Paul North: Likeness and Inertia

We will discuss the old concept “becoming” and how we could possibly see it as an effect of likenesses. A corrolary question is, then, how likenesses emerge and/or change. If an apple is like an orange in being a tree fruit, how can the apple at the same time or subsequently be like a planet, in being affected by gravity (Newton’s aperçu)? Wittgenstein calls this question “hard as granite.” What does it mean for something to be like two different things? Further, under what conditions might a thing’s likenesses change? The question cannot be answered as Wittgenstein posed it, however; individual examples or atomic instances cannot explain the emergence of likenesses. You need a view of the entire system of likenesses and the strange non-force that governs it, inertia, and for that Henri Bergson’s argument in Matter and Memory is useful.