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Aristotle and the Origins of Evil

Jozef Müller

Abstract

Why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond and against their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality, in particular in the (necessary) presence of theoretical reason. As theoretical reason requires that human beings have unlimited non-rational desires for the fine (to kalon), it also gives rise to a tendency to form unlimited non-rational desires for other things.

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08 Nov 2019

Thick Concepts and Moral Revisionism in Plato’s Gorgias: Arguing About Something There Can Be No Argument About

Philipp Brüllmann

Abstract

David Furley has suggested that we think of Callicles’ immoralism as attacking a thick concept. I take up this suggestion and apply it to the argument of Plato’s Gorgias more generally. I show that the discussion between Socrates, Gorgias and Polus, which prepares the ground for Callicles, is precisely addressing the thickness of the concept of justice: it reveals that this concept is both descriptive and evaluative and that formulating a revisionist position about justice is therefore extremely difficult. Callicles’ strategy is best read as a response to this difficulty, which sets the stage for Socrates’ revisionist account of justice.

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08 Nov 2019

Mixing Body and Soul: Galen on the Substance of Soul in QAM and De Propriis Placitis

Robert Vinkesteijn

Abstract

In a late treatise, That the Capacities of the Soul Follow the Mixtures of the Body (QAM), Galen of Pergamum infamously offered the view that the substance of the soul is identical with a bodily mixture. This thesis has been found radical and extreme in modern scholarship and is generally considered to be at odds with Galen’s ‘agnosticism’ on the substance of soul. In this paper I propose a close reading of QAM that allows us to make sense of it in terms of Galen’s other work, including his late work On My Own Opinions (De Propriis Placitis).

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31 Oct 2019

Mathematical Generality, Letter-Labels, and All That

F. Acerbi

Abstract

This article focusses on the generality of the entities involved in a geometric proof of the kind found in ancient Greek treatises: it shows that the standard modern translation of Greek mathematical propositions falsifies crucial syntactical elements, and employs an incorrect conception of the denotative letters in a Greek geometric proof; epigraphic evidence is adduced to show that these denotative letters are ‘letter-labels’. On this basis, the article explores the consequences of seeing that a Greek mathematical proposition is fully general, and the ontological commitments underlying the stylistic practice.

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28 Oct 2019

Aristotle’s Empiricist Theory of Doxastic Knowledge

Hendrik Lorenz and Benjamin Morison

Abstract

Aristotle takes practical wisdom and arts or crafts to be forms of knowledge which, we argue, can usefully be thought of as ‘empiricist’. This empiricism has two key features: knowledge does not rest on grasping unobservable natures or essences; and knowledge does not rest on grasping logical relations that hold among propositions. Instead, knowledge rests on observation, memory, experience and everyday uses of reason. While Aristotle’s conception of theoretical knowledge does require grasping unobservable essences and logical relations that hold among suitable propositions, his conception of practical and productive knowledge avoids such requirements and is consistent with empiricism.

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25 Oct 2019

Geometrical Objects as Properties of Sensibles: Aristotle’s Philosophy of Geometry

Emily Katz

Abstract

There is little agreement about Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry, partly due to the textual evidence and partly part to disagreement over what constitutes a plausible view. I keep separate the questions ‘What is Aristotle’s philosophy of geometry?’ and ‘Is Aristotle right?’, and consider the textual evidence in the context of Greek geometrical practice, and show that, for Aristotle, plane geometry is about properties of certain sensible objects—specifically, dimensional continuity—and certain properties possessed by actual and potential compass-and-straightedge drawings qua quantitative and continuous. For their part, the objects of stereometry are potential sensible three-dimensional figures qua quantitative and continuous.

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25 Oct 2019

Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy

James Warren

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25 Oct 2019

Is Plato an Innatist in the Meno?

David Bronstein and Whitney Schwab

Abstract

Plato in the Meno is standardly interpreted as committed to condition innatism: human beings are born with latent innate states of knowledge. Against this view, Gail Fine has argued for prenatalism: human souls possess knowledge in a disembodied state but lose it upon being embodied. We argue against both views and in favor of content innatism: human beings are born with innate cognitive contents that can be, but do not exist innately in the soul as, the contents of states of knowledge. Content innatism has strong textual support and constitutes a philosophically interesting theory.

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25 Oct 2019

Self-Knowledge in the Eye-Soul Analogy of the Alcibiades

Daniel Ferguson

Abstract

The kind of self-knowledge at issue in the eye-soul analogy of the Alcibiades (132d5-133c7) is knowledge of one’s epistemic state, i.e. what one knows and does not know, rather than knowledge of what one is. My evidence for this is the connection between knowledge of one’s epistemic state and self-improvement, the equivalence of self-knowledge to moderation, and the fact that ‘looking’ into the soul of another is a metaphor for elenctic discussion. The final lines of the analogy (133c1-7) clarify that the part of the soul one ‘looks’ into and the part one learns about when learning about one’s epistemic state is divine.

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25 Oct 2019

What Are the Wages of Justice? Rethinking the Republic’s Division of Goods

Merrick Anderson

Abstract

A growing number of scholars have seen that the Republic’s division of goods includes goods which possess value δι᾽ αὑτό in virtue of some of their causal effects. Building on this, I argue that goods, including justice, which are valuable διὰ τὰ γιγνόµενα ἀπ’ αὐτοῦ (and whose effects can contribute to the value a good has δι᾽ αὑτό) are so in virtue of a limited class of beneficial effects: those that depend on the recognition of other agents. This way of dividing goods explains why Socrates legitimately invokes some effects of justice in his demonstration that justice is valuable δι᾽ αὑτό.

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24 Oct 2019