Scholars have long debated how exactly Aristotle thinks that agents acquire the distinctive archai (“principles” or “starting‐points”) that govern their practical reasoning. The debate has traditionally been dominated by anti‐intellectualists, who hold that for Aristotle all agents acquire their archai solely through a process of habituation in the nonrational soul. Their traditional opponents, the intellectualists, focus their argument on the case of the virtuous person, arguing that in Aristotle’s view virtuous agents acquire their archai through a (...) process of reasoning. I intervene in this debate in two main ways: first, I press a heretofore underappreciated objection against anti‐intellectualism, that it is inconsistent with Aristotle’s account of akrasia; and second, I urge that all sides in the debate would benefit from more sustained attention to Aristotle’s nonvirtuous character types. In the final section, I suggest that proper consideration of the full breadth of Aristotle’s account of character points in the direction of a new approach that I call “character pluralism,” according to which Aristotle’s moral psychology does not involve a single conception of psychic structure or moral development that is equally applicable to all character types. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Place of GA in Aristotle's Philosophy Male and Female as archai The Nature of Sperma The Transmission of Soul: GA II.3 Reproductive Hylomorphism Inheritance Individual Forms Four Causes of Generation Notes Bibliography.

The concept of autarkeia present in the Aristotelian Politics is conceived as inseparable from the end of the city-State, insofar as it is not only constituted for mere living but for living well. This implies a moralization of the state order that allows us to think about the conformation of an economic dimension based on the concept of autarkeia. Taking as a methodological starting point the “dialogical tension zones” device, we will affirm that exists an Aristotelian economic thinking based on (...) three significant concepts of his political philosophy: “self-sufficiency”, “city-State”, “justice”. Finally, we will affirm that the concept of “natural slavery” aims to guarantee the constitution of an autonomous productive economic order that delegitimizes the federated states’ model of organization. (shrink)

Plato’s Lysis shows Socrates in conversation with two boys he has met at a wrestling school, Lysis and Menexenus. Their debate revolves around the notion of philia, seeking to pin down the nature of this relation, who or what takes part in it, and what causes it. The word philiahas usually been translated as “friendship” but has a wider application in this dialogue, as it encompasses a variety of friendly and loving attitudes toward both people and things. The kinds of (...) interpersonal philia evoked include erotic attachments, kinship relations, utility-based relations, and playful companionship. Roughly two-thirds into the dialogue, the focus turns to a more general theory of desiderative attachments and the question of their ultimate telos and cause. The conversation ends, at least on the face of it, in an impasse, an aporia, when the interlocutors find themselves thrown back to the point from where they started, and no attempt to answer the question of what philia is or what motivates it has stuck. The Lysis nevertheless offers many incentives for further discussion and has elicited radically different responses from its interpreters as to what its real message is. For instance, does it promote a form of utilitarian egoism according to which human attachment can never, or should never, be altruistically motivated? Or does it hint at a very different concept of interpersonal love based on the idea that friendship, as it were, completes us since it connects us with those that share the same values? Does this dialogue stay within the familiar ambit of Socratic ethics, centered around the question of what it takes to achieve happiness (eudaimonia) in a human life, without a concern for metaphysical questions? Or, quite the contrary, does its discussion of the highest object of love (to proton philon) point forward to the metaphysical program of Plato’s so-called middle-period dialogues and especially to the notions of the form of the good or the form of the beautiful, notions which are at the center of the Republic and the Symposium? These questions and others will continue to be debated about this puzzling dialogue. The essays assembled in the present volume address many of these topics. (shrink)

Clearly a Late Antiquity’s phenomenon, the Neoplatonism represented to the ancient men the last bastion of its old traditions, the religion of their ancestors and classical culture. Especially the neoplatonic philosophy of Plotinus, that had engendred precepts which, by its meanings, resounded through the last voices of paganism and survived the Middle Ages into the scholastic philosopy. Although the ideas of Plotinus achieved such later importance, it were the main problem conceiving the conflicts between the philosophers Porphyry and Iamblichus. That (...) will be the starting point of this paper, which analyzes the layers of Neoplatonism throught its historical context. (shrink)

The characterization of thought as a subject reflection about a given object is expressed by an enunciation of predicative order. The introduction of the possibility of a type of thought that it is not constituted in virtue of this presupposition brings a lot of difficulties, which is responsible for why Lloyd treats this theme as an enigma of Greek philosophy, i.e, non-discursive thinking. Plotinus seems to make a distinction between rational and intellectual thought, taking as a starting point the _sui (...) generis_ definition of a thinking that thinks itself. The intriguing nature of this description, i.e, the self-thinking as non-discursive thought, has raised studies with the primary aim to understand how it works this type of thinking. Then to clarify what does it mean to adopt the non-discursive approach. This paper intends to analyze the cited problem in the light of the “non-predicative” of Santos. The hypothesis is that by applying this concept to the discussion it will contribute to increase clarification on the distinction between reason and Intellect. That exercise will be conducted in majority through the reading of V.3 [49] of Plotinus _Enneads_. The nature of the intellectual thought would be non-predicative and the rational would be predicative. (shrink)

The main aims of this article are to demonstrate the presence of two physiological conceptions of pleasure in the Hippocratic Corpus, pointing out the differences between them and conjecturing about the reverberation of one of them in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. We can find in texts of Greek medicine a description of pleasure produced during sexual intercourse and another related to the occurrence of pleasure during nourishment. However, the second account, unlike the first one, is strongly marked by the notion of (...) pleasure as replenishment. Identifying a physiological conception of pleasure featured by a process of filling in the Hippocratic Corpus is relevant because a very similar conception seems to be taken as starting point by Plato in his reflections on pleasure. (shrink)

In the Lysis, Socrates claims to be looking for an account of what kind of quality in another person or object stimulates friendship or love (philia). He goes through a series of proposals, refuting each in turn. In the end, he throws us back to the point from where the arguments started, declaring an aporetic outcome. What is the purpose of this apparently futile and circular inquiry? Most interpreters try to reconstruct a theory of friendship or love from the arguments (...) of this dialogue. Against such a doctrinal reading, this essay defends an “aporetic reading” of the dialogue and connects it to its protreptic function. Starting with a preliminary discussion of what defines an aporetic dialogue and what distinguishes indirect protreptic from explicit protreptic discourse, the essay then analyzes the aporetic method of the Lysis, distinguishing it from aporetic discourse in some of his earlier dialogues. Finally, it analyzes how, and for what kind of audience, the Lysisfunctions as an indirect protreptic. This includes a comparison with the protreptic use of aporetic argumentation in the Euthydemus. (shrink)