With the support of recent scholarship the author proposes an understanding of the Aristotelian Corpus inspired by the biological works. He points out that this understanding is bound up with other current philosophical discussions, especially on biology, rationality, realism, the knowledge of an individual, metaphor, and poetics. The author concludes that Aristotle offers the most promising ontological, epistemological and anthropological basis not only for undertaking a series of urgent reconciliations (of facts and values, of theoretical and practical reason, of understanding and sensation, and of intelligence and emotion), but also for solving many dualisms of modern times, in their Platonic or materialist varieties.
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Our interpretation of Aristotle‘s examination of place attempts to take seriously its dialectic character and thus to defend it against criticism that alleges an internal inconsistency. Any such inconsistency results from the ambiguity of the object of examination, an ambiguity that may be overcome by a succession of gradual distinctions. According to these, a place surrounds that of which it is the place, and does not constitute any of the surrounded thing. A surrounded thing’s own place is not bigger or smaller that that thing, and is separable from the surrounded thing. Each place has its up and its down, and according to these differences each body either moves naturally or remains where it is. Enumeration is an important part of the dialectical examination, the methodology of which Aristotles describes here in a general way, in a single passage. According to this passage, when we delimit the nature of a thing, each definition must resolve the difficulties arising from prior knowledge of the thing – albeit while agreeing with evident facts – and must clarify doubts which might result from it itself. In order that we may specify a definition of place, we must first draw a distinction within local motion between that which moves on its own accord and that with moves only accidentally. Only then can we approach the formulation of a definition of place. At first this definition will be negative, denying other possibilities of what place might be – showing that place is neither shape, extension nor matter. Then we arrive at a positive formulation, according to which place is the limit of the surrounding body. This is, however, not yet adequate from the point of view of the description of motion, and therefore it is necessary to qualify the definition by a final, necessary, requirement – that such a limit must be unmoving.
The article discusses the problem of natural justice which has been considered by Aristotle in his (1) Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics and (2) Magna Moralia. In his Nicomachean and Eudemian Ethics Aristotle says of natural justice that it is changeable and not the same everywhere. The implication seems to be that no action, not even murder, is always wrong. But, as is evident especially from his Magna Moralia, Aristotle distinguishes justice into the “what” (equality), the “in what” (proportion between persons and things), and the “about what” (what things are exchanged with which persons). The article concludes that Aristotle allows for variability only in the “about what,” while in the “what” and the “in what” he allows for no variability.
According to Aristotle, philosophical knowledge consists in the discovery of the first causes that occur in reality. For this reason, the quantitative and essential analysis of the causes was the fundamental task for philosophical reflections. Aristotle considered it a priority to show the ways the causes are discerned in the aspect of questions that occur in the cognitive process. The question “why” is the question that Aristotle regarded as fundamental for the acquisition of philosophical knowledge. The phenomenon of this question is revealed when we indicate that it corresponds to the causes that occur in reality. The causes discerned in this way become the foundation for building the method of causal knowledge.
When studying various aspects of art and aesthetic tastes, contemporary evolutionists have no doubt that art is part of human nature, we have it in the brain and in the genes, as we might say today. Following the path set out by Aristotle, Hume, Darwin and his followers, evolutionary aesthetics (inspired by evolutionary psychology) develops in its three main branches: (1) anthropological ethological (E. Dissanayake, 1890s Darwinian art theorists: H. Balfour, A.C. Haddon, F. Clay), (2) evolutionary aesthetics (Dutton and continuators) and (3) literary Darwinism (B. Boyd, J. Carroll, J.Gottschall, D.S. Wilson). The article examines the theoretical proposals of D. Dutton, the author of The Art Instinct as well as the views of his predecessor, E. Dissanayake.
The text considers problems associated with sensible cognition. The author focuses on the problem mentioned by Stagirite who, recalling his predecessors, states that there are two concepts of cognition: one maintains that the similar knows the dissimilar, and second that the similar knows the similar. These two concepts meet in a position that at the beginning of the cognitive process the subject and object are dissimilar, but then they become similar. Such an explanation is made possible by distinguishing two kinds of the possible. The first one may be illustrated by the image of a man at the beginning of his education. The second type of the possible may be illustrated by the image of a scholar who at any time can start to contemplate the truth.
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The author suggests that pity, fear, and catharsis are experienced not only by the audience but by the playwright and actors as well. This, of course, inevitably involves him in the old problem of whether the actor himself must feel the emotions that he is trying to portray. Furthermore, Brunius suggests that the three elements are already inevidence in the original story behind the trage.
