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Anna Marmodoro, Doing and Being: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Theta, by Jonathan Beere., Mind, Volume 119, Issue 476, October 2010, Pages 1138–1141, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzq095
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‘What I do is me’. This powerful line by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which Beere quotes as a foreword to his monograph, captures the very essence of his interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of powers. The question Beere engages with is: What is the relation between an item having the power to φ but not exercising it, and that item engaged in φ-ing? The solution he puts forward on behalf of Aristotle is that for an item to exercise the power to φ is for it to be qualified by that power in a certain way. To use a paradigmatic Aristotelian example: for a person who has the power to build a house, exercising that power in housebuilding is a way of being a housebuilder. In short, doing is being.
Beere frames Aristotle’s question within a broader investigation into the nature of being initiated by Plato — which is in itself an interesting and useful contribution to the field of both Platonic and Aristotelian scholarship. In Plato’s Sophist two views on the nature of being are presented in opposition to each other, as a battle between the Giants and the Gods. The Giants hold that ‘a thing really is if it has any capacity at all … to do something to something else or to have even the smallest thing done to it’ (247d8-e4). As Beere puts it: ‘the Giants … associate being with change’ (p. 7). The other view, attributed to the Gods, is that ‘that which wholly is, is at rest’ (248e), which we can understand as the claim that being is (causally) inert. Who is right between the Giants and the Gods? What is the relation between being and change?
