Gweltaz Guyomarc'h

In his own De anima, Alexander of Aphrodisias famously identifies the “active” (poietikon) intellect with the prime mover in Metaphysics Λ. However, Alexander’s claim raises an issue: why would this divine intellect come in the middle of a study of soul in general and of human intellection in particular? As Paul Moraux asks in his pioneering work on Alexander’s conception of the intellect, is the active intellect a “useless addition”? In this paper, I try to answer this question by challenging a solution according to which the active intellect would intervene directly with the material intellect to trigger its ordinary working. I argue that the active intellect acts as a final cause, both for human intellect and for its ordinary objects of thought. The active intellect is twice “cause of the intellection”, i.e. cause of the actualization of human thought: once (i) when it offers thought occasions for thinking through objects, and again (ii) when it actualizes mediately the human intellect itself in its development. This reading agrees with Alexander’s usual position about the prime mover’s causality. It accounts for the multiplicity of expressions with which Alexander describes the causality of the active intellect in his De anima. It also explains why the development of human intellect has been described without direct reference to active intellect, since substances do not aim directly at the First cause, but their aiming at it is mediated by their desire for their own good.

It is a commonplace that ancient commentators would have worked to systematise Aristotle. In doing so, they would have ignored all that was exploratory and problematic in the Aristotelian thought. Alexander of Aphrodite would offer an typical example of this tendency when he seeks to make metaphysics a demonstrative science. In this chapter I examine his use of the dialectical method in metaphysics, in particular in his exegesis on Metaphysics Beta, and in his practice of the aporetic method. Against the idea that Beta’s aporias are no longer genuine puzzles, I would like to show, on the one hand, that aporia retains, in Alexander, an authentically exploratory function and, on the other hand, that its use in metaphysics is not so much a matter of systematization as of the accomplishment of the organon status granted to dialectics. Thanks to the dialectical method, Alexander maintains this exploratory character of aporias within a scientific approach. If we show the heuristic role of the dialectic as an integral part of science, we will then be able to better base the idea that Alexander maintains the exploratory character of the aporias.

The nutritive soul provides a relevant test case to examine Alexander of Aphrodisias’ conception of the parts of the soul, since it appears in Alexander’s De anima along with methodological considerations, especially an analogy with the division of an apple. I examine here the unity of the powers of the soul, focusing especially on the case of the vegetative soul. If the division of soul parts and soul powers is neither local, nor numerical, what is it? I put forward three correlated hypotheses: 1) Even if there is no lexical distinction in Alexander between “powers of the soul” and “parts of the soul”, Alexander nonetheless comes up with criteria which distinguish a soul power from a soul part, or from a soul of its own. The difference between his position and Aristotle’s is found chiefly in Alexander’s effort to clarify these criteria. 2) As will become clear in the case of the vegetative soul, even the powers that do constitute a soul or a soul part (vegetative/animal/human) are objectively distinct (in a sense that remains to be clarified) and are not simply the result of a change in perspective. 3) The main criterion by which one can account for the organization and the unification of soul parts is the teleological criterion.

At the beginning of his Isagoge, Porphyry establishes a famous set of questions concerning genera and species, which is the origin of the medieval “Quarrel of universals”. But this text gave rise to difficulty for interpreters: does Porphyry, when elaborating this set of questions, refer to historical positions or does he offer these alternatives in a lingua franca, which would be neutral from a doctrinal point of view? This article focusing on the first of the three alternatives raised by Porphyry aims to show that replacing Porphyry's text in its historical and philosophical background can shed light on the meaning of this alternative. During the Post-Hellenistic period (100 B.C.–200 A.D.), the different schools discussed the ontological status of universals. Therefore, not only does Porphyry use the terminology shaped by former philosophers, but he also alludes to the debate between Stoics, Middle Platonists and Peripatetics. Alexander of Aphrodisias constitutes a precious help to reconstruct this dispute, which this article tries to depict.

