Do you know where Aristotle expresses this 'direct action' as clearly as that?

It seems to me that this is one of the most difficult parts of the text to decipher.

The discussion of phantisia in DA 3 is ample evidence of that.

I take the general point from Physics regarding affecting and being affected. When looking at the movement from perception to 'intellection', the discussion becomes more difficult. Thus, all the arguments about what is an 'appearance' or an 'image' in Book 3 of De Anima. What is accepted for what it is and what is susceptible to error.

Those calculations make sense but whether Russia can really find a work around to the sanctions is the big strategic question.

I follow the general idea that time is not on Ukraine's side.

No, I am calling the event "actually sensing" and explicitly saying it is the action of the sensible object and the passion of the sense. Aristotle is quite clear in De Anima, that the sense organ changes in sensation. Being changed is undergoing passion. — Dfpolis

I agree that it takes two to tango. Aristotle, however, speaks of two concurrent activities on this matter rather than of one thing simply changing another:

The activity of the perceptible object, however, and of the perceptual capacity is one and the same (although the being for them is not the same). I mean, for example, the active sound and the active hearing. For it is possible to have hearing and not to hear, and what has a sound is not always making a sound. But when what can hear is active and what can make a sound is making a sound, then |425b30| the active hearing comes about at the same time as the active sound, and we might say that the one is an act of hearing and the other a making of a sound. — De Anima, 425b20, translated by CDC Reeve.

But this shared proximity happens within a 'goldilocks' zone.

Since, though, the activity of the perceptible object and of the perceptual part are one, although the being is not the same, it is necessary for hearing and sound that are said to be such in this [active] way to be destroyed and to be preserved together, and so also with flavor and tasting, and similarly with the others. But when these are said to be such potentially this is not necessary. The earlier physicists, however, did not speak well about this, since they thought that there was neither white nor black without seeing, nor flavor without tasting. For though in one way they spoke correctly, in another way incorrectly. For since perception and the perceptible object are spoken of in a twofold way, on the one hand as potential and on the other as active, what they said holds of the latter but not of the former. They, though, spoke in a simple way about things that are not spoken of in a simple way. But if voice is a sort of consonance, and voice and hearing are in a way one (while in another way not one and the same), and if consonance is a ratio, then hearing must also be a sort of ratio. And that is why each sort of excess, whether high or low pitch, destroys hearing, and similarly excesses in flavor destroy taste, and in colors the intensely bright and dark destroy sight, and in smell the strong odors, whether sweet or bitter, since the perceptual capacity is a sort of ratio. That is also why things—for example, the sharp, sweet, or salty—are pleasant when, being pure and unmixed, they are brought into the ratio, since they are pleasant then. And in general a mixture, |a consonance, is more pleasant than either high or low pitch, and for touch what can be [further] heated or cooled. The perceptual capacity is a ratio, and excessive things dissolve or destroy it. — ibid. 426a10

This relates to how touch is said to be the simplest form of perception. A being either touches another or not. If the encounter stops you from being what you are, that is not an act of perception any longer.

The question of the 'passive' does enter into the discussion of appearances and images but does not seem equivalent to the above discussion of 'material' near other 'material'. The use of 'ratio' (logos) in this description is an interesting observation about the natural world.

The guy was a catalyst for reconsidering Ancient Greek texts in a time where scholars were very pleased with themselves. Some bitter enemies recognize that while keeping with the hating.

I am not a good reader of a lot of the text because so much of it strikes me as a three-card monte game: Let's switch the value of this to that and move it around a bit.

I have tried to understand how Heidegger understood Nietzsche and here I am on firmer ground. Those lectures are spectacularly incorrect, turning Nietzsche's ideas into something a believer of 'Germanness' could embrace. I don't know if that is a betrayal or not, but it is difficult for me to accept that Heidegger was not aware of all those times Nietzsche pissed on his idea.

Thanks for the link to the essay.
A quarter of the way in, I see that it is a serious challenge to established scholars.
I will study more before trying to comment.

