I reconstruct Aristotle’s reasons for thinking that the intellect cannot have a bodily organ. I present Aristotle’s account of the aboutness or intentionality of cognitive states, both perceptual and intellectual. On my interpretation, Aristotle’s account is based around the notion of cognitive powers taking on forms in a special preservative way. Based on this account, Aristotle argues that no physical structure could enable a bodily part or combination of bodily parts to produce or determine the full range of forms that (...) the human intellect can understand. For Aristotle, cognitive powers with bodily organs are always spatiotemporally limited, but the understanding is not. Aristotle claims that our understanding applies to all instances of the thing understood wherever and whenever they exist. On Aristotle’s own account the intellect in its nature is only “potential,” it does not actually possess any form. Thus nothing prevents it from possessing all forms. (shrink)

I argue that Plato thinks that the soul has location, surface, depth, and extension, and that the Timaeus’ composition of the soul out of eight circles is intended literally. A novel contribution is the development of an account of corporeality that denies the entailment that the soul is corporeal. I conclude by examining Aristotle’s objection to the Timaeus’ psychology and then the intellectual history of this reading of Plato.

This paper explores in detail Gorgias' defense of rhetoric in Plato 's Gorgias, noting its connections to earlier and later texts such as Aristophanes' Clouds, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' Nicocles and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The defense as Plato presents it is transparently inadequate; it reveals a deep inconsistency in Gorgias' conception of rhetoric and functions as a satirical precursor to his refutation by Socrates. Yet Gorgias' defense is appropriated, in a streamlined form, by later defenders of rhetoric such as Isocrates (...) and Aristotle. They present it as an effective reductio against a critique of rhetoric that depends on the "harm criterion." This is puzzling, since Plato 's own critique of rhetoric does not depend on the harm criterion. On the other hand, Plato does seem to embrace the harm criterion as a more general principle—as if pre-emptively embracing the reductio —in his arguments about the good in the Meno and Euthydemus. Nonetheless, Isocrates and Aristotle seem to be deliberately misreading Plato on rhetoric: where he intends to criticize its intrinsic nature, they respond as if he were merely complaining about its contingent effects. (shrink)

Surprisingly little attention has been devoted to Musonius Rufus, a noted teacher and philosopher in first–century CE Rome, despite ample evidence for his impact in the period. This paper attempts to situate Musonius in relation to his philosophical predecessors in order to clarify both the contemporary status of the Stoic tradition and the value of engaging with the central figures of that school’s history. I make the case for seeing Cleanthes as a particularly prominent predecessor for Musonius and reaffirm the (...) importance of framing his philosophical commitments in the context of the Stoic tradition. On this latter point, I attempt to connect Musonius’ perspective on askesis and moral development with that of Posidonius (and Seneca). In doing so, I push back against the sometimes overly schematic intellectualism attributed to Stoic ethics generally. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory opens by intervening in a debate between the jurist Carl Schmitt and the theologian Erik Peterson. Peterson's “Monotheism as a Political Problem” undermined Schmitt's thesis that the modern concept of sovereignty derives from Christian theology by arguing that divine monarchy is a Judaic and Greek idea that was liquidated by the doctrine of the Trinity. Agamben, by contrast, argues that the Trinity preserves and transforms the model of divine monarchy by casting God as (...) singular in his being and multiple in his management of the world. I argue that this critique of Peterson in fact builds upon the “Monotheism” essay, which shows how political theologians inherited and rearticulated conceptual problems derived from Aristotle's Metaphysics, and is driven by Agamben's concern with the impact of Aristotle's thought on ontology and politics. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to reconstruct a metaphysical interpretation of the philosophy of history with regard to the spirit of historical thinking. The spirit of historical thinking is to emphasize the relation between what happened in the past and historical thinking about the past in the present. However, current philosophies of history, which are largely epistemologically oriented, have not adequately explored this relation. In order to investigate the relation between past and present, I refer to an Aristotelian philosophy (...) of practice and politics, and adapt it to the domain of the philosophy of history, and argue the case for a metaphysical science of history. A metaphysical science of history contains two primary parts. They are the part on physis and the part on technê/phronēsis. With regard to physis that metaphysically investigates the natural generating progress of entities, I argue that the existence of historical events can be understood as a natural developing progress in which the events are ordered in a chronological sequence. Such chronological sequence is essentially the physis of history in the metaphysical sense. For the part on technê/phronēsis, I demonstrate that Aristotelian knowing is for itself an action of knowing, which is located beyond a given temporal position in the past to both the past and the thinking present, and indicates the fundamental Beingness of history. Finally I conclude that the historical eudaimonia, namely the pursuing of the completeness of historical knowledge, is the final presentation of actualizing Geschehenszeit, as it bridges the past and the present in accordance to the spirit of historical thinking. (shrink)

