Volume 47, Issue 2

Galen and the doxographical tradition portray the dispute between the Hellenistic medical sects as a symmetrical argument about the role of knowledge. I show a divide between doxographical accounts and surviving testimonia of the Hellenistic Empiricists. I argue that the dispute between the medical sects was asymmetric: for the Rationalists, it was a dispute about medical methodology; but for the Empiricists, the dispute concerned the conception and therapeutic purpose of medicine

This study offers a unified interpretation of Empedocles’ thought, based on his concept of the δαίμων. Following Simplicius’ testimony to B 59, the case is made for understanding each δαίμων not only as a compound, but as an instance of a natural kind, a pre-Aristotelian material substance. Its two main attested instances are limbs or body parts (B 59) and long-lived but ‘limbless’ gods (B 29 and especially B 134). The case for limbs as substances is confirmed by a review of Aristotle’s various criticisms of Empedocles and new evidence for Empedocles’ embryology in section c of the Strasburg papyrus. The link between limbs and limbless gods, it is then suggested, is mediated by an Empedoclean scale of nature based on a hierarchy of elemental blends. This in turn makes it possible to identify the reincarnated δαίμων of B 115 as an intermediate between the other two: a body part whose blend is superior to the limbs, so that it endures from one body to the next, but which remains too contaminated by Strife to escape from further reincarnation

In this paper I ask how Timaeus explains change within the trianglebased part of his cosmos. Two common views are that change among physical items is somehow caused or enabled by either the forms or the demiurge. I argue for a competing view, on which the physical items are capable of bringing about change by themselves, prior to the intervention of the demiurge, and prior to their being turned into imitations of the forms. I outline three problems for the view that physical things depend on the forms for their causal powers, and show how the view I propose solves each. I then add further arguments for my view, based on (a) statements by Timaeus that seem to favor my view directly, (b) implications of Timaeus’ positions that favor the view, and (c) Timaeus’ explanatory practice in the second half of his speech

Unsuccessful activities are pervasive facts of our daily lives. Our vision is nearsighted or farsighted; we puzzle over difficult problems without making headway; we make resolutions to do certain things and then fail to do them. For Aristotle, seeing, contemplating, and deciding belong to the metaphysical kind energeia (the technical term which often gets translated as ‘activity’). In this paper, I investigate the consequences of Aristotle’s conception of unsuccessful or incomplete energeiai for his theory of excellence in the Nicomachean Ethics. I will begin with some remarks on a difficult passage in Nicomachean Ethics X.4, where Aristotle seems to draw a distinction between more and less complete and successful, and more and less incomplete and unsuccessful, activities. I will argue, first, that the idea of degrees of completeness of activities should be understood in terms of degrees of approaching or approximating to a single state - completeness - and to the extent that a particular activity fails to be complete, it also fails to be that particular activity in a strict sense. I will then argue that this account of unsuccessful activities has a striking consequence: it means that good and excellent people can literally do things that the rest of us cannot. They are distinguished from the rest of us by being capable of performing the activities of desiring, contemplating, and deciding that on Aristotle’s view are definitive of rational agency

It is often claimed that Socrates rejects material causes in the Phaedo because they are not rational or not teleological. In this paper I argue for a new account: Socrates ultimately rejects material causes because he is committed to each change having a single cause. Because each change has a single cause, this cause must, on its own, provide an adequate explanation for the change. Material causes cannot provide an adequate explanation on their own and so Socrates rejects them. Aristotle agrees that material causes cannot explain changes on their own, but by allowing the same change to have multiple causes, he makes room for a material cause. Aristotle draws attention to the anti-Platonic implications of his four causes in a passage in Physics II.3 (195a3- 14) that has been overlooked by commentators.

Plato thought ordinary people have a cognitive, but ignorant, relationship with the Forms. Plato makes this relationship evident for the Slave at Meno 82b-86c, the Lover of Sights and Sounds at Republic 476-480, the ordinary person (hoi polloi) in the finger exercise conducted with Glaucon at Republic 523d3-5 and also in the argument about the equality of sticks and stones at Phaedo 74a-75b.