Space, Time, Matter, and Form collects ten of David Bostock's essays on themes from Aristotle's Physics, four of them published here for the first time. The first five papers look at issues raised in the first two books of the Physics, centred on notions of matter and form, and the idea of substance as what persists through change. They also range over other of Aristotle's scientific works, such as his biology and psychology and the account of change in his De Generatione et Corruptione. The volume's remaining essays examine themes in later books of the Physics, including infinity, place, time, and continuity. Bostock argues that Aristotle's views on these topics are of real interest in their own right, independent of his notions of substance, form, and matter; they also raise some pressing problems of interpretation, which these essays seek to resolve.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Plato's The Republic has influenced Western philosophers for centuries, with its main focus on what makes a well-balanced society and individual.

THE science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be. For of things constituted by nature some are bodies and magnitudes, some possess body and magnitude, and some are principles of things which possess these. Now a continuum is that which is divisible into parts always capable of subdivision, and a body is that which is every way divisible.

Ancient Greek Philosophy: From the Presocratics to the Hellenistic Philosophers presents a comprehensive introduction to the philosophers and philosophical traditions that developed in ancient Greece from 585 BC to 529 AD. * Provides coverage of the Presocratics through the Hellenistic philosophers * Moves beyond traditional textbooks that conclude with Aristotle * A uniquely balanced organization of exposition, choice excerpts and commentary, informed by classroom feedback * Contextual commentary traces the development of lines of thought through the period, ideal for students new to the discipline * Can be used in conjunction with the online resources found at http://tomblackson.com/Ancient/toc.html

This book offers an introduction to Socrates, ideal for undergraduate students taking courses in Ancient and Greek Philosophy. Socrates is regarded as the founder of Western philosophical inquiry. Yet he left no writings and claimed to know 'nothing fine or worthy'. He spent his life perplexing those who encountered him and is as important and perplexing now as he was 2500 years ago. Drawing on the various competing sources for Socrates that are available to us, "Socrates: A Guide for the Perplexed" guides the reader through the main themes and ideas of Socrates' thought. Taking into account the puzzles surrounding his trial and death, the philosophical methods and ethical positions associated with Socrates, and his lasting influence, Sara Ahbel-Rappe presents a concise and accessible introduction to this most influential and important of philosophers. She concludes by suggesting that it is in fact the Socratic insistence on self-knowledge that makes Socrates at once so pivotal and so elusive for the student of philosophy. This book is the ideal companion to the study of key thinker in the history of philosophy. Continuum's "Guides for the Perplexed" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging - or indeed downright bewildering. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.

This is an important new monograph on Plato's metaphysics, focusing on the theory of the forms, which is the central philosophical concept in Plato's theory.Few philosophical doctrines have been as influential and as widely discussed as Plato's theory of Forms; yet few have been as misunderstood. Most philosophers, following the recommendation of Aristotle, regard the Forms as abstract entities. However, this view is difficult to square with other aspects of Plato's thought, in particular his theory of knowledge.Francis A. Grabowski aims to dissociate the theory of Forms from its Aristotelian reception, by interpreting it within the larger framework of Plato's philosophy. Grabowski notes that the theory emerged largely from epistemological concerns. He shows that the ancients conceived of knowledge almost exclusively as a perception-like acquaintance with things. He goes on to examine Plato's epistemology and shows that Plato also regards knowledge as the mind being directly acquainted with its object. Grabowski argues that, by modelling knowledge on perception, Plato could not have conceived of the Forms as Aristotle and others have claimed. He concludes that an interpretation of the Forms as concrete rather than abstract entities provides a more plausible and coherent view of Plato's overall philosophical project.

It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In this book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.

In this book, Kevin M. Cherry compares the views of Plato and Aristotle about the practice, study, and, above all, the purpose of politics. The first scholar to place Aristotle's Politics in sustained dialogue with Plato's Statesman, Cherry argues that Aristotle rejects the view of politics advanced by Plato's Eleatic Stranger, contrasting them on topics such as the proper categorization of regimes, the usefulness and limitations of the rule of law, and the proper understanding of phron sis. The various differences between their respective political philosophies, however, reflect a more fundamental difference in how they view the relationship of human beings to the natural world around them. Reading the Politics in light of the Statesman sheds new light on Aristotle's political theory and provides a better understanding of Aristotle's criticism of Socrates. Most importantly, it highlights an enduring and important question: Should politics have as its primary purpose the preservation of life, or should it pursue the higher good of living well?"

