Volume 89, Issue 3

This article aims at discussing the origin of an Indian argument quoted by a member of the Peripatetic school at the end of the 4 th Century BC. Aristoxenus' 53 rd fragment tells the surprising story of a (fictitious) meeting between Socrates and an Indian in Athens. Challenging Socrates and his definition of philosophy as investigations about human life, the Indian argues that it is not possible for anyone to understand human matters (τὰ ἀνθρώπɛıα κατıδɛĩν) without considering divine ones (ἀγνοοντά γɛ τὰ θɛĩα). This argument, even though it clearly belongs to internal Greek philosophical debates, echoes the genuine and typically Indian axiom that knowledge of the human self is knowledge of God and vice-versa, which is one of the major commonplaces in traditional Brahmanic thought. By discussing successively the historical context of the fragment, some related Platonic passages and some Indian parallels on the issue, the article shows that Aristoxenus' fragment is one of the first and only texts, historically, in which a typical Greek philosophical argument is challenged by an authentic Indian proposition translated into an argument based on Greek conceptual categories.

In this article, I consider the significance of the discovery of spermatozoa for Leibniz's deeply held beliefs that (i) no true substance can ever be generated or destroyed, except miraculously; and (ii) that every substance must be perpetually organically embodied. I further consider the way these beliefs are transformed as Leibniz's basic middle-period commitment to corporeal substance gives way (though not entirely) to a metaphysics of monadological immaterialsm. What endures throughout, I show, is the conviction that whatever is real must be indestructible, whether this is conceived as a form-matter compound in which the two components can never be entirely sundered from one another, or as a node of perception “absolutely destitute of parts”. Whatever the deepest metaphysical account of corporeality, Leibniz never abandons his interest in spermatozoa as the corporeal hosts of preexisting animals.

Although various points of Hume's canonical works hint at a critique of religious affect, his most explicit attack on such sentiments occurs in a letter of June 30th 1743 to his friend William Mure. In this letter Hume sets out an objection to all affective attitudes that are putatively directed toward God, and maintains that the Deity is not in fact the ‘natural object’ of any human passion. I examine this claim and canvass three possible interpretations of Hume's challenge to religious affect, according to which Hume is, alternatively, (i) asserting the impropriety of all religious affect, (ii) denying that our affective states can secure reference to the divine, or (iii) rejecting the psychological possibility of affective states that take God as their object. Hume's argument may be best understood, I suggest, as a combination of all three criticisms. I close with an examination of Hume's diagnosis of the self-deceit involved in putative cases of religious feeling, and connect the argument of his letter to the similar analyses in Essays, Moral and Political and the Natural History of Religion .

This work throws a new light on Xenocrates, the third leader of the Academy, who is considered in the existing research as merely a derivative doctrinaire. Dillon and Krämer have shown that Xenocrates is a link between Plato and Aristotle. Xenocrates' first principle, the Monas, is trancendent and a Nus with the Ideas as moments in it. It is illustrated here that Xenocrates knew two priciples, the Monas and the indefinite duality. The latter, however, is a result of the former. This means Xenocrates taught a monism which was not independent from that of Plato and other members of the Academy. The source for this demonstration is Sextus Empiricus.

James Wilberding: Plotinus's Cosmology. A Study of Ennead II, 1 (40) . Text, Translation and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006, xii + 269 pp. ( Alain Lernould )