For Aristotelians, abilities play a fundamental explanatory role: it is by referring to abilities that Aristotelians explain what living beings are and how they act, without further analyzing abilities as such. Early modern anti-Aristotelians ridiculed this approach as generating mere pseudo-explanations. In their view, abilities must be reduced to something more fundamental or even eliminated. Anti-Aristotelianism remained the default position even into the revival of metaphysics in twentieth-century analytic philosophy, but more recently it, too, has come under critical scrutiny. Philosophers of science, philosophers of mind, and metaphysicians again freely use Aristotelian concepts such as power and ability without feeling the need to either reduce or eliminate them. Is this progress or regression? And what would a plausible Aristotelian theory look like today? We will discuss these questions from an intradisciplinary standpoint, establishing a dialogue between contemporary philosophy and the history of philosophy.

Barbara Vetter is professor of philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and vice-president of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy (GAP). After completing her BPhil and DPhil in philosophy at Oxford, she taught at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg before moving to FU Berlin. Her research is primarily in contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language, focusing on issues concerning abilities, powers, and possibilities. With Dominik Perler, she co-directs the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities “Human Abilities.” Barbara Vetter is the author of Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality (OUP, 2015) and numerous articles in journals including Mind, Analysis, Philosophical Studies, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

Dominik Perler is professor of philosophy at Humboldt-Universität and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. He taught at Oxford and Basel before moving to Berlin in 2003. His visiting appointments have included UCLA, Princeton, Tel Aviv University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Université libre de Bruxelles, and the École normale supérieure and École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His research focuses on medieval and early modern philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, epistemology, and metaphysics. With Barbara Vetter, he co-directs the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities “Human Abilities.” Dominik Perler’s recent books include The Faculties: A History (editor, OUP, 2015), Feelings Transformed: Philosophical Theories of the Emotions, 1270–1670 (author, OUP, 2018), Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy (co-editor, Routledge, 2020), and Eine Person sein: Philosophische Debatten im Spätmittelalter (author, Klostermann, 2020).