In Aristotle’s Metaphysics IV.2, the possibility of the science of being qua being seems to depend on the famous so-called doctrine of ‘focal meaning’ (pros hen), i.e. the idea that all beings are said with reference to substance. This article focuses on Alexander of Aphrodisias’ interpretation of this theory. I try here to determine whether Alexander tends to conceive being qua being as a genus and consequently underestimates the starting claim of IV.2: ‘being is said in many ways’. Does the fact that beings are ‘with reference to one’ (pros hen) imply they can be held as mere relatives (pros ti) and thus, according to Aristotle’s own account of relatives, as ‘offshoots’ of substance? Alexander’s interpretation appears to be worthy of interest in that it constantly tries to make consistent these two claims: being does not constitute a genus; the object studied by one science has to present a kind of unity.

According to some testimonies, the Aristotelian ethics have been torn between a hedonist reading, as much as an anti‑hedonist one, throughout Antiquity. From Critolaos to Verginius Rufus and Sosicrates, pleasure is considered both as “an evil [that] gives birth to many other evils” and as the first appropriate thing and the supreme good. This noteworthy disagreement stems from a famous difficulty within the Aristotelian corpus, raised by Aspasius, i.e. the alleged coexistence of two ‘definitions’ of pleasure in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics VII and X. In this paper, I offer a reconstruction of Alexander’s treatment of this difficulty, based on some passages from Alexander’s Ethical Problems and the Mantissa. I try to show that Alexander does not dismiss the so‑called “definition A” of pleasure as being spurious, although he obviously values more the definition B. Even if he never openly brands the definition A as “dialectic”, Alexander takes it as a reputable endoxon, which however needs to be emended in that it blurs the distinction between pleasure and activity. Pleasure only supervenes on the activity to which it is appropriate, and this supervenience is precisely what accounts for the inaccuracy of the definition A. As much as the child conflates the apparent good and the good, so the hedonist takes pleasure to be identical with the activity and the telos of human life. On the contrary, for Alexander, pleasure is actually only a sign of happiness and the shadow of the activity.

English summary: This volume offers a reading of Book III of De Anima, followed by thirteen chapters by leading specialists in Aristotelian philosophy. In this difficult book, which has not ceased to nourish the interpretations of commentators since antiquity, Aristotelian psychology, starting with the faculties that the human soul shares with the rest of the animals, rises to the cognitive functions by which man is distinguished from them. The thirteen studies in the form of a commentary on Book III of De Anima invite us to enter into this Aristotelian exploration of the human soul. French description: Le volume Aristote et l'yme humaine. Lectures de De Anima III offertes a Michel Crubellier, propose une lecture suivie, par de grands specialistes de philosophie aristotelicienne, des treize chapitres qui composent le livre III du De Anima. Dans ce livre difficile, qui n'a cesse de nourrir les interpretations des commentateurs depuis l'Antiquite, la psychologie aristotelicienne, partant des facultes que l'yme humaine partage avec le reste des animaux, s'eleve jusqu'aux fonctions cognitives par lesquelles l'homme, cette fois, s'en distingue. Les treize etudes de ce volume, en forme de commentaire du livre III du De Anima, nous invitent a entrer dans cette exploration aristotelicienne de l'yme humaine.

La conception aristotélicienne des principes divins est parcourue de tensions épistémologiques, archéologiques et proprement théologiques, qui constituent à la fois un défi pour Aristote lui-même et un ensemble de problèmes qu'il lègue à la tradition, qu'elle se revendique de lui, ou se fasse critique à son égard. Restituée au mouvement de la tradition, aux vicissitudes de ses relectures, la théologie aristotélicienne voit s'actualiser les potentialités qu'elle portait en son sein, et qu'Aristote lui-même, déjà, commençait d'explorer. Ce volume, sans prétendre à l'exhaustivité, souhaite, par la diversité de ses contributions, donner à lire quelques-unes de ces actualisations, qu'elles soient exégétiques ou polémiques, et tracer quelques linéaments de leurs effets historiques.

