Thesis ID: CBB001561325

A Matter of Possibility: On the Problem of Self-Movement in the Aristotelian Texts (2007)

unapi

Grazzini, Benjamin J. (Author)


New School University
Baracchi, Claudia


Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Advisor: Baracchi, Claudia
Physical Details: 335 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation provides an account of the problem of self-movement in the Aristotelian texts. There is no Aristotelian treatise "On Self-Movement," but there is a coherent line of thought concerning self-movement in the texts. My primary aim is to show how that line of thought works. Although the account is largely reconstructive, the trajectory it follows is established in the texts: from physics to psychology to ethics, as the problem is specified with respect to nature, soul, and character. The central thought is that self-movement depends on how actuality is prior to and conditions, but does not exhaust, potentiality. That thought plays out in three respects. (1) In order to account for self-movement Aristotle must show how an animal's movements are not simply determined by how it is affected, when neither nature, nor soul, nor character is an unqualified power of self-movement. Aristotle's challenge is to provide a non-reductive, non-dualistic account of the capacities and activities of living beings. (2) Those capacities and activities are acquired and developed through time and experience. It is insofar as an animal is capable of desire that it is able to move itself, but that capability is shaped through the incorporation of past experience within an animal's capacities for being affected. (3) Because of the historical character of the Aristotelian corpus, the texts cannot be understood apart from the traditions through which they have come down to us. How we do, and can, read the Aristotelian texts is crucially affected by the history of their reception. In all three respects, how things are, and how they have come to be, does not exhaust how they admit of being otherwise.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/10 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3286266.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561325/

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Authors & Contributors
Mor Segev
Claudia Zatta
Anna Schriefl
Blyth, Dougal
Zink, T.
Young, Douglas
Concepts
Soul (philosophy)
Philosophy
Psychology
Aristotelianism
Philosophy of mind
Mind and body
Time Periods
Ancient
Places
Greece
Rome (Italy)
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