Many thanks to participants for another fine conference!

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“Causation, Motion, and Change in Aristotelian Physical Science”

Sixth Annual Marquette Summer Seminar in

Ancient and Medieval Philosophy,

(tentative dates) 20-22 June 2011

Presented by the Midwest Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

and the Aquinas and the Arabs Project

with the support of the

Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette

and the Mellon Fund

Marquette University

Department of Philosophy

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

This Conference is intended to provide a formal occasion and central location for philosophers and scholars of the Midwest region (and elsewhere) to present and discuss their current work on Aristotle’ and his interpreters in ancient, medieval and contemporary philosophy.

ATTENDING ONLY: Send Registration check with name, address, academic affiliation.

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION FOR ALL PRESENTERS AND ATTENDEES

(fees cover breakfasts, refreshments, dinner one night)

Advance Registration ($45 by check) Deadline: May 1.

NOTE => After May 1 Registration only at the door: $50 cash.

CHECKS SHOULD BE MADE OUT TO: Marquette University

(Fees are waived for Marquette students, faculty and staff.)

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Registration Form.

=> ALL ATTENDEES (including the Marquette community) are asked to register.<=

NAME:

TITLE: 

ACADEMIC AFFILIATION:

ADDRESS:

EMAIL ADDRESS:

TELEPHONE:

CHECK NUMBER: 

(Registration fees are waived for members of the Marquette community.)

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Print the Registration Form above and send your check made out to “Marquette University” to:

Owen Goldin

Philosophy Department

Marquette University

P.O. Box 1880

Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881

Registered Attendees:

forthcoming

*Fee paid, or waived for Marquette students, faculty, staff.

Conference Schedule

All sessions will be held in the Beaumier Conference Center in the lower level of Raynor Library at 1355 W. Wisconsin Ave.. (See below for location link.)

MONDAY JUNE 20 :  Beaumier Conference Center, Raynor Library

Presentations 

9-10:25: [1]  Prof. Robert Bolton, Rutgers University, “Dialectic, Peirastic and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s SOPHISTICAL REFUTATIONS and PHYSICS”

10:35-12: [2]  Mr. Brian Embry, University of Toronto, “Aristotle and Plotinus on Matter and Change”

12-1:30 pm Lunch: suggestions: AMU (Student Union), Subway, Jimmy John’s Subs, local Pizza restaurant, Qdoba, Miss Katie’s Diner, and more in the immediate area.

Presentations

1:30-2:55: [3]  Dr. Robert Matava, Georgetown University, “Aristotelian Premotion and the Divine Causation of Human Free Choices”

3:05-4:30: [4] Prof. Richard Tierney, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “'Proper Place, Form, and Natural Elemental Motion”

4:40-6:05: [5]  Prof. David Twetten, Marquette University, “The Prime Mover: Contemporary Aristotle Scholarship versus Averroes?”

7:00 pm  Picnic (TBA)

Carpooling available.

TUESDAY JUNE 21  : Beaumier Conference Center, Raynor Library

 

Presentations

 

8:30-9:55: [6]  Prof. Robert Gallagher, American University of Beirut, “Incomparability in Physics VII.4”

10:00-11:25: [7] Dr. Owen Goldin, Marquette University, “Aristotle and the Pythagorean Opposites”

11:30-12:45 pm Lunch: suggestions: AMU (Student Union), Subway, Jimmy John’s Subs, local Pizza restaurant, Qdoba, Miss Katie’s Diner, and more in the immediate area.

1:00 - 2:15 Tour Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church (designed by F. L. Wright) carpooling available.

Presentations

2:30-3:55: [8]  Prof. John Thorp, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, “The Heat and Light from the Stars”

4:00-5:25: [9]  Prof. Thomas Olshewsky, University of Kentucky and New College of Florida, “The Evolution of the Elements”

6:00 dinner (TBA) carpooling available

 

WEDNESDAY JUNE 30 : Beaumier Conference Center, Raynor Library

Presentations

8:30- 9:55: [10] 4:40-6:05: [10]  Mr. Scott O’Connor, Cornell University “The Persisting Simple: Aristotle's Physics 1.7”

10:00- 11:25 [11]  Ms. Simona Vucu, University of Toronto, “Henry of Ghent on Substance as the Foundation of Different Real Relations”

11:30-12:55 [12] Mr. Jacob Tuttle, Purdue University, “The Structure of Efficient-Causal Situations in Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations”

CONFERENCE LOCATION:

Conference sessions will take place in the Raynor Library (1355 W. Wisconsin Ave.) Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday June 16-18, 2009. For information on the Raynor Library and nearby parking see http://www.marquette.edu/contact/finder/raynor.shtml and the links there.

