Volume 48, Issue 4

Aristotle uses two kinds of material cause in his analysis of biological organisms: compositional matter, which persists through their birth and death; and functional matter, which consists of the organs and functional parts out of which biological organisms are made while they are alive. These two kinds of material cause, it has been argued, have quite different explanatory roles: functional matter is required by biological organisms to perform their essential functions, but compositional matter contributes nothing necessary to them and is only responsible for their accidental properties. Against this view, I argue that biological organisms are systematically dependent upon their compositional matter and the latter is responsible for many of their necessary attributes.

abstract Aristotle’s discussion of ‘to be’, presented in his Metaphysics V 7, has been much debated. Most scholars explain the Aristotelian ‘to be’ kata symbebêkos as a result of a so called ‘unnatural predication’. By accepting this reading, Aristotle’s distinction becomes necessarily blurred. The same holds with respect to Ross’ reading of the passage according to which ‘to be’ kath’ hauto is restricted to essential predications. The purpose of this paper is to show the inappropriateness of both readings and to offer a better one. In doing so, I will argue that Aristotle’s concern is neither about various uses of the verb ‘to be’ in Ancient Greek nor about types of predication, but on ontology and its pitfalls.

Several prominent scholars assume that Aristotle regards the heavenly spheres as self-moving or rationally ensouled. Against this I argue first, Ph. 8.5 gives no support, and passages in Ph. 8 imply that all self-movers are terrestrial animals; second, passages in De motu animalium and De caelo where the heaven is called alive do not imply a quasi-animal soul; third, the exclusion of incidental self-movement from the heavens in Ph. 8.6 cannot be explained by locating movers in or on the spheres; fourth, the passage in Ph. 8.10 concerning the prime mover’s location must be understood with that in De caelo 1.9 placing the changeless beings beyond the cosmos; fifth, Metaph. 12.7 and 9 exclude a heavenly intellect separate from the prime mover; and sixth, the heaven’s desire, responsible for its movement, consists in physical excitation of its aitherial body, analogous to animal desire in MA 10.

In this paper I deal with Alexander of Aphrodisias’ theory of categorical μὴ κατὰ χρόνον propositions, namely of propositions which are neither necessity nor contingency propositions, but which are true not only at a certain instant in time . I argue that these propositions are true at least at two instants in time, but their presentation does not commit Alexander to a revision of his general semantic scheme for modal propositions, in which he showed that categorical propositions are not necessity propositions, and thus cannot be true at every instant in time. In the last section, I shall argue that Alexander’s presentation of categorical μὴ κατὰ χρόνον propositions is linked to his theory of predication and that such a semantic framework may explain the apparently difficult classification of this set of propositions.

The longevity of Aristotelian natural science consists not so much in the fact that Aristotle’s solutions to puzzles were accepted by generations of philosophers, but by the fact that the presuppositions that made these puzzles look puzzling were. In what follows I consider some Neoplatonic responses to two puzzles that Aristotle poses in De Caelo Book 2, Chapter 12. Both Proclus and Simplicius rejected Aristotle’s solutions to the puzzles he posed. In one case, but not in the other, they also reassessed the relative importance of the presuppositions that created the puzzle.

The paper tries to demonstrate that in his Commentary on Aristotle’s de Anima Philoponus develops a comprehensive Neoplatonic approach to Aristotle’s psychology. This means that he makes Aristotle a supporter of a coherent set of Neoplatonic positions in the area of psychology. First of all, Philoponus attributes Plato’s definition of soul as the self-moving principle to Aristotle as well. He further ascribes to Aristotle the conviction that the human rational soul is both ungenerated and immortal, and even the belief in an astral body as the vehicle of the rational soul. According to Philoponus, Aristotle also accepts Plato’s theory of innate Ideas and the Neoplatonic doctrine of the presence of the Ideas as creative logoi in the divine Intellect. This last element shows that Philoponus’ interpretation of Aristotle’s psychology and his master Ammonius’ Neoplatonic, emanationist interpretation of Aristotle’s theology are complementary. Both interpretations or rather distortions of Aristotle’s philosophy are part of an Alexandrian exegetical policy which consistently tries to harmonize Aristotle with Plato as much as possible, and to interpret Aristotle’s criticism of Plato as directed not against the real but only the apparent meaning of Plato’s words. This policy served the purpose of giving the pagan Neoplatonism of Ammonius and the early Philoponus a broader basis of authority in its opposition to Christianity.