A Philosophical Analysis of Learning: What Can Aristotle’s Account of Act and Potency Teach Us?

Abstract

A Philosophical Analysis of Learning: What Can Aristotle’s Account of Act and Potency Teach Us? Angus Brook Over the last few decades there has been a revival in interest in a loosely speaking Aristotelian notion of powers in metaphysics1 and a corresponding scholarly interest in Aristotle’s connected notions of potency and act.2 One excellent piece of scholarship in this area is Anna Marmodoro’s relatively recent book Aristotle on Perceiving Objects.3 The primary objective of this work is to properly interpret Aristotle’s metaphysics of causal powers as the basis of explaining his theory of perceiving objects and to show that Aristotle’s theory of perception is worthy of consideration in contemporary philosophical arguments about powers. The argument of this book is compelling and provides an excellent interpretation of Aristotle’s account of perception. What is particularly interesting about Marmodoro’s book, for the purposes of this article, is that, in explaining how Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of causal powers works, the book enters into a fairly extended discussion of Aristotle’s account of teaching and learning insofar as both can be understood with regard to the potency–act relation, specifically the [End Page 3] relation between agency and passion. In reading Marmadoro’s arguments, I began to wonder what Aristotle’s account of the potency– act relation might have to teach us about learning.4 This article is an attempt to make a beginning at answering this question. In order to attempt to answer the question of what Aristotle may have to teach us about learning, the article will be divided into four parts: The first will discuss the analysis of teaching and learning to be found in Marmodoro’s book on perception; the second part will move to a broader discussion of Aristotle’s notions of potency and act; the third part will then focus more specifically on the powers of the intellect, which in turn will then serve as the basis for the application of Aristotle’s notions of potency and act to an account of learning, which I will develop in the fourth part.5 I will argue that there are three things in particular Aristotle has to teach about learning today: (1) that learning is primarily grounded in our passive dispositions of receptivity to the world; (2) that learning, properly speaking, is the integration of what we learn into ourselves such that we are transformed by learning; and (3) that learning is how we become who we are: contemplative beings who have the potential in a way to become all things.6 Given that Aristotelian [End Page 4] philosophy, as the love of wisdom, is marked out by a lifelong activity of learning the truth, it may well be that Aristotle’s account of learning might also have something to teach even philosophers not particularly interested in the philosophy of education. I Marmodoro’s book, as mentioned above, aims to unpack and explain Aristotle’s account of perception within the context of his “powers ontology.” For this reason, the work is primarily concerned with Aristotle’s account of dunamis (traditionally translated as “potency”) in those circumstances that dunamis operates as a causal power. One of the trickiest aspects of Aristotle’s account of power, in this sense, is his account of agency and patiency (receptivity): when the power of an agent is actualized, or activated, in another substance. Aristotle’s argument here is important to Marmodoro’s work because perception is about precisely this kind of causal relation between perceived objects and the perceiver. As such, it will set the scene for his account of perception. According to Aristotle, however, teaching and learning, alongside the medical relation of physician and patient, is an exemplar of this kind of causal relationship. It is in this context that Marmodoro enters into a relatively extended discussion of teaching and learning. According to Marmodoro’s discussion of Aristotle’s position, this kind of causal relation is always a relation between an active (causal) power and a passive power, or the relationship between the mover and the moveable. 7 Causation is, in this context, a mutual activation of causal powers. This mutual activation, Marmodoro...