Aristotle's Works, Misc

The paper starts with reflections on Plato’s critique of the poets and the preference many express for Aristotle’s view of poetry. The second part of the paper takes a case study of analytic treatments of ancient philosophy, including the ancient philosopher poets, to examine the poetics of analytic philosophy, diagnosing a preference in Analytic philosophy for a clean non-poetic style of presentation, and then develops this in considering how well historians of philosophy in the Analytic tradition can accommodate the contributions (...) of philosophers who wrote in verse. The final part of the paper reviews the current enthusiasm for decoding Empedocles’ vague and poetic descriptions of the cosmic cycle into a precise scientific periodicity on the basis of the recently discovered Byzantine scholia on Aristotle. I argue that this enthusiasm speaks to a desire for definite and clear numerical values in place of poetic motifs of give and take, and that this mathematical and scientific poetic is comparable to the preferred poetic of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The only extant fragment of Aristotle’s lost treatise On Prayer [Περὶ εὐχῆς] is an excerpt from Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s On Heavens [De caelo] (ad II.12, 292b10; ed. CAG VII; p. 485.19-22 Heiberg). Simplicius’ text, however, has been poorly edited for a long time, with several textual problems being spread unconsciously by the majority of the editors of the Aristotelian fragments, and only recently the text began to be properly clarified. The fragment 49 Rose3 was repeatedly exploited to sustain and (...) to endow with antiquity and authority theological readings with Neoplatonist features, and there is a place where the establishment of the critical text is of the utmost importance for a research in quest for the possibility of understanding God and its intelligibility. This paper discusses the context of Simplicius’ testimony, the idiosyncrasies of the textual problems, the structure of the fragment, its lexicon (e.g. ὑπέρ and ἐπέκεινα), and the hermeneutical challenges it poses regarding its authenticity and interpretation within the Aristotelian corpus. (shrink)

In the 6th century, Paul the Persian used his own pen to write a summary of Aristotle's Peri Hermeneias in the Persian language. Severus Sebokht translated it into Syriac. This book is a transcription and translation of the Syriac manuscript of Paul the Persian's Peri Hermeneias and a comparison of it with Aristotle's original Greek text.

Boethius fasst im 6. Jahrhundert den Plan, samtliche Werke Aristoteles' und Platons ins Lateinische zu ubersetzen und mit Kommentaren zu versehen. Die Motivation fur dieses Projekt liegt in seiner Einsicht in die bildungstheoretischen Grundlagen des Platonismus und des Aristotelismus begrundet, die ihm auch als Massstab fur seine ethischen Erkenntnisse und sein padagogisch orientiertes Schaffen dienen. Daruber hinaus liefert seine Sorge um die Anschlussfahigkeit dieser Bildungstradition an die gesellschaftlichen Bedingungen im lateinischsprachigen Raum seiner Zeit den entscheidenden Impuls. Ziel dieses Buches ist (...) es, Boethius' Ubersetzungsprojekt in die verschiedenen Ebenen der mit diesem Projekt verbundenen Wissenstransfers aufzuschlusseln und sowohl die Inhalte als auch die Bedingungen dieser Transfers aufzuzeigen. Die Ubersetzungen im engeren Sinne sind hierbei nur ein Teil des Wissenstransfers. Denn mit Blick auf die Sorge um eine gelingende Vermittlung der Inhalte fur die verschiedenen Niveaustufen seines Zielpublikums stellen die Kommentierungen und die Massnahmen der didaktischen Vermittlung einen integralen Bestandteil seines Ubersetzungsprojekts und damit weitere Wissenstransferebenen dar. Die Vorgehensweisen bei diesen verschiedenen Aspekten der Ubersetzung wiederum finden ihre Grundlage in den sprachphilosophischen und seelentheoretischen Einsichten, die fur Boethius' Konzeption einer gelingenden Vermittlung verantwortlich sind. Die Theorie der Sprache, die Boethius in seiner Bearbeitung der aristotelischen Schrift Peri hermeneias (bzw. De interpretatione) ins Lateinische ubertragt, bildet damit zugleich die Grundlage fur die Praxis seiner Ubertragung. (shrink)

My aim is to figure out whether Aristotle’s response to the argument for fatalism in De Interpretatione 9 is successful. By “response” here I mean not simply the reasons he offers to highlight why fatalism does not accord with how we conduct our lives, but also the solution he devises to block the argument he provides for it. Achieving my aim hence demands that I figure out what exactly is the argument for fatalism he voices, what exactly is his solution, (...) whether his solution is coherent, and whether it does indeed succeed. I find that the argument is essentially bivalence plus that the truth of a proposition stating that an event will happen in the future entails that this event will necessarily happen, that Aristotle’s solution is to restrict bivalence when it comes to propositions about contingent future events, that this solution is coherent, and that while it does not rule out the possibility of fatalism, it does succeed in blocking the argument for fatalism offered within chapter 9. (shrink)

We hope to show that the overall protreptic plan of Aristotle's ethical writings is based on the plan he used in his published work Protrepticus (Exhortation to Philosophy), by highlighting those passages that primarily offer hortatory or protreptic motivation rather than dialectical argumentation and analysis, and by illustrating several ways that Aristotle adapts certain arguments and examples from his Protrepticus. In this essay we confine our attention to the books definitely attributable to the Nicomachean Ethics (thus excluding the common books).

n his Problemata, Aristotle provided medieval thinkers with the occasion to inquire into the natural causes of the sexual desires of men to act upon or be acted upon by other men, thus bringing human sexuality into the purview of natural philosophers, whose aim it was to explain the causes of objects and events in nature. With this philosophical justification, some late medieval intellectuals asked whether such dispositions might arise from anatomy or from the psychological processes of habit formation. As (...) the fourteenth-century philosopher Walter Burley observed, "Nothing natural is shameful." The authors, scribes, and readers willing to "contemplate base things" never argued that they were not vile, but most did share the conviction that they could be explained. From the evidence that has survived in manuscripts of and related to the Problemata, two narratives emerge: a chronicle of the earnest attempts of medieval medical theorists and natural philosophers to understand the cause of homosexual desires and pleasures in terms of natural processes, and an ongoing debate as to whether the sciences were equipped or permitted to deal with such subjects at all. Mining hundreds of texts and deciphering commentaries, indices, abbreviations, and marginalia, Joan Cadden shows how European scholars deployed a standard set of philosophical tools and a variety of rhetorical strategies to produce scientific approaches to sodomy. (shrink)

A selection of Aristotle's most important philosophical works in English translation with an introduction and comments by Renford Bambrough with emphasis on metaphysical questions and a new afterword by Susanne Bobzien that focuses on how to study Aristotle and on Aristotle on determinism and freedom.

The work which the Loeb Classical Library classifies as book 3 of the Oikonomika attributed to Aristotle is a curious piece. It has come down to us only via medieval translations into Latin. (I will be quoting the Loeb text and translation except where noted.) It is not certain that it is by Aristotle: and it is not certain whether it is even a part of the work attributed to Aristotle in ancient times. For want of a better name, let (...) me refer to its author, whoever that was, as “Aristotle”, and let me refer to this piece as book three of Ta Oikonomika – but with the caveats that it may not have been by the Stagirite, and its ancient source may not have even been one typically attributed to Aristole, although it was so attributed at some stage. (shrink)

Metaphysics -- Parts of animals -- Ethics -- Politics -- Poetics.

This page is a dedication to Aristotle on his 2400th Birth Anniversary by Centre for Positive Philosophy and Interdiscipliary Studies (CPPIS) Pehowa (Kurukshetra) .