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.A" Marcus Aurelius - 'Meditations' Marcus Aurelius is considered to one of the great Emperors of Rome who was not only a skilled military leader but also a great philosopher in the Stoic tradition. He was born in 121 AD and both of his parents came from wealthy backgrounds. His father died when Marcus was 3 years old and by the time he was 6 he had gained the attention of the Emperor Hadrian who oversaw his education. Hadrian ensured that Marcus was taught by some of the greatest scholars in Rome who educated him in literature, drama, geometry, Greek oratory, Greek and Latin. Marcus later abandoned most of those subjects in favor of philosophy, with the work of the Greek philosopher Epictetus being a major influence on his thinking. In 138, while still a young man, the Emperor Antoninus Pius adopted Marcus, and in 161 he himself became Emperor. Marcus insisted he would only take up the Emperorship if Lucius Verus were also installed. Marcus's insistence on Lucius joining him as Emperor was a military one. At that time Rome was fighting wars on multiple fronts and Marcus wanted someone he could trust to marshal the troops who he knew would not at some point lead a revolt against him. Lucius and Marcus were loyal to each other up until Lucius's death in 169 AD. After Lucius's death, Marcus was the sole Emperor and due to the incessant wars in the provinces he was unable to spend much time indulging his philosophical pursuits. He did manage to found four Chairs of Philosophy in Athens, one for each of the main philosophical schools of thought, Aristotelian, Epicurean, Platonic and Stoic. Although Marcus spent almost all of his reign on campaigns in foreign territories, he managed to write down his thoughts and these became what are now considered a masterpiece of Roman philosophy, the discourses 'Meditations'. Marcus wrote 'Meditations' around 170 - 180, whilst on a campaign in central Europe, most probably in what is now Serbia, Hungary and Austria. The 12 books that make up 'Meditations' were not written as an exercise in explaining his philosophy but rather as a personal notebook for self-improvement and study. 'Meditations' illustrates just how important Epictetus was to Marcus as he quotes the Greek philosopher's famed 'Discourses' on more than one occasion. Epictetus was a legendary figure in Greek philosophy and many claim he is the greatest of the Stoics; texts that remain in existence from the period suggest that in his native Greece, he was even more popular than Plato. As was previously mentioned, 'Meditations' was not written for public consumption but rather as an aid to personal development. Marcus wanted to change his way of living and thinking and to do this he embarked on a set of philosophical exercises. He would reflect on philosophical ideas and by writing them down and by repeating them he hoped to re-programme his mind and find his own philosophy to live by. One of the key exercises in the book discusses Marcus attempting to look at the world from 'the point of view of the cosmos' in a bid to try and look at life and the universe outside of the common and limited parameters of individual concerns. You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgment, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.A" Marcus Aurelius died on March 17, 180, in the city of Vindobona which was situated where Vienna is today. History remembers him as the last of the 'Five Good Emperors' of the Nervan-Antonian dynasty. Marcus' son Commodus replaced his father as Emperor and although he reigned over a relatively stable period in Roman history, in terms of war and peace, his personal behavior and antics were not in the spirit of those Emperors that came immediately before him. Commodus was eventually murdered in a plot that involved his mistress Marcia, thus bringing to an end the highly regarded Nervan-Antonian dynasty.

