This essay situates Gregory’s treatment of the soul—especially, but not exclusively, in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection—within the philosophical tradition of treatises On the Soul (περὶ ψυχῆς, to which he significantly added the Christian component περὶ ἀναστάσεως) and in conversation with Origen’s complex psychology. While Origen never wrote a work On the Soul, for precise reasons, he did write one On the Resurrection. His older contemporary Tertullian composed both a work On the Soul and one On the (...) Resurrection. Gregory opted for a synthesis—not in two separate treatises, but in the same dialogue—of the philosophical genre On the Soul with the Christian (for him Origenian) genre On the Resurrection (which in his view, as in Origen’s, coincided with restoration-apokatastasis) within the framework of a remake of a Platonic dialogue—namely, the Platonic dialogue on the immortality of the soul par excellence, the Phaedo. An investigation into the meaning of restoration with respect to the soul will be conducted in the light of Gregory’s philosophical definition of the soul and of the Platonic ideal of harmony and unity that are paramount in Gregory’s doctrine of the soul and nous. I shall finally tease out the role of the soul in what I call Gregory’s ‘theology of freedom’, deeply rooted in Plato’s philosophy, and the influence that he seems to have exerted on Evagrius’s theories of the threefold resurrection (of body, soul, and nous) and of the subsumption of body into soul and soul into nous (the so-called ‘unified nous’): it will be argued that the Christian Neoplatonist Eriugena was right to trace the latter doctrine back to Gregory of Nyssa. -/- . (shrink)

This volume is a collection of papers that advance our understanding of the metaphysics of powers — properties such as fragility and electric charge. The metaphysics of powers is a fast developing research field with fundamental questions at the forefront of current research, such as Can there be a world of only powers? What is the manifestation of a power? Are powers and their manifestations related by necessity? What are the prospects for dispositional accounts of causation? The papers focus on (...) questions concerning the metaphysics of powers that cut across any particular subject-specific ontological domain -- whether philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, epistemology – investigating the metaphysical structure of powers, the nature of the manifestation of powers, the necessity or contingency of a power’s relation to its manifestations, and powers and causation. A number of authors also engage in discussion with Humean and neo-Humean treatments of causation, thereby making contributions to a larger metaphysical debate beyond powers. Additionally, the authors engage critically with the latest contributions to the debate on powers in the literature, thereby bringing together in a wholesome and analytical way the most recent and noteworthy theoretical developments in this research field. (shrink)

How can we explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? This book investigates Aristotle's views on these and related questions.

Fifteen philosophers offer new essays exploring the metaphysics of relations from antiquity to the present day. They address topics as diverse as ancient and medieval reasons for scepticism about polyadic properties; recent attempts to reduce causal and spatiotemporal relations; recent work on the directionality of relational properties; powers ontologies and their associated problems; whether the most promising interpretations of quantum mechanics posit a fundamentally relational world; and whether the very idea of such a world is coherent. From those who question (...) whether there are relational properties at all, to those who hold they are a fundamental part of reality, The Metaphysics of Relations covers a broad spectrum of positions on the nature and ontological status of relations, from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis introduction presents a brief overview of the concept of ‘mental power’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and focuses on the issue of how a sample of influential thinkers of that period conceptualized the human agent’s mental abilities and skills as governing perception, action and moral behaviour. This leads to innovative accounts which partially ground, in a broad sense, modern psychology. The representative thinkers included in this special issue are: Descartes, Cudworth, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume and Kant.

This volume introduces readers to a selected number of core issues in metaphysics that have been central in the history of philosophy and remain foundational to contemporary debates, that is: substances; properties; modality and essence; causality; determinism and free will. Anna Marmodoro and Erasmus Mayr take a neo-Aristotelian approach both in the selection and presentation of the topics. But Marmodoro and Mayr's discussion is not narrowly partisan-it consistently presents opposing sides of the debate and addresses issues from (...) different philosophical traditions, and encourages readers to draw their own conclusions about them. (shrink)

