In Pl. 1.3, Apuleius provides an account of the genesis of the tripartition of philosophy, recalling its incorrect (but by then traditional) attribution to Plato. In doing so, Apuleius states that Plato showed that the three parts of philosophy do not fight each other, but on the contrary support each other with mutual aid. While the meaning of the passage is clear, the text has been long debated. The aim of this paper is to show that none of the texts printed so far is satisfactory, and to propose a new solution.
Heraclitus’ fragments employ a powerful literary technique which is used to convey information without giving it directly: the texts appeal to sensation and bodily experience to evoke spatial scenes and so become intuitively comprehensible and display a surprisingly vivid quality. The means to bring this effect about can be analysed and explained with approaches from cognitive studies. This article presents three criteria to analyse vividness in spatial scenes and applies them to four fragments of Heraclitus in order to show how the text makes use of perceptual structures and exploits them to convey information without the recipient noticing it.
In the following close examination of chapter 26 of Aristotle’s Poetics it is argued (a) that unlike the main part of the treatise, tragedy and epic are no longer compared in the frame of ‘poetic art’, i.e. as literary genres, but rather as Gesamtkunstwerke judged by elitist criteria; (b) that the chapter adopts a logical method of argumentation founded on the dialectical method of the Topics; (c) that, as at the end of Book 8 of the Politics, it mainly reflects disputes in the Academy instigated by the so-called ‘New Music’; (d) that for a variety of reasons this chapter of the Poetics and hence the earlier layer of the treatise dates back to Aristotle’s first Athenian period (367-347 BCE).