Elena Comay del Junco

Forthcoming in _Arabic Sciences and Philosophy_ 38, no. 1 This paper examines the place of love in Ibn Sina’s philosophical theology. Despite adopting a term historically associated with passionate longing (ʿishq), Ibn Sina develops an account of love that severs the connection between love and desire and hence sees love as entailing lack or imperfection. Love, instead, is understood as a kind of pleasure, which allows it to be ascribed to God. We consider antecedents in both Islamic and Greek sources, before offering a close reading of key chapters of the Pointers and Reminders and Letter on Love. Then, after demonstrating how his account of divine love closely parallels his well-known views on divine knowledge, the paper shows how this aims to remedy perceived defects in Aristotle’s cosmotheology. We conclude with two prompts for future investigation. The first examines intertexts between Ibn Sina and earlier Sufi authors and suggests that the familiar opposition between “mystical” and “anti-mystical” readings may obscure more than it reveals. The second looks ahead to later critics, including both al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya, whose philosophical theology nevertheless incorporates divine in a way that bears unmistakable similarities with Ibn Sina’s.

This chapter looks at Aristotle’s writing on Egypt in order to articulate new ways of engagement with the (pre)history of race and racism in the history of philosophy. For readers familiar with the history of Greek writing about foreign cultures, it will come as no surprise that Egypt stands for the strange and wondrous par excellence—the country possessing the “most wonders of any other land,” to quote Herodotus’ well-known epithet (Hist. ii. 35). Against this cultural background and in a wide range of context from across his corpus—from biology to astronomy to politics—we shall see that Aristotle’s remarks about Egypt are marked fundamentally by ambivalence. On the one hand, he refers repeatedly to the country’s enormous antiquity, its abundance, and its intellectual accomplishments. Yet not only does he share other authors’ unease at the weirdness of this strange land—wondrousness and monstrosity are never far apart—but even these apparently ‘positive’ remarks about Egypt turn out to be more complex than they may initially appear. Ancientness begets stasis, fertility destabilizes gender roles, and even Egypt’s priority in the history of science turns out to be rather less significant than modern readers might assume. A close reading of the Aristotelian construction of Egypt should thus prompt us to consider not just the familiar question of whether a given historical figure was or was not racist but, even more important, how they were racist and how their modes of crafting race both align with and diverge from contemporary ones.

Aristotle is not known as a theorist of erotic love, his apparent disinterest contrasting both with Plato’s extensive treatment as well as the intensity of his own interest in friendship. Yet there is an original account to be uncovered in his scattered remarks on the subject. Aristotelian eros is rooted in the sexual norms operative in Aristotle’s time—a ‘paiderastic paradigm’—yet is not merely the restatement of classical Greek commonplaces. This article reconstructs a finely tuned account of Aristotelian eros using the Rhetoric’s framework for understanding emotions. This descriptive, phenomenological approach stands apart from Plato’s prescriptions to turn our erotic attentions away from the sexual domain, as well as from contemporary philosophers who treat love as an unproblematic and self-evidently desirable phenomenon.

Many contemporary philosophers hold that comparison requires a common, monistic ‘covering value’, and Aristotle is often described as a forerunner of this view. This paper reconsiders that claim. First, its textual warrant is substantially weaker than has been thought. Philosophically, moreover, Aristotle’s theory of non-synonymous predication allows for comparisons to be made using the special kind of non-synonymous terms that he calls pros hen legomenon, literally those ‘said with reference to a single thing.’ His favourite example is ‘healthy’ as said of food, organisms, and medical procedures: these various senses are not entirely synonymous, yet are not simply unconnected. This has significant implications. Aristotle famously holds that goodness is species-specific, and it would then seem that species cannot be ranked according to how good they are. Yet Aristotle does—frequently—rank species. The paper shows us that he is not, pace other scholars, thereby caught in a contradiction.

How many scientific demonstrations can a single phenomenon have? This paper argues that, according to Aristotle's theory of scientific knowledge as laid out in the Posterior Analytics, a single conclusion may be demonstrated via more than one explanatory middle term. I also argue that this model of multiple demonstration is put into practice in the biological writings. This paper thereby accomplishes two related goals: it clarifies certain relatively obscure passages of the Posterior Analytics and uses them to show how Aristotle explains biological phenomena by reference to both final and material causes in the Parts of Animals. The first part of the paper explains the account of multiple demonstration present in the Posterior Analytics and distinguishes it from another kind of plural explanation rejected by Aristotle. The second part of the paper turns to the biological explanation in the Parts of Animals and shows how Aristotle's account of multiple demonstrations works in practice. The paper thus provides evidence for the claim that the ‘applied’ reasoning on display in the biological works is in harmony with the framework of the logical treatises, and thus may also shed light on questions of the unity of the Aristotelian corpus.