Do powers have powers? More urgently, do powers need further powers to do what powers do? Stathis Psillos says they do. He finds this a fatal flaw in the nature of pure powers: pure powers have a regressive nature. Their nature is incoherent to us, and they should not be admitted into the ontology. I argue that pure powers do not need further powers; rather, they do what they do because they are powers. I show that at the heart of (...) Psillos’ regress is a metaphysical division he assumes between a pure power to φ and its directedness towards the manifestation of φ-ing, i.e. between a pure power and its essence. But such an ontological division between an entity and its essence has already been shown by Aristotle to be detrimental, condemning the entity to a regressive nature. I show that Psillos’ regress is but an instance of Aristotle’s regress argument on the relation between an entity and its essence. I compare Aristotle’s, Bradley’s, and Psillos’ regresses, showing that Bradley’s and Psillos’ (different) conclusions from the regress arguments lead to impasses. I then build on Aristotle’s directive against regressive natures, arguing with him that an entity is not other than its nature (being divided from its nature by a relation between them). Rather, an entity is an instantiated nature itself. The Aristotelian position I put forward explains how the oneness of the entity is achieved by its being an instance of a type. Thus, the regress is blocked, and the nature of pure powers is shown to pose no threats of an ontological or epistemological kind, if physics gave us reasons to posit pure powers. (shrink)

We summarize in this introduction the contents of all the contributions included in Synthese special issue on form, structure and hylomorphism. Moreover, we provide an exhaustive bibliography of recent research on these topics.

The Stoics’ guiding principle in ontology is the Eleatic principle. Their existents are bodies that have the power to act and be acted upon. They account both for the constitution of material objects and the causal interactions among them in terms of such dynamic bodies. Blending is the physical mechanism that explains both constitution and causation; and is facilitated by the fact that for the Stoics all bodies exist as unlimited divided. In this paper I offer a novel analysis of (...) this Stoic stance, and of the role it plays in their metaphysics. I argue that when blended, the substances involved become sharing subjects of qualities and structural features. (shrink)

Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium, opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to align with their philosophical and religious outlook in each period. Topics examined (...) range from ethics and politics in Neoplatonism and ethos in the context of rhetorical theory and performance to textual exegesis on Aristotelian ethics. The volume will appeal to scholars and students in philosophy, classics, patristic theology, and those working on the history of education and the development of Greek ethics. (shrink)

‘The Union of Cause and Effect in Aristotle : Physics III 3’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 32, pp. 205-232, May 2007.: I argue that Aristotle introduced a unique realist account of causation, which has not hitherto been appreciated in the history of philosophy: causal realism without a causal relation. In his account, cause and effect are unified by the ectopic actualization of the agent’s potentiality in the patient. His solution consists in the introduction of a property that belongs to (...) one subject but is realized in another subject on whose state this realization depends. I identify and analyze the multiple ontological dependencies between the causal state of the agent and that of the patient during their causal activity. (shrink)

The metaphysics of powers (Shoemaker, 1980; Mumford, 2004; Marmodoro, 2009; Heil, 2012 among many others) is a promising conceptual framework that has been successfully put to use in many philosophical and scientific domains, but surprisingly its potential applications in the contemporary philosophy of mind are still under-investigated. This thematic issue aims to show that power ontology has implications concerning major questions in the contemporary philosophy of mind, such as: what is the metaphysical relationship between consciousness and the physical? Are (...) phenomenal properties reducible to physical properties, fundamental, or emergent? How are we to explain notions such as belief, agency, and free will? (shrink)

The book argues that Anaxagoras's theory of extreme mixture, with a share of everything in everything, is underpinned by an ontology of physical causal powers, which exist as endlessly partitioned. Anaxagoras is thus the first ante litteram 'gunk lover' in the history of metaphysics; his reality is atomless.

This book brings together twelve original contributions by leading scholars on the much-debated issues of what is free will and how can we exercise it in a world governed by laws of nature. Which conception of laws of nature best fits with how we conceive of free will? And which constraints does our conception of the laws of nature place on how we think of free will? The metaphysics of causation and the metaphysics of dispositions are also explored in this (...) edited volume, in relation to whether they may or may not be game-changers in how we think about both free will and the laws of nature. The volume presents the views of a range of international experts on these issues, and aims at providing the reader with novel approaches to a core problem in philosophy. The target audience is composed by academics and scholars who are interested in an original and contemporary approach to these long-debated issues. Chapters [2] and [4] are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

This book offers original essays by leading philosophers of religion representing these new approaches to theological problems such as incarnation.