Since intelligibility is a precondition of knowledge, intelligible properties are prior to, and independent of, the act of knowing — Dfpolis

The language of 'independent' has an interesting role in your account. I agree with your approach that what can be known is a connection to our experienced world rather a visit from an alien planet. That is expressed clearly in this account (emphasis mine)"

For something is said to be a substance, as we mentioned, in three ways, as form, as matter, and as what is composed of both. And of these, the matter is potentiality, the form is actuality. And since what is composed of the two is an animate thing, the body is not the actualization of the soul, but rather the soul is the actualization of a certain sort of body. And that is why those people take things correctly who believe that the soul neither exists without a body nor is a body of some sort. For it is not a body, but it belongs to a body, and for this reason is present in a body, and in a body of such-and-such a sort, rather than as our predecessors supposed, when they inserted it into a body without first determining in which and in what sort, even though it appears that not just any random thing is receptive of any random thing. In our way of looking at it, by contrast, it comes about quite reasonably. For the actualization of each thing naturally comes about in what it already belongs to potentially, that is, the appropriate matter. That the soul, then, is a certain sort of actualization and account of what has the potentiality to be of this sort, is evident from these things. — De Anima, 414a15, translated by C.D.C. Reeve

This obviously does not fit with the Cartesian models you have criticized. But Aristotle says they do not fit with what came before him. The idea of the completely random is in a wrestling match with some kind of order.

It would be a monkey brain thing to map out what stop chattering meant. You can't be quiet and say what it is.

There are different practices that approach this in a disciplined fashion. I am no kind of guru to chatter about that.

I have seen the benefits of slowing reactions down. When one does not say the first, second, or third thing that pops into your head, you are in a different country, unsure of what surrounds you. People will recognize you are making an effort at that point.

In this thread, you haven't really indicated what it is I am saying which doesn't make sense to you. — Metaphysician Undercover

I did so here in response to:

There is nothing to indicate that the world might be eternal. and everything indicates that there is potentiality and actuality. So that possibility, that the world is eternal and there no potentiality or actuality is easily excluded as unreal. — Metaphysician Undercover

This does not make sense of much of what Aristotle has said. I am getting off the merry-go-round now. You do not recognize my efforts as efforts. I will make no more of them.

I hate this piecemeal sort of reply.
If a comment is not worth a separate effort, then it is just an idea you see amongst other ideas.
I get enough of that at work.

How about Aristotle's De Anima?

Or is that an overgrown lot filled with irreconcilable weeds?

You like to make objections against my interpretation without any real support, like pointing to what exactly is wrong with my interpretation. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is not a fair accounting. I have quoted Aristotle extensively where I think he does not support your thesis.

I did wrestle with your thesis itself more strenuously in the past but stopped when I realized that I did not understand it enough to disagree with. That is still the case.

I am no expert in the matter. It is obvious that we both have read a lot of primary text. I appreciate anyone who has made that effort. I am not making accusations but saying why your view does not make sense to me.

I am curious if you have a collection of like-minded thinkers who see the role of bodies the way you do. I have read enough secondary text to get the hang of some of the contemporary academic debate regarding these questions. Is there anybody from that world who reads Aristotle the way you do?

The small parts which are not consistent are best disregarded rather than trying to work them into the overall consistency because this would be an impossible task. — Metaphysician Undercover

We are back at the same impasse met last year. What you consider small, I find to be fundamental. It is not just about the nature of heavenly bodies. There are too many places where the eternal is interwoven with the temporal for your theory of matter to explain away.

You have divided Aristotle against himself to the point where the author's intent cannot be cobbled back together from the broken parts.

I appreciate your recognition that what you present is at odds with the text, as testimony.

I will think about your thesis under these new parameters.

I am familiar with Gendlin and his suggestions. He does a great job of showing how easy it is to misunderstand what Aristotle is saying.

But I think Reeve is more correct in this case.

In the text, the matter is immediately cast into the language of actuality and potentiality. Something causes change. Something else is changed.

In regard to perception, it is interesting that Aristotle started with the sense of touch as the most basic form of it. It is difficult to place that observation side by side with the others.

I don't think that Spinoza captures exactly what Aristotle said but agree those writings are closer than pretty much anything else before recent attempts to read him.

