Platonic arguments often have premises of a particular form which is misunderstood. These sentences look like universal generalizations, but in fact involve an implicit qua phrase which makes them a fundamentally different kind of predication. Such general implicit redoubled qua predications (girqps) are not an expression of Plato's proprietary views; they are also very common in everyday discourse. Seeing how they work in Plato can help us to understand them.

La experiencia común presenta los sueños como una sucesión de imágenes. Incluso quienes lo teorizaron vinculan lo onírico con lo visual: soñar es ver algo. No obstante, dado que los sueños están habitados por negatidades que se presentan bajo la forma de la ausencia, de la falta, de la frustración o, de manera más general, del deseo, el autor muestra que la ontología paradójica de éstas obliga a alejarnos del paradigma visual de la representación para pensarlo mediante el modelo discursivo (...) de la significación. Así, lejos de ser una imagen, los sueños son siempre ya un texto. (shrink)

Aristotle’s broad characterization of the soul has been challenged on account of its reliance on the notion of a “potentially alive body”. J. L. Ackrill famously claimed that no body can meet this description without being already actually alive. By a close inspection of both metaphysical and embryological texts, this paper argues that (1) it is embryos (and not fully-formed organic bodies) who provide the right kind of potentially alive subjects and that (2) the schematic character of the soul’s common (...) formula accounts for its seemingly intractable features. It also holds that (3) once the homonymous nature of life is brought into the picture, the κοινότατος λόγος appears unproblematic – at least for some of its most troublesome instances. (shrink)

Aristotle notoriously begins his examination of being in the sense ofdunamisandenergeiainMetaphysicsTheta with what he describes as the sense that is ‘most dominant’ but not useful for his present aim. He proceeds to define the not-useful sense ofdunamisas “the principle of change in something else or in itself qua other”, along with other senses derived from this primary sense. But what then is the useful sense? All that Aristotle tells us at the outset is that it is a sense that extends (...) “beyond things spoken of only in relation to motion” and nowhere in Book Theta does he explicitly identify the useful sense as such. This has allowed for very different interpretations of the useful sense in the literature, the primary ones being that it is (1) ‘possibility’, (2) the potential to receive a form, (3) being-potentially-x understood modally as encompassing all specific senses ofdunamis, and (4) capacity for substantial change. The present paper argues that there are significant problems with all of these suggestions and defends an identification of the useful sense ofdunamiswith the sense that Aristotle explicitly opposes to the not-useful sense at the start of Theta 8:phusis(‘nature’). This goes hand-in-hand with an identification of the useful sense ofenergeiawith ‘activity’ as distinguished from motion/change at the end of Theta 6. What makes these senses ofdunamisandenergeiathe useful ones for Aristotle’s present aim is that they are required to explain fully the priority ofenergeiatodunamisin substance defended in Theta 8, they support the identification in Theta 9 ofenergeiawith the good, and they explain the unity of the only substances that Aristotle recognizes as being genuinely substances: natural living substances. (shrink)

After a quick overview on the specification of the causal role of the powers or faculties (δυνάμεις) in nutrition, from the Hippocratic physicians to Galen, via Aristotle, the article defines the set of questions about this process that the Hippocratic physicians leave open. It then examines how Aristotle provides some sort of indirect physical and ethical answers, while Galen openly takes the side of reappropriating the central Stoic concept of oikeiôsis in a Platonist way.