a few suppositions. Everything is either a particular or a universal. Kinds, unless they are tropes, are not particulars. They are ones that run through many. Hence, kinds are universals. Traditionally understood, they are also irreducible. In other words, they can't be broken into pieces and put back together into new kinds.
Suppose presentism is correct. Further suppose that the only universals that exist are instantiated universals. Further further suppose there is a possible world in which only 10 species (kinds) exist.
Poe's question is, “If an 11th species then comes into (or is brought into) existence, where does that 11th species universal come from? Does it emerge from new configurations of the biological components? Does God create it ex nihilo? Do all dogcows have a potency to procreate with another dogcow such that their offspring is whatever can lead to there eventually being a dog?”
- Shade Tree Philosopher
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
Dennis and iwpoe:
Heh, my problem is I don't see a problem. I'm not boasting about that, and I should speak more formally. Still, every house needs a Stove, maybe? Stoked with a little Feyer in the abend? I slay me.
Ahem.
I shouldn't say there is *no* problem. Rather, the problem can be solved by using ordinary Aristotelian philosophy:
(1) The substantial form is what gets reproduced in general; the matter is the culprit of corruption.
(2) Living matter is full of its own subordinated form (as salt is full of the forms potential to its elemental sodium and chlorine).
(2.1) Refer to Thomas' De mixis, which is online, but is quite familiar thinking to a chemist: in the matter of the salt, there can be neither just sodium and chlorine atoms, nor can they be simply destroyed - they're in a special intermediate,subordinated form: ions in the salt example.
(3) For the reproduction of living things, it's convenient to call the chromosomes their matter.
(4) Corruption is due to the matter, not to the substantial form.
(4.1) The subordinate forms are the cause of matter's refractory nature. So, in a way corruption is also due to form - but not the substantial one.
(5) 'Corruption' is a funny term here. We needn't follow Aristotle on this entirely. Instead of decay, consider genetic variation of children from parents as departure.
(5.1) Some departures - I'm sure - are not corruptions of substance; otherwise absurdly we'd look like the clones in Star Wars. But some corruptions are corruptions of substance.
(5.2) Still, 'corruption' is a funny term. "What makes a man? A man, and the Sun." (Another Aristotelian quote I cannot place.) Where one form begins to fail to master the matter, other forms can become prominent. And with 'the Sun', i.e. an engine of change like environmental pressure, the altered substance need not be merely a crappy, less optimal version of its parents.
(6) There is no restriction on the number of kinds of substantial forms.
(6.1) And thus, there is every reason that children can depart from parents by any amount the matter can thwart, yet still be a substance.
- - - - - - - -
(7) And so with these conceptual tools, there is at least the start of an account for the evolution of biological species.
iw, pardon if i get glassy-eyed when you speak of problems about 'relations'. It's just a fault of my own, and I'm not sure I can even reply to you in those terms.
One tidbit: Aristotle implies that any genetic manipulation or breeding isn't natural. Neither sheep nor sheepdogs are about nature. So their relation to form is to an artificially induced one. How does that fit in with our discussion??
My *own* puzzle isn't corruption into new biological species. Rather, how can there be variety without corruption in reproduction? It is intuitively absurd that in a perfect Aristotelian world we'd look like clones. Even better (or worse)k note the especially wide variety of dogs; somewhere I read their genetics is especially labile. HIV virus also has a huge genetic space, yet remains (tragically) HIV.
Chris-Kirk
- Shade Tree Philosopher
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
Poe -
Thank you for your corrections. Your initial post struck me a certain (wrong) way, and so far i've worked from there. I'm finding your prose difficult, but that's my fault of course. I have not had any colleagues for a while now, and it definitely shows. I can also get stuck on particular words, and I wouldn't myself blame it on my analytical-school background.
On compatibility. Surely you want more than just an assurance that scientific biology and A/T metaphysics do not clash? I'm afraid I've been answering a very narrow question, there. I took the headline much too literally.
By virtue of what aspect of the substance is the generation of like-offspring accomplished? It's not the matter.
Well, I claim it *is* the matter but not in virtue of being merely matter, but in virtue of its forms. And the motion can be inaptly applied. (A lesser mind like mine shudders to wonder what Aristotle himself thought was happening in the bedchamber with his male 'imparting' the motion, and what motions of *his* made it fail!)
you aren't rehearsing the pseudo-conflict between Platonism and Aristotelianism here with me. I don't mean that the cause of sameness is some disembodied form.
Well - maybe I am, but I shouldn't.
Also I'm sourcing Aristotle himself on the matter- not that anyone still reads The Generation of Animals.