HOUSING:

On campus housing is available at a modest cost.  For information, click here.  To reserve a room contact the housing office directly:  Carrie Enea at 414-288-7204 or via email at carrie.enea@marquette.edu. Cut-off date for room reservations: May 17, 2009. Rooms requested after the cut-off date are subject to availability.

Rooms will be at Straz Tower, 915 W. Wisconsin Ave., a three block walk from the conference location.

PARKING:

Structure 1, located on 749 N. 16th Street, and Structure 2, located at 1240 W. Wells St ., have been designated the university’s visitor parking facilities. For information on the costs of parking ask at the check-in desk at Straz Tower, 915 W. Wisconsin Ave.

Daytime visitors’ parking 6 am - 5 pm is $5.00 per day at these structures.

Overnight parking ($6) can be arranged at the check-in desk at Straz Hall.

New: For parking information, click here or go to:  http://www.marquette.edu/about/visitor_parking.shtml.

HOTELS:

Just a few blocks East from Marquette University is the Holiday Inn Milwaukee City Center, 611 West Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53203. Tel. 1-414-273-2950.

For further information on the hotel, see http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/hi/1/en/hd/mkecc?irs=null

A few blocks West from Marquette University is the very charming Ambassador Hotel: 2308 W Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53233. Tel.(414) 342-8400

For further information on the hotel, see www.ambassadormilwaukee.com

(Mention that you are attending a Marquette conference may get you a discount. Be sure to ask.)

DIRECTIONS AND MAPS:

For directions to the Marquette Campus, see http://www.marquette.edu/contact/directions/

For a map of the Marquette University campus, see http://www.marquette.edu/contact/CampusMap.pdf

For a map of downtown Milwaukee, see

http://www.wisconline.com/counties/milwaukee/map-downtown.html

For parking information, click here or go to:  http://www.marquette.edu/about/visitor_parking.shtml.

TRAVELING TO MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY (& DOWNTOWN MILWAUKEE) FROM

MILWAUKEE’S MITCHELL AIRPORT:

For a shuttle, see http://www.mitchellairport.com/getting.html

Downtown Milwaukee: info from http://kiwinc.itgo.com/mwc/mitchell.html

    * Expect a taxi to cost around $30 or a bit more due to fuel costs.

    * Most convenient: Airport Connection shared ride van serves a frequent loop of most downtown hotels. http://mkelimo.com/ ($12-15)

    * Cheapest: MCTS bus route 80 serves 6th St. downtown, next to the Midwest Airlines Center and nearby hotels. Travel time is 25 minutes, often only a few minutes longer than taxi or van.

http://www.ridemcts.com/routes_and_schedules/schedule.asp?route=80

Straz Tower is at 9th and Wisconsin.

The Conference Center is in the lower level of Raynor Library at 1355 W. Wisconsin Ave.

Midwest Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy link:

http://web.mac.com/mistertea/Midwest_Seminar/Welcome.html

Aquinas and the Arabs Project link:

http://web.mac.com/mistertea/iWeb/Aquinas%20&%20the%20Arabs/Aquinas%20&%20the%20Arabs.html

MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT link:

http://www.marquette.edu/phil/

Conference Abstracts – Alphabetical Order

Prof. Robert Bolton, Rutgers University, TBA, [1] 

[no abstract]

Mr. Brian Embry, University of Toronto, “Aristotle and Plotinus on Matter and Change,” [2] 

In Ennead II.4, On Matter, Plotinus argues that matter must exist if we are to account for elemental change. Thus far he relies on Aristotle, who also argues that we must posit matter to account for change. However, at the end of II.4, Plotinus argues that matter is identical to privation. This is an odd claim for Plotinus because Aristotle’s account of change hinges on the distinction between matter and privation. Indeed, Aristotle faults Plato for failing to make that distinction. Plotinus’ turn against Aristotle at the end of II.4 therefore raises the question, how does Plotinus take his theory of matter to account for change without falling afoul of Aristotle’s criticism of Plato? This is the question I address in this paper. In the first section of the paper I explain why Aristotle thinks that it’s important to distinguish between matter and privation. In the second section, I explain Plotinus’ account of matter and criticism of Aristotle. In sections three and four, I explain how Plotinus accounts for elemental and accidental change.

Prof. Robert Gallagher, American University of Beirut, “Incomparability in Physics VII.4,” [6] 

Aristotle says that many movements or changes (kinēsis) (curvilinear, rectilinear, alterations) are incomparable. Movements are incomparable because kinēsis has forms (eidē) (249a11-12); they are produced by different processes, a fact obscured by the homonymy of “speed” (cf. 248b10-12). Likewise, alterations are incomparable because they too have forms (cf. 249b9-10). In general, changes are incomparable if the things being changed differ in form (or genos) (cf. 249b11-14). Now, comparability is an indispensable ingredient of commensurability. Things that are commensurable are comparable, and things that are not comparable are not commensurable. So, in arguing that many kinēseis are incomparable, Aristotle develops his theory of incommensurables in physical processes. Incommensurables are not only mathematical entities (e.g., √2).Rather, with mathematical incommensurables, we try to represent incommensurable actions and processes that exist in nature, apart from representation.

