Ferejohn’s clear and elegant book makes a strong case for a developmentalist reading of Aristotle’s views about the nature of philosophical understanding. It is a pleasurable read and engages with several issues central to Socratic and Aristotelian scholarship. Formal Causes will be an important resource for anyone thinking about Aristotle’s philosophical method and the relationships between his thought and that of his predecessors.Ferejohn’s general picture of Aristotle’s philosophical development is familiar, if also somewhat controversial. In the works comprising (...) the Organon, Aristotle’s thinking occurs largely within the confines he inherits from the Academy. He emphasizes the importance of formal causes in... (shrink)

Michael T. Ferejohn presents a new analysis of Aristotle's theory of explanation and scientific knowledge, in the context of its Socratic roots. Ferejohn shows how Aristotle resolves the tension between his commitment to the formal-case model of explanation and his recognition of the role of efficient causes in explaining natural phenomena.

I review Michael T. Ferejohn's "Formal Causes: Definition, Explanation, and Primacy in Socratic and Aristotelian Thought".

This paper advances a philosophical interpretation of Hegel's Logic as defending a metaphysics, which includes an absolute, itself comparable to God in other systems of metaphysics of interest to Hegel, including Aristotle's and Spinoza's. Two problems are raised which can seem to block the prospects for such a metaphysically inflationary interpretation. The key to resolving these problems is consideration of the kinds of metaphysical priority that Hegel sees in Aristotle. This allows us to build a philosophical model of Hegel's absolute, (...) and to demonstrate how the model fits the argument of Hegel's Logic. Application of this model provides a philosophical explanation of the senses in which Hegel's metaphysics is idealist; he argues that thought is absolute and comparable to God in other systems of metaphysics: thought is both self-determining and metaphysically prior to being. (shrink)

A bold new interpretation of Aristotelian thought is central to Bernard Yack's provocative new book. He shows that for Aristotle, community is a conflict-ridden fact of everyday life, as well as an ideal of social harmony and integration. From political justice and the rule of law to class struggle and moral conflict, Yack maintains that Aristotle intended to explain the conditions of everyday political life, not just, as most commentators assume, to represent the hypothetical achievements of an idealistic (...) "best regime." By showing how Aristotelian ideas can provide new insight into our own political life, Yack makes a valuable contribution to contemporary discourse and debate. His work will excite interest among a wide range of social, moral, and political theorists. (shrink)

Drawing on the theory of ‘mental models’, I have previously shown that the valid syllogisms in the Aristotelian logical system, including all of its figures and moods, are very easy for the human mind. Indeed, they can even be used to predict inferences that people can make with quantified sentences. In this paper, I further argue that, if mental models theory is correct, then also the Aristotelian conversion rules are not hard for the human mind. My account here (...) again focuses on the distinction made by the mental models theory between canonical and noncanonical models. (shrink)

Through a study of argument, science, art, and human intelligence, Louis Groarke explores and builds on a line of Aristotelian thought that traces the origins of logic and knowledge to a mental creativity that is able to leap to insightful and truthful conclusions on the basis of restricted evidence. In an Aristotelian Account of Induction Groarke discusses the intellectual process through which we access the "first principles" of human thought - the most basic concepts, The laws (...) of logic, The universal claims of science and metaphysics, And The deepest moral truths. Following Aristotle and others, Groarke situates the first stirrings of human understanding in a creative capacity for discernment that precedes knowledge, even logic. Relying on a new historical study of philosophical theories of inductive reasoning from Aristotle To The twenty-first century, Groarke explains how Aristotle offers a viable solution To The so-called problem of induction, while offering new contributions to contemporary accounts of reasoning and argument and challenging the conventional wisdom about induction. In recovering and developing philosophical ideas that have been largely overlooked or misrepresented by more recent sources, An Aristotelian Account of Induction makes a major contribution To The historical study of philosophy and to critical debate. (shrink)

In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as (...) Suárez, others quite obscure. Two thirds of the book is devoted to the Aristotelians, with occasional references to Descartes; the last third focuses on Descartes, although there still much Aristotelian ground is covered. Des Chene indicates three major themes for his book: natural change and agency, the structure of material substance, and finality. (shrink)

Physiologia provides an accessible and comprehensive guide to late Aristotelian natural philosophy; with that context in hand, it offers new interpretations of major themes in Descartes’s natural philosophy.

