Archai 30 introduces a new editorial phase for Archai Journal. Learne more...

A Archai 30 inaugura uma nova fase editorial da Revista Archai. Saiba mais...

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)

Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey, qui avait succédé à Pierre Aubenque à la chaire de philosophie antique de Paris IV, et qui a su maintenir très haut le rayonnement international du Centre de recherches sur la pensée antique, plus familièrement appelé Centre Léon Robin, n'est pas seulement un aristotélisant subtil et exigeant. Il a toujours refusé une pure érudition qui oublierait de se relier à une pensée philosophique. Et par là même, peut-être, il déborde le cadre strictement universitaire de la spécialisation, d'abord, (...) non seulement à l'intérieur du domaine grec, avec notamment son approche des présocratiques, mais surtout comme éditeur et interprète reconnu de Maine de Biran, et aussi par son goût de la littérature, que trahit une élégance stylistique heureusement toujours féconde. C'est pour rendre hommage au professeur et à l'homme, que nous nous sommes réunis à Lyon, au printemps 2008, autour de lui, son propre professeur de khâgne, M Gourinat, son camarade de toujours, J-F Marquet, ex-collègue de Paris IV, le maître des études hégéliennes qu'est B Bourgeois, les collègues, les amis, les anciens élèves, que sont B Saint Girons, M Protopapas, A-G Wersinger, A Devarieux, J-J Duhot, J-F Mattéi, J Frère, M Rashed, A Villani, F Baghdassarian. (shrink)

SECTION I THE PRE-HIPPOCRATICS AND PLATO So far as is known Ionian philosophy was not connected with medicine in any way. It was, in fact, a thing apart, ...

Este artículo puede ser considerado como un comentario de Física, I. En él se expone, por lo tanto, una interpretación de la investigación mediante la que Aristóteles intenta responder a la pregunta acerca de cuántas y cuáles son las archaí del saber relativo a la physis. A través de un análisis de la crítica aristotélica de las respuestas dadas a esa pregunta por los filósofos precedentes, buscamos además aclarar y facilitar la comprensión del desarrollo de dicha interpretación. This article may (...) be considered as a commentary on Physics, I. In it is expounded, therefore, an interpretation of the research by which Aristotle tries to answer the question about how many and which are the archai of the knowledge concerning physis. By an analysis of the Aristotle's criticism of the answers given to this question by the previous philosophers, we also try to clarify and make easier the understanding of that interpretation¿s development. (shrink)

Traitant des origines de la pensée européenne - des présocratiques à Damascius, en passant par Platon, Aristote, Plotin et saint Augustin -, ce livre rencontre les inévitables intrications entre mythe et philosophie ainsi qu'entre l'Un et l'Etre. C'est précisément dans cette double intrication que s'enracine l'énigme de notre présent. Il s'agit ici d'une réflexion sur le passé. Mais le passé n'y est interrogé que dans la mesure où s'y dessine l'horizon à l'intérieur duquel la pensée continue de se déployer aujourd'hui. (...) Cette 3e édition est enrichie d'une présentation qui approfondit la question de la différence entre philosophie européenne et philosophie occidentale. (shrink)

This paper rehabilitates the Stoic conception of blending from the ground up, by freeing the Stoic conception of body from three interpretive presuppositions. First, the twin hylomorphic presuppositions that where there is body there is matter, and that where there is reason or quality there is an incorporeal. Then, the atomistic presupposition that body is absolutely full and rigid, and the attendant notion that resistance (antitupia) must be ricochet. I argue that once we clear away these presuppositions about body, the (...) foundations of Stoic corporealism fall into place. Body is fundamental (not hylomorphic). The two fundamental principles (archai) are bodies: divine active reason (logos) and passive matter (hulē); and these two bodies are two, not matter and form all over again, nor actual and potential, but agent and patient. The independence of the two archai is no threat to the unity of the cosmos, however, because the Stoic theory of body allows for the complete coextension of the archai. The hylomorphic thinker rightly asks, what relation could be tighter than that of the wax and its shape? The Stoic replies: a causal relation, the interaction of agent and patient completely coextended in a through and through blend. (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.

