Daniel Maher

“New ideas and innovations” are constituted in relation to the status quo: what had been new becomes old when something yet newer appears. This truism draws attention to the necessity of thinking about the new in relation to what came before. In reproductive ethics, this means, in part, that mitochondrial donation, for example, must be understood in reference to “old” IVF. It also means that we must understand this and every other technique for manipulating, facilitating, or preventing conception in relation to the natural way or ways in which human beings come to be. The temporal and conceptual priority of nature to our technical, moral, and political innovations is inescapable, and yet we do not seem to have a clear understanding of what we presuppose nature to be when, for example, we approve of three-parent babies and disapprove of reproductive cloning. The prospects of a child arising from a single “parent” or from three parents shed fresh light on what it means for human beings to arise naturally from two. Thesis: Even if human sexuality is an evolutionary accident and provides no standard to which we should defer, it remains the reference point for thinking about all “new ideas and innovations” by which we strive to bring nature under our control and eliminate chance.

This volume, the 36th year of published proceedings, contains five papers, four commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during the academic year 2019–20. Paper topics: On Platonism, how Plato's Cave preserves his political interest from Arendt's critique, and how Plutarch's Isis and Osiris uses a complex framing device to integrate Platonic metaphysics and politics. On Aristotle, that dialectic is a versatile techne for formal and informal discussion, and the role of practice to preserve the voluntary nature of character despite its grounding in upbringing. Finally, using Aristotle to argue for the legitimacy of anger against transhumanist efforts, echoing Stoic concerns, against such emotions. The comments challenge or sustain the theses presented in the main papers

The first volume in the Clarendon Aristotle Series to present a segment of Nicomachean Ethics is Professor Pakaluk’s translation of and commentary on books 8 and 9. In a brief preface, Pakaluk explains that the translation attempts “to be accurate and literal,” “to make clear the inferential and argumentative structure of the text,” and to convey in good English “the force and character of Aristotle’s style”. In his commentary, he attempts to analyze the logic of Aristotle’s arguments and the consistency of his conclusions, and to give a sort of divisio textus by “determining the function of the various parts of a chapter”. He also seeks to identify “the deeper philosophical motivation underlying some larger stretches of the argument” and formulates arguments that he takes Aristotle to suggest as well as the goals or unstated presuppositions that might be guiding Aristotle’s investigation.

Aristotle's treatment of Parmenides in the beginning of Physics argues that it is impossible that being have one sense only, but leaves unstated the relation between one and being. The remainder of Physics A reveals that the practice of counting the principles involves a determination of what those principles are. The analysis of number that is incorporated into Aristotle's account of time in Physics $\Delta$ reveals that a multitude or magnitude can be counted to be a determinate number only by fixing a measure that is or can be taken to be one and that is cognate $ with each part of the amount to be counted. Counting proceeds differently for discrete multitudes and continuous magnitudes because the measures for each are one in different ways. In order to determine more precisely in what sense being is one, the dissertation follows Aristotle's procedure in Metaphysics, beginning with a difficulty cast in terms of the accounts of his predecessors, concerning how being and one are with respect to other natures. Aristotle's solution to the difficulty proceeds by way of explaining how sensible substances are one despite their many parts. Aristotle shows that each determinate sense of being is and is one in virtue of itself, so that one belongs to the first sense of being with an intimacy greater than that between a substance and its accident, or between a definition and its part, or between matter and form, or even between potency and act. Even so, being and one do not have the same account . Aristotle's solution to the aporia involves distinguishing between one in the sense of indivisible and one in the sense of the measure of a class. This distinction enables him to show how there can be different sorts of numbers and to preserve the fundamental difference between what is one in itself and what is many

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s two forms of human happiness correspond to two forms of human virtue (moral and intellectual) and, I argue, to two forms of virtuous friendship (active and contemplative). I propose that the most properly human form of happiness is achieved in contemplative friendship. This friendship is a genuinely contemplative approximation of divine life and still a specifically human life consisting in discursivespeech with others. Contemplative friends wish the good to one another as human beings and thus fulfill what friendship is more completely than do friends occupied with moral virtue. Aristotle’s text shows, first, that discussion and thinking can be shared more perfectly than can moral action and, second, that intellectual virtue completes human nature more fully than does moral virtue.