Abstract

It should be stated first that the title is accidental for, as the editor explains, the contributors were invited to write on topics in Greek philosophy that were connected with philosophical issues that are still debated by contemporary philosophers, and all happened to write on either Plato or Aristotle. Consequently, the essays are all absolutely independent, and the emphasis on ‘Greekness’ or ‘modernity’ falls differently in different essays. Perhaps the most successful fusion is Owen’s essay ‘Aristotle on the snares of ontology’, an attempt to chart the basic patterns of Aristotle’s analysis of existence, his account of the verb ‘to be’ in what is ordinarily called its ‘existential’ sense. Owen shows that we can distinguish at least three existential uses of the verb ‘to be’. Two of them are found in an example like the following: ‘while Arrowby is in existence there is at least one man still in existence, but if Arrowby dies there is one man who is no more’. The third is that involved in a question such as ‘Does time exist?’. Aristotle himself gives no express recognition to these distinctions.