The earth’s shadow darkens the initial Heavens of Dante’s ascent, the shadow waning the nearer a Heaven is to that of the Sun.The inhabitants of the last earth-shadowed Heaven turn to that Heaven hoping to be free from the imperfections of terrestrial existence.But these Heavens’ vestigial earthiness exerts an effect.Each focuses on a particular imperfection: the fragility of moral vows; the defect of human law as a vehicle of justice; and the reign of “mad love.”These produce an urge to transcend this region.

But Dante has readers assess the losses as well as the gains that accrue when we leave our world behind.This assessment puts reason on trial, its inadequacies seeming to sanction reason’s subordination to faith as provided in the vision that beckons above.But these Heavens ask not only whether that’s possible but desirable.Reason’s inadequacies are shown to be inseparable from moral responsibility, from more just politics, and from the desires that generate the Comedy.Asking whether the transcendence of terrestrial existence makes for a happier life, Dante gives readers cause to consider the possibility that these earth-shadowed Heavens are more than merely a necessary step on the way to perfection.

This chapter explores Aristotle’s intellectual development, methodological distinctiveness, and ethical thought, particularly as expressed in the Nicomachean Ethics. It begins with an account of Aristotle’s biography, including his long association with Plato, his departure from Athens, and the eventual founding of his own school, the Lyceum. A crucial distinction is drawn between the genres of Platonic and Aristotelian texts: Plato’s dialogues are literary-philosophical compositions, while Aristotle’s surviving works are mostly lecture notes. The chapter argues that this difference in genre has shaped interpretive traditions. Central to Aristotle’s ethics is the idea that observation of human life, rather than abstract theorizing, grounds our understanding of the good. Ethics, he argues, must be treated with appropriate imprecision due to its practical and variable subject matter. Happiness (eudaimonia), for Aristotle, is not pleasure or honor but a life of activity in accordance with virtue, achieved through habituation and deliberate choice. Virtue is conceived as a mean between extremes and guided by phronêsis (practical wisdom). The chapter concludes by emphasizing Aristotle’s belief in the divine dimension of human flourishing and his view that ethics, properly understood, is inseparable from civic life and human interrelation within the polis.

This chapter sets the conceptual and methodological stage for the book by challenging conventional disciplinary boundaries in the history of philosophy. It argues for a broad understanding of philosophical inquiry that includes religion, literature, and lived practice. The chapter critiques the dominance of argument-based historiography, stemming from Descartes, Brucker, and the nineteenth-century research university model, which privileged metaphysics and epistemology over ethics and the art of living. It outlines a corrective vision that foregrounds genre, orality, and the performative dimensions of philosophy. Christianity is shown to be not only compatible with philosophy but also a key medium through which ancient philosophical ideas were preserved, transformed, and popularized. The chapter highlights neglected periods, especially late antiquity, and insists on the importance of reading ancient thinkers – Plato, Augustine, Paul – on their own terms and in their own genres. It advocates for a generous, contextually informed reading practice that sees philosophical ideas as part of a long conversation across centuries. Ultimately, this chapter positions the book as a work of retrieval that seeks to restore the breadth and spiritual seriousness of ancient and late ancient philosophical traditions.

In Parts of Animals II.10, Aristotle introduces an approach to studying the nonuniform parts of animals: “to speak about the human kind first” (656a10). This chapter asks why Aristotle adopts this strategy and how he goes about implementing it. I argue that he selects it because he holds that human bodies offer particularly clear illustrations of some of his scientific concepts, including the relationship between parts and the ends they are for the sake of. As a result, he thinks that beginning with the causal explanations of human parts helps us to develop such explanations for the parts of other animals, especially when it is difficult to do so.

The analogies Aristotle employs in Parts of Animals (PA) are indispensable to the scientific investigation he undertakes in that work. This is because many analogies in PA express relations strong enough to ground a unique variety of unity. What is analogical unity? What sort of relationship must an analogy capture to ground such a unity? What role does analogy play in the scientific study of animals and their parts? I first contrast analogical unity with two different varieties of unity: formal unity and generic unity. I then examine the analogies in PA to discern which of the proportional relationships they express yield analogical unities. The most promising interpretations of these passages risk analogical unity’s collapse into one of the other varieties of unity Aristotle accepts. I argue that Aristotle employs the same concept of analogy in PA and in the Metaphysics and that this consonance allows us to preserve analogical unity’s unique explanatory role.

