Taking Mark's inventory 9

Date: 2009-02-08 06:33 am (UTC)
koganbot: (Default)
From: [personal profile] koganbot
v: P19: "A sick man often grows healthy by himself, but an external agent is needed, or believed to be needed, to make him sick. One set of qualities, one end point of change, represents a body's natural state, the one that it realises voluntarily and thereafter rests."

(I doubt that it matters for our purposes, but the word "voluntarily" jumps out at me. Presumably it accurately communicates a concept within Aristotelian ideas, a concept that I don't immediately understand.)

I noted: "The same asymmetry should be characteristic of local motion, and it is. The quality that a stone or other heavy body strives to realize is position at the center of the universe; the natural position of fire is at the periphery."

vi: "They are realising their natural properties just as the acorn does through its growth."
vii: "Another... part of the A doctrine begins to fall into place."
viii: "locking individual bits of A physics into place in the whole"
ix: "lend each other mutual authority and support"

I think the phrase "lend each other mutual authority and support" is more crucial than is "locking individual bits into place," the former better communicating that the concepts of Aristotle's physics can't flourish individually, on their own, in isolation. (Which is why a change in one concept can have an effect on a whole, can potentially cause a revolution.)

x: "the status of, say, a square circle"

A question that jumps out at me, from this analogy, is how do you - how did they, successfully - challenge an idea that's axiomatic, or that is true by definition?

xi: "The argument has force..."
xii: "If there could be a void, then the Aristotelian universe or cosmos could not be finite."

Even though Kuhn doesn't use the metaphor of "family" here, I can think of it as having a second application. The first application is that acorn to oak, sickness to health, heavy object to its place in the center, etc. form a family, the Motion family, based on their perceived similarity. A second application is that motion being change, change occurring by changing qualities not matter, change being asymmetric, qualities and matter being inseparable, a vacuum being impossible, the cosmos being finite, there being a center and there being natural places, etc., are all related, all interdependent, hence in that sense they're all a family, too, not by resembling each other but by being crucially indebted to each other.
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Frank Kogan

July 2025

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