The Paradox of Prime Matter DANIEL W. GRAHAM TRADITIONAL INTERPRETATIONS OF Aristotle hold that he posited the existence of prime matter–a purely indeterminate substratum underlying all material composition and providing the ultimate potentiality for all material existence. A number of revisionary interpretations have appeared in the last thirty years which deny that Aristotle had a concept of prime matter, provoking an even larger number of vigorous defenses claiming that he did have the concept? The traditionalists are clearly in the (...) majority, but some obstacles stand in the way of a general acceptance of prime matter as an Aristotelian concept. In a recent contribution to the debate, William Charlton, an opponent of prime matter, has pointed out that the opposing parties have reached a stalemate in large measure because most of the relevant texts are ambiguous; consequently, "the question whether or not Aristotle believed in prime matter really comes down to the question how far, if at all, it is demanded by his philosophy as a whole. "{\textasciitilde} It seems to me that Charlton is right to shift the focus of the debate from questions of textual exegesis to questions of systematic relevance. However, within the context of Aristotle’s general theory of change, the challenge implicit in his statement can be met, for the concept of prime matter and its associated doctrine is the product of a series of ontological and scientific i Friedrich Solmsen, "Aristotle and Prime Matter," Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (a958): 243-52 and A. R. Lacey,"The Eleatics and Aristotle on Some Problems of Change," ibid. 26 (1965): 451-68; reply to H. R. King’s argument against prime matter, "Aristotle Without Prime Matter," ibid. 17 (1956): 37o-89; H. M. Robinson, "Prime Matter in Aristotle," Phronesis 19 (1974): 168-88 and C. J. F. Williams, Aristotle De Generatione et Corrpuptione, Oxford (1982), Appendix reply to an appendix rejecting prime matter in W. Charlton’s Aristotle’s Physics Books I-H (Oxford, 197o). See also Alan Code, "The Persistence of Aristotelian Matter," Philosophical Studies 29 0976): 357-67, who defends the traditional interpretation of matter against Barrington Jones, "Aristotle’s Introduction of Matter," Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 474-5{\textasciitilde} See also Russell M. Dancy, "Aristotle’s Second Thoughts on Substance," Philosophical Review 87 (1978): 372-413 9 William Charlton, "Prime Matter: A Rejoinder," Phronesis 28 (1983): a97-2a a, 197. 475 476 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY {\textasciitilde}5:4 OCT 1987 commitments made by Aristotle. At the same time, opponents of prime matter have a legitimate basis for criticizing the tradition, for there is something fundamentally wrong with the doctrine. Given Aristotle’s assumptions and commitments, the doctrine of prime matter is not only dialectically inevitable but also systematically incoherent. In this paper I shall not defend the existence of a doctrine of prime matter in Aristotle’s philosophy, although my argument will provide an incidental justification for it by exhibiting its function within Aristotle’s system. My aim here is to explain what is wrong with the doctrine of prime matter. (1) I shall examine a problem concerning prime matter–a problem of which Aristotle was aware and which he thought he had solved. (2) I shall argue that he did not solve the problem, for the doctrine of prime matter entails a paradox for his system. (3) I shall reply to some objections, and (4) I shall offer a tentative diagnosis of how Aristotle could have come to embrace a paradoxical position. 1. According to Aristotle’s theory of change, there is a substratum which underlies every change (Ph. 1.7.19oa33ff). When a thing changes its features, we call that accidental change and identify the substratum as substance. When a thing comes into being or ceases to be, we call that substantial change3 and identify the substratum as matter.4 The most simple bodies of the Aristotelian cosmos are the four traditional "elements": earth, air, fire, and water.5The elements are characterized by the contrary powers hot, cold, wet, and dry. Each element has one member of the contrary pair hot-cold, and one of the contrary pair wet-dry (Gen. Corr. 2.2-3). For Aristotle, it is... (shrink)

This article is part of a For-Discussion-Section of Methods of Information in Medicine about the paper "Biomedical Informatics: We Are What We Publish", written by Peter L. Elkin, Steven H. Brown, and Graham Wright. It is introduced by an editorial. This article contains the combined commentaries invited to independently comment on the Elkin et al. paper. In subsequent issues the discussion can continue through letters to the editor.

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank (...) Yates and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.

