Of all the criticisms that Aristotle gives of his predecessors’ theories of soul in De anima I.3–5, none seems more unmotivated than the ones directed against the world soul of Plato’s Timaeus. Against the current scholarly consensus, I claim that the status of Aristotle’s criticisms is philosophical rather than eristical, and that they provide important philosophical reasons, independent of Phys. VIII.10 and Metaph. Λ.6, for believing that νοῦς is without spatial extension, and that its thinking is not a physical motion.

In view of the current fragmentation in management and organisation studies, we argue that there is a need to elaborate techniques that help reconcile contradictory and superficially incommensurable standpoints. For this purpose, we draw on ‘pre-modern’ Aristotelian epistemological and methodological sources, particularly the idea of ‘saving the appearances’ (SA), not previously introduced into organisation studies. Using SA as our starting point, we outline a methodology that helps to develop reasonable and acceptable intermediary positions in contemporary debates between ‘modernism’ and ‘post-modernism’. (...) We illustrate the functioning of SA in the case of three issues in the philosophy of science where ‘modernist’ and ‘post-modernist’ scholars seem to have incommensurable standpoints: the nature of scientific knowledge; the conception of causality; and the epistemology of practice. We show in particular how to use the logics of ‘qualification’, ‘new conception’, and ‘complementary combination’ to form the basis for mediating positions which could then be accepted by less extreme proponents of both ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’. (shrink)

Whereas scholars often look to De Anima 2.5 to support one or another understanding of the sense in which perception, for Aristotle, qualifies as an alteration and qualitative assimilation to the sense-object, I ask the more basic question of what the chapter is meant to establish or accomplish with respect to the question whether perception is an alteration. I argue that the chapter does not presuppose or legitimate the view that perception is an alteration where it is thought to, and (...) that it is meant rather to challenge that view, most importantly, by putting its argumentative weight behind a different model of perception, leading to a kind of antinomy. What stands in the way of understanding perception as an alteration (and assimilation to the sense-object), in this chapter, is ultimately the lack of an account of perceiving a quality as having that quality. (shrink)