Lynx-Eyed Aristotle

And now for some catty remarks. In the Prologue to the Expo-sitio super viii (octo) libros Physicorum, William of Ockham pounces upon a particularly jarring image with which to praise Aristotle’s exceptional status among the philosophers:The most accomplished man to have appeared among them is Aristotle, outstanding as a man of no slight or insignificant learning. With the eyes of a lynx, as it were, he explored the deep secrets of nature and re-vealed to posterity the hidden truths of natural philos-ophy.1I’m placing this image of the lynx-eyed Aristotle beside Kellie Robertson’s learned and capacious essay because Ockham’s queer construction of a nocturnal, feline Aristotle further supplements her archive of medieval Aristotles: the infidel, the physicist, the S&M bottom engaged in a brisk session of pony-play with a rampant Phyllis, but more importantly, the thinker of a hylomorphic metaphysics whose enduring alterity might help to pry us out of present predicaments. Joining this company, scenting the air with paws extended and pupils di-lated wide, Ockham’s lynx-eyed Aristotle stands poised to forage for what lies hidden within the dark world of physical nature that Graham Harman’s project has plumbed so fierce-ly. Since Kellie’s paper is both historical in its exposition of the past archive of these medieval Aristotles and proleptic in its sense of how that history might reinforce and prepare the way for Graham’s own paper today, I want to cut left and simply flag some key, portable points in Kellie’s paper that I found most generative. These points—hers not mine—potentially help to anchor a particularly life-saving rope bridge that we might throw across some wide gaps in philosophical history.