I examine Aristotle’s reasons in DA I.3 for rejecting the claim that understanding (nous) is a magnitude (megethos), an idea Aristotle associates most explicitly with Plato, who describes nous as a self-moving circle in the Timaeus. Aristotle shows that his definition of soul, on which soul is not a magnitude or body of any kind, can explain perception, thought, and motion better than his predecessor’s materialist accounts. But unlike perception and motion, nous is not actualized through the body nor does (...) it have a bodily organ, which makes nous a very different kind of soul capacity. Earlier thinkers, including Plato, already maintain that nous does not have a bodily organ, but they cannot explain how nous could operate or be a mover without being some sort of body itself. Even in the Timaeus, nous is described as being a kind of magnitude. But if nous were a magnitude of any kind, Aristotle claims it would not be able to think or reason. There is something about being a magnitude qua magnitude that makes reason impossible. His critique of Plato in I.3 prepares the way for his account of nous in DA III.4. (shrink)

Abstract Aristotle's account of Phantasia in De Anima 3.3 is notoriously difficult to decipher. At one point he describes Phantasia as a capacity for producing images, but then later in the same chapter it is clear Phantasia is supposed to explain appearances, such as why the sun appears to be a foot wide. Many commentators argue that images cannot explain appearances, and so they claim that Aristotle is using Phantasia in two different ways. In this paper I argue that images (...) actually explain perceptual appearances for Aristotle, and so Phantasia always refers to images. I take a new approach to interpreting DA 3.3, reading it alongside Plato's Theaetetus and Sophist . In the Theaetetus , Socrates explains how memory gives rise to perceptual appearance. I claim that Aristotle adopts Socrates' account of perceptual appearance, but what Socrates calls memory, Aristotle calls Phantasia. (shrink)

Aristotle defines anger as a desire for revenge aroused by an intentional and undeserved slight. His remarks on revenge are scattered throughout his corpus causing many commentators to overlook or oversimplify his account of revenge. Stocker and Hegeman, for example, claim that for Aristotle the purpose of revenge is to make the offender suffer and take pleasure in his suffering. David Konstan claims that the purpose of revenge is to restore one’s sense of honour and social status. Both these claims (...) are correct, but the main purpose of revenge for Aristotle, I argue, is to restore justice and ensure that we are not mistreated by the offender in the future. I begin by showing that for Aristotle revenge entails three things. First, we desire to cause the offender pain; second, we want the offender to know that we are the cause of his pain; and third, we want him to know that we are causing him pain because he mistreated us. If the purpose of revenge was merely to take pleasure in the offender’s suffering, these last two criteria would be unnecessary. I further show that the desire for revenge is not a desire to destroy or ruin the offender. Killing another person or ruining their reputation would be an act of hatred, according to Aristotle, not revenge. This is an important point and one that many contemporary philosophers writing on revenge have failed to make. For Aristotle, revenge is analogous to punishment. We punish people for stealing so that they will refrain from stealing in the future. Similarly, we seek revenge because we believe the offender wronged us; we want to cause him pain so that he will not wrong us in the future. (shrink)

According to Aristotle there may be times when the virtuous person is justified in taking revenge. Many commentators claim that revenge, on Aristotle’s account, aims at restoring the honor and reputation of the avenger, but I will show that this cannot be why the virtuous person seeks revenge. I argue, instead, that the virtuous person seeks revenge when she is slighted in order to prove her worth. Aristotle claims that we slight those we think are neither good nor bad nor (...) capable of producing good or bad things. Although the virtuous person will ignore most slights, Aristotle thinks there may be times when even a virtuous person will have to take revenge in order to prove her worth, not because she is insecure or requires honors, but because she cannot function to the best of her abilities within her society if those she interacts with fail to recognize her worth. (shrink)

Given the current climate of political division and global conflict it is not surprising that there has been an increasing interest in how we ought to respond to perceived wrongdoing, both personal and political. In this volume, top scholars from around the world contribute all new original essays on the ethics of forgiveness, revenge, and punishment. -/- This book draws on both historical and contemporary debates in order to answer important questions about the nature of forgiveness, the power of apology, (...) the relationship between punishment and revenge, the path to reconciliation, the morality of blame, and the role of forgiveness in political conflict. -/- Chapter 16 is available open access . (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume were first presented at a workshop entitled Ethics of Forgiveness and Revenge, which was held May 22-23, 2014 at Union College in Schenectady, New York. The papers cover a range of topics, including the rightness and wrongness of vengeance and forgiveness, who has the standing to avenge or forgive, the relationship between retributive punishment and revenge, and the role apology plays in determining correct punishment. The papers in this volume are not only philosophically interesting, (...) but are also relevant to our everyday lives, since how we respond to moral wrongs is just as important as how we conduct the rest of our moral lives. (shrink)

