Making Sense of the World: Substances
In my first published piece on Aristotle I claimed that he saw the world as consisting primarily of material objects, ordinary natural things of form and matter. A thing, or substance, is its form and has matter: its form—what makes it what it is—may pers
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Making Sense of the World: Substances
Abstract In my first published piece on Aristotle I claimed that he saw the world as consisting primarily of material objects, ordinary natural things of form and matter. A thing, or substance, is its form and has matter: its form—what makes it what it is—may persist even as its matter changes. Things are not reducible to their components. This river is not its present water, so we can step into the same river twice even if not the same water twice. A person, whose form is a soul, is not just flesh and blood. Aristotle has a bodily criterion of personal identity, but the body in question is a living, functioning body. In recent years this conception has been criticized, as has his view that persons have abiding character. If we acknowledge that a thing is not its components, we probably will not believe that science undermines our understanding of the world or our ordinary ways of dealing with it. Nor is the relative precision of science any reason for trying to make a science of organization theory. Thirty years ago I claimed that an organization can be considered a persisting entity, an artifact with form and matter, though in a sense less strict and less permanent than natural substances. Since then I have thought further about the purposes of organizations and about the issues that new organizational forms raise. Aristotle’s claim that humans are essentially sociable creatures gives us reason to consider the crucial roles in human life of associations of various sorts, including organizations. Keywords Accident · Essence · Form · Identity · Matter · Organizations · Polis · Rationality · Science · Sociabilty · Soul · Substance
Aristotle is often called the philosopher of common sense, though the characterization may seem a bit misleading given the brilliance of his accounts of everything. The point is that he thinks that our view of the world is basically right, though incomplete and sometimes wrong on details. He justifies and extends common sense rather than undermine it, as modern science may seem to do. He does not do what today would be considered epistemology. He often invokes common opinion respectfully. He undertakes to make sense of the world as we typically experience it, and he does not offer any special intuitive faculty that underlies our senses or our rationality. He does not believe that the world is mysterious, though it is © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. M. Hartman, Arriving Where We Started, Issues in Business Ethics 51, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44089-3_1
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1 Making Sense of the World: Substances
complex—indeed, it is far more complex than Aristotle realizes. He might agree with Einstein: the Lord is subtle but not malicious. He sees nothing very mysterious about ethics either. Most of us have a fairly good idea of what an ethical person looks like, though we have no principles akin to laws of nature that permit us always to make highly accurate assessments of people’s behavior. In fact Aristotle does not claim that there are l
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