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To Hou Heneka And Continuous Change, Christopher Mirus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Beginning with Aristotle’s statement in Physics II.2 that motion must be continuous to be for the sake of an end, I argue that properly understood, continuity is actually a sufficient condition for the goal- directedness of any motion in Aristotle’s teleology. I establish this conclusion first for the simple motions discussed in Physics V-VI, and then for complex changes such as the generation and development of a living thing. In both steps of the argument, the notion of καθ’ αυτό agency serves as a key link between continuity and goal-directedness. The understanding of Aristotle’s teleology that emerges from the consideration …

Atoms, Complexes, And Demonstration: Posterior Analytics 96b15-25, Owen Goldin

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

There is agreement neither concerning the point that is being made in Posterior analytics 96b15-25 nor the issue Aristotle intends to address. There are two major lines of interpretation of this passage. According to one, sketched by Themistius and developed by Philoponus and Eustratius, Aristotle is primarily concerned with determining the definitions of the infimae species that fall under a certain genus. They understand Aristotle as arguing that this requires collating definitional predictions, seeing which are common to which species. Pacius, on the other hand, takes Aristotle to be saying that a genus is studied scientifically through first determining the …

Egoism And Eudaimonia - Maximization In The Nicomachean Ethics, Erik J. Wielenberg

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

I argue that Aristotle holds the following principle:

(AE) An ethically virtuous person always chooses a course of action that he believes promotes his own eudaimonia at least as much as any other course of action he could have chosen.

The claim that Aristotle holds such a principle conflicts with Richard Kraut’s interpretation of Aristotle’s view presented in Kraut’s important book Aristotle on the Human Good. I am inclined to count (AE) as a brand of egoism, primarily on the grounds that it implies that sacrificing one’s own eudaimonia for the sake of the eudaimonia of others is incompatible with …