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  1. Essence and Cause: Making Something Be What It Is.Riin Sirkel - 2018 - Discipline Filosofiche 28 (1):89-112.
    Aristotle frequently describes essence as a “cause” or “explanation”, thus ascribing to essence some sort of causal or explanatory role. This explanatory role is often explicated by scholars in terms of essence “making the thing be what it is” or “making it the very thing that it is”. I argue that this is problematic, at least on the assumption that “making” expresses an explanatory relation, since it violates certain formal features of explanation. I then consider whether Aristotle is vulnerable to (...)
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  2. Ontological Priority and Grounding in Aristotle's Categories.Riin Sirkel - 2024 - In Calvin G. Normore & Stephan Schmid (eds.), Grounding in Medieval Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 33-63.
    In the Categories, Aristotle intends to ascribe to particular substances ontological priority over all other things, but it is far from obvious what notion of priority would make this plausible. This question is the focus of my paper. I will examine what has been the standard account of his notion of ontological priority— the “modal-existential” account—and the problems it entails, as well as some scholarly alternatives to it. I will defend my own alternative account—the “explan- atory-existential” account—which addresses the problems (...)
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  3. Philoponus on the Priority of Substances.Riin Sirkel - 2016 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (3):351-372.
    One of the issues that deeply interested the philosophers of late antiquity, the Ancient Greek Commentators, concerns the priority of substances. While questions concerning ontological priority have recently attracted attention in Aristotelian scholarship and contemporary metaphysics, the Commentators’ discussions have not yet received the attention they deserve. My aim is to start to fill in this gap, by focusing on John Philoponus’s account of the priority of substances in his commentary on Aristotle’s "Categories". In particular, I aim to show how (...)
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  4. Alexander of Aphrodisias's Account of Universals and Its Problems.Riin Sirkel - 2011 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 49 (3):297-314.
    The philosophical problem of universals is traditionally framed as the problem about the ontological status of universals. It is often said that the ontological status of universals is a post-Aristotelian problem that was bequeathed to the Middle Ages by a famous sentence in Porphyry's Isagoge. 1 Porphyry raises but then refuses to answer three questions about the ontological status of genera and species, saying that they are too "deep" for the present investigation. 2 Although Porphyry is the first to announce (...)
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  5.  71
    Porphyry on Justice towards Animals: Are Animals Rational and Does It Matter for Justice?Riin Sirkel - 2021 - In Sophia A. Xenophontos & Anna Marmodoro (eds.), The Reception of Greek Ethics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 174-192.
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    Aristotle's Ontology of Artefacts. [REVIEW]Riin Sirkel - 2024 - Bryn Mawr Classical Review 202411.
  7. Aristotle and Other Platonists – by Lloyd P. Gerson. [REVIEW]Riin Sirkel - 2008 - Theoria 74 (1):91-95.
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    The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient Philosophers on Happiness. Edited by Øyvind Rabbås, Eyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen. [REVIEW]Riin Sirkel - 2016 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (619).