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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
My task in writing a paper to accompany Milton Fisk's complex and provocative one is unusually difficult. His argument is so condensed and at such a high level of abstraction that I could easily devote my entire discussion to a single paragraph of his, to his very first one for example. Instead of doing this, I thought it would be more helpful to say something about the historical background from which his essay derives, and then go on to raise some difficulties regarding his central claim that nature is something over and above part and property. I will end with some suggestions on my own part as to how the categories of capacity and nature might best be related.
But first it is worth asking: to whom is this paper addressed? Its language and general approach are not those to which readers of the philosophy of science are accustomed.
1 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book I, Chapter 8. The quotations in the next few paragraphs come from the same chapter, except where otherwise noted.
2 Book IV, Chapter 3.
3 Loc. cit.
4 Loc. cit.
5 Book I, Chapter 8.
6 He traces it further back, via the mass-energy relations of Special Relativity, to the notion of potential energy. This is to take ‘resistance’ a little too literally, just as Newton did in his notion of a vis insita. Potential energy is not involved in the explication of the concept of inertia; it is involved in the sort of resistance Locke characterized as the quality of solidity.
7 The attempts of John Wheeler and others to reformulate contemporary mechanics in purely geometric terms (masses for instance appear as “wormholes” in space) might be regarded as an attempt to return to a Cartesian-type mechanics comfortably free of overtly dispositional concepts. But, of course, the “geometry” of their geometrodynamics is by no means that of Euclid and Descartes; it involves dynamical terms that would be impossible to situate within the old dichotomies of power and primary property. See the Epilogue to The Concept of Matter in Modern Thought (ed. McMullin, Ernan, University of Notre Dame Press, revised edition, 1971)Google Scholar, especially §6: ‘Matter and space’.