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In this introduction, I outline Proclus’ relationship with Aristotle and provide an overview of the state of the art. I discuss Proclus’ views on the so-called harmony of Plato and Aristotle and contrast it with the views of other, contemporary Neoplatonists, showing that Proclus stands out as more critical of Aristotle. I show that the concept of motion provides a perfect avenue for understanding how Proclus sees the tension between Plato and Aristotle. Lastly, I explain how Proclus differentiates distinct levels of motion which also structure my discussion in the monograph.
The dominant understandings of space that inform International Relations (IR) theories struggle to account for the material dynamism of the natural environment. From neo-realism through to constructivism and post-structuralist IR perspectives, the natural environment is relegated to the background of analysis as the seemingly stable backdrop against which humans do global politics. Supporting this relegation is an associated tendency among IR theorists to view nature abstractly, rather than materially, in alignment with the cartographic imagination. Meanwhile, realist scholars adhering to the tenets of classical geopolitics foreground the natural environment as a factor in global politics yet view it as ontologically static and materially deterministic in its effects. In an era of unprecedented spatial flux amid human-induced climate change, this article seeks to contribute to ongoing efforts in IR and political geography to develop alternative spatial frameworks that can account for the natural environment’s material dynamism and instability. To do so, the article adopts a post-humanist framework that centres matter’s ontological fluidity and mobility. By affording primacy to matter-in-motion, it is argued, a richer understanding of space as performatively produced through relational processes can be developed, where attention is attuned not only to what matter ‘does’, but also how it moves.
This study investigated the differences in the expression of numerical motion metaphors in English and Spanish. We evaluated 1472 English-to-Spanish translations in which a manner of motion verb (e.g., skyrocket, plummet) was used to metaphorically express numerical change (e.g., unemployment is skyrocketing). For each of the translations, we annotated (1) the type of metaphor used in Spanish, (2) whether the manner of motion and path information was present in Spanish, and (3) whether the path and manner information in Spanish were conflated in a single word or indicated via adjuncts. There were three main findings. First, Spanish translations shifted from the motion domain to a quantity domain in almost half of the translations (e.g., skyrocket translated as aumentar, Eng. increase). Second, Spanish translations omitted manner of motion in half of the cases (e.g., prices surging translated as alza de los precios, Eng. rise in prices). Third, the path of motion was always present in the Spanish translations. This translation analysis provides evidence that the typological differences reported for the encoding of literal motion are also observed in the expression of numerical, metaphorical motion and that the choice of metaphorical mappings depends on language typology.
Taking the notion of the ‘mechanic’ as its starting point, this chapter outlines how an interest in the mechanic and scientific aspects of speech production is a pervasive feature of Romantic-era treatments of spoken utterance. The chapter investigates the numerous contemporary senses of the term ‘mechanic’, to highlight these senses’ common concern with physical movement, whether of the human hands, a constructed machine, or the material world. It examines how Romantic innovations in the theory of speech production which present utterance as a form of motion – of bodies, of machines, and of matter itself – combine, engage with, and react to traditions of materialist philosophy and elocution teaching and explores how such studies of speech rely on blending knowledge-based fields of study with traditionally non-theoretical practices including medicine and elocution.
We investigate numbers of faces of polytopes. We begin with the face numbers of 3-polytopes. The characterisation of $f$-vectors of $d$-polytopes ($d\ge 4$) is beyond our current means.In view of this, researchers have considered characterisations of the "projections" of the $f$-vectors, namely the proper subsequences of the $f$-vector; we review the existing results. Section 8.2 gives a proof of a theorem of Xue (2021) on the minimum number of faces of $d$-polytopes with at most $2d$ vertices, answering a conjecture of Grunbaum (2003). This is followed by results on the minimum number of faces of $d$-polytopes with more than $2d$ vertices. We then discuss the lower and upper bound theorems for simplicial polytopes, due to Barnette (1973) and McMullen (1970), respectively, and their extensions such as the $g$-conjecture of McMullen (1971), now the $g$-theorem. The proof of the lower bound theorem connects rigidity theory and the combinatorics polytopes. The chapter ends with a discussion of the flag vector of a polytope. This includes a result of Bayer and Billera (1985) on linear equations for flag vectors like the Dehn--Sommerville’s equations for simplicial polytopes.
