Abstract The concept ‘zero equivalence’ refers to those words with no equivalent lexical items in the target language. Such was the case of dēmagōgos and its cognates when medieval translators had to translate Aristotle’s Politics, Moerbeke and Oresme. This article aims to analyse the strategies preferred by these translators and how they have influenced how we conceive demagogy in negative terms. I contend that their particular interpretation of the Aristotelian text and their use of foreignisms shaped what we understand by demagogues in modern Western languages, as leaders who threaten the status quo.

Abstract Argument interpretation and reconstruction are two necessary presuppositions of argument analysis and evaluation, constituting a cornerstone of argumentation theory. One of the most used, and at the same time most controversial, principles underlying this interpretative practice is the Principle of Charity (CP), recommending a “charitable” (i.e., the strongest, or a strong within certain limits) reconstruction of the arguments expressed in a text. Grounded on “ethical,” “practical,” or “strategic” considerations, criticized, rejected, or replaced by criteria seen as inherently charitable, the various versions of CP advanced in argumentation theory raise the basic questions of where charity comes from, and how in the history of argumentation the problem of argument reconstruction was addressed before the concept of charity. This paper aims to provide a historical overview of the Charity Principles, evaluating them in light of some challenging cases. Such accounts will be compared with the Aristotelian principles used for reconstructing enthymematic arguments, which can be regarded as the predecessors of the modern CP. The Aristotelian texts suggest hermeneutic and logical guidelines grounded on the pragmatic and dialectical dimensions of rhetorical arguments, which avoid some pitfalls of charity and complement some fundamental insights of the CP tradition.

Averroes’ kalām treaty, the Kitāb al-kašf ʿan manāhiğ al-adilla is one of the most controversial texts from the Andalusian philosopher. Its writing relied vastly on Aristotelian texts and opuses from the aš‘arite kalām, of which Averroes wanted to deconstruct and refute the doctrines. Most of its references – whether they are Aristotelian or ašʿarite are not explicitly quoted – are consistent with the medieval Islamic customs. Having published between 2005 and 2007 an analysis of the Aristotelian sources of this text, this contribution aims at studying the ašʿarite authors critiqued by Averroes and broadly mentioned as the ‘modern ašʿarites’. The main source discovered through this textual comparison is the Kitāb al-Niẓāmī fī usūl ad-dīn by Abu-Bakr Al-Fūrakī, author of a kalām treaty of which a single copy has been conserved in Istanbul. A transcription and a translation of its most salient excerpts have been included in this contribution, in order to show the relationship between those two kalām treaties.

This article uses the Princeton-based AI Logion and its error detection algorithm to show that large language models can contribute to the textual criticism of Aristotle. We discuss a total of eight case studies from the Metaphysics, Poetics, and De motu animalium to demonstrate that Logion can (i) correctly identify corruptions in the transmitted text of Aristotle and (ii) suggest plausible emendations. Even where Logion’s suggested readings are not viable, they can alert the human philologist to problems in the text and thus initiate a search for new solutions. We conclude that language models like Logion can contribute to the current revival in the study of the Aristotelian text, provided we use them responsibly and hold on to the fact that, while machines may make intriguing suggestions, only human philologists can ultimately adjudicate philological problems.

Abstract This article argues that a joke about the demagogue Hyperbolus in Aristophanes’ Peace (685–7) can be illuminated by a reconsideration of the meaning of the little-attested word περιζωσάμενος in the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians (Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3), where it describes how Cleon dressed in an unconventional manner when appearing before the assembly. In recent translation of and commentary on the Aristotelian text there appears to have been no investigation of the meaning of περιζωσάμενος in Greek comedy: readers are informed that Cleon either hitched up his (unspecified) clothing or somehow fastened his cloak to allow him to make gestures with both hands. However, the philological and material-cultural evidence presented here points to something more specific and more dramatic. Elsewhere in classical and later Greek the word περιζώννυσθαι means belting or knotting something around the waist and is most frequently found in contexts of manual labour. Here, it is argued that the import of Athênaiôn Politeia 28.3 is that Cleon spoke to the assembly dressed for work in his family’s tannery—a powerful symbol of his allegiance to the manual-labouring demos and his antagonism towards the aristocratic elite. It is to his unconventional self-fashioning that Aristophanes alludes in Peace when he jokes that after Cleon’s death the naked demos has wrapped itself (περιεζώσατο) in Hyperbolus, the new leader of the people.

