This volume, including sixteen contributions, analyses ancient and medieval theories of intentionality in various contexts: perception, imagination, and intellectual thinking. It sheds new light on classical theories and examines neglected sources, both Greek and Latin.

Although he does not provide a general analysis of argumentation, Aristotle is a highly influential source of modern argumentation theory. In his treatises the Topics, the Sophistical Refutations and the Rhetoric, Aristotle presents complementary aspects of a theory of sound arguments that are seen as the most effective means of persuasion. Aristotle’s central notion of a deductive argument (sullogismos) does not include references to an addressee, the situative context or non-verbal aspects of communication, and thus differs from some modern views (...) on argumentation. A deductive argument in the Aristotelian sense is a sequence of intellectual steps where the conclusion follows of necessity from the premises. Aristotle does not relativize or relax this notion but takes other factors into account by providing supplementary theoretical elements. For example, he reflects on acceptable premises (endoxa), the adjustment of rhetorical arguments to the horizon of the audience, methods of finding premises on the basis of argumentative schemes (topoi), the use of non-argumentative means of persuasion, and a framework of implicit discourse rules. Many of these themes are, albeit under a different name, still discussed in modern argumentation theory. (shrink)

In der neueren Forschung gehören die Substanzbücher der Metaphysik zu den meistdiskutierten Aristotelischen Texten. In den letzten zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten entwickelte sich eine umfangreiche Diskussion, die zu einem ganz neuen Bild von der Aristotelischen Substanzlehre führte. Eine für die Seminararbeit zugängliche Übersicht über diese Diskussion und den neuesten Stand der Forschung lag aber bisher im deutschen Sprachraum nicht vor. Der Band hilft diesem Mangel ab. Seine Beiträge geben unterschiedliche Standpunkte wieder und reflektieren den jeweiligen Forschungsstand, so dass sowohl für die Seminardiskussion (...) als auch für die eigene Beschäftigung mit diesem Thema eine direkt aus der Forschung gewonnene Grundlage vorliegt. MIT BEITRÄGEN VON: Andreas Anagnostopoulos, Thomas Buchheim, Mary Louise Gill, Donald Morrison, Christof Rapp, Holmer Steinfath, Walter Mesch und Michael V. Wodin. (shrink)

Aristoteles wurde geboren, arbeitete und starb. Mit diesen Worten begann Heidegger seine Vorlesung über Aristoteles. Über das Leben des Philosophen liegen uns nur wenige verlässliche Informationen vor, sein Werk ist jedoch im Wesentlichen überliefert. Er nahm damit maßgeblich Einfluss auf sämtliche Wissenschaften von der Philosophie und Literatur über die Biologie bis zur Kosmologie. Das Handbuch gibt Einblick in sämtliche Werke Aristoteles , behandelt ausführlich die Rezeption und macht mit wiederkehrenden Begriffen wie Glück, Tugend, Freundschaft, Polis und Verfassung vertraut.

Zu den Vorsokratikern zählt man die frühgriechischen Philosophen, die vor allem im 6. und 5. Jh. v. Chr. Gewirkt haben; die Epoche wird im Allgemeinen durch das erste datierbare Auftreten von Thales im Jahr 585 v. Chr. und durch den Tod von Demokrit im Jahr 370 v. Chr. definiert.

A much-maligned feature of ancient and medieval political thought is its tendency to appeal to nature to establish norms for human communities. From Aristotle's claim that humans are "political animals" to Aquinas' invocation of "natural law," it may seem that pre-modern philosophers were all too ready to assume that whatever is natural is good, and that just political arrangements must somehow be natural. The papers in this collection show that this assumption is, at best, too crude. From very early, for (...) instance in the ancient sophists' contrast between nomos and physis, there was recognition that political arrangements may be precisely artificial, not natural, and it may be questioned whether even such supposed naturalists as Aristotle in fact adopt the quick inference from "natural" to "good." The papers in this volume trace the complex interrelations between nature and such concepts as law, legitimacy, and justice, covering a wide historical range stretching from Plato and the Sophists to Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, Cicero, the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, ancient Christian thinkers, and philosophers of both the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages. (shrink)

