This book is the first sustained modern investigation of Plato’s theology. A central thesis of the book is that Plato _had _a theology—not just a mythology for the ideal city, not just the theory of forms or the theory of cosmic souls, but also, irreducible to any of these, an account of God as _Nous _(Reason), the source of rational order both to souls and the world of bodies. The understanding of God as Reason, and of the world as governed (...) directly or indirectly by Reason, is worked out in the dialogues of Plato’s last period, the _Statesman, Philebus, Timaeus, _and _Laws. _These dialogues offer a strategy for explaining the physical world that goes beyond anything in the middle dialogues, and gives the best starting point for understanding the cosmologies and theologies of Aristotle, the Stoics, and later ancient thinkers. Menn focuses on the _Timaeus _as Plato’s most sustained effort to provide what (according to the _Phaedo) _Anaxagoras had failed to deliver: an explanation of the world through Reason, showing that things are as they are because it is best, or because it best serves the order of the world as a whole. Anaxagoras was disappointed because he explained things through their material constituents, without explaining why the constituents are ordered as they are; but the theory of forms has the same defect, since it_ _cannot explain why different parts of the universe participate in different forms according to a particular order. The _Timaeus _and other late dialogues attempt to supply the missing explanation of the ordering of the physical world. These dialogues do not retreat from the middle dialogue theory of forms, nor do they escape into an esoteric theory of numbers; but they add to the middle dialogues an analysis of the principles necessary to account for the existence and partial intelligibility of the sensible world—not only forms and a material substance but also _Nous _and souls. Although the demiurge of the _Timaeus _(and his counterpart the _Nous _of _Philebus) _is represented as a cause both to souls and bodies, most scholars have been reluctant to identify the demiurge as a being separate from and superior to souls, because they think that both the meaning of the Greek word _nous _and Plato’s own statements require that _Nous _is_ _either a kind of soul (mind or rational soul) or something inseparable from souls (rational mental activity). Reexamining the linguistic evidence and the Platonic texts, Menn argues that _nous _can mean something separate from souls, namely the virtue of rationality or intelligence that souls participate in. Menn argues that Anaxagoras’ _Nous _should be construed as such a virtue; then he examines what status this virtue has in the context of the Platonic theory of forms, and how it_ _is a cause both to souls and to bodies. Soul plays a crucial role in mediating the causality of _Nous _and introducing rational order into the world of bodies, but neither soul in general nor the world-soul in particular can be identified with _Nous. _ Menn stresses the pre-Socratic context for the cosmology and theology of Plato’s late dialogues; he argues for the importance of Diogenes of Appolonia in particular, and he reconstructs a possible new fragment of Diogenes from the _Timaeus _and from the Hippocratic treatise _On Breaths. _In the _Timaeus _and other late dialogues Plato attempts to do better than his predecessors by standards implicit in Socrates’ critique of Anaxagoras in the _Phaedo, _but what Plato offers remains consciously provisional. Aristotle argues that the _Timaeus _remains liable to some of the same criticisms that Socrates had leveled against Anaxagoras, and Aristotle’s own cosmology and theology take up Plato’s challenge to carry out Anaxagoras’ promise of an explanation of the world through _Nous, _and attempt to improve on the _Timaeus _as_ _Plato had improved on Anaxagoras. In this way the _Timaeus _serves as an essential starting point, not only_ _for those later ancient philosophers who took it as an authoritative statement on the world and on God but also for those who took it as a challenge to do better. (shrink)

"Anton Wilhelm Amo is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. We give an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo's life and work, and provide Latin texts, with facing translations and explanatory notes, of Amo's two philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and (...) Organic Body, both published in 1734. The Impassivity is an extended argument that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body The Distinct Idea works out the implications for the mind's actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by 'intentions' which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external things. Both dissertations try to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body, and expose and resolve earlier philosophers' self-contradictions on these questions"--. (shrink)

ARISTOTLE PRESENTS HIS DOCTRINE OF GOD as the first unmoved mover as the crown of his metaphysics, and thus of his entire theoretical philosophy. He obviously considers it an important achievement. Yet the doctrine has been peculiarly resistant to interpretation. It is difficult to know where to break in to Aristotle's theology: certainly not with his proof that the first mover must be unmoved. The proof has clearly been developed for the sake of the conclusion and not vice versa. How (...) did this conclusion occur to Aristotle, and why did he want it to be true? (shrink)