Abstract This article presents and analyses new evidence for how Simplicius made use of Alexander of Aphrodisias for his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics. Alexander’s commentary on the Physics is lost to us (except for scholia on Physics IV–VIII), but, as argued in section II of this article, we have a slightly abridged version of Alexander’s commentary on Physics II 3 in the form of his commentary on Metaphysics V 2 (Aristotle’s Physics II 3 and Metaph. V 2 are more or less identical). This allows a comparison of Alexander’s and Simplicius’ commentaries on the same Aristotelian text. In section III, it is shown that Simplicius relies much more extensively on Alexander than his explicit references indicate. In section IV, it is shown that (a) when Simplicius refers to Alexander disapprovingly, he reports reliably what Alexander said, but that (b) when Simplicius refers to Alexander approvingly and as an authority in support of his own view, he provides a tendentious interpretation of Alexander’s argument. My results help to evaluate Simplicius’ reliability as a witness to the many works of ancient philosophy for which he is our only source.

This is an annotated translation of the last five chapters of the second book of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. My aim is to provide Portuguese-speaking readers with a clear text, supplemented by materials that elucidate and contextualize Aristotle’s work, addressing a notable gap in the Lusophone bibliographical universe. To achieve this, I have based my translation on Ross’s edition of the Aristotelian text and compared it with various existing translations and commentaries.

This is an annotated translation of the first four chapters of the second book of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics. I aim to offer Portuguese-speaking readers a clear text with complementary materials to elucidate and contextualize Aristotle’s work, fulfilling a significant gap in the Lusophone bibliographical universe. To do this, I have taken Ross’s edition of the Aristotelian text as a basis – in which I have made some small changes – and compared my work with a series of existing translations and commentaries on the text.

abstract: The present article reassesses Aristotle's views on the relationship between ethical character and the natural environment. The standard reading, to the effect that Aristotle endorsed environmental determinism, is rejected. The discussion invites a more careful examination of Aristotelian texts commonly adduced to support the orthodox reading, while also providing a clear account of what environmental determinism is. I argue that the textual evidence presented by defenders of the standard reading does not match that account. All in all, I conclude, we are not authorized to invoke Aristotle's views on the relationship between natural environment and human beings in order to discredit his ethical and political project.

The Brukenthal National Museum Library hosts an impressive collection of incunabula, one of them being Aristotle’s Organon, Venice, Baptista de Tordis, 1484. Initially, the book belonged to ‘The Chapel Library’ (Kapellenbibliothek), a library founded in the fourteenth century, and was transferred to the Brukenthal Library in 1879. One of the first scholars who wrote a commentary about Aristotle’s Organon – to be more precise: only on Categories – in Syriac language was Sergius of Resh’ayna, a sixth century physician and priest who studied in Alexandria. Sergius wrote two commentaries, but he did not translate the texts from Greek to Syriac simply because his audience, native in Syriac, had good knowledge of Greek. Later, when the contacts between Mesopotamia and the Late Roman Empire/Byzantium had decreased, original Aristotelian texts had to be translated into Syriac, because the local elites were not able to understand Greek. Such being the case, the translators played a major role, and two of them were Jacob of Edessa – he himself a bishop –, and George ‘the bishop of the Arabs’, who were active at the end of the seventh century and at the beginning of the eighth century.

