Jiyao Tang

Many scholars argue that from an Aristotelian point of view, Alexander has no conceptual ground to defend his incompatibilist and indeterminist position; I wish to argue against this reading by showing that this is only right if we take his position to be grounded on the Nicomachean account of what is up to us. I thus wish to argue that Alexander’s position is not at odds with Aristotle’s notion of what is up to us in the Eudemian account, which clearly claims that the human being’s capacity of acting otherwise is deeply rooted in her rational nature.

Aristote, Théophraste, Plutarque, Rhétorique, Ethique à Nicomaque, This paper offers a reconstruction of Aristotle’s theory of humor, both descriptive and normative. In the first part, which focuses mainly on the third book of the Rhetoric, I show that the idea of "incongruity" is central to understanding what makes a word or expression "funny" or "humorous". In the second part, I attempt to reconstruct this theory from a normative point of view (relying above all on the chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics dedicated to the virtue of the "sense of humor"), with the central question, "what is a good joke".

Anscombe famously argues that ‘I’ is not a referring expression, otherwise, a ‘Cartesian Ego’ would inevitably appear. She thinks the form of self-consciousness expressed in ‘I’ is ‘subjectless’: it is consciousness that does not involve a self-object (or Ego). Sartre’s theory of consciousness offers a strikingly parallel and mutually illuminating framework. He similarly denies the presence of the Ego within consciousness, arguing instead that the Ego is a transcendent object constructed through reflection. For both of them, the fundamental form of self-consciousness is pre-reflective. I argue that Anscombe’s position encounters two difficulties: (1) how the non-referential ‘I’ can express subjectivity, and (2) how self-consciousness is about an embodied subject. I propose that Sartre’s accounts of (1) the ‘fundamental ipseity’ and (2) the ‘lived body’ offer a phenomenological framework that helps to respond to Anscombe’s difficulties.