Notes: Paperback reprinting with corrections of the 2007 edition. The only corrections are in the index locorum (which has erroneous page numbers in the 2007 edition due to a publisher's error).
Abstract: Translation, with introduction and notes, of Philoponus' commentary.
In the chapters discussed in this section of Philoponus' Physics Commentary, Aristotle explores a range of questions about the basic structure of reality, the nature of prime matter, the principles of change, the relation between form and matter, and the issue of whether things can come into being out of nothing, and if so, in what sense that is true. A number of distinctive passages of philosophical importance occur in this pat of Book 1, in which we see Philoponus at work on issues in physics and cosmology, as well as logic and metaphysics.
Notes: The first volume (chapters 1-3) appeared in 2006 (see below).
Abstract: The book is ostensibly about what we think animals are, how we perceive ourselves as like or unlike them, and about the humane attitude towards animals and other natural things. The issue is complicated, however, because when we come to consider the nature of the beasts, and the nature of the human being, we discover that any description of the world, any account of how things are with respect to the differences between ourselves and other kinds, already reflects the moral stance we take towards the world and towards our fellow creatures. It is not that the moral stance follows from the biological and psychological inquiries, but rather that the decision about what counts as a relevant biological fact follows from the moral stance. The two are bound up together. We cannot first ask whether Aristotle was right to see continuity in the psychological functions of animal and human souls, and then (having settled how things are in nature) draw conclusions from nature to decide the correct treatment of the other species. For the question whether he was right to see continuity is already a moral question: given that we can focus on continuity or on discontinuities, how should the natural scientist draw his boundaries?
So we need to think, and we are obliged to act and to react, in a world that we see under a certain description. My quest in this book is not merely to piece together some account of what Aristotle and the rest had to say about the nature of reality and our place in it, alongside the plants and other creatures with souls; nor merely to make those accounts of our souls and theirs impinge upon our own difficulties with regard to the justification of our attitudes and responses to other kinds. I also try to show how these questions force us to think about where moral justification could come from, and to show that such a question cannot be answered if we continue to believe that moral obligations are determined by the moral status of the object. For the moral status of the object is a product of our own imagination... and once we see that, we also see that there remains the question <i>where we ought to have the will to see it</i>.
Notes: Chapter headings:
Part I Constructing Divisions
1. Introduction: On William Blake, Nature and Mortality
2. On Nature and Providence: Readings in Herodotus, Protagoras and Democritus
Part II Perceiving Continuities
3. On the Transmigration of Souls: Reincarnation into animal bodies in Pythagoras, Empedocles and Plato
4. On Language, Concepts and Automata: Rational and irrational animals in Aristotle and Descartes
5. On the Disadvantages of Being a Complex Organism: Aristotle and the scala naturae
Part III Being Realistic
6. On the Vice of Sentimentality: Androcles and the Lion and Some Extraordinary Adventures in the Desert Fathers
7. On the Notion of Natural Rights: Defending the voiceless and oppressed in the tragedies of Sophocles
8. On Self-Defence and Utilitarian Calculations: Democritus of Abdera and Hermarchus of Mytilene
9. On Eating Animals: Porphyry's dietary rules for philosophers
Conclusion
Reviewed in JHS 128 (2008) 275-6, The Classical Review (2008), 58:1:76-78, Bryn Mawr Classical Review http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2007/2007-09-60.html,
Abstract: Translation, with introduction and notes, of Philoponus commentary on the first book of Aristotle's Physics, chapters 1-3.
The attached pdf is an extract (pages 3 to 7 of the introduction)
Notes: The second volume (chapters 4-9) has now appeared (2009).
Abstract: This is a book about the invention of Western philosophy, and the first thinkers to explore ideas about the nature of reality, time, and the origin of the universe. It begins with the finding of the new papyrus fragment of Empedocles' poem, and uses the story of its discovery and interpretation to highlight the way our understanding of early philosophers is marked by their presentation in later sources. Generations of philosophers, both ancient and modern, have traced their inspiration back to the presocratics, even though we have very few of their writings left. In this book, Catherine Osborne invites her readers to dip their toes into the fragmentary remains of thinkers from Thales to Pythagoras, Heraclitus to Protagoras, to try to fill in the bits of a jigsaw that has been rejigged many times and in many different ways.