At the beginning of Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle reminds us that we cannot claim demonstrative knowledge ( epistêmê apodeiktikê ) unless we know immediate premisses, the archai of demonstrations. By the end of the chapter he explains why the cognitive state whereby we get to know archai must be Nous . In between, however, Aristotle describes the process of the acquisition of concepts, not immediate premisses. How should we understand this? There is a general agreement that it is (...) Nous by means of which we acquire both premisses and concepts. I argue that this cannot be the case. Since concepts are simples while premisses are composites (predications of concepts), the two cannot be objects of the same cognitive state. I further argue that, whereas Nous is responsible for our grasp of concepts, the state Aristotle elsewhere calls non-demonstrable knowledge is the one whereby we get to know the premisses of demonstrations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and PhilosophyKevin RobbPatricia F. O’Grady. Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and Philosophy. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp xxii + 310. Paper, $84.95.This book has a consistent thesis: Thales of Miletus was the first Western scientist and philosopher not just for what he began, but for what he himself said (or, as O'Grady believes, wrote). On this view, (...) Thales made significant contributions to metaphysics ("He asked the question: 'What is real?' no less than Plato and Aristotle did," 249), cosmology (on the earth and earthquakes, 87 ff.), astronomy (notably the eclipse, 126 ff.), mathematics (Proclus attributes Euclidean theorems to Thales, 191 ff.), psychology (on psyche) and theology (on "full of the gods," 108 ff.). O'Grady's thesis is that we know enough about Thales' thoughts in these areas (each a treacherous minefield of scholarly dispute, as O'Grady admits) that, after a clarified understanding of "Scientificity and Rationality" (her awkward title for Chapter 11), we can confidently conclude that philosophy and science were well begun by Thales. "I believe I have drawn a clear and detailed picture of a brilliant, veracious, and courageously speculative Greek. I see him as a questioner of almost everything, an investigator of nature...Thales is not the mere shadowy figure of Guthrie's perception. He is a man of substance, a man of distinction and of lasting importance" (251).O'Grady had early noted that W. K. C. Guthrie considered Thales a shadowy figure historically, made all the more so, Guthrie believed, because the legend kept expanding. For example, a sixth-century Thales as the seeker after the material archê, and so the first important physikos, is unknown before fourth-century Aristotle's Metaphysics Alpha, and by the time Euclidean theorems are attributed to Thales the tendency to foist imposing discoveries on famous persons was prevalent.This raises the major issue concerning O'Grady's exhaustively researched book. To what extent can the doxographic sources (the "A" sections of Diels's 1903Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker), be used to interpret the Presocratics, especially if the original wording from a thinker perished (any "B" section quotations). It is clear that in the fourth century nothing in writing from Thales survived for the Lyceum to read and catalogue although its scholars clearly sought it; the repeated legetai ("it is said") of Aristotle in Metaphysics Alpha and elsewhere is decisive. It is his standard way of indicating that no written work on the matter survives to be consulted, but stories or oral accounts do.O'Grady's thesis requires that the "A" section material be exploited fully, especially to present Thales as a philosopher (29-70). Many historians will be unwilling to take the entire journey with her. Some (Harold Cherniss) would balk at the first step. The demand for confirming ipsissima verba (or "B" quotations) to reconstruct the thought of any Presocratic with real confidence (as once proposed by G. S. Kirk) threatens to exclude Thales from histories of philosophy, an unsatisfactory result. Even so, Harold Cherniss proposed that drastic solution in 1935 in his magisterial Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratric Philosophy. Presocratic philosophy, he argued, should begin with Anaximander (375).The heart of Cherniss's numbingly exhaustive argument (400 + pages) was that Aristotle's purpose in surveying his predecessors's views was never historical, but dialectical. His intent was to argue for a fourfold causality (on the grounds only four archai had been turned up by all his predecessors, starting with Thales' material cause), and to fit those predecessors's views into a theory of natural causality as he had finally formulated it in his sophisticated, [End Page 107] largely technical vocabulary. Aristotle's "historical" notices on which all later accounts must depend were, thus, never history; the problem and the solution, along with their language, were Aristotle's alone. If Theophrastus paraphrased what he found in Aristotle (McDiarmid), and if the post-Aristotelian doxographic notices were largely dependent on Theophrastus (so already Diels in 1879, in Doxographi Graeci), then any attempt to extract a philosophical Thales from the later doxographic sources (or Aristotle) is methodologically doomed from... (shrink)