An introduction to our edited volume, The Metaphysics of Relations, covering a range of issues including the problem of order, the ontological status of relations, reasons for ancient scepticism about relational properties, and two ways of drawing the distinction between internal and external relations.

The debate over whether and how philosophers of today may usefully engage with philosophers of the past is nearly as old as the history of philosophy itself. Does the study of the history of philosophy train or corrupt the budding philosopher's mind? Why study the history of philosophy? And, how to study the history of philosophy? I discuss some mainstream approaches to the study of the history of philosophy, before explicating the one I adopt and commend.

Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time – but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms‟ capacity for the “stability of form” – homeostasis - is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue that this capacity is derived from, and grounded (...) in a more primitive one – namely, the homeodynamic capacity for the “specified variation of form”. In introducing a novel type of causal power – a „structural power‟ – we claim that it is the persistence of their dynamic potential to produce a specified series of structurally adaptive morphologies which grounds organisms‟ privileged status as metaphysically “one over many” over time. (shrink)

Are colors features of objects “out there in the world” or are they features of our inner experience and only “in our head?” Color perception has been the focus of extensive philosophical and scientific debate. In this paper we discuss the limitations of the view that Chalmers’ (2006) has characterized as Primitivism, and we develop Marmodoro’s (2006) Constitutionalism further, to provide a metaphysical account of color perception in terms of causal powers. The result is Power-based Constitutionalism, the view that (...) colors are (multi-track and multi-stage) powers of objects, whose (full) manifestations depend on the mutual manifestation of relevant powers of perceivers and the perceived objects being co-realized in mutual interaction. After a presentation of the tenets of Power-based Constitutionalism, we evaluate its strengths in contrast to two other recent power-based accounts: John Heil’s (2003, 2012) powerful qualities view and Max Kistler’s (2017) multi-track view. (shrink)

I am interested in examining the reasoning of Plato’s extremely condensed argument in Republic X for the uniqueness of Forms. I will explore the metaphysical principles and assumptions that are supplied in the text, or need to be presupposed in order to understand the reasoning in the argument. Further, I will reflect on the truth and philosophical significance of its conclusion.

In everyday life we assume substantial behavioural reliability in others, and on the basis of it we talk of people as acting “in character” and “out of character”. This common assumption seems intuitively well founded. But recent experiments in social psychology have generated philosophical controversy around it. In the context of this debate, John Doris challenges Aristotle’s well known and influential view that people’s behavioural reliability with respect to acting virtuously is underpinned by character traits, understood as settled and integrated (...) dispositions of the agent to have appropriate judgment and appropriate feelings toward what she is called upon to do in a given situation. In this paper I will take John Doris’ challenge at face value, and argue in response that Aristotle’s position is not undermined by it. In fact, rethinking Aristotle’s realism about character and moral virtues in light of Doris’ criticism has important and hitherto unexplored heuristic value for Aristotelian scholars and situationist philosophers alike. (shrink)

This book investigates the thought of two of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, Plato and his predecessor Anaxagoras, with respect to their metaphysical accounts of objects and their properties. The book introduces a fresh perspective on these two thinkers' ideas, displaying the debt of Plato's theory on Anaxagoras's, and principally arguing that their core metaphysical concept is overlap; overlap between properties and things in the world. Initially Plato endorses Anaxagoras's model of constitutional overlap, and subsequently develops qualitative overlap. Overlap (...) is the crux to our understanding of objects participating in Forms in Plato's metaphysics; of Plato's account of relata without relations; of the role of Forms as causes; of the metaphysics of necessity; and of the role of the Great Kinds and of the paradeigma in the development of Plato's thought. Anna Marmodoro argues that Plato is ground-breaking in the history of metaphysics, in different ways from those acknowledged so far, and with respect to more metaphysical questions than had been hitherto appreciated; e.g. Plato's treatment of structure as property; of complexity; and his introduction of the first ever account of metaphysical emergence. In addition to these results, Marmodoro makes Anaxagoras's and Plato's systems philosophically accessible to us, today's philosophers, by applying conceptual tools from analytic metaphysics to the study of ancient metaphysics. In this way, the book brings Anaxagoras's and Plato's ideas to bear on todays' philosophical discussions and opens up new venues of research for current philosophical discussions. (shrink)

