For Aristotle, the shape of a physical body is perceptible per se (DA II.6, 418a8-9). As I read his position, shape is thus a causal power, as a physical body can affect our sense organs simply in virtue of possessing it. But this invites a challenge. If shape is an intrinsically powerful property, and indeed an intrinsically perceptible one, then why are the objects of geometrical reasoning, as such, inert and imperceptible? I here address Aristotle’s answer to that problem, focusing (...) on the version of it that he presents in De caelo III.8. I argue that if we grant that Aristotle conceived of the shape of a sensible body as some kind of causal power, then the satisfactory resolution of that challenge pushes us to interpret him as having conceived of it as being, more specifically, an impure power—that is, as a property that is not only intrinsically powerful but also, in some way, intrinsically non-powerful as well. This is a notable result not only insofar as it illuminates Aristotle’s conception of shape but also insofar as it contributes to our knowledge of Aristotle’s theory of dunameis and his ontology more broadly. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to argue against Karl Rogers's attacks on realism in physics. Rogers argues that electrons do not exist independently of the relevant socio-technological process, but I show that such an assumption would make our best scientific theories incomprehensible. While the paper supports Rogers's attempts to refute positivism, it demonstrates that his own position is positivistic, and it corrects his overemphasis on the roles of technology and the experimenter. Rogers assumes that the founders of modern (...) science were simply mechanists, but I show how they were actually Platonic realists. Contrary to Rogers, realist faith in the fundamental unifying power of the laws of physics is shown to be reasonable, and any denial of this belief would imply that science is impossible. (shrink)

In the resolution proclaiming 2015 the International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies, the General Assembly of the United Nations drew atten- tion to the importance of light in the lives of the citizens of the world. This is of major importance, not only because light plays a crucial role in fields as diverse as arts, culture or technology, but also because ‘light’ is a major concept within the history of philosophy. Since the first Presocratic philosophers, light had an important (...) role in their philoso- phical systems and was one of the most resourceful concepts explaining realities and conveying their properties. Since these world-visions ‘light’ was much more than a physical reality or a symbol; it was a powerful metaphor, sometimes used against some ideas of ignorance, obscurantism or even evil. The relevance of Neoplatonist thinkers is proved by the extensive translations and commentaries undertaken during Middle Ages, which influenced art, physics, optics,and aesthetics. This paper will pay particular attention to the discussion of the concept of ‘light (phos)’ in Plotinus’ Enneads, and then we will discuss its metamorphosis in the thought of philosophers such as Proclus, Damascius and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine what is for Plato and all those who follow in his footsteps the ne plus ultra of cognition, namely, intuition (nous or noēsis). This is the paradigm of cognition, meaning that all forms of human (and even animal) cognition are inferior manifestations of this. Intuition is mental seeing, analogous to physical seeing. Among embodied souls, it is seeing a unity of some sort manifested in some diversity or plurality. Thus, someone who sees that the Morning (...) Star is the Evening Star, or that S at t1 is identical with S at t2, or that f = ma, etc., sees the unity ‘behind’ the diversity. The disembodied intellect that is the Demiurge (or, for Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover) sees paradigmatically the diversity of all intelligible being as a unity. Because mental seeing or intuition is paradigmatic for all cognition, cognition is essentially a unificatory process. Plato's method of collection and division displays both this process and its reverse. In the light of this core doctrine, I examine some of the insights that Platonists, especially Plotinus and Proclus, arrived at regarding a host of issues, including the nature of the first principle of all and the nature of normativity. (shrink)

Proclus' interpretation of the Timaeus confronts the question of whether the living being that is the Platonic cosmos perceives itself. Since sense perception is a mixed blessing in the Platonic tradition, Proclus solves this problem by differentiating different gradations of perception. The cosmos has only the highest kind. This paper contrasts Proclus' account of the world's perception of itself with James Lovelock's notion that the planet Earth, or Gaia, is aware of things going on within itself. This contrast illuminates several (...) key differences between contemporary theories of perception and the neoplatonic world view. In particular, it argues that the neoplatonists had a radically different view of these matters because they assigned the property of truth not only to representations, but to objects as well. (shrink)

