Stephen Menn
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 5644378 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Stephen Menn |
| NOMBRES | Stephen |
| APELLIDO | Menn |
| FIRMA | MENN S |
| AFILIACIONES | McGill University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 27 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 11 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 27 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1990 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2017 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Yaḥyā Ibn ʿadī and Ibrāhīm Ibn ʿadī
The “lost” Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī treatises recently discovered in the Tehran codex Marwī 19 include a record of a philosophical debate instigated by the Ḥamdānid prince Sayf-al-Dawla. More precisely, Marwī 19 contains Yaḥyā’s adjudication of a dispute between an unnamed Opponent and Yaḥyā’s younger relative Ibrāhīm ibn ʿAdī (who also served as al-Fārābī’s assistant), along with Ibrāhīm's response to Yaḥyā’s adjudication, and Yaḥyā’s final word. At issue…
On the Title of Porphyry’s Categories Commentary Προς Γεδαλειον
Simplicius cites Porphyry’s lost greater commentary on the Categories by the name of its addressee: Πρὸς Γεδάλειον. It has been assumed that we know nothing about Gedalius, and even suggested that he may have been a fictional construct. But his name is Jewish, and Porphyry had no reason to make up a Jewish addressee. It was extremely rare for Greek pagan texts to be dedicated to a Jewish addressee. But Porphyry had an unusual degree of involvemen…
Plato’s Soteriology?
Self-motion and reflection
The later Neoplatonists want to reconcile Aristotle and Plato on how far down immortality extends. They must therefore maintain that Aristotle’s poiêtikos nous is part of the soul, and that when Plato says the soul is immortal he means only the rational soul. They face a difficulty in the Phaedrus, where Plato uses the premise that soul is self-moving to argue that ‘all soul is immortal’: it seems that if this argument works, it will prove too mu…
Aristotle's Theology
When Aristotle speaks of theologikê, he means not the study of a single God, but the study of gods and divine things in general. He never uses the phrase “the unmoved mover” to pick out just one being (or even to pick out the many movers of the heavenly spheres), and that phrase would not express the essence of the beings it applies to. To see what sort of religious interest there might be in such a being, and how the words “god” and “divine” ent…
On Myles Burnyeat’s Map of Metaphysics Zeta
The present discussion of Myles Burnyeat’s Map of Metaphysics Zeta (2001), originally intended as a review, has long since exceeded both the size-limits and the time-delay possible for a review. The book has been reviewed in other journals, and other scholars have responded to Burnyeat in their own articles and books; indeed, they were doing so even before the book was published, because for years before publication Burnyeat was circulating short…
Zeller and the Debates about Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius
Reviewed by: Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator Stephen Menn Han Baltussen. Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator. London: Duckworth, 2008. Pp. xii, 292. $80.00. ISBN 978-0-7156-3500-1. Most people who have heard of Simplicius know two things about him: he was a very learned man who included many quotations and reports of others' views in his writing, thus becoming one of our …
Simplicius on the Theaetetus (In Physica 17,38-18,23 Diels)
Aristotle in Physics I,1 says some strange-sounding things about how we come to know wholes and parts, universals and particulars. In explicating these, Simplicius distinguishes an initial rough cognition of a thing as a whole, an intermediate “cognition according to the definition and through the elements,” and a final cognition of how the thing’s many elements are united: only this last is πιστήμη. Simplicius refers to the Theaetetus for the po…
Al-Fārābī's Kitāb Al-Ḥurūf and His Analysis of the Senses of Being
Al-Fārābī, in the Kitāb al-Ḥurūf , is apparently the first person to maintain that existence, in one of its senses, is a second-order concept [ ma‘qūl thānī ]. As he interprets Metaphysics Δ7, ‘‘being'' [ mawjūd ] has two meanings, second-order ‘‘being as truth'' (including existence as well as propositional truth), and first-order ‘‘being as divided into the categories.'' The paronymous form of the Arabic word ‘‘ mawjūd '' suggests that things e…
Colloquium 1
Aquinas on Being
Book Review| July 01 2006 Aquinas on Being Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being. Oxford: Clarendon, 2002. x + 212 pp. Stephen Menn Stephen Menn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2006) 115 (3): 391–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2006-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen Menn; Aquinas on Being. The Philosophical Review 1 Jul…
Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy
Early modern philosophers looked for inspiration to the later ancient thinkers when they rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. The impact of the Hellenistic philosophers (principally the Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics) on such philosophers as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and Locke was profound and is ripe for reassessment. This collection of essays offers precisely that. Leading historians of philosophy explore the c…
