Agent and Patient

[George Turner]

I was reading through Aristotle's Physics, and he several times uses the phrase Agent and Patient, as in

"Nor is there motion in respect of Agent and Patent - in fact there can never be motion of mover and moved, because there cannot be motion of motion or becoming of becoming or in general change of change."

Later I read "Since, then, motion can belong neither to Being nor Relation nor to Agent and Patient, it remains that there can be motion only in respect of Quality, Quantity, and Place: for with each of these we have a pair of contraries."

Not that these sentences make much sense, since it's Aristotle, and authors with just one name are notorious for this. However, he's also completely absorbed with the Before and After, and sometimes the during. Considering that his works were the standard thought for a very long time, I'm not surprised that even his phrasing seems to be echoed in some of the period manuals. It may be worthwhile to wade through (and it is a wade) his Physics, since some of the masters seem to echo some of his phrasing, and his work on motion was considered fundamental throughout much of the period. Since everyone was reading him, a quick phrase in one of the manuals might be refering to things that "everyone" knew, which could go back to some basic Aristotlian concepts and illustrations.

Best Regards,

George Turner

[Jake_Norwood]

Man...I never thought of that but you're right. I read Aristotle's Physics (all of it...ugh...) back in high school. Could it be that "in des" and all of that goes as far back? Was Aristotle a warrior at all? I understand that Socrates had served in the military in his youth (although that could be someone's conjecture).

[George Turner]

Man,

Aristotle is rough. It's like reading something written by someone who is relatively uneducated, really, really smart, and really, really high. However, I didn't see anything in his physics that directly related to any form of combat. However, he gets into heavy discussions about how one object's motion causes anothers (when in direct contact), and how motion is transfered through an object, such as your arm moving a stick which moves a ball.

I guess my point would be that almost any person educated enough to write one of the period manuals would also have been educated in Aristotle's physics, logic, and other stuff. This seems to be indicated by the manuals references to Agent and Patient, and dwelling on before and after and such.

There's also the fact that during much of the middle ages people were thinking Aristotle was wrong in many key respects, and many of the works through this period are refutations of some of his arguments. Galileo's work is mostly a huge piece of evidence aimed directly (and very pointedly) at the people still clinging to Aristotle.

One very good book on the subject is "The Principle of Inertia in the Middle Ages" by Professor Allan Franklin. Due to happenstance, I now own more copies of it than he does...
It seems that many authors reached the basic conclusion that you can have motion continuing without applied force (principle of inertia), but this would imply that in the void an object could continue forever. This means that the universe would have to be almost infinite in extent, which is obviously not true, because it's actually very tiny in extent, extending not far beyond our own planets, and thus they couldn't accept their own logic.

Best Regards,

George Turner