nature

Posted On March 25, 2024

[WORK IN PROGRESS]

• Ross has his own definition of natures, which he appears to distinguish from essences, forms and substances.
• Natures, as Ross defines them, are determined by their action (or “behavior“). He writes: ” Real nature is formed matter as principle of the operations of a thing.”
• I find his descriptions in “Adapting Aquinas: Analogy & Forms” even more helpful than later works like Thought and World. The following quotes all come from that article.
• Not substances:

1. “Things don’t have to be subsistent to have or be real natures, though whatever does exist on its own, like lions and tigers, does have an essence, even if we do not yet have a scientifically refined conception of it or of the borderlines in nature. For we don’t have a formula for lion the way we do for sulfuric acid.”

• Not individuals:

1. “Natures are primarily sortal and derivatively individual.”

• Not Platonic forms:

1. Adhering to a strictly realist and existentialist ontology, Ross insists that natures are not antecedent to individuals.
2. “The commonness of a nature, like being human or being a chicken, is not antecedent to the individuals, as Plato (and even Scotus in a different sense) thought, but consequent upon them.”

• Ross’s dictum: kinds do not exhaust being, and individuals do not exhaust kinds.

1. What’s true of “kinds” is true of “natures”. They do not include all the overflow conditions. They are not transcendently determinate. They are not defined extensionally as some particular group of fixed individuals. No matter how many individuals belong to the nature, more could always be added, because materialization of the nature cannot exhaust it.
2. “Repeatability is itself a consequence of the inability of any materialization to exhaust the form; that is, for any [nature] there can be another, if material is available.”
3. “There are real common natures both of things and processes, but being common is the resultant of the physical multiplication of repeatable (because receivable) intelligible structure, and physical repeatability is, itself, a consequence of a structure’s not being entitatively complete on its own, but requiring a receptive basis.”

• Ross believes that the existence of natures suggests a Creator: “So, classical questions as to whether cosmically pervasive intelligible structure [LOGOS???] can be explained any way but from an originating intelligence, are reopened.”