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 .