Hey! I'm still here you know! I have read it; but only the spicy parts.
corruption is a failure with respect to substantial form. . . .Corruption, as such, at its most active gets you a crappy version of an animal . . . account for the difference between a deformed animal and a new kind of animal
I attempt to address that in my previous post to you and Dennis.
Did Van Gogh fail to reproduce a starry night in Starry Night? Yes, and yet it's no failure, it's beautiful in its own way. That's because not only was Van Gogh suffering from absinthe poisoning (let's say), he also contributed his artistic genius. Did the dog fail of its wolf ancestor? Well, yes, and yet what a failure. So 'corruption' is a funny way to put things, especially when we must reject the eternal stasis of Aristotle's Universe.
As for different 'kind' of animal, I'm stumped, because I'm partly with the biologists on the epistemics, if not the anti-essentialism. Biological 'species' are a convenience especially over the eons, so there's no surprise at all if *they* don't mesh well with specific forms; nobody has a clue what a natural species *is*, if the biologists don't; and if Aristotle thought something like Porphyry's Tree existed eternally in any detail, well, Aristotle was wrong.
In fact his account of species v genus in the Metaphysics has nothing to say how a genus might naturally pan out into one, single range of species. Maybe he does this in On the soul, but there's there's only self-maintaining, sensitive, and rational. Or five if you split the first into nutrition and reproduction, sensation-desire and mobility, and reason. Is this a big hole of just the right shape to fit evolution into?
(In defense of the three-to-five species thesis, biologists do seem to have trouble explaining the evolution of the top kingdoms; there still seems a natural break between plants an animals for instance.)
1. The conceptus shares the human form of its parents necessarily. . . .arises from a view of reproduction and the transmission of form. 1 has implications. It implies that at no point can a human being properly speaking ever produce a non human being. But this is clearly implied by evolutionary theory. Gradualist accounts won't fix the issue either.
Here we simply disagree. Are we falling into a sorites problem?
Forget human beings: we are a special case. This generation of dogs produces dogs-with-insignificant-variation. On any sane account, there's no essential difference between generation 1 and generation 2. Ditto for G2 to G3, G3 to G4 etc. Allow that eventually there is a generation that is very different from G1 - let it be G10,000, different enough that we agree it is a different kind. But it is absurd - to me - to worry that that changes the obvious fact that G1 faithfully reproduced G2, G2 G3 etc. A big heap of garbage is still one even if i remove just . . . . crap, there I go teaching you to suck an egg. Sorry.
I might also object to human beings as an example, because our history is quite short enough that so far as we know, all generations of us are interfertile, and thus effectively one biological species.
if you think that reproduction involves a transmission of form from parent to child.
I'm getting the analytical willies again: 'transmission'? Does a builder transmit a blueprint (even the one in his head) to the house? Whenever I have doubts about forms and essences, I fall back on the builder-blueprint-house analogy. If that's unhelpful, I'd like to know more.
Thank you again for your patience.
Chris-Kirk
- iwpoe
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
My prose is difficult because for a number of reasons:
1. While I've got university training, I was more educated by a number of mentors, friends, and by my own reading. You all *are* my colleagues.
2. I'm mediating between 5 or 6 different vocabularies in my head. The Greeks, Phenomenology, Hegel, Thomists, ... say a lot of things very finely. I have to pick which I'll be using as the occasion directs. Rarely I'll coin a phrase.
3. I'm trying to think this through again from the beginning. Last time I seriously took up Evolution philosophically I was a Nietzschean and it was a decade ago. I've not been particularly satisfied with my post-theistic naive acceptance of 'whatever the biologists tell me is fine' stance up to now. This means you get my thoughts, not a presentation.
Generally speaking, when I write you're getting my thought process, not a presentation. I could probably see benefits by working towards publication again, but I'm still in the middle of trying to think through metaphysics systematically, so the old approach to writing won't work for me.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
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- Shade Tree Philosopher
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Re: Is evolution a problem for the Thomistic doctrine of essences?
suppose there is a possible world in which only 10 species (kinds) exist.
If an 11th species then comes into (or is brought into) existence, where does that 11th species universal come from? Does it emerge from new configurations of the biological components? Does God create it ex nihilo? Do all dogcows have a potency to procreate with another dogcow such that their offspring is whatever can lead to there eventually being a dog?
Let us deny there are a limited number of kinds available for instantiation. God's mind, where I like to think Forms reside if they reside anywhere, is surely capacious enough. Just as there is only one world although God could create an indefinite number of them, each different from the other, so there can be an indefinite number of species of living things although the history of life on Earth only instantiates some.
Chris-Kirk