Download or read book Ammonius On Aristotle On Interpretation 9 with Boethius On Aristotle On Interpretation 9 written by David L. Blank and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about determinisism. It contains the two most important commentaries on the determinists' sea battle argument, and on other deterministic arguments besides. It includes the earliest full exposition of the Reaper argument for determinism, and a discussion of whether there can be changeless knowledge of the passage of time. It also contains the two fullest expositions of the idea that it is not truth, but only definite truth, that would imply determinism. Ammonius and Boethius both wrote commentaries on Aristotle's On Interpretation and on its ninth chapter, where Aristotle discusses the sea battle. Their comments are crucial, for Ammonius' commentary influenced the Islamic the Islamic Middle Ages, while that of Boethius was of equal importance to medieval Latin-speaking philosophers. It was once argued that Boethius was influenced by Ammonius, but these translations are published together in this volume to enable the reader to see clearly that this was not the case. Ammonius draws on the fourth- and fifth-century Neoplatonists lamblichus, Syrianus, and Proclus. He arranges his argument around three major deterministic arguments and is our main source for one of them, the Reaper argument, which has hitherto received insufficient attention. Boethius, on the other hand, draws on controversies from 300 years earlier between Stoics and Aristotelians as recorded by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Porphyry. This volume is essential reading for all those with an interest in the history of determinism. Ammonius' commentary on the first eight chapters of Aristotle's On Interpretation has appeared in a previously published volume in this series, translated by David Blank.
Download or read book Boethius On Aristotle On Interpretation 1 3 written by Boethius, and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boethius (c.480-c.525) wrote his highly influential second commentary on Aristotle's On Interpretation in Latin, but using the style of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle. It was part of his project to bring knowledge of Plato and Aristotle to the Latin-speaking world of his fellow Christians. The project was cruelly interrupted by his execution at the age of about 45, leaving the Latin world under-informed about Greek Philosophy for 700 years. Boethius reveals to us how On Interpretation was understood not only by himself, but also by some of the best Greek interpreters, especially Alexander and Porphyry. Alexander had insisted that its subject was composite thoughts, not composite sentences nor composite things - it is thoughts that are primarily true or false. Although Aristotle's first six chapters define name, verb, sentence, statement, affirmation and negation, Porphyry had claimed that Aristotelians believe in three types of name and verb, written, spoken and mental, in other words a language of the mind. Boethius discusses individuality and ascribes to Aristotle a view that each individual is distinguished by having a composite quality that is not merely unshared, but unshareable. Boethius also discusses why we can still say that the dead Homer is a poet, despite having forbidden us to say that the dead Socrates is either sick or well. But Boethius' most famous contribution is his interpretation of Aristotle's discussion of the threat of that tomorrow's events, for example a sea battle, will have been irrevocable 10,000 years ago, if it was true 10,000 years ago that there would be a sea battle on that day. In Boethius' later Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison awaiting execution, he offered a seminal conception of eternity to solve the related problem of future events being irrevocable because of God's foreknowledge of them. Boethius' influential commentary was part of his ideal of bringing Plato and Aristotle to the Latin-speaking world. Throughout the Latin Middle Ages, it remained the standard introduction to On Interpretation. This volume contains the first English translation of Boethius' commentary, as well as a detailed introduction, notes and bibliography.
Download or read book Substance and Essence in Aristotle written by Charlotte Witt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Substance and Essence in Aristotle is a close study of Aristotle's most profound—and perplexing—treatise: Books VII-IX of the Metaphysics. These central books, which focus on the nature of substance, have gained a deserved reputation for their difficulty, inconclusiveness, and internal inconsistency. Despite these problems, Witt extracts from Aristotle's text a coherent and provocative view about sensible substance by focusing on Aristotle's account of form or essence. After exploring the context in which Aristotle's discussion of sensible substance takes place, Witt turns to his analysis of essence. Arguing against the received interpretation, according to which essences are classificatory, Witt maintains that a substance's essence is what causes it to exist. In addition, Substance and Essence in Aristotle challenges the orthodox view that Aristotelian essences are species-essences, defending instead the controversial position that they are individual essences. Finally, Witt compares Aristotelian essentialism to contemporary essentialist theories, focusing in particular on Kripke's work. She concludes that fundamental differences between Aristotelian and contemporary essentialist theories highlight important features of Aristotle's theory and the philosophical problems and milieu that engendered it.