I read it to say that what gives a surface a color is intrinsic to what the thing is:

For what is visible is color, and it is what is on [the surface of] what is intrinsically visible—intrinsically visible not in account, but because it has within |418a30| itself the cause of its being visible. — ibid. 418a30

The transparent is a change caused from an outside activity:

And light is the activity of this, of the transparent insofar as it is transparent. But whatever this is present in, so potentially is darkness. For light is a sort of color of the transparent, when it is made actually transparent by fire or something of that sort, such as the body above. For one and the same [affection] also belongs to it. — ibid. 418b10

An account (logos) can be given for this activity, but it does not have a name (for Aristotle, at least).

On all these grounds, therefore, we may infer with confidence that there is something beyond the bodies that are about us on this earth, different and separate from them ; and that the superior glory of its nature is proportionate to its distance from this world of ours. (269b 14)

While noting that distance, it is interesting to see how some elements in the 'sublunary' sphere are active in the divine sphere:

For it is not insofar as something is water or insofar as it is air that it is visible, but because there is a certain nature in it that is the same in both of them and in the [eternal] body above. — Aristotle, De Anima, DA II 7 418b7–9, translated by C.D.C. Reeve

The primary science, by contrast, is concerned with things that are both separable and immovable. Now all causes are necessarily eternal, and these most of all. For they are the causes of the divine beings that are perceptible. — Metaphysics, 1026a10

There are some who say that chance is a cause both of this heaven and of everything that is in the ordered universe; for they say the vortex came to be by chance, and so did the motion which separated the parts and caused the present order of the universe. And this is very surprising; for they say, on the one hand, that animals and plants neither exist nor are generated by luck but that the cause is nature or intellect or some other such thing (for it is not any chance thing that is generated from a given seed, but an olive tree from this kind and a man from that kind, and on the other hand, that the heavens and the most divine of the visible objects were generated by chance, which cause is not such as any of those in the case of animals or plants. — Aristotle, Physics, 196a25, translated by HG Apostle

There is no single science that deals with what is good for all living things any more that there is single art of medicine dealing with everything that is, but a different science deals with each particular good. The argument that man is the best of all living things makes no difference. There are other things whose nature is much more divine than man's: to take the most visible example only, the constituent parts of the universe. — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 114a25, translated by Martin Ostwald

I won't repeat last year's argument concerning your interpretation of De Anima Book 1. I will just leave this discussion by observing that it does not fit with Aristotle's view of Astronomy:

For the nature of the stars is eternal, because it is a certain sort of substance, and the mover is eternal and prior to the moved, and what is prior to a substance must be a substance. It is evident, accordingly, that there must be this number of substances that are in their nature eternal and intrinsically immovable, and without magnitude (due to the cause mentioned earlier). It is evident, then, that the movers are substances, and that one of these is first and another second, in accord with the same order as the spatial movements of the stars. But when we come to the number of these spatial movements, we must investigate it on the basis of the mathematical science that is most akin to philosophy, namely, astronomy. For it is about substance that is perceptible but eternal that this produces its theoretical knowledge, whereas the others are not concerned with any substance at all—for example, the one concerned with numbers and geometry.
— Metaphysics 1073a30, translated by C.D.C Reeve

You said:

There are no unnatural, or divine bodies, nothing in the universe is moving in an eternal circular motion, because all has been generated and will be destroyed, consisting of natural bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover

I quoted from Metaphysics, Book Epsilon:

The primary science, by contrast, is concerned with things that are both separable and immovable. Now all causes are necessarily eternal, and these most of all. For they are the causes of the divine beings that are perceptible.
— Metaphysics, 1026a10 — Paine

Your thesis of a mortal Kosmos is so sharply different from Aristotle's' account of different kinds of ousia (substances) that the contradiction itself requires an explanation.

Is it an esotericism designed to avoid persecution of the sort Socrates suffered? A kind of schizophrenia where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing?

I was not arguing that individuals were only what could be marked out as their kind.

Aristotle refers to different kinds of ousia. You said that there was a division between kinds that was a critical departure from the holistic view Aristotle seems to aspire to.

By the way, I will not respond to group replies from now on. If what I say is worth an effort, then it should be treated as such. if it should be blown off, just ignore it.

