Between friendship and justice: on Lincoln’s political thought

Reading Aristotle and applying his notion of philia, or political friendship, across 26 centuries sheds significant light into Abraham Lincoln’s career. It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address. The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends who shared a commitment to nature and nature’s law as expressed in the Declaration.     

What is in a word? Neuron: Early usage and evolution in antiquity to its long-lasting current significance

Neuron, a Greek term with a rustic background, made much of its way to its current significance since antiquity, when full recognition was achieved that sensory and motor signals travel through the animal body along nerves (neura, plural). Drawing from classic and recent historical scholarship, this study identifies the successive steps toward such a major breakthrough, starting from the usage of the expression in archaic times and continuing up to the much later transference of a mature theory into the modern world. It is shown that four main consecutive stages may be distinguished in the process: (a) incorporation of the word into early anatomical terminology; (b) theorizing on material composition, origin, properties, and role of the neura in animal bodies; (c) functional association of the neura with a transmitting vehicle; (d) identification of true anatomical and physiological correspondences. Upon this over 2000-year-old foundation is still being built one of the most relevant and fascinating scientific adventures of all time.     

The historical origins of the vegetative state: Received wisdom and the utility of the text

The persistent vegetative state (PVS) is one of the most iconic and misunderstood phrases in clinical neuroscience. Coined as a diagnostic category by Scottish neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and American neurologist Fred Plum in 1972, the phrase “vegetative” first appeared in Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul (circa mid-fourth century BCE). Aristotle influenced neuroscientists of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Xavier Bichat and Walter Timme, and informed their conceptions of the vegetative nervous system. Plum credits Bichat and Timme in his use of the phrase, thus putting the ancient and modern in dialogue. In addition to exploring Aristotle’s definition of the “vegetative” in the original Greek, we put Aristotle in conversation with his contemporaries—Plato and the Hippocratics—to better apprehend theories of mind and consciousness in antiquity. Utilizing the discipline of reception studies in classics scholarship, we demonstrate the importance of etymology and historical origin when considering modern medical nosology.     

Scale, causality, complexity and emergence: rethinking scale's ontological significance

Scale remains a pivotal yet highly contentious concept in geography. I survey the lively discussions engaged in recently by many critical/radical geographers regarding the theoretical status of scale. While these discussions have been intellectually fruitful, I argue that much more needs to be said. Drawing from complex systems theory, I argue that scale should be understood as an ontological category essential to understanding causality. Revalorising Aristotle's four categories of cause – formal, final, material and efficient – from two centuries of positivist thinking facilitates this endeavour. Research on the relationship between university-based poultry scientists and the poultry industry illustrates the explanatory potential of poly-scalar analysis.     

Feature Reviews

Abstract

Liberal education has a real, if precarious, place in America. Its purpose is to remind each of us that were all more than middle-class, more than beings with interests or rights. American liberal education finds its resources in classical and Christian thought, both European and indigenous. The main challenge to liberal education today comes from the libertarians.     

Aristotelian Works in Seventeenth-century China

Between 1623 and 1640, Jesuits in China published nine Aristotelian works in the domains of logics, natural philosophy and ethics. Some forty years later, under the Qing dynasty, Ferdinand Verbiest integrated those previous works into a unified and comprehensive philosophical handbook, which he presented to the Kangxi emperor. We shall present here the philosophical background of this translation project, analyze the main features of those Aristotelian works and reflect on their degree of compatibility with Chinese culture.     

亚里士多德《雅典政制》汉译举误

亚里士多德的《雅典政制》是研究古希腊政治史的重要史料。主要的汉译本有两种,其中商务印书馆出版的译本在学术界影响较大。两个译本都存在多处翻译问题。本文以商务印务馆出版的译本为对象,摘其要者36处从古希腊文原文出发一一辨析,并引后者加以对照。本文的举误以指出字句上的误译为主,间或考证史实说明文意,这方面主要建立在西方学者研究成果的基础上,有些地方提出了自己的见解。     

Ancients and moderns in medieval music theory: from Guido of Arezzo to Jacobus

ABSTRACT

Medieval discourse about both the theory and practice of music featured much debate about the views of moderni and antiqui from when Guido of Arezzo devised a new way of recording pitch in the early eleventh century to the complaints of Jacobus in the early fourteenth century about new forms of measured music in the ars nova. There was also a shift from a Boethian notion that practical music was a manifestation of cosmic music, towards a more Aristotelian model, that privileged music as sensory experience. That this could have a profound effect on human emotion was articulated by Johannes de Grocheio writing about music c. 1270 and Guy of Saint-Denis soon after 1300 about plainchant. Jacobus, writing in the 1320s, was troubled by this shift in thinking about music not as reflections of transcendent realities, but as sounds of human invention that served to move the soul. He argued that musical patterns should reflect a transcendent harmony that was both cosmic and celestial.     

La théorie des éléments de Christophorus Clavius et l'idée du globe terraqué

Christophorus Clavius' Theory of the Elements and the Idea of the Terraqueous Globe. The need to reconcile Aristotle's theory of elementary spheres with the evidence of earth above sea level – the so‐called ‘terra firma’ – induced an important conceptual shift. As a consequence anti‐Aristotelian arguments were brought to the fore in order to be incorporated into the very same Aristotelian tradition. The German Jesuit Christophorus Clavius played a momentous role in this process. He introduced the idea of the terraqueous globe into the Scholastic cosmology, modifying the logical frame of Aristotelian physics. The present work analyses Clavius' theory as well as the procedures he considers to reach his purpose. He used a combinatorial approach to study the relations occurring between the four elements – earth, water, air and fire – and analysed their relations from a physical perspective, proposing a possible structure of the sublunary world.     

Theory and Akrasia in Aristotle's Ethics

Abstract

In book 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that vice, lack of self-restraint (akrasia), and brutishness are to be avoided. While the opposite of vice is virtue, the opposite of akrasia is self-restraint, and of brutishness a form of divinity. This article explores Aristotle's analysis of self-restraint and its lack, akrasia, focusing on the phenomenon of akrasia and its causes. Self-restraint is the experience of excessive and idiosyncratic desires that are nevertheless resisted. Like self-restraint, akrasia, or lack of self-restraint, involves the experience of excessive and idiosyncratic desires. However, those lacking in self-restraint give in to these desires; the unrestrained person knows the good but does the opposite nonetheless. Possible causes of akrasia are the overpowering of reason by desire among the young and the effeminacy of some women and womanly men. This article argues, however, that the most interesting cause of akrasia in Aristotle's account is theoretical thinking.