Aristotle’S Definition of Soul And The Programme of the De Anima
Aristotle’s De anima is a very fashionable book. It is fashionable chiefly because Aristotle develops a doctrine of the soul, as the form or ‘first actuality’ of an organic natural body, which seems to offer a via media between materialism and dualism. On Aristotle’s account, an animal’s soul is something other than its body, indeed something of a different ontological type from the body, but the soul is not independent of the body, and no proble…
Plato and the Method of Analysis
Late ancient Platonists and Aristotelians describe the method of reasoning to first principles as "analysis." This is a metaphor from geometrical practice. How far back were philosophers taking geometric analysis as a model for philosophy, and what work did they mean this model to do? After giving a logical description of analysis in geometry, and arguing that the standard (not entirely accurate) late ancient logical description of analysis was a…
Plotinus on the Identity of Knowledge with its Object
Plotinus's insistence that knowledge is identical with its object has been a major obstacle to taking him seriously as a philosopher: as we will see, even later neo-Platonists such as Proclus either reject or minimize this part of Plotinus's thought. Plotinus says in V.9 7 that all έπιστημαι 'inasmuch as they are έπιστημαι, are the same as each of the things they know [νοοΰσι].' This is, on the face of it, absurd: when I know a tree, do I become …
On Dennis Des Chene's Physiologia
Dennis Des Chene's Physiologia: Natural philosophy in late Aristotelian and Cartesian Though reconstructs the discourse of late scholastic natural philosophy, and assesses Descartes' agreements and disagreements. In a critical discussion, I offer a different interpretation of late scholastic theories of final causality and of God's concursus with created efficient causes. Fonseca's and Suárez' conceptions of final causality in nature depend on th…
Descartes and Augustine
Introduction 1. Descartes and the history of philosophy 2. Descartes' project for a new philosophy Part I. Augustinian Wisdom: 3. Plotinus 4. Augustine Part II. Descartes' Metaphysics: 5. The design of the Meditations 6. Isolating the soul and God 7. Theodicy and Method 8. From God to bodies 9. Conclusion
Descartes and Augustine
Introduction 1. Descartes and the history of philosophy 2. Descartes' project for a new philosophy Part I. Augustinian Wisdom: 3. Plotinus 4. Augustine Part II. Descartes' Metaphysics: 5. The design of the Meditations 6. Isolating the soul and God 7. Theodicy and Method 8. From God to bodies 9. Conclusion
The Stoic Theory of Categories
both Plotinus (6. 1. 25. 1–3) and Simplicius (InCateg. 66. 32–67. 2 and 67. 17–19) report that the Stoics posited four summagenera of beings, [ineq] , πoιóν πως [ineq], and πρóς τí πως [ineq]; this list is confirmed, piecemeal, by many other texts, and Plutarch presupposes the whole list when he says that the Stoics ‘make each of us four’ (Comm. not. 1083 E). Plotinus and Simplicius assume that the Stoic list of genera is in competition with the …
Descartes and Augustine
This book is a systematic study of Descartes' relation to Augustine. It offers a complete reevaluation of Descartes' thought and as such will be of major importance to all historians of medieval, neo-Platonic, or early modern philosophy. Stephen Menn demonstrates that Descartes uses Augustine's central ideas as a point of departure for a critique of medieval Aristotelian physics, which he replaces with a new, mechanistic anti-Aristotelian physics…
Colloquium 1
The Stoics say that there are many virtues, although each virtue entails all the others; sometimes they give lists of what these virtues are, or rather of the generic virtues that include all specific virtuous disposi- tions. Sometimes they give the conventional list, "prudence, temper- ance, courage, justice" (Stobaeus II, 60 Wachsmuth-Hense); but two sources (Diogenes Laertius VII, 92 and the prologue to the pseudo- Plutarchan Placita) say the …
The Editors of the Metaphysics
We are told that the fourteen books of Metaphysics were brought into their present arrangement by editors after Aristotle's death. Book A, which they set at the beginning, describes the aim of philosophy as the removal of surprise and perplexity by supplying knowledge of original causes, and assesses the work of Aristotle's predecessors in that field. After the short book designated a, B outlines a set of 'perplexities, most of which get examined…
The Origins of Aristotle’s Concept of Ένέργεια
God and Greek Philosophy
This is a study of the main arguments for the existence of a god or first causal principle in the ancient Greek philosophers. Gerson's study of ancient Greek philosophers includes the pre-Socratics - Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and sceptics, and Plotinus. In the Greek philosophers, arguments for the existence of God are a part of theology, which is distinguished from and held to be superior to mythic and civic theology. Unlike a Jewish, Christia…
Gassendi the Atomist
Preface List of illustrations Introduction 1. Other atomists, other skeptics, and other Epicureans: the problem of determining the context of Gassendi's career Part I. Humanist Historiography: 2. Refuting Aristotle is not enough: how to acquire the skills of a French humanist 3. Gassendi's Life of Peiresc: the humanist's unattainable goal of writing a universal history 4. The growth of Gassendi's Epicurean project: from biography and commentary t…
