Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science最新文献

{"title":"Aristotle’s Critique of Timaean Psychology","authors":"J. Carter","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2017-0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2017-0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Of all the criticisms that Aristotle gives of his predecessors’ theories of soul in De anima I.3–5, none seems more unmotivated than the ones directed against the world soul of Plato’s Timaeus. Against the current scholarly consensus, I claim that the status of Aristotle’s criticisms is philosophical rather than eristical, and that they provide important philosophical reasons, independent of Phys. VIII.10 and Metaph. Λ.6, for believing that νοῦς is without spatial extension, and that its thinking is not a physical motion.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"8 1","pages":"51 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82616205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Impulsive Impressions","authors":"Thomas A. Blackson","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2017-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2017-0005","url":null,"abstract":"There are two main interpretations of how the Stoics understood impulsive impressions in adults: the “form” interpretation and the “no-form” interpretation. I assess these interpretations against the well-known passages in Stobaeus’ account of Stoic ethics that provide the primary evidence for how the Stoics understood impulsive impressions. It is in terms of these passages that Inwood and other historians argue for the form interpretation. I argue that these arguments for the form interpretation are not sound and that these passages in Stobaeus provide no reason to believe that the form interpretation is more plausible than the no-form interpretation.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"8 1","pages":"112 - 91"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85236407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empedocles’ Sphairos","authors":"Vojtěch Hladký","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2017-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2017-0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: The aim of this article is to reopen the rather neglected issue of the nature and internal structure of the Sphairos as it appears in Empedocles’ account of the cycle of the cosmos. The Sphairos is generally understood as a result of the mixing of the four elements, or ‘roots’ at the moment of the greatest dominance of Love. Based on an analysis of preserved fragments and testimonies, the article argues that the Sphairos is not an amorphous mixture. On a contrary, it has a complex and structured form with clearly differentiated parts. Moreover, Empedocles’ description of the process of mixing of the basic elements and a gradual emergence of ever more complex things and organisms seems to support this interpretation. The process of unification of the elements should culminate at the moment of the strongest influence of Love with in the emergence of a huge, internally differentiated, complex, and thinking ‘superorganism’. This superorganism is then identical with the whole of the cosmos and all lower, simpler organisms which had emerged in the prior phases of the zoogony are contained in it.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"96 1","pages":"1 - 24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86393414","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Plato’s Marionette","authors":"M. Schofield","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2016-0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper takes a fresh look at the marionette image introduced by Plato in a famous passage of Book I of the Laws, as he undertakes to explain the bearing of self-rule upon virtue (644b–645e). I argue that the reader of the passage is first offered a cognitive model of a unitary self, presided over by reasoning – which prompts bafflement in the Athenian Visitor’s interlocutors. The marionette image then in effect undermines that model, by portraying humans as passive subjects of contrary controlling impulses determining their behaviour. Finally the image is complicated and in the end transcended by reintroduction of reasoning as a special kind of divinely inspired impulse, with which one must actively cooperate if animal impulses are to be mastered. I examine the way Plato’s reference at this point to law (where there is a key translation problem) should be understood to bear upon the nature of the reasoning in question. In conclusion I comment on what light we may suppose to be thrown by the marionette passage on self-rule, as we are promised it will.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"15 1","pages":"128 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82108279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Plato’s Theodicy in the Timaeus","authors":"V. Ilievski","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2016-0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this paper is to challenge the claims that Plato’s theodicy, if existent at all, is meager and undeveloped. In it I focus on the Timaeus alone, and after briefly examining the question why would an omnibenevolent God create a sensible world at all, try to extract three theodicean strategies from the dialogue. The first one is known as the Principle of Plenitude, and it professes to explain the abundance of life forms in the universe, some of which seem superfluous or unwanted. In the course of presenting this strategy, I also try to show that it can justifiably be ascribed to Plato, against Sarah Broadie’s criticism. The second strategy is the Solution from Personal Responsibility, and it mainly aims at addressing the moral aspect of the problem of evil. The third and the last one I call the Coeval Entity Solution, and it discloses the Timaean Necessity as a cause of natural evils. I try to argue, against David Sedley, that Necessity is indeed of stubborn or recalcitrant nature.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"93 1","pages":"201 - 224"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73555935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Powers, Structure, and Thought in Empedocles","authors":"P. Curd","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2016-0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract How is it that Empedocles’ world is is an organized system of diverse entities and how does this system of maintain regularity over long periods of time? I suggest that it is the impulses and thoughts of the roots and of Love and Strife that answer these questions. Love and Strife, working within the laws of nature provide the major structural aspects of the cosmos: the circular motion of the whirls created by the opposing forces produce the masses of roots that are worked up into the heavenly bodies and the living things that populate the cosmos. It is useful to conceive of Empedocles as a proto-power-structuralist. The basic ingredients of the world are ontologically prior to the medium sized objects of sensible experience: it is not the case that there are underlying Aristotelian subjects with properties and attributes depending on those subjects.