This article examines the philosophical and theological nuances in the works of Étienne Pascal and Étienne Noël, focusing on their interpretations of Saint Augustine and Jean Duvergier de Hauranne. It explores the concept of antithesis (ἀντίθεσις) in both rhetorical and philosophical contexts, drawing upon Platonic and Aristotelian texts. The article highlights the use of antithesis in Augustine’s explanation of evil and its integration into the universal order, connecting this to 17th-century French thought, especially in relation to Blaise Pascal’s ideas on rhetoric. A critical analysis of Étienne Pascal’s letter to Father Noël is presented, emphasizing his understanding of rhetorical figures, notably metaphor and antithesis, and their theological implications. The discussion extends to Saint-Cyran’s interpretation of Augustine, particularly concerning ecclesiastical guidance and priesthood preparation. The article concludes by underscoring the complex interplay between language, thought, and faith in these historical contexts.

The question, “Was Aristotle the first logicist?”, may appear anachronistic and elicit skepticism since the doctrine of logicism as a fully-fledged idea emerged only in the nineteenth century in the context of the debates surrounding the foundation of mathematics. Indeed, Bertrand Russell credits Gottlob Frege with being the first in “logicising” mathematics (Russell 1919, p. 7), where the thesis espouses that mathematical concepts and propositions are ultimately reducible to or derivable from a number of fundamental logical concepts and principles. However, anachronistic appearances aside, in a fresh reexamination of some of the specific Aristotelian texts in Metaphysics and Prior Analytics, and especially focusing on Aristotle’s particular remarks on the status and significance of the principle of non-contradiction, one may textually argue for a nascent and burgeoning form of logicism in Aristotle, albeit within a much larger metaphysical context than mathematics.

The present paper discusses Grosseteste’s reception of Proclus’ Elements of Physics (EP) in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics VI. In the first section I examine the method with which Grosseteste reconstructs Aristotelian texts. The second section initiates a study of the way Grosseteste evaluates Proclus’ EP on the basis of this method. Thus, the third section brings out Grosseteste’s moderate criticism of Proclus’ treatment of certain Aristotelian conclusiones and assumptions. The fourth section extends this study to the conceptual relation between contiguity, continuity and succession. Finally, Grosseteste’s evaluation of Proclus’ tendency to omit, divide and merge Aristotelian conclusiones is studied in the fifth section. I conclude that Grosseteste is a careful and moderately critical reader of Proclus. He aptly grasps the dependence of the EP on Physics VI and conceives of Proclus’ EP as a forerunner of his own method of reconstructing Aristotelian texts.

Among his many accomplishments, Grosseteste is known for translating Greek philosophical, theological, and glossarial treatises into Latin, making them available for Latin readers. Three of these translations are nowadays studied for the Aristoteles Latinus project, which aims at making critical editions of all Greek-Latin medieval translations of Aristotle’s oeuvre. The goal of this contribution is to give an overview of the history of Robert Grosseteste’s translations of Aristotelian texts within the context of Aristoteles Latinus. The first part is devoted to previous research on these translations and to a status quaestionis of current scholarship. The second part turns its focus to Grosseteste’s characteristic translation method. It offers new insights into the usual translation of certain smaller Greek words (such as particles and conjunctions) into Latin by Grosseteste, and what can set this translator apart from other medieval translators.

In Nicomachean Ethics IV Aristotle exposes the characteristics of the moral virtue of the μεγαλοψυχία and offers a detailed description of the conditions of the magnanimous. St. Thomas in his commentary on Ethics follows the Aristotelian text apparently without disagreeing with the Greek author, and completes this exposition with other texts found in the Summa Theologica. The aim of this paper is to highlight the differences, if there are any, between the Aristotelian conception of the μεγαλοψυχία and that of Saint Thomas, considering also whether the virtue of humility that appears in the Thomist texts can be equated to the vice of the pusillanimity of which Aristotle speaks.

