By attending closely to three ancient stories concerned with the origin and effect of patriarchal dominion, this essay seeks at once to discern the tragic dialectic according to which patriarchal authority operates and to open new possibilities for politics beyond the logic of domination and force. The stories of Zeus’s consumption of Métis in…[Read more]

At least since the appearance of Aristotle’s Politics, Plato’s Republic has been read as arguing for a politics of unity in which difference is understood as a threat to the polis. By focusing on the musical imagery of the Republic, and specifically on its compositional organization around three “preludes,” this essay seeks an underst…[Read more]

Scholars often assume that Aristotle uses the terms morphē and eidos interchangeably. Translators of Aristotle’s works rarely feel the need to carry the distinction between these two Greek terms over into English. This article challenges the orthodox view that morphē and eidos are synonymous. Careful analysis of texts from the Categories, Phy…[Read more]

This essay challenges the received orthodoxy that in Aristotle, nous, the capacity for intuitive insight and logos, the capacity of combination that belongs to human discursive thinking, are mutually exclusive, independently operating capacities of the human mind. It argues rather that Aristotle articulates an understanding of nous that is able to…[Read more]

By taking seriously the extent to which Aristotle understands the things said (ta legemona) by his predecessors as genuine phenomena that express something of the truth about beings, this essay challenges the orthodox understanding of Aristotle’s approach to the history of philosophy as merely a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize the authority o…[Read more]