What is life, and where does it come from? The question is very old, but it reemerged in the seventeenth century with the crisis of the Aristotelian-Galenic paradigm. Matter was now stripped of any impulse and capacity for self-organization; therefore, it was necessary to find something that would take into account the strength and information that it seemed to hold, especially in what were considered vital phenomena. Georg Ernst Stahl and Friedrich Hoffmann, both professors in Halle and responsible for two (...) of the most famous medical systems of the first half of the eighteenth century, offered solutions to the problem that only appear to be very different. The first invoked the soul as an ideal place of production of the energy that allowed the human body to fight the putrefactive forces in the natural world; the second referred to the concept of ether, to which he attributed modes of action basically similar to those that tradition attributed to vegetative and sensitive souls. This paper highlights the positions of the two physicians, setting them in the climate of the revisitation of ancient certainties that characterized natural philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (shrink)

Traditional interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of perception mainly focus on uncovering the underlying mechanisms that are at stake when perceivers are affected by sensible qualities. Investigating the nature of sense perception is one of Aristotle’s main worries and one that he explicitly relates to the question of its causes (e. g.Sens. 436a16–17, 436b9) and its ends (e. g.de An. 434a30 ff.). Therefore I suggest that, in order to fully explain Aristotle’s view of perceptual phenomena, the possibilities, the constraints, and the (...) goals defined by the embodied and situated engagement of perceivers with the external world must be taken into account. Accordingly, in this paper, I provide an affective reading of Aristotle’s theory of perception. I shall ask what, in addition to functioning sense organs and appropriate response mechanisms, the perceiver contributes to perceptual content. Specifically, I propose to shed light on the significance of perceptual experience for the perceiver and I aim to show that, according to Aristotle, one’s biological and personal qualities are perceptually relevant, meaning that they underpin perception, rather than coming into play after perception has occurred and its objects have been discerned. The paper is divided into two parts, respectively dealing with sensory affections and more complex affective phenomena. As regards the domain of primal sense perception, I will focus on smell as a representative example: since Aristotle identifies it as the least developed of human sensory faculties, it will serve as a revealing illustration of how sense perception is informed and qualified by what, drawing on contemporary philosophical terminology, I will call ‘perceptual interests’, viz. the affective sense of what is at stake in the living being’s interaction with the environment. I will then proceed to consider the way more complex affective phenomena underpin perception by examining the case of emotions and that of virtues of character. By showing how perception is affectively inflected and how emotion is rooted in perception’s bodily nature, I aim to sketch out the general lines along which I believe that the Aristotelian theory of perception should be approached. (shrink)

The present paper proposes an emergentist reading of Peirce, with special reference to his concept of evolution. Although the author never adopts the word “emergence” in a technical manner, it will be demonstrated that the core problem of emergence lies at the heart of his evolutionary doctrine, generally displayed by the interplay of his three well-known categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Indeed, although the Classical pragmatists most quoted in connection to emergentism are Dewey and Mead (and William James to (...) some degree), scholars have recently suggested some emergentist readings of Peirce’s thought (cf. above all Tiercelin 1998, Quieroz & El-Hani 2006, Rose 2016), in particular with regard to semiotic process and cosmogony. Exploring further the path opened by those researches, the present paper aims to clarify the theoretical problem of emergent evolution from a pragmatist perspective and especially to illustrate Peirce’s emergentist standpoint. In order to reach this goal, the article is divided into four parts: after (1) a brief introduction to the contemporary debates on emergence, (2) I give a historical overview of Classical Pragmatism and British Emergentists, (3) with a special focus on the common roots of the British Emergentists and Peirce on evolution. Finally, (4) I offer an emergentist reading of Peirce’s theory of evolution. In particular, I show how his strong emphasis on chance and the “growth” of the universe go together with his arch-stone of synechism (that is his theory of continuity), through what he calls agapasm. (shrink)

Sixteenth century pharmacology was still very much under the influence of a distinction going back to ancient medicine: the distinction between effects of medicaments that were taken to be explainable by the elementary qualities, their mutual modification in mixture, and the combination of these modified elementary qualities on the one hand, and the effects of medicaments that were taken not to be explicable in this manner.1 Galen coined the expression that a medicament of the latter kind possesses the capacity of (...) acting "by its whole substance,"2 and the question of how actions of the whole substance could be explicated gave rise to heated controversies in early modern pharmacology. Did Galen just... (shrink)

In Aristotle’s On the Soul he considers and refutes two versions of the harmonia theory of the soul’s relation to the body. According to the harmonia theory, the soul is to the body what the tuning of a musical instrument is to its material parts. Though he believes himself to have entirely dismissed the view, he has not. I argue that Aristotle’s hylomorphic account is, in fact, an instance of the harmonia theory.

