Marwan Rashed

Essentialisme : Alexandre d'Aphrodise entre logique, physique et cosmologie

This book is the first study of the ontological system of Alexander of Aphrodisias (floruit c. 200 AD), famous for his commentaries on the works of Aristotle. By drawing not only on the entire known corpus of the commentators works, but also on numerous new Greek and Arabic sources, Marwan Rashed aims at defining Alexanders place in the history of metaphysics. Alexanders attempt to substantiate the objectivity of the Aristotelian form draws down the curtain on the phase of the Hellenistic peripatos, at the same time marking the beginning of medieval Aristotelianism.

La zoogonie de la Haine selon Empédocle: retour sur l'ensemble 'd' du papyrus d'Akhmim

This article aims at reconstructing the most damaged part of the Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles (fragment f-d), by taking into account all the parameters at our disposal: palaeography, metre and, of course, content. According to this attempt, Empedocles would be describing the very moment in the phase of increasing Strife when the whole-natured creatures (the ολοφυ) were split into male and female beings. Thus, the first part of the fragment becomes very similar, in its content, to fr. 62 D.-K. and to Plato’s parody of Empedocles in Aristophanes’ myth in the Symposium, while its second part emerges as containing new details of the process by which double creatures were split into two. If this reconstruction is accepted, its implication will be that Aetius’ presentation of Empedocles’ cosmic cycle as a fourfold continuous process is deeply inadequate.

Alexander Of Aphrodisias On Particulars And The Stoic Criterion Of Identity

One could claim that for an Aristotelian philosopher, particulars are not a philosophical problem - at least not an epistemological one. For an Aristotelian philosopher daily confronted with Stoic theories of Providence and individuation, however, this was a haunting question. After all, what did Aristotle have to say on the status of the particulars not qua belonging to a species, but qua pure singularities taking place within the world? This chapter shows that even if Alexander is too much of an Aristotelian to have a real theory of the particular, his reaction to his historical context leads him to new insights on this topic. These insights, inturn, constitute a starting point out of which Avicenna and Leibniz developed their ideas about how fatalism could be avoided without giving up the principle that the entire effect corresponds to its full cause. The chapter sketches the main phases of this long and intricate story. Keywords: Alexander; Aristotelian philosopher; Avicenna; Leibniz; stoic criterion