Plato and the Method of Analysis
Late ancient Platonists and Aristotelians describe the method of reasoning to first principles as "analysis." This is a metaphor from geometrical practice. How far back were philosophers taking geometric analysis as a model for philosophy, and what work did they mean this model to do? After giving a logical description of analysis in geometry, and arguing that the standard (not entirely accurate) late ancient logical description of analysis was a…
On the Title of Porphyry’s Categories Commentary Προς Γεδαλειον
Simplicius cites Porphyry’s lost greater commentary on the Categories by the name of its addressee: Πρὸς Γεδάλειον. It has been assumed that we know nothing about Gedalius, and even suggested that he may have been a fictional construct. But his name is Jewish, and Porphyry had no reason to make up a Jewish addressee. It was extremely rare for Greek pagan texts to be dedicated to a Jewish addressee. But Porphyry had an unusual degree of involvemen…
Descartes and Augustine
Introduction 1. Descartes and the history of philosophy 2. Descartes' project for a new philosophy Part I. Augustinian Wisdom: 3. Plotinus 4. Augustine Part II. Descartes' Metaphysics: 5. The design of the Meditations 6. Isolating the soul and God 7. Theodicy and Method 8. From God to bodies 9. Conclusion
Descartes and some predecessors on the divine conservation of motion
Gassendi the Atomist
Preface List of illustrations Introduction 1. Other atomists, other skeptics, and other Epicureans: the problem of determining the context of Gassendi's career Part I. Humanist Historiography: 2. Refuting Aristotle is not enough: how to acquire the skills of a French humanist 3. Gassendi's Life of Peiresc: the humanist's unattainable goal of writing a universal history 4. The growth of Gassendi's Epicurean project: from biography and commentary t…
The Origins of Aristotle’s Concept of Ένέργεια
God and Greek Philosophy
This is a study of the main arguments for the existence of a god or first causal principle in the ancient Greek philosophers. Gerson's study of ancient Greek philosophers includes the pre-Socratics - Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and sceptics, and Plotinus. In the Greek philosophers, arguments for the existence of God are a part of theology, which is distinguished from and held to be superior to mythic and civic theology. Unlike a Jewish, Christia…
Colloquium 1
The Stoics say that there are many virtues, although each virtue entails all the others; sometimes they give lists of what these virtues are, or rather of the generic virtues that include all specific virtuous disposi- tions. Sometimes they give the conventional list, "prudence, temper- ance, courage, justice" (Stobaeus II, 60 Wachsmuth-Hense); but two sources (Diogenes Laertius VII, 92 and the prologue to the pseudo- Plutarchan Placita) say the …
The Editors of the Metaphysics
We are told that the fourteen books of Metaphysics were brought into their present arrangement by editors after Aristotle's death. Book A, which they set at the beginning, describes the aim of philosophy as the removal of surprise and perplexity by supplying knowledge of original causes, and assesses the work of Aristotle's predecessors in that field. After the short book designated a, B outlines a set of 'perplexities, most of which get examined…
Descartes and Augustine
This book is a systematic study of Descartes' relation to Augustine. It offers a complete reevaluation of Descartes' thought and as such will be of major importance to all historians of medieval, neo-Platonic, or early modern philosophy. Stephen Menn demonstrates that Descartes uses Augustine's central ideas as a point of departure for a critique of medieval Aristotelian physics, which he replaces with a new, mechanistic anti-Aristotelian physics…
The Stoic Theory of Categories
both Plotinus (6. 1. 25. 1–3) and Simplicius (InCateg. 66. 32–67. 2 and 67. 17–19) report that the Stoics posited four summagenera of beings, [ineq] , πoιóν πως [ineq], and πρóς τí πως [ineq]; this list is confirmed, piecemeal, by many other texts, and Plutarch presupposes the whole list when he says that the Stoics ‘make each of us four’ (Comm. not. 1083 E). Plotinus and Simplicius assume that the Stoic list of genera is in competition with the …
On Dennis Des Chene's Physiologia
Dennis Des Chene's Physiologia: Natural philosophy in late Aristotelian and Cartesian Though reconstructs the discourse of late scholastic natural philosophy, and assesses Descartes' agreements and disagreements. In a critical discussion, I offer a different interpretation of late scholastic theories of final causality and of God's concursus with created efficient causes. Fonseca's and Suárez' conceptions of final causality in nature depend on th…
Descartes and Augustine
Introduction 1. Descartes and the history of philosophy 2. Descartes' project for a new philosophy Part I. Augustinian Wisdom: 3. Plotinus 4. Augustine Part II. Descartes' Metaphysics: 5. The design of the Meditations 6. Isolating the soul and God 7. Theodicy and Method 8. From God to bodies 9. Conclusion
Descartes and Augustine
Introduction 1. Descartes and the history of philosophy 2. Descartes' project for a new philosophy Part I. Augustinian Wisdom: 3. Plotinus 4. Augustine Part II. Descartes' Metaphysics: 5. The design of the Meditations 6. Isolating the soul and God 7. Theodicy and Method 8. From God to bodies 9. Conclusion
