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Hey Ayten,
It has been a long while since
I've heard from you. Welcome back.
You wrote...
To attract more vivid attention please use a larger font, perhaps
12 instead of 10.
Well, I may not want to draw much more
attention than I already have. We may be off the map here at the Rosen
list. There may be monsters here.
Further you wrote...
Could the disagreement with that someone you were talking about this
concept stem from the basic difference in mental process of the contenders: one
represents a project approach where the formal cause at the edge and represents
a fixed plan to be materialized to reach a fixed objective, the other (You and I
for that matter) represent a process approach which stretches the boundary of
the formal cause makes it flexible and links it with the final cause as a light
house to move towards.
It wasn't really a disagreement between us.
We were just kind of bantering about the nature of formal causation
between us. In Robert Rosen's book Essays on Life Itself in
chapter one there is a section entitled: What is this "New Physics"? In it
Robert says the following...
Most significant, I feel, will be the
shifting of attention from exclusively inertial (or structural) concepts to
gravitational aspects. This can be expressed as a shift from concerns with
material causations of behavior, manifested in state sets, to formal and
effecient causations.
So I was just trying to get a jump on things, if
you know what I mean. I am still not clear about how RR uses the terms
inertial and gravitational. He seems to be talking to physicists when he
uses these terms, and I'm not a physicist. Getting back to formal causation,
there seems to be, in my own mind, some confusion about what exactly it is. So I
was talking with this person in the hopes that by discussing it, the nature
of formal causation would become clarified for me (which is really why I brought
it to the list).
In the uses I've heard before of formal causation
(like most all of the examples Aristotle used) it has been applied to
artifacts. So a question such as "why the statue?" would be answered with
"because of the form of a man." However, RR seems to be
intending more than this. The person I was talking to seemed to hit it
with describing formal cause as "the instructions for building something" which
I merely pointed out as encompassing things in addition to the
idea of a form, or blueprints in the specific case of a house.
David
P.S. As an aside, apparently Aristotle felt that
psychology was a field of study residing somewhere between physics and
biology.
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