Dr. Owen Goldin, Marquette University, “Aristotle and the Pythagorean Opposites,” [7]

Aristotle presents the Physics as an inquiry into principles (arkhai) of nature.  The first book leads to the conclusion that there are three principles of change: two contraries and a substrate.  What does arkhē mean in this context?  What are the demands that a satisfactory account of principles, in this sense, must meet?  One way of approaching this question is to consider at what Aristotle has to say of the nature of accounts given by his predecessors.  Unnamed Pythagoreans anticipated Aristotle in taking the principles of natural things to be correlated contraries, linked through causal relations.  In De Caelo 2.2 Aristotle criticizes the Pythagoreans on the grounds that their appeal to contraries does not distinguish between which are prior and which are posterior.  I here argue that Aristotle's point is that the Pythagoreans did not distinguish between causal priority and posteriority in their explanations.  Certain principles are more causally basic than others, and explanations, in the natural sciences, and elsewhere, must make that apparent.  The theory of demonstration presented within the Posterior Analytics is at least in part intended to show how explanations are to be structured to allow this to be so.  I conclude by showing how, even though the account of the three principles of change developed in Physics 1 is not easily integrated with the Aristotle's syllogistic, it in principle is not subject to the objection that Aristotle raises against the Pythagorean appeal to contraries as explanatory principles.

Dr. Robert Matava, Georgetown University, “Aristotelian Premotion and the Divine Causation of Human Free Choices,” [3]  

Aristotleʼs teaching on motion in Books III and VIII of the Physics has exercised a significant influence on the formation of medieval and early modern scholastic thought concerning the divine causation of human free choices. One of the most influential thinkers to appropriate Aristotleʼs teaching was Aquinas, whose own thought on the divine motion of the human will has been the source of controversy from Second Scholasticism to the present day. Lonergan has been one of the most seminal figures to enter this fray. However, Lonerganʼs work on Aristotelian premotion and fate in Aquinas remains virtually absent from contemporary philosophical discussions. This is curious because theologians who have engaged Lonergan tend to consider his position definitive. Thus there has tended either to be no critical engagement with Lonergan, or no engagement at all. The contribution of this paper is to bring Lonergan in to the conversation through a critical engagement with his thought, ultimately suggesting an alternative reading of Aquinas that situates Aquinasʼ appropriation of motion

within the context of creation.

Mr. Scott O’Connor, Cornell University “The Persisting Simple: Aristotle's Physics 1.7,” [10] 

In Physics.1.7 Aristotle speaks about two kinds of change, qualified change and unqualified change (gigenetai haplôs) (190b1-3). He says that each contains three elements (archai, stoicheia) (189b27, 190b17-19.); the privation (sterēsis), the form (eidos), and the subject (hupokeimenon) (191a15-19). In this paper I discuss a puzzle about whether Aristotle believes that the subject in each change persists through that change for which it is the subject. On the one hand, Aristotle seems to say that the subject of each change persists, or remains (hupomenei), through that change for which it is the subject (190a9-10). He also says that plants and animals come into being from sperma (ek spermatos)(190b4-5), which suggests that sperma is a subject and persists through a natural generation. But this leads to something peculiar: Assume that the unfertilised egg is a sperma. If you dissect Socrates, nowhere do you find in him the unfertilised egg that he came into being from. After describing this puzzle, I look at two different responses: 1) Aristotle only says that the subject in qualified changes and not unqualified changes persists.1 2) Aristotle says that the subject of these natural generations do persist through these changes, but the subject is only sperma at the beginning and not at the end of the change.2 I argue against both responses. I then defend a new interpretation by focusing on what Aristotle says sperma is in the first book of the Generation of Animals, in particular, on how he describes sperma as a useful residue of ultimate nutriment (726a25-28). By discussing why Aristotle believes that some of this nutriment must persist in order for the heart (the principle of growth) to grow the umbilical chord, I show how sperma persists and remains sperma in natural generations.

Prof. Thomas Olshewsky, University of Kentucky and New College of Florida, “The Evolution of the Elements,” [9] 

Popular presumption has it that Empedocles determined that the elements were the traditional four, that Plato adopted this view in the Timaeus, and that Aristotle codified it in his physical works. Evidence shows that Empedocles never used the term, that Plato never applied it to the traditional four, and the conception was never stable in the works of Aristotle. From his lack of acknowledgement of the elements in Physics VII and the treatments in terms of principles in Physics I, through the “standard” treatment in Physics II, its breakdown in On Coming to Be and Passing Away and its reconstruction in On the Heavens, into the problems in Metaphysics Z-17, Physics VIII-4, and the Meteorology, Aristotle gives us varying, conflictual concepts of the elements that can be undertood only in terms of his developing conceptions of motion.