A topic common to both Plato’s and Aristotle’s discussions of theories of the soul is the doctrine of the soul as a harmony of the parts of the body. Plato’s Phaedo as well as Aristotle’s De anima and Eudemus present this theory and argue against the identification of the soul as a harmony. This paper has two focuses, one philosophical and one historical. First, I will focus on the argumentation used by Aristotle in his dialogue Eudemus, which is often associated (...) with Aristotle’s early attachment to Plato. On the basis of the argumentation against the harmonia theory, I will try to show that the Eudemus is not a dialogue that depicts Aristotle’s Platonic phase. Instead, by comparing the arguments of the Eudemus with both Plato and Aristotle’s mature thought, I will argue that the argumentation of the Eudemus seems to be an indirect attack on Plato’s view on the Forms and on the nature of the soul, and that it seems to be consistent with Aristotle’s mature work On the Soul. Second, given that Aristotle discusses this topic twice, I will try, also on the basis of conclusions about the Eudemus and on later reception of Aristotle’s arguments, to show why this is the case. (shrink)

In a late treatise, That the Capacities of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body, Galen of Pergamum infamously offered the view that the substance of the soul is identical with a bodily mixture. This thesis has been found radical and extreme in modern scholarship and is generally considered to be at odds with Galen’s ‘agnosticism’ on the substance of soul. In this paper I propose a close reading of QAM that allows us to make sense of it in (...) terms of Galen’s other work, including his late work On My Own Opinions. (shrink)

L’objectif de cette étude est d’examiner l’hypothèse selon laquelle la quarta natura, théorisée par Épicure pour rendre compte des activités de l’âme et décrite par Lucrèce (DRN III, 237-244), résulte de l’appropriation par Épicure d’un argument aristotélicien afin de répondre aux critiques d’Aristote à l’égard de la théorie démocritéenne de l’âme. Pour ce faire, on analysera le témoignage de Cicéron (Tusc. I, 10, 22) sur le quintum genus attribué à Aristote et on rendra compte des débats sur ses sources possibles. (...) En confrontant le témoignage cicéronien avec les vers dans lesquels Lucrèce expose la théorie de la quatrième nature, on montrera les fortes ressemblances entre leurs structures argumentatives. Sur la base de la possible datation de la théorie de la quintessence et de son attribution au Péripatos du iie siècle av. J-C, on proposera d’expliquer cette similarité par l’appropriation par Lucrèce de l’argument par soustraction qui caractérise la théorie de la quintessence, à partir de laquelle il aurait conçu la théorie de la quatrième nature. Afin de vérifier l’exactitude de cette interprétation, on examinera l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’appropriation de cet argument, et donc la conception de la quatrième nature, remontent à Épicure, la paternité de l’argument par soustraction (à partir duquel les péripatéticiens postérieurs pourraient avoir conçu la théorie de la quintessence) étant alors à attribuer à Aristote. Pour ce faire, on analysera un passage du De Caelo (269a30-269b2) et un passage de La Génération des animaux (736b29-737a1) où l’argument par soustraction sert à introduire d’une part l’éther et d’autre par le pneuma. Ensuite, en s’appuyant sur l’analyse d’un passage du De Anima (405a5-7), on montrera que l’appropriation de cet argument pourrait s’expliquer par la tentative, de la part d’Épicure, de répondre à une critique aristotélicienne concernant la théorie démocritéenne de l’âme. (shrink)

Sixteen years after Kim’s seminal paper offering a welcomed analysis of the emergence concept, I propose in this paper a needed extension of Kim’s work that does more justice to the actual diversity of emergentism. Rather than defining emergence as a monolithic third way between reductive physicalism and substance pluralism, and this through a conjunction of supervenience and irreducibility, I develop a comprehensive taxonomy of the possible varieties of emergence in which each taxon—theoretical, explanatory and causal emergence—is properly identified and (...) defined. This taxonomy has two advantages. First, it is unificatory in the sense that the taxa it contains derive from a common unity principle, which consequently constitutes the very hallmark of emergentism. Second, it can be shown that the emergence taxa it contains are able to meet the challenges that are commonly considered as being the hot topics on the emergentists’ agenda, namely the positivity, the consistency and the triviality/liberality challenges. (shrink)

