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Article
heart
Julius Rocca
Article
Xenarchus (3) of Seleucia, Peripatetic philosopher, c. 30 BCE
Myrto Hatzimichali
Xenarchus taught at Alexandria, Athens, and Rome, and his acquaintances included the geographer Strabo and the emperor Augustus. He is best known for his critique of Aristotle’s fifth element, which constitutes the material of the heavenly bodies according to the De caelo. Xenarchus targeted in particular Aristotle’s reliance on direct correspondences between simple bodies and simple motions and suggested that the ontologically privileged fire “in its natural place” could perform circular motion and was thus a plausible candidate for the material constituent of the heavens. He made further contributions in physics, psychology, and ethics, but he does not seem to have shown the same interest in the Categories as his Peripatetic contemporaries.
We are able to date Xenarchus’ activity to the 1st century
Article
poetry, philosophers on
S. Halliwell
The engagement of philosophers with poetry was a recurrent and vital feature of the intellectual culture of Graeco-Roman antiquity. By around 380
Article
animals, knowledge about
Pietro Li Causi
Article
Aristotelian and Kantian Virtues and Education
Guðmundur Heiðar Frímannsson
Virtues are conditions for education, a part of education, and a result of it. Virtues are stable, desirable traits of persons. For a person to be virtuous, these traits of character must be regularly expressed in action. Choosing rationally to perform good actions is not sufficient for virtue; even though it may be a necessary condition for an action to be good, performing is necessary as well to exercise virtue. It is sometimes claimed that moral theory along utilitarian and deontological lines neglected or forgot the virtues in its theoretical work in the 20th century. This is true about much of 20th-century moral theory. Aristotelian moral theory has grown in influence since the early 1970s and it can be reasonably said that it is now just as influential as deontology and utilitarianism if not more so. Naturalism is a part of Aristotelian moral theory and has proved a much stronger base for moral action and moral argument than 20th-century moral theory was willing to accept with its fundamental distinction between facts and values. Values are just as fundamental to our understanding of the world as facts. Arguments in moral theory move easily from facts to values and values to facts. The relation between facts and values is more complicated than much of 20th-century moral theory allowed for. Immanuel Kant is often taken as an example of a philosopher who neglected the virtues. Yet Kant wrote a work, The Metaphysics of Morals, half of which was devoted to virtues. Education is a normative endeavor aiming at well-rounded individuals capable of fulfilling those functions that modern society requires from them, such as being a citizen, entering working life with valuable complex skills, or governing one’s own life. It is not possible to fulfill these functions without mastering the moral and intellectual virtues.
Article
Martin Luther and Ontology
Dennis Bielfeldt
Although many have interpreted Luther as “anti-metaphysical” and therefore unconcerned with the question of being, careful scrutiny of his texts shows otherwise. Trained at Erfurt to read Aristotle in the via moderna tradition, Luther did have ontological and semantic convictions that are displayed throughout his work, but especially in his disputations dealing with Trinitarian, Christological and soteriological issues. While rejecting as idolatrous the human attempt to grasp the summum bonum through natural reason, Luther nonetheless assumed that God’s revelation in Christ has ontological implications.
The Finnish School of Luther interpretation, founded by Tuomo Mannermaa, has done a great service for Luther research by highlighting the motifs in Luther of Christ’s real presence in the justified believer and the presence of God’s love in faith. Although the Aristotelian categories available to Luther were inadequate for conceiving the paradoxical presence of the infinite in the finite, Luther did not thereby adopt a relational ontology more characteristic of the late 19th century than of his own time. Instead, he simply regarded as true what his philosophical categories could not fully conceive: just as God became a human being while remaining God, so too do humans become God while remaining human. While the Finnish scholarship highlights Luther’s use of participatio in speaking of the presence of the divine in the justified believer, Luther did not mean thereby that human beings are essentially transformed into God, but rather that they are, in faith, profoundly interpenetrated by the divine.
Luther’s discussion of the nova lingua of theology connects to the “real-ontic” presence of Christ in the believer. As a good nominalist, Luther understood that sentential truth presupposes ontology. While everyday language, the language of philosophy generally, has truth conditions that can be articulated in terms of the existence of particular substances and their particular qualities, things are not so clear for the language of theology that speaks of the Trinity, incarnation, and the presence of God in the world and particularly in the life of the believer. How is this language constituted so that the real presence of the divine can be spoken with meaning and truth? While Luther assumes the extensionalism of nominalism when speaking philosophically, it is not clear that this is the case when he speaks theologically. Luther understands that language itself must be profoundly changed in order to grasp and state the reality of the infinite in the finite. Whether this change can be understood on the horizon of an extensionalist semantics is an open question.