A new account of Aristotle's Ethics, this book argues for the central importance of the concept of techne or craft in Aristotle's moral theory. Exploring the importance of techne in the Platonic and pre-Platonic intellectual context in which Aristotle was writing, Tom Angier here shows that this concept has an important role in Aristotle's Ethics that has rarely been studied in Anglo-American scholarship. Through close-analysis of the primary texts, this book uses the focus on techne to systematically critique and renew Aristotelian moral philosophy. Techne in Aristotle's Ethics provides a novel and challenging approach to one of the Ancient World's most enduring intellectual legacies.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Daniel Russell examines Plato's subtle and insightful analysis of pleasure and explores its intimate connections with his discussions of value and human psychology. Russell offers a fresh perspective on how good things bear on happiness in Plato's ethics, and shows that, for Plato, pleasure cannot determine happiness because pleasure lacks a direction of its own. Plato presents wisdom as a skill of living that determines happiness by directing one's life as a whole, bringing about goodness in all areas of one's life, as a skill brings about order in its materials. The 'materials' of the skill of living are, in the first instance, not things like money or health, but one's attitudes, emotions, and desires where things like money and health are concerned. Plato recognizes that these 'materials' of the psyche are inchoate, ethically speaking, and in need of direction from wisdom. Among them is pleasure, which Plato treats not as a sensation but as an attitude with which one ascribes value to its object. However, Plato also views pleasure, once shaped and directed by wisdom, as a crucial part of a virtuous character as a whole. Consequently, Plato rejects all forms of hedonism, which allows happiness to be determined by a part of the psyche that does not direct one's life but is among the materials to be directed. At the same time, Plato is also able to hold both that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and that pleasure is necessary for happiness, not as an addition to one's virtue, but as a constituent of one's whole virtuous character itself. Plato therefore offers an illuminating role for pleasure in ethics and psychology, one to which we may be unaccustomed: pleasure emerges not as a sensation or even a mode of activity, but as an attitude - one of the ways in which we construe our world - and as such, a central part of every character.

Truth, etc. is a wide-ranging study of ancient logic based upon the John Locke lectures given by the eminent philosopher Jonathan Barnes in Oxford. Its six chapters discuss, first, certain ancient ideas about truth; secondly, the Aristotelian conception of predication; thirdly, various ideas about connectors which were developed by the ancient logicians and grammarians; fourthly, the notion of logical form, insofar as it may be discovered in the ancient texts; fifthly, the question of the 'justification of deduction'; and sixthly, the attitude which has been called logical utilitarianism and which restricts the scope of logic to those forms of inference which are or might be useful for scientific proofs. In principle, the book presupposes no knowledge of logic and no skill in ancient languages: all ancient texts are cited in English translation; and logical symbols and logical jargon are avoided so far as possible. There is no scholarly apparatus of footnotes, and no bibliography. It can be read in an armchair. Anyone interested in ancient philosophy, or in logic and its history, will find it interesting.

This book concentrates on the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias which takes place in the first part of Plato's Gorgias. Scholars have tended to concentrate on the following two conversations held by Socrates with Polus and, especially, with Callicles. This first, relatively short, conversation is usually taken to be a kind of preface coming before Plato's 'real' philosophy. The present study challenges this assumption, arguing that the conversation between Socrates and Gorgias actually anticipates the message of the whole dialogue, which concerns the essence of rhetoric and its implications.

On Location is the first book devoted to a highly significant doctrine in the history of philosophy and science--Aristotle's account of place in the Physics. Ben Morison presents an authoritative exposition and defence of this account of what it is for something to be somewhere, and demonstrates its enduring philosophical interest and value.

Ruth Glasner presents an illuminating reappraisal of Averroes' physics. Glasner is the first scholar to base her interpretation on the full range of Averroes' writings, including texts that are extant only in Hebrew manuscripts and have not been hitherto studied. She reveals that Averroes changed his interpretation of the basic notions of physics - the structure of corporeal reality and the definition of motion - more than once. After many hesitations he offers a bold new interpretation of physics which Glasner calls 'Aristotelian atomism'. Ideas that are usually ascribed to scholastic scholars, and others that were traced back to Averroes but only in a very general form, are shown not only to have originated with him, but to have been fully developed by him into a comprehensive and systematic physical system. Unlike earlier Greek or Muslim atomistic systems, Averroes' Aristotelian atomism endeavours to be fully scientific, by Aristotelian standards, and still to provide a basis for an indeterministic natural philosophy. Commonly known as 'the commentator' and usually considered to be a faithful follower of Aristotle, Averroes is revealed in his commentaries on the Physics to be an original and sophisticated philosopher.

