Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Understanding and Being

Titel: Understanding and Being

Stichwort: Aristoteles, Widerspruch in seinen Prinzipien; Physik; Unveränderbarkeit Gottes

Kurzinhalt: einerseits: Wissenschaft je nach den Ursachen; anderseits: Erklärung der Physik als Theorie der Bewegung -> unvollständige Verwirklichung der Kategorien (Ort, Qualität, Quantität)

Textausschnitt: I think that Aristotle in his Physics violated his own principles. He, or at least the Aristotelian corpus - it's very difficult to say what is from Aristotle - but in that body of writings he distinguished his predicaments from causes, and science is conceived in terms of causes. But Aristotle's Physics is fundamentally a theory of motion, and motion is defined as the incomplete realization of three of the predicaments.
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Again, quality, or change of quality - what's called alteration, alloi-ôsis - is change in the sensibilia propria, in color, hot and cold, wet and dry, smooth and rough, and so on. What is 'becoming white'? Well, it's an incomplete realization of 'being white.' What is 'heating'? It's an incomplete realization of 'being hot, at a certain intensity of heat,' and so on. (366; Fs)
Similarly, for quantity.
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The categories, the predicaments, form the basis, then, on which he develops his theory of motion. Science becomes not a reduction of reality to its causes - certain knowledge of things through their causes -but knowledge of things through the predicaments, so that science, instead of advancing from description to explanation in causes, starts circling around within the descriptive field.
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The definitions I worked out, of potency, form, and act, are exactly what Aristotle uses in his psychology. Eye, sight, seeing, are potency, form, act. The capacity to will, habits of will, and acts of will are potency, form, act. The possible intellect, habits of intellect (the acquisition of a science), and acts of understanding are potency, form, act, again - all analogous to prime matter, substantial form, and existence. And that in Aristotle, I believe, survives, when systematically collected. But Aristotelian physics has doubled back on the descriptive element, and that's why it was a block to the development of science. And that's what sets the problem of just what kind of a department of philosophy cosmology is.
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... there are other types of argument for that exclusion of change from God. If you have change, you have some sort of finality. You have some sort of potentiality, imperfection, some perfection to be acquired. And if you posit unlimited act, well, you're excluding the possibility of change in quite a different way from the argument from the supposition of matter. In other words, matter isn't the only type of potency. It's by the negation of potency, capacity for development, that you get the immutability of God.
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I should qualify what I said before. If you conceive metaphysics in terms of necessity and impossibility, you haven't got from change a metaphysical argument. But if you conceive metaphysics, as I do, as what is true as a matter of fact in our knowledge - there are factual conditions for it - then metaphysics differs from physics, not in terms of necessity and impossibility, but on the level at which it considers the same reality.