Owen Goldin

Edward Halper’s “The Metaphysics of the Syllogism” argues that the ontological ground of valid inference is found in the necessity of the predications that constitute the premises of the sort of syllogism central to Aristotle’s theory: demonstration. I further support his conclusion on the basis of a consideration of the title and structure of Aristotle’s Analytics, as well as some recent analysis of Aristotle’s modal logic. Halper however suggests that the logical form of inference is a result of how the mind sorts out the elements involved in a complex unity. I suggest that it is not primarily the mind that does this work, but language. What the mind does is primarily to be understood as a reflection of what language does, not vice versa.

What is it for a philosophical account to be atomist? What is the attraction of an atomistic metaphysics? These questions are best approached by considering representative varieties of atomism. The present paper offers a preliminary account of atomism in general and then, in order to shed light on atomism in general and its appeal, considers two very different varieties of atomism: that of Democritus and that of Fredkin’s “digital ontology.” Atomistic accounts are philosophically attractive for two related reasons. First, on an atomistic account, the units of explanation are determinate, and for that reason are in principle ultimately intelligible, as are the complexes derived from them. Both examples of atomism that the author takes as examples display these features. Second, atomism is reductionistic. Ancient atomism has this feature, but it is not an inevitable result of an atomistic strategy. It is absent from Fredkin’s digital ontology.

In this dissertation I present an interpretation of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics II.3-10 according to which Aristotle here outlines the structure of reductive explanations, in which attributes taken to be basic from the standpoint of common sense are analyzed as complexes of theoretical primitives. ;I first discuss the basic features of Aristotle's account of scientific understanding. I then show how an Aristotelian definition of a kind is thought to play two roles: that of grounding all explanations of the attributes of that kind and that of expressing the kind's essence. There follows an examination of the various technical senses of kath' auto. ;Next I discuss Aristotle's distinction between those kinds whose einai is assumed among the first principles of a science and those whose einai is demonstrated. I show that Aristotle's distinction is between the basic kinds studied by a science and the attributes demonstrated to belong to those basic kinds. ;I then turn to my interpretation of Post. An. II.3-10. I argue that Aristotle's distinction between what does not have a cause other than itself and what does is the same as the distinction between basic kinds considered by a science and the attributes of those kinds that are demonstrated to exist. I show that Aristotle is claiming that only those kinds that are not to be considered basic can have their essences explained through demonstration. This is done through a syllogism in which the existence of the conjunction of predicates that is identified with the kind through a nominal definition is shown to follow from certain indemonstrable definitions of other kinds. I argue that such a demonstration constitutes a reductive explanation of the existence and properties of the kind in question, as reductive explanation has been explicated by Sellars. I then show how those nonsubstantial kinds that are taken to be basic by the sciences that study them are in effect considered substantial from the perspective of those sciences

At Metaphysics A 5 986a22-b2, Aristotle refers to a Pythagorean table, with two columns of paired opposites. I argue that 1) although Burkert and Zhmud have argued otherwise, there is sufficient textual evidence to indicate that the table, or one much like it, is indeed of Pythagorean origin; 2) research in structural anthropology indicates that the tables are a formalization of arrays of “symbolic classification” which express a pre-scientific world view with social and ethical implications, according to which the presence of a principle on one column of the table will carry with it another principle within the same column; 3) a close analysis of Aristotle's arguments shows that he thought that the table expresses real causal relationships; and 4) Aristotle faults the table of opposites with positing its principles as having universal application and with not distinguishing between those principles that are causally prior and those that are posterior. Aristotle's account of scientific explanation and his own explanations that he developed in accordance with this account are in part the result of his critical encounter with this prescientific Pythagorean table.

Human concern over the urgency of current environmental issues increasingly entails wide-ranging discussions of how we may rethink the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world. In order to provide a context for such discussions this anthology provides a selection of some of the most important, interesting and influential readings on the subject from classical times through to the late nineteenth century. Included are such figures as Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Hildegard of Bingen, St Francis of Assisi, Bacon, Decartes, Kant, Mill, Emerson and Thoreau. As the collection as a whole amply demonstrates, the history of western philosophical accounts of nature can help us to better understand current attitudes and problems. Human Life and the Natural World may also be of interest to a broad range of philosophers and students of philosophy, and more generally to those with a concern for the environment that engages the intellect as well as the heart

There is agreement neither concerning the point that is being made in Posterior analytics 96b15–25 nor the issue Aristotle intends to address. There are two major lines of interpretation of this passage. According to one, sketched by Themistius and developed by Philoponus and Eustratius, Aristotle is primarily concerned with determining the definitions of the infimae species that fall under a certain genus. They understand Aristotle as arguing that this requires collating definitional predictions, seeing which are common to which species. Pacius, on the other hand, takes Aristotle to be saying that a genus is studied scientifically through first determining the infimae species that fall under that genus. This interpretation attributes to Aristotle a distinction between primary and derivative subjects. I argue for Pacius’s interpretation, defending it against Barnes’s objections.Author Keywords: Demonstration; Definition; Aristotle; Species; Principles

Contrā Dale Jamieson, the study of the metaethical foundations of environmental ethics may well lead students to a more environmentally responsible way of life. For although metaethics is rarely decisive in decision making and action, there are two kinds of circumstances in which it can play a crucial role in our practical decisions. First, decisions that have unusual features do not summon habitual ethical reactions, and hence invite the application of ethical precepts that the study of metaethics and ethical theory isolate and clarify. Second, there are times in which the good of others may well be given greater weight in one’s ethical deliberations if theory has made clear that the good to be promoted is ontologically independent of one’s own good.

abstract What gives ethical and political validity to a state? This is to ask what a state is for and to provide a means to determine whether or not a constitution is just. In this paper I compare the account given by Tamir in Liberal Nationalism with that of Rawls, in order to clarify the decisive differences. Although both recognize the importance of particular associations and the moral imperative to be fair, Tamir places priority on the first and Rawls on the second. I explore their practical implications in regard to the ethical defensibility of Israel's self‐identification as a Jewish state and to conflicting nationalistic territorial claims for the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. I suggest that if Tamir is correct in her analysis of nationalism, the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict is a problem that is without the sort of solution that is sought by those who are both interested parties and rational agents of good will

It is now a commonplace that Aristotle and Theophrastus systematically misunderstood Heraclitus in interpreting fire as an ἀρχή of the kind posited by the Milesians. While air in the thought of Anaxamines and the ἄπειρον in the thought of Anaximander can be considered to play the role of the Aristotelian material substrate without too much distortion, this is not so for fire in the thought of Heraclitus. As Cherniss has indicated, while a substrate of the kind posited by the Milesians is a permanent being underlying change, Heraclitean fire is change itself.