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Author: George Sylvester Morris
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Published: 2024-03-19
Total Pages: 34
ISBN-13: 3385387086
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.
Author: George Taylor (of Connecticut.)
Publisher:
Published: 1855
Total Pages: 250
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Richard F. Hassing
Publisher: CUA Press
Published: 2018-03-02
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 081323056X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Teleology - the inquiry into the goals or goods at which nature, history, God, and human beings aim - is among the most fundamental yet controversial themes in the history of philosophy. Are there ends in nonhuman nature? Does human history have a goal? Do humanly unintended events of great significance express some sort of purpose? Do human beings have ends prior to choice? The essays in this volume address the abiding questions of final causality. The chapters are arranged in historical order from Aristotle through Hegel to contemporary anthropic-principle cosmology.
Author: Boris Hennig
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781433159299
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book examines Aristotle's four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final), offering a systematic discussion of the relation between form and matter, causation, taxonomy, and teleology. The overall aim is to show that the four causes form a system, so that the form of a natural thing relates to its matter as the final cause of a natural process relates to its efficient cause. Aristotle's Four Causes reaches two novel and distinctive conclusions. The first is that the formal cause or essence of a natural thing is not a property of this thing but a generic natural thing. The second is that the final cause of a process is not its purpose but the course that processes of its kind typically take.
Author: Monte Ransome Johnson
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2005-11-03
Total Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 0191536504
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Monte Johnson examines one of the most controversial aspects of Aristiotle's natural philosophy: his teleology. Is teleology about causation or explanation? Does it exclude or obviate mechanism, determinism, or materialism? Is it focused on the good of individual organisms, or is god or man the ultimate end of all processes and entities? Is teleology restricted to living things, or does it apply to the cosmos as a whole? Does it identify objectively existent causes in the world, or is it merely a heuristic for our understanding of other causal processes? Johnson argues that Aristotle's aporetic approach drives a middle course between these traditional oppositions, and avoids the dilemma, frequently urged against teleology, between backwards causation and anthropomorphism. Although these issues have been debated with extraordinary depth by Aristotle scholars, and touched upon by many in the wider philosophical and scientific community as well, there has been no comprehensive historical treatment of the issue. Aristotle is commonly considered the inventor of teleology, although the precise term originated in the eighteenth century. But if teleology means the use of ends and goals in natural science, then Aristotle was rather a critical innovator of teleological explanation. Teleological notions were widespread among his predecessors, but Aristotle rejected their conception of extrinsic causes such as mind or god as the primary causes for natural things. Aristotle's radical alternative was to assert nature itself as an internal principle of change and an end, and his teleological explanations focus on the intrinsic ends of natural substances - those ends that benefit the natural thing itself. Aristotle's use of ends was subsequently conflated with incompatible 'teleological' notions, including proofs for the existence of a providential or designer god, vitalism and animism, opposition to mechanism and non-teleological causation, and anthropocentrism. Johnson addresses these misconceptions through an elaboration of Aristotle's methodological statements, as well as an examination of the explanations actually offered in the scientific works.
Author: Robert Wisnovsky
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-05-31
Total Pages: 318
ISBN-13: 1501711520
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The eleventh-century philosopher and physician Abu Ali ibn Sina (d. A.D. 1037) was known in the West by his Latinized name Avicenna. An analysis of the sources and evolution of Avicenna's metaphysics, this book focuses on the answers he and his predecessors gave to two fundamental pairs of questions: what is the soul and how does it cause the body; and what is God and how does He cause the world? To respond to these challenges, Avicenna invented new concepts and distinctions and reinterpreted old ones. The author concludes that Avicenna's innovations are a turning point in the history of metaphysics. Avicenna's metaphysics is the culmination of a period of synthesis during which philosophers fused together a Neoplatonic project (reconciling Plato with Aristotle) with a Peripatetic project (reconciling Aristotle with himself). Avicenna also stands at the beginning of a period during which philosophers sought to integrate the Arabic version of the earlier synthesis with Islamic doctrinal theology (kalam). Avicenna's metaphysics significantly influenced European scholastic thought, but it had an even more profound impact on Islamic intellectual history—the philosophical problems and opportunities associated with the Avicennian synthesis continued to be debated up to the end of the nineteenth century.
