Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Aristotelianism in the news

Recently, in considering whether Pringles count as potato crisps, for the purposes of British taxation, Lord Justice Robin Jacob

was even more dismissive of Procter & Gamble’s argument that to be taxable a product must contain enough potato to have the quality of “potatoness.” This “Aristotelian question” of whether a product has the “essence of potato,” he insisted, simply cannot be answered.
See the whole article.

3 comments:

Tim Lacy said...

The irony here is that, in terms of Aristotle, this seems rather to be an issue of division gone wrong than any issue of essence/species.

Brian said...

So is potatoness a graded property?

Heath White said...

Why isn't this a platonic question?