The ancient sources tell a particular story about the destiny of the works of Aristotle and Theophrastus after Theophrastus' death. According to information provided mainly by Strabo and Plutarch, the texts produced by the Peripatetic school were lost and unavailable during a period of more than two hundred years, from the time of Neleus, the heir of Theophrastus' library, until Sulla's victory in Athens, in 86b.c., at the end of his campaign against Mithridates. That was the point at which the (...) private library of a famous bibliophile was confiscated: Apellicon of Teos, who at some time at the beginning of the first centuryb.c.had acquired the autograph papyri that contained the only copies of Aristotle's and his disciple's works. Sulla, so these sources maintain, recovered then for later generations the so-called ‘esoteric writings’ of Aristotle, and this prepared the ground for the general diffusion of Aristotelian thought, and for the work of Andronicus of Rhodes, whose name has gone down in history as the author of theeditio princepsof theAristotelian Corpus. (shrink)

Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (ca. 1126-98), who came to be known in the Latin West as Averroes, was born at Cordoba into a family prominent for its expert devotion to the study and development of religious law (shar'ia). In Arabic sources al-Hafid (“the Grandson”) is added to his name to distinguish him from his grandfather (d. 1126), a famous Malikite jurist who served the ruling Almoravid regime as qadi (judge) and even as imam (prayer leader (...) and chief religious authority) at the magnificent Great Mosque which still stands today in the city of Averroes' birth and where Averroes himself served as Grand Qadi (chief judge). When the governing regime changed with the success of 'Abd al-Mu'min (r. 1130-63), founder of the Almohad (al-Muwahhidun) dynasty, the members of the family continued to flourish under a new religious orientation based on the teachings of the reformer, al-Mah. di ibn Tumart (d. ca. 1129-30). Although insistent on the strict adherence to religious law, Ibn Tumart's teachings were at the same time equally insistent on the essential rationality of human understanding of the existence and unity (tawhid) of God and his creation as well as the rationality of the Qur'an and its interpretation. (shrink)

The great Pontano -- The storms of life -- The haven of philosophy -- Rewriting moral philosophy -- Learned authority -- Latin philosophy -- Virtue, inside out -- The rule of reason -- Beyond the veil -- Chronology of Pontano's works -- Chronology of Pontano's life -- Moral virtues in Aristotle and Pontano.

Chapter One THE PROBLEM OF BEING IN THE METAPHYSICS TO determine whether the notion of Being in Alexander of Hales is Aristotelian or Platonic, a recent historian seeks his criterion in "the gradual separation of the Aristotelian ...

"The twelve chapters of this volume all began their existence as contributions to workshops held between 2009 and 2011 by a Danish-Swedish research network called The Aristotelian Tradition: The reception of Aristotle's works on logic and metaphysics in the Middle Ages, headquartered in Gothenburg and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Most of them were written by members of the network, some by invited speakers. While the volume amply illustrates the set of scholarly approaches characteristic of the (...) "Copenhagen School of Medieval Philosophy" (notably a strong philological foundation and an interest in ancient as well as medieval and Greek as well as Latin texts), its thematic diversity reflects the network's breadth of interests. What unites the chapters in this respect is simply a concern with different historical manifestations of Aristotelian thought on logical and metaphysical matters. The volume includes studies of texts by, among others, Apuleius, Boethius, Anonymus Aurelianensis III, Michael of Ephesus, Averroes, Anonymus Cantabrigiensis, Nicholas of Paris, Robert Kilwardby, Anonymus O, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Francisco Suárez, relating to themes and passages in Aristotle's Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics 1, Posterior Analytics 1, Sophistical Refutations and Metaphysics A and Z. The last two chapters consist of a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the first part of a fiercely anti-Aristotelian work, which has been described as the starting-point for Renaissance Platonism and Aristotelianism alike: George Gemistos Plethon's On Aristotle's Departures from Plato."--. (shrink)

