Bryan C. Reece

Many think that reality is structured such that some beings are more fundamental than others and characterize this structure in terms of “grounding.” Grounding is typically regarded as explanatory and as exhibiting certain order-theoretic properties: asymmetry, irreflexivity, and transitivity. Aristotle's notion of ontological priority, which inspired discussions of grounding, also has these features. This Element clarifies Aristotle's discussions of ontological priority, explores how it relates to other kinds of priority, and identifies important connections to metaphysical grounding. Aristotle provides numerous examples that appear to impugn ontological priority's order-theoretic coherence. This is Aristotle's “Priority Problem.” But Aristotle has an independently motivated solution that eliminates the threat from each of the apparently problematic examples and explains why such examples are ubiquitous. The Element argues that a ground-theoretic analog of Aristotle's solution to the Priority Problem addresses recent challenges to grounding.

Some think that the notion of grounding is unhelpful or inappropriate for understanding philosophy or its history. This idea is expressed in this volume’s chapter by Sosseh Assaturian and Rachel O’Keefe. They claim that since the nature of grounding is highly controversial, appealing to the notion is unhelpful for illuminating historical positions. They also claim that the thematization of grounding is a recent phenomenon and infer from this that describing historical views in terms of grounding is anachronistic. This chapter argues for the rejection of both claims. The first would prove too much, for various other notions that have long been centrally important in philosophical discourse are controversial in similar ways. The second is also dubious: various philosophers of the past have carefully theorized notions that historically give rise to the notion of grounding and exhibit the properties nowadays most commonly agreed to belong to grounding. The chapter concludes with a description of the ground-theoretic conception of philosophy advocated by those past thinkers.

Aristotle’s cryptic De Anima III 5 has precipitated an enormous volume of commentary, especially about the identity of what has come to be known as active intellect and how it relates to potential intellect. Some take active intellect to be the prime mover of Metaphysics Λ, others a hypostatic or cosmic principle (for example, an ideal Intellect, intellect associated with the tenth celestial sphere, etc.), and others a faculty, potentiality, or power of the human soul that is distinct in function, office, or operation from potential intellect. But a very different, ontologically lightweight way of characterizing active and potential intellect can be reconstructed from fragments of a work by the only interpreter personally acquainted with Aristotle, his junior colleague, Theophrastus of Eresus. This reconstruction suggests various philosophically attractive solutions to notorious problems raised by Aristotle’s text.

Aristotle thinks that happiness is an activity---it consists in doing something---rather than a feeling. It is the best activity of which humans are capable and is spread out over the course of a life. But what kind of activity is it? Some of his remarks indicate that it is a single best kind of activity, intellectual contemplation. Other evidence suggests that it is an overarching activity that has various virtuous activities, ethical and intellectual, as parts. At stake are questions about how we should live and the correct balance of theoretical and practical activity. Numerous interpreters have sharply disagreed about Aristotle's answers to such questions. This book offers a fundamentally new approach to determining what kind of activity Aristotle thinks happiness is, one that challenges widespread assumptions that have until now prevented a dialectically satisfactory interpretation. This approach displays the boldness and systematicity of Aristotle's practical philosophy.

Aristotle’s theory of human happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics explicitly depends on the claim that contemplation (theôria) is peculiar to human beings, whether it is our function or only part of it. But there is a notorious problem: Aristotle says that divine beings also contemplate. Various solutions have been proposed, but each has difficulties. Drawing on an analysis of what divine contemplation involves according to Aristotle, I identify an assumption common to all of these proposals and argue for rejecting it. This allows a straightforward solution to the problem and there is evidence that Aristotle would have adopted it.

Aristotle appears to claim at Nicomachean Ethics 10.8, 1178a9 that there are two kinds of happy life: one theoretical, one practical. This claim is notoriously problematic and does not follow from anything that Aristotle has said to that point. However, the apparent claim depends on supplying 'happy' or 'happiest' from the previous sentence, as is standard among translators and interpreters. I argue for an alternative supplement that commits Aristotle to a much less problematic and unexpected position and permits a wider variety of interpretations of Aristotle’s overall theory of happiness.

Diogenes subscribes to a principle that, roughly, causal interaction and change require a certain sort of uniformity among the relata. Attending to this principle can help us understand Diogenes's relationship to the superficially similar Anaximenes without insisting, as some do, that Diogenes must be consciously responding to Parmenides. Diogenes is distinctive and philosophically interesting because his principle combines two senses of ‘archê’ (principle, starting-point), namely, the idea of source or origin and that of underlying (material) principle, and gives the rudiments of an argument for associating the two, by which Aristotle may have been influenced. Diogenes’s principle and its deployment in biological explanations thematized a concern that Aristotle at least partially shared, and which led him to appeal, as Diogenes is said to have done, to pneuma (breath, air).

Aristotle’s typical procedure is to identify something's four causes. Intentional action has typically been treated as an exception: most think that Aristotle has the standard causalist account, according to which an intentional action is a bodily movement efficiently caused by an attitude of the appropriate sort. I show that action is not an exception to Aristotle’s typical procedure: he has the resources to specify four causes of action, and thus to articulate a powerful theory of action unlike any other on offer.