Starting with the observation that there exist contradictory claims in the literature about the relationship between vitalism and emergentism—be it one of inclusion or, on the contrary, exclusion–, this paper aims at disentangling the vitalism–emergentism knot. To this purpose, after having described a particular form of emergentism, namely Lloyd Morgan’s emergent evolutionism, I develop a conceptual analysis on the basis of a distinction between varieties of monism and pluralism. This analysis allows me to identify and characterize several forms of vitalism (...) and emergentism, and a subsequent comparison between these forms constitutes the occasion for a clarification of the relationship between both doctrines. (shrink)

In this article I address the issue of the ontological conditions of possibility for a naturalistic notion of emergence, trying to determine its fundamental differences from the atomist, vitalist, preformationist and potentialist alternatives. I will argue that a naturalistic notion of ontological emergence can only succeed if we explicitly refuse the atomistic fundamental ontological postulate that asserts that every entity is endowed with a set of absolutely intrinsic properties, being qualitatively immutable through its extrinsic relations. Furthermore, it will be shown (...) that, ironically enough, this metaphysical assumption is implicitly shared by all the above mentioned alternatives to Emergentism. The current article concludes that the notion of organization by itself is not enough, and that ontological emergence can only be justified by assuming a relational ontological perspective that, in opposition both to atomism and holism, defends that the existence-conditions, the identity and the causal behavior of any emergent systemic property can only be conceived, and explained, as constructed by and through specific networks of qualitatively transformative relational processes that occur between the system’s components and between the system and its environment. Additionally, I try to explain how one can make sense of the idea that an emergent phenomenon is both dependent on, and autonomous from, its emergence base. (shrink)

Two texts that raise problems for Alexander of Aphrodisias' theory of universals are examined. "De anima" 90.2-8 appears to suggest that universals are dependent on thought for their existence; this raises questions about the status both of universals and of forms. It is suggested that the passage is best interpreted as indicating that universals are dependent on thought only for their being recognised as universals. The last sentence of "Quaestio" 1.11 seems to assert that if the universal did not exist (...) no individual would exist, thereby contradicting Alexander's position elsewhere. This seems to be a slip resulting from the fact that species with only one member are the exception rather than the rule. (shrink)

Ancient philosophy has been a source of inspiration for contemporary philosophy in recent decades. An outstanding example is the renaissance of hylomorphism in the field of philosophy of biology. For the philosophy of mind, hylomorphism has been little discussed so far. Therefore, ancient models in the philosophy of mind are still of interest. This article argues that Plato’s Phaedo can act as a source for contemporary debates. As a starting point, Simmias’s objections to the immortality of the soul are analyzed. (...) Plato does not simply reject these objections, but introduces conditions for a hylomorphistic understanding of the soul in Socrates’ reply. These conditions are the following: (A) the mind supervenes on the body; (B) this supervenience must allow the strong emergence of the mind; (C) the mind comprises causal powers; (D) teleological explanations are a necessary ingredient of a suitable model for the mind-body problem. With these conditions, Plato already introduces central components that are present in contemporary philosophical debates, but have not yet been unified into a hylomorphistic concept in the philosophy of mind. The present article proposes this unification. (shrink)

In this paper I describe basic features of traditional (British) emergentism and Popper’s emergentist theory of consciousness and compare them to the contemporary versions of emergentism present in connectionist approach in cognitive sciences. I argue that despite their similarities, the traditional form, as well as Popper’s theory belong to strong causal emergentism and yield radically different ontological consequences compared to the weaker, contemporary version present in cognitive science. Strong causal emergentism denies the causal closure of the physical domain and introduces (...) genuine new mental causal powers and genuine downward causation, while weak emergentism provides new insights in understanding the mechanisms and explanation that is compatible with physicalism. (shrink)

