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161. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Robert Bernasconi My Travels in Scott-land
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Charles Scott’s relation to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is complex because he is sometimes highly critical, rejecting many of the words Levinas employed, while nevertheless at other times being faithful to some of Levinas’s most original insights. Employing a word often used by Scott himself, I understand his reading of Levinas as an “interruption.” It is a word that also comes to mind when I think of our own discussions about the meaning of ethics from 1981 to 1990, discussions which seem to have brought us to a point of proximity. The essay is intended as a description and celebration of the experience of thinking in the company of a powerful thinker such as Charles Scott is.
162. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
John J. Stuhr Indifference, Description, Difference
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This essay explores four questions: Is there an indifferent dimension to our lives?; what is the relation of indifference to our everyday differentiated meanings, interpretations, preferences, and values?; is it possible to develop an attunement to an indifferent dimension of life and, if so, how?; and, is a life marked by or attuned to indifference better than a life without it? In response, through a concrete example and analysis of a novel and a poem, I characterize indifference as both negation and as a kind of power, engaging the views developed by Charles Scott. I conclude by linking indifference to a project of description, and show the limits to this project, whether it is labeled phenomenological or pragmatic.
163. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 1
Michael A. Deere Gappiness in Dimensional Accounts
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The work of Charles Scott bears a lightness that enlivens his thinking and writing. In the spirit of such lightness, I argue for gappiness and dimensionality as ways of thinking indifference and liveliness in Scott’s accounts of things. Through a close reading of Starlight in the Face of the Other, I show that gappiness happens with indifference in senses of galactic space and exceeds the philosophical and historical lineages of alterity. Through the functions of recoil and the subjunctive mood in Scott’s work, I show that dimensionality characterizes the liveliness of thinking in attunement to indifference. I conclude with an indifferent and dimensional account of the space of disclosure in thinking.
164. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Ömer Orhan Aygün On Bees and Humans: Phenomenological Explorations of Hearing Sounds, Voices, and Speech in Aristotle
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This paper proposes a solution to the apparent contradiction between Aristotle’s positions concerning the bees’ ability to hear in the Metaphysics and in the History of Animals. It does so not by appealing to external (chronological or philological) emendations, but by disambiguating the Ancient Greek verb akouein into three meanings: hearing of sound (psophos), of voice (phônê) and of speech (logos). Such a differentiation shows that, according to Aristotle, bees do hear other bees’ intermittent buzzes as meaningful and interested calls for cooperation. This differentiation also hints toward the specificity of human communication and community.
165. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Nickolas Pappas The Impiety of the Republic's Imitator
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The Republic rarely speaks of piety; yet religious concerns inform more of its treatment of poetry than readers acknowledge. A pair of tripartite rankings in Book 10 has puzzled interpreters: first the triad Form-couch-painting, then the ostensibly equivalent triad of a flute’s or bridle’s user-maker-imitator. The tripartitions work better together if one recognizes the divinity at work behind Athena’s gifts the flute and bridle. This mythic reading reveals the imitator to stand, yet again, in opposition to the gods; but it also points toward an ambiguity about knowledge that Plato has forcibly excluded from his discussion.
166. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Serge Mouraviev Editing Heraclitus (1999-2012): Ten Volumes Plus One
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I shall tell you the story, propose an overview, and show the structure, goal, and peculiarities of this monstrous edition that I undertook forty-four years ago: the Heraclitea, of which ten volumes have appeared since 1999. One volume was published in November 2011 and a few others are still in preparation. While telling you this story, I shall strive to show the radical differences between my approaches and the standard ones taught worldwide in the departments of classics and ancient philosophy in universities.
167. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Michael M. Shaw The Problem of Motion in Plato's Phaedo
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This paper examines the relationship between participation and motion with respect to the natural philosophy of the Phaedo. Aristotle’s criticism of participation and its failure to account for motion shows the relevance of the dialogue to this problem. Challenging Aristotle’s critique, I interpret the Phaedo as offering a possible solution to the question of how forms cause motion in material beings. The verb ὀρέγεσθαι at 65c8, 75a2, and 75b1, together with the active ὀρέγειν at 117b2, ground an account of ontological striving as a solution to the difficulties inherent in participation within the literary context of the dialogue.
168. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Enrique Hülsz Piccone Heraclitus on Фύσις
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Presocratic philosophy as a historical category was defined by Aristotle as physics, or physical philosophy, because φύσις (understood as a single genus of being, among others) was its object of study, its practitioners being since tagged accordingly as φυσικοί or φυσιόλογοι. The central part of the paper deals briefly with the four pioneering Heraclitean uses of the word φύσις (frs. DK B106, B1, B112, and B123), in which the sense of the only Homeric use of the term seems to be deepened and continued. Φύσις in Heraclitus has an ontological sense (covering the rationale of genuine and unitary being), and appears always in epistemic contexts, as the object of search, criterion of knowledge, basis for action and language, susceptible of show­ing and concealing. Contrasting with Aristotle’s outlook, Plato’s Phaedo 95e ff. sheds a different light on φύσις, suggesting Plato’s acknowledgement of a wider metaphysical reach of Presocratic thought, and stressing historical continuity of the philosophical project as such. In particular, the meaning of the word φύσις in Plato and Heraclitus isn’t natural or physical reality, but reality tout court, or the nature of things (their essential being: the what, how and why of things that are).
169. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
James Risser On the Threefold Sense of Mimesis in Plato's Republic
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The traditional reading of Plato’s criticism of the poets and painters in Book 10 of the Republic is that they merely imitate. In light of Plato’s own image-making, the critique of imitation requires a more careful examination, especially in regards to painting. This paper argues that it is insufficient to view Plato’s critique of image-making by the painter solely in terms of the image replication that does not consider the eidos. In view of the context of Plato’s argument within Book 10 and elsewhere, other considerations, such as the ideas of measure and proportion, which pertain to the notion of the beautiful, are required for a complete understanding of the argument against the painter. In light of these further considerations I argue for a threefold distinction between mimesis as replication, mimesis as false resemblance, and mimesis as true resemblance. With respect to the third kind of mimesis, which directly pertains to Plato’s own image-making, one can see in Plato a different configuration of the relation between image and original portrayed in the image.
170. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Dennis J. Schmidt Orcid-ID From the Moly Plant to the Gardens of Adonis
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The intention of this article is investigate ways in which the image and metaphor of the garden open productive avenues for thinking the being of nature. The primary focus of this investigation is found in two instances in which gardens play significant roles in presenting, even if only tacitly, an image of nature: Homer’s Odyssey and Plato’s reference to the “Gardens of Adonis” in Phaedrus.
171. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Sara Brill Plato's Critical Theory
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This paper argues that the creation of Kallipolis and the educational pro­gamme designed therein should be read in the context of one branch of Plato’s critique of Athenian democracy; namely, its employment of the Laconizing trope prominent in Politeia literature in order to identify and radicalize the desires innervated by an idealized vision of Spartan unity. In particular, it aims to show that the discussion of sexual difference in the famous first wave of Book 5, as well as the peculiar concep­tion of phusis on which the foundation of Kallipolis rests and the account of familial discord so decisive for the distinct moments of its demise, should be read in light of the service they perform to Plato’s reframing of ownership.
172. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Walter Brogan Letter from the Editor
173. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
James M. Ambury The Failed Seduction: Alcibiades, Socrates, and the Epithumetic Comportment
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In this paper I argue that Plato’s Alcibiades is the embodiment of what I call the epithumetic comportment, a way of life made possible by the naïve ontological assumption that appearance is all that is. In the first part of the paper, I read select portions of the Alcibiades I and establish a distinction between the epithumetic comportment, which desires gratification in exchange for flattery, and the erotic comportment, which desires care of the soul. In the second half of the paper I turn to the Symposium and argue that Alcibiades fails in his seduction of Socrates because his inability to abandon the epithumetic comportment makes it impossible for him to be a Socratic interlocutor and subsequently know philosophical Forms. Through an interrogation of Alcibiades’s character we see that his failure is to be blamed neither on ‘Platonic love’ nor on Socrates himself but should be understood as a consequence of his inability to truly care for himself. I conclude by analyzing the consequences of my argument for typical interpretations of Alcibiades’s encomium to Socrates.
174. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Josh Michael Hayes Being Ensouled: Desire as an Efficient Cause in Aristotle's De Anima
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Throughout the tradition of Aristotelian commentary, there is a common tendency to present a static conception of substance according to the persistence of form imposed upon matter. In this essay, I present a dynamic conception of substance beginning with an account of the striving movement of the soul in De Anima. I argue that the paradigm for Aristotle’s definition of substance as actuality (entelecheia) is necessarily determined by his account of desire (orexis) as an efficient cause of the soul. The striving movement of desire as an efficient cause fulfills a holistic function by providing a teleological unity to the various capacities of the soul.
175. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Adriel M. Trott Rule in Turn: Political Rule against Mastery in Aristotle's Politics
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Aristotle’s political theory is often dismissed as undemocratic due to his treatment of natural slavery and women and to his conception of political rule as rule by turns. The second reason presents no less serious challenges than the first for finding democracy in Aristotle’s political theory. This article argues that Aristotle’s account of ruling in turns hinges on a critique of master rule and an affirmation of political rule, which involves both the rulers and the ruled in the project of ruling. Ruling in turns makes the rule shared, not merely an exchange of opportunities to rule as a despot.
176. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 17 > Issue: 2
Robin Weiss In Cicero's De Finibus, an Ars Vitae between Technê and Theôria
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Cicero’s De Finibus contains a debate about whether practical knowledge should be compared to theoretical knowledge (theôreia/sapientia), or to technical knowledge (technê/ars). The way in which practical knowledge is conceived by the Stoics on the one hand, and Peripatetics on the other, lies behind and explains, for Cicero, the tendency of Peripatetics to place greater priority upon harmony with the external world, and that of the Stoics to seek inner harmony at the cost of harmony with that external world. The dialogue ends in aporia because, for Cicero, practical knowledge either comes to bear an excessive resemblance to technê, as in the case of the Peripatetics, or to theoretical knowledge, as in the case of the Stoics; for him, it must fall neither to one nor the other extreme.
177. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Vishwa Adluri Heidegger, Luther, and Aristotle: A Theological Deconstruction of Metaphysics
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This paper examines Heidegger’s concept of “facticity” in his writings from the 1920s. Heidegger’s focus on this concept, the author suggests, is keyed to Heidegger’s own rethinking of existence in terms of Luther’s and Paul’s interpretations of early Christianity. In this context, then, we gain new insight into Heidegger’s notions of temporality, of Jeweiligkeit, and also his critical appropriation of Aristotle.
178. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Charlotta Weigelt The Hermeneutic Significance of Aristotle's Concept of Chance
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In this article I argue that Aristotle’s discussion of chance in the Physics gives an important contribution to the theory of action put forward in the Nicomachean Ethics, in particular as regards its notion that man is himself the origin or ground (archê) of his actions. Whereas the ethical works show a tendency to explain this notion in objective and causal terms, the account of chance as the happening of the unexpected not only points to the essential finitude of all human conduct, but also indicates that the concept of ground in connection with human agency must be understood in subjective terms, or in the direction of sense-giving and responsibility.
179. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Jakob Ziguras Archē as Urphänomen: A Goethean Interpretation of Aristotle's Theory of Scientific Knowledge
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The problems involved in understanding the Aristotelian notion of an ἀρχή arise from the widely accepted view that Aristotle’s theory of knowledge is torn between irreconcilable empiricist and rationalist tendencies. I argue that several puzzling features of the Aristotelian ἀρχή are clarified when it is understood as akin to the Urphänomen, which plays a central role in the scientific thought of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. More broadly, I argue that the apparent conflict in Aristotle’s theory of knowledge is resolved by seeing that Aristotle is neither an empiricist, nor a rationalist, but a “rational empiricist” akin to Goethe.
180. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy: Volume > 18 > Issue: 1
Tyler Tritten A Will Free to Presence . . . or Not: Schelling on the Originality of the Will
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This article presents Schelling’s doctrine of creation, primarily as outlined in his lectures on mythology and revelation. Schelling there presents not a will to power, but a power to will or not to will—the decisiveness of freedom rather than blind willing. Accordingly, Schelling is able to surpass the tradition of the metaphysics of presence through freedom as an unprecognoscible act prior to potency/power. Schelling’s will is not natural but preternatural, capable of bringing forth something original, i.e., that which first becomes possible only once it has already become actual.