Recent Submissions

  • Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access ,
    Livio Rossetti nella terra incognita degli Eleati
    (Wydział Filozoficzny UAM, 2021) Roberta Ioli
  • Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access ,
    Truth in Practical Reason: Practical and Assertoric Truth in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
    (Wydział Filozoficzny UAM, 2021) Michail Pantoulias; Vasiliki Vergouli; Panagiotis Thanassas
    Truth has always been a controversial subject in Aristotelian scholarship. In most cases, including some well-known passages in the Categories, De Interpretatione and Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the predicate ‘true’ for assertions, although exceptions are many and impossible to ignore. One of the most complicated cases is the concept of practical truth in the sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics: its entanglement with action and desire raises doubts about the possibility of its inclusion to the propositional model of truth. Nevertheless, in one of the most extensive studies on the subject, C. Olfert has tried to show that this is not only possible but also necessary. In this paper, we explain why trying to fit practical truth into the propositional model comes with insurmount­able problems. In order to overcome these problems, we focus on multiple aspects of practical syllogism and correlate them with Aristo­tle’s account of desire, happiness and the good. Identifying the role of such concepts in the specific steps of practical reasoning, we reach the conclusion that practical truth is best explained as the culmination of a well-executed practical syllogism taken as a whole, which ultimately explains why this type of syllogism demands a different approach and a different kind of truth than the theoretical one.
  • Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access ,
    Bycie – nie bycie, prawda – fałsz w koncepcji Arystotelesa
    (Wydział Filozoficzny UAM, 2021) Marian Andrzej Wesoły
    The basis of Aristotle’s arguments about truth and falsity is formulated syntactically according to the distinctions of ‘to be’ as the predicative affirmation - composition and, correspondingly, ‘not to be’ as negation – separation. As the nominal defining characteristic of falsity is contradic­tion, so of truth is non-contradiction. The expression of truth or falsity in the declarative sentence of affirmation or negation is a function of thinking as a human cognitive disposition under the semantic figures of categorical predication. In addition, we cite Aristotle’s more important texts on the true intellection of non-composites (indivisibles), the inves­tigation of truth and probability, the diagnosis of falsehood, the truthful­ness and lying. Finally, a mention of modern adaptations of Aristotle’s concept of truth.
  • Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access ,
    Aristotle’s Mixture in its Medical and Philosophical Background: The Hippocratic De victu and the Aristotelian De generatione et corruptione
    (Wydział Filozoficzny UAM, 2021) Claudia Mirrone
    Aristotle’s notion of qualitative interaction ruling both the process of mixture and the process of reciprocal elemental transmutation is based upon the idea of a physical contrariety endowed with two extremes and a wide central area where the opposite forces reach different equilibrium points (i.e., the so-called mixtures) or can be present to the fullest degree (in this case we do not have a mixture, but an element). Differently from previous scholarship which attributes this notion specifically to Aristotle, we have found, in a text which Aristotle seems to have been acquainted with, the Hippocratic De victu, an incipient structure of a contrariety endowed with extremes and a central area where opposite forces meet and yield respective equilibrium points, mixtures, which, as in Aristotle, give an account of the variety of beings existing in the world. In this article, we suggest the possibility that in the development of the Aristotelian thinking about elemental and qualitative dynamics, the Hippocratic De victu may have contributed to suggesting to Aristotle a way of envisioning the structure of his basic physical contrarieties.
  • Item type:Item, Access status: Open Access ,
    An Ontology for the In-Between of Motion: Aristotle’s Reaction to Zeno’s Arguments
    (Wydział Filozoficzny UAM, 2021) Michel Crubellier
    This paper proposes an interpretation of Books V and VI of Aristotle’s Physics as being (at least partly) a reaction to Zeno’s four “arguments against motion” that Aristotle expounds and discusses in Phys. VI 9. On the basis of a detailed textual analysis of that chapter, I show that Zeno’s arguments rest on a frame of a priori notions such as part and whole, in contact, between, limit, etc., which Aristotle takes over in order to account for the inner structure (here called “the In-Between”) common to all facts of motion and change. That frame allows him to develop a specific ontology for that inner structure – although it exists only potentially according to the Aristotelian orthodoxy – because he needs such an ontology in order to vindicate the reality of motion and change.