Formalizing Euclid’s first axiom. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. 20 (2014) 404–5. (Coauthor: Daniel Novotný) -/- Euclid [fl. 300 BCE] divides his basic principles into what came to be called ‘postulates’ and ‘axioms’—two words that are synonyms today but which are commonly used to translate Greek words meant by Euclid as contrasting terms. -/- Euclid’s postulates are specifically geometric: they concern geometric magnitudes, shapes, figures, etc.—nothing else. The first: “to draw a line from any point to any point”; the last: the (...) parallel postulate. -/- Euclid’s axioms are general principles of magnitude: they concern geometric magnitudes and magnitudes of other kinds as well even numbers. The first is often translated “Things that equal the same thing equal one another”. -/- There are other differences that are or might become important. -/- Aristotle [fl. 350 BCE] meticulously separated his basic principles [archai, singular archê] according to subject matter: geometrical, arithmetic, astronomical, etc. However, he made no distinction that can be assimilated to Euclid’s postulate/axiom distinction. -/- Today we divide basic principles into non-logical [topic-specific] and logical [topic-neutral] but this too is not the same as Euclid’s. In this regard it is important to be cognizant of the difference between equality and identity—a distinction often crudely ignored by modern logicians. Tarski is a rare exception. The four angles of a rectangle are equal to—not identical to—one another; the size of one angle of a rectangle is identical to the size of any other of its angles. No two angles are identical to each other. -/- The sentence ‘Things that equal the same thing equal one another’ contains no occurrence of the word ‘magnitude’. This paper considers the problem of formalizing the proposition Euclid intended as a principle of magnitudes while being faithful to the logical form and to its information content. (shrink)

NOTA PRELIMINAR: o texto a seguir representa a versão ampliada (e corrigida conforme as indicações dos pareceristas) do artigo homônimo, publicado na revista Archai em 2014. Por algum problema técnico, acabou sendo publicada, na época, a primeira versão, sem as melhorias sugeridas pelos avaliadores. Eis, então, a versão ‘definitiva’ do artigo “Zenão e a impossibilidade da analogia”: -/- A reductio ad absurdum foi elevada por Zenão de Eléia a único método que permitiria vislumbrar a verdadeira realidade, invisível tanto aos (...) sentidos quanto à maneira de pensar comum. Mostrando uma certa continuidade com os filósofos anteriores, não só na busca de um procedimento para que a especulação pudesse avançar, como também na mesma rota de afastamento daquilo que é mais próximo, conhecido e particular (visível) em direção àquilo que é menos conhecido, distante e universal (invisível), para dizê-lo em termos aristotélicos, Zenão utilizou-se de argumentos aporéticos como único caminho possível para poder entrever o ‘reino do Ser’. Esse, com efeito, é invisível não somente aos nossos sentidos, como também ao nosso raciocínio ordinário. Eis que somente a ‘via do não-ser’, a única que poderia ser trilhada após Parménides, como diz Wolff, nos permite ter uma ideia, por quanto vaga, daquilo que é ‘verdadeiramente invisível’. Tão invisível ao ponto de ser inalcançável até mesmo pelo pensamento. (shrink)

I believe Aristotle's position on practical ends is both illuminating and consistent with the idea that practical archai, and even conceptions of the ultimate end, are subject to justificatory reasoning. The purpose of this paper is substantiate these beliefs.

The claim that knowledge is grounded on a basic, non-inferentially grasped set of principles, which seems to be Aristotle’s view, in contemporary epistemology can be seen as part of a wider foundationalist account. Foundationalists assume that there must be some premise-beliefs at the basis of every felicitous reasoning which cannot be themselves in need of justification and may not be challenged. They provide justification for truths based on these premises, which Aristotle unusually call principles (archái). Can Aristotle be considered a (...) foundationalist? Are his first principles necessary premises to right inferences? We will look at the issue here. (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)