Early in his 1993 book Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek asks contemporary philosophy to “repeat the Kantian gesture.” The implication is that (much like Plato did with the Sophists) Kant accepted the critique of metaphysics made by David Hume, affirming it in an unexpected positive sense. The analogous gesture for a would-be Kant in our time would be to accept deconstruction’s insistence on the contingency of meaning while treating contingency not as a failing, but as the very stuff of (...) truth itself. For Žižek this is precisely what Jacques Lacan has already done, and this makes Lacan the pivotal thinker of our era. Yet as we follow Žižek’s pursuit of this theme in his recent article “The Parallax of Ontology” (an extract from his book Sex and the Failed Absolute), we catch sight of a new direction in Žižek’s thinking. His previous model of parallax in terms of two separate and irreconcilable realities seems to shift toward a new emphasis on the differential becoming of the two, rather than their paradoxical co-existence. (shrink)

Rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence are leading to an increasing human reliance on machine decision making. Even in collaborative efforts with Decision Support Systems (DSSs), where a human expert is expected to make the final decisions, it can be hard to keep the expert actively involved throughout the decision process. DSSs suggest their own solutions and thus invite passive decision making. To keep humans actively ‘on’ the decision-making loop and counter overreliance on machines, we propose a ‘reflection machine’ (RM). This (...) system asks users questions about their decision strategy and thereby prompts them to evaluate their own decisions critically. We discuss what forms RMs can take and present a proof-of-concept implementation of a RM that can produce feedback on users’ decisions in the medical and law domains. We show that the prototype requires very little domain knowledge to create reasonably intelligent critiquing questions. With this prototype, we demonstrate the technical feasibility to develop RMs and hope to pave the way for future research into their effectiveness and value. (shrink)

Originally published in 1967 Medieval Minds looks at the Middle Ages as a period with changing attitudes towards mental health and its treatment. The book argues that it was a period that that bridged the ancient with the modern, ignorance with knowledge and superstition with science. The Middle Ages spanned almost a millennium in the history of the humanities and provided the people of this period with the benefit of this knowledge. The book looks at the promise and progress which (...) was reflected by thinkers such as Augustin and Aurelianus, Alexander of Tralles and Paul of Aegina. The book also looks at martyrs like Valentine and Dympna, and the patrons of those afflicted with illnesses such as epilepsy and insanity. Written by the psychologist Thomas Francis Graham, this book provides a distinct and unique insight into the mind of those living in the medieval period and will be of interest to academics of history and literature alike. (shrink)

`Folk Psychology' - our everyday talk of beliefs, desires and mental events - has long been compared with the technical language of `Cognitive Science'. Does folk psychology provide a correct account of the mental causes of our behaviour, or must our everyday terms ultimately be replaced by a language developed from computational models and neurobiology? This broad-ranging book addresses these questions, which lie at the heart of psychology and philosophy. Providing a critical overview of the key literature in the field, (...) including the seminal work of Fodor and Churchland, the author explores the classic `Frame Problem' and assesses the future prospects of cognitive science. The scope of the frame problem, touching on connec. (shrink)

A new English translation of Schelling’s unfinished magnum opus, complete with a contextualizing introduction by the translator.

Explaining the Cosmos is a major reinterpretation of Greek scientific thought before Socrates. Focusing on the scientific tradition of philosophy, Daniel Graham argues that Presocratic philosophy is not a mere patchwork of different schools and styles of thought. Rather, there is a discernible and unified Ionian tradition that dominates Presocratic debates. Graham rejects the common interpretation of the early Ionians as "material monists" and also the view of the later Ionians as desperately trying to save scientific philosophy from (...) Parmenides' criticisms. In Graham's view, Parmenides plays a constructive role in shaping the scientific debates of the fifth century BC. Accordingly, the history of Presocratic philosophy can be seen not as a series of dialectical failures, but rather as a series of theoretical advances that led to empirical discoveries. Indeed, the Ionian tradition can be seen as the origin of the scientific conception of the world that we still hold today. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new (...) materialisms”; and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”. (shrink)

If C 1 , ..., C k are members of a certain class of suitable categories (which contains those arising from models with dimension), C = C 1 × ⋯ × C k , C' is a suitable category, F: C → C' is a partial recursive combinatorial functor satisfying a certain property (which, if C = C 1 , is that F is nonconstant) and U ∈ C, then (1) if FU is regressive so is U as is each (...) U i , and (2) if FU is Dedekind then each U i is Dedekind. (shrink)

Rational social theorists have failed to confirm that observations of social reality equal social reality. Yet they argue that teams, organizations and social systems should minimize interdependence and competition, echoed by social psychologists to make data iid. But the evidence indicates that competitive teams maximize interdependence; self-reports of social reality correlate poorly with social behavior; and only competition measures interdependent social states. Rational expectations aside, we report progress towards a science of interdependence for human–machine teams. Our model of interdependence works (...) like an uncertainty principle in the sense that tradeoffs arise from the uncertainty caused by measuring interdependent actors in orthogonal roles; e.g., in the tradeoff between teams and individuals, teams are more productive but more opaque. Previously, we described interdependence as bistable stories of social reality; the motivation to reject alternative interpretations, increasing uncertainty and errors; and the inability to factor social states. Now we explore education as a surrogate for intelligence in teams. We hypothesized that teams rely on the education of its members to produce more patents. We found that the average schooling in a nation is significantly related to its total patents produced. (shrink)