Volume 52, Issue 1 -

I argue that a common interpretation of DA 3.4, which sees Aristotle as there rejecting Anaxagoras’s account of mind, is mistaken. Instead, I claim that, in providing his solution to the main puzzles of this chapter, Aristotle takes special care to preserve the essential features that he thinks Anaxagoras ascribes to mind, namely, its ability to know all things, its being unmixed, and its inability to be affected by mixed objects.

Here I propose an interpretation of the ancient Stoic psychological theory on which (i) the concepts that an adult human possesses affect the content of the perceptual impressions (φαντασίαι αἰσθητικαί) she forms, and (ii) the content of such impressions is exhausted by an ‘assertible’ (ἀξίωμα) of suitable complexity. What leads the Stoics to accept (i) and (ii), I argue, is their theory of assent and belief formation, which requires that the perceptual impression communicate information suitable to serve as the content of belief. In arguing for (i), I reject a rival interpretation on which conceptualization occurs subsequently to the formation of a perceptual impression. In arguing for (ii), I deny that perceptual impressions have two kinds of content: one formulated in an assertible, the other sensory, featuring independently of this assertible. I explore the implications of (i) and (ii) for the Stoic theory of emotions, expertise, and rationality, and argue that they shed new light on the workings of impression, assent, and belief.

The aim of this paper is to show that a new approach to Middle Platonist technical exegesis is both necessary and profitable, for it can shed light on the deep philosophical and methodological background of Middle Platonist exegesis as a whole. Through the exegesis of Plato’s divisio animae , the Middle Platonists wanted to establish specific ways of both demonstrating and conceiving Plato’s authority also in the field of harmonics. In particular, I shall take into account Platonists such as Plutarch, Theon, Nicomachus, and Severus, in order to show that: a) the Middle Platonist exegesis of Plato’s divisio animae is chiefly based on a literalist approach to Plato’s text, which is exploited in such a way as to make good technical sense of Plato’s divisio animae ; b) in this way, Middle Platonists sought to establish Plato’s authority in the field of harmonics; c) this conception of authority is however controversial, for some Platonists (e.g., Theon) regarded him as the founder of very specific technical notions, while others (such as Plutarch, Nicomachus, and Severus) considered him the first to have established the general framework of Greek harmonics.

Integrity – the darling of many contemporary virtue ethicists – does not seem to feature in Aristotle’s system. This article explores whether integrity is redundant in Aristotelian virtue ethics, even of the reconstructed neo-Aristotelian kind, in the sense that any role it could reasonably be expected to play is already adequately covered by other virtues. I explain why that may be the case. Nevertheless, I propose to answer this question eventually in the negative by carving out a role for integrity within Aristotelian virtue ethics, which arguably no other construct covers, in integrating the moral but non-virtuous commitments of the continent. Prior to that, however, some ground-clearing is needed, calling for a number of discrete arguments. We need to know, for instance, how to understand ‘integrity’, and whether vice is potentially amenable to integration in the same way as virtue allegedly is. We also need to inquire whether integrity is better understood as a moral or an intellectual virtue. While I am mostly interested in the role of integrity as a higher-order (‘meta’ and/or ‘master’) virtue, I pay some attention also to accounts that consider it simply as one standard virtue among many.