1. 西方思想經典：亞里斯多德《物理學》
國立清華大學哲學研究所 助理教授 陳斐婷

2. Change requires the contraries
Aristotle’s Physics 1.5
Change requires the contraries

6. Is Aristotle arguing for a logical, even conceptual doctrine
Is Aristotle arguing for a logical, even conceptual doctrine? Or is his argument empirically based? On the usual story, Aristotle is appealing to the supposedly a priori truth that all change takes place along “incompatibility ranges.” According to William Charlton (2006, 66): This is not an empirical doctrine to the effect that the universe is regular; it is the purely logical doctrine that change is within definite ranges. We would say that a thing changes from being red to being blue; we would not say that a thing changes from being red to being elliptical.
All change is between contraries. But what is the nature of contrariety?
Are the contraries abstract entities such as pallor or knowledge of music, or concrete entities such as the pale thing or the thing which knows music?

7. Change requires an underlying subject
Aristotle’s Physics 1.6
Change requires an underlying subject

9. Aristotle’s Physics 1.7

10. Introduction of form and matter
How do we talk about change?
We say that (1) The man becomes musical.
But not that (2) From the man, he comes to be musical.
In other cases, both ways of speaking are available: (3) The unmusical becomes musical. (4) From the unmusical, he comes to be musical.
In Physics 2.1 natural objects are characterized as compounds of form and matter (193b5).
Individual substances are a “this-in-this,” or “what is out of these,” or a “composite,” or a “composite substance.”

11. Problems of persistence
What, if anything, persists through the exchange of elemental contraries in the mutual transformation of the elements?
The stuffs and structures that serve as matter for a living animal, for example, cannot exist in the absence of the form that characterize the whole. For example, only the living eye can be part of the matter of an animal—and to be living, it must be endowed with the form or soul of the whole creature. How, then, can it be independent of the form, in the way that Aristotle’s notion of the persistence of matter apparently requires?

12. The hierarchy of form and matter
Physics Books 1 and 2 provide a blueprint for work in natural philosophy: (1) an account of the metaphysical constitution of natural objects, (2) how such things can be subject to change, (3) what in general counts as explanation for the behavior of natural objects.
At every point, various stuffs or structures serve as matter, and are acted on or constrained in one way or another by form. Aristotle will say that a given stuff or structure is the matter of a form-matter compound—some higher-level matter, perhaps, or a finished substance—and that the first is as proximate matter to the second, if no intermediate matter lies between the two.

13. The hierarchy of form and matter
Elements (earth, air, fire, water)  the uniform parts (blood, flesh, bone) the non-uniform parts (eyes, ears, horns) and the ambiguous parts (the viscera)
The simplest perceptible constituents of the sublunary world are the elements: unhappy named, for Aristotle, because they are neither eternal (since the mutual transformation of the elements is a datum of experience) nor simple (since they each consists of the appropriate two from the four elemental contraries, hot, cold, wet, dry, together with, on the traditional view, prime matter).
The transformation of one element into another (e.g., air is transformed into fire) can take place when one constituent contrary (e.g., moist) is overwhelmed by the presence of its contrary (e.g., dry).
But the contraries may act on each other in such a way to achieve a mean or an intermediate—each destroys the other’s excesses—and the result is a mixture.

14. Prime matter and the Unmoved Mover
The Unmoved Mover is the limiting case of form, on the usual view, because all engagement with matter is absent from it. Just so, prime matter is the limiting case of matter, because all engagement with form is absent. Of all the cases of matter, prime matter alone is not itself a compound of form and matter.
Meanwhile, because the Unmoved Mover has no constitutive matter, it has no shred of potentiality but is pure actuality: the activity of thinking, engaged in thinking its own activity of thinking. And because prime matter has no constitutive form, in a certain sense it exhibits the maximum degree of potentiality.

15. Matter
A defining feature of matter is that it has the capacity for receiving or losing the form.
The capacity for receiving or losing the form plays a causal role: the fact that s possesses the capacity in question contributes to s’s constituting or ceasing to constitute a thing of a given kind.
Marble (say) counts as matter, because it has the appropriate passive power—the power for being made to receive the appropriate form, so that it can be made into a statue.
Meanwhile, the corresponding active power for the relevant form is lodged in the agent or sculptor, who has the form of a statue before his mind.

16. Problems concerning the unity of substance
Are form and matter artifacts of our way of looking at individual substances, and not a feature they exhibit “in the real order”?
Or are form and matter the real parts of a thing and not merely our creations? If so, Aristotle will owe us an explanation how they can together make up a unity.
Two wrong suggestions Aristotle has discredited in Met. Z.17:
Suggestion #1: What is responsible for the unity among the material parts or elements is yet another element or is composed of elements.
Problem: This suggestion invites an infinite regress.
Solution: If a thing is to be an unity, it must be not only its material parts or elements, but “also something else” (Met. Z.17, 1041b16-19). So the answer must involve the material parts or elements together with a single unifying form or principle internal to the thing.

17. Problems concerning the unity of substance
Suggestion #2: The unity of substance requires introducing a special connecting relation, in addition to the material parts and the form. If there is a difference between x (form) and y (matter), then z (some unifying formula) will be needed to connect them.
Problem: Aristotle holds that the unity of a thing is to be traced to its matter and form, and to nothing more than these.
Solution: So he must be able to say what it is about the matter and, especially, the form by themselves, such that the compound material substance that results from them is indeed a unity.
Frank Lewis argues that form and matter are neither identical nor different in quality; instead, they are two, but they are alike in the way that in general the potential and the actual and alike. For instance, if I am about to make a bronze sphere, its matter is already potentially a sphere, and the form is actually the very same thing—it is a sphere.

18. Prime matter
Prime matter is something that is receptive of the elemental contraries, hot, cold, wet, dry, as the elements, earth, air, fire, water, come to be and are destroyed in the course of their mutual transformation. The various elemental contraries are occurrent properties of prime matter, and are all accidental to it.
The traditional view: Aristotle appears committed to the concept of prime matter traditionally ascribed to him above all in GC II.1 329a24-b6, II.7 334a Foremost among the components of the traditional view of prime matter is persistence.
Prime matter by definition itself has no matter. It is not itself a compound of form and matter, so it cannot be subject to generation or destruction. On the traditional view, some portion of prime matter persists through each elemental transformation. E. Zeller (1897) sees prime matter as the eternal substratum for all change.

19. Prime matter
Revised version of the traditional view: Aristotle’s concept of prime matter does not commit him to a “featureless bearer of properties,” but to something which is a bearer of properties but has no occurrent features of its own.
Bare Substrate Theory (the traditional account)
Bundle Theory (a minority view): Various properties are compresent without the benefit of an accompanying substrate. (D. Charles 2004, D. Bostock 2006, F. Lewis 2008)

20. First essay due 9/30/ :00
第一次閱讀心得作業1000字 due 9/30/2017週六22:00 Moodle 會屆時自動關閉不再收作業因此此請準時繳交！
請你就第一至第三週課堂內容 （1）或者整理課堂筆記 （2）或者分析與討論我們在課堂提及過的論證（諸如Parmenides on the impossibility of change） （3）或者嘗試用你自己的話去說明閱讀文本的一段話（諸如闡釋Physics Book 1 Chapter 1）。 無論你採取哪一種形式，我都希望你能放進你的批判思考。