Aristotle on the Truth of Things

Aristotle on the truth of things Abstract Most of Aristotle\u27s texts dealing with truth are unexceptionable: truth belongs only to sentences or beliefs, and it does so in virtue of a correspondence between those sentences or beliefs and the things in the world that they are about. Single words cannot be true, and the things in the world, whether single or compound, cannot be true either. There is however one text, Chapter 10 of Book Theta of the Metaphysics, that breaks with these familiar and comfortable views; it allows that single words or thoughts can be true, and also that things in the world, whether single or compound, can be true as well. This paper reviews a number of attempts to make sense of the truth of things – Brentano, Aquinas, Heidegger – and finds them all wanting. It then goes on to make a new proposal, exploring that part of the semantic terrain of alêthîes and its cognates that has to do with genuineness, with realness, and so, ultimately, with existence

Homeopoesis: Aristotle on Nutrition and Growth

This paper seeks to understand how Aristotle’s ideas about nutrition avoid cancerous growth: why does the flesh that is distilled out of the digestive process, and that travels out to the various parts of the body, not just produce formless growth? De Anima II.5 gives a purely formal reply ( limit and ratio: ) Using GA and GC I try to put together Aristotle\u27s schematic account of the process

Aristotle\u27s Rhetorodicy

There is a well-known question about Aristotle\u27s view of rhetoric: on the one hand he inherited the typical Platonic disdain for rhetoric as a concealer of truth; but on the other he throws himself with verve into the elaboration of a rhetorical manual. This paper points up a little-noticed Aristotelian justification for rhetoric, one that sees rhetorical contests as means for discovering the truth; it asks how such an optimistic view might be grounded

Plato\u27s Bed: essence and archetype in the Theory of Forms

The Theory of Forms is a thread that runs through nearly all of Plato’s intellectual career, being variously elaborated, nudged, and tweaked along the way. The project summarized in this poster argues that there is a serious ambiguity underlying the entire theory, an ambiguity that Plato himself never really noticed; at different times he was pursuing two different understandings of the Forms: as archetypes on the one hand, and as essences on the other. Each of these understandings has serious drawbacks

Intelligible Matter in Aristotle

The oxymoronic phrase ‘intelligible matter’ occurs three times in Aristotle. In two passages it has the same meaning; in the third the meaning seems radically different. This gives the impression that the Aristotelian language of metaphysics is distressingly slack. This paper argues, against the nearly unanimous voice of two millennia of commentaries, that ‘intelligible matter’ has the same meaning in all three loci. In doing so it develops a capital distinction that tightens up the apparatus of Aristotelian metaphysics

Aristotle\u27s clivus naturae

It is usually thought that Aristotle\u27s understanding of the soul sees it has having four distinct parts, cumulatively arranged, resulting in a kind of scala or ladder: all living things have the nutritive and reproductive soul; animals have, in addition, the sensitive soul, and most of them also the locomotive soul; only humans have all these plus the intellective soul. This ladder-like picture emerges from his theoretical work de Anima. In his more empirical studies, though, the discreteness of these levels is softened, and the image is more that of a clivus or slope, rather than a scala or ladder of nature