Individual natural objects like electrons, gold, and living organisms are all clearly different kinds or categories of natural things, each with their own range of properties, natural tendencies, and activities distinctive of their kind. Natural objects are intrinsically dynamic and active some undergo radioactive decay, some biological assimilation, some spin, some dissolve in water, and others engage in the philosophical enterprise. For the contemporary Neo-Aristotelian, the natural world is a complex array of identifiable and empirically specifiable objects that stand in dynamic causal relations to one another. Teh, (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), and Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge (Germany: Editiones Scholasticae, 2019). For a few helpful overviews of the general contours of this neo-Aristotelian metaphysical framework see Brian Ellis, The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism (Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002), Robert C. Let me begin with a thumbnail sketch of a Neo-Aristotelian metaphysical picture that is currently on the rise in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science. My overall aim in this brief response to Paul Gould’s lead essay is to draw the reader’s attention to an area of contemporary moral philosophy-Neo-Aristotelian metaethics-that is ripe for rediscovery in the wake of the ongoing resurgence of Neo-Aristotelianism in metaphysics and philosophy of science.
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