Aristotelian Context Research Articles

The Poetics in its Aristotelian Context. Edited by Pierre Destree, Malcolm Heath, and Dana L. Munteanu

The Poetics in its Aristotelian Context. Edited by Pierre Destree, Malcolm Heath, and Dana L. Munteanu

DASEIN AND ἦΘΟΣ: DO VALUES EXIST?

The article considers M. Heidegger’s deconstruction of the metaphysical foundations for the moral philosophy of modern times. Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle (together with an analysis of early Christianity) offers an original version of ontology combined with ethics. In such optics, Being and Time, like Nicomachean Ethics, is an ethical treatise: it is also based on an understanding of human ethos (from the Greek ἦθος, “temper, character, nest”) and reveals the characteristics of life structured by “proper”. During the Age of Enlightenment (17th–19th centuries), a paradigm shift occurred in the field of practical philosophy, associated with the transition from ethics (that is, ethos as a form of life with its practical and normative dimensions) to moral concepts based on individualism and the distinction between facts and values. The split between ontology and the teachings of morality made impossible any rational substantiation or justification of ethics. Unlike modernist theories of morality, which attempt to express impartial and value-free principles of individual behavior, Heidegger explores the conditions for the possibility of changing lifestyles. His understanding of ethics can be interpreted in an Aristotelian context, in which life in society (that is, being in a “shared world”) determines the ontological conditions that make ethical action possible. The philosopher reveals the existence of Dasein in the context of a certain perfectionist understanding: two modes are found in it, one of which is obviously more valuable (or perfect) than the other – at least due to a wider perspective and deep self-understanding. The fulfillment of “ethics” means revealing an individualizing (“owned”) way of disclosing the world, what implies sensitivity to the call of Being and a readiness in the midst of the world to transform one’s finiteness in order to become a “genuine” member of the historical community. In the ontological structure of Dasein, such way of being is fulfilled in special revealing “moods” (πάθη), which are not reducible either to empirical sensibility or to cognitive functions. The factual enactment of ethical values is expressed in resoluteness, steadfast adherence to the chosen historical heritage, sensitivity to all aspects of the existential situation. These characteristics of revealing “moods” form a list of metacultural virtues that are the basis for mutual understanding and dialogue between representatives of various “ethoses” of a fragmented society.

MODAL LOGIC BETWEEN TRADITIONNAL (ARISTOTLE, IBN SINA) AND CONTEMPORARY APPROACH

Aristotle founded the science of logic in order to control language source of fallacies and sophistry. He built his syllogistic on two basic principles: non-contradiction and the excluded middle. He distinguished between different types of statements: declarative and non-declarative, only the first type was used in syllogism’s theory, because it is a tool of demonstrative science. He divided them, declarative statement, into two categories: Assertorics, and modals (necessary, possible, contingent, impossible) which he encountered difficulties in his logical analysis, because it is out of frame two valued according to the two principles, such as propositions that occur in the future whose cannot be determined now. This kind of statement was also treated by the Muslims logicians, especially Ibn Sīnā who expanded the modal concept to other field like Temporal modalities (always, sometimes, never), but he could not get out the Aristotelian context. The concept expended in contemporary logic system to include other sort of modality like: epistemological, deontic, tense … This resulted the emergence of contemporary logical systems, (epistemic logic, deontic logic, tense logic), whose approach differs from the traditional one. The propose of the article is to show the difference between the approaches Keywords: Logic; Modality; Epistemological; Deontic, Temporal; Truth; False.

The Aristotelian Context of the Existence-Essence Distinction inDe Ente Et Essentia

AbstractThis paper explores the Aristotelian context of the real distinction between existence and essence thought to be posited in Thomas Aquinas’ early workDe Ente Et Essentia. In doing so, the paper situates its own position in the context of contemporary scholarship and in relation to the contemporary trend to downplay Aristotle’s influence in Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy. The paper argues that re-readingDe Ente Et Essentiain this way sheds new light on some of the crucial debates in contemporary Thomist scholarship, particularly with respect to the analogous relation between potency and act: essence and existence, the distinction between conceptual and causal explanation, and the relationship between philosophy and theology in the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy. Kellie Robertson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. ix+443.

<i>Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy</i>. Kellie Robertson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. ix+443.

