Christopher Frey

Anscombe endorses many aspects of Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance. But the idiosyncratic interpretation she offers of Aristotle’s texts and the way she employs Aristotle’s theory in her contemporary writings are both inflected by her Wittgensteinian commitments. In this essay, I discuss several aspects of Anscombe’s Aristotelian metaphysics in both its historical and contemporary registers. In doing so, I aim to illuminate how unique the variety of Aristotelianism she adopts is. I focus on her understanding of three of the theory’s central elements: (i) Aristotle’s conception of substance as he presents it in the Categories, (ii) Aristotle’s account of matter and its role as a principle of individuation, and (iii) the concept of an essence and its relation to grammar.

Aristotle employs three distinct but interrelated concepts of rest: kinetic rest, energic rest, and telic rest. The third variety, telic rest, is crucial to Aristotle’s natural philosophy. Anything that moves or acts by nature does so in part for the sake of realizing its form more completely. There is, in the fullest attainment of this good, a kind of rest without cessation or destruction. The peace that telic rest affords is not a kind of stasis; it consists in perfect and complete activity. By clarifying the varieties of rest Aristotle employs, I aim to provide a richer understanding of Aristotelian natures. By emphasizing the role of telic rest, I aim to illuminate a universal and perennial aspect of the human condition, an aspect that both drives us to gain knowledge of the natural world and unites us with that world’s divine cause.

My dissertation is an examination of an oft-invoked but insufficiently understood feature of perceptual experience, namely, its presentational character. We open our eyes and a world is before us. Someone strikes a tuning fork, and a sound is simply present. To experience is always, in part, to appreciate phenomenally something as other or as before one; it is always, in part, to appreciate phenomenally a manifest opposition between the self--that before which the other is present--and the other--that which is present before the self. I call this aspect of experiential phenomenality, this universally appreciable but non-sensuous sense of otherness in experience, phenomenal presence.

Phenomenal presence is uniquely suited to illuminate the substantive interrelations that
exist between two fundamental features of perceptual experience: intentionality and phenomenality. I argue that (i) the intentional features of experience, understood in isolation from experiential phenomenality, neither constitute nor explain phenomenal presence, (ii) phenomenal presence is itself the minimal realization of experiential intentionality, and (iii) the intentionality embodied in phenomenal presence is constitutively and explanatorily prior to all other forms of experiential intentionality. I then show how these conclusions can be brought to bear on the intentional status of our non-phenomenal, mental states.

These discussions guide us toward an account of perceptual experience in which experiential phenomenality is competent to direct us intentionally beyond ourselves, independently of the contributions made by the understanding or intellect. Modeling the intentionality and self-awareness involved in perceptual experience upon the intentionality and self-awareness involved in belief and judgment, or insisting that the former depend on the latter obscures both the role of and the contribution made by the exercises of our perceptual capacities. This tendency to assimilate the perceptual and the intellectual realms and to privilege the intellectual leads inevitably to accounts of perceptual experience that either render epiphenomenal the distinctive contributions of experiential phenomenality or neglect those contributions altogether.

To which science, if any, does the intellect’s study belong?  Though the student of nature studies every other vital capacity, most interpreters maintain that Aristotle excludes the intellect from natural science’s domain.  I survey the three main reasons that lead to this interpretation: the intellect (i) is not realized physiologically in a proprietary organ, (ii) its naturalistic study would corrupt natural science’s boundaries and leave no room for other forms of inquiry, and (iii) it is not, as all other vital capacities are, a principle of movement and rest.  I show that the third consideration is the most significant and then defend the view that the student of nature can (and ought to) study the intellect despite its not being a principle of movement. I argue that all of an organism’s vital activities have one and only one nature as their principle, namely, the organism’s soul considered as a unitary whole. The student of nature must concern herself with whatever activities are involved in the coming to be, development, and full realization of these natural forms.

The dominant interpretation of Metaphysics Θ.8 commits Aristotle to the claim that the heavenly bodies’ eternal movements are not the exercises of capacities. Against this,
I argue that these movements are the result of necessarily exercised capacities. I clarify what it is for a heavenly body to possess a nature and argue that a body’s nature cannot be a final cause unless the natural body possesses capacities that are exercised for the sake of its nature qua form. This discussion yields a better understanding of what capacities are, what explanatory work capacities do, and what it is to possess a nature.

I argue that an experience’s sensuous elements play an ineliminable role in our being intentionally directed upon an entity through perception. More specifically, I argue that whenever we appreciate a sensuous element in experience, we appreciate an intrinsic and irreducibly phenomenal aspect of experience that I call phenomenal presence—an aspect of experience that I show is central to its presentational character—and that the appreciation of phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality. If an experience is to possess intentionality, the experience itself must make an entity available as an object of perceptually-based singular beliefs and the experiencing subject, by virtue of undergoing the experience, must in some sense be able to appreciate that it has done so. Phenomenal presence is necessary for perceptual intentionality because it plays an ineliminable role in making an entity available to its subject in this way.