Band 58, Heft 1

The treatise On the Nature of the Universe , attributed to the Pythagorean Ocellus, has frequently been the subject of scholarly attention due to its engagement with Aristotle’s theory of elemental transformation or its role in the late Hellenistic debate on the eternity of the universe. In this paper, I argue that its author endorses a peculiar conception of matter: prime matter is an unqualified body, only potentially perceptible. Ps.-Ocellus draws this doctrine from Stoicism but reworks it for his purposes outside the framework of Stoic corporealism. The author presents it as an antecedent to both Plato’s receptacle and Aristotle’s prime matter. As it turns out, the doctrine was meant to address some of the challenges posed by an incorporeal material principle.

Scholars have long been aware of striking similarities between a crucial passage in Book II of Plato’s Republic and the longest papyrus fragment surviving from Antiphon’s On Truth . Previous scholarship has identified some views common to both texts but has not explained how these views hang together in a unified and coherent ethical outlook. A deeper investigation into these two texts turns up a blueprint for Greek immoralist arguments, a finding which should be of considerable interest to scholars of ancient Greek ethics and political philosophy. The paper argues that both texts include an argument whose demonstrandum is that it is by nature good or advantageous to commit injustice when one can do so undetected; that this argument in each case involves a set of background premises that constitute a blueprint for immoralist arguments in Classical Athens; and that the immoralist ethical theory of Republic II is an outline distilled from several more detailed theories, including the one belonging to On Truth .

One of the many puzzles in Aristotelian hylomorphism is this: What happens to matter when it comes to be enformed? Interpreters ascribe to Aristotle different theories of diachronic composition. Some of them assume that he endorses a view that contemporary metaphysicians label as ‘preservationism’: matter survives unchanged in the hylomorphic whole. Others take it that he accepts what nowadays is tagged as ‘annihilationism’: matter is annihilated and replaced by a new object, the one created by the union of matter and form. And yet others argue that he maintains that matter survives in the hylomorphic whole but it undergoes some significant changes, a thesis which, in modern metaphysical parlance, is labelled as ‘alterationism’. This paper does four things. First, it shows that none of these approaches to the issue at hand is satisfactory. Second, it examines some key passages in Physics I 7 and Generation and Corruption I 1-5 where Aristotle is often assumed to maintain incompatible views about coming to be. Third, it argues that there is no incompatibility between the positions presented in these texts. Finally, it shows that this same textual evidence sheds light on Aristotle’s views on what happens to matter when it comes to be enformed. He actually adopts different theories of diachronic composition for different hylomorphic wholes. He applies alterationism to non-substances and annihilationism to substances.

In this paper, I show that Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium is tied into an interesting and hitherto unexplored web of ideas in Plato’s ethics and psychology. The poet’s analysis of erōs as ‘leading us to what “belongs” (the oikeion )’ (193d2) and as ‘restoring us in our “original nature” ( archaia phusis )’ (193d4) is not a mere negative contribution that renders him a ‘target for Diotima’s fire’ (Dover). Rather, he unwittingly communicates central ethical and psychological ideas which we find developed in key passages of Plato’s dialogues. What is interesting is that Diotima in a curious passage seems to dismiss his contribution of the oikeion as unrelated to our good ( agathon ) and irrelevant to the analysis of desire (205d10–206a1). I argue that this interpretation of Diotima’s response to Aristophanes, which would render her position an ethical anomaly in Plato’s dialogues, should be rejected. Instead, it is more plausible to read her response as proposing a revisionary conception of the oikeion , relying on the idea that our agathon is our true oikeion . In addition, I tentatively suggest that the theory of psychic pregnancy may be seen as presenting the agathon of wisdom of virtue produced in the ascent as an oikeion . Just as fascinating as Diotima’s stance on the oikeion is the question how her teachings relate to the concept of an archaia phusis of the soul. The idea that the soul’s self-perfection constitutes a return to a temporally prior condition of excellence, which in two places other than the Symposium ( Republic X, Timaeus ) is called the ‘ archaia phusis ’, is pervasive and centrally important to Plato’s psychology. I address the question whether Diotima’s ascent passage constitutes a psychological anomaly in portraying self-perfection as unrelated to the concept of the archaia phusis . I argue that an answer to this depends on the stance we take on the Symposium ’s position regarding the immortality of the soul. While a reading that posits a rejection of immortality in the Symposium must indeed deny a role for the concept in Diotima’s speech, I show that a reading allowing for immortality as a theoretical commitment in the background has an interesting interpretative option: along with Timaeus 90d5, it may fruitfully interpret the ascent as an ordering of the soul ‘in accordance with its archaia phusis ’.