Emma Emrich

This paper investigates contemporary applications of the Aristotelian conception of potentiality in limit cases of life and death arising from developments in modern science in order to argue that in its current usage, the term is often so far from its Aristotelian context that its philosophical rigor and, hence, usefulness is undermined. By analyzing the account of the soul in Aristotle’s De Anima, I argue for the necessity of a conception of nature that can contextualize the relevant sense of potentiality by giving a telos arising from the subject’s nature, which orients that subject’s potentiality. I argue that these contextualizing components of nature and teleology are necessary for using a philosophically rigorous sense of potentiality. I begin by surveying the current use of potentiality to delineate beginning and end-of-life cases in order to show that these various uses are not robust enough to offer answers to the challenging cases of life and death in a non ad hoc way. I then address John Lizza and Joel Feinberg’s suggestions for making the concept of potentiality more robust, namely, a more specified framework of ‘normal’ internal conditions and ‘important’ external conditions to which the subject’s potentialities can be referenced. I argue that the insufficiency of the current uses of potentiality is more specifically due to a lack of an Aristotelian conception of a teleological nature that directs the subject’s potentiality and further that this Aristotelian framework of the subject’s nature can provide an answer to Feinberg and Lizza call for a context of normalcy of internal features and external environment in a more robust way. In the final section, I turn back to the problematic cases of life and death in order to highlight how, given a more specific and robust conception of a teleological nature, my account can offer three suggestions for applying the concept of potentiality.

This article considers the role of emotion in John Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent by distinguishing five different ways (or ‘models’) in which the emotions play a positive epistemic role in relation to cognition. The most important of these, the Cognitive-Emotion Model, offers a new account of Newman's crucial idea of real assent, one that stresses the primary role of the emotions in real assent rather than imagination. This model helps to explain the nature of real assent by highlighting Newman's portrayal of an emotional way of knowing an object that is personal or individual, incommunicable, vivid, and motive. In this study of the relations between emotion and cognition I hope to highlight unexplored aspects of the nature of real assent and the importance of the role of emotion in it and hope to show how Newman's epistemology offers a rich framework for exploring the positive epistemic contributions of the emotions.