As the description of this event suggests, (neo-)Aristotelianism is truly experiencing a renaissance. This workshop is yet another proof of it, and, of course, so is my volume! Anna Marmodoro’s project in Oxford is another prominent example — she will be presenting at this event as well. Do also make a note of the podcasts on Marmodoro’s project website, featuring talks by Peter van Inwagen, Jonathan Jacobs, Stephen Mumford, and James Ladyman.

Subject: Aristotelian Powers, London School of Economics

Aristotelian Powers Now
Tuesday, 8th May 2012
LSE, CPNSS, T206
10.00 a.m. – 1.00 pm
Chair: Robert Northcott, Birkbeck

The recent resurgence of interest in Aristotelianism reflects the relevance of these ideas to contemporary issues in causation, science and ontology. This seminar presents two papers looking at Aristotelian powers. Anna Marmodoro’s paper seeks to make sense of Aristotle’s account of powers for a modern audience, highlighting what is distinctive and relevant from a contemporary perspective. Nancy Cartwright and John Pemberton’s paper argues that to make sense of modern science we must understand it as using powers which have Aristotelian characteristics.

Structural Powers in Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Anna Marmodoro, Oxford
Aristotle’s ontology aims at explaining what there is and what happens in nature. The elemental items in his ontology are pure powers which are instances of different types of potentiality. Powers can act on their correlative passive powers and become mutually manifested. But powers do not occur as free-floating instantiations of potentiality in nature. Rather, they are always composed along with other powers into entities. According to Aristotle, powers compose holistically with other powers to constitute entities, the way rain drops compose into pools of water. The compositions of powers may be natural, artificial, or chance compositions. Aristotle explains the composition of powers in his ontology through substance-forms and privation-forms. Such forms, which are a type of structural universal, whether natural, or artificial, or chance ones, explain the emergent functionality of the entities constituted by the powers.

Aristotelian Powers: what would modern science do without them?
Nancy Cartwright and John Pemberton, LSE
Modern science is centrally concerned with arrangements of things, nomological machines, and with the processes of change to which they can give rise: e.g. in chemical reactions, force-based dynamics, and biological processes. The methods used by science take things to have powers which give rise to change: hydrogen to link with oxygen, masses to attract, hearts to pump blood. What a power does when exercised is in the nature
of that power – the changes which occur are coherent processes through time. These characteristics are Aristotelian. Relational accounts of powers seem problematic. Arrangements of things can give rise to new emergent powers.

Registration:

R.Robinson1@lse.ac.uk