This article attempts to shed more light on a problem addressed in a previous work by the same authors, namely the nature of Empedocles’ Sphairos, which is taken for a structured whole and not – according to the usual interpretation – as an amorphous mixture. This article does not concentrate on the fragments of Empedocles himself, but focuses on the further reception of the Sphairos by ancient Greek writers. First, the paper attempts to show that the interpretation prevalent today is actually due to Aristotle’s equation of the Sphairos with his concept of ‘underlying matter’ conceived as an indeterminate substratum. The only ancient author who seems to hold the interpretation of the Sphere as an amorphous mixture is, however, John Philoponus, and, moreover, only in some of his commentaries on Aristotle. Philoponus’ notion of the Sphairos was then adopted by Friedrich Wilhelm Sturz, author of the first substantial modern study on Empedocles, published in 1805. The current article then examines the Neoplatonic explanation of the Sphairos, in which it is regularly equated with the intelligible word of the Forms. Although its transcendence is clearly at odds with the Empedocles’ original intentions, this interpretative approach assumes that the Sphairos is as clearly structured as the Forms are.
Dieser Artikel diskutiert die Rolle des Narren in den vollständig erhaltenen Werken des Aristophanes. Zu Beginn wird die Bedeutung des Begriffes „bômolochus“ analysiert, um daraufhin die Charakteristika einer solchen Person herauszuarbeiten. Anschließend erfolgt die Untersuchung der in den Komödien des Aristophanes auftauchenden Narren, die in zwei Kategorien eingeteilt sind: (1.) der Narr in der Nebenrolle und (2.) der närrische Protagonist. Neben den für einen Narren typischen Techniken der Komik, spielt die Obszönität eine wichtige Rolle. Die Hauptaufgabe des Narren in den Werken von Aristophanes ist es, eine derbe Form des Humors zu kreieren.
The article deals with Physics III,5, 205a25–28 and examines its function in Aristotle’s argumentation against the existence of an infinite sensible body. Since attempts to connect this passage with the preceding argument (205a23–25) have so far proved unsuccessful, scholars have resorted to transposing this text after Ph. 205a19 or 205b1 or to postulating a lacuna directly before it (205a25). This paper shows why those proposals are unsatisfactory and instead proposes anoth- er, less radical solution which consists in interpreting the passage in its transmitted context. More precisely, instead of trying to connect it with 205a23–25 it suggests treating the text as elliptical and seeing in 205a25–28 an important step in an argument based on Aristotle’s theory of natural place, one that is directed against the existence of an infinite heterogeneous body composed of a finite number of constituents (205a22–28).
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle has given a tableau of the desirable virtues and their infringement through the surpassing of their limits. Thus, every virtue is framed or delimited by vices that represent either its excess or its deficiency. However, this type of defining is related to deep, metaphysical reasons: since every being, especially the liv-ing one, has its telos. Man’s telos is to practise and fulfil his human specificity, i.e. reason, and reason is the measure/quality of virtue as such; the excess or deficiency in his behaviour perverts and even stops the realisation of the humanity of man. And this humanity is, in turn, in accordance to the telos of nature, the good in and for the preser-vation of all things. If, hypothetically, persons would not be virtuous at all, this accord-ance would not be realised and man would be an accident in the logic of nature: and accidents are removed, sooner or later. The criterion of the “quantitative” moral evalua-tion is thus qualitative: a quality, the good aimed at by mindfulness applied to the con-crete particular moral relations and learned from experience.
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The article discusses the concept of normative criticism and the objective value of artworks by Daniel D. Kaufman. He has established both the notion of artistic value grounded on Aristotelian virtue ethics and the idea of artistic purpose which expresses „the interest of civilization in culture”. It seems that if we refer to the purposes of culture, different meanings of culture should be taken into account. I attempt to show the possibility of applying this view to the axiological (culture as a cult of values) and the pluralistic (culture as a cult of fluctuation) sense of culture. Kaufman denies art criticism the right to ask moral questions. This appears to be slightly reductive on account of his references to the philosophy of Aristotle, which is deeply rooted in ethics.
The present paper analyses the methodology adopted in the ancient Greek grammatical tradition to define and describe the nominal inflectional categories, i.e. gender, number, and case. The main source for the said analysis is the treatise Tekhne grammatike attributed to Dionysius Thrax, but references are also made to the works of Aristotle and some other authors. The research shows that semantic (functional) criteria played the principal part in describing the nominal inflectional categories, and especially that of the case. This does not mean, however, that the formal factor was completely absent: Aristotle’s determination in searching for formal criteria of gender classes of nouns is noteworthy in this respect, as well as the attempt to associate the number category with some formal factors, evidenced in the Tekhne.
