Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.
Aither 17/2017:4-31 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2017.001 
In his De caelo, Aristotle ascribes to Anaximander of Miletus a conception according to which the Earth remains at its place in the universe only thanks to the symmetry of its position. Simplicius, however, in his commentary on this passage from Aristotle, notes that such a formulation can also be found in Plato. Aetius, meanwhile, ascribes this entire argument to Parmenides and Democritus. Plato shows that the validity of this argument is based on the assumption that both the Earth and the universe that surrounds it are spherical. Anaximander, however, in all likelihood, believes the Earth to be flat - a feature typical of Ionian cosmology....
Aither 17/2017:32-47 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2017.002
Aristotle's opinions are controversial in at least a triple sense. First, we have in mind his editing of and commenting on Poetics. Second, we may see his work as part of a polemic with his contemporaries with whom he did not agree with over the evaluation of tragic poetry. Third, his work is controversial because of the method Aristotle employed and the results he obtained with this method. In this paper the focus will be on the third point, especially on Aristotle's alleged or real interpretation of tragedy as a text and on the possible reasons for his seeming or deliberate underappreciation of tragedy as performance or spectacle (ὄψις)....
Aither 17/2017:48-73 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2017.003
The problem of the analogy of being is at an intersection of ontology and semantics. It can be motivated by the following aporia: the assumptions that "being" is meaningful and transcendental and that every super-ordinate concept decomposes into specific concepts by means of specific differences are inconsistent. The solution is to reconsider the semantics of "being" or the theory of the generality of concepts. Since the thirteenth century, the former was associated with the view that the concept of being is transcendental but (systematically) ambiguous, while the latter with the view that the concept of being is transcendental and unambiguous but...
Aither 17/2017:74-104 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2017.004
This essay provides a contextual reconstruction of Aristotle's ethical heritage at the University of Prague during late Middle Ages. The first part retraces the impact of the commentary tradition on Nicomachean Ethics within the milieu of the Prague Faculty of Arts between 1347/8 and 1409. Since the early years of the Prague University, the local didactic curriculum and discourse in ethics were intensely influenced by the teaching patterns as well as textbooks from the University of Paris, most of all by the commentary compiled by Jean Buridan (d. 1360/1361). However, we should also presuppose the impact of other expositions extant in manuscripts,...
