Jonathan Buttaci

I examine the development of Cebes’ objection in Plato’s Phaedo, that nothing prevents (οὐδὲν κωλύει) the soul’s eventual destruction, and Socrates’ several attempts to meet this challenge. Given a substantive similarity between Socrates’ final argument and Aristotle’s account of substantial form, I suggest that Aristotle’s use of the same phrase is significant, imitating the structure of Cebes’ objection while reversing its argumentative burden. Instead of arguing that nothing prevents the soul’s eventually perishing, Aristotle argues that nothing prevents its indefinite survival (at least in some limited cases). According to this new interpretation, Aristotle’s apparently tentative remarks about the imperishability of the human soul mark a subtle and selective appropriation of both the framing and the argument of Plato’s Phaedo. I end by exploring several reasons why Aristotle might have preferred this argumentative strategy to Socrates’ more direct response to Cebes’ challenge.

The authors propose and explore conditions of adequacy for human interpretations of Aristotle’s De anima 3.5. Given the descriptions of that chapter, if the agent intellect is human, then it would be our most godlike capacity or principle, and thus should play a commensurate role in our most godlike activity, contemplation. The receptive intellect of 3.4, however, clearly also plays some essential role in human contemplative activity. The authors apply these constraints jointly in a critical review of representative interpretations.

I consider a more generic goal teachers have for students in addition to learning some determinate content: that they learn how to learn anything whatsoever. To explain this process, I draw on two insights from Aristotle’s account of learning: first, that in every case students learn by doing the very things they are learning to do; and second, that it is possible to achieve a general educatedness whereby someone can make intelligent judgments and intellectual progress even in previously unfamiliar subject areas. In both cases, Aristotle’s account of the teacher as thinking-facilitator rather than knowledge-infuser is illuminating. This connects with recent literature on Experiential Learning. Having developed this broadly Aristotelian account of learning how to learn I offer some concrete strategies for putting the theory into practice in the philosophy classroom. These strategies include targeted reading guidance and mystery text assignments, both of which develop incrementally throughout the course.

In the summer of 1983, a group of scholars met in Williamstown, MA for a workshop directed by Allan Gotthelf. Many of the papers presented at this meeting grew into Philosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology. The aim of the workshop and volume to follow was to engage with Aristotle’s biological works from a genuinely philosophical perspective. That volume was a watershed moment for the “biological turn” in Aristotle studies.The present volume is compiled in the same spirit, growing out of several conferences and collaborations spearheaded by the late Gotthelf, who was to co-edit the volume until his death in 2013. It presents a range of recent scholarship on the Generation of Animals rather...

One of the most highly debated passages in Aristotle is his doctrine of the nous poiētikos of de Anima III.5. The interpretations of its precise nature and operation that were given by ancient and medieval commentators abound also today. With few exceptions, however, present-day interpretations disagree with the ancients and others on the logic of the passage. In particular, while most ancient and medieval commentators agree that there are three intellects or intellectual powers on scene in the passage, most contemporary interpreters assume that there are only two, identifying the pathētikos nous at the end of III.5 with the intellect described in III.4. In this paper I argue that this assumption is wrong, and that although the text is underdetermined in several ways, it is not so in this respect. The text, taken with other relevant passages, demands that the pathētikos nous be different from the intellect described in III.4.