Actuality, Potentiality and De Anima II.5

Actuality, Potentiality and De Anima II.5

Myles Burnyeat has argued that in De Anima II.5 Aristotle marks out a refined kind of alteration which is to be distinguished from ordinary alteration, change of quality as defined in Physics III.1-3. Aristotle’s aim, he says, is to make it clear that perception is an alteration of this refined sort and not an ordinary alteration. Thus, it both supports his own interpretation of Aristotle’s vie...

Technological Presence: Actuality and Potentiality in Subject Constitution

Technical mediation shapes our experience of the world, but it also shapes our experience of ourselves. In this paper, I argue that in order to understand the latter aspect of technical mediation, we need to expand on notions of technical mediation that focuses on actual use, and bring in possible use as well. The concept of technical mediation must therefore be grounded in a more general conce...

Bridging Necessity and Contingency in Quantum Mechanics: Potentiality, Actuality, and the Scientific Rehabilitation of Process Ontology

THE PROBLEM OF THE SOUL IN ARISTOTLE’S De anima

Life and death, generation and corruption are obviously universal experiences of mankind. Man had to deal with these phenomena and search for psychological accommodation to the objective facts. Man, however, has tremendous capacity for imagination and wonder -so it is easy to let our imagination err in the gray zone, especially when it seeks to satisfy our deepest desires. Thus the notions of t...

Chance and Actuality

The relation between chance and actuality gives rise to the following puzzle. On the one hand, it may be a chancy matter what will actually happen. On the other hand, standard semantics for ‘actually’ imply that sentences beginning with ‘actually’ are never contingent. In order to elucidate this puzzle, a kind of objective semantic indeterminacy will be defended: in a chancy world, it may be a ...