Midterm Exam Questions—PHL 350, Group Study Notes

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1) In light of some of the ecclesiastical (and other) documents we considered to begin the
semester, discuss the notion of philosophy as a humane engagement with questions of
perennial concern.

● Philosophy is a balanced approach to the study of these questions of perennial concern.

○ Avoids extremes of fideism (faith only) and scientism (reason only), as well as
emotional irrationalism, idealism, or ideology that humans are prone to.
○ Without good philosophy the world becomes unreasonable, even as it purports to
be scientific.
■ Evidenced by “party of science” believing that babies aren’t people and
that men can be women.
● Philosophy as a broader way to know and understand than simply dependence upon the
hard sciences and the scientific method, which are not able to provide answers to all of
our questions.
● Philosophy meant to help marry the truth found in both science and religion, for truth is
never opposed to itself.
● So philosophy seeks to balance our knowledge and experiences, revelation and discovery,
helping us to become more fully aware of who we are and how we should live,
developing a sufficient cosmography (picture of how things are, e.g. man, God, and the
world.
○ A human centric, humane approach.

Fides et Ratio - JPII (9/14/1998)

● Perennial questions:
○ Who am I?
○ Where have I come from and where am I going?
○ Why is there evil?
○ What is there after this life?
● Answers given to these particular questions decides the direction which people seek to
give to their lives.
● A greater knowledge of truth leads lives to be ever more human.
● Intro. Section 3
 ○ Philosophy at its best is a humanistic pursuit of wanting to understand how things
are and why things are within the context of human life.
■ Helps us to dive deep on the meaning of life.
○ “Philosophy, which is directly concerned with asking the questions of life’s
meaning and sketching an answer to it.”
■ We must learn how to ask certain types of (lively) questions and grapple
with them.
■ Doing philosophy is about learning how to make intellectual distinctions
(key distinctions)
● Be willing to ask a question and consider its implications
● Continued process of defining and sketching answers (unlike the
sciences, which all have an end)
● Intro. Section 4
○ Without wonder, men and women would lapse into deadening routine and little by
little would become incapable of a life which is genuinely personal.
○ Must stray away from “philosophical pride” - always take a holistic approach and
be willing to refine & question anything/everything.
● Intro. Section 5
○ Philosophy is a way to come to know fundamental truths about human life.
○ The Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper
understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those
who do not yet know it.
○ Unfortunately, today, many people deny truth its exclusive character and assume
truth can reveal itself equally in different doctrines, even if they contradict one
another.
■ People rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking
to ask questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human,
personal and social existence.
● Intro. Section 6
○ Philosophy has the great responsibility of forming thought and culture.

Optatam Totius - Pope Paul VI (10/28/1965)

● Section 15 (talking about ecclesiastical studies)
○ Solid & coherent knowledge of man, the world, and of God.
○ Give priority to the question.
○ Philosophy & the questions of life.
○ Work toward correctly understanding the characteristics of the contemporary
mind.
○ Honest recognition of limits of human knowledge.
 ○ Detect the roots of errors and refute them.
2) Discuss the broad paradigm shift between, as Collingwood frames it, the ancient (or
classical) and Renaissance approaches to nature, with a particular focus on the respective
periods’ leading analogies for understanding the natural.

Ancient/Classical (~ 6th-2nd century BC) view of nature:

- Permeated by mind
- Inherently ordered and intelligible
- Animated by unifying principle
- Universe -- Man : Macrocosm -- Microcosm
- Macrocosm is permeated by mind/intelligence (nous)
- Microcosm of man is body & soul
- The mind belongs essentially to the body and lives with it in the closest
union.
- Nature as an intelligent organism
- Everything interrelated and cyclical
- Internally ordered (inherent from within)
- Focuses on metaphysics.

Renaissance (~16th century) view of nature:

- No longer need the working idea of nature as an organism, or the cosmos as an
intelligibility.
- Machine with order imposed from without (by God) [e.g. watchmaker, auto maker] -
Extrinsic laws and forces: extrinsically ordered by deity
- Nature a closed system. Designed a certain way and static.
- A reflection of the creator
- Moved away from inherent order… now order is imposed (from on high) -
Look to the designer/blueprint of the machine to see the thing for what it is -
Existence of nature is contingent upon a maker
- Only intelligible when considered as something produced
- E.g. Flowers are not intelligible in themselves, but only when considered as
created things.
- Descartes Substance Dualism: Soul is an immaterial substance rather than an immaterial
principle of a substance.
- Focuses on metaphysics.

3) Discuss the predominance of history in modern approaches to nature and the

(evolutionary) sciences. Strive to illuminate this dynamic by appeal to cultural
examples.
17th Century - Early Modern Period
18th Century - Modern Period
As history became a science, so nature began being studied like history
- Progress, change, development, is key
- Not static and cyclical, but developing and linear
- Evolution a central idea
- No fixed repertory of kinds
- Spontaneous generation, mutation
- Natural selection gives appearance of design
- With emphasis on evolution (things are always changing)
- Adam Smith - Invisible Hand (laissez-faire)
- Dismisses metaphysics.
- Examples in modernity:
- Progressivism: Gender issues, abortion, marriage, religion, radical
autonomy and self-determination
- Artificial Intelligence
- Reshaping and rebuilding culture and society by tearing down old
institutions
- Idea that we can keep progressing, becoming what we want to be
and “more” than we currently are

4) Offer an outline of Thales’ approach to the question “What is nature?”