My primary aim in this chapter is to explain in what the traditional mind–body problem consists, what its possible solutions are, and what obstacles lie in the way of a resolution. The discussion will develop in two phases. The first phase, sections 1.2–1.4, will be concerned to get clearer about the import of our initial question as a precondition of developing an account of possible responses to it. The second phase, sections 1.5–1.6, explains how a problem arises in our attempts (...) to answer the question we have characterized, and surveys the various solutions that can be and have been offered. More specifically, sections 1.2–1.4 are concerned with how to understand the basic elements of our initial question – how we should identify the mental, on the one hand, and the physical, on the other – and with what sorts of relations between them we are concerned. Section 1.2 identifies and explains the two traditional marks of the mental, consciousness and intentionality, and discusses how they are related. Section 1.3 gives an account of how we should understand ‘physical’ in our initial question so as not to foreclose any of the traditional positions on the mind–body problem. Section 1.4 then addresses the third element in our initial question, mapping out the basic sorts of relations that may hold between mental and physical phenomena, and identifying some for special attention. Sections 1.5–1.6 are concerned with explaining the source of the difficulty in answering our initial question, and the kinds of solutions that have been offered to it. Section 1.5 explains why our initial question gives rise to a problem, and gives a precise form to the mind–body problem, which is presented as a set of four propositions, each of which, when presented independently, seems compelling, but which are jointly inconsistent. Section 1.6 classifies responses to the mind–body problem on the basis of which of the propositions in our inconsistent set they reject, and provides a brief overview of the main varieties in each category, together with some of the difficulties that arise for each. Section 1.7 is a brief conclusion about the source of our difficulties in understanding the place of mind in the natural world. (shrink)

Concerns about the efficacy of consciousness can arise either as part of a broad concern about the efficacy of mentality in general, or as a more specific worry focusing on conscious mental states, or the conscious aspects of mental states. This chapter discusses in detail why the two issues, the general one concerning the mental, and the more specific issue about consciousness, have come to be distinguished and how they relate to each other. It discusses the epiphenomenalist arguments of the (...) nineteenth‐century biologist T. H. The experiments and observations that moved Huxley to embrace epiphenomenalism were basically of the following sort: animals for which we have compelling anatomical evidence that they are not conscious can perform activities of the kind that we normally take to require consciousness. The epiphenomenalist arguments follow only on the assumption that the mental is not reducible to the physical; namely, the assumption that reductionist physicalism has been ruled out. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 62, Issue 1, pp 69 - 89 Galen’s physiology—his theory of elements, mixtures and the emergence of natural capacities—compels him to conceive of each part of the soul as a peculiar mixture of elementary qualities in the material substance of the organ in which it is located. The reason why Galen, nevertheless, refrains from making a dogmatic assertion about the substance of the soul, or of human nature in general, is the acknowledged failure to account for two (...) goal-directed activities—the formation of bodily organs and human intelligence—in terms of elementary qualities and their mixtures. (shrink)

Emergent phenomena are quite interesting and amazing, but they present two main scientific obstacles: to be rationally understood and to be mathematically modelled. In this paper we propose a powerful mathematical tool for modelling emergent phenomena by applying category theory. Furthermore, since great part of biological phenomena are emergent, we present an essay of how to access an emergence from observational data. In the mathematical perspective, we utilize constructs (categories whose objects are structured sets), their operations and their corresponding generalized (...) underlying functor (which are not necessarily faithful) to define emergence. From this definition, we elaborate several results concerning homomorphism between emergences, representability, pull-back, push-out, equalizer, product and co-product of emergences among other results. After we have presented such mathematical model, we utilize a hierarchical structure as example—from molecules to a flatworm—, in order to understand the relation between biological systems and its underlying emergence in a hierarchical model. (shrink)

Here I offer a precise analysis of what it takes for a property to count as emergent. The features widely considered crucial to emergence include novelty, unpredictability, supervenience, relationality, and downward causal influence. By acknowledging each of these distinctive features, the definition provided below captures an important sense in which the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.

Nearly all of us would accept that at least some of our thoughts – desires, beliefs, and intentions, for example – can be causally responsible for movements in our bodies. Starting in antiquity, and especially since Descartes, philosophers have deployed this claim as the pivotal premise in an increasingly popular line of argument against dualism. The purpose of this paper is to show that, in the Phaedo, Socrates uses this very same claim as the pivotal premise in a surprisingly powerful (...) two-part argument for dualism. (shrink)

Is Leibnizian dynamics the New Physics sought in his youth to provide a solution to the problem of body unity/composition? This question can only be answered tentatively. The thesis that I will develop in this second part is that chemical-combinatoria project is not complete without some ideas of dynamics. The idea of form, which since the early Leibniz’s philosophy is projected to give a foundation to the corpuscular theory, only reaches this objective with the theory of conspiring movements that Leibniz (...) develops as the last phase of his dynamics. Within this general objective, this second part develops three secondary issues of importance: Leibniz’s emergent and realistic position, his theory of compounds and the interpretation of the Combinatoria or Characteristica project as a science of forms. (shrink)

