Sean Foley

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.

Plato’s Sophist features a discussion of false statements, the literal sense of which has been the source of much scholarly controversy. Two readings of the discussion, the Oxford Interpretation and the Incompatibility Range Interpretation, are especially plausible. This essay enters the exegetical debate by placing the discussion of false statements in the broader context of the dialogue, which is principally concerned with sophistic speech, not false statements. When the discussion of false statements is understood as contributing to an inquiry into sophistic speech, the Incompatibility Range Interpretation—with slight modification—emerges as a clear favorite.

We argue that some sports test athletes’ capacities to endure specific types of suffering, and in such cases the suffering is constitutive of the sport: the sporting contest would not be a good sporting contest if that capacity were not tested. We then argue that it is morally acceptable for athletes to experience pleasure (Schadenfreude) in response to the constitutive suffering of competitors insofar as that pleasure is compatible with pity or sympathy for non-constitutive suffering. We use the case of morally acceptable pleasure in the constitutive suffering of a competitor to clarify the sense of Schadenfreude. We defend a little recognised distinction of Aristotelian provenance between benign and malignant Schadenfreude, and, in contrast to the prevailing scholarly assessment, we show that Schadenfreude is not necessarily a passive emotion.