Prof. John Thorp, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, “The Heat and Light from the Stars,” [8] 

Aristotle famously claims, in the de Caelo and the Meterologica, that the heavenly bodies are not themselves fire or fiery; rather they rub against the air that is beneath them, and it is the air that is heated by this friction. This has seemed unintelligible to nearly two millennia of commentaries, from Alexander to our own day: for, first, it is not air but fire that is immediately below the moon; and, second, neither the moon nor the other stars are thought to protrude from the spheres that carry them; and, third, in any case, there is no air available for the remoter bodies to rub against – the fifth element is taken to be pure. What does Aristotle have in mind? I propose an answer that requires that we take a new and close look at some Aristotelian texts about motion and change.

Prof. Richard Tierney, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “'Proper Place, Form, and Natural Elemental Motion,” [4]

In Physics VIII 4, Aristotle articulates a problem that directly relates to the natural motions of the elements (although he actually frames it in the more general terms of “light and heavy things”). The problem is that, in the case of their natural motions, “it is no longer evident, as it is when the motion is unnatural, whence their motion is derived”. This is a problem because of Aristotle’s conviction, of which he also wants to convince his audience, that “all things that are in motion must be moved by something”; a central premise in his argument for the unmoved mover. He purports to solve the problem by appealing to a distinction between two levels of potentiality.

In this paper I argue that in making this appeal, Aristotle implicitly draws upon a particular conception of natural motion, which enables us to understand that the elements must indeed be moved by something.

Mr. Jacob Tuttle, Purdue University, “The Structure of Efficient-Causal Situations in Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations,” [12]

This paper presents and explains Suárez’s theory of efficient causation. It is divided into two parts. In the first part, I defend an interpretation of Suárez’s analysis of what I call ‘efficient-causal situations’—namely, the situations (or facts, or states of affairs) that account for the truth of claims of the form ‘C efficiently causes E’. I argue that, according to Suárez, such situations can be analyzed in terms of five components: an agent, an effect, an action, an active power, and a time. In the second part of the paper I resolve a puzzle associated with Suárez’s notion of per se efficient causation. I show that, once properly understood, this notion reveals important connections between Suárez’s views on causation and causal explanation.

Prof. David Twetten, Marquette University, “Averroes’ Aristotle - Our Aristotle: Three Points of Convergence on the Prime Mover” [5] 

Recent work in Aristotle scholarship on the prime mover has broken with the prevailing interpretation since Zeller refuted Brentano: that Aristotle’s prime mover is exclusively a final cause; in other words, that the only way to account for the prime mover’s causality is to reduce it to finality, to a telos or to to hou heneka.  Sarah Broadie in 1993 made perhaps the first significant break, affirming that the prime mover is an efficient cause, a kind of immanent soul of the outermost sphere. Enrico Berti has gone further, identifying the prime mover of Metaphysics Λ as a transcendent efficient cause, regardless whether the heavens have souls. Such readings have encouraged others to reconsider how, rather than resort immediately to a theory of development, a coherent sense can be given to Aristotle’s various presentations of the matter. One effect of such efforts is that Aristotle scholars once again affirm interpretations that are within the spectrum, not only of the Greek commentators, but also of the great medieval and renaissance readers of Aristotle.  Increased knowledge of the latter could help broaden the range and increase the sophistication of interpretative possibilities. At the same time, ideas in the commentary tradition that before would have seemed highly “un-Aristotelian” can now turn out to have unexpected interest. I examine three such ideas in Averroes, suggesting that they may help us out of certain quandaries that result from our contemporary readings.

Ms. Simona Vucu, University of Toronto, “Henry of Ghent on Substance as the Foundation of Different Real Relations,” [11] 

In defending the possibility of self-change, Henry of Ghent argued that a substance efficiently causes all its necessary accidents and that it therefore must be endowed with the relevant causal powers. Furthermore, Henry understood a power as the essence of a substance under a relational aspect. Thus, for a substance to be the efficient cause of a necessary accident, the essence of the substance must be under a relational aspect to the production of this accident. But as a self-changer, a substance must also have a passive power to receive this necessary accident; thus, the essence of the substance is under a relational aspect to the reception of this accident. This view faces the following objection: if active and passive powers are really distinct, it follows that the same substance is at the same time the foundation of two really distinct and opposite relations to the same necessary accident. Medieval authors accepted that only the divine essence can be the foundation of many really distinct relations, because of its infinity. Since the essences of created substances are not infinite, they cannot be the foundations of two really distinct and opposite relations. In this paper I will discuss Henry's answer to this objection.