Author: Gaven Kerr
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Published: 2022-10-15
Total Pages: 290
ISBN-13: 3868382712
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The twentieth century witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the philosophical thought of St Thomas Aquinas. One of the fruits of that Thomistic revival was an uncovering of St Thomas’s original contributions to many areas of philosophy, not least metaphysics. In the twenty first century, there has been renewed interest in Aquinas’s argumentation for the existence of God. This interest flows from an engagement with the work of the twentieth century scholars in presenting Aquinas’s own characteristic metaphysics. What we have seen is an interpretation and presentation of Aquinas’s proofs for God’s existence in terms of Thomas’s unique insights into the nature of being and the metaphysical structure of reality. Gaven Kerr has been one such author who has contributed in numerous ways to the revival of interest in Aquinas’s argumentation for the existence of God and its metaphysical buttressing. Over the last ten years Kerr has published articles on Aquinas’s various proofs for God’s existence and the metaphysics standing behind those proofs; this volume draws together those articles. Herein are included Kerr’s articles on per se ordered series, existential inertia, the proof in De Ente et Essentia, the argument from motion in the Summa Contra Gentiles, and the five ways themselves. Kerr has also written two new articles for this volume: one on the possibility of demonstrating God’s existence, and the other on how to move from God’s existence to God’s nature. This volume offers an overview of Kerr’s thinking over the last decade on Aquinas’s thought on the existence of God.
Author: Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.
Publisher: Emmaus Academic
Published: 2020-10-01
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 194901374X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Order of Things: The Realism of the Principle of Finality is an exploration of the metaphysical principle, “Every agent acts for an end.” In the first part, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange sets forth the basics of the Aristotelian metaphysics of teleology, defending its place as a central point of metaphysics. After defending its per se nota character, he summarizes a number of main corollaries to the principle, primarily within the perspective established by traditional Thomistic accounts of metaphysics, doing so in a way that is pedagogically sensitive yet speculatively profound. In the second half of The Order of Things, Garrigou-Lagrange gathers together a number of articles which he had written, each having some connection with themes concerning teleology. Thematically, the texts consider the finality and teleology of the human intellect and will, along with the way that the principle of finality sheds light on certain problems associated with the distinction between faith and reason. Finally, the text ends with an important essay on the principle of the mutual interdependence of causes, causae ad invicem sunt causae, sed in diverso genere.
Author: Thomas Kjeller Johansen
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-10-18
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0191633011
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Aristotle is considered by many to be the founder of 'faculty psychology'—the attempt to explain a variety of psychological phenomena by reference to a few inborn capacities. In The Powers of Aristotle's Soul, Thomas Kjeller Johansen investigates his main work on psychology, the De Anima, from this perspective. He shows how Aristotle conceives of the soul's capacities and how he uses them to account for the souls of living beings. Johansen offers an original account of how Aristotle defines the capacities in relation to their activities and proper objects, and considers the relationship of the body to the definition of the soul's capacities. Against the background of Aristotle's theory of science, Johansen argues that the capacities of the soul serve as causal principles in the explanation of the various life forms. He develops detailed readings of Aristotle's treatment of nutrition, perception, and intellect, which show the soul's various roles as formal, final and efficient causes, and argues that the so-called 'agent' intellect falls outside the scope of Aristotle's natural scientific approach to the soul. Other psychological activities, various kinds of perception (including 'perceiving that we perceive'), memory, imagination, are accounted for in their explanatory dependency on the basic capacities. The ability to move spatially is similarly explained as derivative from the perceptual or intellectual capacities. Johansen claims that these capacities together with the nutritive may be understood as 'parts' of the soul, as they are basic to the definition and explanation of the various kinds of soul. Finally, he considers how the account of the capacities in the De Anima is adopted and adapted in Aristotle's biological and minor psychological works.
