Aristotelian Forms and Laws of Nature

• Authors: Pruss Alexander
• Languages of publication: PL EN

Abstracts

EN

Aristotelian Forms are mysterious entities. I offer an account of them as entities that makes the laws of nature be laws. The Aristotelian ontology is fundamentally an anti-Humean ontology: Not only are laws a reality over and beyond regularities, but that in virtue of which they are laws is in fact that which is most truly called substance. If we further take it, say, on ethical grounds, that there are individual forms, then we get a multiplicity of substances in the universe, including multiple substances of the same sort, and the laws of nature end up being grounded in their powers. But we have global regularities, then, only because there is coordination between the lawmakers, or forms, of the solo doings of individual entities, a coordination that entails global patterns.

Keywords

EN

Aristotle; forms; laws of nature; metaphysics; ontology; matter

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego
• Journal: Analiza i Egzystencja. Czasopismo Filozoficzne
• Year: 2013
• Issue: 24
• Pages: 115 - 132

Contributors

author

Pruss Alexander

• Baylor University