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This article presents findings from a fresh examination of a familiar source, shedding new light on the creation of one of the best-known contemporary accounts of the 1641 Irish uprising. It is argued that a text usually regarded as the work of Henry Jones, dean of Kilmore, ought to be understood as the intellectual property of both a team of authors and their sponsors, a New English faction at Dublin Castle with long-standing ambitions to crush popery and entrench planter hegemony in Ireland. It is argued that this group's objective was to strengthen the hand of the populist ‘junto’ at Westminster, led by John Pym, that was wrestling with Charles I for political and constitutional supremacy in English affairs in the winter and spring of 1641–2. The colonialists contributed to this metropolitan revolution by rendering safe to handle the Irish rebels’ politically-explosive seditious slander that their uprising had been raised by royal command. The notorious falsehood of the rebels’ claims has obscured the demonstrably underhand and fundamentally deceitful calculation with which the colonialists helped introduce it into mainstream English political culture, in order to isolate the king further and weaken his personal authority on both sides of the Irish Sea.
This translation is a joint work. Each author translated her or his chapter. Andrea Falcon and Sean Kelsey revised the entire translation with the goal of making it as uniform as possible.
This essay provides basic exposition of GC II 11; for though the upshot of this difficult chapter is by and large clear, the argumentative details are often hard to make out. The question of the chapter is whether there is anything that comes to be of necessity; its answer, briefly put, is that there would be if there were anything whose coming to be was everlasting, which there would be if there were anything whose coming to be was cyclical, which in point of fact there is (e.g., solstices). The argument fails, of course; the reason, I suggest, is that it does not follow, from the fact that (say) solstices come to be cyclically, that they are always in process of coming to be.
Generation and Corruption II is concerned with Aristotle's theory of the elements, their reciprocal transformations and the cause of their perpetual generation and corruption. These matters are essential to Aristotle's picture of the world, making themselves felt throughout his natural science, including those portions of it that concern living things. What is more, the very inquiry Aristotle pursues in this text, with its focus on definition, generality, and causation, throws important light on his philosophy of science more generally. This volume contains eleven new essays, one for each of the chapters of this Aristotelian text, plus a general introduction and an English translation of the Greek text. It gives substantial attention to an important and neglected text, and highlights its relevance to other topics of current and enduring interest.
Aristotle maintains that defining nous requires first defining its activity, which requires first having considered its objects, intelligible beings. This chapter is about the nature of these objects: what about them makes them intelligible? My principal proposals will be that what makes them intelligible is that they are separate or unmixed, and that because, insofar as they are intelligible, they are, in their essence, activity. I am not unaware that this makes it sound as though Aristotle takes intelligibility to consist in some kind of nous. But he himself virtually says as much, when he claims that nous is the form of its objects (lit. εἶδος εἰδῶν); besides it is a result he is committed to by the doctrines that nous is intelligible and that there is something that intelligible objects all are in common; for the alternative, as he himself says, is to suppose that nous “will have something mixed-in, which makes it intelligible just like the rest.” The challenge, then, is not to steer clear of this result, but to make sense of it. My proposal will be that the key lies in realizing that and why Aristotle thinks intelligibility is a creature of nous.
Why is the human mind able to perceive and understand the truth about reality; that is, why does it seem to be the mind's specific function to know the world? Sean Kelsey argues that both the question itself and the way Aristotle answers it are key to understanding his work De Anima, a systematic philosophical account of the soul and its powers. In this original reading of a familiar but highly compressed text, Kelsey shows how this question underpins Aristotle's inquiry into the nature of soul, sensibility, and intelligence. He argues that, for Aristotle, the reason why it is in human nature to know beings is that 'the soul in a way is all beings'. This new perspective on the De Anima throws fresh and interesting light on familiar Aristotelian doctrines: for example, that sensibility is a kind of ratio (logos), or that the intellect is simple, separate, and unmixed.