In the Dominican Archive San Luis Beltran (Bogotá) there is a manuscript of an unknown cursus philosophicus signed by the Franciscan master Pedro Ceballos y Tena, dated in 1741, Quito. The last section of this cursus is entitled Articulus utilis desyllogismo falsigrapho. For the first time, we can reconstruct the long transition of the vocabulary and the conception of deceptive arguments called falsigraphi. Pseudo-Scotus showed the fallacies behind this sort of defective argumentation, despite the geometrical origin of this expression. In the Aristotelian texts, falsigraphus was a philosophical character who wrongly “drew” the geometrical principles in order to induce a demonstration about a specific problem (e.g. circle quadrature). However, Pseudo-Scotus preferred to highlight the op-position between the demonstrative syllogisms - and their immediate principles - and the sophistic arguments configured by linguistic ambiguities or fallacies. These types of fallacies appear in the Cursus philosophicus dictatus Limae (1701) under the name of syllogismum pse[u]dographum. The question is how the later readers of Pseudo-Scotus assumed the linguistic perspective on deceptive arguments focused on categorical mistakes, while neglecting the geometrical character of those ar-guments that involved the use of a “graphical reasoning”. The contrast between pse[u]dographumand falsigraphus will show how the linguistic perspective on deceptive arguments was embraced by the later Scholastic. This linguistic emphasis achieves an interesting point, however, in Ceballos y Tena, who recovers the Pseudo-Scotus’ view of the term falsigraphus to note the ambiguity of logical terms. The hypothesis of this work is the historical oscillation of deceptive arguments between the linguistic perspective and the graphical reasoning involved in geometrical demonstrations.

On the standard interpretation of Metaphysics IX, Aristotle proceeds from the original sense of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια to an ontological conception of these terms. This should raise the question of what is not ontological about the former and what is ontological about the latter. To address these questions I discuss the commentaries by Heidegger and Menn, which alone come close to addressing these issues. But their readings cannot neatly distinguish between the two senses of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια that we find in the Aristotelian text, thus compelling us to seek a better way of clarifying the standard interpretation, which I argue can be more precisely understood in the following way: δύναμις and ἐνέργεια in their customary meaning cannot be considered ontological in the sense that they have a particular locus among the categories, which is what sets them apart from their newer, ontological meaning. I conclude therefore that the text of Metaphysics IX can be understood as proceeding from an intracategorial conception of δύναμις and ἐνέργεια toward a transcategorial conception of these terms.

<i>The Thirteenth-Century Animal Turn: Medieval and Twenty-First Century Perspectives</i> <i>Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary between Humans and Animals</i>

The ontology of artefacts in Byzantine philosophy is still a terra incognita. One way of mapping this unexplored territory is to delve into Michael of Ephesus’ commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Written around 1100, this commentary provides a detailed interpretation of the most important source for Aristotle’s ontological account of artefacts. By highlighting Michael’s main metaphysical tenets and his interpretation of key-passages of the Aristotelian work, this study aims to reconstruct Michael’s ontology of artefacts and present it as one instance, which is perhaps exemplary, of the Byzantine ontology of artefacts. In particular, the study shows that this commentary holds a definite position on the nature of artefacts, according to which they are neither substances nor hylomorphic compounds. Indeed, artefacts lack a form altogether and their forms exist only in thought. As a result, Michael’s commentary provides an ontological interpretation of artefacts as accidental beings, i.e., as matter which acquires a mere property as opposed to a substantial form. While such an interpretation shows originality when compared to the Aristotelian text, it also indicates adherence to the reading established by Alexander of Aphrodisias, despite important departures concerning the status of natural forms.

Resumen: El presente texto explora en las obras seleccionadas de Aristóteles la conexión del deliberar en el plano de la&#13;\nacción particular y en el plano político, y su rico trasfondo antropológico y ontológico, no siempre atendidos&#13;\nen la bibliografía secundaria. Pone de relieve las varias y complejas conexiones en el marco de la&#13;\nantropología, la ética y la política aristotélicas. Para tal fin, hace foco en la fuente textual, puntualmente en&#13;\nla selección de pasajes clave de cuatro textos aristotélicos: Ética a Nicómaco, Ética Eudemia, Retórica y&#13;\nPolítica. En los dos últimos se analiza y describe el plano político de la deliberación, en cambio en ambos&#13;\nanteriores el plano de la prâxis individual. Cierra el artículo un apartado que presenta las conexiones entre&#13;\nambos planos.