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The Nature of Artifacts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Michael Losonsky
Michael Losonsky
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
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Extract

In Book II, Chapter 1 of the Physics Aristotle attempts to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. He begins by stating that a natural object ‘has in itself a source of change and staying unchanged, whether in respect of place, or growth and decay, or alteration’. But this is not sufficient to distinguish natural objects from artifacts. As he points out later, a wooden bed, for example, can rot or burn, and this is surely a change whose source is, in part, internal to the bed. To make his distinction, Aristotle writes that in a natural object the internal ‘source of change and remaining unchanged’ belongs to it ‘primarily and of itself, that is, not by virtue of concurrence’. The bed rots because it happens to be made of wood: the change is due to its material, not due to its essence, namely that it is a bed. A natural object, however, changes because of its essence, that is, because it is the natural object that it is.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 251 , January 1990 , pp. 81 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 Physics, trans. Charlton, W. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 192b20–2Google Scholar; also see 193a10–17.

2 Ibid., 192b15–20.

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19 Ibid., 6.

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26 Landes, , 124ff.Google Scholar

27 I wish to thank Carl Steen for introducing me to the sciences of artifacts and Jim Fetzer for encouragement.