Distinction and Limitation: The Practice of Music in the Libro de Apolonio as an Early Case of Aristotelianism

This article examines a crucial but neglected scene of musical performance in the Castilian vernacular version of the story of Apollonius of Tyre, Libro de Apolonio (c.1250). The scene, in which the protagonist plays the fiddle and sings at the court of his future wife and father-in-law, contains musicological detail unique in European literary history. The event of Apolonio’s performance is also highly significant for the narrative and broader significance of the poem. When Apolonio takes up the fiddle he demonstrates that he is of superior rational capacity and can moderate his desire, in consonance, as I argue, with Aristotelian natural philosophy and ethics. Analysing the scene in close textual detail and with reference to other major thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iberian texts, including the Libro de buen amor (1330/43), Libro del Caballero Zifar (c.1300) and Lucas de Tuy’s De altera vita fideique controversiis (c.1236), I consider the evidence for an Aristotelian context for the Libro de Apolon...

Towards a Reassessment of British Aristotelianism

Abstract The aim of the paper is to reassess the role of British Aristotelianism within the history of early modern logic between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a crucial moment of cultural transition from the model of humanistic rhetoric and dialectic to that of facultative logic, that is, a logic which concerns the study of the cognitive powers of the mind. The paper shows that there is a special connection between Paduan Aristotelianism and British empiricism, through the mediation of British Aristotelianism. British Aristotelians took the ideas of the Paduan Aristotelian tradition and carried them to an extreme, gradually removing them from the original Aristotelian context in which they were grounded and developing what would later become the fundamental ideas of British empiricism.

Utopia Reconsidered: The Modern Firm as Institutional Ideal

This paper challenges Alasdair MacIntyre’s assertion that the modern firm — such as Google, Unilever, or Microsoft — is inimical to human flourishing within an Aristotelian framework. The paper begins by questioning MacIntyre’s rendering of utopian communities. It then addresses four specific criticisms of the modern firm to be found throughout MacIntyre’s oeuvre, namely compartmentalisation, myopia, inequality, and loss of community. Arguments are made to the effect that these criticisms do not vitiate the institutional role of the modern firm in an Aristotelian context. The paper concludes with an invocation of the modern firm as institutional ideal within an evolving utopian vision of human flourishing. This is a utopian vision in which the modern firm plays a constructive, not corruptive, institutional role.

Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays (review)

Reviewed by: Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays Peter E. Gordon Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis , editors. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays. Bloomington-Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 194. Paper, $24.95. Heidegger's troubled and over-determined interest in Greek philosophy is well known. In the 1933 rectoral address, he declared that genuine science would become possible only "if we again place ourselves under the power of the beginning of our spiritual-historical existence. This beginning is the departure, the setting out, of Greek philosophy." All of Western science, Heidegger concluded, "remains bound to that beginning of philosophy. From it science draws the strength of its essence, assuming that it still remains at all equal to this beginning." Such claims bear witness to his life-long interpretive confrontation with the dawning figures of Western philosophy: Aristotle, Plato, and the pre-Socratics. Heidegger's attitude toward this "beginning" was notoriously complex. Indeed, his method of reading both Plato and Aristotle furnishes perhaps the best example for what he called an Auseinandersetzung: an exegetical confrontation that seeks not merely to comprehend the original texts, but to transform them and thereby to liberate what remains "unthought" in the otherwise ossified doctrines of the philosophical past. No slender volume of essays under the banner of 'Heidegger and the Greeks' could possibly do justice to the many facets of this confrontation. What is therefore so remarkable about this collection is that the authors do not rest content with summarizing Heidegger's views. They themselves engage in their own Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger's account of Greek philosophy: they contest his translations, question his interpretations, and (in several of the essays) set forth bold and thought-provoking philosophical alternatives. As is typical for the proceedings of a conference (some of these essays were first given as papers at a conference on the same topic at the American College of Greece in 2003), the collection covers an astonishing range of topics and perspectives. What holds the volume together is the unusual clarity and creativity each contributor brings to his or her task. Drew Hyland's essay, "First of All Came Chaos," provides a philological and philosophical reading of key texts by Hesiod and Plato, and argues (against Heidegger) that something like the ontological difference remains a prominent theme in both of these authors: Hesiod presents Chaos as a "between," and Plato suggests that both eros and the good are "neither some logos, nor some epistemic knowledge" (Symposium 211a). Hyland concludes with the provocative suggestion that Heidegger was too rash when he charged Plato with "ontological oblivion." Claudia Baracchi's essay, "Contributions to the Coming-to-Be of Greek Beginnings: Heidegger's Inceptive Thinking," argues that Heidegger's larger narrative of a "unity and homogenous 'history of metaphysics' formulaically reduces the Greek beginning," and in particular, misses certain complexities in both Plato and Aristotle that would belie Heidegger's characterization. Walter Brogan's essay, "The Intractable Interrelationship of Physis and Techne," provides a close look at Aristotle's Metaphysics and deepens our appreciation of Heidegger's remarks in the Contributions to Philosophy on "technicity" in relation to nature. An importance consequence of Brogan's reading is to warn us off from any simple-minded belief that Heidegger wished to turn away from techne in favor of a pre-technological nature or physis. Rather, he wished us to understand the necessary if conflictual bond between them, which he summarized in The Origin of the Work of Art as the "strife" between "earth" and "world." In "Translating Innigkeit: The Belonging Together of the Strange," Peter Warnek offers a long meditation on the difficulties of reading Heidegger on Hölderlin, suggesting that Hölderlin's themes of inwardness cannot remain the property of an exclusively German community, and that Heidegger's notion of a metaphysically distinctive conversation between only the Germans and the Greeks is impermissible even according to Heidegger's own logic, "whether Heidegger would admit it or not." Günther Figal's essay, "Heidegger's Philosophy of Language in an Aristotelian Context: Dynamic meta logou," seeks to show that Heidegger never truly abandoned his Aristotelian beginnings; on the contrary, he remained "as a...

