Potency And Act, Distinguished

As I noted on Thursday, Edward Feser’s new book Scholastic Metaphysics came in the mail. Feser writes clearly about difficult topics, but in this book he’s going into a little more detail than in the past, and I’m finding that I need to work a little harder to dig into it.

In Section 1.1.3, he discusses the concepts of Potency and Act, and breaks them down categorically, identifying all of the usual terms that relate to them and how they relate to each other. But you can’t tell the players without a program, and I found it necessary to draw a diagram to make sense of it all.

I don’t intend to explain what Potency and Act are today (though I’ll need to get around to that sometime in the next couple of weeks), but I thought the diagram might be of use to others reading the book. Here it is. You can click on it to see it full size.