For Thales, “what is nature?” = What is the basic element/constituent from which things are
made/composed?
Talk about the reason he thought it was water to expand on this point.
● Water = Universal Substance
○ Moisture needed for vitality
○ Sexual Reproduction
○ Nature as an organism - ensouled (Microcosm/Macrocosm)
○ Earth as Alive & Floating on water, needing its steady regeneration
This question develops:
a. It can’t just be this one kind of element or constituent (water) because what
about the other types of things. That works for things that are like that so to speak
but what about the diversity.
b. There’s a shift of air or vapor that gets mystified like the Ionians we’re trying
to get at.
5) Summarize later Ionian attempts to understand nature, with a particular eye to how
their approaches developed in regard to the diversity of the natural order.

Nice Summarizing video from Thales to Anaximander to Anaximenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKhNX62JHRs

Anaximander -- Mid 6th cent BC

- Earth as solid cylinder floating in free/undifferentiated stuff. (Apeiron) -
Boundless: infinite spatially and temporally, imperishable, etc.
- “God” as immanent (intrinsic) to creation
Anaximenes -- Late 4th cent BC
- Flat Earth approach, like Thales
- But didn’t sit on H2O - instead upon a medium (air/vapour) supported by its
density
- Primitive substance vapour/air is Divine
- This accounts for the differentiation b/w natural substances
- Vapour → Fire = Rarefaction
- Vapour → Wind, Cloud, Water, Earth, Stone = Condensation

For both, there’s an acknowledgment that the fundamental principle thing cannot be a specific
element, due to the problem of opposites. It has to be something more general, not more like one
thing than another, so that it can become anything.

6) Discuss the Pythagorean shift away from concern with, first and foremost, the
fundamental matter of the universe toward a focus on its formal characteristics.

● Pythagoreans - community/movement w/ common life that was religious, philosophical

& scientific.
● Breakthrough Point of Ionians: If Primary Matter is that from which all things are
made, it can’t be anymore like one thing than another.
● **KEY SHIFT** Geometrical Structure: Differentiating and yielding qualitative
differences/distinctions (rather than just the material that constitutes them) Notion of “the
one and the many”
○ Clarifying a criterion for primary matter → moving us away from specifying the
primary matter → the shape/formal arrangement of it matters more.
● Experimental approach: Acoustics
○ Diff. musical notes are marked by rates of vibration but not by material on which
they are played
○ If musical instrument is (roughly) rhythmical complex of geometrical shapes, why
 not a magnet or a worm?
○ Doesn’t matter so much what world is made of; what matters more is the patterns
& changes of patterns that primitive matter (whatever it is) undergoes.
● Breakthrough Point of Pythagoreans: Shift away from explaining things by appeal to
their matter/substance and toward doing so by appeal to their structure/form which was
mathematically representable. (Idealism as opposed to materialism).
● Pythagorean Lead: Form is what makes things be what they are & behave as they do. ○
Plurality of forms → (Mathematical Form): Hierarchy of forms/structures, infinite in
variety: circle, triangle, sphere, pyramid, box, etc.
■ Can account for innumerable differentiation.
■ Constitutes the intelligible world (things don’t have imperfections)
→ contrasted with → perceptible world (subject to change,
decay/corruption - passes away; imperfections)
■ What we perceive in the world has imperfections. Tangible reality
resembles but unable to mimic the intelligible world.
■ In Theoretical realm, the trapezoid cannot be smashed by a sledge hammer

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7) Offer an outline of Plato’s approach to the forms, giving particular attention to the
Pythagorean character of his outlook.

Pythagoreans had the idea that the mathematical forms they discovered as the differentiating
principle of things were perfect or ideal.
- Intelligible world/order, which is real and ideal -- comprised of the plurality of forms

Plato agrees with the Pythagoreans on this, but differs in that he finds the perceptible world to be
imperfect/corrupt/unreal/deceptive. That is, the perfect, ideal forms are not found in the
perceptible world, but they do exist in the Intelligible world.
- Form as transcendent -- wholly other
- Form is not immanent in things (contrasts with Aristotle)
- Immanent - form is in the thing (Pythagoreans)
- Transcendent - The thing is a representation of the true form (Plato)
- Things don’t actually participate in the forms, but only have a tendency toward
participation in them
- Real/intelligible world not physical at all
- Sense perception only engages the physical world
- Extends idea of forms beyond the mathematical to the moral, and finds the moral forms
to be the realest of all.
- Plato is an Idealist - sense perception JUST IS the means we have for thinking
about/engaging the (changing) physical world. - Not just deficient way that could be
improved on.
Plato’s Cosmology (Timaeus):
● World as in process of becoming - need for a creator
● Why would “god” create?
○ Diffusive goodness
■ It overflows and isn’t self contained. Lends itself to being shared.

