John Anders

The project of this paper is to look at problēmata in the Organon, how the Mēchanika employs problēmata, what these texts can teach us about each other, and the significance of all these things for the difficulties that Aristotelian natural philosophy encounters in explaining projectile motion. My treatment of the last item will highlight a pun used in the Mēchanika and argue that it makes a serious point. The paper proceeds as follows: first I will briefly present a reading of how problēmata are understood by Aristotle in the Organon. Next I will examine how problēmata are treated in the Mēchanika. Then I will put these two views of problēmata in dialogue with each other. Lastly I will utilize this discussion to address some of the well-known difficulties associated with Aristotle’s account of projectiles, and what this might mean for Aristotelian natural philosophy as a whole.

This chapter will examine two puzzles that percolate Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (PITC). They concern: (1) whether or not memory is pictorial and (2) whether or not the temporal determinations (past, now, future, etc.) are categories. Considering these aporetic discussions helps us to understand the time diagrams Husserl uses, as well as some of the motivation behind Husserl’s talk of the two intentionalities of retention and his talk of the time-constituting flow. Moreover, this approach to PITC helps to highlight the role that aporetic considerations play in phenomenological investigation more generally.

In his “Third Way” Aquinas appears to argue in a way that relies upon shifting quantifiers in a fallacious way. Some have tried to save this and other parts of the “Third Way” by introducing sophisticated logical and metaphysical machinery. Alternatively, Aquinas’ apparently fallacious quantifier shift can be seen to be part of a valid argument if we supply a simple premise which an Aristotelian natural philosopher would surely hold. In this short paper, I consider candidates for this premise, defend a specific premise, and from that discussion draw a moral about quantifier predicate logic. I conclude that Aristotelian natural philosophy is more than an historical backdrop to Aquinas’ arguments