Riin Sirkel

The modal-existential account of ontological priority was, until relatively recently, the standard account in both the scholarship of ancient philosophy and contemporary metaphysics. This paper proposes that the dominance of this account can be traced to the Platonist Commentators on Aristotle (300–600 CE), who explicated the notion of priority Aristotle ascribes to Plato in modal and existential terms and assumed that Aristotle adopted the same Platonist notion of priority. Specifically, the paper examines how Porphyry and Philoponus addressed two major challenges in their efforts to ascribe the modal-existential notion of priority to Aristotle in their commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories. The first challenge is to explain how sensible particular substances could enjoy modal-existential priority over other things, while the second is to reconcile Aristotle’s ascription of priority to sensible substances with the Platonist privileging intelligible substances over sensible ones. The paper shows that Porphyry and Philoponus addressed these challenges by supplementing the modal-existential account of priority with assumptions about the natures of the things involved. This supplementation may help to explain why the limitations of the modal-existential account remained largely unnoticed until recently.

This chapter explores Aristotle’s account of household hierarchy in "Politics" 1, focusing on his use of metaphysical explanation. It argues that Aristotle takes the natural rule of men over women within the household to be metaphysically explained by a difference in deliberative capacity. The central question addressed is how to understand this difference within the conceptual framework of Aristotle’s logical works. Is it essential, necessary without being essential, or accidental? Each proposal faces significant difficulties, leaving us with a dilemma. If the difference between men and women is essential, then the household hierarchy is on a firm basis, but we have a conflict with Aristotle’s views on essence, particularly human essence. If men and women are not essentially the same, then this conflict is avoided, but other problems arise, leaving it unclear why men should be the natural rulers of the household.

This paper examines Aristotle’s account of scientific knowledge through demonstration in Posterior Analytics, challenging the prevailing view that he excludes sensible particulars from demonstrative knowledge. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of demonstration includes not only unqualified demonstrations but also what I call ‘qualified’ demonstrations, which can have definite sensible particulars as subjects. These demonstrations yield knowledge that meets Aristotle’s central requirements for knowledge, albeit in a qualified way. Although qualified knowledge falls short of unqualified knowledge, it is nevertheless genuine demonstrative knowledge. I further argue that unqualified knowledge entails potential knowledge of a given particular, which is actualized by applying it to a particular at hand. Qualified demonstrations allow us to apply demonstrative knowledge to the sensible particulars around us.

My contribution focuses on the early chapters of Francesco Orsi’s book The Guise of the Good: A Philosophical History (2023), specifically on Orsi’s interpretation of the Stoic account of the guise of the good. I will argue that Stoic philosophy encompasses all three variations regarding the objective or subjective understanding of the phrase “x appears under the guise of the good,” as distinguished by Orsi. The Stoics can be interpreted as endorsing the Subjective Only view in connection with desires, the Subjective + Objective view in relation to what are termed “selections,” and the Objective Only view in the context of the “good emotions” attributed to Stoic sages.

In the Categories, Aristotle intends to ascribe to particular substances ontological priority over all other things, but it is far from obvious what notion of priority would make this plausible. This question is the focus of my paper. I will examine what has been the standard account of his notion of ontological priority— the “modal-existential” account—and the problems it entails, as well as some scholarly alternatives to it. I will defend my own alternative account—the “explan- atory-existential” account—which addresses the problems that arise for other pro- posed accounts, and will make plausible Aristotle’s claim that particular substances have priority over all other things. I will argue that he puts forth this notion of prior- ity in Categories 12, and that it bears a similarity to the notion of grounding as dis- cussed in contemporary metaphysics.

Aristotle frequently describes essence as a “cause” or “explanation”, thus ascribing to essence some sort of causal or explanatory role. This explanatory role is often explicated by scholars in terms of essence “making the thing be what it is” or “making it the very thing that it is”. I argue that this is problematic, at least on the assumption that “making” expresses an explanatory relation, since it violates certain formal features of explanation. I then consider whether Aristotle is vulnerable to this problem by examining the explanatory role of essence in Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics Z 17.

The philosophical problem of universals is traditionally framed as the problem about the ontological status of universals. It is often said that the ontological status of universals is a post-Aristotelian problem that was bequeathed to the Middle Ages by a famous sentence in Porphyry's Isagoge. 1 Porphyry raises but then refuses to answer three questions about the ontological status of genera and species, saying that they are too "deep" for the present investigation. 2 Although Porphyry is the first to announce the problem, it was Boethius's commentary on Porphyry, rather than the Isagoge itself, that made this sentence famous and that is therefore responsible for the problem of universals in ..

One of the issues that deeply interested the philosophers of late antiquity, the Ancient Greek Commentators, concerns the priority of substances. While questions concerning ontological priority have recently attracted attention in Aristotelian scholarship and contemporary metaphysics, the Commentators’ discussions have not yet received the attention they deserve. My aim is to start to fill in this gap, by focusing on John Philoponus’s account of the priority of substances in his commentary on Aristotle’s "Categories". In particular, I aim to show how Philoponus develops and defends the view that, while particular substances enjoy priority over accidents and concepts (“universals after the many”), they do not enjoy priority over all other things. Rather, a certain type of universal substance (“universals prior to the many”) enjoys priority over particulars.