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292Aristotle’s Considered View of the Path to KnowledgeIn Lesher James H. (ed.), El espíritu y la letra: un homenaje a Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, Ediciones Colihue. pp. 127-145. 2012.I argue that these inconsistencies in wording and practice reflect the existence of two distinct Aristotelian views of inquiry, one peculiar to the Posterior Analytics and the other put forward in the Physics and practiced in the Physics and in other treatises. Although the two views overlap to some degree (e.g. both regard a rudimentary understanding of the subject as an essential first stage), the view of the syllogism as the workhorse of scientific investigation and the related view of inquir…Read more
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15The emergence of philosophical interest in cognitionOxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 12 1-34. 1994.On some accounts, early reflection on the nature of human cognition focused on its physical or physiological causes (as, for example, when in fragment 105 Empedocles identifies thought with blood). On other accounts, there was an identifiable process of semantic development in which a number of perception-oriented terms for knowing (e.g. gignôskô, oida, noeô, and suniêmi) took on a more intellectual orientation. Although some find evidence of this transition in the poems of Solon and Archilochus…Read more
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139‘Early Interest in Knowledge’In The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, . pp. 225-249. 1999.Western philosophy begins with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Or so we are told by Aristotle and many members of the later doxographical tradition. But a good case can be made that several centuries before the Milesian thinkers began their investigations, the poets of archaic Greece reflected on the limits of human intelligence and concluded that no mortal being could know the full and certain truth. Homer belittled the mental capacities of ‘creatures of a day’ and a series of poets of the…Read more
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51 Parmenidean ElenchosIn Scott Gary Alan (ed.), Does Socrates Have a Method?: Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato's Dialogues and Beyond, Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 19-35. 2002.
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40The humanizing of knowledge in presocratic thoughtIn Patricia Curd & Daniel W. Graham (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2008.This article explores Presocratic epistemology, arguing that divine revelation is replaced as a warrant for knowledge with naturalistic accounts of how and what we humans can know; thus replacing earlier Greek pessimism about knowledge with a more optimistic outlook that allows for human discovery of the truth. A review of the relevant fragments and testimonia shows that Xenophanes, Alcmaeon, Heraclitus, and Parmenides—even Pythagoras and Empedocles—all moved some distance away from the older “g…Read more
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17Odysseás Elytis's Conversation with Heraclitus: "Of Ephesus"Philosophy and Literature 44 (2): 226-236. 2020.ARRAY
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22Borges's Love Affair with HeraclitusPhilosophy and Literature 41 (1A): 303-314. 2017.In an early poem, "Year's End", Jorge Luis Borges takes the turning of the year as an occasion to consider how "something in us" endures, despite the fact that we are products of "infinite random possibilities" and "droplets in the stream of Heraclitus": It is not the emblematic detail of replacing a two with a three, nor that barren metaphor that brings together a time that dies and another coming up nor yet the rounding out of some astronomical process that stuns and undermines the altiplano1 …Read more
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31Aristotle's Theory of the Unity of Science (review) (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (2): 290-292. 2001.Malcolm Wilson begins his account of Aristotle’s philosophy of science by identifying a difficulty inherent in Aristotle’s general approach to understanding the nature of scientific thought: if we assume, with Aristotle, that the premises of a scientific demonstration must contain only terms predicable of a subject essentially (or per se) and ‘as such’ (or qua a particular kind of being), we risk being committed to a view of the sciences as a set of narrowly focused and unrelated areas of inquir…Read more
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23Hume's analysis of "cause" and the 'two-definitions' disputeJournal of the History of Philosophy 11 (3): 387-392. 1973.
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15Τὰ Πολλὰ Ἥσσω ΝοῦAncient Philosophy 42 (1): 1-9. 2022.Diogenes Laertius reports that Xenophanes of Colophon said that τὰ πολλὰ ἥσσω νοῦ εἶναι— on one defensible translation: that ‘many things are weaker than mind.’ The remark has been interpreted in various ways, none of them entirely convincing. However, a review of the relevant fragments and ancient testimonia will provide the basis for a credible interpretation. Ultimately, it will emerge that the remark reflects Xenophanes’ understanding of the relationship between the divine mind and the cosmo…Read more
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A systematic Xenophanes?In Joe McCoy & Charles H. Kahn (eds.), Early Greek philosophy: the Presocratics and the emergence of reason, Catholic University of America Press. 2013.
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225Knowledge and Presence in Early Greek Poetry and PhilosophyIn ‘Knowledge’ in Archaic Greece: What Counted as ‘knowledge’ Before there was a Discipline called Philosophy, Center For Hellenic Studies. forthcoming.Philosophical reflection on the conditions of knowledge did not begin in a cultural vacuum. Several centuries before the Ionian thinkers began their investigations, the Homeric bards had identified various factors that militate against a secure grasp of the truth. In the words of the ‘second invocation of the Muses’ in Iliad II: “you, goddesses, are present and know all things, whereas we mortals hear only a rumor and know nothing.” Similarly Archilochus: “Of such a sort, Glaucus, son of Leptine…Read more
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230Heraclitus and Modern Poetry: Works Cited
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205This study forms a part of a larger investigation of the influence of the philosophy of Heraclitus of Ephesus on modern poetry. T. S. Eliot, to mention the best known of the many poets inspired by Heraclitus, selected two Heraclitus fragments (B 2 and B 60) as epigraphs for his “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot explained that he was drawn to the fragments because of their ‘ambiguity’ and ‘extraordinary poetic suggestiveness’. Similarly, in ‘This Solitude of Cataracts’, Walla…Read more
Areas of Specialization
History of Western Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
History of Western Philosophy |