Volume 98, Issue 4

Abstract: This paper studies the interplay between the history of mankind, philosophical polemics and ethical debates about the best life in the fourth century BC through an inquiry into the positions of Dicaearchus of Messana, a pupil of Aristotle, and his disagreement about the best life with Theophrastus. Against recent interpretations, the paper establishes the various stages in Dicaearchus’ history of wisdom, its downward path and its criteria to define “philosophy”. This leads to a better understanding of Dicaearchus’ assessments of the Golden Age, the Seven Sages and Socrates and, above all, of his notion of the “practical life” as not restricted to politics and as opposed to contemporary scolastic conceptions of philosophy probably put forward by Plato and best exemplified by Theophrastus in Dicaearchus’ eyes.

Abstract: Frege’s mature writings apparently contain two different criteria of sense identity. While in „Über Sinn und Bedeutung“ (1892) and in „Kurze Übersicht meiner logischen Lehren“ (1906?) Frege seems to advocate a psychological criterion, his letter to Husserl of December 12, 1906 offers a thoroughly logical criterion of sense identity. It is argued that the latter proposal is not a „momentary aberration“, but rather Frege’s official criterion; his psychological criteria only serve as a way of illustrating questions of sense identity by appealing to the thoughts of ideal thinkers.

Abstract: No major edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a whole has been published since the one prepared by Ross in 1923, and no minor edition either since Jaeger’s in 1957. Yet in recent years individual books have been edited, and there is a lively debate regarding the stemma codicum as a path towards an edition more accurate and reliable than existing ones. Starting from Primavesi’s work on book Alpha , as the most elaborated edition of a book of the Metaphysics available so far, the article draws a scenario for future investigation, in which areas of obscurity and open desiderata are elucidated. A path is suggested of how to deal with the long-standing problem of how to reconcile the two different branches of the text’s transcription.

Abstract: This article discusses critically Silvia Fazzo’s appraisal – it appears in the same issue of the AGPh – of Oliver Primavesi’s recent edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha (published in C. Steel [ed.], Aristotle’s Metaphysics Alpha , Oxford, 2012, 385–516). It further explicates what should be the manuscript basis for a new critical edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics .