• Powers, Parts, and Wholes (edited book)
    with Christopher J. Austin and Andrea Roselli
    Routledge. 2024.
  •  52
    Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2015.
    Written by a group of leading scholars, this unique collection of essays investigates the views of both pagan and Christian philosophers on causation and the creation of the cosmos. Structured in two parts, the volume first looks at divine agency and how late antique thinkers, including the Stoics, Plotinus, Porphyry, Simplicius, Philoponus and Gregory of Nyssa, tackled questions such as: is the cosmos eternal? Did it come from nothing or from something pre-existing? How was it caused to come in…Read more
  •  31
    This volume introduces readers to a selected number of core issues in metaphysics that have been central in the history of philosophy and remain foundational to contemporary debates, that is: substances; properties; modality and essence; causality; determinism and free will. Anna Marmodoro and Erasmus Mayr take a neo-Aristotelian approach both in the selection and presentation of the topics. But Marmodoro and Mayr's discussion is not narrowly partisan-it consistently presents opposing sides of t…Read more
  •  25
    We inhabit a world not only full of natural dispositions independent of human design, but also artificial dispositions created by our technological prowess. How do these dispositions, found in automation, computation, and artificial intelligence applications, differ metaphysically from their natural counterparts? This collection investigates artificial dispositions: what they are, the roles they play in artificial systems, and how they impact our understanding of the nature of reality, the struc…Read more
  •  36
    Powers, Parts and Wholes: Essays on the Mereology of Powers (edited book)
    with Christopher J. Austin and Andrea Roselli
    Routledge. 2023.
    This volume offers a fresh exploration of the parts-whole relations within a power and among powers. While the metaphysics of powers has been extensively examined in the literature, powers have yet to be studied from the perspective of their mereology. Powers are often assumed to be atomic; and yet what they can do--and what can happen to them--is complex. But if powers are simple, how can they have complex manifestations? Can powers have parts? According to which rules of composition do powers …Read more
  •  120
    Aquinas on Forms, Substances and Artifacts
    with Ben Page
    Vivarium 54 (1): 1-21. 2016.
    _ Source: _Volume 54, Issue 1, pp 1 - 21 Thomas Aquinas sees a sharp metaphysical distinction between artifacts and substances, but does not offer any explicit account of it. We argue that for Aquinas the contribution that an artisan makes to the generation of an artifact compromises the causal responsibility of the form of that artifact for what the artifact is; hence it compromises the metaphysical unity of the artifact to that of an accidental unity. By contrast, the metaphysical unity of a s…Read more
  •  13
    Scott Berman, Platonism and the Objects of Science
    Ancient Philosophy Today 5 (1): 80-85. 2023.
  •  2
    Philosophical and Theological Topics in Joachim of Fiore and the Joachimite Tradition
    Recherches de Theologie Et Philosophie Medievales 89 (2): 213-213. 2023.
    Introduction.
  •  1
    Given how central causality is in ancient as well as in modern philosophical thought, it is surprising that the number of existing studies on the way the topic was theorized on in antiquity are still too few. This is one of the reasons why the present volume is a very welcome addition to the literature on ancient theories of causation. This volume also has the special merit of covering a period in ancient Western thought that, as a whole, has been so far less investigated than others: the Hel...
  •  14
    The Power of Color
    American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (1): 65-78. 2020.
    Are colors features of objects “out there in the world” or are they features of our inner experience and only “in our head?” Color perception has been the focus of extensive philosophical and scientific debate. In this paper we discuss the limitations of the view that Chalmers’ (2006) has characterized as Primitivism, and we develop Marmodoro’s (2006) Constitutionalism further, to provide a metaphysical account of color perception in terms of causal powers. The result is Power-based Constitution…Read more
  •  10
    Forms and Structure in Plato's Metaphysics
    Oxford University Press. 2021.
