Past Event: Philosophy Dept talk: Ben Koons

Title: Our Omissions and Aristotle’s Privations

Abstract: Omissions—actions that somebody doesn’t do but should—have presented a number of problems in contemporary metaphysics, ranging from the spatiotemporal location of omissions to their apparently subjective nature. These problems principally arise insofar as omissions appear to be a kind of non-being that nonetheless acts as a cause. I argue that to solve these problems we need to follow Aristotle in his theoretical use of the concept of privations. Following David Hommen’s more general account of absences, I conceive of omissions as some substance’s active power not manifesting. What omissions cause are privations, though, so it is only when some other substance is suffering a privation that this non-manifestation of a power is an omission. When we look to Aristotle, we can tease out a correlative notion of privations as the non-manifestation of the passive power of some substance when the power’s manifestation is necessary for the substance’s fulfillment. Hence, an omission acts as a cause only if some other substance’s passive power is not being manifested. By conceiving of omissions as the causes of privations in this way, we can determine the spatiotemporal location of omissions and can characterize causal omissions as a kind of causation derivative from the principal kind of cause—the actual manifestation of a power.