Although Aristotle’s name is regularly mentioned when it comes to the question of where the notion of the will historically derives from and although one of the most influential exponents of philosophical theories of the will, Thomas Aquinas, seems to think that he is just applying the Aristotelian theory, many historians of philosophy explicitly deny that Aristotle had a notion of the will. If we think that the notion of the will is among the notions that have been gradually developed (...) in the history of philosophy, nothing is strange about saying that some philosophers prior to this development lacked this particular notion. However, Aristotle’s case is peculiar, because the same historians, who are reluctant to describe such a notion to Aristotle, admit that he played some role in the formation of the same notion. The line-up of more or less recent philosophers and scholars who are of the opinion that Aristotle had no notion of the will is a very remarkable one. This could almost be called a standard or default position, while the list of exponents of the opposed position, i.e. that Aristotle did have a notion or theory of the will, is much shorter. (shrink)

This paper explores a partialist strand in Epictetus’s ethical thought. Epictetus repeatedly refers to the specific roles we have to play in our lives. Some of these roles are defined by certain social relationships in which we are involved: we are children of somebody, sometimes siblings, sometimes someone’s parents or someone’s spouses. All these roles, or so Epictetus argues, define the actions appropriate for someone occupying these specific roles. This means again that there are actions appropriate towards parents, which are (...) different from actions appropriate towards siblings or towards strangers. It is appropriate, then, not to treat everybody alike, but to display a special concern for the well-being of those close to us. (shrink)

According to the Standard Definition ‘a fallacious argument, as almost every account from Aristotle onwards tells you, is one that seems to be valid but is not so’ ( Hamblin 1970 : 12). Scholars take this definition to be problematic in part because ‘appearances can vary from person to person, thus making the same argument a fallacy for the one who is taken in by the appearance, and not a fallacy for the one who sees past the appearances’ ( Hansen (...) 2020 : §4.2). We argue that Aristotle's treatment of fallacy is not subjective in the way that critics of the Standard Definition allege. (shrink)

This article discusses some core theorems of Aristotle's account of persuasion as it is set out in the Rhetoric. It is the declared ambition of Rhetoric I and II to develop a technê, or art, of rhetoric, and the central tool of this technê is, as it were, the introduction of three technical means of persuasion: êthos, pathos, and logos. Probably the best point to start with is two claims that Aristotle eventually makes in the course of his work on (...) rhetoric, the first of which consists in saying that proofs and arguments are central to persuasion. The second claim states that proofs and arguments, however central and important they may be, are not sufficient to persuade. The article examines the relation between these two claims in order to elucidate certain assumptions that Aristotle seems to make concerning the moral psychology of persuasion. (shrink)

Many recent thinkers imagine that a new way of life, or a new kind of thinking, is beginning to unfold on the basis of the discovery that reason is an outmoded concept and that the projects of Western philosophy are defunct. Postmodernist thinkers, in particular, have tried to describe the way things look from a post‐philosophical, post‐rational point of view. Jean‐François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition argues against the possibility of a comprehensive understanding of contemporary social and intellectual activities, while most (...) of the essays in Literature and the Question of Philosophy (ed. Anthony J. Cascardi) also reject the idea that there can be a valid comprehension of the elements found in textual or in ethical and political phenomena. Yet in every instance, the effort to establish a post‐philosophical, post‐rational way of looking at things involves an unwitting exercise of the rational power to conceive of a situation in terms of the relative disposition of its elements. Furthermore, the themes and ideas of post‐philosophy can be shown to have originated within the two grand narratives of modern philosophy (the emancipatory and the speculative narratives) that Lyotard has incorrectly pronounced passe. Postmodemism's confusion about itself shows the continuing relevance of Hegel's concept of Reason. (shrink)

Does Aristotle's terminology provide some guidance when we inquire into the origins of the notion of thing? Naturally, one might think of Aristotle's notion of being, which is meant to capture everything that is. However, ‘being’ in Aristotle seems to be significantly broader than what we take to be a ‘thing’. I will take up a thesis introduced and defended by Rainer-Wolfgang Mann, namely that Aristotle is actually the inventor of the notion of thing in that his Categories conceptualized the (...) distinction between properties on the one hand and their bearers, individual substances, on the other. It will be argued though that Aristotle, when conceptualizing things as bearers of properties, depicts a notion that is actually stronger than what we usually mean by ‘thing’. (shrink)

Die Schrift Metaphysik gilt als das Hauptwerk des Aristoteles und als eines der wichtigsten Werke der antiken griechischen Philosophie überhaupt. Bekannt ist die aristotelische Metaphysik vor allem für die Entfaltung der Ontologie als Wissenschaft des Seienden als Seienden, für die Darlegung einer philosophischen Theologie mit dem unbewegten Beweger als göttlichem und vernünftigem Prinzip von allem sowie für die Theorie der Substanz. Außerdem findet in der Metaphysik die entscheidende Auseinandersetzung mit Platons Ideenlehre und mit Aristoteles’ Zeitgenossen in der sogenannten Älteren Akademie (...) statt. (shrink)

