Stephen Scully both offers a reading of Hesiod's Theogony and traces the reception and shadows of this authoritative Greek creation story in Greek and Roman texts up to Milton's own creation myth, which sought to "soar above th' Aonian Mount [i.e., the Theogony] ... and justify the ways of God to men." Scully also considers the poem in light of Near Eastern creation stories, including the Enuma elish and Genesis, as well as the most striking of modern "scientific myths," Freud's Civilization and its Discontents. Scully reads Hesiod's poem as a hymn to Zeus and a city-state creation myth, arguing that Olympus is portrayed as an idealized polity and - with but one exception - a place of communal harmony. This reading informs his study of the Theogony's reception in later writings about polity, discord, and justice. The rich and various story of reception pays particular attention to the long Homeric Hymns, Solon, the Presocratics, Pindar, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Plato in the Archaic and Classical periods; to the Alexandrian scholars, Callimachus, Euhemerus, and the Stoics in the Hellenistic period; to Ovid, Apollodorus, Lucan, a few Church fathers, and the Neoplatonists in the Roman period. Tracing the poem's reception in the Byzantine, medieval, and early Renaissance, including Petrarch and Erasmus, the book ends with a lengthy exploration of Milton's imitations of the poem in Paradise Lost. Scully also compares what he considers Hesiod's artful interplay of narrative, genealogical lists, and keen use of personified abstractions in the Theogony to Homeric narrative techniques and treatment of epic verse.

Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology, religion, literature and poetry. The sea cradles and soothes us, we visit it often for solace and inspiration, it is familiar, being the place where life ultimately began. Yet the sea is also dark and mysterious and often spells catastrophe and death. The sea is a set of contradictions: kind, cruel, indifferent. She is a blind will that will 'have her way'. In exploring this most capricious of phenomena, David Farrell Krell engages the work of an array of thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hoelderlin, Melville, Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and Freud. The Sea explores the significance in Western civilization of the catastrophic and generative power of the sea and what humankind's complex relationship with it reveals about the human condition, human consciousness, temporality, striving, anxiety, happiness and mortality.

This volume analyses in depth the reception of early Greek philosophy in the Epicurean tradition and provides for the first time in scholarship a comprehensive edition, with translation and commentary, of all the Herculanean testimonia to the Presocratics. Among the most significant scientific outcomes, it provides elements for the attribution of an earlier date to the attested tradition of Xenophanes' scepticism; a complete reconstruction of the Epicurean reception of Democritus; a new reconstruction of the testimonia to Nausiphanes' concept of physiologia, Anaxagoras' physics and theology, and Empedocles' epistemology; new texts for better comparing the doxographical sections of Philodemus' On Piety with those of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, which update Hermann Diels' treatment of this subject in his Doxographi Graeci.

Returning to the Greek understanding of art to rethink its capacities, Creation and the Function of Art focuses on the relationship between techne and phusis (nature). Moving away from the theoretical Platonism which dominates contemporary understandings of art, this book instead reinvigorates Aristotelian causation. Beginning with the Greek topos and turning to insights from philosophy, pure mathematics, psychoanalysis and biology, Jason Tuckwell re-problematises techne in functional terms. This book examines the deviations at play within logical forms, the subject, and upon phusis to better situate the role of the function in poiesis (art). In so doing, Tuckwell argues that art concerns a genuinely creative labour that cannot be resolved via an ontological or epistemological problem, but which instead constitutes an encounter with the problematic. As such, techne is shown to be a property of the living, of intelligence coupled to action, that not only enacts poiesis or art, but indicates a broader role for creative deviation in nature.

Friedrich Schleiermacher's Platons Werke (1804-28) changed how we understand Plato. His translation of Plato's dialogues remained the authoritative one in the German-speaking world for two hundred years, but it was his interpretation of Plato and the Platonic corpus, set forth in his Introductions to the dialogues, that proved so revolutionary for classicists and philosophers worldwide. Schleiermacher created a Platonic question for the modern world. Yet, in Schleiermacher studies, surprisingly little is known about Schleiermacher's deep engagement with Plato. Schleiermacher's Plato is the first book-length study of the topic. It addresses two basic questions: How did Schleiermacher understand Plato? In what ways was Schleiermacher's own thought influenced by Plato? Lamm argues that Schleiermacher's thought was profoundly influenced by Plato, or rather by his rather distinctive understanding of Plato. This is true not only of Schleiermacher's philosophy (Hermeneutics, Dialectics) but also of his thinking about religion and Christian faith during the first decade of the nineteenth century (Christmas Dialogue, Speeches on Religion). Schleiermacher's Plato should be of interest to classicists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars of religion.

