Volume 56, Issue 1

In this essay, I respond to a problem raised by Sarah Broadie in her 1987 article “Nature, Craft and Phronesis in Aristotle.” Broadie analyzes Aristotle’s famous craft analogy for natural causation in order to determine whether or not it requires importing a psychological dimension to natural teleology. She argues that it is possible to make sense of the analogy without psychology, but that the tradeoff is a conception of craft so thoroughly de-psychologized that it is rendered unrecognizable, perhaps even incoherent as a referent. I dispute this suggestion and argue, rather, that Aristotle’s insistence on removing psychology from the craft side of the analogy points to his prioritization of techne itself, rather than any particular craftsman, as primary efficient agent. The lack of psychology that characterizes a techne ensures stability and reliability in the causal process that could not be guaranteed by the idiosyncratic psychologies of various craftspeople. The same kind of stability and reliability belong to nature as an efficient cause, forming the basis of the comparison between craft and natural teleology. It is therefore the craft, not the craftsman, that must stand as analog to nature. I demonstrate the value of this revision by applying the analogy to the case of natural teleology: reproduction as depicted in Aristotle’s Generation of Animals . The result is a reading of Aristotle’s analogies that can assuage Broadie’s concerns and allow for a natural thing’s own nature to more fully inhabit its intended role as an inner source of change.

Scholars have long considered de Philosophia and de Caelo to be in contradiction regarding the nature of the heavenly bodies, particularly with respect to the activity proper to the element composing them. According to the accounts we have of de Philosophia, Aristotle seems to have put forth that stars move because they have minds, and, according to Cicero’s account of the lost text, they choose their actions out of free will. In de Caelo, however, Aristotle seems only to consider that stars engage in the activity of circular motion because it is in their nature to do so, as it is in the nature of, e.g. fire to move upwards or Earth to move downwards. In this paper, I argue against the longstanding view that there is an incompatibility between these two “early” cosmological texts of Aristotle. I aim to show that these two texts endorse complementary, not contradictory, views of the heavenly bodies. I argue that in de Philosophia, Aristotle attributes to stars the intellective counterpart of the spatial motion which is developed in greater depth in de Caelo, while in de Caelo, we see hints of Aristotle’s view in de Philosophia that the stars are also minds and are able to rationally cognize their particular good – a point which is shown in de Caelo 292a18–293a14, where Aristotle attributes both life and praxis to the heavenly bodies. The overarching view which I present of these two texts is that while de Caelo approaches the heavenly bodies qua bodies and de Philosophia approaches them qua minds, they are still examining one and the same substance and that Aristotle has not changed his mind regarding the basic nature of such a substance in the (supposed) interim between writing de Philosophia and de Caelo. Rather, we find echoes of de Caelo in de Philosophia, and echoes of de Philosophia in de Caelo, which speaks to the fact that Aristotle maintains one view of the heavenly bodies which he presents over the course of these two texts.

Among the educative games of Plato’s Cretan city, choral performances have a prominent role. This paper examines the function of play (παιδιά) in the choral education in virtue in Plato’s Laws . I reconstruct the notion of play as it is elaborated throughout this dialogue, and then show how it contributes to solving the problem of virtue acquisition in the Athenian’s account of moral education through songs and dances. I argue that play in the Laws is best understood as an imitative activity that is intrinsically pleasurable, ordered by rules and patterns of repetition, and undertaken for its own sake by a player whose psychic condition is childish. Thus interpreted, we are in a better position to see why choruses must be engaged in playfully. Because the self-likening process (ὁμοίωσις) choral performances aim at requires pleasure and because pleasure normally obtains when there is a concordance between one’s character and the imitations, virtue acquisition is best secured if the imitations of virtue in choruses are performed or spectated playfully.

This paper argues for a possible-worlds interpretation of the arguments marshalled by Socrates against Protagoras in Plato’s Theaetetus . Specifically, it reads Protagoras’ position as implying a limited form of modal realism, and evaluates both the self-refutation sequence at 170a–71d and the Future Argument at 177c–9c on the basis of this reading. It emerges that Socrates’ project is only partly successful: while the three main arguments of the self-refutation sequence force Protagoras into ever more awkward and metaphysically top-heavy positions, and the Future Argument is psychologically compelling, these arguments do not force a collapse of the relativist position. Protagoras can still defend himself, though the cost is high.

In Metaphysics Λ7 1072b30–1073a3, Aristotle introduces a Speusippean theory according to which ‘what is most beautiful and best is not en archēi ’. Through a detailed analysis of the passage, I argue that Aristotle’s refutation of Speusippus’ thesis is favoured by the introduction of the seed example, which conflates both ontological and temporal priority. The elements gathered from the analysis of Aristotle’s polemical strategy will support a broader conclusion: Speusippus’ reason not to characterise his principle(s) as (the) good is related to the problematic relationship Forms and sensibles had within Plato’s account, or, in other words, participation.

The five books of Artemidorus of Ephesus’ Oneirocritica (c. second century CE) constitute the largest collection of divinatory dream-interpretations to survive from Graeco-Roman antiquity. This article examines Artemidorus’ contribution to longstanding medico-philosophical debates over the ontological and epistemic character of such dreams. As with wider Mediterranean traditions concerning premonitory dreams, Greeks and Romans popularly understood them as phenomena with origins exterior to the dreamer (e.g. a visitation of a god). Presocratic and Hippocratic thinkers, however, initiated an effort to bring at least some dream events within the body as interior processes of a physical soul, a bodily turn which ultimately engendered a split in thinking about the possibility and scope of prophetic and diagnostic dreams (e.g. Hippocrates Regimen 4, Aristotle On Prophecy in Dreams, Rufus of Ephesus, and Galen). Here, I examine the way that Artemidorus meant the Oneirocritica to address seriously questions about the origins of dreams and the powers of empirical science in two, related ways. We will see that his defense of oneirocriticism as a techne unfolds along two main axes. First, Artemidorus constructs a necessary veneer of scientific credibility by mobilizing the tropes and organizational strategies characteristic of contemporary technical literature. Secondly, he anchors that authority upon a materialist account of prophetic dreams as “semiotic movements of the soul.” As Price, S. 1986. “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus.” Past & Present 113: 3–36 and Harris-McCoy, D. 2012. Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary . Oxford: Oxford University Press observed, this explicit commitment to an empirical method of dream-interpretation resembles that of the Hellenistic medical ‘sect’ known as ‘Empiricists,’ who eschewed interest in theoretical etiology in favor of observation, comparison, and compilation of symptoms and outcomes. Pushing beyond similarity, I argue that Artemidorus not only deployed this method to defend empirically grounded accounts of dream-divination (cf. Cicero De div. 1), but endeavored to show that such a scientific method can be used to stabilize and corral productively the potentially infinite number of interpretations any dream-sign might bear without recourse to an underlying, causal theory.