The belief that Aristotle opposes potency (dunamis) to actuality (energeia or entelecheia) has gone untested. This essay defines and distinguishes forms of the Opposition Hypothesis—the Actualization, Privation, and Modal—examining the texts and arguments adduced to support them. Using Aristotle’s own account of opposition, the texts appear instead to show that potency and actuality are compatible, while arguments for their opposition produce intractable problems. Notably, Aristotle’s refutation of the Megarian Identity Hypothesis applies with equal or greater force to the Opposition Hypothesis. (...) For Aristotle, then, potency and actuality are compatible. (shrink)

Tekst ma na celu bliższe zapoznanie Czytelnika z otwierającą cykl Aristotelica pracą doktorską Franza Brentano Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862), która znana jest głównie z tego, że miała zainspirować młodego Martina Heideggera i sprawić, że zajął się filozofią. Tekst bada naturę i siłę tej inspiracji. Część pierwsza opowiada historię powstania Von der mannigfachen … oraz przedstawia szerszy kontekst zetknięcia się Heideggera z filozofią Brentana, a także stara się przedstawić Heideggera na tle jego pozostałych uczniów (Kazimierz Twardowski, (...) Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, et al.). Część druga omawia piętnaście tez o bycie, które stanowią sedno dzieła O wielorakim znaczeniu bytu u Arystotelesa i tym samym umożliwia porównanie tomistycznej w duchu ontologii Brentana z ontologią fundamentalną Heideggera, o czym traktuje część trzecia. Część trzecia stara się również zweryfikować faktyczną wysokość „długu”, jaki Heidegger miał u Brentana zaciągnąć i odpowiedzieć na pytanie, do jakiego stopnia, o ile w ogóle, Martina Heideggera możemy nazwać „brentanistą”. (shrink)

To a first approximation, ontology is concerned with what exists, metaontology with what it means to say that something exists. So understood, metaontology has been dominated by three views: (i) existence as a substantive first-order property that some things have and some do not, (ii) existence as a formal first-order property that everything has, and (iii) existence as a second-order property of existents’ distinctive properties. Each of these faces well-documented difficulties. In this chapter, I want to expound a fourth theoretical (...) option, which unfortunately has remained ‘under the radar.’ This is Franz Brentano’s view, according to which to say that X exists is not to attribute a property at all (first- or second-order), but to say that the correct attitude to take toward X is that of accepting or believing in it. (shrink)

مفهوم «کمال» در اندیشه ارسطو به‌طور کلی با دو واژه «انرگیا» و «انتلخیا» بیان شده است که هر دو در انگلیسی به ترجمه شده است. ارسطو در بحث علم‌النفس برای تعریف نفس یکبار نفس را به صورت بدن طبیعی تعریف کرده است و در ادامه آن را به «کمال اول» تعریف کرده است و «کمال نخستین» را در برابر کمال نهایی یا ثانوی قرار داده است. او در تبیین کمال بودن نفس و چرایی «کمال نخستین» برای نفس از آنالوژی تناسب (...) بهره می‌گیرد. پرسش این است چرا در تعریف نفس از صورت به کمال گذر کرده است؟ معنی کمال در تعریف نفس چیست؟ مراد از «اولی» بودن در «کمال» در تعریف نفس چیست؟ چرا ارسطو نفس را کمال نخستین معرفی کرده است؟ مؤلفه‌های کمال نخستین نسبت به کمال نهایی چیست؟ بهره ارسطو از آنالوژی‌ها در تعریف نفس چه بوده است؟ در این نوشتار با بیان آنالوژی‌ها در تعریف نفس در صدد تحلیل این مسئله و پاسخگویی به این پرسش‌ها هستیم. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

The Middle Included is a systematic exploration of the meanings of logos throughout Aristotle’s work. It claims that the basic meaning is “gathering,” a relation that holds its terms together without isolating them or collapsing one to the other. This meaning also applies to logos in the sense of human language. Aristotle describes how some animals are capable of understanding non-firsthand experience without being able to relay it, while others relay it without understanding. Aygün argues that what distinguishes human language, (...) for Aristotle, is its ability to both understand and relay firsthand and non-firsthand experiences. This ability is key to understanding the human condition: science, history, news media, propaganda, gossip, utopian fiction, and sophistry, as well as philosophy. Ömer Aygün finds Aristotle’s name for this peculiar but crucial human ability of “gathering” both experiences is logos, and this leads to a claim about the specificity of human rationality and language. (shrink)

This paper identifies a problem that Aristotle revealed and that Heidegger’s own insights, into the diverse forms that the Being of entities takes, exacerbated: the problem is whether there is sense to the idea of ‘Being in general’—‘Being as a whole’—and this is a problem because there not being such sense threatens the very possibility of the discipline of ontology. The paper proposes that Heidegger envisaged the project which a completed Being and Time would have carried out as an attempt (...) to solve this problem. The project considers what the subject who intends ‘Being as a whole’ would have to be like; crucially this requires reflection on what it would be for that subject itself to be a whole; and we find such reflection in Heidegger’s discussion of authenticity. By looking in particular at his notions of ‘guilt’ and ‘Being-towards-death’, and the role that they play in identifying an ‘ecstatic’ form of temporality, we can identify a ‘horizon’ against which the authentic can be seen as ‘being-a-whole’ and as living in the light of an understanding of what might indeed be called ‘Being as a whole’. (shrink)

Both through his own work and that of his students, Franz Clemens Brentano had an often underappreciated influence on the course of 20 th - and 21 st -century philosophy. _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ offers full coverage of Brentano’s philosophy and his influence. It contains 38 brand-new essays from an international team of experts that offer a comprehensive view of Brentano’s central research areas—philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and value theory—as well as of the principal (...) figures shaped by Brentano’s school of thought. A General Introduction serves as an overview of Brentano and the contents of the volume and three separate bibliographies point students and researchers on to further avenues of inquiry. Systematic and detailed, _The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School_ provides readers with a valuable reference to Brentano’s work, and to his lasting importance in the history of philosophy and in contemporary debates. (shrink)

All kinds of identity are typical, genus, and numerical identity. This predication that is the basis of the propositional language of Aristotle is the condition of speaking and use of categories and general concepts in the realm of beings. Because of this, these categories are called categories of being. Before we can speak of prediction, everything must be self-identical. So we have now the best known and logical form of the principle of identity i.e. A=A. Aristotle with formulating the logic (...) and with a concentrate on the numerical identity leads to a kind of concept of the world i.e. conceptual-logical world. The world, after that, is the world of mind and logical thought. With the superiority of the numerical identity and constitution of the principle of identity, the nature of categories is logical-Mindy nature. The definition of identity as A=A give rise to man solely directed at the logical form of this principle and will wipe out of ontological sense. So this particular view about identity leads to a formulation of logical-mindy nature of categories. (shrink)

"However that may be, Aristotelian syllogistic concerned itself exclusively with monadic predicates. Hence it could not begin to investigate multiple quantification. And that is why it never got very far. None the less, the underlying grammar of Aristotle's logic did not in itself..