The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader brings together seminal texts from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time. With readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell, it analyses and discusses major classical, medieval and modern texts and figures from the natural sciences. Grouped by topic to clarify the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of theories, each section includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading and end-of-section discussion questions, allowing students to develop the skills needed to: read, interpret, and critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history and philosophy of science understand and evaluate scientific material found in a wide variety of professional and popular settings appreciate the social and cultural context in which scientific ideas emerge identify the roles that mathematics plays in scientific inquiry Featuring primary sources in all the core scientific fields - astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences - The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader is ideal for students looking to better understand the origins of natural science and the questions asked throughout its history. By taking a thematic approach to introduce influential assumptions, methods and answers, this reader illustrates the implications of an impressive range of values and ideas across the history and philosophy of Western science.

Overcoming Uncertainty in Ancient Greek Political Philosophy makes an historical and theoretical contribution by explaining the role of opinion in ancient Greek political philosophy, showing its importance for Aristotle's theory of deliberation, and indicating a new model for a deliberative republic. Currently, there are no studies of opinion in ancient Greek political theory and so the book breaks new historical ground. The book establishes that opinion is key for the political theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics because each sees uncertainty as a problem that needs to be overcome if one is to establish a virtuous polity. Since they have different notions of the nature of the uncertainty of opinion, they develop very different political strategies to overcome it. The book explains that Plato's and the Stoics' analyses of uncertainty support oligarchy and monarchy, respectively, and that theoretical support for deliberate politics requires a more nuanced understanding of uncertainty that only Aristotle provides.

Anaximander, the sixth century BCE philosopher of Miletus, is often credited as being the instigator of both science and philosophy. The first recorded philosopher to posit the idea of the boundless cosmos, he was also the first to attempt to explain the origins of the world and humankind in rational terms. Anaximander's philosophy encompasses theories of justice, cosmogony, geometry, cosmology, zoology and meteorology. "Anaximander: A Re-assessment" draws together these wide-ranging threads into a single, coherent picture of the man, his worldview and his legacy to the history of thought. Arguing that Anaximander's statements are both apodeictic and based on observation of the world around him, Andrew Gregory examines how Anaximander's theories can all be construed in such a way that they are consistent with and supportive of each other. This includes the tenet that the philosophical elements of Anaximander's thought (his account of the" apeiron," the extant fragment) can be harmonised to support his views on the natural world. The work further explores how these theories relate to early Greek thought and in particular conceptions of theogony and meterology in Hesiod and Homer.

Greek Heroes in and out of Hades is a study on heroism and mortality from Homer to Plato. In a collection of thirty enjoyable essays, Stamatia Dova combines intertextual research and thought-provoking analysis to shed new light on concepts of the hero in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Bacchylides 5, Plato's Symposium, and Euripides' Alcestis. Through systematic readings of a wide range of seemingly unrelated texts, the author offers a cohesive picture of heroic character in a variety of literary genres. Her characterization of Achilles, Odysseus, and Heracles is artfully supported by a comprehensive overview of the theme of descent to the underworld in Homer, Bacchylides, and Euripides. Aimed at the specialist as well as the general reader, Greek Heroes in and out of Hades brings innovative Classical scholarship and insightful literary criticism to a wide audience.

Maximus the Confessor (c.580-662) has become one of the most discussed figures in contemporary patristic studies. This is partly due to the relatively recent discovery and critical edition of his works in various genres, including On the Ascetic Life, Four Centuries on Charity, Two Centuries on Theology and the Incarnation, On the 'Our Father', two separate Books of Difficulties, addressed to John and to Thomas, Questions and Doubts, Questions to Thalassius, Mystagogy and the Short Theological and Polemical Works. The impact of these works reached far beyond the Greek East, with his involvement in the western resistance to imperial heresy, notably at the Lateran Synod in 649. Together with Pope Martin I (649-53 CE), Maximus the Confessor and his circle were the most vocal opponents of Constantinople's introduction of the doctrine of monothelitism. This dispute over the number of wills in Christ became a contest between the imperial government and church of Constantinople on the one hand, and the bishop of Rome in concert with eastern monks such as Maximus, John Moschus, and Sophronius, on the other, over the right to define orthodoxy. An understanding of the difficult relations between church and state in this troubled period at the close of Late Antiquity is necessary for a full appreciation of Maximus' contribution to this controversy. The editors of this volume aim to provide the political and historical background to Maximus' activities, as well as a summary of his achievements in the spheres of theology and philosophy, especially neo-Platonism and Aristotelianism.