Volume 5, Issue 1

Abstract: The aim of this article is to reopen the rather neglected issue of the nature and internal structure of the Sphairos as it appears in Empedocles’ account of the cycle of the cosmos. The Sphairos is generally understood as a result of the mixing of the four elements, or ‘roots’ at the moment of the greatest dominance of Love. Based on an analysis of preserved fragments and testimonies, the article argues that the Sphairos is not an amorphous mixture. On a contrary, it has a complex and structured form with clearly differentiated parts. Moreover, Empedocles’ description of the process of mixing of the basic elements and a gradual emergence of ever more complex things and organisms seems to support this interpretation. The process of unification of the elements should culminate at the moment of the strongest influence of Love with in the emergence of a huge, internally differentiated, complex, and thinking ‘superorganism’. This superorganism is then identical with the whole of the cosmos and all lower, simpler organisms which had emerged in the prior phases of the zoogony are contained in it.

Abstract: In Physics  I.8, Aristotle outlines and responds to an Eleatic argument against the reality of change. I defend a new reading according to which the argument assumes Predicational Monism, the claim that each being can possess only one property. In Phys. I.2, Aristotle responds to Predicational Monism, which he attributes to the Eleatics; I argue that he uses this response to distinguish coincidental from non-coincidental becoming, a distinction he employs in Phys  I.8 to resolve the argument against the reality of change. The Eleatics’ acceptance of Predicational Monism, I argue, explains why this distinction is unavailable to them.

Abstract: Of all the criticisms that Aristotle gives of his predecessors’ theories of soul in De anima I.3–5, none seems more unmotivated than the ones directed against the world soul of Plato’s Timaeus. Against the current scholarly consensus, I claim that the status of Aristotle’s criticisms is philosophical rather than eristical, and that they provide important philosophical reasons, independent of Phys. VIII.10 and Metaph. Λ.6, for believing that νοῦς is without spatial extension, and that its thinking is not a physical motion.

Abstract: In this paper, I examine the concept of sunesis (comprehension) in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In Section I, I clarify the differences between phronēsis and sunesis, focusing on the roles they play in bouleusis (deliberation). I argue that sunesis is not directly involved in practical deliberation in the canonical sense of the notion. In Section II, I suggest an interpretation of sunesis as ethical discernment. We employ sunesis in cases without any immediate objects of practical deliberation, such as when we criticize an action in the past or give advice to others. In this function, discernment has a crucial role in the ethical life of individuals embedded in a community.

Abstract: There are two main interpretations of how the Stoics understood impulsive impressions in adults: the “form” interpretation and the “no-form” interpretation. I assess these interpretations against the well-known passages in Stobaeus’ account of Stoic ethics that provide the primary evidence for how the Stoics understood impulsive impressions. It is in terms of these passages that Inwood and other historians argue for the form interpretation. I argue that these arguments for the form interpretation are not sound and that these passages in Stobaeus provide no reason to believe that the form interpretation is more plausible than the no-form interpretation.