The present article attempts to show some of the difficulties connected with Aristotle's distinction between 'energeia' and 'kinesis'. On the basis of an analysis several fragments from the 'Metaphysics', 'Physics', 'De Anima', and 'Nicomachean Ethics', the author comes to the conclusion that the main cause of ambiguities is an unclear division of 'energeia' into 'energeia ateles' and 'haplos energeia'. The author does not offer a definitive solution but suggests that the difficulties are a useful instrument in a deeper reflection on man from the point of view of his activity.
Drawing on examples of works of art by very diverse artists as Fra Angelico, Vermeer, Lucebert, De Bruyckere, and Moreau, The author aims to show that the specific ways in which artworks yield aesthetic experiences cannot be properly understood without recourse to the peculiar (and all too often neglected) presence of matter in the work of art. In this paper he sketches the contours of what a ‘matterist’ aesthetic fundamentally needs to involve. Unlike ‘significant form’ (Bell & Fry), matter in art is necessarily related to presence, finitude and contingency. Touching matter resists communication through determinate concepts. It constrains the production and receptivity of beauty and coherent meaning, and not so much addresses our faculty of understanding as it touches and stimulates our imagination and our ‘soulflesh’, i.e., what Lyotard calls l’âme-chair. This ‘passibility’ to touching matter (which is not passive) neither presupposes nor procures any dialectic reinstalling of transcendental subjectivity, and resists appropriation by argumentative rationality and rhetoric. On the contrary, it points to a path that necessarily lies always before us: the path out of techno-science’s obsession with consensus, information and superficial entertainment towards communality in and through (aesthetic) affects, which testify to our inevitable human finitude.
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The article deals with the concept of a human being with respect to its composition from soul and body. The discussion of this topic was very important and fruitful in the 13th century. It was stimulated by Aristotle's writings appearing at that time in Christian Europe. The article focuses on the most important 13th century authors who contributed to that discussion: Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Latin averroists. During this discussion of soul and body, there was a shift from a platonic philosophical framework to an Aristotelian one. It also resulted in the Church doctrine of human soul.
The article sheds light on how Thomas Aquinas philosophically explained and founded the unity of human being as the centre of the created universe, establishing the continuity between the spheres of nature and intellect. Thomas’ conception is explored with respect to older doctrines drawing on Aristotle’s hylemorfic approach, especially to human soul, showing at the same time the development of Thomas’ conception itself. In Thomas the traditional problem of a possible uniting the soul as a form with the soul as a founding principle of thinking is successfully eliminated by transposing the psychological problematic as a whole to metaphysical level (especially in his later writing De substantiis separatis). This shift enabled him to explain the continuity of universe as well as the unity of human being thanks to the distinction between essence and being taken from Avicenna.
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