Gianna Pomata and Nancy G Siraisi (eds), Historia: empiricism and erudition in early modern Europe, Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Press, 2005, pp. viii, 490, £32.95, $50.00 (hardback 0-262-16229-6).

Gianna Pomata and Nancy G Siraisi (eds), Historia: empiricism and erudition in early modern Europe, Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Press, 2005, pp. viii, 490, £32.95, $50.00 (hardback 0-262-16229-6).

Heidegger’s Appropriation of Aristotle’s Δύναμισ/Ἐνέργεια Distinction

Two of Heidegger's most fundamental distinctions, authenticity and inauthenticity, the existential and the existentiell, are motivated by Aristotle's δuναμiσ/eνeργeiα distinction. Even the basic concept of truth must be understood in terms of δuναμiσ and eνeργ∈iα. Moreover, Heidegger's existential imperative only becomes fully comprehensible within the Aristotelian context, revealing the intrinsic interrelation of Heidegger's two distinctions with one another.

The Problem of Humana Natura in the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius

In Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae one finds a rather unusual argument contending that human beings can lose their natures as the result of immoral or virtuous activity. A number of texts in the work argue that the polarities of beast and god serve as options for those who lead highly immoral or highly virtuous lives. This argument is examined in detail in light of its philosophical ancestry. I argue that those who think the Boethian doctrine is Platonic in origin tend to read the texts about the loss of human nature as metaphorical. I then suggest that if one places the argument in an Aristotelian context one is able to see it as a metaphysical argument, and more particularly, as part of Boethian psychology. This paper thus provides a new context for approaching Boethius's contention that human beings can lose their natures.

Aristotle's "De Interpretatione": Contradiction and Dialectic (review)

Reviewed by: Aristotle’s “De Interpretatione”: Contradiction and Dialectic by C. W. A. Whitaker Eugene Garver C. W. A. Whitaker, Aristotle’s “De Interpretatione”: Contradiction and Dialectic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. x + 235. Cloth, $60.00. Traditionally, the De Interpretatione is placed in the Organon between the Categories and the Prior Analytics. Where the Categories is about single terms and the Analytics about inferences, the De Interpretatione is about propositions. That traditional view is presupposed by most contemporary studies of the work, which “concentrate on a small number of passages, which have been treated as isolated oases of philosophical interest in an otherwise barren work,” highlights which include “Aristotle’s semantic theory of philosophy of language” in the first chapter, the first four “linguistic chapters,” and chapter 9 on the Sea Battle (1). I suppose that the square of opposition could be added to Whitaker’s list. Whitaker, in this republication of a doctoral dissertation, wants to challenge both the traditional view and the contemporary concentration by instead studying the work as a coherent whole, whose subject, it turns out, is not propositions after all but “contradictory pairs, which are central to the working of dialectic” (2). The book then proceeds through the De Interpretatione, chapter by chapter. If he succeeds, the De Interpretatione will henceforth be read as preparation for the Topics, rather than for the Analytics. There are also three appendices examining the use of such contradictory pairs in Metaphysics IV, the Topics, and the Posterior Analytics. Thus, the first five chapters of the De Interpretatione explain the nature of assertions, name and verb, and “before that, how language is related to thought and to the real world, and how it is that utterances can make claims about things which are true or false” (8). Where names, verbs, and propositions are part of our ordinary understanding of language, contradictory pairs are not, but are a philosophical understanding of a linguistic structure that has a specifically philosophical, dialectical, purpose. The rest of the De Interpretatione, from chapter 6 on, is the examination of contradiction. Chapters 7–9 classify contradictory pairs by different criteria. Each of these chapters isolates an exception to “the rule that, in every contradictory pair, one member is true and the other false” (79). Chapter 7 looks at the first exception to the rule, “non-universal statements about universals” (91). Whitaker’s project looks good here, since he then shows the dialectical uses of such propositions, and denies their value for the deductive logic of the Analytics. Similarly, in Chapter 8 Aristotle looks at “apparently simple assertions . . . which are not single” (105), which also have important uses in dialectic. Finally, chapter 9 looks at the third exception to the rule, future singular assertions. One payoff of this book is to place the sea battle discussion in its Aristotelian context. [End Page 459] Whitaker says that most discussions of the sea battle assume that what is at stake is what he calls the “Principle of Bivalence” in which every assertion is either true or false. He instead insists that it is contradictory pairs, not single assertions, that are being tested by future contingents. He thus concludes: “Dialectic is a universal discipline, and its questioning can cover any subject where a question can be posed which has a right and a wrong answer. Chapters 7 to 9 . . . demonstrate that there are limits to the universality of dialectic” (128). Whitaker follows the De Interpretatione chapter by chapter in the remainder of the book. He shows how the later chapters assist the dialectician in “sorting assertions into contradictory pairs” (181). And just as De Interpretatione begins with a consideration of the relation of language, thought, and the world, so it ends by showing the connection between contradictory propositions and opposed beliefs. Whitaker rarely strays from the De Interpretatione to show how our understanding of dialectic is improved by attention to this prerequisite. When he does, for example in a very short discussion of the relation of problems and propositions in the Topics, the results are illuminating. I would have liked more. This book should be useful to the growing numbers of scholars interested in Aristotle’s art of dialectic...