Plenitude, roughly, the thesis that for any non-empty region of spacetime there is a material object that is exactly located at that region, is often thought to be part and parcel of the standard Lewisian package in the metaphysics of persistence. While the wedding of plentitude and Lewisian four-dimensionalism is a natural one indeed, there are a hand-full of dissenters who argue against the notion that Lewisian four-dimensionalism has exclusive rights to plentitude. These ‘promiscuous’ three-dimensionalists argue that a temporalized (...) version of plenitude is entirely compatible with a three-dimensional ontology of enduring entities. While few would deny the coherence of such a position, and much work has been done by its proponents to appease critics, there has been surprisingly little by way of exploring the various forms such an ontology might take as well as the potential advantages of one plenitudinous three-dimensional ontology over another. Here I develop a novel form of plenitudinous three-dimensionalism, what John Hawthorne (Metaphysical essays, 2006a, b) has called “Neo-Aristotelian Plenitude,” and argue that if one is inclined to endorse an abundant three-dimensional ontology, one is wise to opt for a plenitude of accidental unities. (shrink)

I argue that Aristotelian decisions (προαιρέσεις) cannot be conceived of as based solely on wish (βούλησις) and deliberation (βούλευσις), as the standard picture (most influentially argued for in Anscombe's "Thought and Action in Aristotle", in R. Bambrough ed. New Essays on Plato and Aristotle. London: Routledge, 1965) suggests. Although some features of the standard view are correct (such as that decisions have essential connection to deliberation and that wish always plays a crucial role in the formation of a (...) decision), Aristotelian decisions sometimes must include non-rational desires such as appetite. Consequently, any exegetical account of Aristotle’s notion of decision must be able to accommodate this feature. (shrink)

David Lewis is usually thought to reject what Quine called “Aristotelian essentialism”. The starting point of this paper is to define and explain Aristotelian essentialism and locate it in the context of the criticism that Quine made of quantified modal logic. Indeed, according to Quine, Aristotelian essentialism would be one of the consequences of accepting quantified modal logic. After having explained Lewis’s stance in the Quinean debate against quantified modal logic, this paper will deal with the (...) question as to whether Lewis accepts or rejects Aristotelian essentialism. I think there are different plausible interpretations of the essentialist thesis, and I will distinguish between three such interpretations. This distinction between different interpretations of essentialism is both interesting per se and helpful in understanding the senses in which Lewis is or is not an antiessentialist. I will say, in fact, that while it is true that Lewis rejects Aristotelian essentialism under the first two understandings of the essentialist thesis, he endorses such a thesis according to a third understanding. I will then take this to show that there is a sense in which Aristotelian essentialism survives in Lewis’s metaphysical theory. (shrink)

Aristotelian imagination is widely understood as a psychological power by which retained perceptual states recur in consciousness. According to this view, imagination is decaying sense, a part of the psyche that is parasitic on perceptual acts for its content. This paper disputes this reading and provides an alternative account of Aristotle’s concept of imagination. I argue that Aristotelian imagination is a power of the psyche that is both productive like intellect, and presentational like perception. Unlike perception and intellect, (...) however, imagination does not correctly discriminate among beings, and thus cannot be relied upon to give one knowledge of the world. When one accepts this alternative conception of Aristotelian imagination, it becomes clear how it can take on the peculiar epistemic function of allowing a particular serve as the vehicle of a universal thought. This paper argues that Aristotle’s explanation of valid judgments in geometry depends on the imagination to allow the perception of a particular diagram to give rise to the intellectual grasp of a general proposition. (shrink)

