Melissa Merritt aims to locate one of the limits of Kant’s Aristotelianism. While it is widely supposed that Aristotle is the most relevant ancient reference point for Kant’s conception of virtue as “moral strength of will” (6:405), Merritt argues that Kant draws primarily on Stoic ethics. Much of what may seem Aristotelian in Kant’s remarks about virtue — such as his likening it to “the state of health proper to a human being” (6:384) — should be read as nods to a pervasive tendency of ancient Greek thought, which views ethics as a dimension of natural teleology. Ethics, so conceived, is centrally concerned with how the human being develops naturally towards the telos of virtue, conceived as the completion of our essentially rational nature. While this is a feature common to Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, Merritt argues that Kant favors a specifically Stoic approach, one that has a notion of “appropriate” or completion-promoting action — officium — at its heart.

Corey Dyck discusses the eighteenth-century German context of Kant’s Critical philosophy and shows that a number of prominent Kantian doctrines can be seen as growing out of discussions of Aristotelian ideas in philosophers such as Wolff and Crusius. These include the idea that there are three fundamental operations of the mind (the tres operationes mentis), that the mind is an “entelechy,” and that the operations of a rational mind are characterized by spontaneity.

Matthew Boyle relates Kant’s account of cognition to Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of substance. On Aristotle’s view, the form of a substance is the ground of its existence. To know this form is to know those of its properties without which it cannot exist. These characterize the substance as it is in itself. Such knowledge of form amounts to knowledge of a thing in itself, and the view that such knowledge is possible for us might be called formal realism. Kant thinks that this requires a type of mind human beings do not have: a non-discursive intellect. Boyle argues that Kant transposes Aristotle’s hylomorphic framework from a formal-realist to a formal-idealist register, and so “internalizes” the form-matter contrast. Instead of speaking of forms of being qua being Kant speaks of forms of objects insofar as they are knowable by a finite intellect. For Kant, just as for Aristotle, the form of a thing is its essence (and thereby the ground of its intelligibility). But for things whose form is ideal – appearances – knowledge of form cannot amount to knowledge of the ground of their existence. It can only amount to knowledge of the ground of their knowability.

Alexandra Newton discusses the relation between virtue and habit in Kant’s moral philosophy. While commentators frequently claim that Kant rejects Aristotle’s definition of virtue as a type of habit, Newton argues that this overlooks the fact that Kant distinguishes different kinds of habit. While he rejects the idea that virtue is a habit of action or desire, like Aristotle he allows virtue to be a habit of choice (hexis prohairetike), understood as an exercise of practical reason. Carefully distinguishing the different notions of habit Kant delineates thus allows us to see that his conception of virtue is more Aristotelian than commonly assumed. At the same time, Newton notes, there remain important points on which Kant’s conception diverges from Aristotle’s, having to do specifically with the temporal character of virtue

The “democratic” character of the representative legislature is routinely contrasted with the undemocratic character of courts administered by unelected judges. Since the legislature allegedly possesses a democratic pedigree while the courts allegedly lack such a pedigree, it is argued that the courts should defer to the legislature on questions regarding fundamental social values. I argue that this view does not survive a careful examination of the history and character of representative government and the judiciary. Representative government was designed to assign decisive political power to elites whose qualities distinguish them from the average citizen. The legislature, therefore, hardly possesses an impeccable democratic pedigree. The democratic pedigree of courts exercising the power of judicial review, on the other hand, is stronger than has been generally appreciated. The democratic pedigree of the Constitution is superior to that of statutory law because the Constitution represents a more fundamental and direct expression of the public will than statutory law. The courts, in exercising the power of judicial review to enforce constitutional requirements, can therefore plausibly claim a democratic pedigree—within their areas of competence—at least equal to that of the legislature.

The prototypical form of hybris in the Greek sources involved the self-assertion of the rich and powerful, which resulted in their disrespecting their subordinates in arrogating to themselves claims to respect they were not entitled to. This contribution looks at the flipside of this scenario, because hybris can also work in the opposite direction: from the bottom up. Hybris, that is, can also involve subordinates overstepping their position in the social hierarchy and arrogating to themselves prerogatives reserved for those higher up the social ladder. While denouncing the hybris of the powerful has egalitarian implications – it defends the right to equal respect (or at least to some respect) of those who are disrespected – denouncing the hybris of the downtrodden towards their superiors is a tool for maintaining and reproducing a social hierarchy by grounding it on an allegedly shared (yet heavily asymmetrical) recognition order.

