Papers
Selves and other selves in Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics 7.12
Accepted for publication in "Ancient Philosophy" (NB this is not the final publication version because I'm waiting for a way of putting up a revised version here: please e-mail if you want updates)
Aristotle observes an apparent conflict between, on the one hand, the value of self-sufficiency and, on the other hand, the value of relationships with our friends, the people with whom we enjoy spending our time. Using Aristotle's discussion of the issue as a prompt, I try to explain why this sort of relationship with our friends is in fact very dear and precious to us. In the course of this discussion I argue against the idea that Aristotle thinks that friends are useful for assisting us towards self-knowledge, and defend instead the idea that friends provide an extension of the self which enable one to obtain a richer view of the shared world that we view together. I then go on to examine how we might ask similar questions about why the good person would gain from encountering fictional characters in literature, and what kinds of literature would be beneficial to the good life.
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“If all things were to turn to smoke, it’d be the nostrils would tell them apart”
Draft, submitted in 2007 for publication in a volume to be edited by Enrique Hulsz
I start by asking what Aristotle knew (or thought) about Heraclitus: what were the key features of Heraclitus's philosophy as far as Aristotle was concerned? In this section of the paper I suggest that there are some patterns to Aristotle's references to Heraclitus: besides the classic doctrines (flux, ekpyrosis and the unity of opposites) on the one hand, and the opening of Heraclitus's book on the other, Aristotle knows and reports a few slightly less obvious sayings, one of which is in my title.
Secondly, I ask some further questions. Is there any systematic connection between the bits that Aristotle reports? Do they hang together? Ought we to see here some relic of an Aristotelian understanding of what made Heraclitus tick? If we juxtapose these themes and Aristotle's comments on them, I suggest, we can generate some suggestive motifs, in particular a rather curious fascination with smoking, and the pleasures of inhaling.
Finally, I suggest that smells (and the way the world would be if smells were the only differences to be discerned) are important in understanding what Heraclitus was doing.
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Why one should be passionate about numbers
Draft submitted in 2005 for publication in a volume to be edited by Apostolos Pierris
Philosophers are generally somewhat wary of the hints of number mysticism in the reports about the beliefs and doctrines of the so-called Pythagoreans. It's not clear how much Pythagoras himself (as opposed to his later followers) indulged in speculation about numbers, or in more serious mathematics. But the Pythagoreans whom Aristotle discusses in the Metaphysics had some elaborate stories to tell about how the universe could be explained in terms of numbers—not just its physics but perhaps morality too. Was this just fanciful speculation? Is it muddled as a theory of causality, as Aristotle suggests? I shall try to rehabilitate the passion for numbers by linking it with the notions of harmony and proportion in other thinkers who have a higher credibility factor in the philosophical stakes, and by showing that the desire to reduce quality to quantity, and to discover an exact science that can explain human life and meaning, is a serious philosophical passion that doesn't easily go away. And, after all, why should it?
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Absolute goodness, rhetoric and rationality: a discussion of Robert Pirsig's novel Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance and Plato's Phaedrus.
This is a paper that is clearly never going to get published in the journals, so I've decided to post it here. It'll probably get more readers this way, anyway. There's stuff written on the novel that I haven't addressed, and there's a lack of detail in what I say about the Phaedrus: there's a fuller defence on that in another paper that I have published.
The paper examines the explicit and implicit connections between Robert Pirsig's popular philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the dialogue of Plato from which Pirsig borrowed the name for his novel's hero. Pirsig was attempting to challenge the dominant approach in Western Philosophy by appeal to an alternative outlook in which absolute goodness (or 'quality') is left undefined but is granted its proper place, the supreme place, in the metaphysics of the world and in the values of the philosopher. Pirsig associated this outlook with Plato's opponents, the sophists and rhetoricians of ancient Greece. I argue that Plato's Socrates, and not his opponents, speaks out for the very same values that Pirsig wished to defend; and that he does so particularly clearly in the dialogue named after Phaedrus. Hence Pirsig was misguided in his attack on Plato, though the moral that he wished to illustrate is a worthy one that has found other, more famous, champions.
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Ralph Cudworth's The True Intellectual System of the Universe and the Presocratic Philosophers
Final draft with editors' corrections, submitted for a forthcoming volume edited by Oliver primavesi
Ralph Cudworth (1617-88) was one of the Cambridge Platonists. His major work, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, was completed in 1671, a year after Spinoza published (anonymously) the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. It was published a few years later, in 1678. Cudworth offers a spirited attack against the materialism and mechanism of Thomas Hobbes. His work is couched as a search for truth among the ancient philosophers, and this paper examines his use of the Presocratics as a tool for discussing the issues of his day.
Was verse the default form for Presocratic Philosophy?
in Form and Content in Didactic Poetry, ed Catherine Atherton, Bari 1998. Apologies for the poor copy.
I argue that there is nothing strange about the idea of writing philosophy in verse (as though the normal way to write it was in prose) for any philosopher up to and including Parmenides and Empedocles. Rather the reverse: the idea of writing philosophy as joined up arguments in prose is what is novel and needs explaining, if it even happened in any recognisable sense before Plato. In a predominantly oral culture in which teaching is done by memorable declamation, verse is the default.
In addition it is a mistake to detach the content of a work of philosophy from its mode of presentation as though one might think the thoughts in prose and then "put them into poetry". Philosophers think their thoughts in the form that they can be expressed. The form of the poetry is part of the expression: it would be a mistake to think that there is a formless thought that is hidden under a fancy but unnecessary cloak of poetry.
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