My quick translation of a brief article to be printed in the newspaper again:
"Entelecheia of Aristotle
Entelecheia (Εντελέχεια
and 'the chance event' (το συμβεβηκός are two of the main notions Aristotle uses in his books on Physics. While the former connotes the end-state (telos) which any altering object inherently carries with it, the latter is usually regarded as synonymous to something happening arbitrarily.
The chance event is something that has undoubtedly taken place, but it took place without absolutely having to be so. If one would happen to find a coin while walking in some road it is evident that it doesn't follow that he would always find such a coin while walking there. Therefore that he happened to find it at some time was indeed by chance.
The intention of Aristotle's through the use of the notion of the chance event is to limit the phenomena which may be set as poignant to be examined in the confines of any field of science, given that only those phenomena which are argued to be caused by clearly defined laws may be studied further more. To the contrary, those phenomena that are either outside of those laws, or are tied to those laws in indistinct ways, are regarded as things that just co-exist with the more defined elements in that scientific order. To make a parallel, those external phenomena not to be studied in the same way are like the chance event co-existing traits of a road where runners compete, such as the irregular patches of grass around the road or on its edges, which may attract a glimpse by the runners, but they are in no way as important to the run as are elements like the stable and crucial sizes and meters of that road, or the road's curvature.
Entelecheia, on the other hand, is an Aristotelean concept according to which any object is altering towards a set ending state. So it is not Entelecheia that the coin may sometime end up thrown onto the road that a walker will happen to find it, but it is Entelecheia that the coin will erode with time, or that there will be saturation in a solvent if more of the substance than can be diluted into it is dropped there...
If we would drop a larger quantity of salt into a test-tube filled with water, than the quantity able to dissolve evenly into that water, then the salt will begin to form a residue in the bottom of the test-tube. And while it is a chance event that a careless student might cause such a solution to be over-saturated while the experiment asked him to examine it at a state prior to saturation, it is Entelecheia that residue would occur under such conditions.
Aristotle wished to have the sciences exist outside of the inherent vagueness caused by the dialectic method (where any field can tie to any other field, and the specific and limited context of a study or an experiment will bring with it shadows of the indistinctly relevant microcosms below it and macrocosm above it). But it may be so that even such a wish like Aristotle's can be the cause for a saturation all of its own, and one harming both philosophy and science.
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You can comment on the article, etc. No trolling by enteleches
"Entelecheia of Aristotle
Entelecheia (Εντελέχεια
and 'the chance event' (το συμβεβηκός are two of the main notions Aristotle uses in his books on Physics. While the former connotes the end-state (telos) which any altering object inherently carries with it, the latter is usually regarded as synonymous to something happening arbitrarily.The chance event is something that has undoubtedly taken place, but it took place without absolutely having to be so. If one would happen to find a coin while walking in some road it is evident that it doesn't follow that he would always find such a coin while walking there. Therefore that he happened to find it at some time was indeed by chance.
The intention of Aristotle's through the use of the notion of the chance event is to limit the phenomena which may be set as poignant to be examined in the confines of any field of science, given that only those phenomena which are argued to be caused by clearly defined laws may be studied further more. To the contrary, those phenomena that are either outside of those laws, or are tied to those laws in indistinct ways, are regarded as things that just co-exist with the more defined elements in that scientific order. To make a parallel, those external phenomena not to be studied in the same way are like the chance event co-existing traits of a road where runners compete, such as the irregular patches of grass around the road or on its edges, which may attract a glimpse by the runners, but they are in no way as important to the run as are elements like the stable and crucial sizes and meters of that road, or the road's curvature.
Entelecheia, on the other hand, is an Aristotelean concept according to which any object is altering towards a set ending state. So it is not Entelecheia that the coin may sometime end up thrown onto the road that a walker will happen to find it, but it is Entelecheia that the coin will erode with time, or that there will be saturation in a solvent if more of the substance than can be diluted into it is dropped there...
If we would drop a larger quantity of salt into a test-tube filled with water, than the quantity able to dissolve evenly into that water, then the salt will begin to form a residue in the bottom of the test-tube. And while it is a chance event that a careless student might cause such a solution to be over-saturated while the experiment asked him to examine it at a state prior to saturation, it is Entelecheia that residue would occur under such conditions.
Aristotle wished to have the sciences exist outside of the inherent vagueness caused by the dialectic method (where any field can tie to any other field, and the specific and limited context of a study or an experiment will bring with it shadows of the indistinctly relevant microcosms below it and macrocosm above it). But it may be so that even such a wish like Aristotle's can be the cause for a saturation all of its own, and one harming both philosophy and science.
"
*
You can comment on the article, etc. No trolling by enteleches
