- [UNTITLED]
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Notes on the Contributors
- Abbreviations of Aristotle's Works
- Aristotle's Philosophical Life and Writings
- Aristotle on Earlier Natural Science
- Science and Scientific Inquiry in Aristotle: A Platonic Provenance
- Aristotle's Categorial Scheme
- De Interpretatione
- Aristotle's Logic
- Aristotle's Philosophical Method
- Aristotle on Heuristic Inquiry and Demonstration of <i>What it is</i>
- Alteration and Persistence: Form and Matter in the <i>Physics</i> and <i>De Generatione et Corruptione</i>
- Teleological Causation
- Aristotle on the Infinite
- The Complexity of Aristotle's Study of Animals
- Aristotle on the Separability of Mind
- Being <b><i>Qua</i></b> Being
- Substances, Coincidentals, and Aristotle's Constituent Ontology
- <i>Energeia</i> and <i>Dunamis</i>
- Aristotle's Theology
- Aristotle's Philosophy of Mathematics
- Conceptions of Happiness in the <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i>
- Aristotle on Becoming Good: Habituation, Reflection, and Perception
- Aristotle's <i>Politics</i>
- Aristotle on the Moral Psychology of Persuasion
- Aristotle on Poetry
- Meaning: Ancient Comments on Five Lines of Aristotle
- Aristotle in the Arabic Commentary Tradition
- The Latin Aristotle
- General Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Index Nominum
- Subject Index
Abstract and Keywords
The opening five lines of On Interpretation 1 contain Aristotle's influential account of the meaning of verbs and names, in which he describes them as signs of mental experiences that are in turn likenesses of actual things. The passage occasioned much comment from the ancient commentators, and among modern philosophers the resulting tradition has been criticized by Hilary Putnam. Many modern philosophers hold that thinking involves having representations, and there is discussion (e.g., Michael Tye) of whether these representations should be likenesses of what is thought, or rather some kind of symbols. On a view espoused by Jerry Fodor, the symbols constituting thought form a special language of thought, mentalese, which is different from any natural language, and on another (Norman Malcolm, Hilary Putnam), representations are not needed for thought at all. Where Aristotle stands on these issues depends on how the five lines are taken. The lines treat two things as symbols and one as a likeness. Images play an important role in Aristotle's account of meaning.
Keywords: Aristotle, meaning, On Interpretation, thought, experiences, likeness, symbols, images, representations, mentalese
Richard Sorabji is Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. He is the author or editor of 120 volumes. The 12 volumes authored include Aristotle on Memory; Necessity Cause and Blame; Time, Creation and the Continuum; Matter, Space and Motion; Animal Minds and Human Morals; Emotion and Peace of Mind; Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death; 3 volumes of The Philosophy of the Commentators 200-600 AD, A Sourcebook; Opening Doors: The Untold Story of Cornelia Sorabji, and (forthcoming) Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values. He is currently writing a history of the idea of Moral Conscience. He is the General Editor of the series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which celebrates its 100th volume in 2012, and he is editor or co-editor of 10 further volumes, including The Ethics of War: Shared Problems in Different Traditions.
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- [UNTITLED]
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- Notes on the Contributors
- Abbreviations of Aristotle's Works
- Aristotle's Philosophical Life and Writings
- Aristotle on Earlier Natural Science
- Science and Scientific Inquiry in Aristotle: A Platonic Provenance
- Aristotle's Categorial Scheme
- De Interpretatione
- Aristotle's Logic
- Aristotle's Philosophical Method
- Aristotle on Heuristic Inquiry and Demonstration of <i>What it is</i>
- Alteration and Persistence: Form and Matter in the <i>Physics</i> and <i>De Generatione et Corruptione</i>
- Teleological Causation
- Aristotle on the Infinite
- The Complexity of Aristotle's Study of Animals
- Aristotle on the Separability of Mind
- Being <b><i>Qua</i></b> Being
- Substances, Coincidentals, and Aristotle's Constituent Ontology
- <i>Energeia</i> and <i>Dunamis</i>
- Aristotle's Theology
- Aristotle's Philosophy of Mathematics
- Conceptions of Happiness in the <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i>
- Aristotle on Becoming Good: Habituation, Reflection, and Perception
- Aristotle's <i>Politics</i>
- Aristotle on the Moral Psychology of Persuasion
- Aristotle on Poetry
- Meaning: Ancient Comments on Five Lines of Aristotle
- Aristotle in the Arabic Commentary Tradition
- The Latin Aristotle
- General Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- Index Nominum
- Subject Index