Your daughter is cute to the point of being distracting but WHO CARES she is so adorable it's a treat to watch her. And we can always replay the video to get the content we missed. Helpful!
Love the information herein wholly, except the plants/vegetations also have sensation. For example, growing/moving away from other plants that are blocking/competing sunlight. Vines can chose where their next landing are on a tree. The roots also traces where water and nutrients are to grow into. To me these are the evidences they have sensations.
I actually get an exactly information from you sir. Thanks for your sharing about this I really like those examples that you use from non-locomotor and locomotor things. Your baby is really cute I really want to say HI to her she absolutely distractin my attention while watching.
That could refer to either of two things (either of which would be referred to as "separated substances"): disembodied human souls, or a separate species of purely formal creatures (e.g. angels). Thomas Aquinas treats these questions quite thoroughly in a couple of places, especially Question 89 (on separated human souls) and Question 51 (on angels' relation to bodies) of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae. I hope that helps!
Hey, Professor, you familiar with that guy: Peter Wohlleben? In his book about trees he writes about how trees communicate, etc. So, how would it change the three souls theory? Greets
I've looked vaguely into the issue, though not specifically to Wohlleben. I think it largely depends on how the "communication" is carried out, since it isn't quite a power properly speaking. Humans communicate in a rational way, animals communicate in a merely sensory and locomotive way, so perhaps plants may communicate in a merely vegetative way? I discussed this briefly in class, recorded in my lecture titled "Natural Law Background", of you're more interested. You could also always come ask in the chat of my livestreams and discuss the issue!
I have two questions, how and why would Aristotle speak about fire? I’m reading this for the first time and it seems that fire shows so many lifelike qualities and obviously isn’t alive but it’s raw energy that consumes and has a nutritive desire perhaps? The next question is what about humans that lack parts that are necessary for function? Missing eyes and sight or other sense and perception qualities or even the absence of all senses perhaps reproductive parts etc. if they cease to be human or not having a soul what would that make them? The latter may sound ignorant or ill willed but I’m only inquiring for a better understanding of the text. Apologies for any offense!
Aristotle understood fire as an inanimate substance, so it wouldn't have nutritive desires, except by rough analogy. My understanding of Aristotelian physics is relatively limited, but I believe Aristotle describes fire's 'consumption' in terms of its heat changing and in some cases corrupting/destroying the substances around it, rather than consuming like an organism. This may be due to his conceptualizing fire as a (static) substance, rather than a process or reaction (or a result thereof) as we might understand it better by modern physics. To your second series of questions, an organism missing parts would be deficient in certain ways, insofar as those parts are necessary for its biological functions. In the case of eyes, that would not be strictly essential to the organism, since the organism can continue to exist, albeit in a relatively limited capacity, without functioning vision. However, it would less fully instantiate the kind of organism that it is if it were missing characteristics/powers. That said, an organism is primarily defined by its highest powers/capacities, and so a human missing eyes is diminished qua human to a lesser degree than a brute animal would be, since sight/sensation is more definitive of what it is to be an animal than of what it is to be a rational animal. I would recommend my series on Natural Law, beginning with this one (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-FKe6UKbKIto.html), as well as my lecture on Augustine's explanation of the nature of the good of beings, which explains the different ways in which something can be deficient, and the effect that has on its being (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0f17YmXsezY.html) Thanks for the great questions!
Sorry if this is a dumb question, BUT when you said that the soul of a thing is its "formal" cause (and in humans, the body is the "material" cause), and then you said when a tree dies, it loses its "essential" form: Are they two different categorisations? Or is a formal cause the same as an essential form? Or am I missing some knowledge here?
Not a dumb question really, I should have clarified. Those are roughly equivalent terms, and I'm using them interchangeably here in this lecture. If we're to be somewhat more precise, the formal cause describes the relationship between the essential form (which is a universal, strictly speaking) and the being which instantiates it. When an organism dies, it no longer instantiates its essential form, i.e. it is no longer what it was.
Probably not, given their apparent inability to abstract from particulars and so to form novel thoughts. Communication isn't per se a mark of rationality.
Does aristotle have knowledge about bacteria or smt like that? Lol. How can u put the diffrences beetwen animals and plants? What if tomorrow we find a plant with the ability of locomotion?
As far as I know, Aristotle did not know about any microorganisms, but by his taxonomy would likely categorize them as animals due to their power of auto-locomotion. If we were to find a plant (in the modern genetic sense) that could auto-locomote, it may functionally be considered an animal. Something like a venus fly trap might be a liminal example (which, as far as I know, Aristotle had also never documented). It's a different system of categorization, which shouldn't really be a theoretical problem, aside from using the same words for different categories due to accidental historical development.
So as we can see, in modern world , it is so difficult to describe things. I think it is the reason why some philosophers say "our era is a post-truth era" ... And probably Aristotle doesnt have a knowledge of cells. I mean, both animals and plants made up by cells. There is plant cell and animal cells if u look at them in a microscope. If u look at living things in a microscope, u will see any living thing is made up by cells and atoms and smt like that. In macro world there is differences between things but in a micro world everything is the same thing, in a sense. So what am i? Which is the truth? Am i a bunch of atoms and cells? Lol
I cringed when you referred to the baby as "little animal." You should said she is a *BEING* infused with Divine Soul of God with the potential power of rational thought.
In technical philosophical terms "being" could refer to any substance created, whether a person, an animal, or inanimate object. We humans are animals, but not merely animals; we are rational animals with naturally immortal souls bearing the Image and Likeness of God. Animal in this context is not derogatory in any way, but is properly descriptive.
@@profmccoige We are not "rational animals with naturally immortal souls." We are immortal soul having naturally physical bodies. I don't know how much I can stress this for people to understand.
"Rational animal" is the relatively uncontroversial definition of a human being going back to Plato, embraced by almost every western philosopher until the Existentialist movement in the 20th Century or so. To prioritize body or soul at the expense of the other for the sake of defining who and what we are is essentially a form of the ancient heresy of "gnosticism". Rather, we are body-soul composites, each being incomplete without the other, as I outline in this video, as well as in another more directly about the subject about "hylomorphic dualism" (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-qi2qMi6IHUk.html). This is part of the reason of the classical Christian doctrine of the Resurrection, since if we are "separated substances" (i.e. disembodied souls) in Heaven, we are not our whole and complete selves until we are reunited with our bodies at the Eschaton.
Hi Konnor. Between this and your other comments, I think you're getting hung up on the connotations that come with the term "soul", mostly from later philosophers after Aristotle. With the possible exception of rational (i.e. human) souls, the soul of a living thing is strictly a naturalistic phenomenon. There's nothing "spooky" or magical about it. It is just a description of the "life" of an organism. As defined in the video already, the soul is the internal principle of motion, change, and development, present in any living thing, which differentiates it from an inanimate object. We can distinguish between different kinds of souls, i.e. vegetative, animate, and rational, by examining the powers of the soul, or perhaps we can say the innate powers of the organism, so as to avoid the problematic word "soul" entirely.
Who needs an internal principle of anything? As you said, it's naturalistic. And from a naturalistic perspective plants are just macromolecular machines that build more of themselves. Doesn't it go against ockhams razor to postulate an unnecessary and undetectable soul?
