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By the Renaissance here is meant the period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries during which there was a deliberate attempt, especially in Italy, to pattern cultural activities on models drawn from antiquity. However, Aristotelianism during that period was not cut off from medieval developments, since earlier interests and topics of discussion still held the attention of philosophers, theologians and non-academic intellectuals. Moreover, given that Aristotelianism was embedded in the university curriculum, the approach and activities of Renaissance Aristotelians often reflected earlier institutional developments. The educational reforms of the German Lutheran Philipp Melanchthon and of the newly-founded Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) ensured that Aristotle remained central to the curriculum. On the other hand, deliberate attempts to divorce themselves from earlier structures and approaches can be discerned in some Renaissance Aristotelians. Owing to the influence of humanism, professors of philosophy whose loyalty was to Aristotle came to study Greek and explicate Aristotle from the Greek text, to imitate the style of classical models, and to prefer the Greek commentators over the medieval Latins because their language was Greek. Renaissance Aristotelianism did not constitute a uniform, coherent school of thought with a clearly defined body of doctrines shared by all adherents. A careful reading of the many commentaries, paraphrases, textbooks and treatises based on Aristotle’s works reveals a surprisingly wide variation in interpretation and a strong tendency to modify or supplement the Stagirite’s teachings with tenets derived from other philosophical or scientific sources or from contemporary interests and discoveries. It is perhaps wise to speak of a variety of Aristotelianisms rather than to perpetuate the long-standing caricature of ‘modern’ philosophy and science arising by throwing off the shackles of a monolithic Peripatetic orthodoxy. The various Aristotelianisms included Albertism, Thomism, Scotism and Averroism, but as a result of the new translations of the Greek commentators on Aristotle there were also Renaissance Aristotelians who approached Aristotle by way of Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Simplicius and John Philoponus. Another current is best described as ‘eclectic Aristotelianism’. Some Aristotelians adopted a ‘philological’ approach, approaching Aristotle simply through analysis of the Greek text and not as a philosophical challenge. This approach made Aristotelianism irrelevant to the enterprise of philosophy, but fortunately did not predominate.

At its best, popular culture provides our society with opportunities to impose a narrative form on our cultural presuppositions and anxieties. It allows its creators and its audience an imaginative space to explore issues central to society's self-conception by reaffirming our cultural biases or illustrating alternatives to cultural presuppositions. In the latter mode, it can propose societal critiques within a safe, that is, non-political, environment and allow its audience a chance to engage in thought experiments. As a result, the audience can come to recognize forgotten possibilities for change and action as well as develop a better understanding of the social attitudes and forces that limit our conception of what the world can be and what role the individual can play. One pervasive set of social attitudes involves our understanding of and relation to technology. With the advent of modern technology and all of its revolutionary consequences, a philosophical critique of technology came into being. One particular theme prominent in that philosophical tradition is the notion of a technological society. On this view, technology and the social relations it requires have shaped our society in ways that are less than apparent and have restricted the scope of our imagination in ways that circumscribe the way we view our available actions. In this paper, I argue that several central themes in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be understood best against the background of philosophical discussions concerning technology and that by reflecting on the themes in the show we can understand more clearly the sources of our social relations as they are conditioned by technology. In brief, my thesis is that the "fantasy" world inhabited by Buffy Summers, the eponymous heroine of the show, is the technological world we inhabit, but one that vividly renders that world so we can better understand our own. Two quotations should provide us with an approach to thinking about technology in this context. The first passage is from Adorno's "Theses Against Occultism." Written in 1947, it remains a very succinct and useful work that neatly expresses some main themes of his thought, but also speaks to the still current cultural obsession with the occult: Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature. (128) The second passage is from Donald Phillip Verene's recent work, Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge: Instinctively, the technological person knows that the idea of the hero is anathema to the technological society. There can never be true working together, because the individual, if he is not to be nothing, must cling to his cause-which is always the particular "mineness" he can work out in relation to the particular thing. (159) These two passages provide the parameters for the discussion below. First, the Adorno passage suggests that fear is a motif for understanding today's society. The control of nature and the control of others is so horrific that it is hard for us even to see it. Instead, we experience some vague panic that misses the underlying causes of these methods of control. If Adorno is right, it is worth considering how the horror about which he speaks is manifested in society and a consideration of a prototypical horror show should provide us with a good sample case. The Verene passage speaks to the consequences of a technological society: an exclusive sense of individual entitlement, the demand to treat others as means to an individual end, and a lack of authentic heroes. All of these consequences relate to the way in which technology and its attendant way of looking at the world have restricted the stage on which we can act. For the purposes of this paper, then, I want to stipulate that we live in a "technological society," as Jacques Ellul and others have argued; a world in which the use of machines is paramount and in which the "one best means" is constantly sought (Verene 141-91). …

Etude de la conception de la sensation interne developpee par F. Suarez dans son commentaire du «De anima» d'Aristote. Soulevant la question du nombre des sens internes, et de leur relation avec les sens externes et les autres facultes cognitives, l'A. montre que la position de Suarez s'inscrit dans la problematique aristotelicienne de la perception, contre la conception de l'intellect chez Saint Thomas d'Aquin.

To best understand the key problem facing any Aristotelian theory of sensation, one would be wise to turn to the words of Jonathan Lear: The task is to show how some part of the world—ourselves and other animals—can become conscious of the rest of the world. The danger is that we make the account of the transition from world to mind either too material or too spiritual. If, on the one hand, we give a purely material account of, say, the physical change that a certain visual scene (a tree) forms in the eye of the perceiver, we seem to leave consciousness out of the account. It remains unclear how, by such a physical change, one is meant to get out of the nonconscious physical world. On the other hand, if we give a totally spiritual account, it is not clear that we have given an account of a transition, for it is not clear that we have begun in a thoroughly nonconscious world. Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 108.