Greek thinking has historically been engaged by American philosophers in at least three (not always mutually exclusive) ways. Roughly speaking, the first involves the discussion and interpretation of specific Greek texts. The second involves the development, often in new contexts, of ideas inspired by or rooted in Greek ideas, but not necessarily identical to them. The third way is the apparently independent development of ideas and ways of thinking that parallel those found in Greek thought, where there is no evidence of direct influence. The papers in this panel illustrates all three modes by which Greek thinking has been engaged by American philosophers.

The first paper, entitled The Natural History of the Soul, takes up the first and second modes by focusing on a set of lectures Fredrick Woodbridge gave in 1930 on Aristotle's De Anima in which he reads Aristotle as concerned primarily with the being and meaning of nature. The paper is divided into three sections. The first considers Woodbridge's innovative account of Aristotle's method, which is guided by Aristotle's own theoretical practice of attempting to put the natural phenomena he encounters into words. This methodological commitment to the articulation of things suggests the importance of Aristotle's own ontological orientation toward language, which is the focus of the second section of the paper. Finally, drawing on Woodbridge's account of how, for Aristotle, it is natural for things to go into language the paper will conclude with a discussion of Aristotle's understanding of the intelligibility of things that links Aristotle's naturalism to both Woodbridge's conception of cooperation and Dewey's understanding of transaction.

Illustrating the first and third modes, Peirce's Account of Pythagoras explores the speculative biography of Pythagoras written by Peirce on multiple occasions. Primarily, Peirce offers it as a methodological example of abduction based upon meager evidence, and which offers few predictions regarding possible future experience. Peirce considers his method both distinctive and superior to others because it demands an explanation of all the evidence, even, or especially, known falsehoods. That is, one should explain why a false testimony would be asserted as true, and why in one way rather than another. More broadly, Peirce implicitly argues that we should engage with the ancients seriously, rather than assigning them to the “infancy” of thought. In fact, Peirce's account concludes with an intriguing hypothesis as to the secret behind Pythagorean "mysticism," based largely on a supposition regarding Pythagoras' travels outside the Greek world.

The final paper of the panel, Inquiry, Truth, and Normativity in Parmenides and Peirce, addresses the second and third modes of the American engagement with Greek thinking by drawing Peirce's conception of philosophical inquiry into dialogue with that of Parmenides. In his search for alternatives to aspects of modern philosophy he found to be misguided, Peirce often independently took up Greek notions also used by Parmenides. The thematic study of inquiry was central to Peirce's conception of philosophy. In this his closest philosophical precursor was Parmenides. Both investigated what it is that inquiry might enjoin and require, and what its success might consist in and imply. Both also explored the normative or evaluative dimensions of the search for truth. This paper looks at these two areas of common interest. The paper examines the convergences and divergences between Peirce and Parmenides on the theme of inquiry, with the aim that the reflection of each on the other might illuminate both and further our understanding of the questions they addressed.

For modern philosophy, method is designed to set forth objective rules of procedure so as to establish philosophy as a rigorous science. For Plato, however, method cannot be divorced from the contingent contexts in which philosophy is always practiced. While modern method permits no madness, there is madness in Plato's method. This article traces three strategies that constitute the method of madness that operates in the Symposium and Republic. The first is a distancing strategy in which Plato systematically distances himself from the content of the ideas expressed in the dialogues in order to provoke the sort of critical self-reflection required for philosophy. The second is a grounding strategy whereby Plato embeds philosophical debate in determinate social and political contexts so as to anchor philosophy in the concrete world of human community. The third is a demonstrative strategy in which Plato models philosophy as an activity intent on weaving a vision of the good, the beautiful and the just into the contingent world of human politics. Together these three strategies function methodologically to show the powerful conception of philosophy embodied in the dialogues.

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 the Theogony, of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia in the Agamemnon and of Athena’s attempt to establish a just human community in the Eumenides articulate something of the logic of force that underlies and undermines patriarchal dominion at its very origins. These stories also, however, suggest another possibility for politics insofar as they give voice to the transformative political intelligence known to the Greeks as metis. This habit of thinking is dynamic and open in such a way that it can actualize what Hannah Arendt has designated as genuine political power: the ability to bring words and deeds together to cultivate relations and create new realities. The power of metis, it is suggested, is a habit of thinking capable of weaving difference into community with an eye toward justice. This essay turns to these ancient stories in order to draw out the possibilities metis holds for a new politics in the face of the chronic, pathological failures of the logic of force that has historically animated patriarchal politics.

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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, Physics and Metaphysics in which these terms appear in close proximity reveals a fundamental tension of Aristotle’s thinking concerning the being of natural beings. Morphē designates the form as inseparable from the matter in which it inheres, while eidos, because it is more easily separated from matter, is the vocabulary used to determine form as the ontological principle of the composite individual. The tension between morphē and eidos—between form as irreducibly immanent and yet somehow separate—is then shown to animate Aristotle’s phenomenological approach to the being of natural beings. This approach is most clearly enacted in Aristotle’s biology, a consideration of which concludes the essay.