Aristotle is the most influential philosopher of practice, and Knight's new book explores the continuing importance of Aristotelian philosophy. First, it examines the theoretical bases of what Aristotle said about ethical, political and productive activity. It then traces ideas of practice through such figures as St Paul, Luther, Hegel, Heidegger and recent Aristotelian philosophers, and evaluates Alasdair MacIntyre's contribution. Knight argues that, whereas Aristotle's own thought legitimated oppression, MacIntyre's revision of Aristotelianism separates ethical excellence from social elitism (...) and justifies resistance. With MacIntyre, Aristotelianism becomes revolutionary. MacIntyre's case for the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition originates in his attempt to elaborate a Marxist ethics informed by analytic philosophy. He analyses social practices in teleological terms, opposing them to capitalist institutions and arguing for the cooperative defence of our moral agency. In condensing these ideas, Knight advances a theoretical argument for the reformation of Aristotelianism and an ethical argument for social change. (shrink)

At the center of contemporary neo-Aristotelian naturalism is the thought that we can account for a great deal of ethics by thinking about what is needful in human life generally. When we think about practices like promising, virtues like justice or courage, and institutions that serve to produce, maintain, and help to reproduce well-ordered social life we can make some headway we consider the sense in which our topic makes some forms of human good possible and even, in (...) some cases, actualizes the very good made possible thereby. G.E.M. Anscombe introduced this kind of thinking about ethics, which Philippa Foot named ‘Aristotelian Necessity'. In this essay, I take a hard Look at Anscombe’s work on the topic, and then consider her later insistence that crucial aspects of ethics could not be understood in these terms. (shrink)

In this paper I assess the possibility of advancing a modern conception of social justice under neo-Aristotelian lights, focussing primarily on conceptions that assert a fundamental connection between social justice and eudaimonia. After some preliminary remarks on the extent to which a neo-Aristotelian account must stay close to Aristotle’s own, I focus on Martha Nussbaum’s sophisticated neo-Aristotelian approach, which I argue implausibly overworks the aspects of Aristotle’s thought it appeals to. I then outline the shape of (...) a deeper and more general, and as yet unanswered, problem facing neo-Aristotelian accounts: how to justify the claim that the point of a just society is to assist or enable its members to flourish. (shrink)