Late ancient Platonists and Aristotelians describe the method of reasoning to first principles as "analysis." This is a metaphor from geometrical practice. How far back were philosophers taking geometric analysis as a model for philosophy, and what work did they mean this model to do? After giving a logical description of analysis in geometry, and arguing that the standard (not entirely accurate) late ancient logical description of analysis was already familiar in the time of Plato and Aristotle, I argue that (...) Plato, in the second geometrical passage of the "Meno" (86e4-87b2), is taking analysis as a model for one kind of philosophical reasoning, and I explore the advantages and limits of this model for philosophical discovery, and in particular for how first principles can be discovered, without circularity, by argument. (shrink)

This book is a systematic study of Descartes' relation to Augustine. It offers a complete reevaluation of Descartes' thought and as such will be of major importance to all historians of medieval, neo-Platonic, or early modern philosophy. Stephen Menn demonstrates that Descartes uses Augustine's central ideas as a point of departure for a critique of medieval Aristotelian physics, which he replaces with a new, mechanistic anti-Aristotelian physics. Special features of the book include a reading of the Meditations, a comprehensive historical (...) and philosophical introduction to Augustine's thought, a detailed account of Plotinus, and a contextualization of Descartes' mature philosophical project which explores both the framework within which it evolved and the early writings, to show how the collapse of the early project drove Descartes to the writings of Augustine. (shrink)

When Aristotle speaks of theologikê, he means not the study of a single God, but the study of gods and divine things in general. He never uses the phrase “the unmoved mover” to pick out just one being, and that phrase would not express the essence of the beings it applies to. To see what sort of religious interest there might be in such a being, and how the words “god” and “divine” enter into Aristotle's philosophy, it is best to (...) start with what he says about gods and divine things in moral and political contexts. Guided by his criticisms of Plato on the soul's self-motion, Aristotle sets out, in Physics VIII, to give a revised version of Plato's cosmotheological argument in Laws X. This article focuses on Aristotle's theology and his views about gods, the soul, the cosmos, heavens and heavenly bodies, and the first principle or first cause. (shrink)

It is important for Aristotle’s science of being that being is said in many ways, not only the categorial senses, but also being as actuality and potentiality, as truth, and _per accidens_. But Aristotle describes all the senses of being only in the puzzling _Metaphysics_ Δ. 7, which also puzzlingly ignores the distinction between 1-place (existential) being and 2-place (predicative) being, giving predominantly predicative examples with a few existential examples mixed in. But Aristotle’s methodology requires him to reanalyse assertions of (...) 1-place being as assertions of 2-place being in order to investigate their causes; different ‘senses’ of being yield different investigations of causes. But we must reject the common assumption that Aristotle analyses ‘_F_ exists’ as ‘for some appropriate _G, F_ is _G_’; rather, he analyses ‘_F_ exists’ as ‘for some appropriate _S, S_ is _F_’, and looks for the causes of _F_’s existence in the causes of _S_’s being _F_. (shrink)

Al-Fbb al-f, is apparently the first person to maintain that existence, in one of its senses, is a second-order concept [mal th]. As he interprets Metaphysics d] has two meanings, second-order being as truth'' (including existence as well as propositional truth), and first-order being as divided into the categories.'' The paronymous form of the Arabic word mawjd] distinct from their essences: for al-Kindd of all things. Against this, al-Fburr thinks that Greek more appropriately expressed many such concepts, including being, by (...) particles rather than nouns or verbs; he takes Metaphysics r's title can mean both Book of Particles'' and Aristotle's Metaphysics.''. (shrink)

Michael Frede in The Historiography of Philosophy, or in the Nellie Wallace lectures that are the core of the book, addresses a great many issues about the historiography of philosophy. He has thin...

J'examine le statut et la fonction des Catégories dans la philosophie d'Aristote.Le traité n'appartient ni à la philosophie première, ni même à la philosophie tout court, mais à la dialectique. Il ne s'agit pas d'une « discussion dialectique » de l'être, mais plutôt de dialectique en tant que tel : ce traité forme un ensemble avec les Topiques, qui a pour but d'aider le questionneur dans un débat dialectique à décider si le terme donné peut tomber sous la définition proposée (...) ou sous le genre proposé. Bien qu'il y ait un emploi philosophique des Catégories, tout comme de la dialectique en général, l'opposition prétendue entre la théorie de la substance des Catégories et celle de la Métaphysique est fondée sur une méconnaissance des buts différents des deux traités. I examine the status and function of the Categories in Aristotle's philosophy.The work does not belong to « first philosophy, » or indeed to philosophy at all, but to dialectic; not as a « dialectical discussion » of being, but in the strict sense that it is intended, together with the Topics, to help the dialectical disputant to decide whether a given term can fall under a proposed definition or a proposed genus. Although the Categories, like dialectic in general, has uses in philosophical argument, the supposed opposition between the accounts of substance in the Categories and in the Metaphysics depends on a misunderstanding of the different aims of the two works. (shrink)