Article
matriarchy
Simon Geoffrey Pembroke
Article
Virtue Ethics and International Relations
Kirsten Ainley
Virtue Ethics (VE) is a way of thinking about how to behave well which focuses on the character of moral agents and the nature of the good life. This contrasts with dominant approaches to international ethics which prioritize the identification or development of moral rules or duties (deontological approaches) or the consequences of actions (consequentialist approaches). The relevance of virtue ethics to international affairs is established by setting out the critique of the dominant law-based approaches offered by VE and then exploring the positive contribution VE can make. Virtue ethicists argue that character and a concrete conception of the human good are central to ethics—that the right question to ask when working out what it means to be ethical is not “what should I do” but “what sort of person should I be?” The three central concepts in VE—virtue, practical wisdom, and flourishing—have not been applied systematically qua VE in international political theory or international relations, but their appearance in various guises in recent scholarship suggests avenues for future research. Four such avenues are identified, ranging from the moderate to the radical, which offer innovative ways to confront key ethical dilemmas faced in international affairs.
Article
Ethics of Reading
Matthew Garrett
The ethics of reading connects with but is not identical to the field of ethical criticism. Often pursued as a normative inquiry into morality, ethics may be better understood in historical terms. From this point of view, the inquiry into ethics is not a matter of good and evil (or universal moral correctness) but rather of understanding historically variable and socially conditioned regimes of subjective self-construction (ethics). Thus, moral thought may be taken to be one specific modality of the ethical, not its essential feature. A social and historical inquiry into the ethics of reading must then examine the ethical impulse itself, the recurring attraction of ethical questions, normative moral claims, and the search for moral models in literary and cultural texts. Various strands of ethical criticism have treated literary characters as approximations of persons or have considered the way reading itself may be a morally healthful act. Understanding these approaches and their limitations helps one recognize an alternative ethics of reading, focused on the social and historical reconstruction of the category of the ethical, as well as a more specifically literary-critical style of reading, focused on a single ethical injunction: fidelity to the object of critical attention.
Article
thymos
Douglas Cairns
Article
Anonymus Londiniensis
Daniela Manetti
Article
poetic unity, Greek
Richard Hunter
Article
geocentricity
Jacqueline Feke
Geocentricity is the theory that the Earth is located at the center of the cosmos. The theory was espoused first by Parmenides in the fifth century BCE and then became the standard view from the fourth century BCE onward. Eudoxus and his student Callippus devised geometrical models based on the geocentric hypothesis. In these models, the heavens consist of a series of homocentric spheres, centred on the Earth, that account for the movements of the Sun, Moon, stars, and five planets visible with the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Aristotle modified this cosmological system and developed an element theory consistent with geocentricity. Some ancient Greek intellectuals offered alternative cosmologies—notably Philolaus, Heraclides of Pontus, and Aristarchus of Samos—but the geocentric conception of the cosmos remained the standard view. Cleomedes and Claudius Ptolemy offer proofs of the geocentric hypothesis in their astronomical texts. In addition, Ptolemy puts forward complex astronomical models that incorporate the eccentric and epicyclic hypotheses as well as the equant, a feature of his own invention. Ptolemy’s geocentric astronomy was authoritative until the seventeenth century, when mathematicians came to espouse a Copernican conception of a heliocentric cosmos, where the Sun is situated at the centre of the cosmos and the Earth orbits the Sun. Isaac Newton developed a physics consistent with heliocentricity and thus prepared the way for the demise of the geocentric theory and the widespread acceptance of heliocentricity.
Article
meteorology
Liba Taub
Greco-Roman meteorology included the study of what we today consider to be atmospheric, astronomical, and seismological phenomena; wind, rain, comets, and earthquakes were subjects of meteorological study, as were many other phenomena. For the most part, those authors and texts that treated meteorology were not concerned with weather prediction but rather with explaining phenomena. Various philosophers, including the Presocratics, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Epicurus, as well as other philosophically-minded authors such as Lucretius and Seneca, approached the topic from the standpoint of their own interests, including ethics as well as physics. The traditional gods were not wholly absent from philosophical accounts, but they were not thought responsible for weather. Various authors and texts addressed weather prediction, providing lists of weather signs. Ancient Greco-Roman meteorology and weather prediction were both characterized by conservatism and a valorization of tradition, but nevertheless permitted a degree of innovation and originality.
“Meteorology” strictly means “the study of things aloft,” but the term was widely used in antiquity to cover the study of what might now be called meteorological phenomena, as well as comets (today treated as astronomical) and phenomena on and within the earth itself, such as tides and earthquakes (the latter now described as “seismological”). The Homeric and Hesiodic poems describe meteorological phenomena as linked to gods, often as epiphanies. The long-lived authority of the poets on meteorological topics is attested by many quotations and allusions in the writings of later authors, even in prose works on meteorology. Notwithstanding this, later Greek and Roman thinkers offered explanations of meteorological phenomena with no mention of gods.
