Anna Marmodoro

In this paper I argue against the view that essences are related to the things that have them as properties those things cannot lose without losing their identity. If things have their essences, regresses develop and unravel the ontology. Both Modal Essentialism and Kit Fine’s Definitional Essentialism are open to such regresses. By contrast, I advocate a type of essentialism according to which things do not have essences and are not qualified by their essences, but rather, they are constituted by their essences.

This chapter introduces the reader to Aristotle’s account of causal powers and highlights the conceptual innovations he introduced in relation to the accounts of his predecessors, most notably Anaxagoras and Plato. The chapter argues that Aristotle’s predecessors had a distinctive account of powers, different from Aristotle’s in that their powers exist as always exercising and not interacting with each other. Aristotle famously introduces the distinction between being in potentiality and being in actuality, and between active and passive powers; and provides a definition of powers that has remained mainstream in current philosophy too.

A number of contemporary metaphysicians find Aristotle’s hylomorphism a promising and yet wanting account of what there is, and have engaged in ‘reconditioning’ it into a sound metaphysics (e.g. Jaworski 2016, Koons 2014, Rea 2011, among others). Jonathan Lowe’s four-category ontology aligns with this way of thinking, notwithstanding its explicit rejection of the notion of matter that is typically attributed to Aristotle. This chapter offers a taxonomy of the most recent versions of hylomorphism that have been developed in the literature, and locates Lowe’s views within it. It further addresses the question of whether Aristotle’s hylomorphism does in fact need the ‘reconditioning’ it has recently received in the literature; the chapter argues for a negative answer. It finally focuses on the thorny issue of matter: here the questions addressed are: what Aristotle meant by ‘matter’; how many kinds of matter did he introduce into his system; and how does his system compare to Lowe’s matterless four-category ontology. As a version of hylomorphism, Lowe’s ontology is more Aristotelian than Lowe believed.

This paper puts powers to work by developing a broadly Aristotelian account of causation, built on the fundamental idea (which Aristotle found in Plato, attributed by him to Heraclitus) that causation is a mutual interaction between powers. On this Aristotelian view, causal powers manifest them-selves in dependence on the manifestation of their mutual partners. (See also Heil, this volume; Mumford, this volume; and Martin 2008.) The manifestations of two causal power partners are co-determined, co-varying, and co-extensive in time. (See Marmodoro 2006.) Yet, causation has a direction and is thus asymmetric. This asymmetry is what underpins metaphysically the distinction between causal agent and patient. The proposed Aristotelian analysis of the interaction between mutually manifesting causal powers is distinctive, in that it pays justice to the intuition that there is agency in causation. That is, agency is not a metaphorical way of describing what causal powers do. For some powers, it is a way of being that instantiates the non-anthropomorphic sense in which powers are causal agents. This point is brought out in the paper in relation to the explanation of the concept of change. In an Aristotelian fashion, the paper argues that the distinction be-tween agent and patient in causation is pivotal to offering a realist account of causation that does not reify the interaction of the reciprocal causal partners into a relation. On the proposed view, the interaction between mutually manifesting causal partners consists in the power of one substance being realized in another substance. Specifically, the agent’s causal powers metaphysically belong to the agent, but come to be realized in the patient. The significance of this is that the interaction of the agent’s and the patient’s powers is not a relation; rather, it is an ex-tension of the constitution of the agent onto the patient, which occurs when agent and patient interact and their powers are mutually manifested. Thus the proposed Aristotelian account of causation explains the mutual interaction between manifestation partners—potentiality, agency, and change—as irreducible to one another, but interconnected.

This volume is a collection of papers that advance our understanding of the metaphysics of powers — properties such as fragility and electric charge. The metaphysics of powers is a fast developing research field with fundamental questions at the forefront of current research, such as Can there be a world of only powers? What is the manifestation of a power? Are powers and their manifestations related by necessity? What are the prospects for dispositional accounts of causation? The papers focus on questions concerning the metaphysics of powers that cut across any particular subject-specific ontological domain -- whether philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, epistemology – investigating the metaphysical structure of powers, the nature of the manifestation of powers, the necessity or contingency of a power’s relation to its manifestations, and powers and causation. A number of authors also engage in discussion with Humean and neo-Humean treatments of causation, thereby making contributions to a larger metaphysical debate beyond powers. Additionally, the authors engage critically with the latest contributions to the debate on powers in the literature, thereby bringing together in a wholesome and analytical way the most recent and noteworthy theoretical developments in this research field.

This introduction presents a brief overview of the concept of ‘mental power’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and focuses on the issue of how a sample of influential thinkers of that period conceptualized the human agent’s mental abilities and skills as governing perception, action and moral behaviour. This leads to innovative accounts which partially ground, in a broad sense, modern psychology. The representative thinkers included in this special issue are: Descartes, Cudworth, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and Kant.

This chapter introduces a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics of powers, drawing on various of his works, and putting it in dialogue with alternatives in contemporary metaphysics, thus assessing its relative strengths. The chapter argues that Aristotle held what is currently known as a “pure” power ontology, with no categorical properties at the Mental level and no categorical base to the fundamental powers. In Aristotle’s system, there are no relations relating a power with its manifestation, or with its Manifestation partners. Power for Aristotle are relatives, that is, monadic properties of a special kind, whose nature is discussed in the chapter. Their manifestation is governed by conditional necessity. Instances of physical powers are for Aristotle all there is at the foundations of reality.

