Two Metaphysical Naturalisms: Aristotle and Justus Buchler by Victorino Tejera (review)

The American philosophical school called “Columbia Naturalism” began with Aristotle. That is, the naturalist thinkers at Columbia University over the first half of the 20th century, including John Dewey and Ernest Nagel, began with F.J.E. Woodbridge (1867–1940), Columbia’s famed Aristotelian from 1902 to 1937 and founder of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (today The Journal of Philosophy). Dewey (1859–1952) arrived in 1904, retired in 1930. Later John Herman Randall (1899–1980, Columbia Ph.D.1922, hired 1920) took up the cause of interpreting Aristotle so as to be consistent with the “functionalist” naturalism of Dewey, presented in his 1960 Aristotle. A third generation philosopher, student and friend of Randall’s, Justus Buchler (1914–1991, Columbia PhD 1938, hired 1942), produced a unique “ordinal naturalism.” Buchler acknowledged kinship with Aristotle, especially in his theory of judgment.

Victorina Tejera, (1922–, Columbia PhD 1956) a student of Buchler’s and Randall’s, eventually a professor at State University of New York at Stony Brook with Buchler (now Stony Brook University), author of some 16 books, has been the most prominent of the classicists of the Columbia school since the days of Randall. Atila Bayat has collected a series of his writings on the Greeks and the American philosophers. Two Metaphysical Naturalisms advances the Columbian project in two ways: it provides a sustained reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, with careful attention to his Greek and its alterations by editors and translators; and it relates that metaphysics to the work of Buchler, providing important parallels. In effect, it is an update of Randall’s Aristotle with greater scholarly depth (in regard to the Metaphysics) and the advantage of more recent work. Part One is an introductory chapter, partly written by editor Bayat. After that, the book has three parts: eleven chapters commenting on the fourteen books of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; four chapters on Buchler’s metaphysics and theory of judgment; and four chapters relating Peirce and Buchler to Aristotle, Plato, and Parmenides.

Part Two, Tejera’s interpretation of Aristotle, like Randall’s rests on the claim that what appears to be Platonism in Aristotle derives not from Aristotle but from Hellenistic and later editors and translators (Speusippos, Theophrastus, Andronikos of Rhodes, and of course the Latin medievals). Plato himself was not the Plato of the Platonists, Tejera argues. Who would have known this better than Aristotle? The naturalist reading hangs on three points. First, the project of metaphysics for Aristotle is to seek the most generic features of the plural kinds of determinate beings, not the Unity of existence, nor the True Being behind all appearances. Second, Aristotle’s “ousia” or primary being is read as a natural process. Tejera refers to Randall’s interpretation of “substance,” the Latin translation of ousia: “Substance is a complex of interacting and cooperating processes, each exhibiting its own determinate ways of cooperating, or Structure.”(Randall 1958, p.152) Third, the “unmoved mover” of Aristotle’s text must be interpreted as a principle of motion’s intelligibility, not a physical cause or ideal immaterial being or God. Thus Aristotle is a process and naturalist philosopher.

Much hangs on questions of translation. The common translation of Aristotle’s epistêmê as science “obliterates the fact that Aristotle’s praktikê and poiêtikê were not inferior species of knowledge, but equally kinds of knowledge, i.e. equally epistêmai along with theôritkê.”(Tejera 2015, p.24) Knowledge and reason apply indifferently to the three, hence to the practical, the poetic, and the theoretical. Buchler, Tejera rightly explains, makes this claim the core of his own theory of human judgment. Judgment comes equally in the forms of assertion, action, and exhibition, and when systematic and methodical, this yields three forms of what Buchler calls “query,” namely, inquiry, morality, and art. (Buchler 1955) For Buchler and Tejera, these three are functions; the same product may serve exhibitive or assertive or active functions in different...