What is it, metaphysically, for a universal to be instantiated in a concrete particular? Philosophical controversy has been ongoing since the beginning of philosophy itself. I here contribute a novel account of instantiation developed on the basis of Aristotelian premises (but departing from the mainstream interpretation according to which Aristotelian universals are instantiated by ‘combining’ hylomorphically with matter). The key stance is that for Aristotle each substance is one, i.e. single (in addition to also being a non-recurrent particular). I show (...) that for Aristotle, the oneness of substances is primitively assumed, and, importantly, cannot be derived from composition of parts, not even holistic composition. Parts undermine oneness. It follows that instantiated properties are 'not parts' of substances. However, if not parts of the substances they are in, what are they? Aristotle shows they are 'qualifications' of the substances they are in. Don’t qualifications undermine the singleness of a substance? I show that Aristotle makes sure they do not. The way he does it is new, then and now. Instantiated properties are ‘hybrid’ entities: they sacrifice their own discreteness 'qua' properties, while adopting the discreteness of the metaphysical subject they qualify, i.e. the substance. But then, how can a universal quality recur in many substances, if, when instantiated, it assimilates the discreteness of each of these substances? This is a key Aristotelian stance: 'the quality recurs, not its qualifications'. Qualities are abstracted from their instances in similar objects, e.g. ‘wisdom’ is abstracted from many ‘wise’ people; ‘wisdom’ is individuated bottom-up from its instances, by abstraction. (shrink)

Researchers from diverse disciplines, including organismal and cellular physiology, sports science, human nutrition, evolution and ecology, have sought to understand the causes and consequences of the surprising variation in metabolic rate found among and within individual animals of the same species. Research in this area has been hampered by differences in approach, terminology and methodology, and the context in which measurements are made. Recent advances provide important opportunities to identify and address the key questions in the field. By bringing together (...) researchers from different areas of biology and biomedicine, we describe and evaluate these developments and the insights they could yield, highlighting the need for more standardisation across disciplines. We conclude with a list of important questions that can now be addressed by developing a common conceptual and methodological toolkit for studies on metabolic variation in animals. (shrink)

Abstract: I defend the intuition that the phenomenology of our experience is right in attributing the colors we see to objects; but although colors are properties of objects, they are constitutively dependent on the perceiver’s experiences. I offer a metaphysical account for this primitivist intuition, in response to David Chalmers’ arguments against it, drawing inspiration from Aristotle’s theory of causation.

In this paper, we examine Abelard’s model of the incarnation and place it within the wider context of his views in metaphysics and logic. In particular, we consider whether Abelard has the resources to solve the major difficulties faced by the so-called “compositional models” of the incarnation, such as his own. These difficulties include: the requirement to account for Christ’s unity as a single person, despite being composed of two concrete particulars; the requirement to allow that Christ is identical with (...) the pre-existent Son, despite the fact that the pre-existent Son is a (proper) part of the incarnate Christ; and finally the requirement to avoid Nestorianism, i.e., the position that Christ’s proper parts are persons in their own right. We argue that Abelard does have adequate solutions to these problems. In particular, we show that his theories of relations and predication can be put to use in defence of a compositional account of the incarnation. (shrink)

The mind-body relation was at the forefront of philosophy and theology in late antiquity, a time of great intellectual innovation. This volume, the first integrated history of this important topic, explores ideas about mind and body during this period, considering both pagan and Christian thought about issues such as resurrection, incarnation and asceticism. A series of chapters presents cutting-edge research from multiple perspectives, including history, philosophy, classics and theology. Several chapters survey wider themes which provide context for detailed studies of (...) the work of individual philosophers including Numenius, Pseudo-Dionysius, Damascius and Augustine. Wide-ranging and accessible, with translations given for all texts in the original language, this book will be essential for students and scholars of late antique thought, the history of religion and theology, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Written by a group of leading scholars, this unique collection of essays investigates the views of both pagan and Christian philosophers on causation and the creation of the cosmos. Structured in two parts, the volume first looks at divine agency and how late antique thinkers, including the Stoics, Plotinus, Porphyry, Simplicius, Philoponus and Gregory of Nyssa, tackled questions such as: is the cosmos eternal? Did it come from nothing or from something pre-existing? How was it caused to come into existence? (...) Is it material or immaterial? The second part looks at questions concerning human agency and responsibility, including the problem of evil and the nature of will, considering thinkers such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and Augustine. Highlighting some of the most important and interesting aspects of these philosophical debates, the volume will be of great interest to upper-level students and scholars of philosophy, classics, theology and ancient history. (shrink)