The idea that something can be present at every place has engendered much discussion both in the past and at present. Typically, omnipresence is thought to be a divine attribute, but the question as to how something can be omnipresent has not been historically confined to the status of a divine being. The Oxford Handbook of Omnipresence offers an insight into historical accounts of omnipresence and its developments in ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary thought. It further widens the study of omnipresence by including less widely studied strands of thought on this topic from mystical, process theological, feminist theological, and phenomenological perspectives. Additionally, whilst the study of omnipresence has typically focused on Christian thinkers, the volume broadens the range of voices on this attribute further by including Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Sanskrit, and Donghak accounts. The Handbook provides an introduction to the main facets of omnipresence, both historical and contemporary, and opens up new avenues for research that are yet to be fully explored.

L'A. offre l'analisi del libro D della Metafisica mettendo a confronto l'impostazione esegetica dei commentatori moderni con quelli medievali, in particolare è presa in esame la Lectura super librum Metaphysicorum di Paolo Veneto tradita dai mss. Pavia, BU, Aldini 324 e Casale Monferrato, Seminario Vescovile, I.a.3-6. Dopo aver analizzato le due principali linee interpretative della nozione di Essere negli esegeti moderni e la molteplicità dei suoi significati nel corpus aristotelico, l'A. passa ad esaminare in maniera specifica la soluzione interpretativa proposta da Paolo Nicoletti in merito alla nozione di Essere focalizzando l'attenzione sulla definizione di ente e sulla questione di essere come vero e non essere come falso e le soluzioni proposte dall'autore. Si evidenzia come alcuni spunti interpretativi possono essere riscontrati sia Alberto Magno sia in Averroè. Il testo del Nicoletti, edito dall'A. nella parte conclusiva dell'articolo, corrisponde al Libro V, tr. II, c. 2.

This volume offers a fresh exploration of the parts-whole relations within a power and among powers. While the metaphysics of powers has been extensively examined in the literature, powers have yet to be studied from the perspective of their mereology. Powers are often assumed to be atomic; and yet what they can do--and what can happen to them--is complex. But if powers are simple, how can they have complex manifestations? Can powers have parts? According to which rules of composition do powers compose into powers? Given the centrality of powers in current scientific as well as philosophical thought, recognizing and understanding the ontological differences between atomic and mereologically complex powers is important, for both philosophy and science. The first section of this book explores how powers divide; the second section how powers compose. The final section showcases some specific study cases in the domains of quantum mechanics and psychology. Powers, Parts and Wholes will be of interest to professional philosophers and graduate students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science and logic.

This book brings together twelve original contributions by leading scholars on the much-debated issues of what is free will and how can we exercise it in a world governed by laws of nature. Which conception of laws of nature best fits with how we conceive of free will? And which constraints does our conception of the laws of nature place on how we think of free will? The metaphysics of causation and the metaphysics of dispositions are also explored in this edited volume, in relation to whether they may or may not be game-changers in how we think about both free will and the laws of nature. The volume presents the views of a range of international experts on these issues, and aims at providing the reader with novel approaches to a core problem in philosophy. The target audience is composed by academics and scholars who are interested in an original and contemporary approach to these long-debated issues. Chapters [2] and [4] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This volume introduces readers to a selected number of core issues in metaphysics that have been central in the history of philosophy and remain foundational to contemporary debates, that is: substances; properties; modality and essence; causality; determinism and free will. Anna Marmodoro and Erasmus Mayr take a neo-Aristotelian approach both in the selection and presentation of the topics. But Marmodoro and Mayr's discussion is not narrowly partisan-it consistently presents opposing sides of the debate and addresses issues from different philosophical traditions, and encourages readers to draw their own conclusions about them.

This book presents Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise In Hexaemeron as a specimen of early Christian philosophy. The Greek text, reprinted from the Gregorii Nysseni Opera, is printed together with a new translation by Andrew Radde Gallwitz, which is especially attuned to the philosophical subtleties of the text. The introduction contextualizes the In hexaemeron within the broader history of ancient cosmology. Individual chapter subsequently discuss key topics in Gregory’s treatise: his theory of ‘simultaneous creation’ (Gleede); his relationship with the Stoic tradition (Reydams-Schils); his understanding of matter (Greig; Marmodoro); his theories of elementary particles (Radde-Gallwitz), of light (Katsos), and of the logos (Zachhuber). In all these chapters, Gregory’s ideas are analysed on the basis of his text and with a special view to their philosophical valence.

Written by a group of leading scholars, this unique collection of essays investigates the views of both pagan and Christian philosophers on causation and the creation of the cosmos. Structured in two parts, the volume first looks at divine agency and how late antique thinkers, including the Stoics, Plotinus, Porphyry, Simplicius, Philoponus and Gregory of Nyssa, tackled questions such as: is the cosmos eternal? Did it come from nothing or from something pre-existing? How was it caused to come into existence? Is it material or immaterial? The second part looks at questions concerning human agency and responsibility, including the problem of evil and the nature of will, considering thinkers such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and Augustine. Highlighting some of the most important and interesting aspects of these philosophical debates, the volume will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of philosophy, classics, theology and ancient history.

We inhabit a world not only full of natural dispositions independent of human design, but also artificial dispositions created by our technological prowess. How do these dispositions, found in automation, computation, and artificial intelligence applications, differ metaphysically from their natural counterparts? This collection investigates artificial dispositions: what they are, the roles they play in artificial systems, and how they impact our understanding of the nature of reality, the structure of minds, and the ethics of emerging technologies. It is divided into four parts covering the following interconnected themes: (i) Metaphysics and Artificial Dispositions, (ii) Artificial Systems and Artificial Dispositions, (iii) Agency, Mind, and Artificial Dispositions, and (iv) Artificial Moral Dispositions. This is a groundbreaking and thought-provoking resource for any student or scholar of philosophy of science, contemporary metaphysics, applied ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of technology.