Volume 8, Issue 1

Do the early Greek poets and thinkers really “play” with their language? What sort of “play” should we expect from part of the professional craftsmen they were of a basically sound language? What did imply their awareness of the phono -syllabic nature of Greek language? And what about Heraclitus in particular, who is most concerned among them with the intrinsic virtues of Greek discourse (λόγος)? An analysis of fr. 22 B 52 DK within the melodic and sonic state of archaic Greek language reveals, instead of “play of words”, a rather spontaneous phenomenon of phono-syllabic generation, that is as necessary for the political message of Heraclitus’ fragment as the meaning of each of its words and their superficial syntactic organization.

We critically reconsider an old hypothesis of the role of the dekad in Pythagorean philosophy. Unlike Zhmud, we claim that: 1) the dekad did play a role in Philolaus’ astronomical system, and 2) Aristotle did not project Plato’s theory of the ten eidetic numbers onto the Pythagoreans. We claim that the dekad, as the τέλειος ἀριθμός, should be understood in Philolaus’ philosophy as completeness and the basis of counting in Greek – as in most other languages – in a decimal system. Additionally, we argue that the number ten is not even a candidate for the τέλειος ἀριθμός in Plato’s philosophy. As a final result of our discussion, we compare and contrast Philolaus’, Plato’s, and Speusippus’ accounts of completeness in relation to numbers.

Aristotle’s main thesis in Metaphysics Z.17, which takes substance to be a principle and a cause of some sort (1041 a 9–10, 1041 b 7–9, b 30–31), is of a piece with the assumption that hylomorphic compounds are unified wholes (1041 b 11–12) – an assumption that proves critical to settling an important controversy about the form-matter relationship in that chapter, i. e. whether matter and form are mutually indistinguishable or rather just accidentally the same. By rejecting these interpretive options, this paper argues that form and matter are bound together by an essential link which, nevertheless, is able to preserve both (i) the different explanatory roles that each of those principles play vis-à-vis specific substances and (ii) the compound’s proper unity.

I intend to show that Aristotle follows some of the main guidelines of the Analytics in his investigation about the nature of the city in Politics  I. I assume that Pol . I sets out the causes of the city and that the book responds to the four questions presented in APo . II.1. I demonstrate that Aristotle’s methodology follows a φυσικῶς standard. In addition, I assume that dialectic plays a secondary – refutative – role, as opposed to the opinion of Owen (1961) and Barnes (1980) that dialectic was the main methodology applied in practical philosophy.

Okeanos is at once a mythological figure and a philosophical concept appearing in many ancient accounts of the world. A frequent object of allegoresis, his cosmological role and his name posed an enigma to Homer’s readers, especially those with a rationalizing bent. This paper proposes that the paradoxical representation of Okeanos as a primordial generative power and a geographical limit may be explained by the influence of etymological speculation, which was a popular heuristic method used by Greek intellectuals from the archaic period throughout antiquity.