From this we can say that Aristotle has demonstrated that the entire universe is composed of natural bodies, and is itself a natural body. There are no unnatural, or divine bodies, nothing in the universe is moving in an eternal circular motion, because all has been generated and will be destroyed, consisting of natural bodies. — Metaphysician Undercover

This separation of what is natural from what is divine runs counter to the way ousia is presented as different in kind but all connected to the same ultimate cause and the reason we can speak of 'being as being'. Your statement does explain why you reject Metaphysics Book Lambda and the immortality of the active intellect in De Anima, Book 3.

It does, however, put you in the position of explaining away discussions of ousia where the difference in kind is focused upon. For example, Metaphysics Book Epsilon:

The primary science, by contrast, is concerned with things that are both separable and immovable. Now all causes are necessarily eternal, and these most of all. For they are the causes of the divine beings that are perceptible. — Metaphysics, 1026a10

Your thesis has Aristotle saying a lot of things that don't mean what they seem to mean.

What 'bodily substance' he talking about? Endocrines? — Wayfarer

For the nature of the stars is eternal, because it is a certain sort of substance, and the mover is eternal and prior to the moved, and what is prior to a substance must be a substance. It is evident, accordingly, that there must be this number of substances that are in their nature eternal and intrinsically immovable, and without magnitude (due to the cause mentioned earlier). It is evident, then, that the movers are substances, and that one of these is first and another second, in accord with the same order as the spatial movements of the stars. But when we come to the number of these spatial movements, we must investigate it on the basis of the mathematical science that is most akin to philosophy, namely, astronomy. For it is about substance that is perceptible but eternal that this produces its theoretical knowledge, whereas the others are not concerned with any substance at all—for example, the one concerned with numbers and geometry. — Metaphysics 1073a30, translated by C.D.C Reeve

I need to think about this matter of giving accounts of the arche between Aristotle and Plato.
I will reply on your thread.

How does that 'suggestion' square against Aristotle using the word without that limitation??
How does that change what is said in Reeve's translation given above?

If you are interested in the Greek, the passage I quoted is here. The English translation is given by selecting that on the upper right-hand side of that page. I think Reeve's is better but the difference does not matter regarding the use of ousia that you refer to.

Aristotle used ousia in numerous places regarding the 'immaterial',if you are suggesting they were always connected with matter.
I don't like Reeve for some expressions, but he is extremely consistent. He never translates dunamis as 'activity' or subtance (ousia)

I am using Reeve's translation for convenience. Present one you like better.
Or is your beef with Aristotle?

The idea that we have the same chemistry as stars is astonishing. The telescopes keep pushing the border of the 'sublunary' sphere further away. The disagreement between Glaucon and Socrates underscores how the view of what is 'immaterial' is not self-explanatory but is always a part of looking for explanations that reflect better than others. If the idea of the 'immaterial' has a job, the 'eternal' has one too. I read Aristotle to be unhappy with the divide between Glaucon and Socrates. The following supports that view:

If there is something that is capable of moving things or acting on them, but that is not actively doing so, there will not [necessarily] be movement, since it is possible for what has a capacity not to activate it. There is no benefit, therefore, in positing eternal substances, as those who accept the Forms do, unless there is to be present in them some starting-point that is capable of causing change. Moreover, even this is not enough, and neither is another substance beyond the Forms. For if it will not be active, there will not be movement. Further, even if it will be active, it is not enough, if the substance of it is a capacity. For then there will not be eternal movement, since what is potentially may possibly not be. There must, therefore, be such a starting-point, the very substance of which is activity. Further, accordingly, these substances must be without matter. For they must be eternal, if indeed anything else is eternal. Therefore they must be activity. — Metaphysics, 1071b12–22, translated by C.D.C Reeve

Saying: "if indeed anything else is eternal" puts the explanations into a hierarchy.

Aristotle's astronomy tried to account for how beings found within the 'sublunary sphere' had anything to do with those observed outside of it. Now that we understand that they are not different kinds of beings, the view of all beings belonging to a single cosmos is strengthened by our increase in knowledge.

Anyway, carry on. — Wayfarer

Message received.

I take Sachs' and Kahn's point regarding how the use of 'substance' is misunderstood as a translation of einai and ousia. It is not germane to the distinction Aristotle is making in the text I quoted. Aristotle does not have Russell's problem about whether universals are real. Aristotle is saying that they are so real that we are tempted to think they explain what they do not.