Download or read book Aristotle s De Interpretatione written by C. W. A. Whitaker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle's treatise De Interpretatione is one of his central works; it continues to be the focus of much attention and debate. C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system,basing this view upon a detailed chapter-by-chapter analysis.By treating the work systematically, rather than concentrating on certain selected passages, Whitaker is able to show that, contrary to traditional opinion, it forms an organized and coherent whole. He argues that the De Interpretatione is intended to provide the underpinning for dialectic, thesystem of argument by question and answer set out in Aristotle's Topics; and he rejects the traditional view that the De Interpretatione concerns the assertion and is oriented towards the formal logic of the Prior Analytics. In doing so, he sheds valuable new light on some of Aristotle's mostfamous texts.
Download or read book Boethius On Aristotle on Interpretation 4 6 written by Boethius, and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boethius (c. 480-c. 525) was a Christian philosopher and author of many translations and works of philosophy, most famously the Consolations of Philosophy which were probably written when he was under house arrest, having been accused of treason by King Theoderic the Great. He was subsequently executed. On Interpretation is the second part of the Organon, as Aristotle's collected works on logic are known; it deals comprehensively and systematically with the relationship between logic and language. In his first six chapters, Aristotle defines name, verb, sentence, statement, affirmation and negation. Boethius preserves lost interpretations by two of the greatest earlier interpreters, Alexander and Porphyry, and the defence of the work's authenticity against criticism. He records the idea of Porphyry that Aristotelians believe in three types of name and verb, written, spoken and mental, in other words a language of the mind. Boethius' commentary formed part of his project to bring knowledge of Plato and Aristotle to the Latin-speaking world. It had great influence, remaining the standard introduction to On Interpretation throughout the Latin Middle Ages.
Download or read book Aristotelian Interpretations written by Fran O'Rourke and published by Irish Academic Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle’s phrase ‘Every realm of nature is marvellous’ serves as an underlying and unifying motif for this volume of original essays. Aristotelian Interpretations considers themes of perennial interest, offering new avenues of interpretation, illustrating how Aristotle’s thought may be creatively applied to a variety of timeless and contemporary questions. Apart from the final chapter – a comprehensive survey of the extensive and penetrating influence of Aristotle on James Joyce – they are concerned with central topics in metaphysics, aesthetics, political anthropology, ethics, and theory of knowledge. The volume presents an integral survey of Aristotle’s philosophy emphasizing that, far from being just a figure of historical interest, his vision is still alive and relevant. While many of Aristotle’s empirical suppositions are archaic, his deeper intuitions have ageless validity. His philosophy is marked by a robust common sense, an optimistic trust in nature, confidence in the human mind’s capacity to discover truth and value, and an abiding sense of all-embracing beauty. The author’s introduction describes early personal experiences that inspired his affection for a distinctively Aristotelian approach to the world.
