{"title":"Aristotle","authors":"Filippo Del Lucchese","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter argues that Aristotle’s enquiry on the nature and meaning of monstrosity is rooted in his positive attitude toward the knowledge of lower nature, which enjoy the same status of the science of higher beings. Heavens and earth are thus connected through the divine principle that is active throughout the whole nature. Gods thus become author of, but also responsible for, what happens in nature, and Aristotle’s argument provides the ground for every future theodicy. Monstrosity plays a major role in this philosophical approach. Aristotle develops the opposition between the normal and the abnormal development, through the concept of accidental necessity, namely the necessity that is at stake in natural processes that not always happen in the same way. Monsters are of pivotal importance in this ontological picture, because of their paradoxical ambiguity. On the one hand, they are the sign and symptom or a resistant nature, which opposes itself to Aristotle’s major ontological invention, namely the form and the final cause. On the other hand, without this hyatus between formal perfection and actual reality, nature would not exist in the way we experience it: there would be no diversity, no better and worse, no normal and monstrous. Monstrosity is necessary for Aristotle to explain nature and its ontological structure based on the substitition of dynamic forms and ends to both the static ideas of Plato and the exclusively material reality of atomists.","PeriodicalId":434957,"journal":{"name":"Monstrosity and Philosophy","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121171413","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","authors":"Filippo Del Lucchese","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Grounded on the reading of Timeus, book X of The Laws, and book V of The Republic, this chapter analyses the process of invention of idealism, which consists first and foremost in the subordination of the material principle of the atomists to a higher divine principle. Through this process, Plato is able to shape the idea of a hierarchy of perfection in the universe which, as on a scale, relies but also distinguishes superior and inferior things. Monstrosity thus becomes the feature of the lower parts of the universe, the material and necessary parts, recalcitrant to their ordering by the superior and divine ones. This chpapter’s thesis is that, in Plato, the threatening character of monstrosity becomes a dangerous threat for the order and harmony of the universe. Monstrosity is the inferior other of divinity. Plato also reinforces Socrates’s teleology and opposes the realm of ideal truth to that of aimless, rumbling and chaotic causality that monstrously characterises the lower reality.","PeriodicalId":434957,"journal":{"name":"Monstrosity and Philosophy","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132043848","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":"The Pre-Platonic Philosophers","authors":"F. D. Lucchese","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines Empedocles’s idea of monstrosity in the early generation of life, when the earth spontaneously produces all sort of monstrous beings, only some of which will survive and generate viable forms of life. Empedocles intends to establish the norms of life on the process of generation and selection of monstrosities. Nature is not an artist that shapes normal life after many unsuccessful attempts. Empedocles rather sees Nature itself as the successful result of spontaneuous events that create limits and boundaries for viable life. The other major philosopher of the pre-Platonic period is Democritus. I explore his materialism and its relationship with necessity and chance. Atomists have been accused of paradoxically grounding their universe on both necessity and chance. I show that the paradox, however, is only such from the Aristotelian perspective, which aims at establishing teleology as the highest form of causality, in particular in the biological realm. Through the idea of monstrosity, Democritus grounds its atomism on the concept of the spontaneous formation of life. Beyond Empedocles, Democritus flattens even further the material ontology of nature, grounding it on the epigenetical production of normal and mostrous life alike. Through a reading of the agonistic process of life formation, monstrosity becomes the antidote to teleology.","PeriodicalId":434957,"journal":{"name":"Monstrosity and Philosophy","volume":"76 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121995826","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":"Middle and Neoplatonism","authors":"F. D. Lucchese","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"This is the longest chapter of the book, because of the number, nature, and importance of the philosophers that take the side of Plato and develop his teleological idealism in different directions. It also includes several early Christian thinkers – Augustin among them – whose philosophical background and inspiration are largely Platonic. For reasons of consistency, this chapter explores this complex and long-lived philosophical movement through the same categories that have been used in previous chapters, namely the conflict between immanence and transcendence, the questions of nature’s hierarchies, teleology and providence, as well as the origin of evil. However, new elements are introduced because of the puculiar reworking of these ideas within the new and original monotheism of the Judeo-Christian early tradition, as well as their importance for the later medieval and early modern philosophy.","PeriodicalId":434957,"journal":{"name":"Monstrosity and Philosophy","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116661196","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":"The Myth and the Logos","authors":"F. D. Lucchese","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474456203.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chaper explores the question of monstrosity through the conflictual nature of the archaic and ancient mythology. Already in the early cosmogonies, monstrosity fights for alternative orders of being. Against them, normality is established through a long, painful, and challenging process in which, curiously, monstrosity is not only the principal enemy, but also one of the tools that paradoxically helps the mainstream forces to establish themselves. The material analysed in this chapter constitutes the ground to present the passage from myth to logos and to better understand the genealogy of two alternative visions of nature, i.e. materialism and idealism which, long before the great Attic systematisations, divide the field of pre-Platonic philosophy.","PeriodicalId":434957,"journal":{"name":"Monstrosity and Philosophy","volume":"144 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131572570","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}
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