Powers that be.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: I am grateful to read D.M. Armstrong's valuable review of George Molnar's Powers (September 2003). But I note that the review contains an error that Armstrong claims as his own. Armstrong proposes that "Accepting the powers enables one to dispense with the laws of nature, substituting instead the powers possessed by the different sorts of things that there are." As Armstrong asserts, Hume's polemic against the powers was indeed "scornful rhetoric". And Armstrong will be right to "stick with the laws", provided he sees them aright.

Armstrong seductively suggests we accept "the different sorts of things that there are". Apparently he refers to what Parmenides called "what is" and Aristotle called the "beingly being". The acceptance of powers has the great philosophical benefit that at a metaphysical level, in the present context, we do not have to live with the seventeenth-century ontological incoherence of "different sorts of things that there are": for there is only one sort of thing that really is "beingly being". It goes under a seductively bewildering variety of names: eros, energy, activity, passion, creativity, will, causality, spontaneity, originality. The rest is abstraction, delightful, inexecrable, manifold, indispensable for diverse business.

The powers are Aristotle's dunameis, potentials. They were recognised by Locke. They were discussed by Schelling, Lotze, Whitehead, to name a few. Most compellingly for us today, Werner Heisenberg said they are how quantum ...