Arthur Danto's work has always affirmed a deep relationship between philosophy and art. These essays explore this relationship through a number of concrete cases in which either artists are driven by philosophical agendas or their art is seen as solving philosophical problems in visual terms. The essays cover a varied terrain, with subjects including Giotto's use of olfactory data in _The Raising of Lazarus; _chairs in art and chairs as art; Mel Bochner's Wittgenstein drawings; the work of Robert Motherwell, Andy (...) Warhol, and Robert Irwin; Louis Kahn as "Archai-Tekt"; and visual truth in film. Also featured are a meditation on the battle of Gettysburg; and a celebration of the Japanese artist Shiko Munakata, an essay that is partly autobiographical. Arthur C. Danto is one of the most original and multitalented philosophers writing today, a thinker whose interests traverse the boundaries of traditional understandings of philosophy. Best known for his contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, Danto is also esteemed for his work in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophical psychology, and action theory. These two volumes, each with an introduction by the author, contain essays spanning more than twenty-five years that have been selected to highlight the inseparability of philosophy and art in Danto's work. Together they present the thinking of Arthur C. Danto at his very best. (shrink)

Taking very seriously its anti-Parmenidean character, this essay locates a radically temporalized ontology at the heart of Aristotle’s Physics. We first concentrateon Aristotle’s discussion of kinêsis or ‘change’ as always between opposites, drawing the conclusion that the archai that govern and constitute a change, as opposites, cannot be present in the change itself. Thus, change is what it is by virtue of what is necessarily not present. We then draw the implications of this discussion for chronos or ‘time,’ defined (...) in Book IV of the Physics as “the number of change.” Here, we uncover the ecstatic present moment of natural, changing things, a present constituted by its past and future, which is to say by what is emphatically not present. (shrink)

The following hopes to bring Plato’s unwritten doctrines into proximity with Irigaray’s concept of the Two as found in works like To Be Two or I love to you. By focusing on the the indefinite Dyad, Plato's reported co-archai with the One, it will be evidenced that Platonism begins and ends with a One which is not One (a kind of Two). Further, in this Dyad's failure to be One, it ultimately comes to possess its own productive and destructive (...) power or, to use Irigaray's words, to love toward the Other in such a way as to produce or give birth to other others, real difference. Finally, Irigaray’s conception of the Two has dramatic social implications for her as a feminist, grounding a transformation of the political order of things. Due to this political import, the final section shifts to questioning whether Plato’s reported protological principles, the One and the indefinite Dyad, could perform a similar work. (shrink)

In this paper I shall offer an hypothesis to explain the process by which the inventories of the contents of the three chambers of the Parthenon were inscribed in the fifth century and to account for all the surviving fragments of those inscriptions. At the end of their annual term the treasurers of Athena prepared separate inventories of the Pronaos, the Hekatompedon, and the cella which they called the Parthenon. But the four boards of treasurers whose terms filled a Panathenaic (...) penteteris co-operated with each other in stewarding the sacred possessions and began in 434/3 to have their inventories inscribed on the same stelai. The four inventories of the Pronaos filled one face of one stele, the four of the Hekatompedon one face of a second stele, and the four of the Parthenon one face of a third stele. In the course of time the treasurers began to post their records on the backs of stelai erected by their predecessors. This process was apparently changed in 410/09 to allow the four inventories to fill both the obverse and reverse faces of a smaller stele. In 406/5, with the creation of the unified board of the treasurers of Athena and the Other Gods, the inventories began to be inscribed year by year on individual stelai, and the Four Archai disappear. (shrink)

El propósito del presente artículo radica en examinar el cruce de influencias entre la teoría ontológica y la praxis política. Más específicamente, nos interesa analizar de qué manera el estatus otorgado al khorismós platónico, es decir, al límite irrebesable entre el ámbito de los archaí y la dimensión de lo fenoménico, ha determinado el quehacer político europeo. La tesis que nos proponemos defender se formularía, pues, de la siguiente forma: las distintas posturas políticas que han caracterizado de manera paradigmática nuestro (...) devenir cultural son un correlato del modo en el que ha sido pensada la diferencia ontológica que supone el khorismós platónico. (shrink)

Troisième volet du programme 'Le problème de la réappropriation par la philosophie des discours de savoirs antérieurs,' ce volume entend examiner les citations directes ou indirectes de Platon, non seulement aux poètes archaïques et classiques, mais également aux autres discours de savoir non philosophiques afin de prendre la mesure des ressemblances et des écarts entre la 'source' et l'usage qui en est fait ; de tenir compte du contexte pragmatique d'énonciation et du cadre argumentatif dans lesquels s'insèrent ces 'citations' ; (...) de mesurer ainsi l'intérêt que ces savoirs ont pu susciter, les dangers qu'ils ont pu représenter - notamment en termes de concurrence, les réappropriations et/ou les distorsions dont ils ont été l'objet."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