Is power the essence of divinity, or are divine powers distinct from divine essence? Are they divine hypostases or are they divine attributes? Are powers such as omnipotence, omniscience, etc. modes of divine activity? How do they manifest? In which way can we apprehend them? Is there a multiplicity of gods whose powers fill the cosmos or is there only one God from whom all power(s) derive(s) and whose power(s) permeate(s) everything? These are questions that become central to philosophical and (...) theological debates in Late Antiquity (roughly corresponding to the period 2nd to the 6th centuries). On the one hand, the Pagan Neoplatonic thinkers of this era postulate a complex hierarchy of gods, whose powers express the unlimited power of the ineffable One. On the other hand, Christians proclaim the existence of only one God, one divine power or one 'Lord of all powers'. -/- Divided into two main sections, the first part of Divine Powers in Late Antiquity examines aspects of the notion of divine power as developed by the four major figures of Neoplatonism: Plotinus (c. 204-270), Porphyry (c. 234-305), Iamblichus (c.245-325), and Proclus (412-485). It focuses on an aspect of the notion of divine power that has been so far relatively neglected in the literature. Part two investigates the notion of divine power in early Christian authors, from the New Testament to the Alexandrian school (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius the Great) and, further, to the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa), as well as in some of these authors' sources (the Septuagint, Philo of Alexandria). The traditional view tends to overlook the fact that the Bible, particularly the New Testament, was at least as important as Platonic philosophical texts in the shaping of the early Christian thinking about the Church's doctrines. Whilst challenging the received interpretation by redressing the balance between the Bible and Greek philosophical texts, the essays in the second section of this book nevertheless argue for the philosophical value of early Christian reflections on the notion of divine power. The two groups of thinkers that each of the sections deal with (the Platonic-Pagan and the Christian one) share largely the same intellectual and cultural heritage; they are concerned with the same fundamental questions; and they often engage in more or less public philosophical and theological dialogue, directly influencing one another. (shrink)

‘Is being one only one? – The Argument for the Uniqueness of Platonic Forms’ Abstract: Each Form is unique in number; no two numerically distinct Forms can share the same nature. Plato argues for this claim in Republic X. I identify the metaphysical principles Plato presupposes in the premises of the argument, by examining the reasoning behind them, and offer a reconstruction of the argument showing the principles in use. I argue that the metaphysical significance of the argument’s conclusion is (...) to establish that if a Form F were not unique, if there were many Forms F, their nature would alter along with their number: a Form cannot recur without change in its constitution. This is why there can be only one Form for each character in the world. (shrink)

Abstract: I examine the different classifications of the various senses of per se which Aristotle offers in his logical works and in his Metaphysics, and propose an original account of them explaining their interrelations.

L'A. offre l'analisi del libro D della Metafisica mettendo a confronto l'impostazione esegetica dei commentatori moderni con quelli medievali, in particolare è presa in esame la Lectura super librum Metaphysicorum di Paolo Veneto tradita dai mss. Pavia, BU, Aldini 324 e Casale Monferrato, Seminario Vescovile, I.a.3-6. Dopo aver analizzato le due principali linee interpretative della nozione di Essere negli esegeti moderni e la molteplicità dei suoi significati nel corpus aristotelico, l'A. passa ad esaminare in maniera specifica la soluzione interpretativa proposta (...) da Paolo Nicoletti in merito alla nozione di Essere focalizzando l'attenzione sulla definizione di ente e sulla questione di essere come vero e non essere come falso e le soluzioni proposte dall'autore. Si evidenzia come alcuni spunti interpretativi possono essere riscontrati sia Alberto Magno sia in Averroè. Il testo del Nicoletti, edito dall'A. nella parte conclusiva dell'articolo, corrisponde al Libro V, tr. II, c. 2. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2020, Page 200-202.

In this paper I investigate Aristotle’s power ontology, and of it argue for a new interpretation of his hylemorphism and theory of the four causes.

This volume focuses on the authorial voice in antiquity, exploring the different ways in which authors presented and projected various personas. In particular, it questions authority and ascription in relation to the authorial voice, and considers how later readers and authors may have understood the authority of a text's author.