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Record W2518173471 · doi:10.1353/tho.2006.0017

Albertus Magnus and the Categorization of Motion

2006· article· en· W2518173471 on OpenAlex
Steven Baldner

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicMedieval Philosophy and Theology
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPhilosophyDoctrineCriticismClassicsCategorizationMotion (physics)HumanitiesArtTheologyLiteratureEpistemologyArtificial intelligenceComputer science

Abstract

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The Thomist 70 (2006): 203-35 ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION1 STEVEN BALDNER St. Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada BECAUSE OF THE scholarly work of Anneliese Maier,2 the doctrine of motion formulated by Albertus Magnus has come to be seen as decisive for the development of physical theory in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. According to Maier, Albert was the first of the Scholastics to reckon with the unsolved Aristotelian problem of how precisely to categorize motion. Averroes reported that in the Categories, Aristotle had said that motion is in the category of "being passive" (passio) ;3 in the Physics, Aristotle said that motion belongs to several categories.4 To resolve the apparent discrepancy between these two claims, Albert devoted a long chapter (the third) in 1 I should like to express my appreciation to the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Ontario, which generously provided me with resources and facilities to pursue research on Albertus Magnus during my year of sabbatical leave. I would especially like to thank Rev. Lawrence Dewan, O.P., of this community, who provided excellent criticism of a draft of this article. 2 "Die Wesensbestimmung der Bewegung," in Anneliese Maier, Die Vorlaufer Galileis im 14. ]ahrhundert, 2d ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia et Letteratura, 1966), 9-25; "Motus est actus entis in potentia ..."in Anneliese Maier, Zwischen Philosophie und Mechanik (Rome: Edizioni di Storia etLetteratura, 1958), 3-57; "Forma Fluens oder Fluxus Formae?" in Maier, Zwischen Philosophie und Mechanik, 61-143. The first article was originally published in Angelicum 21 (1944): 97-111, and has been translated into English by Steven Sargent in chapter 1 of On the Threshold ofExact Science: Selected Writings ofAnneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 3-39. 3 In fact Aristotle makes no such claim, but Averroes said that Aristotle did in his Commentariae in libros Physicorum Aristotelis, lib. 3, text. 4, fol. 87C (Venice, 1562). 4 Physics 3.1.200b33-20la3. 203 204 STEVEN BALDNER book 3, tractate 1 of his Physica to answer the double question: "Whether and How Motion Is in the Categories."5 In doing so, Albert made use of the positions of Avicenna and Averroes; in fact, according to Maier, Albert canonized certain interpretations of these two authors in ways that were to dominate the succeeding discussions of the problem of motion. Avicenna's position is identified by Albert, so Maier tells us, with the term fluxus formae, "the flow of a form," while Averroes' is identified with the term forma fluens, "the flowing form." And this subtle but crucial distinction of terms led to a fundamentally wrong turn in the history of Scholastic natural philosophy. The nominative nouns in these terms tell the tale: fluxus, on the one hand, or forma, on the other. Is motion fundamentally to be understood as a fluxus, as an inherently flowing reality, or is it to be understood as a forma, as a static sort of reality? True, both the term fluxus formae and the term forma fluens are constructed from the same two words, the noun forma and the verb fluere, but Maier insists that the terms were given quite different technical meanings by Albert. Avicenna's term, fluxus formae, meant for Albert that motion cannot be placed in any Aristotelian category, whereas the term forma fluens meant that motion was essentially identical with some category in which motion is recognized.6 Albert, unfortunately, opted for Averroes' formulation that 5 "An in praedicamentis sit motus et qualiter sit in illis" (Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 3 [Cologne 4.1:149 (II. 56)]). All references to Albert's works are taken from Opera omnia, ed. lnstitutum Alberti Magni Coloniense (Munster i. Westf: Aschendorff, 1951-). 6 "For Albert, the Averroist interpretation of motion is this: qualitative change is a flowing quality (qualitas fluens), local motion is a flowing place (ubi fluens), and motion is distinguished from its terminus, not in essence, but only in being, insofar as it is a 'form in flux', while the end of motion is a 'form at rest'.... Because Avicenna takes the view that motion is a flow ofbeing that can in...

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.949
Threshold uncertainty score0.697

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.215
Teacher spread0.200 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it