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 understanding of Socratic politics that moves beyond the hypothesis of unity. In the first “prelude,” Thrasymachus and his insistence that justice is the self-interest of the stronger threatens to subject the harmony of the community to the tyrannical whims of the individual. In the second, the perfected justice of Adeimantus’s city threatens to destroy the erotic rhythm of difference that is the very condition for the possibility of the polis. It is only in the song of dialectic, which itself is called a “prelude,” that the tension between the rhythm of plurality and the rational homophony of unity is dynamically tuned in such a way that both the anarchic politics of self-interest and the totalitarian politics of rationalized oppression are equally muted. This conception of politics is embodied in the relationship that emerges between Glaucon and Socrates. Ultimately, the true political community is established here, between rational, erotic individuals seeking justice in concrete, living dialogue.

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 of his own philosophical ideas. Drawing on both the continental phenomenological approach to Aristotle and the Anglo-American analytic and pragmatic recognition of the important role an orientation toward ta phainomena play in Aristotle’s method, this article turns to two specific texts—the Physics and the Parts of Animals—to articulate how Aristotle’s engagement with his historical predecessors is itself an integral moment of his philosophical investigation into the being of natural beings. John Herman Randall and Hans Georg-Gadamer provide the conceptual vocabulary through which Aristotle’s engagement with his predecessors can be best understood; for each in his own way expresses the view that genuine philosophy opens new possibilities for the future by critically engaging the past. The essay concludes by suggesting at once the limitations of Aristotle’s approach to his predecessors and the continuing importance of his recognition that philosophy cannot be pursued in isolation from its history.

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A novel rereading of the relationship between ethics and ontology in Aristotle. Concerned with the meaning and function of principles in an era that appears to have given up on their possibility altogether, Christopher P. Long traces the paths of Aristotle's thinking concerning finite being from the Categories, through the Physics, to the Metaphysics, and ultimately into the Nicomachean Ethics. Long argues that a dynamic and open conception of principles emerges in these works that challenges the traditional tendency to seek security in permanent and eternal absolutes. He rethinks the meaning of Aristotle's notion of principle (archē) and spans the divide of analytic and continental methodological approaches to ancient Greek philosophy, while connecting Aristotle's thinking to that of Levinas, Gadamer, and Heidegger.

"This book is cogently presented, well written, and easy to follow. Long defends a controversial thesis and provides persuasive and extensive argumentation. The carefully constructed treatment of the relationship between Aristotle's theoretical and practical philosophy offers an integrated interpretation of Aristotle's philosophy as a whole." — Walter Brogan, coeditor of American Continental Philosophy: A Reader

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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 with the Aspasian politics of care. By distancing himself from both positions, Socrates elucidates the limitations of each: The Periclean vision of politics is grounded in a conception of self-sufficiency that leads to imperialism, the Aspasian in the dangerous myth of autochthony. Socrates’ playful dialogue with Menexenus, and Menexenus’ incapacity to appreciate the ambiguity and nuance of the Socratic position, lend new insight into the meaning and nature of philosophical citizenship. Socrates, as the philosopher citizen, distances himself from two main ideological visions of politics in such a way that a new conception of politics emerges, one grounded as much in justice as in freedom.

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 Metaphysics, but rather that the text itself leads us in this direction. Taking its cue from such contemporary thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, the article attempts to think through the relationship between ethics and ontology by reinvestigating the relationship between Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his Nicomachean Ethics. It is argued that the ontological conception of praxis developed in the middle books of the Metaphysics points already to the Nicomachean Ethics where a conception of knowledge—phronêsis—is developed that is capable of addressing the lacuna in the account of ontological knowledge offered in the Metaphysics.

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. This article intentionally re-reads Aristotle and Hegel, two philosophers who have to some justifiable degree been indicted for the totalizing tendencies of their thinking, through the shattered lens of the Holocaust in order not only to locate the dangerous dimensions of the legacy of such thinking, but also to show how such a re-reading of the history of philosophy may locate other, more liberating aspects of the tradition. The article focuses on the question of ontological identity. By investigating the manner in which the totalizing dimensions of Aristotle’s thinking are both eclipsed and implicitly endorsed by Hegel’s appropriation of Aristotle’s conception of God, and further by following the surplus of Hegel’s misinterpretation back into the heart of Aristotle’s ontology where we find a more open conception of ontological identity, we come to recognize not only the dangers endemic to certain strands of traditional philosophical thinking, but also the resources the history of this thinking itself brings to bear on the attempt to do justice to ontological identity after Auschwitz.

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