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This article addresses the Platonism of the Czech philosopher and logician Pavel Tichý. This is not an easy task as Tichý’s texts are first and foremost detailed analyses of concrete logical problems. The article therefore draws in part on the texts of Tichý’s followers, especially those of P. Materna, M. Duží and J. Raclavský. The author compares Tichý’s version of Platonism with the ancient version of Platonism and then with Aristotle’s critique of Platonism. Reference is made to Aristotle’s (probable) work Peri Ideōn, in which arguments defending Platonism are invariably presented prior to Aristotle’s critique of them. At the beginning of every chapter there is thus always to be found an argument from Peri Ideōn defending Platonism and then the Aristotelian critique of that argument. The arguments in question are the Argument of Scientific Knowledge, the Argument of the One in Multiplicity, and the Argument of the Object of Thinking. Analogies between ancient arguments and Tichý’s defence of Platonism allow the author to apply Aristotle’s critique to Tichý’s view. The kernel of Aristotle’s critique which, in the author’s opinion, is also relevant to Tichý’s conception, consists in the fact that the arguments presented, though they correctly point to there being something common to a plurality of things, do not justify one to postulate a concrete conception (in this case a Platonic one) of universals.
In Physica I,8 Aristotle endeavors to show that a long-term Eleatic puzzle about coming-to-be can be resolved by appealing to his own ontological principles of change (substratum, privation, and form). In this paper, I posit that the key to Aristotle’s resolution lies in the introduction of aspectual distinctions within numerical unities. These distinctions within the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of coming-to-be made it possible for Aristotle to maintain, while answering the puzzle, that there is no coming-to-be ex nihilo and, at the same time, that the product of coming-to-be is something that did not exist before; i.e. that there is coming-to-be. Finally, I suggest that this resolution could be seen as an interesting case of the application of conceptual tools developed in the Sophistici Elenchi, and I analyze the advantages of this resolution over the Platonic resolution of a similar sort of Eleatic problem.
For Aristotle, the classification of the audience is the basis of distinguishing the main genres of rhetoric. Due to the auditor receiving political, judicial or educational content, there is a distinction into deliberative, judicial, and epideictic rhetoric. There are three more specific ends of rhetoric connected with the three basic types of auditors. Due to the communicative character of rhetoric, these ends are achieved against the background of the relation to the subject of the speech, referring to the decisions made by the auditor. Deliberative rhetoric is speech or writing that attempts to persuade an audience to take (or not to take) some action. The specific end of this rhetorical genre is good. Judicial rhetoric is speech or writing that considers the justice or injustice of a certain charge or accusation. Epideictic rhetoric is speech or writing that praises (encomium) or blames (invective). Persuasion in rhetoric happens because of a specific end: goodness, justice, nobility. Thus, the specific nature of the end of persuasion is taken into account. Perceiving the end against the background of the subject of persuasion allows one to develop a method. The method that determines the applicability of rhetoric occurs in the tradition of peripatetic rhetoric in a non-autonomous way, but is closely related to the end and to the subject of speech.
The subject of the article is intuition and its role in philosophical cognition in Plato and Aristotle. The main problem concerns the rationality of intuitive knowledge. Plato is the heir of the Parmenidean doctrinal tradition of being and cognition. According to him, intuition is the immediate perceiving of ideas. This may be supernatural intuition or rational intuition. The first is perceiving ideas seen before birth, the second is recollection of knowledge or cognition of ideas in the mind. The aim of intuitive knowledge is the definition of the essence. Plotinus is the successor to Plato’s theory of supernatural intuition. Aristotle used intuition to formulate the first principles of science or to define the goals of activity. Each type is characterised by common features, such as directness, comprehensiveness of cognition and obviousness. There are differences between the types of intuition. First of all, they concern whether the object is natural or supernatural, its intersubjectivity, and the sources of intuitive cognition. In the case of intersubjectivity, Aristotle introduced a confirmation procedure concerning some of principles known intuitively. The idea of confirmation is forced by accusations against, for example, the principle of non–contradiction, which made Aristotle present a certain extra–intuitive way for it to be substantiated.
This article examines Theophrastus’ definition of tragedy, as preserved by the Latin grammarian Diomedes, focusing on two questions that still need discussion. First, what is the meaning of the variously interpreted peristasis? An analysis of Diomedes’ text and a survey of the use of the word in Peripatetic works, both neglected by scholars up to now, suggest that it means “reversal”. Second, is the definition anti-Aristotelian? Not only katharsis, as is frequently emphasized, but, indeed, all the elements in Aristotle’s definition are absent from Theophrastus’. Nonetheless, references to characters and plot, on which Theophrastus’definition centres, can be found in Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy.
The reflection on form (eidos, morphe) is situated at the core of Aristotle’s philoso-phy. Not only it was the bone of contention with Plato and other academic philosophers, who maintained the separateness and immutability of forms, but mature Aristotle’s theory of form provided him with an adequate theoretical equipment for all fields of scientific inquiry, so the concept of form proved to be all-pervasive (transcendental). This issue is examined in the paper. The article also deals with some issues characteris-tic of the contemporary (postmodern) debate, such as the question of sense and intellec-tual cognition, the problem of identity, the mind-body problem. Finally, the parallel topic of matter is addressed by showing that Aristotle’s conception still proves incisive in contrasting several theories, lending itself—more or less implicitly—to the Neopla-tonic conception.
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