Showing papers in "Phronesis in 1986"

Aristotle's Definitions of Relatives in Cat. 7

Abstract: The important point for the interpretation of these passages is to establish what t6 [iEi0ov and To 6LUaXWTLOv refer to, since what we have to count as relatives depends on this question. An obvious answer to it is to take To ttEitov and lo btnkaOLov as meaning "what is larger" and "what is double", as Ackrill in his translation suggests. Then the sense of the first example given in (B) would be that an object a which is larger than an object b is called what it is, i.e. larger, with reference to b. Consequently, a has to be called a relative according to the definition proposed by (A) and,

The Theory of the Opposites and an Ordered Universe: Physics and Metaphysics in Anaximander

Abstract: In a bold and suggestive paper published in 1947, Professor Gregory Vlastos has given an incisive and intriguing account of Anaximander's cosmogony and cosmology. The "hard core" of Vlastos' reconstruction amounts to the statement that Anaximander held, indeed invented, a "philosophical concept of nature as a self-regulative equilibrium, whose order was strictly immanent, guaranteed through the fixed proportions of its main constituents".' This thesis, I will argue, is false. Regrettably so, because, as Vlastos justly notes, such a view of nature is of greater significance and import than Anaximander's strictly physical hypotheses. Much is at stake here: our analysis will suggest that Anaximander's physical theorythe theory of the opposites which (in a modified form) was to be embraced by Aristotle and the Peripatetic school, could not found the notion of a selfregulative, immanent, natural order. Consequently, in Anaximander as well as in Aristotelian philosophy of nature, natural order had to be sustained and upheld by external factors: in particular, what was to become the sublunary world was not a closed system. As long as the theory of the opposites prevailed, physics could not do without metaphysics. The theory of the opposites will be at the center of our study, but we will have occasion to reflect also on other issues in Anaximander's doctrines. In particular, scholars have long been puzzled by the following apparent contradiction: Anaximander, we know, held that the opposite constituents of the world are in a state of permanent equality; yet, it seems, he also maintained that the world is gradually drying up and that it will ultimately be reabsorbed into the Boundless from which it issued. How can these two ideas be reconciled? Our inquiry into Anaximander's theory of the op-

Is there more than one Generation of Matter in the Enneads

Abstract: There has been some controversy, which has not yet been resolved, concerning the generation of the matter of the physical universe in the Enneads. In an early article O'Brien argued that the partial soul generates matter.' This was later rejected by Schwyzer.2 By interpreting the protasis of a crucial sentence in I, 8, 14 (51-53: xaL yC' dQ aELciT i VpvXi% Tljv i5Xrkv ~yEvvrIoE JuaOofjoa, xcai EL EXOLVWVfJlOEV cUvTn xCi syeviVTo xaxiq, in i5XrT atiTa naQo1vaa) as an unreal condition, Schwyzer argued that matter was eternal and ungenerated. Other relevant passages, he maintained, were all ambiguous, but could be more readily explained as referring to the generation of body. For Schwyzer, then, there is no generation of matter in the Enneads. In the present article I shall first attempt to settle this basic debate. Then I shall go on to argue that the whole question is more complicated than has been recognized. Plotinus has more than one view of the generation of matter. In fact, it is possible to argue that there are three different generations of the matter of the physical universe in the Enneads. Finally, I shall suggest that to regard sensible matter as a static substratum will just not do for all of Plotinus' thinking.3 Certain passages compel us to the view that

The fragments of Parmenides : a critical text with introduction, translation, the ancient testimonia and a commentary

Abstract: Edited with New Translation by Richard McKirahan With a New Preface by Malcolm Schofield This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered "one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times." Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth. This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ _Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta _. The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in T he Fragment s of Parmenides: A Crit ical T ext wit h Int roduct ion and T ranslat ion, t he Ancient T est imonia and a Comment ary    the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides

