How Scholars Work and Some Thoughts on the Prime Matter Arguments
I just had one of those moments where all the things that I have previously read on a subject came together with clarity in a moment. My epiphany was that I realized that several pieces of secondary literature that had become important to me were situated in a scholarly dispute that waged in the literature about forty years ago and this contextualization helped me see what they were actually fighting over.
When I was finishing my dissertation, I would watch The Wire sometimes as I worked. One day I was slogging through and I was like, omg, I’m a philosophical detective! I’m trying to figure out how to make a case with the facts in front of me. That was my feeling this week working through arguments about prime matter. It was like, I knew the facts of the case, but the way this argument got staked out made sense of things I had been staring out for months. I think every scholarly new project involves pulling a bunch of pieces together and trying to find ways to fit them together. This is why it feels like detective work: what allows all these different pieces to add up to some coherent sense?
When I was coming through graduate school arguments weren’t even really made about prime matter, people just kind of dismissed the possibility that there was prime matter. It was like the case was solved, and everyone knew the answer so they didn’t have to prosecute their case anymore. For a long time, I didn’t need to know how the case was solved against prime matter in order to do my work. But now, it turns out, while I thought this was just a side part of my argument, it turns out the arguments about prime matter extend to and influence Aristotle’s metaphysics as a whole. So to share some of my insight, I thought I’d just list the disputes that emerge from the question of prime matter – really this is for those of you who think that disputes over prime matter are peripheral to Aristotle’s metaphysics, which in some circles it really has become. Read more
The Trott Line 