Abstract: In this chapter, Fahy explores the parallels between John Dewey’s and Aristotle’s moral psychology, particularly their shared emphasis on habit (hexis) and practical wisdom (phronesis). He shows how Dewey, like Aristotle, views habits as the foundation of moral character, shaping perception, deliberation, and choice. Aristotle defines virtues as acquired dispositions that guide action through practical wisdom, whereas Dewey extends this idea, emphasizing the dynamic, transactional nature of habit formation. Both thinkers see deliberation as dramatic and integrative, determining both actions and the meaning of values in lived experience. However, they diverge on key points: Aristotle envisions a hierarchical structure of virtues culminating in contemplation (theoria) as the highest good, while Dewey rejects fixed ends, advocating continual growth. This chapter concludes by stating that despite differences, both of these accounts of moral psychology provide rich frameworks for understanding human action, ethical deliberation, and character development.

It is widely known that the ancient Greek language distinguished three main kinds of love. With the exception of one sustained discussion that I consider carefully, friendship receives scarcely a handful of references in its own right in Works of Love, for it is usually lumped together with erotic (or romantic) love – “and friendship” is the phrase used to conjoin philia to eros as a kind of afterthought, and this occurs dozens of times in Kierkegaard’s tremendous yet maddening 1847 text. Incessantly, the flaws of philia are declared in Works of Love to be exactly the same as the flaws of eros. For the most part, that leaves no room for a consideration of friendship itself. My chapter seeks to remedy this neglect, turning to Kierkegaard’s example of Jesus’s love for Peter.

Is mind a proper topic of investigation in Aristotle’s science of nature? The question is surprisingly vexed. Although some evidence suggests that mind should be studied by natural philosophy as well as first philosophy (metaphysics), Parts of Animals I.1 (641a32−b23) presents a series of arguments often construed as decisive evidence that he excludes mind from natural philosophy. This chapter goes through the relevant text and argues that Aristotle presents three arguments to exclude mind from nature but all in the voice of an opponent. Then in a final argument (641b23−642a1) he responds directly to the third argument, with indirect implications for the second argument as well.

Parts of Animals (PA) I.5 sends a strong message that the parts of the animal body are to be studied for the sake of the substance, the whole animal. If, as Aristotle suggests, it is the lowest or ‘indivisible’ species which are the substances, then we should study the parts of animals at this level. Yet many of the parts of animals are common to several species, so explaining them for each species would be repetitive and tiresome. We find thus in the PA two opposed explanatory tendencies: one ‘upwards’ toward the more common and greater simplicity and another ‘downwards’ toward the ultimate species and greater complexity. Aristotle’s proposed solution is to account for the various bodily parts at a general level and to descend to the species only when the parts differ significantly. In this chapter I discuss some difficulties for Aristotle’s solution.

The concept of concept emerged in classical Greece once philosophers began to reflect on their disagreements about the nature of things. Plato made a critical advance by distinguishing the content and object of thought. It is only with Aristotle, who has more to say about content, that we find the beginnings of a theory of concepts. On his view perception enables animals to distinguish between different types of particular, but cannot consider these types on their own abstractly, as we do in thought. This latter ability, together with the operations of combination and division, allows us to consider a much wider range of types than we encounter directly in perception. Abstraction is the ability to focus on certain features rather than attending to all. But the ability to create new concepts, by adding positive and negative qualifications, underwrites the productivity of language and the possibility of scientific investigation.

Aristotle’s understanding of natural objects as matter-form compounds raises important questions about how this hylomorphic view applies to living beings. More specifically:

1. (1) Is the form of living compounds ‘pure,’ that is essentially independent of matter, or ‘true-gritty,’ that is, essentially matter-involving?

2. (2) In his standard view, the form is prior to matter and the compound. But how can the form of living compounds meet this priority requirement if it is ‘true-gritty’?

