Mark Sentesy
I study and teach on philosophical, scientific, and technological factors that give rise to our human centered planet. My research bridges the fields of the history of philosophy, history of science, and environmental philosophy. I also work on topics in climate ethics, philosophy of technology, and the relationship between environmental exploitation and the history of systemic inequities and injustice.
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Books by Mark Sentesy
Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reex¬amination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics.
The essays in this volume each treat a central topic in the contemporary study of language. Part One addresses how expression determines thought according to Humboldt, the use of paraphrase in Quine's semantic ascent, and the non-ambiguity of the Frege-Russell senses of is. Part Two includes treatments of the possibility and impossibility of promising in Nietzsche, and Derrida's re-working of Saussure's distinction between language and world. Topics in Part Three include the origin and end of language for Heidegger and Foucault, and the mutual sharpening of logic and ordinary speech in Anselm.
This book fills a gap in current scholarship by bringing together nine essays that, through rejecting the debilitating yet often unquestioned divisions between disciplines, are able to illuminate the fundamental nature of language.
'In each part of this thought-provoking volume on the nature of language, there are essays that demonstrate the immense intellectual potential of writing that refuses to see any decisive distinction between the present of philosophy and its history, or between the ways in which Kant s work has been inherited in Anglo-American and Franco-German traditions.'
--Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford University, author of Wittgenstein's Private Language
'With its robust range of complementary topics, each subjected to penetrating examination, this collection of essays makes a welcome contribution to the philosophy of language, past and present.'
--Daniel Dahlstrom, Boston University, author of Heidegger's Concept of Truth
'The contributions to this impressive volume ignore traditional divides between analytic and continental, historical and systematic philosophy. This enables the authors to put a number of key issues in the philosophy of language into a striking new light.... Fully accessible to the advanced undergraduate in philosophy, the book also contains many provocative ideas for the specialist.'
--Martin Kusch, University of Cambridge, author of Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium
Papers by Mark Sentesy
Aristotle may be the only thinker to have given a noncircular definition of change. When he gave this definition, arguing that change is real was a losing proposition. To show that it exists, he had to rework the way philosophers understood reality. His groundbreaking analysis of change has long been interpreted through a Platonist lens, however, in which being is conceived as unchanging. Offering a comprehensive reex¬amination of the relationship between change and being in Aristotle, Sentesy makes an important contribution to scholarship on Aristotle, ancient philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, and metaphysics.
The essays in this volume each treat a central topic in the contemporary study of language. Part One addresses how expression determines thought according to Humboldt, the use of paraphrase in Quine's semantic ascent, and the non-ambiguity of the Frege-Russell senses of is. Part Two includes treatments of the possibility and impossibility of promising in Nietzsche, and Derrida's re-working of Saussure's distinction between language and world. Topics in Part Three include the origin and end of language for Heidegger and Foucault, and the mutual sharpening of logic and ordinary speech in Anselm.
This book fills a gap in current scholarship by bringing together nine essays that, through rejecting the debilitating yet often unquestioned divisions between disciplines, are able to illuminate the fundamental nature of language.
'In each part of this thought-provoking volume on the nature of language, there are essays that demonstrate the immense intellectual potential of writing that refuses to see any decisive distinction between the present of philosophy and its history, or between the ways in which Kant s work has been inherited in Anglo-American and Franco-German traditions.'
--Stephen Mulhall, New College, Oxford University, author of Wittgenstein's Private Language
'With its robust range of complementary topics, each subjected to penetrating examination, this collection of essays makes a welcome contribution to the philosophy of language, past and present.'
--Daniel Dahlstrom, Boston University, author of Heidegger's Concept of Truth
'The contributions to this impressive volume ignore traditional divides between analytic and continental, historical and systematic philosophy. This enables the authors to put a number of key issues in the philosophy of language into a striking new light.... Fully accessible to the advanced undergraduate in philosophy, the book also contains many provocative ideas for the specialist.'
--Martin Kusch, University of Cambridge, author of Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium
How, then, does this uniqueness arise in our experience? First, it is not immediately clear how in principle I could ever be distinguished from the objects that I perceive, if the first-person perspective were the only one available to me. Second, it is not clear how in principle this difference that distinguishes perspectives—a difference I care about and am attached to—could emerge from an indifferent and detached third-person perspective.
Hegel’s analysis of desire confirms this result: the uniqueness that characterizes me is not available to me without others. An analysis of the experience of skin colour forces us to conclude that uniqueness comes to light in a peculiar way: something about the other that is inaccessible to the other reveals what about me is inaccessible to me.
