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Democracy In Plato's Republic: How Bad Is It Supposed To Be?, Mason Marshall

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Scholars have typically thought that in the Republic democracy is supposed to be worse than timarchy and oligarchy. But lately, certain commentators have denied that it is. Is it, then? I argue that pursuing this question leads us to a dead end, because it is not clear how bad democracy is supposed to be in the Republic. Perhaps a debate on this topic would help us answer other questions, whatever they might be; but otherwise it would be fruitless. To make my case, I marshal the strongest available evidence that democracy is supposedly better than timarchy and oligarchy. Next I …

Aristotle On [Part Of] The Difference Between Belief And Imagination, Ian Mccready Flora

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

In book 3, chapter 3 of his On the Soul, Aristotle gives several arguments meant to demonstrate the type non-identity of belief and imagination. Each of these arguments rewards study, but this discussion will focus on one in particular, perhaps the most puzzling. The argument concerns the relation between truth and control. Belief is connected with truth and falsehood in a way that imagination is not, and that in turn means that we can control what we imagine in a way that we cannot control what we believe. Here is Aristotle’s argument in full:

(1) It’s clear as well …

Aristotle's Generic Being, Edward C. Halper

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Being is not a genus in the strict sense because there is no categorial nature that is common to all beings. This paper argues that Aristotle nevertheless treats being as a genus, that this treatment is what he means in Metaphysics Gamma by the science that studies being qua being, and that what is common to all beings is not some particular nature, but their each having a nature. This nature is its ousia, and in Gamma, these ousiai are the primary beings to which other beings are related, though later in the Metaphysics, in a different stage …

Aristotle On Friendship And Self-Knowledge: The Friend Beyond The Mirror, Mavis Biss

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Read through the lens of modern concerns regarding shard moral perception and difference between the self and other, Aristotle’s theory of primary friendship raises challenging questions regarding the role of relationships in moral self-evaluation. Aristotle’s emphasis on sameness of character in his description of the virtuous friend as “another self” figures centrally in all of his arguments for the necessity of friendship to self-knowledge. Although the attribution of the Magna Moralia to Aristotle is disputed, the comparison of the friend to a mirror in this work has encouraged many commentators to view the friend as a mirror that provides the …

Citizenship And Participation In Government In Ancient Greek Political Thought, Anthony Preus

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

Sections cover a historical account of citizenship, comments on Plato's account of citizenship, the political motivation of Aristotle's definition of citizenship, and the historical consequences of Aristotle's definition of citizenship.

Free Trade And The Environment, Nicole Hassoun

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

What should environmentalists say about free trade? Many environmentalists object to free trade by appealing the “Race to the Bottom Argument.” This argument is inconclusive, but there are reasons to worry about unrestricted free trade’s environmental effects nonetheless; the rules of trade embodied in institutions such as the World Trade Organization may be unjustifiable. Programs to compensate for trade-related environmental damage, appropriate trade barriers, and consumer movements may be necessary and desirable. At least environmentalists should consider these alternatives to unrestricted free trade if they do not prevent the achievement of other important moral objectives, can efficiently reduce environmental problems, …

Meeting Need, Nicole Hassoun

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This article considers the question ‘How should institutions enable people to meet their needs in situations where there is no guarantee that all needs can be met?’ After considering and rejecting several simple principles for meeting needs, it suggests a new effectiveness principle that (1) gives greater weight to the needs of the less well off and (2) gives weight to enabling a greater number of people to meet their needs. The effectiveness principle has some advantage over the main competitors including a principle suggested by David Miller in Principles of Social Justice. Miller argues that his principle accounts …

Sagp Newsletter 2008/9.2 Central, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Sagp Newsletter 2008/9.1 East Philol, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Announcement of SAGP programs with the American Philological Association and with the American Philosophical Association 2008/2009 academic year.