At the beginning of his Isagoge, Porphyry establishes a famous set of questions concerning genera and species, which is the origin of the medieval “Quarrel of universals”. But this text gave rise to difficulty for interpreters: does Porphyry, when elaborating this set of questions, refer to historical positions or does he offer these alternatives in a lingua franca, which would be neutral from a doctrinal point of view? This article focusing on the first of the three alternatives raised by Porphyry aims to show that replacing Porphyry's text in its historical and philosophical background can shed light on the meaning of this alternative. During the Post-Hellenistic period (100 B.C.–200 A.D.), the different schools discussed the ontological status of universals. Therefore, not only does Porphyry use the terminology shaped by former philosophers, but he also alludes to the debate between Stoics, Middle Platonists and Peripatetics. Alexander of Aphrodisias constitutes a precious help to reconstruct this dispute, which this article tries to depict.

This volume sheds new light on Alexander of Aphrodisias' On Mixture and Growth as an intelligent and carefully crafted rebuttal of Stoic blending, which Alexander regarded as the closest rival of his own brand of hylomorphism. The authors explore Alexander's dialectical method and determine the precise character of the Stoic theory he attacks. The problematic notions of mutual co-extension and infinite division appear in their proper context, while the successive stages of the process of blending are carefully distinguished from the resulting state of the blend. In this perspective the discussion of growth that closes Alexander's work finds its natural place.

Cet article consiste en une étude des différentes occurrences de l’expression « philosophie première » dans le corpus aristotélicien. Une interprétation devenue courante, soutenue en particulier par A. Mansion, veut que « philosophie première » renvoie toujours à la science théologique de Métaphysique E 1. On cherche au contraire à montrer que l’expression couvre en réalité une grande partie des objets traités par l’ensemble de la Métaphysique, parmi lesquels, par exemple, l’étude de la forme comme substance première, l’examen des axiomes, la réfutation des Idées. Pour ce faire, on s’intéresse à la fonction argumentative de l’expression dans ses contextes d’apparition, en montrant qu’elle sert quasi systématiquement à indiquer les limites de la physique. L’expression « philosophie première » a ainsi un sens architectonique et une fonction de démarcation. La pluralité des objets qu’elle recouvre, cependant, n’entraîne pas sa dispersion entre plusieurs sciences mais en fait un concept englobant. Il est donc légitime de se servir de l’expression pour poser la question de l’unité de la science recherchée par Aristote.

In his own De anima, Alexander of Aphrodisias famously identifies the “active” (poietikon) intellect with the prime mover in Metaphysics Λ. However, Alexander’s claim raises an issue: why would this divine intellect come in the middle of a study of soul in general and of human intellection in particular? As Paul Moraux asks in his pioneering work on Alexander’s conception of the intellect, is the active intellect a “useless addition”? In this paper, I try to answer this question by challenging a solution according to which the active intellect would intervene directly with the material intellect to trigger its ordinary working. I argue that the active intellect acts as a final cause, both for human intellect and for its ordinary objects of thought. The active intellect is twice “cause of the intellection”, i.e. cause of the actualization of human thought: once (i) when it offers thought occasions for thinking through objects, and again (ii) when it actualizes mediately the human intellect itself in its development. This reading agrees with Alexander’s usual position about the prime mover’s causality. It accounts for the multiplicity of expressions with which Alexander describes the causality of the active intellect in his De anima. It also explains why the development of human intellect has been described without direct reference to active intellect, since substances do not aim directly at the First cause, but their aiming at it is mediated by their desire for their own good.

In his De anima, Alexander of Aphrodisias identifies the active intellect with the first mover and describes this “first cause” as an immaterial and separate form. In this article, we try to explain the differences between Aristotle and Alexander on this point. Aristotle never defines the first mover as a form but claims that its being is actuality. How is it possible for Alexander, well known for being “the Commentator par excellence”, to assert such a thesis which seems dangerously close to platonism ? We want to show that this description of first mover as a pure face (eidos) is not accidental in Alexander's work and is linked up with his epistemological conceptions as much as his metaphysics.