[MaFLa] Invitation: Representation of motions, representation of parts - Wednesday, 5 February, 11:00 a.m./Nador 15, Room 103

[Krisztina Biber]

The Institute for Advanced Study at CEU is pleased to invite you to its next Fellow Seminar


István Bodnár
Faculty Fellow at IAS CEU

Representation of motions, representation of parts

Wednesday, 5 February, 11:00 a.m.
Nador 15, Room 103

[cid:image002.jpg at 01D5D6B7.8E6412E0]The central issue of this talk is how ancient representations are integrated with their argumentative contexts. After briefly introducing the key instrument of these representations, lettered and unlettered diagrams, we can turn to how Aristotle deploys his rather elementary lettered diagrams in discussions of the divisibility of intervals of time, extensions of bodies and their motions. A key insight about these will be that Aristotle's argumentation requires that we detect correspondences across the different magnitudes, nevertheless, these correspondences do not receive a representation within these diagrams.

After setting forth this constraint, I turn to the discussion of a baffling passage, about which two of Aristotle's foremost interpreters in antiquity - his student, Eudemus, and his most authoritative ancient commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias - proposed alternative expositions. Eudemus for his part queried whether Aristotle's claim can be made across the board, about all possible types of changes. Hence, he does not link his proposal to the representation Aristotle uses in the passage.  Contrary to this, Alexander tries to uphold the generality of Aristotle's claim, suggesting that the labels in Aristotle's diagram should refer to two-dimensional representations of motion. Such two-dimensional representations in principle do allow for a direct representation of correspondences across different magnitudes. Accordingly, I will have to discuss to what extent Alexander's diagrams can be compared to our representations of motions in a system of coordinates.


István Bodnár teaches ancient philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of CEU, and at the Institute of Philosophy of Eötvös University (ELTE). Educated in Budapest (C.Sc. in 1992), he held various post-doctoral fellowships in the U.S., England and Germany, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, 2002/03). Besides his academic teaching and administrative duties, he is editor-in-chief of Rhizomata: A journal for ancient philosophy and science (published by De Gruyter). His research project at the Institute is part of the collaborative project (together with Orna Harari, Tel Aviv) to collect and comment on the fragments and testimonies of Alexander of Aphrodisias' commentary on Aristotle's Physics.




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