RomanJoe wrote:

These potentials may not be actualized, they may just be potential--perhaps they can never be actualized, perhaps they're purely potential. In short, is there a way to show that the first mover is pure actuality, not just that it has the purely actual causal power? 

The highlighted is the key point. When we use the term 'potential' let's assume we are using it in the sense of a 'passive potential' or in more modern terms a disposition (unused active potentials or powers to do things are accepted by proponents of the characterization of God as pure act).

A disposition just is the possibility of doing something/being something else. A disposition which could never be actualised would be a contradiction in terms, a possibility which could never be made actual aka an impossible possibility. 

Last edited by DanielCC (5/01/2017 6:10 pm)

But does saying that some potential can be actualized automatically entail that there is something that exists which could actualize said potential? Isn't this a non sequitur? For instance, the copper, gold, and iron which constitute the statue of liberty had the potential to be in the shape of the statue liberty long before modern man (and the proper mechanisms) existed to put them into that shape. So let's say that this copper, gold, and iron could be found in some mountainside 300,000 years ago. Just because modern man didn't exist at that time (i.e. there wasn't something in existence that could actualize its potential to be in the shape of the statue of liberty), it doesn't follow that the metals didn't have that potential to be in the shape of the statue of liberty. In the same manner, couldn't one argue that just because no proper thing exists that could actualize these hypothetical potentials of the first mover, it doesn't follow that there are no such potentials?

Proclus wrote:

But to say that the metal does in fact go from being potentially in the shape of the Statue of Liberty to actually being in that shape does require man.  To say, then, that there is a potential that does not have anything to actualize it (and never will) is to say that it is a potential that cannot be realized, which, as Daniel pointed out is just to say that it is not a potential.

Okay, I see your point. I can only say the metal can become the Statue of Liberty if man exists to make it that way. If man never existed then that metal could not have the potential to be the Statue of Liberty. So potentials can only be potentials only if something exists which can actualize the potentials--i.e. a potential can only exist insofar as an actualizer for that potential exists. So if the first mover has potentials then something causally prior would have to exist to act as an actualizer for those potentials. But something causally prior to the first mover can't exist. Therefore, the first mover can't have potentials. 

Let me challenge the premise again that there can only be a potential if there's an existent actualizer to that potential. Suppose we have a planet with two individuals: a man and woman. Suppose the man dies. Does the woman lose the potential to be pregnant or is that potential still part of her nature regardless of the existence of a man to actualize that potential? Does she have the potential to become pregnant by virtue that the man once existed? In other words, is a potential purely relational to its actualizer or can the actualizer go out of existence and the potential still exist in some abstract sense?

Last edited by RomanJoe (5/02/2017 12:02 am)

Dennis wrote:

[
I think that the notion of potentiality might not be equivalent to possibility. For the potentiality of anything is grounded in the being/matter of the said objects, but it seems to me that the possibility of anything is grounded on the source of contingency.

Agreed and my way of speaking in that first post was lazy. A point about the powers theory at work in the background: possibility is grounded in the power/active potency of a being. To say Y is possible is to say there is an X capable of instigating a casual chain which would lead to the existence of Y, either directly or indirectly. So something e.g. the Statue of Liberty is possible even if there is not a being with the passive potential to become it (in the example say the Statue would be possible if there were no bronze just as long as there something with the power to start a casual chain leading to there being bronze).
 

RomanJoe wrote:

Okay, I see your point. I can only say the metal can become the Statue of Liberty if man exists to make it that way. If man never existed then that metal could not have the potential to be the Statue of Liberty. So potentials can only be potentials only if something exists which can actualize the potentials--i.e. a potential can only exist insofar as an actualizer for that potential exists. So if the first mover has potentials then something causally prior would have to exist to act as an actualizer for those potentials. But something causally prior to the first mover can't exist. Therefore, the first mover can't have potentials.

 
I would contest this - the metal has the potential to become the Statue if there is something capable of moving its parts into the correct arrangement. This need not be man though - it could be the actions of other natural forces (of course it is very unlikely that such an arrangement would come about just as it is for one to get a million run of heads on a coin toss but it's not impossible).
 
The examples used are somewhat less exact though - strictly speaking lumps of metal or statues are aggregates rather than substances.

Dennis wrote:

Couldn't this be read as the particular glass retaining its passive potentiality to shatter, without ever being able to manifest that in our world? Suppose God stops sustaining the glass, it would thus never break, while still harboring its potentiality. Obviously, the glass's potential to break could be actualized, but just that this would never be done.

There may be a confusion between Diachronic and Synchronic Possibility here. For the glass to have that disposition it is enough that there is some possible world in which the glass shatters not that it has to realise this potential in the complete temporal history of this world.

Last edited by DanielCC (5/02/2017 6:30 am)