Reading Ancient Texts, Vol 2: Aristotle and Neoplatonism: Essays in Honour of Denis O'brien (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History; Reading Ancient Texts)

309 Pages·2008·4.2 MB·English

by  Suzanne Stern-Gillet

(cid:24)(cid:18) (cid:67)(cid:72)(cid:65)(cid:80)(cid:84)(cid:69)(cid:82)(cid:0)(cid:84)(cid:87)(cid:79)
Reading Ancient Texts
Volume II: Aristotle and
Neoplatonism
Essays in Honour of Denis O’Brien
Edited by
Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Kevin Corrigan
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
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On the cover: Maison Carrée, Nîmes (Provence). Photo: Bertrand Stern-Gillet.
Frontispiece: Portrait of Denis O’Brien. Photo: Franck Lecrenay.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN 0920–8607
ISBN 978 90 04 16512 0
Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
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CONTENTS
Preface ......................................................................................... vii
Notes on Contributors ................................................................ xxi
I. Aristotle
Aristotle’s Conception of Dunamis and Techne ............................ 3
C. Natali (Venice)
Aristotle and the Starting Point of Moral Development:
The Notion of Natural Virtue ............................................... 23
C. Viano (CNRS, Paris)
Akrasia and Moral Education in Aristotle .................................. 43
J. Cleary (Boston College & NUI Maynooth)
Effective Primary Causes: The Notion of Contact and the
Possibility of Acting without Being Affected in Aristotle’s
De Generatione et Corruptione ....................................................... 65
T. Buchheim (Munich)
II. Plato and His Heirs: From Apuleius to Augustine
The Organization of the Soul: Some Overlooked Aspects of
Interpretation from Plato to Late Antiquity .......................... 99
K. Corrigan (Emory)
The Final Metamorphosis: Narrative Voice in the Prologue
of Apuleius’ Golden Ass ............................................................ 115
F.M. Schroeder (Queen’s, Ontario)
Plotinus: Omnipresence and Transcendence of the One in
VI 5[23] .................................................................................. 137
G. Gurtler S.J. (Boston College)
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vi contents
The Concept of Will in Plotinus ............................................... 153
C. Horn (Bonn)
Divine Freedom in Plotinus and Iamblichus (Tractate VI 8
(39) 7, 11–15 and De Mysteriis III, 17–20) .............................. 179
J.-M. Narbonne (Laval, Québec)
Was the Vita Plotini known in Arab Philosophical Circles? ....... 199
P. Thillet (Paris I, Paris)
Friendship and Transgression: Luminosus Limes Amicitiae
(Augustine, Confessions 2.2.2) and the Themes of
Confessions 2 .............................................................................. 211
G. O’Daly (University College, London)
Augustine and the Philosophical Foundations of Sincerity ....... 225
S. Stern-Gillet (Bolton)
III. Epilogue: Interpretation in Retrospect
Innovation and Continuity in the History of Philosophy ......... 251
D. Evans (Queen’s, Belfast)
A Detailed Bibliography of Denis O’Brien’s Works .................. 265
Subject Index .............................................................................. 273
Index of Names .......................................................................... 277

