Volume 104, Issue 2

This paper puts forward a new interpretation of the argument at Philebus 36c–40d that pleasures can be false. Protarchus raises an objection at 37e–38a, and in response Socrates presents the elaborate painter-scribe analogy (38e–40c). Most previous interpretations do not explain how the analogy answers Protarchus’ objection. On my account, Protarchus’ objection relies on the plausible intuition that pleasure is simply not in the business of assessing the world, and so it cannot be charged with doing so incorrectly. Socrates responds by demonstrating that pleasure can be mistaken about the world, despite not making an independent assessment of it. The painter-scribe analogy demonstrates how pleasure comes to be mistaken about the world by reproducing the mistake of a judgment. Socrates persuades Protarchus that pleasure can be mistaken in part by preserving his intuition that pleasure itself is not the source of the mistake.

One short passage on what is called the Receptacle in Plato’s Timaeus (49c–50a) has been the subject of much controversy since Cherniss presented an alternative reading of it in 1954. In this paper, I criticize an influential argument presented by Zeyl for a traditional reading, and propose a new interpretation which adopts the alternative reading on important sentences of the passage, but is not accompanied by the defects of Cherniss’ interpretation.

This paper focuses on two passages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics , one in Z 3, the other in H1, in which Aristotle seems to assert that the hupokeimenon is said in three ways, as matter, form, and the compound of matter and form. From these two passages it is often said that subjecthood is a criterion for being substance (alongside two other criteria, separateness and being a tode ti). A consequence of this is that, if form is to be substance, and form is substance, namely first substance, it has to comply with the subject-criterion. This paper challenges this reading, purporting to show that these two passages need not commit Aristotle to the subject-criterion, and that there are good reasons not to commit him to it.

In the eleventh book of the Confessiones Augustine puts forward several considerations about the nature of time. The received view is that he held that only the present exists, while the past and the future do not exist. This received view has recently been attacked by Paul Helm and Katherin Rogers, who have offered alternative interpretations according to which Augustine held that the present has no privileged ontological status, and that past, present and future all equally exist. The aim of this paper is to defend the received view vis-à-vis these attacks. I argue that the received view fits best Augustine’s view of God’s eternity and relation to time and should therefore be preferred.

The article discusses the accusation advanced by Plutarch and Cicero, according to which the Epicureans are unjust, as they would break the law to pursue pleasure if certain of impunity, and deals with this criticism by analyzing the Epicurean theory of law and justice and comparing it with friendship. The article argues that, from a doctrinal standpoint, philia has a higher place in the Epicurean’s priorities and a stronger efficacy than positive law in serving the naturally just. It thus concludes that, as Plutarch and Cicero suspected, the Epicurean’s ultimate loyalty does not lie with positive law, in spite of its importance for social order, but rather with the naturally just ( dikaion ), better secured by friendship.

Spinoza’s own words seem to commit him to necessitarianism. Nonetheless attempts have been made to make room for contingency in Spinozism. Two impressive arguments of this kind are Curley 1969 and Newlands 2010. Both these arguments appeal to Spinoza’s claim that all finite things are locked in an infinite nexus of causal relations (1p28). The question central to this paper is whether contingency can indeed be derived from an infinity of causal ancestors. The goal of the paper is twofold. First, I aim to present an alternative reading of the relation between infinity and Spinoza’s concept of contingency. On my reading, while the infinity of the causal ancestry of finite things does not ground any objective metaphysical contingency on their part, it is a condition which must obtain if they are to appear as contingent. Second, I aim to challenge the derivations of contingency from infinity mentioned above. I will do so by targeting Curley’s assumption that propositions rather than things are the main bearers of modality. On Newlands’ interpretation, the conceivability of things as either contingent or necessary makes the world more perfect than it would otherwise have been. By drawing upon Spinoza’s analysis of “negative” properties (such as evil), I question whether beliefs about contingency contribute to the perfection of the world in virtue of truly attributing the property of objective contingency to things.

This paper claims that Kant’s conception of culture provides a new means of understanding how the two parts of the Critique of Judgment fit together. Kant claims that culture is both the ‘ultimate purpose’ of nature and to be defined in terms of ‘art in general’ (of which the fine arts are a subtype). In the Critique of Teleological Judgment , culture, as the last empirically cognizable telos of nature, serves as the mediating link between nature and freedom, while in the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment , the connection between art and morality passes through culture. In either case, Kant offers distinct, yet interdependent, arguments for how culture demonstrates the amenability of nature to its supersensible ground: the central question Kant claims in the Introduction that the work seeks to answer. Thus, not only does this account advance a concept essential to both parts of the work; it also demonstrates how the two parts can be conceived as complementary, with each supplementing the other to solve Kant’s central question. As such, understanding the Critique of Judgment in terms of culture enables us to see how the two parts of the work do not merely share points of similarity or common themes, but presuppose one another in order to understand how nature is amenable to freedom.