Abstract In Plato’s Philebus, Socrates argues that some pleasures depend for their pleasantness on a felt contrast with pain, whereas others do not. The former are ‘mixed’, and the latter are ‘pure’. He claims that there are pure pleasures associated with learning. But his account of these pleasures is puzzling: it appears to conflict with Plato’s other representations of learning as uncomfortable, it often relies on ambiguous, metaphorical language, and it claims, without explanation, that these pleasures are available only to ‘the very few’. This paper resolves these puzzles by reconstructing the psychic basis of the pure pleasures of learning. It argues that Socrates understands learning as the act of putting in memory, which is enabled by the soul’s powers of memory and recollection. Memory and recollection enable the soul to have representational content present to mind and to enjoy having that content in mind without also being aware of pain. The painlessness of this psychic act has to do with Socrates’ conception of the structure of knowledge: only purely theoretical forms of expertise, which Socrates identifies as highly elite, allow for the representational contents of memory to be separate from the soul’s awareness of its or the body’s needs. The paper concludes with a discussion of the metaphysics of process in the dialogue and its significance for the paper’s interpretation for the pure pleasures of learning.
In the Sophist Plato singles out Being (on, ousia) as just one among the Kinds or Forms. This paper argues that the exploration of one main implication of Plato’s isolation of a Kind Being enables us to question aspects of an entrenched scholarly consensus about Plato’s conception of being, namely that for Plato ‘to be is always to be something’. By scrutinizing various passages from the second half of the Sophist, starting from 250 a 8–d 3, it defends the view that when Plato metaphysically analyses ‘X is’ in terms of X’s participation in or combination with the Kind or Form of Being, he does not mean that X is something, or is itself, or is variously characterized (or similar), but that it exists.
Eudemian Ethics 8. 3 defends a standard (horos), according to which certain actions should promote contemplation. Exactly which actions fall under the scope of the standard is contested. Commentators often limit the scope of the standard to a restricted subset of actions, but such restrictions lead to serious, previously unnoticed inconsistencies. This paper argues for the interpretation that all actions fall under the standard’s prescription by considering the dialectical context of the chapter, as well as the argument Aristotle gives in favour of this standard. The result is that the Eudemian account of virtue includes a further essential feature: virtue aims to promote the most contemplation. This feature should be understood coordinately alongside virtue’s other essential features and not as establishing a dominant end.
Building on Aristotle’s De anima 3. 5, the author of De intellectu makes a striking claim that in order to think anything, we already need to think the divine ‘agent intellect’. Most interpreters saw here a paradoxical view that our very first thought is directed to God. Others identified a Neoplatonist account in the background according to which we think anything whatsoever by turning to the respective form contained in the divine intellect. This paper argues that in order to understand the position developed in De intellectu we need to see it as a novel response to traditional Peripatetic aporiai deriving from Theophrastus. The author seeks to reconcile the idea that our thinking depends on a transcendent principle with the assumption that thinking is up to us. His key move is to conceive the transcendent intellect as a self-standing act of thought which can become ours—at least to some extent. The proposed interpretation makes it easier to accept the traditional attribution of De intellectu to Alexander of Aphrodisias, while raising, from a new angle, the question of Alexander’s potential influence on Neoplatonism.
Contrary to recent work on the topic, this paper argues that, in the Sophist, Plato’s Visitor does not posit any negative kinds or forms, such as the kind or form of the not-beautiful or not-being. Its argument has a textual and a philosophical side. On the textual side, it argues that the Visitor does not posit negative kinds or forms. On the philosophical side, it argues that the Visitor does not need to posit any such entities because he can reach his goals by appeal to difference. The latter conclusion suggests that an appeal to negative kinds or forms would be gratuitous and hence weaken the Visitor’s account. The textual result implies that we need not saddle him with this unsatisfactory view. Rather, by appeal to difference, the Visitor offers a unified account of ‘is not’ claims and false speech that relies on remarkably economical ontological resources.