The analysis of the experience of the other’s gaze in Sartre and Levinas points to an inescapable result: that which is inaccessible to me and which individuates me pre-reflectively are not my physical or mental features, and not my death, but my life. If we wrongly assumed that the way life individuates is obvious, we still face the question how my life or the life of the other discloses uniqueness? Through an analysis of place, we conclude that being there in the world is disclosure, but only if it is understood as this living principle of action here and as a ‘second-person’ being.
The painterly technique of the divided stroke went hand in hand with the decomposition of forms Boccioni sought to reveal the dynamism of life. The decomposition of form through the divisionist technique turned it into light. On the other hand, the decomposition of form revealed the movement of life. In a word, futurist decomposition reveals the unity of light-energy and movement.
Divisionism at work in the act of painting brings forth the dynamism of things. It offers us an experience of the basic moved character of light, the basically illuminative character of motion, by setting the spectator into that motion. In Boccioni’s words, “We Futurists are right inside the object, and we live out its evolutionary concept… we live out the object in the motion of its inner forces.” They sought the destruction of the materiality of bodies, the revelation of things as movement and light, to set the soul of the spectator into motion.
The discovery of the elements in Greek Philosophy is a revolution in the conception of parts and wholes and therefore of science, so the first part of this paper discusses the way that Plato uses written words as models for the way parts fit together into whole things. The first recognizably scientific accounts of things were accomplished by drawing an analogy between writing and things: the word for ‘element’ is the word for ‘letter.’
The second part of this paper works out how the machine changes the concept of nature and its parts. Early Modern science is recognizable through a new metaphor for the workings of nature: the machine and its correlative concepts of force, cause and effect. The paper closes with a sketch of our current model of the physical world—indefinite energy—and discusses possible implications of this conception of things.
Chapters 3 and 4 examine the terms involved in the definition of change: being-at-work (energeia), being-complete (entelecheia), and potency (dunamis).
Chapter 3 addressed energeia and entelecheia, and argued that change and potency both admit of being complete in one respect and incomplete in another.
This chapter examines what dunamis (potency, capacity) is. It argues first that to be a source is to set to work in certain conditions. Potency is the kind of source that only works with others. A particular capacity is always in principle capable of doing something other than it is currently doing, with the exception of capacities that have been completed, e.g. being a violinist, being a living thing. Beings take on the name of their completed potencies. The chapter closes with an examination of how the process of completion is a change into what one was in potency.
Chapter 5 examines the ontology of the process of generation. It argues that Aristotle's claim that natures only exist at the end of a genetic process means that generation is complete once a source of change, (i.e. a nature, a being), has come to be.
The previous chapter examined the definition of change, arguing that it is, in fact, a proof that change admits of being.
This chapter begins with an examination of the terms energeia and entelecheia, and ends with an examination of the senses in which change can be complete and incomplete. I distinguish between the categorical properties of changes and the sources of change, and argue that the proper sense of completeness and incompleteness of change must be related to its sources.
Chapter 1 argued that if change exists, being must be multiple.
Chapter 2 argues that the definition of change in Physics III is a proof for the existence of change--the proof that Physics I did not provide. The definition of change uses the terms potency, activity, and fulfillment. But to make it possible to define change, Aristotle needs to distinguish sharply between two primary senses of being, namely the categorical, and the "energetic" sense. He also needs to distinguish the being insofar as it is the subject of change (i.e. the being-in-potency), from the same being insofar as it is a categorical object bearing properties. In doing so he shows that potency has an ontological sense.
The proof goes as follows: buildable planks exist, but their buildability refers to something makes them buildable, namely the activity of building. Therefore the being of something that evidently exists depends on change in order to be what it is. Change, therefore, exists.
The core claim is this: Aristotle's response to the argument that change cannot exist does not establish the existence of change, but makes coherent descriptions of change possible. But for such descriptions to be possible, being must be multiple in aspect, divided into form, underlying, and privation. Change requires being to be multiple. Moreover, this very multiplicity is Aristotle's answer to how many being is.
Chapter 2 argues that the definition of change in Physics III is a proof for the existence of change--the proof that Physics I did not provide.
With no analogy between beauty and things, the beautiful itself is likely to be reduced to the sea of beauty: safe, stable, interchangeable and the opposite of singularity. However, for Plato to portray Socrates as irreducibly unique and followed by several mad lovers, is to suggest that the beautiful itself cannot be reduced to this sea. In the ascent to the beautiful, Diotima rises through three stages, each with a different account of singularity. Lack does not give us an account of a whole being, for the self is not an abyss to Diotima. Rather, lack describes a separation from a particular good it can possess. With possession comes happiness, and a wholeness that consists of good things. Her account of love and pregnancy, in contrast, is of a double being that senses and desires its own continuity in time.