Abstract: I try to explain why relationships with friends are precious to us, using Aristotle's discussion as a prompt. I then ask the same questions about what the good person gains from encountering fictional characters in literature. I reject the fashionable view that Aristotle thinks that the good man gains self-knowledge from having friends, and argue instead that the value of friends lies in looking out together at a shared world of experience. A friend, I suggest, is an extended self, because he stands alongside me and together we become enlarged by appreciating what is good and suffering what is bad.
Notes: Related work in Eros Unveiled (1994) and in my 1983 article on De anima 3.2.
Abstract: If Socrates is portrayed holding one view in one of Plato's dialogues and a different view in another, should we be puzzled? If (as I suggest) Plato's Socrates is neither the historical Socrates, nor a device for delivering Platonic doctrine, but a tool for the dialectical investigation of a philosophical problem, then we should expect a new Socrates, with relevant commitments, to be devised for each setting. Such a dialectical device – the tailor-made Socrates – fits with what we know of other contributions to the genre of the Sokratikos Logos, to which Plato was neither the first nor the only contributor.
Abstract: It is tempting to look for some significance in the sexual motifs that run through Plato's <i>Phaedrus</i>. I believe that thought is a sound one, but it would be wrong to locate the significance of the sexual motifs in the relation between Socrates and Phaedrus (wrong, at least, to construe their relationship as sexual in the normal sense. Rather, the dialogue is about their passion for words and speeches. Whereas Lysias' speech (read by Phaedrus) is explicitly about seducing a boy to grant sexual favours, Plato's story turns out to be all about seducing a friend to deliver the speech you want to hear: aural gratification, not sexual gratification. Following this insight, the paper shows that the dialogue is reflecting on certain fundamental questions in metaphilosophy, particularly concerning philosophy's claim to track truth. How can philosophy achieve what it claims to achieve? And how can it justify its expectation that, by the process that Plato calls "dialectic", a philosopher places herself in a better position to know that what she says is true, or, indeed, importantly true? The dialogue reflects on the difference between a cool detached rational approach to enquiry, and a passionate erotic approach. In the <i>Phaedrus</i> Plato constructs, considers, and rejects, the false image of a cool detached rationality that plausibly, but monstrously, claims to bring beneficial results without prior sensitivity to beauty, value and goodness in the things that it purports to define, and without any commitment to truth. My aim is to defend a different side of philosophy, the need for inspiration to pursue the truth as a beloved object, and to use the imagination to that end.
Abstract: I argue that the shape of the world in which the earth is in the centre of the cosmos does not make the centre the most important place but rather the lowest or bottom place, of least value.
Abstract: The myth that Parmenides was a turning point in the history of Presocratic thought is examined and shown to be bunk, or rather shown to be a story that we like to tell when we have a certain view of what philosophy is and how it originated.
Abstract: By careful attention to what Heraclitus is saying, in the wider context of his philosophical position, we can see that the sayings that are usually taken to ridicule religion are better read as observations about the significance of the religious context. Although these sayings argue against simple-minded misunderstandings of conventional piety, they do not condemn such piety in itself; instead they offer a more sophisticated theological picture, one that belongs with Heraclitus' famous commitment to the unity of opposites. I look at two groups of fragments: firstly a set concerned with conventional rituals, and secondly some that indicate the proper place in our lives of the divine way of doing things.
Abstract: I question whether the notion of 'didactic poetry' is appropriate or helpful in relation to Parmenides, Empedocles and the other philosopher poets. I suggest that poetry was the default form for the Presocratics, and that we do not need to ask why a poet writes in poetry, but rather whether anyone in Early Greek philosophy writes in prose, and if so when and why. It is the latter that it odd and requires justification, because the normal way to publish one's "wisdom" before Plato was in the form of poetry.
Abstract: In this chapter I explore the parallel between the shape of Timaeus' discourse in Plato's dialogue and the shape of the world that he describes. There is, plainly, an analogy between Timaeus' act of describing a world in words and the demiurge's task of making a world of matter. This analogy implies a parallel between language as a system of reproducing ideas in words, and the world, which reproduces reality in particular things. It becomes clear that authority lies not in the retelling of a truth already told, nor in the description of a world already made, but in the creation of a likeness in words of the eternal Forms. The Forms serve as paradigms both for the physical world created by the demiurge, and for the world in discourse created by Timaeus: his discourse gains its validity not from faithfulness to the way things appear, or the way particular things 'actually happened', but in virtue of its attempt to express in words a likeness of the perfect and eternal reality.
