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  1. Aristotle's Ontology of Change.Mark Sentesy - 2020 - Chicago, IL, USA: Northwestern University Press.
    This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that being is inescapably diverse in kind—is anchored in his argument for the existence of change. -/- Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When (...)
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  2. Are Kinetic and Temporal Continuities Real for Aristotle?Mark Sentesy - 2024 - History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 26 (2):275-302.
    Aristotle argues that time depends on soul to count it, but adds that motion, which makes time what it is, may be independent of soul. The claim that time depends on soul or mind implies that there is at least one measurable property of natural beings that exists because of the mind’s activity. This paper argues that for Aristotle time depends partly on soul, but more importantly on motion, which defines a continuum. This argument offers a robust metaphysics of time. (...)
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  3. The Now and the Relation between Motion and Time in Aristotle: A Systematic Reconstruction.Mark Sentesy - 2018 - Apeiron 51 (3):279-323.
    This paper reconstructs the relationship between the now, motion, and number in Aristotle to clarify the nature of the now, and, thereby, the relationship between motion and time. Although it is clear that for Aristotle motion, and, more generally, change, are prior to time, the nature of this priority is not clear. But if time is the number of motion, then the priority of motion can be grasped by examining his theory of number. This paper aims to show that, just (...)
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  4. Are Potency and Actuality Compatible in Aristotle?Mark Sentesy - 2018 - Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy:239-270.
    The belief that Aristotle opposes potency (dunamis) to actuality (energeia or entelecheia) has gone untested. This essay defines and distinguishes forms of the Opposition Hypothesis—the Actualization, Privation, and Modal—examining the texts and arguments adduced to support them. Using Aristotle’s own account of opposition, the texts appear instead to show that potency and actuality are compatible, while arguments for their opposition produce intractable problems. Notably, Aristotle’s refutation of the Megarian Identity Hypothesis applies with equal or greater force to the Opposition Hypothesis. (...)
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  5. The Hermeneutic Problem of Potency and Activity in Aristotle.Mark Sentesy - 2017 - In Sentesy Mark (ed.), The Challenge of Aristotle. Sofia University Press.
    Of Aristotle’s core terms, potency (dunamis) and actuality (energeia) are among the most important. But when we attempt to understand what they mean, we face the following problem: their primary meaning is movement, as a source (dunamis) or as movement itself (energeia). We therefore have to understand movement in order to understand them. But the structure of movement is itself articulated using these terms: it is the activity of a potential being, as potent. This paper examines this hermeneutic circle, and (...)
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  6. How Technology Changes Our Idea of the Good.Mark Sentesy - 2011 - In Laverdure Paul & Mbonimpa Melchior (eds.), Eth-ICTs: Ethics and the New Information and Communication Technologies. University of Sudbury. pp. 109-123.
    The ethical neutrality of technology has been widely questioned, for example, in the case of the creation and continued existence of weapons. At stake is whether technology changes the ethical character of our experience: compare the experience of seeing a beating to videotaping it. Interpreting and elaborating on the work of George Grant and Marshall McLuhan, this paper consists of three arguments: 1) the existence of technologies determines the structures of civilization that are imposed on the world, 2) technologies shape (...)
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  7.  66
    Being, Identity, and Difference in Heraclitus and Parmenides.Mark Sentesy - 2022 - Ancient Philosophy Today 4 (2):129-154.
    Are all forms of difference contained in what is, or is there some form of difference that escapes, negates, or constitutes what is? Parmenides and Heraclitus may have had the greatest effect on how philosophy has answered this question. This paper shows that Heraclitus is not a partisan of difference: identity and difference are mutually generative and equally fundamental. For his part, Parmenides both makes an argument against opposing being and non-being in the False Road Story, and then uses precisely (...)
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  8.  69
    Community with Nothing in Common? Plato's Subtler Response to Protagoras.Mark Sentesy - 2020 - Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (1):155-183.
    The Protagoras examines how community can occur between people who have nothing in common. Community, Protagoras holds, has no natural basis. Seeking the good is therefore not a theoretical project, but a matter of agreement. This position follows from his claim that “man is the measure of all things.” For Socrates community is based on a natural good, which is sought through theoretical inquiry. They disagree about what community is, and what its bases and goals are. But Plato illustrates the (...)
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  9.  30
    On language: analytic, continental and historical contributions.Jon Burmeister & Mark Sentesy (eds.) - 2007 - Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Press.
    Language was at the heart of philosophical inquiry for Plato and Aristotle, and in contemporary discussion it is no less central. In addition to the history of philosophy’s extensive investigations of language, analytic and continental philosophy too have focused intensively on the matter. But since most inquiries into language remain enclosed in their own methodology, terminology, and tradition, the multiplicity of approaches is often accompanied by their mutual isolation. This book shows, however, that these traditions can speak meaningfully to each (...)
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  10.  70
    Fantastic Phenomena.Mark Sentesy & Jean-Luc Nancy - 2011 - Research in Phenomenology 41 (2):228-237.
    The subject of this essay is the thing itself, examined through the fantastic character of phenomenality, that is, through the coming into being or opening up of the world. The world of appearance emerges from a simple, absolute nothing: there is nothing behind or before the world. There are right away many things, a world: one thing implies others, since for one to be it must distinguish itself from another. Thus, if `to be' means `to distinguish,' Being begins with the (...)
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  11.  65
    Aristotle: Movement and the Structure of Being.Mark Sentesy - 2013 - Dissertation, Boston College
    This project sets out to answer the following question: according to Aristotle, what does movement contribute to or change about being? The first part works through the argument for the existence of movement in the Physics. This argument includes distinctive innovations in the structure of being, notably the simultaneous unity and manyness of being: while material and form are one thing, they are two in being. This makes it possible for Aristotle to argue that movement is not intrinsically related to (...)
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  12.  45
    Colloquium 2 Genesis and the Priority of Activity in Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX.8.Mark Sentesy - 2019 - Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 34 (1):43-70.
    This paper clarifies the way Aristotle uses generation to establish the priority of activity in time and in being. It opens by examining the concept of genetic priority. The argument for priority in beinghood has two parts. The first part is a synthetic argument that accomplishment is the primary kind of source, an argument based on the structure of generation. The second part engages three critical objections to the claim that activity could be an accomplishment: activity appears to lack its (...)
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  13.  61
    Aristotle's Rational and Political Cosmopolitanism Aristotle's Ethics as First Philosophy. [REVIEW]Mark Sentesy - 2010 - Research in Phenomenology 40 (1):150-158.