Aristotelian Powers Now

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.

Chair: Robert Northcott, Birkbeck

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.

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