At the beginning of Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle reminds us that we cannot claim demonstrative knowledge unless we know immediate premisses, the archai of demonstrations. By the end of the chapter he explains why the cognitive state whereby we get to know archai must be Nous. In between, however, Aristotle describes the process of the acquisition of concepts, not immediate premisses. How should we understand this? There is a general agreement that it is Nous by means of which (...) we acquire both premisses and concepts. I argue that this cannot be the case. Since concepts are simples while premisses are composites , the two cannot be objects of the same cognitive state. I further argue that, whereas Nous is responsible for our grasp of concepts, the state Aristotle elsewhere calls non-demonstrable knowledge is the one whereby we get to know the premisses of demonstrations. (shrink)

The majority of the excerpts traditionally taken to derive from a planned book 8 of Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis concern the theory of demonstration (apodeixis) and related matters of logic. The suspension of judgement (epochē), a recognisably sceptical response to disagreement and a lack of demonstrative certainty, receives two brief treatments in this context. Apart from an attempted refutation of scepticism which points to the allegedly self-refuting character of universal epochē (5.15.2–16.3), the text also includes an account of the causes (...) that lead one to suspend judgement (7.22.1–4). ... First, I will give a brief overview of both the argument from self-refutation employed in the first Clementine excerpt and Sextus Empiricus' rejection of a related argument. I will argue that the comparison does not support definite claims about the origin of the Clementine material (section 1). Then I will discuss the second excerpt, which offers a series of remarks on the causal origin of epochē (section 2). I will then contrast it to Sextus’s account of the origin of suspensive disposition in terms of originative principles (archai) rather than causes (aitiai), arguing that Sextus’s formulation allows for a more nuanced sceptical position (section 3). In conclusion, I will briefly consider possible views on the relevance of this material, or the lack thereof, for Clement’s Christian project (section 4). (shrink)

What did kratos imply in the classical democratic context? Focusing on the two Constitutions of the Athenians traditionally attributed to Xenophon and Aristotle respectively, this article explores differences among kratos and three proximate terms: archē (de facto governance or magistracy), kuros (authority, perceived as legitimate), and dēmagōgia (leadership). With Benveniste and Loraux, it argues that kratos specifically signalled ‘superiority’ or ‘predominance’, as revealed in combat or other form of contest. Dēmokratia thereby connoted the forceful predominance of the dēmos (‘assembly’, ‘collective (...) common people’) over the rest of the community, including office-holders (archontes, archai) and political leaders (dēmagōgoi). The association of kratos with force directs attention to the martial underpinnings of classical demotic authority, incidentally highlighting a weakness in modern democracy: the dēmos’ lack of kratos over the political elite when that elite controls military and police power. (shrink)

A presente obra é o resultado de dois seminários de pesquisa que reuniram a Cátedra UNESCO Archai da Universidade de Brasília, o Centro de Estudos Clássicos e Humanísticos da Universidade de Coimbra e o Grupo Filosofia Antiga da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais em dezembro de 2011 em Brasília e em março de 2012 na antiga cidade de Eleia, com o objetivo de realizar uma estudo exploratório tendo em vista a preparação de uma nova edição em língua portuguesa da (...) obra "Vidas e Doutrinas dos Filósofos Ilustres" de Diógenes Laércio. O estudo preparatório resultou nesta coleção de ensaios inéditos e ricos de estímulos e sugestões para a compreensão, imediatamente, da obra de Diógenes Laércio. O volume traz para o debate um panorama de questões sobre a obra e a sua recepção, assim como estudos mais específicos dedicados a uma passagem ou a uma das biografias, desejando desta forma constituir-se num trabalho de referência para os pesquisadores de Diógenes Laércio em língua portuguesa. (shrink)

Tome 1. Complexités intuitive, archaïque et historique --.

