Date & Time: Friday, 12 Dec., 2-4 p.m.
Venue: Rm 202, Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences Education, NYMU
About the theme
Aristotle
provides a compelling account of the metaphysics of powers but focuses little
on how they act in combination[1].
Contemporary science, by contrast, is centrally concerned with nomological machines (often termed mechanisms): arrangements of features
and powers whose repeat operation can rise to laws of nature. Nomological
machines typically involve the simultaneous exercising of multiple powers, which
we may take to be Aristotelian[2],
so that the question of how such powers combine is central to modern science –
but is unfortunately far from adequately answered.
The
exercisings of some powers seem to be contributions to immediate changing, e.g.
powers which result in forces, and perhaps (but perhaps not) the powers to heat
/ cool, to dissolve, or to chemically react. The exercisings of other powers
are processes which take time, e.g. the power of a pendulum to swing, a cistern
to produce a flush, a neuron to fire, or a glass to smash. I explore a range of
examples featuring combinations of powers with each of these two sorts of
timing: this suggests a diversity of case types of how powers combine (which
should perhaps not surprise an adherent of the Stanford School). However, it
seems that (often at least) the exercise of a power that occurs over time
relies on structures within the machine to coordinate the relevant powers of
the parts. For such time extended powers, it seems that we might reframe the
question of how the exercising of powers combine, as a question concerning how
the structures which license those powers combine in forming the machine
arrangement. I explain how this approach might lead to a more unified account
of how Aristotelian powers combine.
About the speaker
John Pemberton, Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences at LSE
專長：
Change, powers, causation, arrangement, structure, laws