Download or read book Ammonius On Aristotle On Interpretation 1 8 written by David L. Blank and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle's On Interpretation, the centrepiece of his logic, examines the relationship between conflicting pairs of statements. The first eight chapters, analysed in this volume, explain what statements are, starting from their basic components - the words - and working up to the character of opposed affirmations and negations. Ammonius, who in his capacity as Professor at Alexandria from around AD 470 taught almost all the great sixth-century commentators, left just this one commentary in his own name, although his lectures on other works of Aristotle have been written up by his pupils, who included Philoponus and Asclepius. His ideas on Aristotle's On Interpretation were derived from his own teacher, Proclus, and partly from the great lost commentary of Porphyry. The two most important extant commentaries on On Interpretation, of which this is one (the other being by Boethius) both draw on Porphyry's work, which can be to some extent reconstructed for them
Download or read book Form Without Matter written by Mark Eli Kalderon and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Eli Kalderon presents an original study in the philosophy of perception written in the medium of historiography. He considers the phenomenology and metaphysics of sensory presentation through the examination of an ancient aporia. Specifically, he argues that a puzzle about perception at a distance is behind Empedocles' theory of vision. Empedocles conceives of perception as a mode of material assimilation, but this raises a puzzle about color vision, since color vision seems to present colors that inhere in distant objects. But if the colors inhere in distant objects how can they be taken in by the organ of sight and so be palpable to sense? Aristotle purports to resolve this puzzle in his definition of perception as the assimilation of sensible form without the matter of the perceived particular. Aristotle explicitly criticizes Empedocles, though he is keen to retain the idea that perception is a mode of assimilation, if not a material mode. Aristotle's notorious definition has long puzzled commentators. Kalderon shows how, read in light of Empedoclean puzzlement about the sensory presentation of remote objects, Aristotle's definition of perception can be better understood. Moreover, when so read, the resulting conception of perception is both attractive and defensible.
Download or read book Aristotle s Theory of Language and Meaning written by Deborah K. W. Modrak and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about Aristotle's philosophy of language, interpreted in a framework that provides a comprehensive interpretation of Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology and science. The aims of the book are to explicate the description of meaning contained in De Interpretatione and to show the relevance of that theory of meaning to much of the rest of Arisotle's philosophy. In the process Deborah Modrak reveals how that theory of meaning has been much maligned.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Boethius written by John Marenbon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boethius (c.480–c.525/6), though a Christian, worked in the tradition of the Neoplatonic schools, with their strong interest in Aristotelian logic and Platonic metaphysics. He is best known for his Consolation of Philosophy, which he wrote in prison awaiting execution. His works also include a long series of logical translations, commentaries and monographs and some short but densely-argued theological treatises, all of which were enormously influential on medieval thought. But Boethius was more than a writer who passed on important ancient ideas to the Middle Ages. The essays here by leading specialists, which cover all the main aspects of his writing and its influence, show that he was a distinctive thinker, whose arguments repay careful analysis and who used his literary talents in conjunction with his philosophical abilities to present a complex view of the world.
Download or read book Ways of Being written by Charlotte Witt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charlotte Witt continues her highly regarded exploration of Aristotle's metaphysics in a book devoted to the ontological distinction between potentiality and actuality. She focuses on Metaphysics book ix, which provides the most sustained discussion of this distinction. Witt rejects the conventional reading of this key text—that Aristotle differentiated between the two concepts solely to further the investigation of substance. Instead, in an original interpretation of his work, she argues that his development of the distinction between "being x potentially" and "being x actually" allowed Aristotle to develop an intrinsically hierarchical and normative vision of reality.For Witt, Aristotle's views about being shed light on his puzzling use of gender language in his descriptions of reality. This language has become an important issue for feminist scholars who have noted that in Aristotle's metaphysics of substance form is sometimes associated with the male, and matter with the female. Witt's interpretation that Aristotelian reality is intrinsically hierarchical and normative, but not intrinsically gendered, offers a new, important understanding of a controversial aspect of Aristotle's metaphysics.
