Phronesis 

Abstract: The story starts with a scene from an early Greek comedy. Its author is the Syracusan comic playwright Epicharmus, and it probably dates from the opening decades of the fifth century B.C. The following reconstruction is based on one verbatim quotation of twelve lines, plus two indirect references to it in later authors.' Character A is approached by Character B for payment of his subscription to the running expenses of a forthcoming banquet. Finding himself out of funds, he resorts to asking B the following riddle: 'Say you took an odd number of pebbles, or if you like an even number, and chose to add or subtract a pebble: do you think it would still be the same number?' 'No,' says B. 'Or again, say you took a measure of one cubit and chose to add, or cut off, some other length: that measure would no longer exist, would it? 'No.' 'Well now,' continues A, 'think of men in the same way. One man is growing, another is diminishing, and all are constantly in the process of change. But what by its nature changes and never stays put must already be different from what it has changed from. You and I are different today from who we were yesterday, and by the same argument we will be different again and never the same in the future.' B agrees. A then concludes that he is not the same man who contracted the debt yesterday, nor indeed the man who will be attending the banquet. In that case he can hardly be held responsible for the debt. B, exasperated, strikes A a blow. A protests at this treatment. But this time it is B who neatly sidesteps the protest, by pointing out that by now he is somebody quite different from the man who struck the blow a minute ago. To subsequent generations, the argument used in this scene read like a remarkable anticipation of a philosophical doctrine associated with the names of Heraclitus and Plato, that of the radical instability of the physical world; and Plato himself was pleased to acknowledge such evidence of the doctrine's antiquity.2 But although the puzzle is a serious challenge to ordinary assumptions about identity, never in the fourth century B.C., the era of Plato and Aristotle, does it meet with a proper philosophical analysis

Abstract: This is a close scrutiny of De Anima II 5, led by two questions. First, what can be learned from so long and intricate a discussion about the neglected problem of how to read an Aristotelian chapter? Second, what can the chapter, properly read, teach us about some widely debated issues in Aristotle's theory of perception? I argue that it refutes two claims defended by Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Sorabji: (i) that when Aristotle speaks of the perceiver becoming like the object perceived, the assimilation he has in mind is ordinary alteration of the type exemplified when fire heats the surrounding air, (ii) that this alteration stands to perceptual awareness as matter to form. Claim (i) is wrong because the assimilation that perceiving is is not ordinary alteration. Claim (ii) is wrong because the special type of alteration that perceiving is is not its underlying material realisation. Indeed, there is no mention in the text of any underlying material realisation for perceiving. The positive aim of II 5 is to introduce the distinction between first and second potentiality, each with their own type of actuality. In both cases the actuality is an alteration different from ordinary alteration. Perception exemplifies one of these new types of alteration, another is found in the acquisition of knowledge and in an embryo's first acquisition of the power of perception. The introduction of suitably refined meanings of 'alteration' allows Aristotle to explain perception and learning within the framework of his physics, which by definition is the study of things that change. He adapts his standard notion of alteration, familiar from Physics III 1-3 and De Generatione et Corruptione I, to the task of accounting for the cognitive accuracy of (proper object) perception and second potentiality knowledge: both are achievements of a natural, inborn receptivity to objective truth. Throughout the paper I pay special attention to issues of text and translation, and to Aristotle's cross-referencing, and I emphasise what the chapter does not say as well as what it does. In particular, the last section argues that the textual absence of any underlying material realisation for perceiving supports a view I have defended elsewhere, that Aristotelian perception involves no material processes, only standing material conditions. This absence is as telling as others noted earlier. Our reading must respect the spirit of the text as Aristotle wrote it.

Abstract: Etude de la conception de l'imagination developpee par Aristote dans le traite «De anima» (III, 3). S'inscrivant dans sa theorie de la sensation et de la conception (perception et pensee), l'A. montre qu'Aristote introduit la faculte de l'imagination afin de resoudre le probleme de l'erreur qui se pose dans le cadre de sa definition de l'intentionnalite

Abstract: IT is well known that Ennead VI contains an onslaught by Plotinus on Aristotle's Categories, but that his pupil, Porphyry, established both the Categories and Predicables as part of the Neoplatonic and eventually the Scholastic philosophical curriculum. So far as this situation has been studied, it has been for the most part from the standpoint of its extemal history. Philology has traced many of Plotinus's criticisms to the commentaries of the Middle Academy, and many of Porphyry's expressions to Stoic logicians; historical enquiry has found motives in the social position of the Schools for the Neoplatonic acceptance of Aristotle's logic. This valuable work, however, tends at best to ignore the philosophical understanding of both the criticism and the reinstatement of Aristotle, and at worst to give an erroneous account of the place of Neoplatonism in the history of logic. First, the criticism is of intrinsic philosophical interest, because it aims to shew that 'inseparable' universals, and the whole theory of genus and species, are unable to do the task required of them. Secondly, the logic which Porphyry and his successors reinstate resembles that of the Stoics in being stripped of certain metaphysical implications. The reason for this is not corruption of Platonism by the Stoa, but the inevitable effect of wanting Aristotle the elementary logician without Aristotle the metaphysician. And the result is that a good deal of credit has gone to the Stoics which was due to the Neoplatonists. Useful as it is, Prantl's work needs rewriting. This must not be misunderstood. In dealing with Neoplatonists we cannot be concerned, as we can in the case of Stoics, withformal logic. I doubt whether there is a single theorem whose discovery can be attributed to them." We are concerned with logic in a wide sense, which can for the present purposes be quite accurately defined as the sense in which the Categories and Predicables are logical doctrines. What Porphyry achieved what he was driven to achieve was a logic of this kind, which, merely because of its restricted metaphysical implications, was valuable to Boetius and the Schoolmen and important in the history of philosophy. It allowed Aristotelian logic to become an autonomous