Article
earthquakes
Georgia L. Irby
Article
paradoxography
Kenneth W. Yu
Article
physiognomy
Maria Michela Sassi
Article
Scholasticisms in Martin Luther’s Thought
Theodor Dieter
The article’s starting point is the observation that “scholasticism” cannot simply be taken as a unity, and thus also not Luther’s relationship to it, in spite of his often very general polemics against “the scholastics.” Rather, Luther’s discussion of specific philosophical and theological topics is analyzed, since only such debates have a clearly defined content and allow for arguments that can be examined, as is characteristic for medieval disputations. Thus, the unusual plural “scholasticisms” is used.
Article
The Cosmological Vision of Martin Luther
Mickey L. Mattox
Martin Luther was not an original contributor to the study of cosmology, and if one were to judge only by his explicit remarks on the matter, it would seem to have been of little interest to him. He was, however, every bit a man of his times, and as such he assumed what educated people of his times assumed, including in the matter of the nature and structure of reality. The world in which he came of age was informed by a compelling vision of the universe as a whole. Astronomical observation and mathematical calculation in the traditions of Aristotle and Ptolemy had long since combined with philosophical and religious speculation to render Luther’s world a coherent “cosmos” (Gk. kosmos, “order” or “world”), at the center of which reposed a stationary sphere, the earth. This world was surrounded at ever-increasing heights by the heavenly spheres, each of them thought to be wheeling in at tremendous rates of speed that increased as one moved up through their heights: first the moon, then the planets, the stars, and ultimately the prime mover. This long-traditional view of the cosmos rendered reality itself an arena of intense motion and beauty.
Taken in a broad scientific and aesthetic sense, cosmology provided not only an interpretation of the heavens but also an imaginative lens through which to experience and understand one’s self and one’s world. Though he quibbled over some of the details, Luther clearly viewed himself and his world through that very lens. During his university studies in Erfurt for the bachelor and master of arts degrees, he read cosmology as a subject covered in the integrated approach to learning set forth in a curriculum based on the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). In combination with other later medieval notions—such as the understanding of the human body and its four humors or the sublunar sphere and its four constituent elements (earth, water, air, fire)—cosmology became for Luther what it was for all his educated peers, that is, a world view. Thus, while Luther was not a cosmologist per se, the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos provided a set of background beliefs that informed his theology and world view at every level. He also developed a distinctive understanding of the reality and exercise of power and authority, both on the earth and in the heavens.
Article
Reason and Philosophy in Martin Luther’s Thought
Hans-Peter Grosshans
Throughout his academic life, Martin Luther was in constant discussion with philosophy. He was prepared for this with a substantial study of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, finishing with a master of arts degree. In many parts of Luther’s work, there are explicit discussions of philosophy, in the interpretation of biblical texts and in the definition of theological concepts. Quite early in his theological career, Luther became aware of the problematic dominance of Aristotelian scholastic philosophy in the formation and definition of theological concepts. He was always attempting to develop a clear distinction between philosophy and theology, which freed theology from the concepts of Aristotelian philosophy and from the limits of Aristotelian logic, but the same time respected the significance of philosophy. As Luther preferred clear critique and often used strident language for this, his sometimes polemical critique of philosophy, logic, and “the philosopher” (Aristotle) was often interpreted as a fundamental dismissal of philosophy. Since the late 20th century, research has presented a very different picture of Luther’s understanding of philosophy, of the role and significance he gave to philosophy theoretically and in his practical academic work, and of the relation of Luther’s references to Aristotle and the concrete Aristotelian philosophy in scholasticism, as well as to the relationship between theology and philosophy in general. All this research showed how deeply Luther was rooted in the philosophical discourses and contexts of late scholasticism and involved in the debates of nominalism. But this research also made clear how Luther successfully struggled to come to a very different model of the relationship between theology and philosophy than the models of scholasticism, which secured the independence of both intellectual disciplines despite their close relatedness their relatedness. Luther’s understanding of philosophy and philosophy’s significance for theology is closely related to his concept of reason. Again, there is some polemical critique of reason in Luther’s writings, but in fact Luther had a high appreciation of reason, when reason was in exploring the physical, social, and psychic reality and in shaping the natural, social, and moral world. Luther was critical and polemical toward reason when it was used in matters of faith. But although the use of reason in theology had its limits, it was nevertheless indispensable in theological work. This was especially clear in Luther’s hermeneutics, as reason was the means to come to the external clarity of biblical texts in the process of interpretation.
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