Download or read book The Aristotelian Tradition written by Borje Byden and published by Papers in Mediaeval Studies. This book was released on 2017-01-20 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The twelve chapters of this volume all began their existence as contributions to workshops held between 2009 and 2011 by a Danish-Swedish research network called The Aristotelian Tradition: The reception of Aristotle's works on logic and metaphysics in the Middle Ages, headquartered in Gothenburg and funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Most of them were written by members of the network, some by invited speakers. While the volume amply illustrates the set of scholarly approaches characteristic of the "Copenhagen School of Medieval Philosophy" (notably a strong philological foundation and an interest in ancient as well as medieval and Greek as well as Latin texts), its thematic diversity reflects the network's breadth of interests. What unites the chapters in this respect is simply a concern with different historical manifestations of Aristotelian thought on logical and metaphysical matters. The volume includes studies of texts by, among others, Apuleius, Boethius, Anonymus Aurelianensis III, Michael of Ephesus, Averroes, Anonymus Cantabrigiensis, Nicholas of Paris, Robert Kilwardby, Anonymus O, Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, and Francisco Suárez, relating to themes and passages in Aristotle's Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics 1, Posterior Analytics 1, Sophistical Refutations and Metaphysics A and Z. The last two chapters consist of a new edition, with English translation and commentary, of the first part of a fiercely anti-Aristotelian work, which has been described as the starting-point for Renaissance Platonism and Aristotelianism alike: George Gemistos Plethon's On Aristotle's Departures from Plato."--
Download or read book Plato The Statesman written by Plato and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-03-23 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Statesman is Plato's neglected political work, but it is crucial for an understanding of the development of his political thinking. In its presentation of the statesman's expertise, The Statesman modifies, as well as defending in original ways, this central theme of the Republic. This new translation makes the dialogue accessible to students of political thought and the introduction outlines the philosophical and historical background necessary for a political theory readership.
Download or read book Aristotle s Metaphysics Lambda written by Michael Frede and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A distinguished group of scholars of ancient philosophy here presents a systematic study of the twelfth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Lambda, which can be regarded as a self-standing treatise on substance, has been attracting particular attention in recent years, and was chosen as the focusof the fourteenth Symposium Aristotelicum, from which this volume derives. At the Symposium, each of Lambda's ten chapters was taken in turn as the subject of a session at which a specially written paper was read to and discussed by the assembled symposiasts. (The ninth chapter commanded twosessions by dint of its particular difficulty.) The papers have been revised in the light of discussion, and are now offered to a wider audience as a discursive commentary on points of particular philosophical interest covering all of Lambda. Michael Frede's extensive Introduction aims to give abroader view of Lambda as a whole and the problems it raises, and thus to provide the context for the discussion of each of the chapters. This volume will be a resource of great value and interest for anyone working on ancient metaphysics and theology.
Download or read book Simplicius On Aristotle On the Heavens 1 5 9 written by Simplicius, and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle argues in On the Heavens 1.5-7 that there can be no infinitely large body, and in 1.8-9 that there cannot be more than one physical world. As a corollary in 1.9, he infers that there is no place, vacuum or time beyond the outermost stars. As one argument in favour of a single world, he argues that his four elements: earth, air, fire and water, have only one natural destination apiece. Moreover they accelerate as they approach it and acceleration cannot be unlimited. However, the Neoplatonist Simplicius, who wrote the commentary in the sixth century AD (here translated into English), tells us that this whole world view was to be rejected by Strato, the third head of Aristotle's school. At the same time, he tells us the different theories of acceleration in Greek philosophy.
Download or read book Boethius on Mind Grammar and Logic written by Taki Suto and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-11-11 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boethius, the Roman philosopher, was executed for treason and pilloried by modern scholars for misinterpreting Aristotle to the West. This book examines his semantics and logic, attempting to clear his name and lend him new credence.
Download or read book Simplicius On Aristotle Physics 8 6 10 written by Richard D. McKirahan and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle's Physics is about the causes of motion and culminates in a proof that God is needed as the ultimate cause of motion. Aristotle argues that things in motion need to be moved by something other than themselves - he rejects Plato's self-movers. On pain of regress, there must be an unmoved mover. If this unmoved mover is to cause motion eternally, it needs infinite power. It cannot, then, be a body, since bodies, being of finite size, cannot house infinite power. The unmoved mover is therefore an incorporeal God. Simplicius reveals that his teacher, Ammonius, harmonised Aristotle with Plato to counter Christian charges of pagan disagreement, by making Aristotle's God a cause of beginningless movement, but of beginningless existence of the universe. Eternal existence, not less than eternal motion, calls for an infinite, and hence incorporeal, force. By an irony, this anti-Christian interpretation turned Aristotle's God from a thinker into a certain kind of Creator, and so helped to make Aristotle's God acceptable to St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This text provides a translation of Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's work.
