Monday, January 7, 2013
Oerter on inertial motion and angels
Last week I linked to my paper “The Medieval Principle of Motion and the Modern Principle of Inertia,” which appears in Volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics. The paper addresses the familiar claim that Newton’s law of inertia has undermined the argument of Aquinas’s First Way, which rests on the principle that whatever is in motion is moved by another -- or, to state it more precisely, the principle that any actualized potency is actualized by something already actual. I argue that when Newton’s principle and Aquinas’s are properly understood, it is clear that the objection has no force and that those who raise it have not even managed to explain exactly what the conflict between Newton and Aquinas is supposed to be.
The first half of the paper is devoted to developing five reasons why the appearance of conflict here is illusory. In summary they are:
1. There would be no formal contradiction between the principles even if we took them to be using “motion” in the same sense.