Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Charles, David
Abstract
Aristotle’s hylomorphism—his analysis of material substances into form and matter—has seen a resurgence in contemporary metaphysics. Yet Aristotle himself appealed to a third principle of material substances—privation. This is surprising, since substances are supposed to be the paradigmatic beings in Aristotle’s ontology, and yet privations—what a substance should have but does not—seem to be a kind of non-being. Equally surprising, Aristotle also ascribes efficient causality to privations: a privation like the absence of a pilot from the ship can cause a shipwreck. What do privations have to be like to play these kinds of roles in Aristotle’s philosophy? Such roles exclude the possibility that privations are just nothing at all. One possibility is that privations are just a negative mode of being for qualities. Privations would be an addition to Aristotle’s ontology: alongside substances and accidents are positive and negative modes of each accident. Another possibility I consider is whether privations are not another kind of being but a different way of being. In other words, there are different ways for something to exist—e.g., actually or potentially—and privations exist in a third way: as mere objects of thought. What is distinctive about privations as objects of thought is that their existence does have some further foundation in what actually or potentially exists. These questions about the ontology of privations are at the forefront in the Introduction and Conclusion, while each body chapter considers a distinct role privations play in Aristotle’s philosophy. In Chapter 1, I argue that privations function as principles of material substances insofar as they—along with form—are the primary contraries. I spell out what is involved in this priority-in-contrariety relation and show one way it can be taken to explain the relative priority of contrary extremes over their intermediates. Finally, I contrast Aristotle’s model for qualities with the more modern model of determinables and determinates. In Chapter 2, I consider a worry springing from Chapter 1: granted that form and privation are the primary contraries and that all change is between contraries, why does Aristotle think this points to privation’s being essential to what a material substance is? In this chapter, I show how for Aristotle form and privation are essential to the definition of what matter is as well: what it is to be matter is to be the subject receptive of these contraries, form and privation. This point has further consequences for Aristotle’s theory of matter and suggests how to avoid a certain problem for the unity of material composites. In Chapters 1 and 2, I looked at how privations function as a kind of formal cause, while in Chapter 3, I turn to how privations, like forms, can also play an efficient-causal role. To spell out how this is possible and to make sense of Aristotle’s commitment to such a role for privations, I first set out an account of positive causation in Aristotle. This account is itself controversial and requires showing that efficient causation involves the controlling of processes from the beginning to the end of their transpiring. Finally, in Chapter 4, I move from the more interpretative project of spelling out what privations do in Aristotle’s philosophy to contemporary debates about omissions. In particular, I approach recent metaphysical problems about omissions and see how far Aristotle’s account of privations can get us in solving these problems. We can make a good deal of progress here, but we will need to further refine our analysis of privations and their efficient-causal role.
Recommended Citation
Koons, Benjamin, "Aristotle's Privations" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1400.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1400