Non-propositional Thought in Plotinus

Abstract: It is well known to those interested in Neoplatonism that Plotinus speaks regularly of two 'intellects'. There is a psychic intellect whose activity he often calls btavota and later philosophers discursive thought; and there is a 'pure' intellect which has not descended into the soul and whose activity later philosophers often call intuitive or non-discursive thought. For the first to be replaced by, or to become the second, which is of course a higher level for the soul, is a necessary step towards contact with the One. Discursive thought means thought that involves transition, an expression often applied to thought by Plotinus. But this can be a temporal transition from one element of a thought to another or a logical transition from a premiss to a conclusion. Singular judgments belong to discursive thought.' No one doubts that temporal transition and inference are both excluded from the activity of pure intellect. But Plotinus regularly describes the object, or better, content, of this activity as 'everything together' (6goiv 3avrTa). And in a paper of 1970 I suggested that, extrapolating from Aristotle's notion of a judgment, he supposed that there is a form of consciousness which is the exercise of a single thought or concept that in discursive thinking would have been subject or predicate of a composite thought called a judgment.2 This form of consciousness is what I described as non-propositional and identified with the activity of pure intellect. Without quarrelling with this notion of 'non-propositional' R. Sorabji has disputed that pure intellect's activity is non-propositional according to Plotinus. Sorabji claimed first in Language and Logos and then in his own Time, Creation and the Continuum that the transition which is absent from

Soft Determinism and Freedom in Early Stoicism

Abstract: In her paper 'Freedom, Causality, Fatalism and early Stoic philosophy" Dr. Sophie Botros challenges assumptions that have perhaps too readily been taken for granted in recent discussions, and makes important suggestions about the perspective from which we should approach Stoic thought on these topics. It is therefore all the more necessary to examine her conclusions and consider whether they are all equally convincing. B. is right to emphasise (p. 275) that attempts to assess the Stoic position in terms of the modern debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists, soft-determinists and libertarians, run the risk of obscuring the distinctive perspectives of Stoic thought. She is right to doubt whether the Stoic conception of causation can be fully captured in the terms of modern post-Humean formulations of determinism,2 and to emphasise both the fact that the Stoics may have regarded causes as constraining their effects3 and also the teleological and pantheistic aspects of Stoic determinism. Perhaps, though, the conflict which B. sees (pp. 279-280) between the chain of causes and causation by the divine is an unreal one. For Stoic pantheism identified God with the active principle which is present in all things and makes them what they are and is particularly linked, as nveiipa, with the principal cause of a thing's behaviour and hence of its effects on other things.4 Indeed, when B. suggests that we might "assume that a teleological account can in principle always be reduced to a deterministic one" (p. 280), it is arguable that for the early Stoa the reduction would, if anything, operate in the other

The Eudemian Ethics on Knowledge and Voluntary Action

Abstract: In this paper I wish to explain and critically assess the Eudemian Ethics' account of the role of knowledge in voluntary action. As we shall see, the account we find there has a number of shortcomings, and I will also attempt to make improvements in Aristotle's theory which do not do too much violence to his original position. The understanding of Aristotle's views on the conditions for voluntary action in the Eudemian Ethics (hereafter EE) is central to the understanding of its account of moral responsibility for actions, for EE identifies the class of actions for which an agent is responsible with the class of actions which are voluntary. Unfortunately, this identification is a source of serious difficulties in EE's explanation of voluntariness. I will use the notion of 'moral responsibility' in such a way that when an agent performs an action for which he is morally responsible, then if the action is good he and it are morally praiseworthy, and if the action is bad then he and it are morally blameworthy. But many actions for which I am morally responsible are morally indifferent, e.g. my action of squeezing my toes while writing the previous sentence. I will assume that Aristotle believes that when an agent is in this way subject to praise and blame his action is one for which the agent is morally responsible.'

