Aristotelian Interpretations

Aristotelian Interpretations PDF Author: Fran O'Rourke
Publisher: Irish Academic Press
ISBN: 9781911024231
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Aristotle’s phrase ‘Every realm of nature is marvellous’ serves as an underlying and unifying motif for this volume of original essays. Aristotelian Interpretations considers themes of perennial interest, offering new avenues of interpretation, illustrating how Aristotle’s thought may be creatively applied to a variety of timeless and contemporary questions. Apart from the final chapter – a comprehensive survey of the extensive and penetrating influence of Aristotle on James Joyce – they are concerned with central topics in metaphysics, aesthetics, political anthropology, ethics, and theory of knowledge. The volume presents an integral survey of Aristotle’s philosophy emphasizing that, far from being just a figure of historical interest, his vision is still alive and relevant. While many of Aristotle’s empirical suppositions are archaic, his deeper intuitions have ageless validity. His philosophy is marked by a robust common sense, an optimistic trust in nature, confidence in the human mind’s capacity to discover truth and value, and an abiding sense of all-embracing beauty. The author’s introduction describes early personal experiences that inspired his affection for a distinctively Aristotelian approach to the world.

Aristotelian Interpretations

Aristotelian Interpretations PDF Author: Fran O'Rourke
Publisher: Irish Academic Press
ISBN: 9781911024231
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Aristotle’s phrase ‘Every realm of nature is marvellous’ serves as an underlying and unifying motif for this volume of original essays. Aristotelian Interpretations considers themes of perennial interest, offering new avenues of interpretation, illustrating how Aristotle’s thought may be creatively applied to a variety of timeless and contemporary questions. Apart from the final chapter – a comprehensive survey of the extensive and penetrating influence of Aristotle on James Joyce – they are concerned with central topics in metaphysics, aesthetics, political anthropology, ethics, and theory of knowledge. The volume presents an integral survey of Aristotle’s philosophy emphasizing that, far from being just a figure of historical interest, his vision is still alive and relevant. While many of Aristotle’s empirical suppositions are archaic, his deeper intuitions have ageless validity. His philosophy is marked by a robust common sense, an optimistic trust in nature, confidence in the human mind’s capacity to discover truth and value, and an abiding sense of all-embracing beauty. The author’s introduction describes early personal experiences that inspired his affection for a distinctively Aristotelian approach to the world.

Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle

Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle PDF Author: Cynthia A. Freeland
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271043845
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Aristotle still influences our abstract thinking, our search for principles, and our reflections on virtue, nature, essence, and sexual difference. Feminists here concede that they too philosophize within the tradition founded by the ancient Greeks. The contributors to this volume enter into new, creative, and subtle dimensions of inquiry about Aristotle from a broader feminist perspective.

Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle

Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle PDF Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253004489
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
In this early lecture series, the author of Being and Time develops his unique approach to understanding humanity’s relationship to the world. This volume presents a collection of Martin Heidegger’s lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg in the winter of 1921–1922. Preceding Being and Time, the work shows the young Heidegger introducing novel vocabulary as he searches for his genuine philosophical voice. In this course, Heidegger first takes up the role of the definition of philosophy and then elaborates a unique analysis of “factical life,” or human life as it is lived concretely in relation to the world, a relation he calls “caring.” Heidegger’s descriptions of the movement of life are original and striking. As he works out a phenomenology of factical life, Heidegger lays the groundwork for a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle, whose influence on Heidegger’s philosophy was pivotal.

Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy

Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy PDF Author: Martin Heidegger
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253004373
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This volume presents Heidegger’s 1924 Marburg lectures which lay the intellectual groundwork for his magnum opus, Being and Time. Here are the seeds of the ideas that would become Heidegger’s unique and highly influential phenomenology. Heidegger interprets Aristotle’s Rhetoric and looks closely at the Greek notion of pathos. These lectures offer special insight into the development of his concepts of care and concern, being-at-hand, being-in-the-world, and attunement, which were later elaborated in Being and Time. Available in English for the first time, these lectures make a significant contribution to ancient philosophy, Aristotle studies, Continental philosophy, and phenomenology.

Substances and Universals in Aristotle's Metaphysics

Substances and Universals in Aristotle's Metaphysics PDF Author: Theodore Scaltsas
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801476358
Category : Substance (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
In this book, Theodore Scaltsas brings the insights of contemporary philosophy to bear on a classic problem in metaphysics that stems from Aristotle's theory of substance. Scaltsas provides an analysis of the enigmatic notions of potentiality and actuality, which he uses to explain Aristotle's substantial holism by showing how the concrete and the abstract parts of a substance form a dynamic, diachronic whole.

Doing and Being

Doing and Being PDF Author: Jonathan Beere
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199206708
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Doing and Being confronts the problem of how to understand two central concepts of Aristotle's philosophy: energeia and dunamis. While these terms seem ambiguous between actuality/potentiality and activity/capacity, Aristotle did not intend them to be so. Through a careful and detailed reading of Metaphysics Theta, Beere argues that we can solve the problem by rejecting both "actuality" and "activity" as translations of energeia, and by working out an analogical conception of energeia. This approach enables Beere to discern a hitherto unnoticed connection between Plato's Sophist and Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta, and to give satisfying interpretations of the major claims that Aristotle makes in Metaphysics Theta, the claim that energeia is prior in being to capacity (Theta 8) and the claim that any eternal principle must be perfectly good (Theta 9).

