Cameron F. Coates

Pierre Aubenque examines how Aristotle’s theory of moral agency is grounded in his broader metaphysics and cosmology. Human action intervenes within “the domain of the contingent”: that which is capable of being otherwise (to endechomenon allōs echein). While wisdom and science have as their object what is immutable and necessary, the virtue of “prudence” (phronēsis) names the aptitude for responding correctly to the indeterminacy of the future and the vicissitudes of chance. While this contingency always threatens to frustrate our ends, it is also the foundation for the very possibility of action and thus for human excellence and flourishing. Throughout the essay, Aubenque contrasts Aristotle’s “cosmology of contingency” with the Stoic worldview. Along the way, Aubenque offers provocative readings of Aristotle’s concepts of art (technē), chance (tuchē), and the opportune moment (kairos). This translation is published in Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice, Greenstine, Johnson, and Mesing eds. (Edinburgh University Press 2025). The essay was originally published as ‘Cosmologie de la prudence’, Chapter 2 of Aubenque’s monograph La prudence chez Aristote (Presses Universitaires de France 1963).

Is it natural for living things to die? According to most interpreters Aristotle considers death to be unnatural: it is a failure of the living thing’s form to completely master the inherent tendency of all matter to disintegrate into the elements. On this reading death conflicts with a living thing’s formal nature—it follows from its material nature alone. I argue that this standard story about Aristotle’s ontology of death is incorrect. While it is true that death is inevitable on account of material necessity, an organism’s species-typical life cycle is an expression of its formal nature as well. This life cycle is limited by a natural lifespan and concludes in what he terms “natural death.” Paradoxically, Aristotle considers natural death to be an intrinsic good for living beings, for the completion of its life cycle is a way in which mortal life imitates the immortal life of the heavenly bodies.

In De Anima 2.4, Aristotle claims that nutritive soul encompasses two distinct biological functions: nutrition and reproduction. We challenge a pervasive interpretation which posits ‘nutrients’ as the correlative object (antikeimenon) of the nutritive capacity. Instead, the shared object of nutrition and reproduction is that which is nourished and reproduced: the ensouled body, qua ensouled. Both functions aim at preserving this object, and thus at preserving the form, life, and being of the individual organism. In each case, we show how Aristotle’s detailed biological analysis supports this ontological argument.

Plato’s references to Empedocles in the myth of the Statesman perform a crucial role in the overarching political argument of the dialogue. Empedocles conceives of the cosmos as structured like a democracy, where the constituent powers ‘rule in turn’, sharing the offices of rulership equally via a cyclical exchange of power. In a complex act of philosophical appropriation, Plato takes up Empedocles’ cosmic cycles of rule in order to ‘correct’ them: instead of a democracy in which rule is shared cyclically amongst equal constituents, Plato’s cosmos undergoes cycles of the presence and absence of a single cosmic monarch who possesses ‘kingly epistēmē’. By means of a revision of Empedocles’ democratic cosmology, Plato’s richly woven myth is designed precisely to reject the appropriateness of democracy as a form of human political association and legitimate monarchy in its stead.