Aristotle's objection to 'universals' understood as causes is its own objection to 'reification'. We encounter a world of beings and figure we have it all figured out by classifying those items properly. We have to classify and place things into relationships. We also have to find a way to find its limits while wondering what the heck is going on.

But the salient point of the dispute is, is each individual an instance of a unique form? I say not, that the form 'man' is common to all men, that is why it is a universal. — Wayfarer

Qualities and parts all men share as attributes do not show us the cause of why we share them. That is how I read the text I quoted. Do you see another way to understand those words?

It is clear that there must be a relationship between the "particular formation" of individuals and the way they can be recognized as members of a species. Otherwise, there would be no species or kinds. How to understand that is a major hot potato in Aristotelian scholarship. But we don't have to get that deep into the pool to see that Aristotle objects to the language of participating in Forms because it starts with a general attribute and circles backs to itself:

" Of which, then, will it be the substance? For it is either the substance of none or of all. And it cannot be the substance of all."

I don't think that's what 'form' means. Socrates truly is the form 'man' but the form 'man' is common to all men. Likewise for forms generally. — Wayfarer

What we can determine is common to a species is not seeing what makes a substance become and maintain its being. As quoted before:

But the universal too seems to some people to be most of all a cause, and the universal most of all a starting-point. So let us turn to that too. For it seems impossible for any of the things said [of something] universally to be substance. For first the substance of each thing is special to it, in that it does not belong to anything else. A universal, by contrast, is something common, since that thing is said to be a universal which naturally belongs to many things. Of which, then, will it be the substance? For it is either the substance of none or of all. And it cannot be the substance of all. — Metaphysics, 1038b9, translated by CDC Reeve

To look for causes of substances composed of matter and form cannot be done by simply identifying components. Whatever is bringing them into existence, and maintaining them while they do, is a principle beyond those components:

But in fact, as has been said, the ultimate matter and the shape are one and the same, the one potentially, the other actively, so that it is the same to look for what is the cause of oneness or what is the cause of being one.946 For each thing is a one, and what potentially is and what actively is are in a way one. And so there is no other cause here, unless there is something that brought about the movement from potentiality to activity. Things that have no matter, though, are all unconditionally just what is a one. — Metaphysics,1045b20, translated by CDC Reeve

This unity is not what is meant by a universal that can be named. In so far as we can talk about substance that makes each unique. The need for analogy points to a limit of our experience:

What we wish to say is clear from the particular cases by induction, and we must not look for a definition of everything, but be able to comprehend the analogy, namely, that as what is building is in relation to what is capable of building, and what is awake is in relation to what is asleep, and what is seeing is in relation to what has its eyes closed but has sight, and what has been shaped out of the matter is in relation to the matter, and what has been finished off is to the unfinished. Of the difference exemplified in this analogy let the activity be marked off by the first part, the potentiality by the second. — ibid. Θ 6 1048a35–b6

We have been given some ratios to work with but are far from seeing how it works in individuals.

I think that distinction works in the absolute terms of the De Anima, 408b passage.

I read the focus on the actual compared to the potential in other contexts to point to a continuity of life despite the intermittent nature of some activities. To say "what is awake is in relation to what is asleep, and what is seeing is in relation to what has its eyes closed but has sight" is to look for a basis of continuity based upon something like the soul that keeps you alive through both phases.

Thanks, the materials you provide are very informative. I wonder if in the above passage, 'mind' is the translation of 'nous'? — Wayfarer

It is. A lot of Aristotle's language is hard to decipher. Not this stuff.

And again, even if Aristotle is not discussing the immortality of the soul, it is easy to see how this would appear to be so for the medieval commentators, Islamic and Christian — Wayfarer

The status of this Easy is a matter of much dispute. We and many others have argued about this on many threads. What is a preservation of an idea versus a distortion of it.? Does the new use of words cancel the old?

(I'm very interested in the medieval conception of the rational soul, which seems very much aligned with these types of ideas.) — Wayfarer

I read Aristotle as a challenge to the idea of the person that many of the medieval conceptions of the rational soul are based upon. Perhaps this deserves its own OP.