    This book investigates the thought of two of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, Plato and his predecessor Anaxagoras, with respect to their metaphysical accounts of objects and their properties. The book introduces a fresh perspective on these two thinkers' ideas, displaying the debt of Plato's theory on Anaxagoras's, and principally arguing that their core metaphysical concept is overlap; overlap between properties and things in the world. Initially Plato endorses Anaxagoras's mode…Read more
  •  31
    Powers, Time and Free Will (edited book)
    with Christopher Austin and Andrea Roselli
    Springer. 2022.
    This book brings together twelve original contributions by leading scholars on the much-debated issues of what is free will and how can we exercise it in a world governed by laws of nature. Which conception of laws of nature best fits with how we conceive of free will? And which constraints does our conception of the laws of nature place on how we think of free will? The metaphysics of causation and the metaphysics of dispositions are also explored in this edited volume, in relation to whether t…Read more
  •  50
    Instantiation
    Metaphysics 4 (1): 32-46. 2021.
    What is it, metaphysically, for a universal to be instantiated in a concrete particular? Philosophical controversy has been ongoing since the beginning of philosophy itself. I here contribute a novel account of instantiation developed on the basis of Aristotelian premises (but departing from the mainstream interpretation according to which Aristotelian universals are instantiated by ‘combining’ hylomorphically with matter). The key stance is that for Aristotle each substance is one, i.e. single …Read more
  •  63
    Why studying the history of philosophy matters
    Think 21 (60): 5-20. 2022.
    The debate over whether and how philosophers of today may usefully engage with philosophers of the past is nearly as old as the history of philosophy itself. Does the study of the history of philosophy train or corrupt the budding philosopher's mind? Why study the history of philosophy? And, how to study the history of philosophy? I discuss some mainstream approaches to the study of the history of philosophy, before explicating the one I adopt and commend.
  •  1
    Time, Law and Free Will (edited book)
    with Christopher Austin and Andrea Roselli
    Springer. forthcoming.
  •  148
    We summarize in this introduction the contents of all the contributions included in Synthese special issue on form, structure and hylomorphism. Moreover, we provide an exhaustive bibliography of recent research on these topics.
  •  5
    The Reception of Greek Ethics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium (edited book)
    with Sophia Xenophontos
    Cambridge University Press. 2021.
    Authored by an interdisciplinary team of experts, including historians, classicists, philosophers and theologians, this original collection of essays offers the first authoritative analysis of the multifaceted reception of Greek ethics in late antiquity and Byzantium, opening up a hitherto under-explored topic in the history of Greek philosophy. The essays discuss the sophisticated ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were reinvigorated and transformed by later authors to …Read more
  •  7
    Editorial
    Ancient Philosophy Today 2 (2): 89-90. 2020.
  •  1316
    Introduction: The Metaphysics of Relations
    In Anna Marmodoro & David Yates (eds.), The Metaphysics of Relations, Oxford University Press. pp. 1-18. 2016.
    An introduction to our edited volume, The Metaphysics of Relations, covering a range of issues including the problem of order, the ontological status of relations, reasons for ancient scepticism about relational properties, and two ways of drawing the distinction between internal and external relations.
  •  39
    The Foundation of Reality: Fundamentality, Space, and Time (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2020.
    Are space and time fundamental features of our world or might they emerge from something else? The Foundation of Reality brings together metaphysicians and philosophers of physics working on space, time, and fundamentality to address this timely question.
  •  94
    Introduction: Mental Powers
    Topoi 39 (5): 1017-1020. 2020.
    The metaphysics of powers (Shoemaker, 1980; Mumford, 2004; Marmodoro, 2009; Heil, 2012 among many others) is a promising conceptual framework that has been successfully put to use in many philosophical and scientific domains, but surprisingly its potential applications in the contemporary philosophy of mind are still under-investigated. This thematic issue aims to show that power ontology has implications concerning major questions in the contemporary philosophy of mind, such as: what is the met…Read more
  • The extended mind in ontological entanglements
    In Anna Marmodoro & Jonathan Hill (eds.), The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, Oxford University Press. 2011.
  •  94
    The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into …Read more
  •  441
    Gregory of Nyssa on the creation of the world
    In Anna Marmodoro & Brian D. Prince (eds.), Causation and Creation in Late Antiquity, Cambridge University Press. pp. 94-110. 2015.