“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Aristotle with a Twist

Sounds like a nice cocktail. I'm looking forward to reading the printed version of Graham's talk. For some reason I was thinking today about my favorite guy of the Arabic Aristotelian world, al-Kindi.

How do you get to invent rubbing alcohol 1000 years ago? You give a shit about the phenomenal world, this one, because the essence of this envelope I'm holding just is this envelope's physical form. It's not some idea in a beyond.

If you strip final causes and prime movers out of Aristotle, you end up with something quite like OOO.



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