Abstract: Current discourse on the mutability of natural justice in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics adopts two approaches. The first approach argues that natural justice is either exclusively mutable or immutable but is inadequate because Aristotle implies that both are aspects of natural justice. The second approach argues that it is both but does not show how it perfects the virtues. The author argues that natural justice, as the exercise of our virtues for the common good, is both mutable and immutable, just in different respects. His account has three advantages: (i) it satisfies Aristotle’s observation that natural justice is both immutable and mutable; (ii) it acknowledges Aristotle’s claim that natural justice perfects our virtues; (iii) it allows us to judge if a system of law is just or unjust. He concludes by showing how natural and conventional justice work in concert to achieve political justice.
Abstract: This article considers the zoologist Adolf Portmann’s claim that the outward form of the organism first has a presentation value ( Darstellungswert ) that is prior to and more basic than its adaptive value. Portmann maintains as a consequence that living beings are fundamentally driven by the urge to self-display ( Selbstdarstellung ). This drive toward self-presentation is directed, above all, to conspecifics because conspecifics can most fully meet this desire to be seen, touched, and heard, that is, to appear. Merleau-Ponty and Arendt show from different directions that this relation “gives an ontological value back to the notion of species. What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality” (Merleau-Ponty). The conception of the living being that emerges from these considerations suggests a novel way of understanding sociality as ontologically primordial. It also discloses a new conception of what is at stake in environmental devastation: the irrecoverable loss of presentation value.
Abstract: Aristotle’s account of truth as apparently the primary sense of being in Metaphysics 9.10 has been the subject of much controversy. Some scholars, seeing such an account of truth as incompatible with what Aristotle says about truth elsewhere, have sought to eliminate it in ways ranging from deletion to strained interpretations. That in contrast the identification of truth with the primary sense of being was central to Martin Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, and indeed his own thought, is well known from some of his published courses. What has gone completely unnoticed and unpublished, however, is a seminar Heidegger devoted to Metaphysics 9.10 in 1942/43. In this seminar Heidegger provides his most detailed reading of this text and his most convincing, both philosophically and as a reading of Aristotle, uniquely interpreting it through the account of energeia in Metaphysics 9.6 and the introductory chapter of De anima .
Abstract: Many scholars remain perplexed by Aquinas’s treatment of “mysterious” common natures. They call it “careless,” “contradictory,” or “ad hoc.” But the standard interpretation (adopted by authors such as Owens, Black, Kenny, Pasnau, Brower, and Galluzzo) mistakenly conflates the common nature with the nature absolutely considered. Starting from Boethius’s meaning of “nature” as whatever can in any way be intelligible, the author argues that the “common nature” and “nature absolutely considered” are conceptually distinct for Aquinas. Unlike the nature absolutely considered, the common nature positively has unity, existence, as well as the intention of universality. Moreover, the common nature (such as the nature of a species) is the only nature that is individuated. It exists in the individual “objectively,” as the foundation for human cognition.
Abstract: Beyond Good and Evil 29 is a short and opaque aphorism about which little has been written. This essay argues that it is more important than has usually been recognized. The theme of death appears to be mostly absent from BGE . However, Nietzsche himself said that BGE “says the same things” as Thus Spoke Zarathustra , but “differently, very differently,” and the earlier book has a whole speech on death. This essay argues that BGE 29 is Nietzsche’s most important reflection on death in the entire book. It argues that this aphorism implicitly distinguishes between the philosopher’s attitude toward death as a final event in human life from the religious attitude as the occasion for judgement by God. It also argues that BGE 29 fits into the developing argument of BGE as a whole. While BGE 29 deals with death, the immediately succeeding BGE 30 deals with the style of writing adopted by books which will be circulated by a writer’s followers after his inevitable death.
Abstract: This article intervenes in a vigorous debate in the study of medieval Islamic philosophy over whether Avicenna's epistemology is rationalist or empiricist. To settle the debate, scholars have so far focused almost entirely on Avicenna's emanationism or abstractionism. In this study, the author articulates two core theses of rationalism: first, innatism, the view that the mind starts out with certain basic truths or concepts; and second, necessitarianism, the view that we can attain necessary or absolutely certain and substantive knowledge. The former has been insufficiently discussed in the debate while the latter has been entirely overlooked. The author demonstrates that Avicenna is not committed to innatism but does subscribe in his natural philosophy to necessitarianism. Thus, he concludes that Avicenna is a rationalist by virtue of the necessitarianism of his natural philosophy. This finding sheds new light on how we should understand Avicenna's philosophical project.
Abstract: What is it for the soul to be the form of a living organism’s natural, instrumental body and the internal principle of its vital activities? How are we to understand how an organism’s vital activities are realized materially? The author attempts to answer these questions by discussing two very different models of the soul/body relation: the assumption of bodies by angels and the possession of bodies by demons. The assumed body that an angel employs instrumentally is not capable of vital activity at all. The possessed body that a demon employs instrumentally is capable of vital activity, but the demon serves as an external principle of its movements. The author argues that a living organism’s vital activities stand alone in having the soul as an internal principle of its instrumental body’s movements and explains what this means.