3. (3) If, by contrast, the form of living compounds is ‘pure,’ how can it be the principle of material and changeable living compounds?

I argue that in De Partibus Animalium (PA), too, forms of living compounds are ‘true-gritty.’ They are also, however, prior to living compounds and their matter. PA offers evidence for a distinction between the type of matter that is essential to form and that of living compounds, which is not essential to but posterior to the form.

In PA I.5, Aristotle encourages his audience to engage in a novel kind of philosophy: the scientific inquiry into animals and plants. What Aristotle is exhorting his readers to do, biology, is newly and originally conceived, but the literary technique employed – protreptic speech – is one of the oldest and most traditional kinds of philosophical discourse. In his earlier popular dialogue the Protrepticus, Aristotle had defended and promoted the Academic conception of philosophy and its preoccupation with theoretical and mathematical sciences such as astronomy by discussing the clarity of such sciences and the excellence of their objects. In the later protreptic to biology, he adapted these earlier arguments, arguing that biology also has excellent objects and offers a kind of clarity that may even surpass astronomy. These arguments turn out to be part of a general rhetorical strategy for comparing and rank-ordering sciences that was theorized in the Topics and Rhetoric.

Melissa Merritt aims to locate one of the limits of Kant’s Aristotelianism. While it is widely supposed that Aristotle is the most relevant ancient reference point for Kant’s conception of virtue as “moral strength of will” (6:405), Merritt argues that Kant draws primarily on Stoic ethics. Much of what may seem Aristotelian in Kant’s remarks about virtue — such as his likening it to “the state of health proper to a human being” (6:384) — should be read as nods to a pervasive tendency of ancient Greek thought, which views ethics as a dimension of natural teleology. Ethics, so conceived, is centrally concerned with how the human being develops naturally towards the telos of virtue, conceived as the completion of our essentially rational nature. While this is a feature common to Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, Merritt argues that Kant favors a specifically Stoic approach, one that has a notion of “appropriate” or completion-promoting action — officium — at its heart.

Corey Dyck discusses the eighteenth-century German context of Kant’s Critical philosophy and shows that a number of prominent Kantian doctrines can be seen as growing out of discussions of Aristotelian ideas in philosophers such as Wolff and Crusius. These include the idea that there are three fundamental operations of the mind (the tres operationes mentis), that the mind is an “entelechy,” and that the operations of a rational mind are characterized by spontaneity.

Matthew Boyle relates Kant’s account of cognition to Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of substance. On Aristotle’s view, the form of a substance is the ground of its existence. To know this form is to know those of its properties without which it cannot exist. These characterize the substance as it is in itself. Such knowledge of form amounts to knowledge of a thing in itself, and the view that such knowledge is possible for us might be called formal realism. Kant thinks that this requires a type of mind human beings do not have: a non-discursive intellect. Boyle argues that Kant transposes Aristotle’s hylomorphic framework from a formal-realist to a formal-idealist register, and so “internalizes” the form-matter contrast. Instead of speaking of forms of being qua being Kant speaks of forms of objects insofar as they are knowable by a finite intellect. For Kant, just as for Aristotle, the form of a thing is its essence (and thereby the ground of its intelligibility). But for things whose form is ideal – appearances – knowledge of form cannot amount to knowledge of the ground of their existence. It can only amount to knowledge of the ground of their knowability.

Alexandra Newton discusses the relation between virtue and habit in Kant’s moral philosophy. While commentators frequently claim that Kant rejects Aristotle’s definition of virtue as a type of habit, Newton argues that this overlooks the fact that Kant distinguishes different kinds of habit. While he rejects the idea that virtue is a habit of action or desire, like Aristotle he allows virtue to be a habit of choice (hexis prohairetike), understood as an exercise of practical reason. Carefully distinguishing the different notions of habit Kant delineates thus allows us to see that his conception of virtue is more Aristotelian than commonly assumed. At the same time, Newton notes, there remain important points on which Kant’s conception diverges from Aristotle’s, having to do specifically with the temporal character of virtue

This chapter explores the historical and conceptual connection between the social sciences, the idea of civil society and the ‘socialist’ natural law of Samuel Pufendorf.