In this paper I reexamine Plato's method of collection and division, and specifically of collection. If collection and division are simply methods for mapping out genus-species trees, then it is hard to understand why Plato is so excited about them. But a close study of Plato's examples shows that these methods are something broader, and shows why Plato would regard collection as an important tool for coming to know "elements" in any domain of inquiry. In the first section I focus (...) on a notoriously problematic example of collection from the "Philebus," Theuth's discovery of the letters of the alphabet; I show how Plato interprets this discovery as a process of collection, and draw conclusions about what Plato takes collection to be. In the process, I try to bring out Plato's analysis of what is involved in learning to read and write a language, which he takes as paradigmatic for other knowledge. In the second section, stepping back from the "Philebus" passage and applying its lessons, I describe the function of collection and division, for the late Plato, in coming to know "elements," including the Forms, or the most basic Forms. Reflection on Plato's use of collection suggests a (relatively non-mystical) account of what it is to know non-complex intelligible entities, and of how we can come to know them. I also use Plato's descriptions of collection and division to suggest a Platonic context for the notion of the separation of the Forms, to which the late Plato remains firmly committed. (shrink)

This section presents, in Latin and English, the entirety of Anton Wilhelm Amo’s 1734 _Inaugural Dissertation on the Impassivity of the Human Mind,_ as well as letters commending Amo by his teacher Martin Löscher and by the rector of the university, Johann Kraus. In this work Amo argues that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body. (...) Amo tries to expose and resolve self-contradictions in earlier philosophers, including Descartes and Sennert, on whether it is the mind or the body that senses. (shrink)

Here I reexamine Duhem's question of the continuity between medieval dynamics and early modern conservation theories. I concentrate on the heavens. For Aristotle, the motions of the heavens are eternally constant (and thus mathematizable) because an eternally constant divine Reason is their mover. Duhem thought that impetus and conservation theories, by extending sublunar mechanics to the heavens, made a divine renewer of motion redundant. By contrast, I show how Descartes derives his law of conservation by extending Aristotelian celestial dynamics to (...) the earth. Descartes argues that motion is intrinsically linear, not circular. But he agrees that motion is mathematically intelligible only where divine Reason moves bodies in a constant and eternal motion. Descartes strips bodies of active powers, leaving God as the only natural mover; thus both celestial and sublunar motions are constant, and uniformly mathematizable. The law of conservation of the total quantity of motion is an attempt to harmonize the constancy derived a priori with the phenomenal inconstancy of sublunar motions. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Xenophon and the Socratic Question The Main Differences Between SocratesX and SocratesP SocratesX and Enkrateia Reworking of Socratic Themes on the Basis of Enkrateia Akrasia Enkrateia and Autarkeia One Socrates and Many.

This section presents, in Latin and English, the entirety of Anton Wilhelm Amo’s 1734 _Philosophical Disputation Containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to Our Living and Organic Body_. In this work Amo attempts to work out the implications of the impossibility of being-acted-upon for the mind’s actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by ‘intentions’ which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external (...) things. Amo tries to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body; he argues especially against Jean Le Clerc, who had attributed a broad range of acts to the mind. (shrink)

In Chapter 7 Aristotle draws some conclusions from the survey of earlier philosophers' views in A3-6. He is interested, not so much in what archai they believed in, or in what kinds of causes they believed in, but rather in how they used their archai as causes: that is, how they used, in explaining other things, the things they posited at the beginning of their accounts. In A7 he is especially interested in how philosophers who posited a Good as an (...) archê used it in explanations. Developing the Phaedo, Aristotle argues that although Anaxagoras posited a Good (namely nous), he used it in explanations only as an efficient cause, not as a final cause, and so did not use it as a cause quâ good. Aristotle then turns the argument against Plato, arguing that although he posited a Good (namely the One), he used in explanations only as a formal cause, not as a final cause, and so did not use it as a cause quâ good. (Plato used efficient and final causes, but, Aristotle claims, he used his archai only as formal and material causes, and used only derivative things as efficient and final causes.) Aristotle is himself implicitly promising that he will discover a good archê and use it in explanations as a final cause. He is not arguing that earlier thinkers progressively discovered the four causes, but rather that even those who posited a Good failed to use it as a final cause; this helps to persuade Aristotle's readers that a new investigation is needed. This chapter concludes with a discussion of Aristotle's critique of the material monists in the first part of A8. (shrink)