For an Aristotelian observer, the halo is a puzzling phenomenon since it is apparently sublunary, and yet perfectly circular. This paper studies Aristotle's explanation of the halo in Meteorology III 2-3 as an optical illusion, as opposed to a substantial thing (like a cloud), as was thought by his predecessors and even many successors. Aristotle's explanation follows the method of explanation of the Posterior Analytics for "subordinate" or "mixed" mathematical-physical sciences. The accompanying diagram described by Aristotle is one (...) of the earliest lettered geometrical diagrams, in particular of a terrestrial phenomenon, and versions of it can still be found in modern textbooks on meteorological optics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 127-128 [Access article in PDF] Dennis Des Chene. Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 220. Cloth, $45.00. The history of philosophy aims at the recovery and interpretation of past thought, and its reconstructions seek to avoid anachronism. Dennis Des Chene's book is exemplary in this respect. It offers (...) a sophisticated and accurate report on Late Scholastic views and arguments about life and its form and principle, the soul. It is full of subtle and informed discussions of texts from, principally, Francisco Toledo, Pedro Fonseca, the commentators from Coimbra, Francisco Suárez, and Rodrigo de Arriaga.But the aim of the history of philosophy is philosophical and not exclusively historical. Recovery of the past is, for the historian of philosophy, at the service of contemporary understanding. The Late Scholastic authors studied by Des Chene understood this to be so. Suárez, for instance, distinguished between those doctrines and inquiries which are "antiquated (antiquatae) and wholly relegated from philosophy" and those which are not (Metaphysical Disputations, "Copious Index to Aristotle's Metaphysics," Book I, ch. 7). Unfortunately, when judged from this perspective, Des Chene's book is not as successful.In spite of its many comparisons between current debates, Descartes's views, and Late Scholastic doctrines, the book does not succeed in extracting much by way of genuine philosophical insight. Though well-informed and intelligent, for the most part these glosses are mere statements of Late Scholastic views in contemporary terms. But correctly describing alchemical theories from the point of view of modern chemistry does not make them any less archaic.This book is indeed more a contribution to the history of ideas or of science than to the history of philosophy. To be fair, it is true that, first, as such it is a most valuable contribution; second, much of what Late Scholastics had to say about life and the soul is indeed antiquated; third, even if philosophically antiquated, an adequate grasp of Late Aristotelian thought on these matters is necessary to understand Descartes and subsequent developments; and finally, the kind of informed historical recovery that Des Chene has provided here is a necessary condition for whatever philosophical lessons could be gained from these texts.Life's Form is divided into four parts. The first, "Data for the Study of Souls," looks at the phenomena which the Late Aristotelians sought to understand and explain, recovering both their grasp of the place of the living among other substances, and the constraints, [End Page 127] originating both from accumulated experience and from Christian faith, to which they were subject.The second part, "Defining the Soul," first examines the question of how to define life. It then looks at the definition of the soul as "first act of an organic or potentially living physical body"—whether the soul is an accident of the body, an entirely separate substance, or the substantial form of the body. Here one finds addressed the question whether there is a form of the body separate from the soul, or whether strictly the body has only one form, the soul. The issue of cadaveric forms, peculiar forms of corpses arising after death and the departure of the soul, comes up here. In the last section of this part Des Chene examines the definition of the soul as a principle of life and the relation, both epistemological and ontological, between this definition in terms of the operations of the soul, and the earlier one of the soul as form, that is, in terms of its being.Part 3, "Powers and Parts," looks at the vegetative (nutritive, reproductive, and augmentative), animal (sensitive), and spiritual (intellective) powers of the soul. Des Chene examines the criteria for distinguishing between powers, the relation between the one soul and its many powers, and the unity of the soul. "Unity," the fourth part of the book, takes up this last topic. It looks at the vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual powers as "parts" of the... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Fourfold Classification Tropes Aristotle's Principle In a Subject Owen's Reading Frede's Reading Differentiae Options for “In a Subject” The Tenfold Classification Substance Relatives The Place of the Categories in Aristotle's Thought Being Said in Many Ways Two Systems? The Afterlife of the Doctrine of Categories Notes Bibliography.

This paper explores the Aristotelian context of the real distinction between existence and essence thought to be posited in Thomas Aquinas’ early workDe Ente Et Essentia. In doing so, the paper situates its own position in the context of contemporary scholarship and in relation to the contemporary trend to downplay Aristotle’s influence in Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy. The paper argues that re-readingDe Ente Et Essentiain this way sheds new light on some of the crucial debates in contemporary Thomist scholarship, (...) particularly with respect to the analogous relation between potency and act: essence and existence, the distinction between conceptual and causal explanation, and the relationship between philosophy and theology in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. (shrink)

‘Virtue ethics’ is prominent, if not pre-eminent, in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging a ‘virtues approach’ to ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Notoriously, Kant held that the only thing good without qualification is the good will; and he then made it difficult to grasp what made the will good when he denied that it could (...) be its preoccupation with or attention to anything in the world. The idea of the good will then seems to be an idea of something which transcends the world, and therefore to be no easier to make sense of, or to believe in, than Plato′s form of the good is usually thought to be. The first obvious attraction of Aristotle′s ethics, then—at least to those of an empiricist or worldly cast of mind—is that it promises an understanding of the ethical which locates that robustly within the world. Aristotle′s virtues are real this-worldly existences. They are, moreover, qualities whose place in our lives seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, a concept variously construed as happiness, as living well, or even as flourishing. Morality is important because of the contribution it makes to the living of a fully human life. And a ‘fully human’ life is characterizable in what modernity calls ‘humanist’, or sometimes ‘naturalistic’, terms: it requires no invocation of transcendence or other-worldliness. (shrink)

