StardustyPsyche wrote:

@Calhoun
"there are other examples too , like temporal becoming, that doesn't require movement from one place to other.  "
--So you cannot name any observed material changes of any sort that do not require locomotion.  Your only examples are of a notion of purely the passage of time, a change in time, absent any change in any material properties.

What do you mean by ​material properties? ,observed material changes ? Nothing about the counterexamples provided to your claims require positing immaterial things.

@ficino,

As to growth, as SDP already pointed out, there is motion of food into your body and motion of constituents from food into flesh or bone.

Yes, of course things move around within a person as he is digesting food.  That does not necessarily mean that the *person* has changed his location wrt to other physical objects around him.  It seems to be a change of topic or an equivocation to speak of someone's location being changed because he is digesting.

People ordinarily think of location as being a different property than size.

At the end of this article is a list of examples of physical properties (accidents in AT).  You will see that mass and location are on the list and are ordinarily considered different properties.

It does not follow that alteration or growth just are locomotion.

Agreed.

@Stardusty Psyche:

"Which was in response to my points. Surely you learned of the notion of levels of indirection in your educational experiences..."

RomanJoe's may have been, mine was in response *solely* to his point. The falafel of "levels of indirection" is simply your incapability of acknowledging any error on your part, no matter how tiny. Of course there is also the fact that you are uneducated.

And you can skip this schoolyard taunting, because, outside of these little snides (and this ought to be the last) I will not engage you, unless a little laugh at your expense can be had. You can even, if you want, remark about my unwillingness as you did  in https://dangerousidea.blogspot.pt/2017/11/mark-linville-on-atheist-retort-to.html about Prof. Feser that, and I quote "Feser isn't like that. Feser throws little public hissy fits like a petulant child, and when a man continues to challenge him he just deletes the comments without ever engaging on the merits. That's what a thin skinned petulant little twerp of a man does." The fact of the matter is that you are an ignorant idiot, a morally repugnant troll, who also thinks I am a liar and expressed as much in no uncertain terms -- so why do you want me to engage you is quite the mistery.

note(s):
- I will neither delete nor edit any word of my post. If the admins find my words too harsh for the rules of this forum, feel free to delete them.

Last edited by grodrigues (11/26/2017 3:56 pm)

@ficino
Yes, as you point out, Feser, as well as others, note the simultaneity of causal events in a so called "essential" series:
*Feser in his Aquinas pp. 69-71 writes as though a causal series ordered per se will manifest its causal events all at the same time. E.g. p. 71: ". “Causal series ordered per se are paradigmatically hierarchical with their members acting simultaneously.”

Then he contradicts himself elsewhere.  He asserts some notion of instrumentality and existence as being important, failing to realize that once he allows for propagation delay and the fact that the asserted first member is not really first he has destroyed his own argument for a hierarchical first mover in the present moment.  He merely claims this is not the case without providing any sound arguments as to why.  Maybe you can make sense of it, his writing is so full of personal invective and so scattered in its presentation as to be little more than garbled nonsense.
*=small But it would similarly miss the point to insist that Aquinas is refuted by the fact that there is a very slight time lag between the motion of a stick and that of a stone it is pushing (as one hostile reader of this blog used to point out obsessively a few years back, as if it were a fatal objection).  For nothing in Aquinas’s argument rides on the question of whether the motion of a stick and that of the stone it is pushing are strictly simultaneous, any more than it rides on a hand’s really being a “first”*
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-incompetent-hack.html




 

bmiller wrote:

 

But in particular you've indicated that you don't know why Feser considers a sustaining cause pertinent.

He seems always to wind up arguing that contingent things need a necessary being to keep them from popping out of existence.

No,. it's obvious that Feser thinks a sustaining cause is pertinent. My beef was that in videos I've seen and in his writing, he will start out expounding the First Way and then shift to arguing about a sustaining cause. That is no longer an argument from motion. 

Material things move either naturally or violently. Material things that are in natural motion move as a result of their form/matter combination.  So whatever sustains them in their particular form/matter combination is the ultimate cause of their motion.

Whatever sustains the form/matter combination is the ultimate cause of the substance. I'd say that an argument from motion needs to start with the first principle of the motion. An argument from sustaining cause is fine but begins with different premises.

"[8] In the second way, Aristotle proves the proposition by induction [Physics VIII, 4]. Whatever is moved by accident is not moved by itself, since it is moved upon the motion of another. So, too, as is evident, what is moved by violence is not moved by itself. Nor are those beings moved by themselves that are moved by their nature as being moved from within; such is the case with animals, which evidently are moved by the soul. Nor, again, is this true of those beings, such as heavy and light bodies, which are moved through nature. For such beings are moved by the generating cause and the cause removing impediments. Now, whatever is moved is moved through itself or by accident. If it is moved through itself, then it is moved either violently or by nature; if by nature, then either through itself, as the animal, or not through itself, as heavy and light bodies. Therefore, everything that is moved is moved by another."

Yes, this is from Aristotle (Phys. VIII.4, 255b31-256a30). It's a confused thing for Ari to say on his own principles. The  cause of the generation of bodies such as "the heavy and light," which he gives as examples, as they come to be and pass away into each other, need not be moving them anymore, any more than the generating cause of Socrates, his father, Sophroniscus, is still moving him after Sophroniscus' death. Aristotle says "either by what engendered and made it light or heavy, or by what set loose the things that held it or prevented it." So he doesn't seem to envision a per se series there. The participial phrase can help Aq argue that all natural bodies are moved by another, but it doesn't supply support for an argument from a per se series. Anyway, with this "either...or" structure, it's not clear whether Aristotle is committing himself to all the possible explanations he offers. I think Ari would have done better just to leave us with whatever removes the impediment against natural bodies' natural motion. But this is a separate topic and a thorny passage!

[ETA: bmiller, you may already know the following, but just in case -- Aquinas' Latin in the phrase that you bolded is in present tense, sc. "generating and removing." Aristotle, however, used aorist participles for what in Aquinas are present tense participles. Aorist participles in Greek denote one-time action which normally is prior. Aristotle is not talking about causes that are generating and removing in the present but about what engendered and made the light or heavy. Cf. Ross' "made." In his commentary on the Physics, Aquinas again at this spot uses present tense: "because either they are moved per se by what is generating them, which makes them to be heavy and light (quia aut moventur per se a generante, quod facit ea esse gravia et levia)..."  I translated "generante" very literally as "what is generating them," and since that makes little sense, Aquinas may be using the participle more as a noun, sc. "by their generator". But "facit" is present tense. Perhaps the translation he used put Aristotle's aorist participles into Latin present. The point is minor but interesting, since Aristotle seems to be giving a sequence that is compatible with a series ordered per accidens. The generator is not depicted as still generating. So this Aristotelian phrase gives less support than it may seem from Aquinas to the notion that a causal series ordered per se governs the primary bodies' motion. ]

 
From Feser's book Aquinas:
"That is to say, just as the First Way is meant to show that no motion or change would occur here and now unless there were a first unmoved mover operating here and now, the Second Way is meant to show that nothing would even exist here and now unless there were a first uncaused cause sustaining things in being here and now."

So it is the Second Way that Feser is referring to rather than the Third Way although those material objects are also contingent beings. 

I don't follow you; I didn't think I talked about the Third Way. I talked about the proof in De Ente et Essentia. I agree with what Feser says about the First Way in the passage you quote above. The Third Way is like the proof in the DEE but has some differences, as I understand those two arguments.
 

Last edited by ficino (11/26/2017 9:18 pm)