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

309 Pages·2008·4.2 MB·English
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Preview Reading Ancient Texts, Vol 2: Aristotle and Neoplatonism: Essays in Honour of Denis O'brien (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History; Reading Ancient Texts)

(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 STERN-GILLET2_f1-i-xxiv.indd iii 11/5/2007 9:53:50 PM 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, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands STERN-GILLET2_f1-i-xxiv.indd iv 11/5/2007 9:53:50 PM 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) STERN-GILLET2_f1-i-xxiv.indd v 11/5/2007 9:53:50 PM 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 STERN-GILLET2_f1-i-xxiv.indd vi 11/5/2007 9:53:51 PM 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. STERN-GILLET2_f1-i-xxiv.indd vii 11/5/2007 9:53:51 PM 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 STERN-GILLET2_f1-i-xxiv.indd viii 11/5/2007 9:53:51 PM 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. STERN-GILLET2_f1-i-xxiv.indd ix 11/5/2007 9:53:51 PM

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What is the history of philosophy? Is it history or is it philosophy or is it by some strange alchemy a confluence of the two? The contributors to the present volume of essays have tackled this seemingly simple, but in reality difficult and controversial, question, by drawing on their specialised kn
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