Indeterminacy and Change in Ancient Metaphysics
(2026) Indeterminacy in Ancient Philosophy — ISBN: [9781441123596], accepted/in-press
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- My aim is to present and discuss the ancient idea that, at least in some re-spects, some specific items within the ontology are indeterminate or indefinite ‘beings’ (the inverted commas are important here since ancient philosophers draw a sharp distinction between being and becoming), namely those in motion or in process of changing. The view was held, albeit in quite different ways, by Heraclitus (and, may-be, by alleged or so-called proponents of Heraclitus’ theory of flux as Protagoras (but Lee 2005: 77-117 and Zilioli 2007: 38-53 have argued, successfully I believe, that Hera-clitean processualism is a thesis that Protagoras never held) or the ‘cleverer people’ from Tht. 156e-160e, Pythagoreans, Plato and Aristotle. I shall expound their posi-tions in turn with an emphasis on Plato and Aristotle (roughly: Plato’s kinematical passages in the Parmenides leaves open the possibility that there are objects that only partially participate in the idea of Being, see Marion 2025b, whereas, for Aristo-tle, an object can have properties by degree and, more famously, objects in motion are neither completely virtual nor fully actual in all respects, see Phys. 3.1-3 and Met. K.9). Obviously, such an idea – moving objects are indefinite entities (at least in some respects) – clashes with Parmenidean ideology (for a philosophical reconstruc-tion of Eleaticism and an in-depth discussion of the texts, I refer the reader to the now classic and still unmatched Barnes 19791: 155-302; for a recent comeback of a ‘soft’ Parmenideanism in contemporary metaphysics, see Mumford 2021, esp. 3-13, note that Mumford does not endorse Parmenides’ rejection of change, see Mumford 2021: 12-13), for the Eleatic stance claims, first, that being is not a qualification which admits degree or indefiniteness (indeed, Parmenides seems to explicity claim that there are no degrees of being in frg. 8.11-48, see Mumford 2021: 7-8), and, sec-ond, that nothing changes or moves (recall Zeno’s four arguments against motion – the Dichotomy, the Achilles, the Arrow and the Stadium – and Melissus’ reasonings against motion, coming-to-be and alteration ). I will reconstruct the discussion be-tween Parmenidean zealots and their opponents by putting together these two lines of thought: the Eleatics support the denial of change because being is always deter-minate (remind the Eleatic challenge that things cannot go in and out of being, given that something can come-to-be neither from what is already nor from nothing, and the Megarian view in Met. Θ.3 + the fact that Melissus’s arguments are driven from the undefended assumption of the absoluteness of being, and not the reverse, in such a way that MO grounds M rather that the reverse), while the other philosophers (Heraclitus, Pythagoreans, Plato, Aristotle) argue that change is real and, conse-quently, that there are indeterminate beings within the natural world. (+ Refik’s hyperintensional question: either MO grounds M, or M grounds MO) Such a discussion will drive us from metaphysics to logic with some closing remarks on the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC), change and indeterminacy (in fact to some remarks about the PNC and its companion, at least in classical and an-cient logics, the Principle of Excluded-Middle (PEM) for indeterminacy can be under-stood either as underdeterminacy – for a predicate X, an item is neither determinate-ly X nor determinately not-X – or as overdeterminacy – for a predicate X, an item is both determinately X and determinately not-X, see Aristotle’s Met. Γ.4-8 for such a difference in a discussion of PNC and PEM: according to Aristotle and classical logic, the rejection of the first leads to trivialism – putatively instantiated by Heraclitus’ processualism –, the denial of the second to nihilism – Anaxagoras’ primordial and universal mixture as interpreted in Met. A.8 989a30-b21, Γ.7 1012a26-28 (see Mar-modoro 2017 for a reconstruction of Anaxagoras’ metaphysics as gunky) –, that is, to two very different kinds of metaphysical indeterminacy). Indeed, on the one hand, the Parmenidean commitment to the truth of the PNC grounds the Eleatic change-less worldview since, ultimately, all Eleatic arguments are reductiones ad absurdum which aim to find contradictions in nonbeing, multiplicity or change (on the ‘con-sistency assumption’ of Eleatic logic, see Priest & Routley 1989a: 7-8; on Parmenides’ view on PNC and PEM, see Sattler 2020: 35-36, 88-91, 130-132); and, on the other hand, following Plato’s Tht., Aristotle explicitly argues that it is a commonplace view that Heraclitus’ theory of flux (everything is always changing in every respect – but see Barnes 19791: 68-69 who distinguishes Heraclitus’ ‘moderate’ or ‘restricted’ flux theory and Cratylus’ ‘extreme’ or ‘unrestricted’ one: the former would say that eve-rything always changes in some respects, while the latter, according to Met. Γ.5 1010a7-15, would claim that everything always changes in all respects – see Marion 2027 for a philosophical analysis of Cratylus’ ontological and semantic processualism) entails the denial of the PNC which itself entails metaphysical indeterminacy (Met. Γ.5 1010a7-b1, cf. Tht. 182c-e and Cra. 439d-e) . However, equipped with his account of change as ‘actuality (ἐντελέχεια) of what is virtually (δυνάμει)-X insofar as it is virtually-X’ , Aristotle is able both to break these entailments (that is, to keep the truth of the Principle of Non-Contradiction in a restless world) and to explain what means to be indeterminate for an item in motion (that is, to make metaphysical in-determinacy understandable and intelligible: roughly, Aristotle does that by equating ‘to be indeterminately-X’ and ‘to be virtually-X’) without falling in Heraclitus’ deeply inconsistent and indeterminate abysses. To sum up, my paper will move from metaphysics (change and indeterminacy) to logic (Principle of Non-Contradiction, change, and indeterminacy, in that order) by means of meta-ontology (definiteness/indefiniteness of being, indeterminacy, and change, in that order) in order to better understand the commonplace idea in an-cient philosophy that change implies indeterminacy.
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Marion, F. (2026). Indeterminacy and Change in Ancient Metaphysics. In Güremen, Refik & Zilioli, Ugo (ed.), Indeterminacy in Ancient Philosophy (Bloomsbury). Bloomsbury. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/260702