Aristotle's Theory of Language and Meaning

Aristotle's Theory of Language and Meaning PDF Author: Deborah K. W. Modrak
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521772664
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This is a book about Aristotle's philosophy of language, interpreted in a framework that provides a comprehensive interpretation of Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology and science. The aims of the book are to explicate the description of meaning contained in De Interpretatione and to show the relevance of that theory of meaning to much of the rest of Arisotle's philosophy. In the process Deborah Modrak reveals how that theory of meaning has been much maligned.

Existence, Meaning, Excellence

Existence, Meaning, Excellence PDF Author: Andrius Bielskis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315447223
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This book addresses the ‘perennial’ question of the meaning of life from the point of view of a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s teleology. Beginning with the premise that at the core of modernity and modern moral imagination are the entropy of meaning and the sense of meaninglessness, the author critically engages with the work of the post-war existentialists, chiefly that of Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, to argue that their analyses are unconvincing and that the question of the meaning of being should therefore be approached using different assumptions, based on the notion of flourishing life. From this Aristotelian outlook, Existence, Meaning, Excellence employs Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity, together with his conceptions of practice and the narrative unity of life and tradition to provide a novel philosophical account of existence, meaning and excellence - an account which is used to contribute to debates (between Kantian and Nietzschean perspectives) on the nature of art and genius, with Mozart’s genius being used by way of illustration. A fascinating and powerfully argued engagement with existentialist thought that draws on the ‘virtue’ tradition to explore questions of meaning, as well as wider questions within philosophy, this book will appeal to philosophers and social theorists with interests in existentialism, moral philosophy and accounts of ‘the good’ based on the notions of human flourishing.

Reason and Character

Reason and Character PDF Author: Lorraine Smith Pangle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668833X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
What does it mean to live a good life or a happy life, and what part does reason play in the quest for fulfillment? Proceeding by means of a close and thematically selective commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, this book offers a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s teachings on the relation between reason and moral virtue. Pangle shows how Aristotle’s arguments for virtue as the core of happiness and for reason as the guide to virtue emerge in dialectical response to Socrates’s paradoxical claim that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance, and as part of a politically complex project of giving guidance to lawgivers and ordinary citizens while offering spurs to deep theoretical reflection. Against Socrates, Aristotle insists that both virtue and vice are voluntary and that individuals are responsible for their characters, a stance that lends itself to vigorous defense of moral responsibility. At the same time, Pangle shows, Aristotle elucidates the importance of unchosen concerns in shaping all that we do and the presence of some form of ignorance or subtle confusions in all moral failings. Thus the gap between his position and that of Socrates comes on close inspection to be much smaller than first appears, and his true teaching on the role of reason in shaping moral existence far more complex. The book offers fresh interpretations of Aristotle’s teaching on the relation of passions to judgments, on what it means to choose virtue for its own sake, on the way reason finds the mean, especially in justice, and on the crucial intellectual virtue of phronesis or active wisdom and its relation to theoretical wisdom. Offering answers to longstanding debates over the status of reason and the meaning of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics, this book will kindle in readers a new appreciation for Aristotle’s lessons on how to make the most out of life, as individuals and in society.

Aristotle on Teleology

Aristotle on Teleology PDF Author: Monte Ransome Johnson
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191536504
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Monte Johnson examines one of the most controversial aspects of Aristiotle's natural philosophy: his teleology. Is teleology about causation or explanation? Does it exclude or obviate mechanism, determinism, or materialism? Is it focused on the good of individual organisms, or is god or man the ultimate end of all processes and entities? Is teleology restricted to living things, or does it apply to the cosmos as a whole? Does it identify objectively existent causes in the world, or is it merely a heuristic for our understanding of other causal processes? Johnson argues that Aristotle's aporetic approach drives a middle course between these traditional oppositions, and avoids the dilemma, frequently urged against teleology, between backwards causation and anthropomorphism. Although these issues have been debated with extraordinary depth by Aristotle scholars, and touched upon by many in the wider philosophical and scientific community as well, there has been no comprehensive historical treatment of the issue. Aristotle is commonly considered the inventor of teleology, although the precise term originated in the eighteenth century. But if teleology means the use of ends and goals in natural science, then Aristotle was rather a critical innovator of teleological explanation. Teleological notions were widespread among his predecessors, but Aristotle rejected their conception of extrinsic causes such as mind or god as the primary causes for natural things. Aristotle's radical alternative was to assert nature itself as an internal principle of change and an end, and his teleological explanations focus on the intrinsic ends of natural substances - those ends that benefit the natural thing itself. Aristotle's use of ends was subsequently conflated with incompatible 'teleological' notions, including proofs for the existence of a providential or designer god, vitalism and animism, opposition to mechanism and non-teleological causation, and anthropocentrism. Johnson addresses these misconceptions through an elaboration of Aristotle's methodological statements, as well as an examination of the explanations actually offered in the scientific works.