This paper suggests that within Aristotle’s well-known contribution to the history of ontology two different levels should be kept apart, an analytic-critical and a constructive level. On the first level Aristotle mainly provides analytic-critical tools for overcoming the main problems of all dealings with the notions of being and to be, while the second level consists in Aristotle’s ambitious project of conducting first philosophy (i.e. the specific part of his philosophy that is meant to continue the old and time-honoured project (...) of identifying what Aristotle calls ‘first principles and causes’) as ontology, i.e. as an inquiry into being qua being. (shrink)

Ce texte traite de la définition aristotélicienne de la cité et des diverses constitutions, en Politique, I et III. On soutient ici (1) que la définition de la cité doit être extraite de deux passages du début du traité, (2) que la cité est définie par le but qui lui est propre et (3) que d’importants théorèmes politiques en Politique III se servent de cette définition initiale de la cité comme d’une prémisse. L’objectif ultime de cet article est de contribuer (...) à l’évaluation du rôle que jouent les définitions dans la méthode qui est celle d’Aristote dans sa philosophie morale et politique. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Dialectical Approach The Moral‐psychological Approach Rhetoric as Dealing with Accepted Beliefs (endoxa) The Stylistic Approach The Conventional Approach The Purpose Of Rhetoric Note Bibliography.

This contribution showcases the work of the Vienna Euchologia Project which aims to make accessible the ‘small prayers’ or ‘occasional prayers’ that are preserved in the Byzantine euchologia manuscripts from the late 8th to the mid 17th century as sources for daily life and social history. A brief introduction to the project is followed by three thematically focused studies that juxtapose the prescriptive prayers in the euchologia with descriptive evidence from other sources: exorcism and other prayers in hagiographical narratives, prayers (...) with relevance to political history, and prayers relating to women’s purity. (shrink)

In den moralphilosophischen Debatten der Gegenwart besteht eine Tendenz, bei der Entwicklung neuer Ansätze auf Elemente antiker Theorien zurückzugreifen, wobei v. a. die Ethik des Aristoteles eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Am Anfang dieses Rückgriffs auf die Antike steht eine grundlegende Kritik an modernen Ethik-Konzeptionen. Um die Wiederbelebung der aristotelischen Ethik zu verstehen, ist es sinnvoll, sich zunächst diese Kritik vor Augen zu führen.

In der modernen philosophischen Handlungstheorie finden sich nur wenige Theoretiker, die sich in ihren zentralen Punkten explizit auf bestimmte Thesen des Aristoteles berufen. Roderick Chisholm, der versucht hat, durch direkten Import der aristotelischen These vom unbewegten Beweger das Determinismusproblem in der Handlungstheorie kausaltheoretisch zu lösen, ist eine Ausnahme von dieser Regel. Gleichwohl war und ist Aristoteles in vielen handlungstheoretischen Debatten gegenwärtig. Sein Einfluss wird sichtbar besonders bei den drei führend an der Ausbildung der modernen analytischen Handlungstheorie beteiligten Personen nämlich Gilbert (...) Ryle, Elizabeth Anscombe und Donald Davidson. (shrink)

In the epistemology of his middle period, Plato repeatedly describes the alleged ‘intellection of true reality’ in terms of sight, vision, illumination, or touch. Does this show more than Plato’s preference for optic and haptic metaphors? Should we assume that this goes back to a specific reason to be found in his underlying epistemological position? On the traditional reading, Plato actually wants to defend a sort of intuitionism. According to this still wide-spread reading, he claims that there is a very (...) particular way of grasping Forms: Philosophers manage to come into a sort of direct contact with intelligible objects. Intellection is thus conceived as a quasi-visual presence of intelligible Forms. In our contribution, we want to challenge this interpretation by raising several objections against it. Surprisingly, there exists a close parallel in Aristotelian scholarship: Although Aristotle’s epistemology is built on considerably different foundations, there is an interpretative tradition according to which one has to assume a strict discontinuity between the methodical procedure and the intellection of the highest epistemic objects. As for Plato, we want to refuse an interpretation of Aristotle based on a concept of intuition characterized by the following features: Intuition is a specific way of gaining knowledge. It is independent of empirical conditions and leads to apriori knowledge. It consists of some experience of evidence or is accompanied by it. Knowledge gained by this kind of intuition does not need any further argument or justification. (shrink)