Philosophical Thought and Language

Maximianus’ fifth Elegy, likely composed in the mid-sixth century CE, recounts an embarrassing incident in which the lover-poet loses his erection after being seduced by a Graia puella (6). Once she realizes that she cannot remedy his impotence, the puella first speaks a lament for his “dead” penis (87-104) and then a hymn on the generative powers of the penis (109-152).

The Derveni papyrus, discovered in 1962 and recently critically edited (KPT), preserves portions of an early fourth-century BCE allegorical “commentary” on an Orphic hexametric cosmogony. Its anonymous author claims that Orpheus concealed a philosophical explanation of how the world came into being behind the stories concerning Zeus and other gods.

In this paper I present new evidence concerning the text of Aristotle’s Metaphysics A 10 and show how this new evidence enables a better understanding of A 10’s function within book A as a whole. My proposed emendation to Aristotle’s text is based on a piece of testimony in Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentary that has not been taken into account by previous editors.

In this paper I argue that the Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry establishes his own epistemic authority in the Commentary on Ptolemy’s Harmonics by conducting an unconventional polemic against the source-text that he is commenting on.

The subject of this paper is the history of a peculiar word that is now enjoying a meaning and a currency that have vastly eclipsed its meager classical pedigree, thanks to the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Scholars disagree over whether or not Aristotle fallaciously infers that there exists ‘some end desired for itself at which every purposive activity aims’ in Nicomachean Ethics I.2.