An Intellectual Diary ... One Man Living in the Western Intellect
09/17/2026: "ananke stenai" is a phrase that I heard a professor use in college, and it has stayed somewhere in my memory and randomly appears sometimes. Well, I looked it up, and it is a phrase of Aristotle in which he basically says there cannot be an infinite regress, but that causation must come to a stop. ἀνάγκη στῆναι = “it is necessary to come to a halt.” That is the compact Aristotelian formula against an infinite regress: a chain of predicates, causes, or movers cannot go on ἄπειρον; it must stop . Morphology Form Parse ἀνάγκη noun, fem. nom. sg. of ἀνάγκη, -ης, ἡ — “necessity, constraint” στῆναι aor. act. inf. of ἵστημι , from the intransitive 2nd aorist ἔστην — “to stand, come to a standstill, halt” No article, no expressed copula. The syntax is the ordinary impersonal construction: ἀνάγκη (ἐστί) + infinitive = “there is necessity that…” / “it must be that…” ἐστί is routinely omitted. _____________________________________________________...
