Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism

Metaphysical accounts of fundamental properties may be divided into two camps. The ‘Humean’ view holds that all fundamental properties are categorical properties (purely qualitative properties which possess no essential dispositional character). All dispositional properties are non-fundamental properties grounded in categorical properties (and the laws of nature). In contrast, the ‘Aristotelian’ view (often called ‘dispositional essentialism’ or ‘power-ontology’) holds that (at least some of) the fundamental metaphysical properties are essentially dispositional. The present volume is motivated by the thought that the recent resurgence of the latter view in metaphysics will challenge long-standing Humean assumptions in other areas. It aims to provide ‘a composite portrait of a neo-Aristotelian, powers-based approach to issues in contemporary analytic philosophy’ (p. 1), and offers seventeen original essays to this end. Part I, ‘Metaphysics’ (four papers), opens with a piece by Stephen Mumford describing how his own thinking about powers developed over time. Next, Alexander Bird provides a cautionary note against overenthusiastic estimations of the significance of dispositional essentialism for other fields and argues that the success of dispositional accounts in other areas has no direct bearing on whether the fundamental properties are categorical properties. Eleonore Stump compares a fairly typical modern account of emergent causal properties with the account of Aquinas (for whom causal power depends upon functional organization) and Lynn Joy argues that Hume is not so ‘Humean’.