Sagp/Ssips 2008 Program, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Sagp/Ssips 2008 Abstract Collection, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Belief And Persuasion In The Socratic Elenchus, Dylan Futter

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Socrates’ philosophical method is how unsuccessful it is. One problem is that elenchus seems able only to destroy common belief without generating anything substantive in its place. Another is that it seems incapable of getting anyone to relinquish his unsupported beliefs. Plato is acutely aware of these problems. In the Meno, he undertakes to show that Socrates’ method of inquiry is capable of generating substantive results. In the Gorgias, he reveals why some people are not moved by reasoned argument. And in the Republic he proposes a complex model of moral belief-formation, …

Aristotle's Abstract Ontology, Allan Bäck

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle has a metaphysics of individual substances, substrata persisting through time that are neither in nor said of a subject. That I do not dispute. However, when we move from the individual to the universal, from perception to knowledge, Aristotle has a metaphysics of relations. This I will try to sketch out here.

Aristotle appeals to abstraction at key places in his philosophy. Somehow abstraction gets us to the first principles and to the objects of the most fundamental sciences. Somehow universals are abstracted from singulars and have no transcendent existence.

Aristotle never states his theory of abstraction formally or …

Plato And Aristotle On The Instant Of Change - A Dilemma, John Bowin

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

There is an ancient puzzle about motion in Plato at Parmenides 155e-157b which has been the subject of scholarship by Richard Sorabji and more recently, Nico Strobach.1 The puzzle, as Plato gives it, can be roughly summarized as follows: At every time, a given object must either be in motion or at rest; there is no third possibility. Also, an object can never be simultaneously both in motion and at rest. The only way for an object to be both in motion and at rest is for it to be in motion and at rest at different times. But how …

Sagp Newsletter 2007/8.2 Pacific Central, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Appetites And Actions In Aristotle's Moral Psychology, Tom Olshewsky

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

The so-called practical syllogism is best understood in dispositional terms. Animate movement originates with orexis (appetite), but appetite is the result of the coming together of dual dispositions, the orektikon and the orekton. For calculative appetite, multiple objectives can be imagined, and deliberation determines which objective is best for this person in this circumstance. Deliberation is an antecedent of the actualized appetite, not its consequence. This psychology makes clear that satisfaction of appetites is a two-stage process for calculative beings: first the determination of the appetite, then movement to fulfillment in its objective. In deliberation, the determination is which …

Persuasion And Force In Plato's Republic, Christopher Moore

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Despite the frequent pairing of and contrast between persuasion and force, Plato’s Republic undermines any coherent split between these two modes of handling others. This paper provides two major pieces of evidence to support this claim: (i) Book I dramatizes the weakness of the distinction; and (ii) the arguments that the best rulers will rule only under coercion (in Books I, V, VII, and IX) makes the distinction into an obvious conundrum. Further evidence omitted here is Plato’s tendency to subvert this same rhetorically popular binary elsewhere, especially Statesman, Sophist and Laws. Given that Plato doesn’t explicitly question the persuasion-force …

Aristotle's Analytic Tools, Mary Mulhern

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle developed analytic tools to deal with conceptual difficulties that were important in his time. Some of these tools are his explicit analysis of homonymy, his eightfold classification of subjects and predicates and its elaboration into the predicaments and predicables, his syntactical analysis of ordinary language sentences, and his construction of a formal language for deductive and demonstrative syllogistic. Some of these conceptual difficulties are traceable to theories of Ideas, in which definitory predicates were not distinguished from non-definitory ones, as for instance in Hypothesis V of the Parmenides, where it is argued that the (non-existent) one is not equal …

Studying Mathematics For The Sake Of The Good, Andrew Payne

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

In the Republic, Socrates describes the good as the end of all human action: “Every soul pursues the good and does what it does for its sake. It divines that the good is something but it is perplexed and cannot adequately grasp what it is or acquire the sort of stable beliefs it has about other things, and so it misses the benefits, if any, that even those other things may give.” I wish to examine how humans act for the sake of the good in the sections of the Republic following this passage. Human action is oriented toward the …

Sagp Newsletter 2007/8.1 (December), Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Includes the SAGP Programs with the Eastern Division (December 28, 2007) in Baltimore, with the American Philological Association (January 4, 2008) in Chicago, with the Pacific Division (March 2008) in Pasadena, and with the Central Division (April 2008) in Chicago.

Sagp/Ssips 2007 Abstract Collection, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

This is a collection of abstracts from the 2007 SAGP/SSIPS conference, in alphabetical order by name of author.

