Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Cosmological Significance Of Animal Generation, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

This paper explores the relation between Aristotle’s mature theory of animal generation and his broader cosmology.

Aristotle And Michael Of Ephesus On The Movement And Progression Of Animals Translated, With Introduction And Notes [Translation Of Studien Und Materialen Zur Geschichte Der Philosophie], Anthony Preus

Anthony Preus

The translation of Michael of Ephesus, Commentaries on The Movement of Animals and the Progression of Animals, here presented, are the first into a modern language. These are the only surviving Greek commentaries on these treaties.

Science And The Philosophy In Aristotle's Biological Works, Anthony Preus

Anthony Preus

The contents of this book cover observations and theories, science and philosophy in Aristotle's "Generation of Animals," understanding the organic parts, necessity and purpose in the explanation of nature, notes and a bibliography.

Topic 6: Aristotelian Ethics: The Virtue Of Success, Lee Eysturlid

Lee W. Eysturlid

No abstract provided.

Critical Moments In Classical Literature [Review], Lawrence Kim

Lawrence Kim

Critical Moments in Classical Literature is a curious book; deeply learned, elegantly written, and filled with subtle observations on a vast array of texts, but also somewhat diffuse, elusive, and in the end frustrating. On the face of it, the subtitle, Studies in the Ancient View of Literature and its Uses, is a good description of the book’s six chapters, each focused on a text constituting a ‘critical moment’ in ancient literary criticism: (1) Aristophanes’ Frogs, (2) Euripides’ Cyclops, (4) Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Imitation, (5) Longinus’ On the Sublime, and (6) Plutarch’s How the …

Aristoteles Über Leiber Und Leichen, Damian Caluori

Damian Caluori

Aristotle's hylomorphism involves the homonymy principle, which states that living bodies and dead bodies are essentially different. Both John Ackrill and Bernard Williams think that the homonymy principle leads to insoluble problems, especially to the so-called body-body-problem. In this essay I try to show that this problem is soluble through a close analysis of some of Aristotle's different concepts of matter.

Thinking About Friendship: Historical And Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, Damian Caluori

Damian Caluori

It is hard to imagine a good life without friendship. But what precisely makes friendship so valuable? And what is friendship at all? What unites friends and distinguishes them from others? Is the preference we give to friends rationally and morally justifiable? This collection of thirteen new essays on the philosophy of friendship considers such questions. In particular, it offers new interpretations of the answers given by famous classic philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Kant and provides fresh answers by leading contemporary philosophers. It is organized around five topics: the nature of friendship, the unity of friendship, friendship and …

The Essential Functions Of A Plotinian Soul, Damian Caluori

Damian Caluori

In reading Plotinus one might get the impression that the essential functions of a Plotinian soul are very similar to those of an Aristotelian soul. Plotinus talks of such vegetative functions as growth, nurture and reproduction. He discusses such animal functions as sense perception, imagination and memory. And he attributes such functions as reasoning, judging and having opinions to the soul. In Plotinus' Psychology, Blumenthal bases his whole discussion of the soul on an analysis of these functions. He concludes that Plotinus 'saw the soul's activities as the functions of a series of faculties which were basically those of Aristotle' …

Divine Practical Thought In Plotinus, Damian Caluori

Damian Caluori

Plotinus follows the Timaeus and the Platonist tradition before him in postulating the existence of a World Soul whose function it is to care for the sensible world as a whole. It is argued that, since the sensible world is providentially arranged, the World Soul’s care presupposes a sort of practical thinking that is as timeless as intellectual contemplation. To explain why this thinking is practical, the paper discusses Plotinus’ view on Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and poiêsis. To explain why it is timeless, it studies Plotinus’ view on Aristotle’s distinction between complete and incomplete actuality. The focus is on …

Reason And Necessity: The Descent Of The Philosopher Kings, Damian Caluori

Damian Caluori

One of the reasons why one might find it worthwhile to study philosophers of late antiquity is the fact that they often have illuminating things to say about Plato and Aristotle. Plotinus, in particular, was a diligent and insightful reader of those great masters. Michael Frede was certainly of that view, and when he wrote that '[o]ne can learn much more from Plotinus about Aristotle than from most modern accounts of the Stagirite', he would not have objected, I presume, to the claim that Plotinus is also extremely helpful for the study of Plato. In this spirit I wish to …

What Is Education? Re-Reading Metaphysics In Search Of Foundations, Angus Brook

Angus Brook

There is a sense in which contemporary approaches to education and to training teachers for a career in educating have for the most part forgotten the philosophical question of the meaning of education; namely, the question of why it is that humans by nature require education. It will be the aim of this article to go back to and re-interpret the metaphysical foundations of the question of what education means through an analysis of the ontological principle first expressed by Aristotle: that ‘being is always the being on an entity’. Through this return to and re-reading of the metaphysical foundations …

Rights, Individualism, Community: Aristotle And The Communitarian-Liberalism Debate, Jeffery Nicholas

Jeffery Nicholas

I argue that Aristotle could not be a fore-runner to liberalism, because his view of humanity is that human beings are constituted by a community and achieve self-fulfillment only as so constituted. Thus, Aristotle endorses a unique position that defends the freedom and self-development of the individual within the parameters of a social order.

