In honoring Carroll Izard’s contributions to emotion research, we discuss infant facial activity and emotion expression. We consider the debated issue of whether infants are biologically prepared to express specific emotions. We offer a perspective that potentially integrates differing viewpoints on infant facial expression of emotion. Specifically, we suggest that evolution has prepared infants with innate action readiness patterns, which are crucial for early infant–caregiver social interaction, and in the course of social interaction specific facial configurations acquire functional significance, becoming (...) associated with specific emotions. Research has not confirmed the presence of innate neurophysiological action patterns that map onto discrete emotions but evidence indicates that the possibility has not been ruled out. (shrink)

The Greater Alcibiades has been dismissed as spurious by a great many scholars including most of the major Platonists, and for a variety of reasons. Many of these reasons are to my mind extremely weak, and would apply with equal force to some of the undoubtedly genuine dialogues: Bluck has argued that nearly all can be met by supposing that Plato wrote it for some special purpose, for instance as a reply to Polycrates' attack on Socrates. It is noteworthy that (...) several scholars, while rejecting die work, do so with reluctance and a hint of misgiving. Shorey, for instance, sees touches worthy of Plato himself, and de Strycker thinks the work may actually have been revised by Plato. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that the Topics is one of Aristotle's earliest works. But after saying this most writers are unwilling to commit themselves any further and discuss the work, if they discuss it at all, with a vagueness about dating that leads them to do it less than justice. Part of the difficulty, no doubt, lies in the fact that the Topics consists of a central, early, core, surrounded by later additions, and cannot therefore be dealt with as a (...) whole. The suggestions about its date that I wish to make now are concerned solely with what I take to be the original Topics—or such part of it as remains—which I believe can be delimited almost exactly. (shrink)

The value and date ofVaticanus graecus1339, which contains many of the works of Aristotle, have been much disputed. Here I want only to argue that at the beginning of theDe Partibus Animalium, the first work it contains, it is closely related toParisinus graecus1853, the great tenth-century manuscript which is one of our major authorities for many of Aristotle's writings.

With Narrative and the Natural Law Pamela Hall brings Thomistic ethics into conversation with ongoing debates in contemporary moral philosophy, especially virtue theory and moral psychology, and with current trends in narrative theory and the philosophy of history. Pamela M. Hall's study offers a solid, challenging alternative to rigid, legalistic interpretations of the substantial discussion of law in Aquinas's Summa theologiae and defends Aquinas's ethics from charges of excessive legalism. Hall argues that Aquinas's characterization of the content and (...) relationship of natural, human and divine law indicates that his understanding of the quest for the human good is practical, communal, and historical. Hall maintains that natural law, the ongoing inquiry into what is the human good, is narrative both in terms of its internal structure and its being informed by the specific story of Scripture. According to Aquinas the discovery of natural law is enacted historically and progressively within communities and by individuals through a process of practical reasoning. Hall then goes on to show how natural law requires articulation by human law, and how both are connected to divine law (salvation history) as Aquinas understands it. Aquinas represents inquiry into the human good as a kind of historical narrative or story with stages or "chapters"; thus knowledge of natural law requires time and experience, as well as sustained reflection by individuals and by whole communities. Such learning of natural law implies the operation of prudence and the assistance of the moral virtues. (shrink)

The interpretation of these words is important for understanding the meaning of in Aristotle. For here, exceptionally, it has been taken to refer to sense-perceptions rather than images.I quote the Oxford translation of 462a15–24 : ‘From all this, then, the conclusion to be drawn is that the dream is a sort of presentation (), and, more particularly, one which occurs in sleep; since the phantoms just mentioned are not dreams, nor is any other a dream which presents itself when the (...) sense-perceptions are in a state of freedom. Nor is every presentation which occurs in sleep necessarily a dream. (shrink)

This is a concise and easy-to-read account of the ethical philosophy of the Greeks, from the Sophists to the Stoics. With particular emphasis on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the author skillfully traces the themes of law and nature, virtue, knowledge and happiness, and love and friendship, giving a comprehensive account of the meanings the Greeks attached to expressions such as "justice", "voluntary action", "virtue", and "good".

Mr Newton-Smith and Mr Boyce, in discussion notes in the January 1972 number of Philosophy , have raised a number of interesting points about my original paper. But I feel that they have not gone beyond a simple denial of the central argument, which is to be found on pp. 124–126 and 128–130 of the April 1971 number, and that much of what they say therefore fails by petitio.

Theodore Waitz, in the section of his introduction to Aristotle's Organon called De Codicibus graecis organi, prints a number of passages found in various manuscripts, which are not to be treated simply as scholia on Aristotle, but are still of some interest to the student of Aristotle's logic. In this paper I am concerned with three leaves, fos. 84–6, from Laurentianus 71, 32, a fourteenth-century manuscript containing paraphrases of several works, which Waitz uses for scholia on the Categories and the (...) De Interpretatione. These leaves are in a different hand from the rest of the manuscript, and Waitz thinks they originated elsewhere. The heading is: Περ τς το ποτ κτηγορς, and the work falls into two parts, a discussion of Time, based on Physics 4, and an independent section in which the category of When, which Aristotle does little more than mention in a number of lists, is treated at length. In Waitz' text there are a number of references to scholia: these are in fact from Simplicius' Commentary on the Categories, and a comparison with these and still other passages of Simplicius not mentioned by Waitz suggests that the author of this work was Boethus of Sidon, the Peripatetic. I propose to examine it and argue that it is indeed by Boethus. Boethus, known as ‘the Peripatetic’, to distinguish him from the Stoic philosopher of the same name, was head of the Peripatos in succession to Andronicus of Rhodes. There is some uncertainty about Andronicus' dates, but he lived some time in the middle of the first century b.c. and we may place Boethus somewhat later in the same century. Andronicus is well known as the editor, and in a sense the rediscoverer, of the esoteric works of Aristotle; it is less well known that he had an independent attitude to Aristotle and put forward what he presumably thought of as some improvements in doctrine. What concerns us here is his attempt to substitute the category of Time for that of When. In opposition to him Boethus may be seen as a conservative, coming to the defence of Aristotle against these innovations. (shrink)