The brilliance of this dialogue is that Plato describes an ascent to the beautiful, and then gives such a vivid example of someone who loves it. Alcibiades’ desire for satisfaction (his common eros) is indeed unreformed: he says philosophy burns his soul like snakebite because of these faults (217e-218a). Yet Socrates eros is also unfinished. While interpreters dismiss Alcibiades or show that he is unstable, the vehemence with which they do so suggests that he is also right about something. For he sees Socrates as the statue of a god.
before and after, a ‘now’. Movement itself, however, is not numerable: by marking off movement, the before and after have delimited that which we number, namely, time. That is, we mark off movement with before and after, but in doing so we do not count movement, nor do we count the ‘nows’ with which we number; instead, we count time. Thus Aristotle’s account of time does not presuppose the existence of time, nor does it reduce time to motion. It does not assume that time is linear or composed of discrete moments. It grapples with and gives an account of the original generation of time.
Existentialism is an attempt to think again, from the start, the human condition of action. The self-destruction of Western Civilization in the two World Wars was linked to radical attempts to control and produce individuals for mass society. Partly through the work of existentialist thinkers, these crises removed the moral authority of society, and revealed it to be an enemy of individuality. Thus freedom without guidance, the existence of others, and the nature of responsibility come to be central concerns of existentialist thinkers. By investigating human identity and its relationship with action in the world, they changed the individual’s relationship with society.
The rejection of experience by natural science, or rather, the act of shifting this experience onto external instruments, has not yet been fully incorporated into western culture. Existentialism attempted to measure what is lost in this shift, and to resist it, on the one hand, by arguing for the priority of practical and bodily experience over theoretical-scientific experience, and, on the other, by insisting on the individual’s inalienable authority to explore, express, and give meaning to experience.
The world of matter and force posited by scientific materialism is not a home for meaning. Its increasing presence in practical life is therefore directly proportional to the urgency of grasping whether, what, and where meaning is. Existentialism diagnoses and resists this crisis of nihilism or meaninglessness in human culture by engaging it fully. Some thinkers situate meaning in a natural life that animates and distorts it, while others oppose meaning to nature and biological life and place it entirely within human thought and action.
The first unit examines ethical life from the point of view of how it is shaped by our actions and beliefs. We frequently interact with people in a partial way, for example, when we make use of a cashier or a co-worker, knowing nothing about their lives. The partial way we interact can be determined by our job, without us really being aware of it. This partiality can be ethically disastrous, however, especially if it is unconscious. How do we learn the principles that determine the way we interact?
The second unit looks at key principles of our northern economic system: the individual as the basis of institutions, the faith that unadulterated self-interest will produce the common good, that the value of money is determined by labor, but if a business turns a profit the value of labor-power necessarily exceeds wages, the implications of money being created by financial institutions, corporate personhood, and the profit-motive of corporations.
The final unit examines how these business principles fit within the complex of human activities and natural systems. The key themes are: social and environmental justice, the limit of economic growth, principles of radical design, and the plenitude economy.
It seems self-evident that human beings are free. But what it means to be free is not at all clear. Freedom is a inescapable political reality: each person is herself a source of action who cannot be predicted or confined, and whose identity cannot be separated from her actions. But when science seeks the causes of phenomena it is unable to find freedom: freedom seems to escape thought.
This means that political freedom has an ambiguous relationship with morality. Is this dangerous? Or is the excellence we strive for in public enough to stabilize the political realm? On the other hand, freedom is also an inner experience, the experience of free will. Are we truly free to choose either good or evil, or can we only fully choose good, or are we ourselves the source of the good?
There is something about the structure of freedom that demands that we are true to ourselves, that we do not conflict with ourselves. And when we are true to ourselves, we are determined by a law at the heart of our freedom. If morality is possible, it cannot be relative, but instead must be universal: what is it about freedom that is universal?
As an inner accord, free-will never seems to appear in the world. How then could it be related to action? If freedom is to be irreducibly part of the world, then it must be impossible to escape in all circumstances: we do not choose to exist, but once we are, we are condemned to choose, and every moment we are responsible for the value we place on the world. Therefore we are irrevocably responsible for what happens, for ourselves, for wars around us, even for genocide. Such a burden seems impossible to bear, but to excuse ourselves from it is to come into conflict with ourselves, to act as though we were not free, but merely events or portions of the world.
Is there a self at all if it utterly belongs to the world, or does belonging allow us another kind of freedom? How can we flow with the events around us, be at peace with them, and bring them into harmony?
Finally, to fit with things and with people appropriately is to be an excellent human being. But excellence requires the training of desire and the cultivation of habits. This is not achieved through knowledge or reflection, but through action: you must play the guitar to become good at it, and you must be good at it to be free with it. Is this cultivated engagement with things and with other people at the core of how we come to agreement with ourselves?