The active intellect in a living person is not a separate 'faculty' in the sense of a capacity that can be set side by side with another faculty of the intellect. What we experience as thinking cannot happen without the perishable and "passive" power to remember what is thought. We cannot observe the active principle as it is as itself. If we speak of active and passive powers, we need the structure of a soul (what makes living things live) to approach what the meeting of form and matter might entail for living things.

It is not as simple as shaping a stone into a statue. Living things are not like shaping things once and you are done. They require a continuous process that cannot stop and start when it gets tired. That is why Aristotle distinguishes between changes like making a house out of stuff from the act of seeing, which is an activity that involves a potential you are born with.

How to view this 'continuous process' is not brought up in the question of surviving death (as discussed in the Phaedo) but to explain the cessation of life. The 'continuous process' either stops because the active principle stopped or because of some defect in the perishable component. That is why I brought up this text when we discussed this last year:

The case of the mind is different; it seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. If it could be destroyed at all, it would be under the blunting influence of old age. What really happens in respect of mind in old age is, however, exactly parallel to what happens in the case of the sense organs; if the old man could recover the proper kind of eye, he would see just as well as the young man. The incapacity of old age is due to an affection not of the soul but of its vehicle, as occurs in drunkenness or disease. Thus it is that in old age the activity of mind or intellectual apprehension declines only through the decay of some other inward part; mind itself is impassible. Thinking, loving, and hating are affections not of mind but of that which has mind, in so far as it has it. That is why, when the vehicle decays, memory and love cease; they were activities not of mind, but of the composite which has perished; mind is, no doubt, something more divine and impassable. That the soul cannot be moved is therefore clear from what we have said, and if it cannot be moved at all, manifestly it cannot be moved by itself.
— De Anima, 408b, 18, translated by J. A. Smith

That idea is going to have a hard time getting past what I just quoted upthread:

Since, then, they cannot share in the everlasting and divine by continuous existence, because no perishable thing can persist numerically one and the same, they share in them in so far as each can, some more and some less; and what persists is not the thing itself but something like itself, not one in number but one in species.

So, less a matter of 'absorption' and more like swallowing a balloon filled with cocaine to get it through customs.

Thank you. He still is kicking my ass.

I did not bring him up as a rebuttal to any thesis here but only to note that Aristotle is not keeping the peas from touching the meat the way Kant likes his supper.

I never canceled the agent intellect. I recognize the agent intellect as an extremely important concept. I just understand it in a way different from you. And that's not at all surprising because the proper way to understand the agent intellect has always been a matter of debate. — Metaphysician Undercover

What became difficult for me to understand then and since then is:

As we proceed through Bk2 and 3, an explanation is provided. This is the actual/potential division. The way that the soul moves the body is by means of the powers, which are potentials. The potentials are not naturally active, they need to be actualized. So I do not think it is the case that we consider one to be a part of the other, but they exist in this relationship which is the active/potential relationship of hylomorphism, matter/form. — Metaphysician Underground

You seem to be putting the active principle outside of the combining of matter and form. The potentiality is somehow existing independently of what turns them on. This proposed separation runs afoul of how actuality and potentiality is used by Aristotle. As far as I can make out, you have nested one hylomorphism into another. The problem of the Third Man gets doubled and we are now up to Six of them. The antidote is to consider what Aristotle says is not potentiality and actuality:

What we wish to say is clear from the particular cases by induction, and we must not look for a definition of everything, but be able to comprehend the analogy, namely, that as what is building is in relation to what is capable of building, and what is awake is in relation to what is asleep, and what is seeing is in relation to what has its eyes closed but has sight, and what has been shaped out of the matter is in relation to the matter, and what has been finished off is to the unfinished. Of the difference exemplified in this analogy let the activity be marked off by the first part, the potentiality by the second. — ibid. Θ 6 1048a35–b6

If we could say exactly what this element is in each case, we would.

There are only potential powers when there are actual ones nearby.

All the instances where the analogy does a job involve situations where the potential is sometimes not activated. This condition does not apply to as quoted above: "Things that have no matter, though, are all unconditionally just what is a one."

This permits Aristotle to speak of an active principle that is immortal to directly activate what is not one:

In separation it is just what it is, and this alone is immortal and eternal. (But we do not remember because this is unaffected, whereas the passive intellect is perishable, and without this nothing thinks. — Aristotle, De Anima, 430a18, translated by DW Hamlyn