A novel rereading of the relationship between ethics and ontology in Aristotle.

The Holocaust throws the study of the history of philosophy into crisis. Critiques of Western thinking leveled by such thinkers as Adorno, Levinas and, more recently, postmodern theorists have suggested that Western philosophy is inherently totalizing and that it must be read differently or altogether abandoned after Auschwitz. This article intentionally rereads Aristotle and Hegel through the shattered lens of the Holocaust. Its refracted focus is the question of ontological identity. By investigating the manner in which the totalizing dimensions of (...) Aristotle’s thinking are both eclipsed and implicitly endorsed by Hegel’s appropriation of Aristotle’s conception of God, and further by following the surplus of Hegel’s (mis)interpretation back into the heart of Aristotle’s ontology where we find a more open conception of ontological identity, we come to recognize not only the dangers endemic to certain strands of traditional philosophical thinking, but also the resources this tradition itself brings to bear on the attempt to think ontological identity after Auschwitz. (shrink)

Carnes Lord is an eminent Aristotelian scholar who has since the mid-1970s intermittently occupied positions within the United States government. This article considers the linkages between his writings on Aristotle and the standpoints he has adopted when in government, with particular reference to the period in the early 1980s when he fulfilled an important role in developing a public diplomacy and information strategy against the Soviet Union. Attention is given to Lord’s interpretation and application, in both his writings and his (...) policy-making, of several key aspects of Aristotle’s political thought, such as rhetoric, regimes, and education. The influence of Leo Strauss on Lord’s thinking is also taken into account. (shrink)

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics, drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws. Part I: The paper opens with the question of why Aristotle would say that no one will doubt that education should be the concern of the legislator, and Sections I–III identify the nature of his enterprise in the Politics, the audience he wishes to address, the (...) conclusions he seeks to establish in VIII. 1, and what public education would amount to for him. An important conclusion reached is that the first of Aristotle's two conclusions in VIII.1 has been routinely misidentified. (shrink)

Abstract The great german Scholar, Eduard Zeller, suggested that the reference to male and female in Parmenides B12.5-6 was probably an allusion to the physical principles of `mortal opinion': Night and Light. This suggestion has been rejected by some scholars because such an association would lead us to admit that, in B12, male was associated with Night and female with Light, a theory which would be at odds with the supposed misogyny of Greek culture. However, Parmenides' account of `mortal opinion' (...) certainly associates male with coldness and density, the attributes of Night, and female with hotness and greater rarity, the attibutes of Light. The aims of this paper are, then, first, to show that the association of female with Light and of male with Night is in fact right; and secondly to investigate the main dualistic features of Parmenides' `mortal opinion' (embryology, sleep, death, knowledge) in relation to this theme. This will lead us, finally, to focus our attention on the Proem, which introduces us to a world full of female divinities, among whom - beyond the gates of the ways of day and night - is the unnamed goddess who will initiate her young male auditor into the two `ways'. (shrink)

This paper develops an interpretation and analysis of the arguments for public education which open Book VIII of Aristotle's Politics , drawing on both the wider Aristotelian corpus and on examination of continuities with Plato's Laws . Part III : Sections VIII-XI examine the two arguments which Aristotle adduces in support of the claim that education should be provided through a public system. The first of these arguments concerns the need to unify society through education for friendship and the sharing (...) of a common end. Several versions of his second argument are considered, and the most promising of them is elaborated in connection with an examination of the links between instruction and legislation in the Laws . This yields what is probably the most compelling argument there is for the claim that public supervision of education is a necessary condition for a just society. (shrink)