Plotinus on the Identity of Knowledge with its Object
Plotinus's insistence that knowledge is identical with its object has been a major obstacle to taking him seriously as a philosopher: as we will see, even later neo-Platonists such as Proclus either reject or minimize this part of Plotinus's thought. Plotinus says in V.9 7 that all έπιστημαι 'inasmuch as they are έπιστημαι, are the same as each of the things they know [νοοΰσι].' This is, on the face of it, absurd: when I know a tree, do I become …
Aristotle’S Definition of Soul And The Programme of the De Anima
Aristotle’s De anima is a very fashionable book. It is fashionable chiefly because Aristotle develops a doctrine of the soul, as the form or ‘first actuality’ of an organic natural body, which seems to offer a via media between materialism and dualism. On Aristotle’s account, an animal’s soul is something other than its body, indeed something of a different ontological type from the body, but the soul is not independent of the body, and no proble…
Plato and the Method of Analysis
Late ancient Platonists and Aristotelians describe the method of reasoning to first principles as "analysis." This is a metaphor from geometrical practice. How far back were philosophers taking geometric analysis as a model for philosophy, and what work did they mean this model to do? After giving a logical description of analysis in geometry, and arguing that the standard (not entirely accurate) late ancient logical description of analysis was a…
Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy
Early modern philosophers looked for inspiration to the later ancient thinkers when they rebelled against the dominant Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. The impact of the Hellenistic philosophers (principally the Stoics, Epicureans and Skeptics) on such philosophers as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and Locke was profound and is ripe for reassessment. This collection of essays offers precisely that. Leading historians of philosophy explore the c…
Colloquium 1
Aquinas on Being
Book Review| July 01 2006 Aquinas on Being Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being. Oxford: Clarendon, 2002. x + 212 pp. Stephen Menn Stephen Menn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2006) 115 (3): 391–395. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-2006-005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen Menn; Aquinas on Being. The Philosophical Review 1 Jul…
Al-Fārābī's Kitāb Al-Ḥurūf and His Analysis of the Senses of Being
Al-Fārābī, in the Kitāb al-Ḥurūf , is apparently the first person to maintain that existence, in one of its senses, is a second-order concept [ ma‘qūl thānī ]. As he interprets Metaphysics Δ7, ‘‘being'' [ mawjūd ] has two meanings, second-order ‘‘being as truth'' (including existence as well as propositional truth), and first-order ‘‘being as divided into the categories.'' The paronymous form of the Arabic word ‘‘ mawjūd '' suggests that things e…
Zeller and the Debates about Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius
Reviewed by: Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator Stephen Menn Han Baltussen. Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator. London: Duckworth, 2008. Pp. xii, 292. $80.00. ISBN 978-0-7156-3500-1. Most people who have heard of Simplicius know two things about him: he was a very learned man who included many quotations and reports of others' views in his writing, thus becoming one of our …
Simplicius on the Theaetetus (In Physica 17,38-18,23 Diels)
Aristotle in Physics I,1 says some strange-sounding things about how we come to know wholes and parts, universals and particulars. In explicating these, Simplicius distinguishes an initial rough cognition of a thing as a whole, an intermediate “cognition according to the definition and through the elements,” and a final cognition of how the thing’s many elements are united: only this last is πιστήμη. Simplicius refers to the Theaetetus for the po…
On Myles Burnyeat’s Map of Metaphysics Zeta
The present discussion of Myles Burnyeat’s Map of Metaphysics Zeta (2001), originally intended as a review, has long since exceeded both the size-limits and the time-delay possible for a review. The book has been reviewed in other journals, and other scholars have responded to Burnyeat in their own articles and books; indeed, they were doing so even before the book was published, because for years before publication Burnyeat was circulating short…
Self-motion and reflection
The later Neoplatonists want to reconcile Aristotle and Plato on how far down immortality extends. They must therefore maintain that Aristotle’s poiêtikos nous is part of the soul, and that when Plato says the soul is immortal he means only the rational soul. They face a difficulty in the Phaedrus, where Plato uses the premise that soul is self-moving to argue that ‘all soul is immortal’: it seems that if this argument works, it will prove too mu…
Aristotle's Theology
When Aristotle speaks of theologikê, he means not the study of a single God, but the study of gods and divine things in general. He never uses the phrase “the unmoved mover” to pick out just one being (or even to pick out the many movers of the heavenly spheres), and that phrase would not express the essence of the beings it applies to. To see what sort of religious interest there might be in such a being, and how the words “god” and “divine” ent…
Plato’s Soteriology?
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