Between Knowledge and Ignorance

Abstract: My interpretation of Book V will be partially determined by my conception of what the dialogue is about. In this section I shall try to state my view briefly. The Republic starts with the words "I went down yesterday . . . ": it finishes by looking forward to the immortal soul's thousand-year journey when it will receive its reward for pursuing "justice with wisdom" (621c5). The dialogue starts in time and ends with eternity. The positive ideal of the dialogue is the union of theoretical and practical wisdom in the philosopherruler. Such a union obviates the evils of instability; it aims at the stability of the individual (VII, 539d4), in harmony with himself both in thought and in action, and the stability of the city, so ensuring peace and harmony. These are interconnected; the man who is at variance with himself in thought is going to be irrational in action also (603dl-3); if he is irrational he will fail to restrain the appetitive part of his soul and thus will become unjust, and if a sufficient number become such this is a recipe for an unjust city, instability and oarot;. The essential propaedeutic for the philosopher is the apprehension of the Forms, archetypes of stability. By acquiring this knowledge, the lover of wisdom and reality distinguishes himself from the

Boethus' Psychology and the Neoplatonists

Abstract: Three writers of late antiquity, all of them Neoplatonists, refer to the psychological doctrine of a certain Boethus. Several philosophers of that name are known, and the fragments have been variously assigned to the Stoic, Boethus of Sidon, who lived in the middle of the second century BC, and his Peripatetic namesake, active about a century later. ' The purpose of this article is to see what exactly we can learn about this thinker from the extant fragments and then to determine which of the various Boethi he is most likely to have been. Our richest source is Porphyry, who wrote a work in five2 books entitled Against Boethus on the soul (IfIQos Bo6rov nErr Vvxfi;), from which nine quotations have been preserved by Eusebius.3 The first four fragments come from the first book of Pophyry's work (ap. Euseb. PE 11.28, II

Aristoteles und das Problem des kausalen Determinismus (Met. E 3)

Abstract: Seit dem Erscheinen des den Buchern F, A und E der Aristotelischen Metaphysik gewidmeten Bandes der Clarendon Aristotle Series, in dem Christopher Kirwan mit Bezug auf das dritte Kapitel des Buches E bemerkt hat: "The chapter has not yet received a satisfactory interpretation",' haben sich mehrere Interpreten um ein besseres Verstandnis dieses schwierigen Textes bemuht.2 Trotz dieser Bemuhungen ist die logische Struktur des Arguments, das Aristoteles in diesem Text bei seiner Auseinandersetzung mit den Verfechtern eines kausalen Determinismus ins Feld fuhrt und das Kirwan fur reichlich "obskur" halt,3 bislang noch nicht mit der wunschenswerten Klarheit herausgearbeitet worden. Dies soll im folgenden versucht werden. Vorausgeschickt sei der Versuch einer Ubersetzung (1027 a 29 b 16):

Les fonctions explicatives de l'Histoire des animaux d'Aristote

Abstract: Nous assistons a une reevaluation de l'Histoire des animaux, que plus personne ne considere aujourd'hui comme un simple recueil de faits, compiles ou directement observes par Aristote et ses assistants euxmemes. I Rehabilitation theorique tellement unanime qu'elle rassemble des interpretations fort differentes. Ainsi quand David Balme, sans doute celui de nos contemporains qui connait le mieux ce traite d'Aristote, propose, dans une perspective chronologique qui n'est assurement pas la mienne, de faire de l'Histoire des animaux le dernier ouvrage du Stagirite, il y a bien reevaluation: I'Histoire des animaux serait, en quelque sorte, le dernier mot de la biologie aristotelicienne.2 L'Histoire des animaux a un objet clairement annonce des son premier chapitre et poursuivi avec constance tout au long de l'ouvrage: "ai tbLapoEaiL TC V4xWv, les differences entre les animaux" (I, 1, 487alO), ces differences pouvant etre faites "selon les modes de vie, les actes, les caracteres, les parties". Plus tard (VIII, 1, init.) cette liste de points de vue sera remani6e et reduite en ce que les modes de vie et les actes seront consideres comme des manifestations du caractere, en relation avec le mode d'alimentation et les conditions exterieures. On peut donc dire que l'Histoire des animaux a