What Does Aristotle\u27s Prime Mover Do?

The Prime Mover of Metaphysics Lambda is the source, above all, of eternal motion in the first sphere. It may seem silly to ask \u27What (according to Lambda) does the Prime Mover do?\u27 The answer is obvious: \u27He — or it — gives rise to the motion of the first sphere\u27. But according to a widely accepted interpretation, this is not what the Prime Mover does first and foremost; instead, the Mover essentially contemplates. This contemplative conception is my target here. I shall adduce reasons for suspecting that the contemplative Prime Mover is not an Aristotelian postulate in Lambda, but an exegetical construct. I shall simultaneously make a case for holding that the actual Prime Mover in Lambda should be viewed as a kinetic agent (which is how the Prime Mover is generally presented elsewhere in the corpus). These arguments are founded on conceptual as well as textual considerations, and on reasonable assumptions concerning Aristotle\u27s aims in Lambda and his capacity for self-criticism especially in respect of absurdities for which he castigates other philosophers. I shall not, however, rely on debatable hypotheses about the development of his theology through several treatises, or about his journey towards or away from Platonism. I shall be concerned with the Prime Mover only in Metaphysics Lambda, and within Lambda I shall restrict the discussion to relations that may be thought to obtain between the Prime Mover, the first sphere, and the movement of that sphere. And as well as saying almost nothing about the other spheres and their movers, I shall touch only briefly on the celebrated doctrine in Ch. 9 that the Prime Mover\u27s activity is a thinking of thinking

The knowledge unacknowledged in the Theaetetus

ISBN: 9780198795797, 9780198795803 Edited by Victor CastonKnowledge, says Hypothesis 3 of the Theaetetus, is true judgement with an account. Socrates explicates this additively: true judgement is the base, and something called ‘an account’ the addendum. The formula is additive not because it shows knowledge entailing true judgement while being something more. Additivity implies something stronger: that the true judgement that amounts to knowledge if combined with something else would have been available on its own in the absence of this something else, hence in the absence of knowledge. The paper explores what the Theaetetus and Sophist show about this additive theory of knowledge. It argues that (at least for some cases of knowledge) the theory is rejected in the Sophist, and has already been called into question in connection with Hypothesis 2 of the Theaetetus.proofPeer reviewe

Corporeal gods, with reference to Plato and Aristotle

Postprin

Practical truth in Aristotle

An interpretation is offered of the Aristotelian concept of “practical truth”in the wake of Anscombe’s very interesting exegesis. Her own interpretation isconsidered and its merits noted, but a question is raised as to its plausibility as anaccount of what Aristotle himself intended in speaking of “truth that is practical”(he alētheia praktikē)

Alternative World-Histories

We act so as to make things better than they would have been but for the action; we are horrified by an uncontrollable catastrophe because it made things so much worse than they would have been without it. Such attitudes are reasonable only if it is reasonable to make the associated counterfactual conditional judgments. But making such judgments cannot be reasonable if one holds both (1) that this world is absolutely and uniquely actual (‘absolute actualism'), and (2) that everything is settled (‘ES'). Determinism (strictly understood) figures as the most obvious example of ES theory, but ES can occur in an indeterministic form too: both forms are considered. Philosophical Papers Vol.31(2) 2002: 117-14