In this paper I present an original interpretation of the concept of separation in Plato. First, I argue that despite the fact that the ancient Greek word for “separation” almost never appears in the metaphysical discussions of Plato’s dialogues, the key role of the concept of separation in Plato’s metaphysics can be attested by the importance the platonic tradition gives to it. Therefore, understanding separation in Plato seems to be a problem we must face, but we do not have a (...) clear strategy to solve it. My strategy will be to tackle this problem by looking at a specific passage in which Plato distinguishes the ontological status of Forms and sensible things. Through the analysis of this passage and its relations to another metaphysical argument in Plato, I hope to show that Plato’s careful choice of words and syntactical structure of sentences aims to distinguish two ontologically different types of entities: the unrelational, separate Forms, and the relational sensible things. (shrink)

In the first argument of Metaphysics Μ.2 against the Platonist introduction of separate mathematical objects, Aristotle purports to show that positing separate geometrical objects to explain geometrical facts generates an ‘absurd accumulation’ of geometrical objects. Interpretations of the argument have varied widely. I distinguish between two types of interpretation, corrective and non-corrective interpretations. Here I defend a new, and more systematic, non-corrective interpretation that takes the argument as a serious and very interesting challenge to the Platonist.

This chapter discusses the first part of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics A-33, 88b30-89a10. I claim that Aristotle is not concerned with an epistemological distinction between knowledge and belief in general. He is rather making a contrast between scientific knowledge (which is equivalent to explanation by the primarily appropriate cause) and some explanatory beliefs that falls short of capturing the primarily appropriate cause.