This essay is an immanent critique of the story Reiner Schürmann tells concerning the origins of metaphysics as an epoch of hegemonic principles. In both Heidegger on Being and Acting and Broken Hegemonies, Schürmann identifies Aristotle as the father of a metaphysics that understands being in terms of human fabrication. The Duplicity of B…[Read more]

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]

The Holocaust throws the study of the history of philosophy into crisis. Critiques of Western thinking leveled by such thinkers as Adorno, Levinas, and more recently by so-called “postmodern” theorists have suggested that Western philosophy is inherently totalizing, and that it must be read differently or altogether abandoned after Auschwitz. Thi…[Read more]

This article takes up the rather bold philosophical suggestion that Aristotle’s Metaphysics culminates not in the purity of God’s self-thinking found in book XII, but rather in the far more ambiguous set of contingent principles found in the Nicomachean Ethics. The suggestion defended is not that Aristotle intended this itinerary for the Met…[Read more]

This article offers an interpretation of Plato’s Menexenus in which the figure of Socrates emerges as critical of both the Periclean and Aspasian vision of politics. By speaking in the voice of Aspasia in the Menexenus, Socrates is able to draw out the limitations of the Periclean politics of freedom without straightforwardly identifying himself w…[Read more]

This essay attempts to uncover the ideology of form that operates in an unquestioned way in much philological scholarship concerning Aristotle’s thinking. Drawing on four different interpretations of form in Aristotle, that of Joseph Owens, Edward Halper, Michael Frede and Günter Patzig, and Michael Loux, this essay attempts to show the manner…[Read more]

Ontology has been traditionally guided by sophia, a form of knowledge directed toward that which is eternal, permanent, necessary. This tradition finds an important early expression in the philosophical ontology of Aristotle. Yet in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s intense concern to do justice to the world of finite contingency leads him to…[Read more]

While the rhetoric of the “end of metaphysics” is guided by a well-founded concern to call into question the hegemonic function of principles, it remains misguided insofar as it rejects the entire history of Western thinking as totalizing. While this article recognizes this legacy of totalizing thinking, it also seeks to locate another ten…[Read more]

Rather than adopting an uncritical conception of the geometrical method as optimal due to its inherent objectivity, this article delineates the rhetorical power of the geometrical method as it is deployed by Spinoza in the Ethics. Specifically, the article focuses on the first fourteen propositions of the Ethics in order to illustrate how they are…[Read more]

In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote that “art’s fateful hour has struck” and that he had “captured its signature” in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction.” Less than a month after these words were written, Martin Heidegger gave a lecture entitled “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Freiburg. These two philosophical ref…[Read more]

This article offers an interpretation of the transition that occurs in Physics A.7, in which Aristotle establishes an important new role for form in accounting for ontological identity. It then turns to Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of physis in order to show the dangers, both ontological and ethical, endemic to Hei…[Read more]

In order to suggest why Kant does not offer an explicit argument for the necessary connection between the synthesis of the imagination and the categories, this article argues that the productive imagination and the understanding are in fact two aspects of one and the same ability (Vermögen), and further, that their identity may be thought in such…[Read more]