Holding For The Most Part: The Demonstrability Of Moral Facts, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

No abstract provided.

From Aristotle’S Teleology To Darwin’S Genealogy: The Stamp Of Inutility, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (Pdf: Introduction)., Marco Solinas

Marco Solinas

Substance And The Primary Sense Of Being In Aristotle, Angus Brook

Angus Brook

Substantial Generation In Physics I 5-7, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

No abstract provided.

Virtue Ethics, Rule Of Law, And Self-Restriction, Stephen C. Angle

Stephen C. Angle

Others Play At Dice: Friendship And Dungeons And Dragons, Jeffery Nicholas

Jeffery Nicholas

D&D garners exemplify Aristotle's claim that "no one would want to live without friends" (1155a5). The popular view is that a gamer is a loner or maybe even a loser, someone without friends, who maybe spends his time in a room alone or, if he has managed to find other losers like himself, in his mom's basement until he's 40, unemployed, and still a virgin. Movies like Saving Silverman or Shaun o f the Dead play with this stereotype, some- times reinforcing it and at other times resisting it. Yet garners in fact value friendship highly. One might even see …

Food For Thought: Text And Sense In Aristotle, Poetics 19, John T. Kirby

John T. Kirby

An abstract for this item is not available.

Aristotle's Poetics: The Rhetorical Principle, John T. Kirby

John T. Kirby

An abstract for this item is not available.

Aristotle On Metaphor, John Kirby

John T. Kirby

An abstract for this item is not available.

In The Mood For A Little Dialogue?, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

A Dialogue About Whether or Not to Dialogue

The Failure Of Evolution In Antiquity, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

This paper traces the emergence and rejection of evolutionary thinking in antiquity. It examines Empedocles' original theory of evolution and why his ideas failed to gain traction among his predecessors.

The Birds And The Bees: Aristotle On The Biological Concept Of Analogy, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

No abstract provided.

Pieces Of Eight, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

A Monologue About Money and Markets

Optimality And Teleology In Aristotle's Natural Science, Devin Henry

Devin Henry

In this paper I examine the role of optimality reasoning in Aristotle’s natural science. By “optimality reasoning” I mean reasoning that appeals to some conception of “what is best” in order to explain why things are the way they are. We are first introduced to this pattern of reasoning in the famous passage at Phaedo 97b8-98a2, where (Plato’s) Socrates invokes “what is best” as a cause (aitia) of things in nature. This passage can be seen as the intellectual ancestor of Aristotle’s own principle, expressed by the famous dictum “nature does nothing in vain but always what is best for …

Of Buggers And Gods: Friendship In Ender’S Game, Jeffery Nicholas

Jeffery Nicholas

Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is a genius—a boy wonder who shouldn’t exist except that his older siblings showed such promise that the government allowed his parents to have a “Third.” Ender is so smart that he never loses a military strategy game at a school for geniuses. He’s such a genius that when fighting the alien buggers, he loses a few battles but wins the war. Orson Scott Card writes the story of Ender to make us believe that Ender’s genius rests on his ability to empathize with his enemy so that he can anticipate their strategy and use it to …

Taney’S Zeno And Scalia’S Mobilia, Peter Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Zeno’s most famous paradox (of motion) is related to us through Aristotle, who presents Zeno’s ‘problems’ in his Physics, 239b11-14. Aristotle “asserts (on Zeno’s behalf) the non-existence of motion on the ground that any object in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”

People For The Ethical Treatment Of Ethics, Raam P. Gokhale

Raam P Gokhale

A Dialogue on the Nature and Basis of Ethical Discourse

From Fleck’S Denkstil To Kuhn’S Paradigm: Conceptual Schemes And Incommensurability, Babette Babich

Babette Babich

This article argues that the limited influence of Ludwik Fleck’s ideas on philosophy of science is due not only to their indirect dissemination by way of Thomas Kuhn, but also to an incommensurability between the standard conceptual framework of history and philosophy of science and Fleck’s own more integratedly historico-social and praxis-oriented approach to understanding the evolution of scientific discovery. What Kuhn named “paradigm” offers a periphrastic rendering or oblique translation of Fleck’s Denkstil/Denkkollektiv, a derivation that may also account for the lability of the term “paradigm”. This was due not to Kuhn’s unwillingness to credit Fleck but rather to …