J.L. Ackrill's work on Plato and Aristotle has had a considerable influence upon ancient philosophical studies in the late twentieth century. This volume collects the best of Ackrill's essays on the two greatest philosophers of antiquity. With philosophical acuity and philological expertise he examines a wide range of texts and topics--from ethics and logic to epistemology and metaphysics--that continue to be in the focus of debate.

It has long been recognized that anyone seriously interested in Aristotle's moral philosophy will need to take full account of the Eudemian Ethics, a work still gravely neglected in favor of the better-known Nicomachean Ethics. The relation between the two continues to be the subject of lively scholarly debate. This volume contains a translation of three of the eight books of the Eudemian Ethics--those that are likely to be of most interest to philosophers today--together with a philosophical commentary on these (...) books from a contemporary point of view. Intended to serve the needs of readers of Aristotle without a knowledge of Greek, this book's aim in translation has been to give as accurate an idea as possible of Aristotle's text; but for the benefit of those who are able to read the original, there are notes on the Greek text used for problematic passages. (shrink)

For Aristotle the fallacy of accident arises from mistakes about being per accidens and not from accidental predication. Mistakes in perceiving per accidens come from our judgements about being per accidens and so commit that fallacy. Practical syllogisms have the same formal structure as being and perceiving per accidens . Moreover perceiving per accidens typically provides the minor premise for the practical syllogism as it makes it possible for us to know singular propositions, especially those about substances. Thus these minor (...) premises may come about through fallacious reasoning, what today would be called reasoning via collateral information. On account of these foundations for the practical syllogism, even a person of practical wisdom will need a lot of luck to avoid mistakes. (shrink)

The paper discusses Heidegger's early notion of the “movedness of life” (Lebensbewegtheit) and its intimate connection with Aristotle's concept of movement (kinēsis). Heidegger's aim in the period of Being and Time was to “overcome” the Greek ideal of being as ousia – constant and complete presence and availability – by showing that the background for all meaningful presence is Dasein, the ecstatically temporal context of human being. Life as the event of finitude is characterized by an essential lack and incompleteness, (...) and the living present therefore gains meaning only in relation to a horizon of un-presence and un-availability. Whereas the “theological” culmination of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics finds the supreme fulfillment of human life in the semi-divine self-immanence and self-sufficiency of the bios theōrētikos, a radical Heideggerian interpretation of kinēsis may permit us to find in Aristotle the fundamental structures of mortal living as self-transcendent movement. (shrink)

Contemporary political discourse is marked with the language of democracy, and Western countries in particular seek to promote democracy at home and abroad. However, there is a sublimated conflict in general political discourse between a desire to rely on alleged political experts and a desire to assert the supposed common sense of all men. Can the struggle between the democratic and aristocratic values embodied in this conflict be reconciled? The question is perennial, and raises issues that are central to constitutional (...) design. Aristotle, developing in significant ways insights made by his teacher Plato, grapples with it in his Politics. Aristotle's views on these matters are relevant—by way of the American Founders'—to contemporary American politics and modern democracies generally. During the eighteenth century, the Founders, some of whom explicitly reached back to Aristotle's work, also struggled—especially in The Federalist Papers—with these thorny issues of constitutional design. They created the U.S. Constitution in part to address these very same problems and issues. We are living in some ways, then, in the shadow of Aristotle's political theorizing, albeit as transposed by the American Founders. Both Aristotle and some of the American Founders theoretically favor aristocracy over democracy, but concede that in practice a blend of the two has to be integrated into the fundamental structure of political society. We need to reconnect with these important political discussions in order to come to terms with aristocratic and democratic values in our current circumstances. Footnotesa I am grateful to Fred Miller and David Keyt for many helpful suggestions and thoughtful questions throughout the editing process. I would also like to thank Irfan Khawaja for valuable feedback on an earlier version of this essay. (shrink)

This is a ground-breaking study of the consequences of a central problem in Aristotle's Metaphysics in the interpretation given to it by Islamic and Christian Aristotelian philosophers: the relationship between individuals as individuals, and individuals as instances of a universal. Father Booth begins from an examination of the factors causing the aporia in the centre of Aristotle's ontology, going on to elaborate the way in which it occurred sometimes with confused reactions among the Greek, Syrian and Arab commentators, and to (...) note in particular the modifications to the weighting of elements in Aristotle's ontological figures (differing in detail, but in tendency the same) when his ontology was brought into the union with Platonist and other thought conventionally known as `Neoplatonism'. The discussion culminates in two chapters on the different reconciliations of the radical Aristotelian and the Neoplatonist traditions, proposed by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, in which the factors in the aporia have a key importance. (shrink)

From ancient times Aristotle, On the Soul II 11, 422b34ff. on the perception of touch has remained incomprehensible. We can only start to understand the text when we see that Aristotle, in talking about “the ensouled body” (423a13), means “the soul's instrumental body” and views this as the actual instrument for the perception of touch. The visible body is only an intermediary between the soul-body and the object of touch.

In the history of medieval semantics, supposition theory is important especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In this theory the emphasis is on the term, whose properties one tries to determine. In the fourteenth century the focus is on the proposition, of which a term having supposition is a part. The idea is to analyse propositions in order to determine their truth (probare). The Speculum puerorum written by Richard Billingham was the standard textbook for this approach. It was very (...) influential in Europe. The theory of the probatio propositionis was meant to solve problems both in (empirically oriented) scientific propositions such as used by the Oxford Calculators, and theological propositions, especially those about the Trinity. The book is original, concise, but not clear in every respect. Studying medieval commentaries may help us to understand Richard's book. In the present paper three commentaries are presented. The commentators discussed problems about the status of Richard's book, and about its doctrine: what is the relation between probatio and truth, what is the relation between probatio and supposition, what exactly are mediate and immediate terms (e.g.is the pronoun 'this' mediate or immediate?). The commentators sometimes criticize Richard. For example, one of them argues, against Billingham, that the verb 'can' ampliates its subject term and is therefore mediate. (shrink)

This book traces the varying conceptions of the nature of God's existence from Aristotle, through the pagan Neoplatonists, to thinkers such as Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas (in the West) and Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas (in the East). The result is a powerful comparative history of philosophical thought in Christendom that provides documentation for the schism between the Eastern and Western churches.