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PREFACE
Why do historians of philosophy do what they do? The truth of the
matter, which they might not readily own up to, is that they (cid:2) nd past
philosophical texts captivating and worth studying for their own sake.
To ascribe intrinsic value to something, however, as Aristotle noted,1 is
no bar to ascribing an instrumental value to it as well. So, what is the
study of past philosophical texts good for? What is its instrumental
value? If pressed, most historians of philosophy would probably answer
that their discipline serves a philosophical purpose, however widely and
variously conceived. Those who allow themselves to be pressed further
mostly describe such purpose in broadly pedagogic terms. Not without
a touch of complacency, they claim to provide their non-historical
colleagues with an extended array of arguments and viewpoints with
which to tackle philosophical problems as currently formulated, or with an
enhanced understanding of these problems themselves, if not of the very
nature of philosophy, or with paradigms to follow or indeed to avoid.
Other historians of philosophy (cid:2) nd such instrumental interpretation
of their role demeaning. Their function, so they would contend,
should not be conceived as a mere breathing of (old) life into (newly)
reformulated philosophical problems. Philosophy, they would claim,
is by its very nature historical. Not only do philosophers inherit their
central problems from past practitioners in the (cid:2) eld, but their very
modus operandi is critical and dialectical, consisting as it does of a critical
engagement with the views of other philosophers, past or present.
Without a degree of historical awareness and readiness to learn from
the past, the philosophic enterprise, so conceived, could not fruitfully
be carried out. To philosophize is, at least in part, to re(cid:3) ect on the
models and methods that one has inherited from the past, to test them
for their continued adequacy, to adjust them whenever possible or to
replace them if necessary. If the discipline is to remain in good order,
they might conclude, past philosophical works, whether canonical or
not, must be interpreted from within their context and in terms of the
issues that they were written to address.
1 Nicomachean Ethics, I 7, 1097a30–b5.
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viii preface
Denis O’Brien, the honorand of the present two volumes, accepts
neither of these two conceptions of the history of philosophy, as
minimally summarised above. He holds his subject to constitute a separate
and autonomous discipline, whose relationship to philosophy has to be
carefully delineated. We have been fortunate in persuading him to spell
out his views on the matter for the (cid:2) rst time, in an essay which will be
published separately in a companion volume. His methodological credo,
which bears the mark of his characteristic vigour and is informed by
forty-(cid:2) ve years at the forefront of historical debates, constitutes a (cid:2) tting
companion to the present two volumes.
From the manner in which historians of philosophy conceive their
relation to philosophy stem their methodological decisions. Are they
to study past works in the original language, or is it suf(cid:2) cient to do so
in a translation accredited by those competent to judge its quality?
How deeply should they delve into the past for the philosophical roots
of the work or the ideas which they seek to explain? How directly
relevant, for instance, is Augustine’s doctrine of divine illumination to
the epistemology of the Meditations? And if the student of Descartes
ignores the De Trinitate to his peril, can he similarly afford to neglect
the theory of anamn(cid:2)sis in the Meno? How widely should historians of
philosophy cast their net for information about the broader context of
their philosopher’s life and works? If it is undoubtedly signi(cid:2) cant, from
a philosophical point of view, that Spinoza was excommunicated in
1656 from the Synagogue of Portuguese Jews in Amsterdam ‘for wrong
opinions and behaviour’, does it also matter to philosophers that he
earned his living by grinding lenses? Must historians focus exclusively
on the arguments of the philosophers, as set out in their philosophical
works, or must they also take account of their non-philosophical—or
less obviously philosophical—writings? To what extent, if at all, does
Berkeley’s 1744 Letter on Tar-Water, for instance, shed light on any aspect
of his system?
The dominance of the analytical school in twentieth-century Anglo-
American philosophy has had a marked impact on the manner in which
historians of philosophy who work within its orbit conceive their role.
Some have adapted their approach and methods to (cid:2) t in with the a-
historical (or anti-historical) bias of their professional milieu. Accepting
the sparse view of the domain of philosophy adopted by those around
them, they eschew the jargon of textual exegesis, they mostly ignore the
cultural and literary context of the past works that they study, and they
focus exclusively on the formal features of the arguments featured in
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preface ix
them. They believe themselves to be doing a favour to their author by
treating him as ‘an energetic collaborator or antagonist’.2 They do not
hesitate to make Parmenides and Heidegger into partners in discussions
on the nature of being. They take pride in the fact that the students in
their care should soon forget that Aristotle is an ancient philosopher.
Anachronism is the price they pay for their treatment of the past.
Although it is a price that such historians of philosophy appear to be
willing to pay, there are others who would not be so willing. These other
historians of philosophy, while endorsing the emphasis that the analytical
school places on lucidity of exposition and cogency in argument, are
nevertheless committed to expounding past philosophies in all their
distinctness. These historians engage in all aspects of textual exegesis.
They read past philosophical texts in their entirety and in the original.
They do not abstract past philosophical concepts and notions from their
historical and cultural contexts. Still less do they attempt to re-formulate
them in idioms better adapted to the needs and interests of the present.
They take anachronism to be an error, if not a sin.
This latter conception of the history of philosophy, which may be seen
as an outcome of a softening of the analytical movement, has had the
unintentional but happy consequence of easing the dialogue between
historians of philosophy working in Britain or the United States and
their counterparts on the Continent of Europe. The dialogue between
the two ‘cultures’ has recently been further facilitated by the waning
of the structuralist, post-structuralist and post-modernist movements,
which had dominated historical writing on the Continent of Europe in
the second half of last century. Continental European historians, many
of whom owed allegiance to these movements, had long been suspicious
of, if not hostile to, the a-historical stance of the analytical school. The
fact that the feeling was heartily reciprocated made for infrequent and
weary contacts between the two traditions. The present rapprochement is
therefore much to be welcome.
Of this rapprochement Denis O’Brien has been a rare pioneer. After
successive research fellowships had run their term, he left Cambridge
in 1971 to join that most civilized of institutions, the Centre National de
la Recherche Scienti(cid:2) que in Paris. Before long, he came to feel thoroughly
at home amongst his new colleagues, whose commitment to meticulous
2 Bennett J., A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1984, p. 1.
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