This comment responds to the paper deliver by William Wians, evaluating his reading of book Epsilon of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and the role of Aristotle’s predecessors in the formation of his view, such as the Pythagoreans and Plato. A series of four questions are raised about the nature and strength of Wians’s thesis, providing critical notes on the conclusions of the argument.

In his original and illuminating essay, Tushar Irani offers a re-reading of Adeimantus’s and Glaucon’s challenges to Socrates in book 2 of Plato’s Republic. If correct, his interpretation has far-reaching implications for how we are to understand the dialogue as a whole. At the core of this re-reading is an attempt to rehabilitate Adeimantus’s reputation by demonstrating his central role in determining the trajectory of the dialogue’s argument. In my response I question Irani’s suggestion that Adeimantus’s challenge to Socrates is (...) as distinct from Glaucon’s as Irani suggests it is and, even if so, whether it is distinct in the precise way he suggests it is. Furthermore, I raise possible objections to his claim that large parts of the Republic—and, especially, its political project—are intended to meet Adeimantus’s challenge, not Glaucon’s. (shrink)

In “Aristotle, Empedocles, and the Unity of All Things,” Michael Shaw has provided a novel and intriguing account of Empedocles’ cosmology, wherein he attempts to outline a few ways in which interpreters (beginning with Aristotle) have failed to capture fully Empedocles’ most important ideas. Central to Shaw’s account of Empedoclean cosmology is a distinctive interpretation of the life cycle of the cosmos that presupposes that the four elements that make up everything and the twin forces that govern them—Love and Strife—interact (...) in ways quite different than often is supposed. The upshot of this is that Shaw thinks Empedocles’ theory may not fall prey to the Aristotelian critiques designed to undermine it because they are based on a misunderstanding of his actual view. While I am sympathetic to his impulse to defend Empedocles against Aristotle’s attacks, I am not convinced that Shaw’s reading should be widely adopted, both because I highly doubt that the depiction of Empedoclean cosmology developed by Shaw is Empedocles’ own and because I think the traditional interpretation of Empedocles’ cosmology fares better against Aristotelian critiques than Shaw’s interpretation of it does. Such are the contentions I intend to show in what follows. (shrink)

I claim in this paper that Adeimantus’s challenge to Socrates in Book 2 of the Republic has more importance than scholars have generally recognized. The established tendency in the secondary literature is to treat Adeimantus’s objection as virtually indistinct from Glaucon’s objection. Such readings overlook the significance of Adeimantus’s contribution to the argument of the dialogue, especially the unique emphasis he puts on the role of culture and social institutions in shaping human beliefs and desires. Whereas Glaucon objects to Socrates’ (...) conception of justice based on his views on human nature, Adeimantus introduces an indispensable political dimension to the discussion. I argue that these two objections are mutually implicating and vital to understanding why Socrates initiates an inquiry into politics in the Republic. Together, the objections show how Plato’s wide-ranging examination of issues in ethics, politics, psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics hangs together as an integrated whole. A further benefit of this reevaluation of Adeimantus’s challenge, I suggest, is the way it illuminates Plato’s views on poetry in the dialogue. According to this reading, far from advocating for the exclusion of poetry from civic life, Plato assigns it a fundamental role in the education of the philosopher due to the importance of poetic practices in cultivating the wisdom-loving part of the soul. (shrink)

The comment reflects on Reece’s presentation of different schools of interpretation of De Anima in light of some broader Peripatetic views. The connection between substance, life, and intellect is seen as undergirding the core of Aristotle’s study of nature, particularly insofar as the unmoved mover provides the final cause of the universe as a whole. This connection is discussed at both the cosmic and individual level, noting the differences in interpretation between Theophrastus and Themistius.

Aristotle’s cryptic De Anima III 5 has precipitated an enormous volume of commentary, especially about the identity of what has come to be known as active intellect and how it relates to potential intellect. Some take active intellect to be the prime mover of Metaphysics Λ, others a hypostatic or cosmic principle (for example, an ideal Intellect, intellect associated with the tenth celestial sphere, etc.), and others a faculty, potentiality, or power of the human soul that is distinct in function, (...) office, or operation from potential intellect. But a very different, ontologically lightweight way of characterizing active and potential intellect can be reconstructed from fragments of a work by the only interpreter personally acquainted with Aristotle, his junior colleague, Theophrastus of Eresus. This reconstruction suggests various philosophically attractive solutions to notorious problems raised by Aristotle’s text. (shrink)

This project reframes the four roots (or elements) in Empedocles in order to challenge the Aristotelian account of the One as undifferentiated sameness. Aristotle credits Empedocles with developing both the theory of four material elements and introducing the conception of dualistic moving causes into philosophy through Love and Strife. Aristotle’s interpretation maintains a singular moment in the evolution of the cosmos when Love dominates the whole and unifies all things into a perfectly spherical One, which he describes as an undifferentiated, (...) qualityless substratum. Based on Fragments B17, B62, and B110, this paper argues that a rhizomatic motion in which each root tends towards its own kind emerges from the roots independently of Love and Strife. Thus, Empedocles actually maintains three different sorts of motion: (1) the motion of unlike towards unlike, motivated by Love, (2) the motion of unlike away from unlike, motivated by Strife, and (3) a rhizomatic motion of like to like. The presence of six sources of motion challenges Aristotle’s assumption that, as the One, the universe enjoys a moment of identity without difference. The presence of rhizomatic motion makes the blending or mixing of the roots impossible in the Σφαῖρος. The paper begins by developing Aristotle’s paradox of Strife in the Metaphysics and his paradox of alteration in On Generation and Corruption, followed by Empedocles’ account of mixture and separation in Fragments B8 and B35. Section three examines the precise functions of Love and Strife in Fragments B17 and B21. The last section considers the Empedoclean Σφαῖρος under these different conditions, arguing that the cosmic sphere should not be viewed as an inconsistent disappearance of the roots, but as god understood as a singular community of difference. (shrink)

Among the three kinds of theoretical knowledge, Aristotle distinguishes between physics and metaphysics—what he calls Second and First Philosophy. Aristotle’s physics studies changing things, things that change in any of several ways according to an inner principle that governs their alterations and their underlying stability—fundamentally, things that come into being and pass away. What Aristotle calls First Philosophy studies substances that are immovable and unchanging, eternal objects including primarily but not exclusively Aristotle’s god. Aristotle’s distinction between Second and First Philosophy (...) constitutes a decisive difference between Aristotle and earlier philosophers. My main claim will be that Aristotle “discovered” First Philosophy through critical reflection on the universalizing or totalizing assumption of his predecessors. By “universalizing assumption” I mean that according to Aristotle, his predecessors assumed either explicitly or implicitly that they were enquiring into τὸ πᾶν, the all, the totality of everything that exists. Aristotle claims that they were wrong in this assumption. All sciences seek knowledge of principles and causes (archai and aitia). But an investigation of beings that come into existence and pass away is essentially different from the philosophical investigation of immovable, unchanging being. To understand why, one must nevertheless begin by studying changing beings—in large part to come to recognize the insufficiency of Second Philosophy to investigate being as such. Aristotle’s discovery was that the original project of Greek philosophy—the study of the whole—requires both Second and First Philosophy. (shrink)