Sean Kelsey

The introduction to this volume briefly describes its aims and its origin in the inaugural seminar of the Plato Dialogue Project. Rather than summarize each essay, the introduction tries to step back and say something about how the parts of the dialogue fit together, in part by way of reminder, in part because the dialogue’s argumentative integrity is often considered to be elusive. We refer you to the essays that follow for a stimulating and insightful guide to some of the glorious and intricate details of Plato’s Philebus.

Aristotle's thesis in Physics I 8 is that a certain old and familiar problem about coming to be can only be solved with the help of the new account of the "principles" he has developed in Physics I 7. This is a strong thesis and the literature on the chapter does not quite do it justice; specifically, as things now stand we are left wondering why Aristotle should have found this problem so compelling in the first place. In this paper I develop an interpretation which (I hope) will help to remedy this.I believe that Aristotle's problem about coming to be depends on a certain principle to the effect that "nothing can become what it already is" (it is this that is supposed to explain why τò óν cannot come to be εξ Óντoς – cf. 191a30). The main innovation of the interpretation developed here is its suggestion that we understand this principle as a principle about kinds. So understood, the principle does not make the comparatively trivial point that nothing ca...

Abstract: In the Phaedo Socrates says that as a young man he thought it a great thing to know the causes of things; but finding existing accounts unsatisfying, he fell back on a method of his own, hypothesizing that Forms are causes. I argue that part of what this ...

Abstract This paper concerns an argument for natural teleology (found in Physics II 8) that is often taken to rest on an analogy between nature and art; I present an alternative reading.(If pressed to formulate the argument's leading idea succinctly, I would put it this way:“as ...

My topic is hylomorphism, by which I mean the doctrine that 'things due to nature'(tå fÊsei ˆnta) are a kind of composite of matter and form. I first present and criticize a certain interpretation of this doctrine and then try to sketch an alternative. I limit myself to the ...

Aristotle says that it is in the nature of color to impart movement to transparent media. Typically this is interpreted as implying that these media must be transparent (in fulfillment) before color moves them. I argue that this is a mistake.