Aristotle had accused the Presocratic philosophers of constantly turning up the wrong set of principles as explanations of physical reality. To speak of the archai as if they were physical entities was, according to Aristotle, to confuse the notion of archai with that of stoicheia. This volume by Sinnige, however, traces the notion of "matter" through Presocratic thought and reveals a non-tangible, indeterminate view of matter that is sometimes identified with that of infinity. The author shows how Anaximander (...) carried over the mythical concept of Chronos as the ruling power of the universe into a more rational notion of apeiron. Sinnige's conclusion here is that "matter" for Anaximander is not a sensible substance at all, but rather the infinite and divine expanse of the universe. Each of the Presocratic views on matter and infinity is considered in its turn. Sinnige maintains that with the Pythagoreans the notion of the apeiron became more fully identified with that of instability and indeterminateness. The author also takes issue with the traditional interpretations of the doxographers who make Zeno's paradoxes nothing more than arguments against the reliability of sensory knowledge. Rather, Sinnige claims, Zeno's view of infinity marks a turning point in which mathematical dimensions are irrevocably associated with that term. Basically the author shows that early notions of matter and infinity vacillate between corpuscular theories on the one hand and mathematical views on the other.--J. J. R. (shrink)

Ce livre propose une réflexion théorico-clinique sur un outil psychanalytique encore trop méconnu, que l'auteur intitule: Cet autre divan. Il traite d'une autre façon d'utiliser la méthode psychanalytique de Freud pour les pathologies non névrotiques actuelles. Cet autre divan peut éveiller la curiosité, car ici le divan lui-même est un outil de la cure. Ce concept de la Psychothérapie Psychanalytique Corporelle (PPC) est issu de la rencontre des travaux de Julian de Ajuriaguerra et des recherches post-freudiennes sur les pathologies des (...) limites. Avec de nombreuses illustrations, l'auteur montre que la PPC permet le dégagement de l'archaïque traumatique à l'aide de la médiation corporelle. L'originalité de cet abord psychanalytique est de faire travailler les paramètres oubliés parce que silencieux dans le cadre psychanalytique classique, qui est mis en difficulté par les patients non névrotiques. Ce livre, qui donne au corps toute son importance organisatrice pour la psyché, montre que nous pouvons innover à partir de Freud pour aider psychanalytiquement ces personnes qui présentent des souffrances identitaires et narcissiques et qui s'adressent à nous. (shrink)

Everything is Something is a book about Stoic metaphysics. It argues that the Stoics are best understood as forging a bold new path between materialism and idealism, a path best characterized as non-reductive physicalism. To be sure, only individual bodies exist for the Stoics, but not everything there is exists — some things are said to subsist. However, this is no Meinongian move beyond existence, to the philosophy of intentionality (as the language of subsistence might suggest), but a one-world metaphysics (...) that both counts its entities by logical criteria, and grounds them in body by physical principles, yielding a tightly ordered ontology in which everything is Something and nothing is not. -/- This last phrase is not innocent. It invokes the Stoic innovation of Something (ti) as the highest genus of reality, and takes the stand that it is not only principled and coherent, but comprehensive — anything that is not Something is nothing at all (for the initiated: there is no class of Not-Somethings between Something and nothing). Further, everything that is Something is either itself a body, or ontologically dependent on body. Herein lies the Stoics’ non-reductive physicalism, and the beating heart of their response to the Battle of Gods and Giants in Plato’s Sophist: a one-world metaphysics. -/- The foundation of Stoic metaphysics is their ground-breaking corporealism, which introduces an alternative to both atomism and hylomorphism. The Stoics are continuum physicists for whom body as such, i.e. solid, three-dimensional extension, is homogeneous, partless, uniform, and infinitely divisible without reaching minima (atoms). And because body is not conceived along hylomorphic lines, i.e. as a composite of matter and form, the Stoics are free to make body fundamental. Out of two basic bodies, then (the archai), and by the tantalizing mechanism of through and through blending (krasis di’ holou), Stoic physics constructs the cosmos (and every body it contains) in completely corporealist terms, composing one thing out of many. And once those bodies are built, Stoic logic gives an account of their identity conditions, kinds, and qualities according to the vexed schema of the Categories, making now many out of one by the constitution relation, as a statue is constituted by its clay. With these distinct mereological relations of composition and constitution, Stoic corporealism artfully divides the labor of Plato’s Forms between physics and logic. -/- Next in the ontological order, with bodies as their foundation, are the incorporeals (asōmata): space (place, room, and surface), time, void, and the (awkwardly named) sayables, or lekta (roughly, though controversially, the meanings of our words). These entities do not exist; they do, however, subsist, inheriting their physical properties and, hence, their subsistence, from the bodies on which they depend. For example, place depends for its three-dimensional (non-solid) extension on the bodies that occupy or delimit it. The ontological dependence of space, time, and their novel semantic entities (the lekta) on body, is what takes Stoic metaphysics beyond corporealism to non-reductive physicalism, beyond a merely sorted ontology to an ordered, one-world metaphysics. Each incorporeal counts as Something according to the Stoic criterion for subsistence (hence, the theory is non-reductive), and what they have in common as incorporeals (and what makes the account physicalist), is their dependence on underlying body. -/- In addition to the incorporeals, the Stoics also recognize the subsistence of things like creatures of fiction and geometrical limits, which they classify as neither corporeal nor incorporeal. What these entities have in common is that they are products of thought; and since thoughts are themselves bodies according to Stoic corporealism, this remains a physicalist account. As before, the account is not Meinongian; neither all objects of thought, nor all products of thought count as Something. Indeed, the Stoics’ eliminative treatment of universals (and Forms) turns on their denying concepts (ennoēmata) a place on the ontological map altogether — concepts are simply not Somethings (and, again, not some further category of Not-Somethings, intermediate between Something and nothing at all). If all this is right, then the Stoics are not flat-footed materialists or ersatz Platonists, as so often assumed, but our first non-reductive physicalists. (shrink)