This book aims to enhance our appreciation of the modernity of the classical cultures and, conversely, of cinema's debt to ancient Greece and Rome. It explores filmic perspectives on the ancient verbal and visual arts and applies what is often referred to as pre-cinema and what Sergei Eisenstein called cinematism: that paintings, statues, and literature anticipate modern visual technologies. The motion of bodies depicted in static arts and the vividness of epic ecphrases point to modern features of storytelling, while Plato's Cave Allegory and Zeno's Arrow Paradox have been related to film exhibition and projection since the early days of cinema. The book additionally demonstrates the extensive influence of antiquity on an age dominated by moving-image media, as with stagings of Odysseus' arrow shot through twelve axes or depictions of the Golden Fleece. Chapters interpret numerous European and American silent and sound films and some television productions and digital videos.
Studies of agency are crucial if we are to grapple with pressing societal and environmental problems. Relevant conceptual and methodological solutions are needed to make alternative futures possible. This chapter outlines a broad position from which the subsequent contributions to this edited volume depart: one that recognises the urgency of agency and the value of cultural-historical perspectives in breaking away from problematic notions that frame agency as a matter of individuals pitted against the social, or in which individual actions lose their social contingency. Elaborating agency as a matter of struggle where individual and social are in dialectic relations, the chapter focusses on motives, mediation and motion. Within a broader and still-evolving cultural-historical framework, these motifs offer a distinctive way to deal with the challenges of conceptualising and facilitating agency, one which brings alternative futures into the realm of the possible by linking agency with learning and development.
Chapter 4 explores cross-linguistic variation in the language of space along with the potential implications of this variation for the spatial conceptualization of time.
This chapter examines Aquinas’s views on the ontological status of the actualization of an agent’s active power, namely its action, and the patient’s passive power, namely its passion. Aquinas claims that one and the same motion constitutes both an agent’s action and its patient’s passion. This chapter considers Aquinas’s motivations for defending the “action-passion sameness” thesis and his responses to common objections. The chapter also includes a solution to a longstanding interpretive difficulty regarding Aquinas’s views on the ontological status of action. Aquinas claims in some texts that actions are accidents in the agent as subject. This seems to conflict with his standard view that an agent’s action is the motion which it causes in its patient. While advancing a solution to this textual difficulty, the chapter proposes a novel interpretation of Aquinas’s understanding of the relationship between forms and accidents and the metaphysics of inherence.
Aristotle's On the Soul aims to uncover the principle of life, what Aristotle calls psuchē (soul). For Aristotle, soul is the form which gives life to a body and causes all its living activities, from breathing to thinking. Aristotle develops a general account of all types of living through examining soul's causal powers. The thirteen new essays in this Critical Guide demonstrate the profound influence of Aristotle's inquiry on biology, psychology and philosophy of mind from antiquity to the present. They deepen our understanding of his key concepts, including form, reason, capacity, and activity. This volume situates Aristotle in his intellectual context and draws judiciously from his other works as well as the history of interpretation to shed light on his intricate views. It also highlights ongoing interpretive debates and Aristotle's continuing relevance. It will prove invaluable for researchers in ancient philosophy and the history of science and ideas.
This chapter locates Spinoza’s scientific interests and contributions in the context of the disciplinary categories of the seventeenth century, investigates the authorship of two small treatises (on the rainbow, and on the calculation of chances) often attributed to him, describes his scientific correspondence, evaluates his strengths and weaknesses as an expositor of Cartesian physics, assesses the role of Cartesian physics in his own philosophy, and explores his conception of methodology in the natural sciences.
This chapter applies the general hylomorphic theory of the human act to one of the two kinds of human acts that Aquinas countenances, namely, bodily human acts. In keeping with the general hylomorphic framework, it argues that a bodily human act is a composite of a volitional act of use and a bodily commanded act. This chapter investigates each of these two components and considers how they form one unified human act. It argues that while use is an immanent act, any bodily commanded is traunseunt. That is to say, use remains in the agent, while the bodily commanded act, which is an exercise of the “motive power” (vis motiva), comes to inhere in a patient external to the human body. What is more, it argues that use is an intrinsically instantaneous act, whereas any bodily commanded act takes time to be completed. On this basis, it concludes that use and the bodily commanded act are inherentially as well as durationally heterogeneous. The last section of the chapter examines whether this dual heterogeneity prevents use and the bodily commanded act from constituting a unified hylomorphic whole. It argue that this is not the case.
