This book traces the development of conceptions of God and the relationship between God's being and activity 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 comparative history of philosophical thought in the two halves of Christendom, providing a philosophical backdrop to the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches.

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Aristotle East and West : metaphysics and the division of Christendom

Aristotle's theory of truth, which has been the most influential account of the concept of truth from Antiquity onwards, spans several areas of philosophy: philosophy of language, logic, ontology and epistemology. In this 2004 book, Paolo Crivelli discusses all the main aspects of Aristotle's views on truth and falsehood. He analyses in detail the main relevant passages, addresses some well-known problems of Aristotelian semantics, and assesses Aristotle's theory from the point of view of modern analytic philosophy. In the process he discusses most of the literature on Aristotle's semantic theory to have appeared in the last two centuries. His book vindicates and clarifies the often repeated claim that Aristotle's is a correspondence theory of truth. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers working in both ancient philosophy and modern philosophy of language.

Aristotle on truth

Aristotle East and West: The Prime Mover

Aristotle was a realist about natural teleology, Kant an anti-realist. My dissertation explains why each accorded it the epistemic and ontological status that he did. I articulate and defend novel conceptions of the problems they were addressing and their solutions to them.
	Aristotle’s natural teleology constitutes an essential part of his solution to a larger problem: how is motion or change possible? Motion had been thought by some to be unlimited and, therefore, unknowable. If there is to be a science of natural motion, then, motion must have limits. The telos was one such limit. Aristotle often glosses telos with limit, and this association is consistent with prior usage. It was, in fact, one of the three standardly recognized limits, together with beginning and middle—archē and meson. All three figure in Aristotle’s account of natural motion. The archē is the efficient cause, and the meson is that by which the archē brings about some telos. So understood, the telos has a natural relation to the possibility of motion: it serves as a limit in virtue of which motion is intelligible.
	Kant’s teleology is intimately related to disputes about universals and our empirical classifications of things. Central to my account is the category of community. Our discursive intellects require that we approach nature as if it were ordered into a system of genera and species. In such a system, the species are parts of the genus and stand together in community under it, thereby constituting a whole. Similarly, an organism or natural end possesses the form of a system and its parts stand together in community under a common or communal ground. They too constitute a whole. But as with nature’s kinds, we can only approach an organism as if its parts formed a real whole: their communal ground is simple and so not to be met with in space. They possess, in other words, a noumenal ground. Consequently, organisms can be explained neither teleologically nor mechanistically, and teleology itself can never be accorded genuinely scientific status. Natural ends can be understood only on analogy with ourselves.

Teleology and Its Limits in Aristotle and Kant

By a "concept" , I mean a unitary thought (of the sort normally represented by a word) that applies to a plurality of differing objects, and by "The Problem of Concepts" I mean the pervasive philosophical questions of how such thoughts are to be explained and by what standards they are to be evaluated. Aristotle is generally held to have been a Moderate Realist, who held that a concept is a putative grasp of a mind-independent universal object that exist somehow in or derivatively on the many particular objects to which the concept applies. I argue that Aristotle rejected the posit of such universal objects and instead understood universality as a feature of thought, which has a basis in reality and a function in cognition. With some notable exceptions, concepts are based on relations of difference in "the more and the less" between their instances and on the causal relations between the various parts and characteristics of each instance. A concept's function is to serve as a term in deductions which enable us to represent the necessity of causal connections. I go on, then, to explore the manner in which, on Aristotle's view, concepts compose propositions and bodies of knowledge and the way in which they are formed.

Aristotle and the Problem of Concepts.

The topic of degrees of being in Aristotle is almost universally ignored. A very few scholars do discuss the topic or make use of it in passing. This situation mightbe explained by a scholarly consensus that (a) Aristotle did have a doctrine ofdegrees of being, but (b) this doctrine is too uninteresting to be worth much discussion. Conversation with a number of scholars from several countries has convinced me, however, that a rather different consensus lies behind the current silence. It turnsout that many experts in the subject deny that Aristotle believed in degrees of being.No one, to my knowledge, has defended this denial in print. But the reason forsilence is not that the topic is dull, but that it is scandalous. Both defenders andopponents of the view that Aristotle had a doctrine of degrees of being tend, in conversation, to find the topic embarrassing. Our contemporary metaphysical prejudices areso opposed to degrees of being that people find themselves unable to make anysense of such a doctrine. As a result, one group of scholars is embarrassed on Aristotle's behalf at the suggestion that he might have held such a senseless doctrine.Another group, less sure of where the philosophical truth lies, finds itself in theinterpretative embarrassment of being unable to explain and motivate the doctrine. So bothgroups avoid the subject.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0009838800030585

Donald Morrison

Papers

The Evidence for Degrees of Being in Aristotle