Aristotle On Mathematical Existence, Phil Corkum

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Do mathematical objects exist in some realm inaccessible to our senses? It may be tempting to deny this. For one thing, how we could come to know mathematical truths, if such knowledge must arise from causal interaction with non-empirical objects? However, denying that mathematical objects exist altogether has unsettling consequences. If you deny the existence of mathematical objects, then you must reject all claims that commit you to such objects, which means rejecting much of mathematics as it is standardly understood. For, as David Papineau (1990) vividly puts it, it is doublethink to deny that mathematical objects exist but to …

On The (In)Consistency Of Aristotle's Philosophy Of Time, Tiberiu Popa

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Aristotle’s mind-dependence theory of time is considerably more than an eccentric afterthought formulated in a short passage, as many believe; rather, it is firmly anchored in Physics IV, especially in Ch. 11. A number of formulations that may seem purely epistemic or propaedeutic in nature do in fact have ontological significance, pointing to the fact that time’s existence hinges crucially on our capacity to perceive change. Aristotle seems to be echoed in crucial respects by contemporary theories of time, notably by A. Grünbaum’s.

Socrates's Great Escape: Philosophy And Politics In The Crito, Matthew King

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Many contemporary students of Plato hold that the arguments Socrates gives the personified Laws in the Crito do not represent Socrates’s own views, but rather work on assumptions to which Crito adheres, but Socrates does not. But if the Laws’ arguments are not Socrates’s own, then we seem to be left with a bewildering problem: why would Plato provide us with arguments that Socrates does not believe in, for a conclusion which Socrates evidently does believe in? After all, Socrates does remain in prison to face his execution; evidently, he believes that that is what he ought to do. This …

The Tension Between Altruistic Character And Self-Serving Possession In A Classical Socio-Political Ethic, Jeremy S. Neill

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Much of the Nicomachean Ethics treats egocentrism as an ineffectual and pernicious social vice out of which humans ought to be habituated. In the Politics self-centeredness is almost universally portrayed as a useful and enduring constituent of human psychology. The system of private property described in the Politics can hardly be a necessary social institution when Aristotle claims in the Ethics that the habituation process is capable of permanently fixing our attention upon public and altruistic fiscal ventures. This interpretive discrepancy between the two texts demonstrates that Aristotle’s defense of private property is ineffectual in its attempt to preserve the …

Sagp Newsletter 2006/7.2, Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Programs of the Society with the Pacific Division, April 7, 2007, in San Francisco, and with the Central Division, April 20, 2007, in Chicago.

Trading Quality For Quantity, Christopher Morgan-Knapp

Philosophy Faculty Scholarship

This paper deals with problems that vagueness raises for choices involving evaluative tradeoffs. I focus on a species of such choices, which I call ‘qualitative barrier cases.’ These are cases in which a qualitatively significant tradeoff in one evaluative dimension for a given improvement in another dimension could not make an option better all things considered, but a merely quantitative tradeoff for the given improvement might. Trouble arises, however, when one of the options constitutes a borderline case of an evaluative kind. I argue that in such cases we can neither affirm nor deny that trading off losses in one …

Resembling Nothing: Image And Being In Plato, Yancy Hughes Dominick

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

A crucial application of Plato’s views on the use of images in philosophy occurs through the use of the image relationship as an image for the relation of forms and particulars. The relation of a picture to the object it depicts, or that between a reflection and what it reflects, can be seen as analogous to the relation of a particular to the form in which it participates. Although the attack on the image model as analogous to the relation of forms and particulars in the Parmenides threatens to undermine any reliance on that model, this essay will present a …

Aristotle On Sense Perception: The Enemy Of My Enemy Is Not My Friend: A Reply To Martha Nussbaum And Hilary Putnam, Anthony Crifasi

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Among the many contributions to twentieth century philosophical scholarship by Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam was their 1992 essay, “Changing Aristotle’s Mind,” in which they appealed to “the Aristotelian form - matter view as a happy alternative” between Cartesian dualism and materialistic reductionism. On the one hand, they argued, Aristotle’s view escapes Cartesian mind-body dualism because for Aristotle, there can be no description of animal functions “without making these functions ... embodied in some matter...” On the other hand, Aristotle does not reduce psychological functions to matter, because the Aristotelian psuche or soul is not identified with the matter of …

Sagp Newsletter 2006/7.1 (December), Anthony Preus

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

No abstract provided.