I examine the function and argument of the Digression (172c–177c) in Plato’s _Theaetetus_. The Digression refutes the ‘semi-Protagorean’ thesis that justice and piety and sensible qualities are perceiver-relative but that we can objectively calculate ‘being and benefit’; or rather, refutes the conjunction of this thesis with the claim that the semi-Protagorean orator or legislative advisor is wise and happy. Avoiding question-begging arguments from Forms, a providential cosmos, or the tripartite soul, Plato argues that objective measurement, even if its object is (...) a value-free universe, has normative implications: by revealing the errors of scale underlying the polis’ conventional values, it makes it impossible for the philosopher to live happily if he assimilates himself to the polis. I offer explanations of Plato’s adaptation of Pindar in his description of the philosopher’s flight through the cosmos to ‘geometrize’ and ‘astronomize,’ and of Plato’s critique of those who claim descent from Heracles. (shrink)

In this section, the editors explain their policies and conventions in transcribing and translating Amo’s dissertations.

This essay discusses the _Confessions’_ aporetic method—specifically its versions of Meno’s paradox, beginning in Book 1, about how we can search for God if we don’t already know him. Augustine says that _belief_ in God guides us in searching until we know him. But how can we have intentional attitudes toward God—belief or desire—if we haven’t yet encountered him? Augustine’s solution comes partly in Book 7’s analysis of God as truth, partly in Book 10’s argument that we have an irreducible (...) desire for truth: although we desire joy, joy requires a propositional content, and _ceteris paribus_ we prefer joy based on true rather than on false stories. I explore how Augustine’s aporetic accounts of memory and of temptation function together in Book 10. The theory of the three temptations, and especially of “curiosity,” shows why desire for happiness—for joy based on truth—does not always prevail. (shrink)

Simplicius cites Porphyry’s lost greater commentary on the Categories by the name of its addressee: Πρὸς Γεδάλειον. It has been assumed that we know nothing about Gedalius, and even suggested that he may have been a fictional construct. But his name is Jewish, and Porphyry had no reason to make up a Jewish addressee. It was extremely rare for Greek pagan texts to be dedicated to a Jewish addressee. But Porphyry had an unusual degree of involvement with Judaism. I collect (...) the evidence, and make a tentative proposal about the context for Porphyry’s dedicating this work to Gedalius. (shrink)

Dennis Des Chene's Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought reconstructs the discourse of late scholastic natural philosophy, and assesses Descartes' agreements and disagreements. In a critical discussion, I offer a different interpretation of late scholastic theories of final causality and of God's concursus with created efficient causes. Fonseca's and Suárez' conceptions of final causality in nature depend on their claim that a single action can be the action of two agents at once--in particular, of God and of (...) a creature. I discuss both their theory of action and its implications for natural teleology. I then compare Descartes, emphasizing his demolition of the Aristotelian hierarchy of causes, with unmoved movers regulating the action of inferior moved movers. Aristotle argues that unmoved causes are needed to produce a stable world-order; he takes arts as his models of unmoved causes, and uses this model to support natural teleology. Descartes radically simplifies this system by denying all unmoved movers other than God, and denying anything analogous to an art in non-human nature. I explore the implications for Descartes' notion of concursus and his criticism of natural teleology, and discuss his resulting difficulties in explaining natural stability. (shrink)

Aristotle in Physics I,1 says some strange-sounding things about how we come to know wholes and parts, universals and particulars. In explicating these, Simplicius distinguishes an initial rough cognition of a thing as a whole, an intermediate "cognition according to the definition and through the elements," and a final cognition of how the thing's many elements are united: only this last is επιστημη. Simplicius refers to the Theaetetus for the point about what is needed for επιστημη and the ways that (...) cognition according to the definition and through the elements falls short. By unpacking this reference I try to reconstruct Simplicius' reading of "Socrates' Dream," its place in the Theaetetus ' larger argument, and its harmony with other Platonic and Aristotelian texts. But this reconstruction depends on undoing some catastrophic emendations in Diels's text of Simplicius. Diels's emendations arise from his assumptions about definitions and elements, in Socrates' Dream and elsewhere, and rethinking the Simplicius passage may help us rethink those assumptions. (shrink)

_Physics_ I 1 is a methodological introduction, not just to physics, but specifically to the investigation of principles. To gain scientific knowledge of nature, we must first determine its principles, but how do we determine these if we don’t know them already? This chapter distinguishes two readings of Aristotle’s claim that ‘at first it is rather confused things which are evident and clear to us, but afterwards, starting from these, the elements and principles become knowable when we divide these things’. (...) On Reading A, we start by knowing compounds but not their elements. On Reading B, we start by knowing the compound more clearly than its elements, but also confusedly knowing the elements. We start by knowing the elements under universal descriptions and come to know them more clearly in substituting more particular descriptions. The chapter defends Reading B and show how it fits Aristotle’s procedure in _Physics_ I and beyond. (shrink)