Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics Reviewed in NDPR
The review by Robert C. Koons (University of Texas at Austin) is here. To my knowledge, this review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews is the first published review of my Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume. NDPR is no doubt the most prominent venue for philosophical book reviews, so it’s good to see this one published. There should be several reviews coming out in journals as well, but those may take longer to appear.
Koons doesn’t make many observations about the volume as a whole, but the review provides a comprehensive summary of each chapter, as well as some critical remarks on the individual chapters. The overall message is very positive though, here’s the opening paragraph:
In this collection, many of the leaders of the neo-Aristotelian movement in analytic metaphysics have contributed brief papers that point to emerging developments in the field. The book will be of interest to anyone who wants to stay abreast of the progress being made by this significant group. The collection is especially strong on the questions of methodology and ontological categories.
Regarding my own chapter, Koons points out that Alexander Pruss’ approach to metaphysical possibility in his recent book may be closer to Aristotle’s than my own (and Lowe’s). That may be true, but doesn’t bother me too much, as I never aimed to be completely faithful to Aristotle. Anyway, I admit that I haven’t read Pruss’ book yet, but I did recently get it and it’s on my reading list…
I expect that the review might boost the sales of the volume, which is why I’m alarmed that it appears to be out of print at Cambridge. There are copies available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, as well as a number of other online retailers, but we’ll see how long they last (get yours while you can!).
Some of my friends and I have been doing a reading group on this book. We’ve only made it as far as Alexander Bird’s paper, but it’s summertime so we’re taking it slow.
In any event, I haven’t read Pruss’s book either (although, like you, it’s on my reading list). But it just isn’t clear to me that his position is more faithful to what Aristotle says in Book Theta than what you and Lowe say. I understood Koons’ point to be that to the extent that Pruss’s approach grounds metaphysical possibility in *actual* powers, his view is more faithful to Aristotle’s claim in Theta 8 that actuality is ontologically prior to capacity or possibiliity. But neither you nor Lowe claim otherwise. You both claim that metaphysical possibility is grounded in essence. Maybe that still diverges from Aristotle’s claim more than Pruss’s approach, but it doesn’t seem to me that you and Lowe are making a radical break from Book Theta.
Anyway, I hope the book doesn’t go out of print!
Thanks for your thoughts John. I’m pleased to hear that there’s a reading group on the book. I’d be curious to hear how it went once you’ve finished it!
Perhaps you are correct in that myself and Lowe do not differ from Aristotle as radically as Koons claims. There is a certain tension between the idea that essence precedes existence (which entails that possibility precedes actuality), and what we see especially in The Posterior Analytics, but I believe that there’s an explanation to this, which is Aristotle’s peculiar conception of ‘species’, i.e. that they are eternal. I’ve looked into this in some more detail recently, in a forthcoming paper “Metaphysics as the First Philosophy”; I’ve just uploaded it here: http://www.ttahko.net/papers/firstphilosophy.pdf
In the review, Koons makes the following claim regarding Aristotle’s position:
“Epistemologically speaking, there is no clear priority in either direction. Instead, there is a dialectical interplay between our knowledge of the possible and of the actual.”
In fact, I also subscribe to this view, at least if we specify it a little bit. That’s because I think that even though essence, or possibility, has ontological priority in individuals examples, scientific and philosophical inquiry in general proceed in such a way that our knowledge of possibility is constantly being complemented by our knowledge the actual. I’ve described this process in my earlier papers on the relationship between a priori and a posteriori knowledge, and coined it “the bootstrapping relationship”.
Well, all this would perhaps justify a dedicated blog post, perhaps I’ll look into that…
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