Aristotle defines hybris as a way of mistreating (dishonouring) others. But he also emphasises its psychology, in ways that chime very well with the understanding of the concept in earlier literary sources. As well as indicating a failure to show other people the respect they deserve, hybris is a way of thinking too much of oneself. This affects one’s estimation of the role that luck plays in all human endeavour: the classic Aristotelian case is that of the rich, ‘lucky fools’ who think that their material good fortune is a sign that they excel in all respects; but ancient hybristai in general tend to develop the belief that they are invulnerable to the vagaries of fortune. In this way, hybris regularly entails a failure to deal adequately with risk. At the same time, it bears a relation to the myth of meritocracy, by which the fortunate convince themselves that their success is deserved.

The brief for this chapter is to consider kingship in the abstract, that is both how late medieval people theorised kingship but also their assumptions, prejudices and expectations about what a king could and should do. The difficulty with this task is that, although these two domains overlap, they are distinct. The hard, theoretical categories of professional thinkers are different from the unspoken assumptions that a time-travelling anthropologist might uncover. The English took their political theory from different ages and places, occasionally adapting it to fit local conditions. This might seem surprising, since the period was rocked by momentous developments in the powers of kings and what their subjects expected them to do. Established ideas can prove surprisingly resilient despite their inapplicability to changed circumstances.

This introduction outlines current understandings and paradoxes of the chorus. It discusses the single and formal role that various critical traditions have assigned to the tragic chorus over the centuries, and how a focus on the chorus’ fragmentations, augmentations, interruptions and interactions is better suited to capture the varied activities that the tragic chorus undertakes in fifth-century Athenian theatre. To justify why a new account of choral performance is necessary, the introduction also examines the relative neglect of the chorus in scholarly accounts of ancient performance, the history and transmission of dramatic texts, and studies exploring the politics of tragic and literary form. It also offers an overview of choral knowns and unknowns, including the chorus’ size and composition, their delivery and performance, and their arrangement on the ancient theatrical space.

The central component of Suárez’s account of time in DM 50.8-11 is the metaphysical notion of duration understood as permanence in existence and as belonging to every real being in its actual existence. Suárez associates different kinds of duration with the different modes of existence displayed by real beings. The mode of existence relevant to time is that of successive beings: time is the duration of successive things, that is, of change. Suárez’s ambitious project is to offer a “metaphysical deduction” of time from the notion of duration. In this paper I analyze two fundamental aspects of this project: the existence of time and its real identity with change. Suárez emphasizes that both the existence of time and its identity with change can be deduced from general properties of duration. However, he is also very much concerned to show that this deduction does not miss specific features of time.

In this introduction, we first describe the contents of the Summa Logicae in some detail, situating the work in the larger context of medieval logical texts of the thirteen and fourteenth centuries and explaining why it occupies pride of place in Ockham’s philosophical project. Second, we argue that the Summa Logicae was most likely composed in Avignon between 1324 and 1328 contrary to the accepted view that Ockham wrote it in London over the summer of 1323. Third, we trace the legacy of the Summa Logicae from its first reception in Oxford and Paris in the 1330s, into the Parisian controversies of the 1330s and 1340s, and its dissemination further into Europe over the course of the next century or so. We end this history by noting the 1974 publication of the modern critical edition of the Summa Logicae, which was an enormously significant landmark in Ockham studies.

Inspired by the later medieval development in logic, especially theories on the properties of terms, Ockham’s modal logic is an innovative expansion of Aristotelian modal logic. Ockham’s treatment of modal logic is evolved systematically on the ground of the medieval distinction between two readings of modal propositions, that is, the reading in the divided and in the composite sense, which can be compared to the de re and de dicto reading in modern modal logic. The result is a comprehensive theory of propositional modal logic and syllogistics. In addition to Aristotle’s modal term logic, Ockham works out syntactic rules for inferences of modal sentences in the composite sense and offers a framework for propositional modal logic. In this chapter, I outline Ockham’s modal logic by describing the related texts, semantics for modalities, the linguistic and logical structure of modal sentences, their truth conditions, propositional modal logic, and modal syllogistics in Ockham.