RésuméLa théorie avicenienne du mouvement des orbes célestes représente un aspect important de sa cosmologie qui n'a cependant pas encore été l'objet d'une étude approfondie. Cet article compte combler ce manque en fournissant une analyse des différents principes à l'origine du mouvement céleste, ainsi qu'une réflexion sur le rôle des disciplines astronomique, physique, et métaphysique dans les explications que fournit Ibn Sīnā à ce sujet. L'accent est mis sur le rapport des intelligences aux orbes et sur la problématique du passage (...) de l'intellectif au physique, un moment charnière dans la cinématique avicenienne. En outre, l'étude remet en question l'adhésion d'Ibn Sīnā à la théorie farabienne des dix intelligences et entreprend une reconstitution de son modèle cosmologique. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 2, pp 177 - 204 This article presents a synoptic account of the faculties of rational soul in the philosophy of Proclus and an interpretation of the unity which this soul constitutes despite the plurality of its faculties and objects of its attentions. It seeks to demonstrate that Proclus, through his conceptual construction of a rational soul grounded in an objective and cosmic framework, accounts for at least some of the subjective aspects of selfhood which (...) many contemporary philosophical theories take to be necessary for a concept of self, but that he does so on his own terms. This means, among other things, that Proclus posits each rational soul as a subjective entity with its own perspective on the world, but a perspective which is always grounded, more or less, in an objective knowledge of the world which belongs to it essentially and eternally. Despite grounding the subjective in the objective, Proclus is able to account for the individuality and uniqueness of souls within the limits of his objective framework. (shrink)

An investigation of Proclus' logic of the syllogistic and of negations in the Elements of Theology, On the Parmenides, and Platonic Theology. It is shown that Proclus employs interpretations over a linear semantic structure with operators for scalar negations (hypemegationlalpha-intensivum and privative negation). A natural deduction system for scalar negations and the classical syllogistic (as reconstructed by Corcoran and Smiley) is shown to be sound and complete for the non-Boolean linear structures. It is explained how Proclus' syllogistic presupposes converting the (...) tree of genera and species from Plato's diairesis into the Neoplatonic linear hierarchy of Being by use of scalar hyper and privative negations. (shrink)

This dissertation offers a new and comprehensive analysis of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī's cosmology by focusing on various important issues that have been largely neglected by the modern scholarship. It provides an examination of the physical, metaphysical, and astronomical aspects of al-Fārābī's cosmology by adopting a multidisciplinary approach that takes into account the history of philosophy and the history of astronomy. Accordingly, my dissertation explores how al-Fārābī attempted to reconcile features of Ptolemaic astronomy with Aristotelian and Neoplatonic theories, an endeavor which (...) resulted in the formulation of innovative cosmological ideas. Chapters I and II provide background information on al-Fārābī's activity as a commentator and his relation to the Greek commentatorial tradition and assess the relevant primary sources. In addition, they examine al-Fārābī's approach to cosmology and his scientific method in terms of both the Ptolemaic astronomical tradition and the Aristotelian corpus. Chapter III addresses problems related to the structure of al-Fārābī's cosmology, especially the origin of his ennadic cosmological model and his spherology. Particular attention is devoted to the question of how Aristotle's unmoved movers and Ptolemy's astronomical theories are reconciled. Chapters IV, V, and VI analyze the place of celestial matter, intellect, and motion respectively in al-Fārābī's cosmology and attempt to redefine the second teacher's relation to the various trends of Greek philosophy. The study stresses al-Fārābī's connection with the Neoplatonic and Peripatetic currents, particularly with thinkers such as Alexander of Aphrod. (shrink)

One of the key concepts in modern science is force (F). In present studies on the history of dynamics, Patricius is either completely omitted or only cursorily mentioned. The aim of this text is to show that Patricius’s concept of the soul, as he developed it in his Nova de universis philosophia from 1591, comes close to the modern (i.e. Newtonian) understanding of force. This should support the more general position that one of the most intriguing aspects of Patricius’s philosophy (...) is his contribution to the emergence of modern science. (shrink)

In theCommentary on the Cratylus, Proclus puts forward an original but largely ignored interpretation of Circe as weaving life inτῷ τετραστοίχῳ. This paper argues thatτὸ τετράστοιχονrefers not to the four genera but to the four elements. Thus what the enchantress weaves are the elemental garments that weigh the soul down to the earthly realm of mortals.

