Physics

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1. mykowebhnAug 2026
   > If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato?

   I am definitely no Plato expert, but two texts: Plato's Theaetetus and his Parmenides.

   Questions of accurate translations aside, if one can focus on the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological ideas presented and questions posed, I think one can spend the rest of one's life trying to understand these two texts. As an added incentive to whet your appetite, Wittgenstein was particularly interested in Theaetetus in his later years.

   And if I had to recommend two texts from Aristotle, definitely his Physics and his Metaphysics. Here he's dealing with the really deep, and meaty, problems of philosophy.

   These four texts definitely get me going, so to speak, although my talking about them bores my wife silly.

   [EDIT] And you didn't ask for this, but here goes anyway: the three philosophers that "get me going" and whom I think are the three greatest philosophers are Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. (I know that last one will get me a lot of hate!)

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2. hackandthinkDec 2024
   You may be interested in:

   "Aristotle's Physics: a Physicist's Look"

   My take is that it was hard to find a better theory, the usual explanation of scholastical dogmatism is to shallow.

   https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4057

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3. lo_zamoyskiDec 2023
   Two points.

   First, I might recommend the Metaphysics before the Physics. Second, I think reading the original Aristotle as a novice and alone is perhaps not the best move. I think it is best to start with a commentary or something more pedagogically suitable. Contemporary expositors like Edward Feser or David Oderberg write lucidly and approachably on the subject (see “Scholastic Metaphysics” and “Real Essentialism”).

   That never said, it takes time to understand this stuff, especially when all sorts of bad intellectual habits must be broken.

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4. agensaequivocumFeb 2019
   Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima.
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5. kwhitefootNov 2017
   I feel I must defend Aristotle. At least we would need a lot more information before we can conclude that Philoponos really knew what he was talking about. Of course he was right but for this to be effective there needs to be a theory and better experiments and that is what Galileo provided. I recommend Carlo Rovelli's essay on Aristotle's Physics: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057.pdf.
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6. rckOct 2025
   I'm not sure what motivated Parmenides because he was more of a poet than anything - it just happened that his poetry was what we would now recognize as incredibly philosophical. He didn't really argue, he just wrote down what the "goddess" told him. But I think the basic problem is that everyone back then agreed that you can't get "something from nothing," and it sure seems like change requires being to come from non-being. The statue is there now, but before it was cast there wasn't a statue, just a chunk of bronze. If being can't come from non-being, how do you account for the "coming-to-be" of the statue? The Eliatic position as I understand it is that the change is just an illusion. Plato and Aristotle both react against this position and argue that it's silly (I'm very inclined to agree). They then give alternative accounts of what change really is.

   I'm not sure about Plato, but the Aristotelian analysis is something like this: every thing that exists has the potential to exist in certain ways and not others, and it's said that the thing is "in potency" to exist in those potential ways. When something could exist in a certain way but right now doesn't, that's called a "privation." And the ways that the thing currently does exist are the "form" of the thing. So a substance changes when it goes from being in potency to being actual, and it does that by losing a privation. Aquinas follows Aristotle in giving the example: "For example, when a statue is made from bronze, the bronze which is in potency to the form of the statue is the matter; the shapeless or undisposed something is the privation; and the shape because of which it is called a statue is the form." Incidentally, Aquinas's short On the Principles of Nature (https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~DePrinNat) is a good overview of this theory, which is spread all over Aristotle (in the Categories, the Physics, and the Metaphysics).

   As far as οὐσία is concerned, I think this is the complete Greek for Parmenides's poem: http://philoctetes.free.fr/parmenidesunicode.htm. In the places where that translation uses "being" you get slightly different words like γενέσθαι (to come into a new state of being) or εἶναι (just the infinitive "to be"). And looking at the definition of οὐσία (https://lsj.gr/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CF%83%CE%AF%CE%B1) it looks like most of the uses of that term specifically come well after Parmenides.

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