8) Give an overview of the various senses of ‘nature’ (φύσις) that Aristotle considers,
giving particular attention to what he thinks ought to be the primary sense or analogate of
notion.

Senses/meaning of nature:

1. Origin/birth of something Marginal and doesn’t satisfy Aristotle

2. Seed Marginal and doesn’t satisfy Aristotle
3. Source of movement/change in natural objects (this is the ordinary Greek usage of the
term) More central to Aristotle
 a. Includes animals, but also non-living things like rocks and fire
4. Primitive matter from which things are made (Ionian understanding) More central to
Aristotle
5. Essence/form of natural things (also a standard Greek usage) More central to Aristotle a.
Risk of vagueness and circularity (Nature of something is its essence, essence of
something is its nature)
6. Essence/form in general More central to Aristotle
7. Essence/form of things with principle of movement within themselves (Primary sense
according to Aristotle) Aristotle zero’s in on this
a. So Aristotle thinks that in its primary sense, the term “nature” should refer to that
essence or form of things that have a principle of growth, organization, and
movement (change or growth) in themselves (this is fundamental to Aristotelian Approach) .
***Aristotle: Nature as world of self-moving things
● Nature involves processes, growth, change
● Eternal Repertory of kinds/types of things that undergo processes, growth &
change.
○ Predicated on fixed types, rather than evolutionary history
○ Catalog of fixed hierarchy of things making up the world but self-moving
○ Manifested cyclically
● Change involving determinate tendency in various kinds of things (Nisus) ●
Possible/Actual - Act/Potency; Matter/Form - Binary examples to highlight
notions.
● Idea of self-movement/principle of their own activity
● Efficient causes outside the Nature of things b/c it’s superfluous
○ These things do what they do in themselves and doesn’t require going to a
higher order (transcendence)
● Aristotle’s God:
○ One single unmoved mover w/ self-contained activity which is
self-knowledge - thinking the forms which are the categories of its own
thought
○ God is perfect in Himself
○ Self-containment: God doesn’t know/love the world or have
plans/intentions for it
○ The world “loves” God
○ Hierarchy of beings/ends
○ Prime mover is pure self-thought
■ Primum Mobile, outermost sphere of the heavens is actuated by
“love” for God; tendency toward the prime mover
■ Planetary motion b/c imitation of God’s activity, movement or
 draw toward it
■ Matter: indeterminate → lacks quality, quantity, & other particular
attributes
● Vanishing point at the end of nature
● Negative aspect of potentiality
● Unrealizedness of unrealized potentiality
● Never get pure matter, but matter en route to organization
○ Chick moving toward henhood
■ **Unrealized potential is matter
● Helps account for change

9) Discuss how one might, in a (neo-)Aristotelian vein, conceive of nature both in the sense
of the inner dimension of substances and also in the sense of the world or cosmic whole. In
regard to the former, discuss the primacy of form and how it pertains to the “agency” and
end (or finality) of substances.

Nature: 2 senses

- Nature as cosmos -- aggregate (mother nature)

- World of individual natures that don’t depend on us for their existence and whose
source of activity is internal.

- Inner dimension: Form -- what it is; the thing as such

- Intelligible
- Ordering/specifying principle. Provides:
- The thing’s characteristic activities/powers: agency
- E.g. Horsehood/horsiness
- What it is meant to become/how it is fully realized: end/terminus
- E.g. a fully mature horse
- Applies to all natural objects, which Aristotle sees as having a principal of
movement/development in themselves
- Does not preclude deviations in specific instances
- E.g. Man with peg-leg is still a man

10) Treat the matter/form dichotomy from a (neo-) Aristotelian perspective. Give
particular attention to form as a specifying or ordering principle and the way in which a
notion like prime or proto matter becomes theoretically interesting or useful.
(Substantial) Form/Nature -- the kind of thing that something is (general).
- The actualizing/vivifying principle.
Matter/material -- what makes a thing a specific/individual instance of a general kind.
- The principle of potentiality.
- Prime/Proto Matter: pure potentiality
- Answer to question: what is the fundamental substance?
- Underneath every material thing is this basic matter which is always
changing and has limitless potential for change and restructuring.
- The thing we see is this proto matter in-formed, signate (signed), or
quantified into some specific object/thing.

- Substances (specific instances) are a composite of form and matter

- Substantial form + matter with extension (informed/signed/quantified matter) -
Horse → horse carcass:
- Matter goes from being “signed” as a horse or having the specific
extension of that horse, to being signed as or having the extension of a
carcass. The matter’s extension changes, but it had the potentiality of
taking on that new extension the whole time.
- The matter is that dimension within the composite being of the horse
which gives the horse its potential for becoming a dead horse. (The form is
that dimension which cannot be anything other than “horse” and which no
longer exists in the horse carcass.)