after the Republic

Next up: Aristotle’s Physics. Greatly looking forward to it. I’ve done the Metaphysics too many times in the last half-decade, and wanted a change.

No one in our circles really likes Aristotle anymore. He’s taken to be the synonym for all that is boring and “classical”. This attitude is a mistake. Yes, I know all about school texts and the rebellion of modern philosophy against them. But the intermittent moments when Aristotle enters philosophy have quite often been fertile moments, or even moments of renaissance. I’m reminded of this whenever I dip into Leibniz, and even whenever I dip into Zubíri (I say “even” only because he lacks Leibniz’s breadth of influence).

Gradually, a consensus has built up that individual substances are gauche, that essence is both gauche and oppressive, and so forth. Many of my frustrations with Le Pli come from Deleuze’s failure just to admit that individual substances are in fact the core of Leibniz’s position (his attempts to explain it away are rather feeble). The Whitehead/Latour outlook is just another way of dodging individual substances, and yes, scientific naturalism is yet another.

In a sense, the whole object-oriented program can be described as a weirder version of Aristotle– weirder insofar as OOO’s substances are more elusive, and insofar as “objects” in my usage of the term are a far broader category than substances. (And to repeat: no, I do not hold that all objects are “equally real.” That’s the early Latour, not me.)