The paper addresses the following question: why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond, and often against, their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality. In particular, it is the presence of theoretical reason that necessitates the limitless nature of (...) human non-rational desires. (shrink)

. The aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the nature of true philosophers is described in Plato’s Timaeus. By examining the distinction between two kinds of opinion – one absolutely false, the other reliably true – I will try to show that Plato coined a new term to denote both true philosophers and the characteristics of their knowledge. From being a ‘love of wisdom’, true philosophy came to be defined as a ‘passion for science’. Finally, (...) I will try to illustrate the protreptic intent underlying this choice of words and how it concerns the main critical target of the Timaeus, the so-called Presocratics. (shrink)

I argue that Plato believes that the soul must be both the principle of motion and the subject of cognition because it moves things specifically by means of its thoughts. I begin by arguing that the soul moves things by means of such acts as examination and deliberation, and that this view is developed in response to Anaxagoras. I then argue that every kind of soul enjoys a kind of cognition, with even plant souls having a form of Aristotelian discrimination (...) (krisis), and that there is therefore no completely unintelligent, evil soul in the cosmos that can explain disorderly motions; as a result, the soul is not the principle of all motion but only motion in the cosmos after it has been ordered by the Demiurge. (shrink)