Aristotle's Endoxa and Plausible Argumentation

Aristotle's conception and use of ta endoxa are key points to our understanding of Aristotelian dialectic. But, nowadays, they are not of historical or hermeneutic importance alone, as, in Aristotle's treatment of endoxa, we still see a relevant contribution to the modern study of argumentation. I propose here an interpretation of endoxa to that effect: namely, as plausible propositions. This version is not only defensible in the Aristotelian context, it may also shed new light on some of his assumptions and methodological shortcomings – e.g. concerning the 'plausible/implausible' pair –; finally, it will even enable us to show certain basic hints and guidelines, advanced by Aristotle's study of endoxa, which still serve nowadays to orientate our studies of argumentation from the angle of a theory of plausible argument currently under construction. These hints and guidelines suggest a pragmatic, gradual and comparative discursive concept of plausibility, and point, in particular, towards the reasonable dealing with, and weighing up of, differences of opinion within this frame of reference.

The argument from potential: a reappraisal.

Several criticisms of the argument from potential are reported. It is noted that such criticisms are inspired by two similarly wrong interpretations of potentiality, one confusing it with possibility and another with probability. A brief analysis of the original Aristotelian context in which the concept emerged shows that potentiality cannot be thought of as indicating the provision of some empirical facts in the future, but must rather be referred to the inherent ontological structure of the being in question. It is then argued that such an Aristotelian concept can be useful to express the dynamic structure of the person, as it must be understood according to contemporary phenomenological personalism. In the light of this philosophical tradition, the embryo can be viewed as a being already possessing the human nature and actively developing its potential for personhood: it also follows that human nature must not be understood as a static and predetermined essence, but rather as the principle of becoming and movement toward further achievements.

La «epopeya», nombre común: algunas consideraciones sobre Aristóteles, &lt;i&gt;Poética&lt;/i&gt; 1447 a 28 - b 16 y su recepción en la teoría literaria renacentista

An anonymous interpolation according to modern textual criticism, the word ἐποποιία in Poetics 1447 a 28 was viewed among Renaissance scholars as originally written by Aristotle, thus giving the text a puzzling meaning —epic may be written both in verse and prose—. This article analyzes some implications of that reading in the interpretation of its broader Aristotelian context by humanists as well as in the Renaissance theory of literary genres.

Kepler'sDe quantitatibus

Summary The paper is an introduction to and an annotated translation of De quantitatibus, a mathematical manuscript by Johannes Kepler. Conceived as a philosophical treatise, the text collects, orders, and interprets the Aristotelian passages relevant to mathematics. Kepler thought of De quantitatibus as an introduction to Dasypodius's textbook, but by choosing the Aristotelian context, he distances himself from the tradition to which Dasypodius belonged. Dasypodius's works on mathematics, like Ramus's, were within the genre developed after the rediscovery of Proclus's commentary on Euclid. Instead, Kepler took a position following the Aristotelian humanism of Schegk. While the dating of De quantitatibus is still uncertain, it is likely that Kepler wrote it not too long after his education in Tübingen, where he received instruction in natural philosophy under the influence of Schegk. In De quantitatibus, Kepler also exhibits some original views on mathematics within this humanist Aristotelian context.