No mês de Novembro de 2017, em ocasião do Dia Mundial da Filosofia da UNESCO, a Cátedra UNESCO Archai, do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Metafísica da Universidade de Brasilia, organizou um hangout Unesco sobre o tema Filosofia, gênero e feminismo, do qual participaram diversxs colegas brasileirxs, especialistas do tema, acima assinadxs. A gravação integral do hangout está disponível aqui: https://youtu.be/LH5LwTegGG4. Segue abaixo uma transcrição, revista e adaptada pelxs autorxs.

I believe Aristotle's position on practical ends is both illuminating and consistent with the idea that practical archai, and even conceptions of the ultimate end, are subject to justificatory reasoning. The purpose of this paper is substantiate these beliefs.

The present thesis in the subject field of Philosophy of Education with the title “Non-Indifference: Outlines of (Non)Religious Education” represents an effort to point at issues that arise upon a philosophical reflection of ‘religious education’. Such a reflection does not merely concentrate on what is ‘necessary to know’, but rather ‘how to conjecture’. The principal concern is a caring and addressing custody of (or search for) the ARCHAI in an attempt to participate in the caring for the life of (...) an education field that is one of the ‘caring professions’ (a profession, which every education should be). Not only education topics are presented; the reflection is also aimed at terms such as philosophy, theology, religion and faith, eventually at other related concepts. Every of these terms are inquired in its immediacy to philosophy, i.e. their ‘relation’ to philosophy is conceptualized. Religious education is addressed in a three-fold transcendence of men (towards themselves, to other people and to the world, i.e. to the environment in which they live), since if education (in the sense of the Czech word výchova) is concerned, it has to be a non-indifferent (E. Lévinas: la nonindifférence) care, cultivation, growth – life. However, the concern of this thesis is not to look after life in the sense of the provision of nutrition so that life can be consumed. Rather, a question is posed, if life – regarded as FYSIS – is not about more than conatus essendi. This is why education is discussed as a ‘religious’ one. (shrink)

The bulk of the writings Husserl himself saw through to publication were, in one way or another, successive attempts at an "introduction" to phenomenology. That not a single one of these works is of easy access to those for whom phenomenology is something novel in no way contravenes the use of the term 'introduction" to name them. After all, to the end of his days Husserl spoke of himself as a philosophical beginner, and not from any false modesty, but because (...) he knew that the philosopher has access to the archai or old beginnings only if, by his persistent questioning, he is always ready to make a new beginning. "Introduction" amounts, then, to a term of art in his philosophy, describing as much a work in progress as an invitation to the dance. (shrink)