The editors of the volume, Krisanna Scheiter and Paula Satne, introduce some of the central themes in the book and briefly summarise the content of the different chapters. The chapters examine the merits and pitfalls of common reactive attitudes to wrongdoing, such as anger, hatred, resentment, and forgiveness, taking into account both historical perspectives and contemporary debates. The introduction explains some of the philosophical debates about the nature and the desirability of anger, and the alleged distinction between revenge (...) and punishment (1.1). The introduction also surveys deep disagreements regarding the normativity of interpersonal forgiveness and indeed the very nature of forgiveness, blame, and resentment, which run through the different chapters of the book (1.2). The third section of the introduction (1.3) turns its attention to forgiveness, punishment, and reconciliation in the political sphere and the philosophical debates surrounding the nature and desirability of political forgiveness and its relation to the moral duty to remember after an atrocity, as well as the relationship between political reconciliation, apologies, and punishment. The volume offers cutting-edge scholarship on these issues and a new way to interpret and understand these concepts by important figures in the history of philosophy. The hope is that the different contributions in this volume will help the reader understand the philosophical issues that are at stake when we think about our responses to both interpersonal and political wrongdoing as well as the considerations that underpin conflicts and our attempts to resolve them. (shrink)

The goal of this study was to explore two accounts for why sketching during learning from text is helpful: sketching acts like other constructive strategies such as self-explanation because it helps learners to identify relevant information and generate inferences; or that in addition to these general effects, sketching has more specific benefits due to the pictorial representation that is constructed. Seventy-three seventh-graders were first taught how to either create sketches or self-explain while studying science texts. During a subsequent learning phase, (...) all students were asked to read an expository text about the greenhouse effect. Finally, they were asked to write down everything they remembered and then answer transfer questions. Strategy quality during learning was assessed as the number of key concepts that had either been sketched or mentioned in the self-explanations. The results showed that at an overall performance level there were only marginal group differences. However, a more in-depth analysis revealed that whereas no group differences emerged for students implementing either strategy poorly, the sketching group clearly outperformed the self-explanation group for students who applied the strategies with higher quality. Furthermore, higher sketching quality was strongly related to better learning outcomes. Thus, the study's results are more in line with the second account: Sketching can have a beneficial effect on learning above and beyond generating written explanations; at least, if well deployed. (shrink)