Emphasis on the ‘craftsmanlike’ character of creation in the Timaeus can give the impression that the cosmos is no more an ‘animal’ than Dr Frankenstein’s monster. But Middle Platonists took more seriously the biological implications of the claim that the god is the world’s father as well as its maker, implanting a soul in matter which (as in all animals) brings the cosmos to maturity through its own creative agency. Entailments of the view are that the world soul is first and foremost the ‘nutritive’ soul of the cosmos and that the soul must be a structural feature of the cosmic body rather than a distinct substance.
This chapter offers an overview of key points of entry for the study of eighteenth-century science. The first section addresses how seventeenth-century philosophers challenged Aristotelianism and ancient cosmologies. The second details the importance of empiricism in the new study of the natural world. The third focuses on the roles of specific instruments and institutions in natural philosophical inquiry. Sections four and five cover two of the fiercest philosophical debates of the period: first, about gravity and action at a distance, and second, about theories of matter and spirit. The final section examines encyclopaedism and the emergence toward the end of the century of three new sub-disciplines: chemistry, botany, and geology. A distinguishing feature of eighteenth-century science is how closely it was interwoven with theology. Theories about providence and intelligent design were central to nearly every scientific debate because it was assumed that studying the causes of natural phenomena was the best way to understand the Prime Mover’s intentions for humankind. Accordingly, a recurrent theme in this chapter is the interconnection of religion and science.
This chapter tests the claim made by Peter Brook: that through the live practice of drama, the work of Shakespeare offers ‘the greatest school of living’ that we know. Using the resources of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, it tries to show how the sudden, deep language of Shakespeare, in particular in Macbeth and King Lear, dramatically discloses lost and neglected forms of being, in a primary emotional aliveness that is denied or tamed within more conventional world-orders. Where other writers give us only secondary versions or paraphrases of nature, Shakespeare, said Hazlitt, offers ‘the original text’ of life.
Shakespeare was writing his plays and poems just as the word ‘emotion’ was emerging into common currency. In its first usages, traceable back to the 1590s, the term referred to the general disturbance suggested by the Latin term emovere (to move out), and Shakespeare and his contemporaries indeed often described as motions the impulses that aroused the mind, body and soul. The introduction to Shakespeare and Emotion explains the rationale for giving serious and sustained attention to the emotions as a way of approaching Shakespeare’s works as art from the past, as well as the place of these works in the present. It offers a brief survey of Shakespeare’s classical and early modern sources for his understanding of affect, and an account of how the present-day surge of interest in emotional experience builds on earlier strands of Shakespearean scholarship from the early to mid-twentieth century. The Introduction concludes with a survey of the volume’s chapters, organised around the assumption that emotion offers a deeply promising (and often challenging) prospect for imagining and enacting change.
This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides, the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible. With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental framework with which we conceptualise motion today.
The laws of treaties are in constant motion and state of flux, which has different connotations. It relates to motion through time and also the manifestation (or lack thereof) of change. The basic principle of the definition of motion, adopted by the authors, is based on the philosophy of Aristotle. He identified six types of motion: creation (genesis), increase (auxesis), diminution (meiosis), alteration (alloiosis), destruction (phthora), and change of place (kata topon metabole). This last type of motion has been amended by the authors to change in space-time (kata topon kai chronon metavole) to reflect our modern scientific understanding of time as a dimension through which motion and change occurs.
The law of treaties is in constant motion, understood not only as locomotion, but also as motion through time and as change. Thus, kinesis and stasis, two sides of the same concept of 'motion', are the central themes of Treaties in Motion. The concept of motion adopted in this book is based on the philosophy of Aristotle. He identified six types of motion: creation (genesis), increase (auxesis), diminution (meiosis), alteration (alloiosis), destruction (phthora), and change of place (kata topon metabole), which has been amended by the authors to change in space-time (kata topon kai chronon metavole) to reflect our modern scientific understanding of time as a dimension through which motion and change occurs. Each chapter's analysis proceeds by focusing on a specific area of a treaty's 'life-cycle', where each type of motion shines through and is described through three different frames of reference: treaties, the Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties, and customary law.