Sense experience, naïvely conceived, is a way of knowing perceptible properties: the colors, sounds, smells, flavors, and textures in our perceptual environment. So conceived, ordinary experience presents the perceiver with the essential nature of a property like Sky Blue or Middle C, such that how the property appears in experience is identical to how it essentially is. In antiquity, as today, it was controversial whether sense experience could meet the conditions for knowledge implicit in this naïve conception. Aristotle was a (...) partisan in this debate, but his position is poorly understood. This dissertation examines how Aristotle’s perceptual psychology responds to ancient challenges to the naïve conception, and so articulates his defense of perceptual knowledge. -/- Aristotle’s defense relies on an ontology of “perceptual qualities"—a core class of perceptible properties—according to which those qualities, despite having a perceiver-independent essence rooted in the physics of causation and affection, nevertheless can be present in experience as they essentially are. Chapter 1 defends this realist and objectivist reading against competing interpretations, which overlook a crucial distinction between perceptual qualities and perceptual objects. Chapter 2 presents Aristotle’s ontology as a physicalism that uncharacteristically allows for perceptual qualities to appear in experience as they essentially are. -/- This ontology informs Aristotle’s account of the psychological conditions under which perceivers actually are presented with the essence of perceptual qualities. The locus of this account is an obscure passage where Aristotle purports to show that the senses “discriminate” perceptual qualities because the senses are “mean states” (An. 2.11, 424a5–7). Chapter 3 develops a comprehensive interpretation of the sensory mean state, which Chapter 4 uses to elucidate Aristotle’s argument for sensory discrimination. Sensory discrimination turns out to be a process in which the essence of a perceptual quality comes to be present in the affection it produces in a perceiver. For Aristotle, this shows that sense perception meets a condition for knowledge that his predecessors, including Plato, thought it could not meet. For in his view, but not in theirs, sense experience shares in both the truth and the essence of the qualities it perceives. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the moral psychology of the Phaedo and argue that the philosophical life in this dialogue is a temperate life, and that temperance consists in exercising epistemic discernment by actively withdrawing assent from incorrect evaluations the body inclines us to make. Philosophers deal with bodily affections by taking a correct epistemic stance. Exercising temperance thus understood is a necessary condition both for developing and strengthening rational capacities, and for fixing accurate beliefs about value. The purification philosophers (...) strive for, and the purifying role of philosophy, should then be understood as a clarificatory act consisting in making one’s thoughts clear and withdrawing assent from erroneous evaluative content in our desires and pleasures. Along the way, I argue that philosophers must neither avoid situations and activities that cause bodily affections as much as possible, nor ignore or care little about them. (shrink)

Aristotle’s Naïve Somatism is a re-interpretation of Aristotle’s cognitive psychology in light of certain presuppositions he holds about the living animal body. The living animal body is presumed to be sensitive, and Aristotle grounds his account of cognition in a rudimentary proprioceptive awareness one has of her body. With that presupposed metaphysics under our belts, we are in a position to see that Aristotle in de Anima (cognition chapters at least) has a di erent explanatory aim in view than that (...) which the literature generally imputes to him. He is not explicating what we would call the “mental”—the private, inner realm which some take to be of a di erent kind than the physical—as most take him to be. His explanandum is content acquisition; the explanans is showing how the body becomes like various aspects of objects. Although he famously describes the mind (nous) as unmixed with the body, he is guided by functional constrains—nous cannot be limited or qualified if it is to potentially think all things. Thus, his inquiry into cognition is philosophically limited from a contemporary perspective. Aristotle is not doing philosophy of mind, for he doesn’t seem to find the “mental” philosophically perplexing. (shrink)

8000 Word annotated bibliography on the Phaedo, with roughly 70 entries. Note that the subscription version is a bit easier to navigate. The hyperlinks work in this pdf, but you can not as easily jump to the different sections.

At Phaedo 86b7–c2 Simmias puts forward the theory that the soul is the attunement of bodily elements. Many scholars have claimed that this theory originates in the Pythagoreans, especially Philolaus. The claim is largely based on their reading of the Phaedo, since we have scarce doxographical evidence. In this paper I show that the dialogue in question does not constitute any evidence for the Pythagorean origin of Simmias’ attunement theory, and that it rather represents the theory as stemming from a (...) materialistic world view that had become widespread among people at that time. I also pursue the question how and why, then, the attunement theory was able to attract many people, by examining its relation to Socrates’ affinity argument. (shrink)