Proposition 28 from Proclus'Elements of Theologyis consistently cited as saying that every producing causefirstbrings about effects that are like it andtheneffects that are unlike it. This is a theorem to which Proclus is indeed committed, but I argue that it is not what Proclus is claiming here. At this stage of his general argument, he merely argues that every cause produces things that are like it, without saying anything about other products than the immediate ones. The standard interpretation of proposition (...) 28 is therefore wrong. This becomes clear if one pays close attention to the argumentative structure of theElements of Theologyand to the proof given for proposition 28. (shrink)

One of the hardest questions to answer for a (Neo)platonist is to what extent and how the changing and unreliable world of sense perception can itself be an object of scientific knowledge. My dissertation is a study of the answer given to that question by the Neoplatonist Proclus (Athens, 411-485) in his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. I present a new explanation of Proclus’ concept of nature and show that philosophy of nature consists of several related subdisciplines matching the ontological stratification (...) of nature. Moreover, I demonstrate that for Proclus philosophy of nature is a science, albeit a hypothetical one, which takes geometry as its methodological paradigm. I also offer an explanation of Proclus’ view of what is later called the mathematization of physics, i.e. the role of the substance of mathematics, as opposed to its method, in explaining the natural world. Finally, I discuss Proclus’ views of the discourse of philosophy of nature and its iconic character. (shrink)

Recently the terms “codes” and “information” as used in the context of molecular biology have been the subject of much discussion. Here I propose that a variety of structural realism can assist us in rethinking the concepts of DNA codes and information apart from semantic criteria. Using the genetic code as a theoretical backdrop, a necessary distinction is made between codes qua symbolic representations and information qua structure that accords with data. Structural attractors are also shown to be entailed by (...) the mapping relation that any DNA code is a part of (as the domain). In this framework, these attractors are higher-order informational structures that obviate any “DNA-centric” reductionism. In addition to the implications that are discussed, this approach validates the array of coding systems now recognized in molecular biology. (shrink)

This paper sets out to analyze Proclus’ exegesis of Socrates’ suggestion in Parmenides 132d1-3 that Forms stand fixed as patterns, as it were, in the nature, with the other things being images and likenesses of them. Proclus’ analysis of the notion of being pattern reveals the impact of the Aristotelian conception of the form as paradigm on his views, as we can infer from Alexander of Aphrodisias’ and Simplicius’ explanation of the paradigmatic character of the Aristotelian form. Whereas Aristotle and (...) Alexander of Aphrodisias refute the efficient causality of the Platonic Forms and support that μέθεξις is just a metaphor, Syrianus, Proclus and Asclepius defend the Platonic theory, and specifically Proclus, who brings to the fore the multilateral role of the Forms as patterns with regard to the secondary things of this realm.[1] [1] An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Symposium Platonicum XII: Plato’s Parmenides, organized by the International Plato Society, Paris, 15-19 July 2019. (shrink)

This paper argues that Malebranche’s semantics sheds light on his metaphysics and epistemology, and is of interest in its own right. By recasting issues linguistically, it shows that Malebranche assumes a Neoplatonic semantic structure within Descartes’ dualism and Augustine’s theory of illumination, and employs linguistic devices from the Neoplatonic tradition. Viewed semantically, mental states of illumination stand to God and his ideas as predicates stand in Neoplatonic semantics to ideas ordered by a privative relation on “being.” The framework sheds light (...) on interpretive puzzles in Malebranche studies such as the way ideas reside in God’s mind, the notion of resemblance by which bodies imitate their exemplar causes, and the issue of direct vs. indirect perception through a mechanism by which agents can see bodies by “seeing” ideas. Malebranche’s semantics is of interest in its own right because it gives a full account of the mediating relations that determine indirect reference; lays out a correspondence theory of truth for necessary judgments; defines contingent truth as based on an indirect reference relation that is both descriptive and causal but that does not appeal to body-mind causation; and within his theory of perception, works out an account of singular reference in which singular terms carry existential import, refer indirectly via causal relations, but describe their referents only in a general way. (shrink)