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"1 1","pages":"55 - 79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90214928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Two Neo-Analytic Approaches to Parmenides’ Metaphysical-Cosmological Poem","authors":"Alexander P. D. Mourelatos","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2016-0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0013","url":null,"abstract":"These two important books, which have appeared five years apart within our immediately recent past, are connected – not merely by the fact of having been produced by the same publisher, rather – by a conceptually rich and intri guing matrix both of antithetical differences and of shared assumptions. And for reasons that will become clear presently, discussion of them can proceed best in the order reverse to that of their publication. (In furnishing page references, which will be mostly done within parentheses, I shall prefix the two authors’ initials – respectively, JP and MW.) Wedin’s book deals almost exclusively with just the central part of Parmenides’ didactic poem, from B2 to B8.49. For this sequence of texts, Wedin prefers, as the book’s subtitle indicates, the name “Way of Truth” (cf. MW, p. 1). But since Parmenides ostensibly uses alētheia, “truth”, in reference to the contents of this central part,1 I shall myself be using that simpler name, “Truth”, as title for the part at issue. The argumentation in “Truth” is laid out by Wedin in strict “regimentation” (a term that recurs frequently in the book),2 i. e., with deployment of the conceptual resources and notational devices of modern formal","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"10 1","pages":"257 - 268"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72705765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empedocles’s metaphysics","authors":"Anna Marmodoro","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2016-0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0001","url":null,"abstract":"This issue of Rhizomata comprises a collection of essays with special focus on Empedocles’ metaphysics, authored by international leading experts in the field. The topics investigated include Empedocles’s views on composition, structure, causation, creation, change, causal powers, and the nature of divinity and of divine agency. There is no comprehensive study of such topics in the existing literature on Empedocles. The field of Empedoclean scholarship is at present divided, because of disagreements regarding textual issues: the question debated is, in a nutshell, whether the extant fragments belong to one or two poems by Empedocles. These disagreements will not be rehearsed in detail here. Suffice it to briefly summarise the main positions on the map: a traditionally mainstream view has it that Empedocles wrote two unrelated poems (see the work of e.g. D. Sedley, H. Diels, R. Wright); those opposing this view argue that he wrote only one poem to which all the extant fragments belong (see the work of e.g. B. Inwood, R. Janko, O. Primavesi, C. Rowett, S. Trépanier). A third view that has been proposed (e.g. by P. Curd) is that while the new finds cannot tell us whether there was one poem or two, they do show decisively that Empedocles did not keep sharply separated the two types of subject-matter he wrote about, physics and theology. A second often-discussed interpretative issue in Empedocles studies is how many cosmologies and zoologies Empedocles posited within one complete cosmic cycle. Some defend two cosmologies (e.g. S. Trépanier), some just one (e.g. D. O’ Brien). Among those defending two cosmologies, one may further find supporters of either one (e.g. M. Schofield) or of two zoologies (e.g. B. Inwood). This special issue of Rhizomata aims to bring about a shift in the study of Empedocles’s philosophy, by making his metaphysical views the focus of the investigation, and by generating constructive discussion even among scholars who hold different (even opposing) views regarding the textual issues. This is not to say that the essays in this issue pay no attention to the linguistic, historical, and other aspects of Empedocles’s thought. On the contrary, the essays are firmly rooted in scholarship of the highest level. By defining specifically philosophical directions of inquiry into Empedocles’s views, and presenting how five leading","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"1 1","pages":"1 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77957958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Love, Sex and the Gods: Why things have divine names in Empedocles’ poem, and why they come in pairs","authors":"C. Rowett","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2016-0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract When Empedocles uses a divine name for one of the items in his ontology, does this serve merely as a poetic metaphor or does it mean that the item in question is a god, with personal agency and intentions? In Empedocles’ poem, most things are described as if they were intentional agents and seem to function as such. Is there anything in the universe that does not have a mind or does not engage in intentional action? In this paper I argue that Empedocles was talking of a universe in which all the components, without exception, are living beings with mental capacities and that their power is the power of agents, acting voluntarily, not of inanimate forces acting mechanically. There is nothing in Empedocles’ ontology that could be described as inert matter, and there are no inanimate things.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"51 11 1","pages":"110 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73036836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How did Anaximander Become a Material Monist?","authors":"Nicolas Carraro","doi":"10.1515/rhiz-2016-0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/rhiz-2016-0009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Although the view that Anaximander was a Material Monist is not very popular nowadays, it is still widely held that it was embraced by Aristotle at least on some occasions, then adopted by Theophrastus, and later on inherited by Simplicius, our main source on the Presocratics. I argue that none of these three philosophers held this view and that, for this reason, it should not be seen as the standard ancient interpretation of Anaximander.","PeriodicalId":40571,"journal":{"name":"Rhizomata-A Journal for Ancient Philosophy and Science","volume":"11 1","pages":"154 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75865408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}