The anti-reductionist character of the recent philosophy of biology and the dynamic development of the science of emergent properties prove that the time is ripe to reintroduce the thought of Aristotle, the first advocate of a “top-down” approach in life-sciences, back into the science/philosophy debate. His philosophy of nature provides profound insights particularly in the context of the contemporary science of evolution, which is still struggling with the questions of form, teleology, and the role of chance in evolutionary processes. (...) However, although Aristotle is referenced in the evolutionary debate, a thorough analysis of his theory of hylomorphism and the classical principle of causality which he proposes is still needed in this exchange. Such is the main concern of the first part of the present article which shows Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance as an open system, ready to incorporate new hypothesis of modern and contemporary science. The second part begins with the historical exploration of the trajectory from Darwin to Darwinism regarded as a metaphysical position. This exploration leads to an inquiry into the central topics of the present debate in the philosophy of evolutionary biology. It shows that Aristotle’s understanding of species, teleology, and chance – in the context of his fourfold notion of causality – has a considerable explanatory power which may enhance our understanding of the nature of evolutionary processes. This fact may inspire, in turn, a retrieval of the classical theology of divine action, based on Aristotelian metaphysics, in the science/theology dialogue. The aim of the present article is to prepare a philosophical ground for such project. (shrink)

This volume integrates aspects of the Poetics into the broader corpus of Aristotelian philosophy. It both deals with some old problems raised by the treatise, suggesting possible solutions through contextualization, and also identifies new ways in which poetic concepts could relate to Aristotelian philosophy. In the past, contextualization has most commonly been used by scholars in order to try to solve the meaning of difficult concepts in the Poetics. In this volume, rather than looking to explain a specific (...) concept, the contributors observe the concatenation of Aristotelian ideas in various treatises in order to explore some aesthetic, moral and political implications of the philosopher's views of tragedy, comedy and related genres. Questions addressed include: Does Aristotle see his interest in drama as part of his larger research on human natures? What are the implications of tragic plots dealing with close family members for the polis? What should be the role of drama and music in the education of citizens? How does dramatic poetry relate to other arts and what are the ethical ramifications of the connections? How specific are certain emotions to literary genres and how do those connect to Aristotle's extended account of pathe? Finally, how do internal elements of composition and language in poetry relate to other domains of Aristotelian thought? The Poetics in its Aristotelian Context offers a fascinating new insight to the Poetics, and will be of use to anyone working on the Poetics, or Aristotelian philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

I argue that a modern gloss on Aristotle’s notions of Form and Matter not only allows us to escape a dualism of the psychological and the physical, but also results in a plausible sort of materialism. This is because Aristotle held that the essential nature of any psychological state, including perception and human thought, is to be some physical property. I also show that Hilary Putnam and Martha Nussbaum are mistaken in saying that Aristotle was not a materialist, but (...) a functionalist. His functionalism should instead be given a materialistic interpretation, since he holds that only the appropriate sort of matter can realize the human psyche. Aristotle’s functionalism is therefore best viewed as a “causal functionalism,” in which functional descriptions enable us to find the right sort of material embodiment. By sidestepping dualistic assumptions, Aristotle also avoids having to deal with any further notion of consciousness. (shrink)

The paper argues for the necessity of building up a philosophy of the internet and proposes a version of it, an ‘Aristotelian’ philosophy of the internet. First, a short overview of some recent trends in the internet research is presented. This train of thoughts leads to a proposal of understanding the nature of the internet in the spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy i.e., to conceive “the internet as the internet”, as a totality of its all aspects, as a (...) whole entity. For this purpose, the internet is explained in four – easily distinguishable, but obviously connected – contexts: we regard it as a system of technology, as an element of communication, as a cultural medium and as an independent organism. Based on these investigations we conclude that the internet is the medium of a new mode of human existence created by late modern man; a mode that is built on earlier (i.e., natural, and social) spheres of existence and yet it is markedly different from them. We call this newly formed existence web-life. (shrink)