Being able to categorize objects as similar or different is an essential skill. An important aspect of learning to categorize is learning to attend to relevant features and ignore irrelevant features of the to-be-categorized objects. Feature variability across objects of different categories is informative, because it allows inferring the rules underlying category membership. In this study, participants learned to categorize fictitious creatures. We measured attention to the aliens during learning using eye-tracking and calculated the attentional focus as the ratio of (...) attention to relevant versus irrelevant features. As expected, participants’ categorization accuracy improved with practice; however, in contrast to our expectations, their attentional focus did not improve with practice. When computing the attentional focus, attention to the aliens’ eyes was disregarded, because while eyes attract a lot of attention, they did not vary across aliens. Yet, an explorative analysis of attention to eyes suggested that participants’ attentional focus did become somewhat more efficient in that over time they learned to ignore the eyes. Results are discussed in the context of the need for instructional methods to improve attentional focus in learning to categorize. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle's On the Soul: A Critical Guide ed. by Caleb M. CohoeAttila HangaiCaleb M. Cohoe, editor. Aristotle's On the Soul: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Hardback, $99.99.Guiding readers through Aristotle's science of the soul, this volume covers many major topics of De Anima (DA) and addresses specific questions, including perennial interpretive problems. The self-contained chapters approach the text either by illuminating its context or by (...) elucidating key psychological concepts. While some contributions refer to relevant [End Page 318] positions by Aristotle's predecessors or contemporary philosophers, connections drawn to other Aristotelian texts predominate. Throughout, the emphasis is on philosophical questions. The result is a first-rate philosophical guide through this densely written treatise, which allows experienced readers of DA to deepen their understanding of Aristotelian psychology. Since most chapters approach interpretive issues from new angles and presuppose familiarity with the existing scholarship, beginners may want to start elsewhere.In Reeve's reading (chapter 1), Aristotle pursues dialectic in DA to define the soul as the first principle for the science of life. He construes dialectic as "going through puzzles and solving them by appeal to endoxa" (21), and equates it with induction from perceptual experience to knowledge of principles and causes. Contesting this view, Carter (chapter 2) argues that the physicist's method is not dialectical because the predecessors' views, conflicting as they are, do not constitute endoxa. Through close readings of DA II.2–5, he shows that Aristotle investigates earlier theories to assess how well they explain the main functions of the soul. One pertinent theory takes the soul to be attunement (harmonia). Shields (chapter 4) elucidates Aristotle's case for hylomorphism as an advance over the harmonia theory. Although harmonia (as the proper arrangement of parts) implies normativity, it falls short of rendering the soul as a final cause with its own good, so it cannot explain the unity of the body. Frey's chapter 5 on the soul's unity deals with this latter function. The problem of unity stems from the fact that each level in the hierarchy of souls—nutritive, perceptual, rational—can be defined independently, yet a posterior soul presupposes the existence of all prior ones. The key Frey uses to understand unity is potential presence. Just as a triangle is present potentially in a quadrangle—for division of the latter yields triangles—so too is the nutritive soul present potentially in the perceptual soul, although not due to a separating act. This, however, has counterintuitive implications: animal nutrition would be the function of a perceptual soul; furthermore, the nutritive soul of the embryo (in Frey's biological example) would first be present potentially (as undeveloped) and, once actualized (when developed), would revert to potentiality (at the development of the perceptual soul). Frey's other proposal is more promising. It turns on the notion of natural continuity: having an internal cause for a characteristic change with a unitary goal. Thus, the soul's unity for Frey (despite his reservations) seems to boil down to teleology: the soul sets a goal achieved through the manifestation of species-specific life functions. Invoking the biology of animal reproduction, Gelber (chapter 6) complements the teleological unity regarding the nutritive soul-part with the unity constituted by the continuity of the processes of nutrition, growth, and reproduction, namely, unity by material and efficient causes.Among the three contributions on reason (nous), Scheiter (chapter 3), examining its separability, breaks with the traditional interpretation and takes Aristotle to show (in DA III.4 and I.3) that reason is independent not only of bodily organs but of any magnitude (megethos). This envisages DA III.4–8 as an investigation into how reason functions as a different kind of capacity. It turns out, according to Kelsey's insightful chapter 11, that reason's actuality—insight (noēsis)—is the same as its intelligible object (noēton), and so intelligibility depends on separation from matter by the actuality of reason, making all and only the immaterial things intelligible and intelligent. Cohoe (chapter 12) draws the conclusion: human reason for Aristotle—being the defining part of the human soul, most... (shrink)

Gottlob Frege ist der Begründer der modernen Logik und Sprachanalyse, seine Schriften gelten "wegen ihrer vorbildlichen Klarheit und ihres Scharfsinns [als] eine außerordentlich anregende Lektüre" (Kutschera) und seine philosophische Bedeutung wird in der "Vorbildlichkeit seiner Argumentationsweise" (Patzig) gesehen. In seinem berühmten Aufsatz "Der Gedanke" kritisiert Frege im dritten Absatz die Korrespondenztheorie der Wahrheit und kommt dabei zu dem Ergebnis, dass nicht nur der "Versuch, die Wahrheit als eine Übereinstimmung zu erklären", scheitere, sondern auch "jeder andere Versuch, das Wahrsein zu definieren." (...) Angesichts der oben zitierten Wertschätzung ist es überraschend, in den heute vorherrschenden Interpretationen zu lesen, alle Argumente, die Frege in diesem Zusammenhang formuliere, seien ungültig - und zwar, wie sich für den Leser der Interpretationen herausstellt, aufgrund von Anfänger-Fehlern. In diesem Buch wird dagegen Freges gesamte Argumentation als in sich konsistent und gültig verteidigt. Das Buch wendet sich nicht nur an Frege-Spezialisten, sondern stellt zugleich eine exemplarische Einführung in die systematische Interpretation philosophischer Texte dar. (shrink)