Volume 56, Issue 3

In the Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle claims that friendship and justice are the same, apparently flouting the not uncommon contrast between friendship and justice. I start by assessing Aristotle’s principle of equality: friends of equal standing engage in exact reciprocity in goods and friends of unequal standing engage in proportional reciprocity. In a number of ways that have gone unnoticed, the equalization principle is a requirement for understanding the sameness of friendship and justice. Just relations and friendship share the same domain, that is, the same relationship of a corresponding community. Moreover, asking how to be just to someone is the same as asking how to be a friend to that person, indicating that the virtue of justice and the virtue of friendship are also the same.

The aim of this paper is to explore how the cosmic soul works and how it accomplishes its providential and demiurgic tasks in Chrysippus’ system. Drawing on (i) the analogy Chrysippus establishes between the individuum and the cosmos and (ii) biological and medical theories of respiration, digestion, and pulse, I will show that the movements of Chrysippus’ cosmic soul reproduce the processes of digestion, pulse, and respiration at a cosmic level. My claim is that Chrysippus, in addition to adopting Praxagoras’ notion that inhaled air nourishes pneuma —well established in the scholarship—appropriated Aristotle’s complex mechanism of respiration and digestion based on the teleological role of cold air, crucial for preserving vital heat. So understood, Chrysippus’ application of biological notions to cosmology allows him to endow the active principle with effective causation throughout the cosmos.

In this paper, I argue that Aristotle was already aware in his earlier texts of the fundamental distinction between motion and activity and of the criterion which structures this contrast. Moreover, I will present textual evidence which suggests that Aristotle’s original concept of ἐνέργεια applies primarily to activities which contain their ends in themselves, and not to motions, which are different from their ends.

The relationship between mind and necessity is one of the major points of difficulty for the interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus . At times Timaeus seems to say the demiurge is omnipotent in his creation, and at other times seems to say he is limited by pre-existing matter. Most interpretations take one of the two sides, but this paper proposes a novel approach to interpreting this issue which resolves the difficulty. This paper suggests that in his speech Timaeus presents two hypothetical models of creation, one with an omnipotent demiurge and one where he is limited by matter, so as to investigate their theoretical and empirical validity. Further, he shows that each model is ultimately an inadequate explanation of the first principles of the cosmos. Timaeus’ speech is therefore properly understood to be aporetic: it leaves its listeners aware of the difficulties inherent in the two models of creation, but without a more viable alternative.

At key moments in the Phaedrus and the Republic , Socrates qualifies our capacity to “see” the highest realities (the “place of being,” the “Good beyond being”) with the adverb “ mogis ” ( mogis kathorosa , Phdr . 248a; mogis horisthai , Rep . 517b). Mogis can be used to indicate either the toilsome difficulty of some undertaking or the subject’s proximity to failing to accomplish the undertaking. Socrates uses mogis to qualify the nature of the human soul’s capacity to make the intellectual ascent and see the divine, but it is not prima facie clear whether the qualification is meant to express (1) the difficulty we have in undertaking the intellectual ascent (a comment on the effort required) or (2) the fact that the human soul’s capacity to make the intellectual ascent will, on account of its limitations, only “just barely” be achieved, if at all. After discussing the uses of mogis in classical literature and surveying Plato’s uses of mogis across the corpus, I interpret Plato’s use of mogis at Phaedrus 248a, arguing that mogis kathorosa should be translated as “only gets a good look at the things that are with much toil” rather than the more common “scarcely able to gaze upon the things that are.” I then turn to the parallel passage at Republic 517b and argue against a prominent account, put forward by John Sallis, among others, of Plato’s understanding of divine inaccessibility. Whereas Sallis et al. argue that Plato’s use of mogis indicates that which is to be seen at the acme of the ascent is only “barely glimpsed” on account of the fact that it “withdraws” from our view, I argue instead that Plato’s use of mogis indicates that though we can “get a good look” at the highest realities, that good look is qualified by their inexhaustible excess. The human capacity to see the highest realities is qualified because there is “always more to see,” not because that which is there to be seen “withdraws” from view, and still less because there is some intrinsic limitation to human intellectual vision that prevents us from apprehending the highest realities. Accordingly, the divine is accessible but never exhaustible.

This paper approaches the Critias straightforwardly as a work of political philosophy but gives greater attention to Athens’ opponent, Atlantis, whose founding, political organization, and eventual decline each offer important lessons about the aims of legislation and political life. I begin by comparing the foundation of the two cities as presented in Critias’ myth, with a special focus on the role of divine persuasion (I). I then describe the political organization of Athens and Atlantis, showing how they reflect the different ways in which their founding gods exercised divine persuasion (II). Next, I focus on the decline of Atlantis and the causes behind it (III). Finally (IV), I discuss the lessons that I think can be gathered from the foregoing sections and show how the themes that emerge from the comparison of the two cities anticipate their more extensive exploration in the Laws .

In the mid-first century BC Geminus of Rhodes, a scientist and philosopher close to Posidonius, composed a comprehensive Theory of Mathematical Sciences , in the surviving fragments of which the numerous characters are referred to plainly by name, with some of them being namesakes of other, more well-known mathematicians and philosophers. This paper tries to set apart the namesakes of Geminus, of which there are four in his fragments: Theodorus, Hippias, Oenopides, and Menaechmus.

For Aristotle, animals, by contrast to plants, possess a perceptual soul. However, there is disagreement concerning the point at which the perceptual soul is acquired, for him. On one influential interpretation, Aristotle thinks that the perceptual soul is acquired not during the initial formation of the embryo, but at some later stage of its development. On such interpretations of Aristotle’s view, the newly formed embryo is not yet an actual animal, but a plant-like living being or even inanimate matter. We argue, by contrast, that Aristotle views the embryo, from the very beginning, as an actual animal exercising basic nutritive and perceptual functions. We show that this interpretation is consistent with Aristotle’s views on embryogenesis in the GA , HA , PA , and the Metaphysics .

Aristotle’s biology is based on his method of division of animal kinds by multiple differentiae. This results in complex clusters of non-subordinate terms, between which Aristotle seeks to establish universal correlations. The form of these, however, does not correspond to that prescribed by his theory of syllogism. Mereological relations between terms are not linear and quantification is far more complex than the distinction between universal and particular propositions. Thus the axiomatisation of Aristotle’s biology requires a tool designed for analysing such complex universal correlations into valid syllogistic premises. Prosleptic-like premises turn out to be the solution outlined by Aristotle. They make it possible to handle both the logic of consequence which translates from and into mereological relations between term clusters, and the complex quantification required by division based on multiple differentiæ, through the instantiation of a variable ideally consisting of indivisible groups of animals.