William Desmond, taking issue with common popular and scholarly views of the ancient Greek Cynics, contends that early Cynics like Antisthenes and Diogenes were not cultural outcasts or marginal voices in classical culture; rather, the Cynic movement through the fourth century B.C. had deep and significant roots in what Desmond calls "the Greek praise of poverty." Desmond demonstrates that classical views of wealth were complex and allowed for the admiration of poverty and the virtues it could inspire. He explains Cynicism's rise in popularity in the ancient world by exploring the set of attitudes that collectively formed the Greek praise of poverty. Desmond argues that in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., economic, political, military, and philosophical thought contained explicit criticisms of wealth and praise of poverty. From an economic and political point of view, the poor majority at Athens and elsewhere were natural democrats who distrusted great concentrations of wealth as potentially oligarchical or tyrannical. In contemporary literature, the poor are those who do most of the necessary work and are honest, self-sufficient, and temperate. The rich, on the other hand, are idle, arrogant, and unjust. These perspectives were reinforced by the Greek experience of war and the belief that poverty fostered the virtues of courage, strength, and endurance. Finally, from an early date, Greek philosophers associated wisdom with the transcendence of sense experience and of conventional values such as wealth and honor. The Cynics, Desmond asserts, assimilated all of these ideas in creating their distinctive and radical brand of asceticism. Desmond's work is a compelling reevaluation of ancient Cynicism and its classical environment, one that makes an important contribution to scholarship of the classical and early Hellenistic periods.

Plato’s Timaeus is unique in Greek Antiquity for presenting the creation of the world as the work of a divine demiurge. The maker bestows order on sensible things and imitates the world of the intellect by using the Forms as models. While the creation-myth of the Timaeus seems unparalleled, this book argues that it is not the first of Plato’s dialogues to use artistic language to articulate the relationship of the objects of the material world to the world of the intellect. The book adopts an interpretative angle that is sensitive to the visual and art-historical developments of Classical Athens to argue that sculpture, revolutionized by the advent of the lost-wax technique for the production of bronze statues, lies at the heart of Plato’s conception of the relation of the human soul and body to the Forms. It shows that, despite the severe criticism of mimēsis in the Republic, Plato’s use of artistic language rests on a positive model of mimēsis. Plato was in fact engaged in a constructive dialogue with material culture and he found in the technical processes and the cultural semantics of sculpture and of the art of weaving a valuable way to conceptualise and communicate complex ideas about humans’ relation to the Forms.

Elijah Del Medigo (1458-1493) was a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher living in Padua, whose work influenced many of the leading philosophers of the early Renaissance. His Two Investigations on the Nature of the Human Soul uses Aristotle's De anima to theorize on two of the most discussed and most controversial philosophical debates of the Renaissance: the nature of human intellect and the obtaining of immortality through intellectual perfection. In this book, Michael Engel places Del Medigo's philosophical work and his ideas about the human intellect within the context of the wider Aristotelian tradition. Providing a detailed account of the unique blend of Hebrew, Islamic, Latin and Greek traditions that influenced the Two Investigations, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism provides an important contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Aristotelianisms and scholasticisms. In particular, through his defense of the Muslim philosopher Averroes' hotly debated interpretation of the De anima and his rejection of the moderate Latin Aristotelianism championed by the Christian Thomas Aquinas, Engel traces how Del Medigo's work on the human intellect contributed to the development of a major Aristotelian controversy. Investigating the ways in which multicultural Aristotelian sources contributed to his own theory of a united human intellect, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism demonstrates the significant impact made by this Jewish philosopher on the history of the Aristotelian tradition.

It is widely agreed that Plato laid the foundations for the whole history of western thought and, well over 2000 years later, his work is still studied by every student of philosophy. Yet his thought and writings continue to evoke perplexity in readers; and perplexity (aporia) is itself a characteristic of many of his writings, a recurrent motif of his thought, and apparently an important stage one must pass through along the path to wisdom that Plato presents. Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough account of Plato's philosophy, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex thought of this key philosopher. The book offers a detailed review of all the major dialogues and explores the particular perplexities of the dialogue form. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Plato's thought, the book also provides a cogent and reliable survey of the whole history of Platonic interpretation and his far-reaching influence. This is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of philosophers.

This book contends that both Anglo-American analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy have lost their vitality, and it offers an alternative in their place, Donald Phillip Verene advocates a renewal of contemporary philosophy through a return to its origins in Socratic humanism and to the notions of civil wisdom, eloquence, and prudence as guides to human action. Verene critiques reflection -- the dominant form of philosophical thought that developed from Descartes and Locke -- and shows that reflection is not only a philosophical doctrine but is also connected to the life-form of technological society. He analyzes the nature of technological society and argues that, based on the expansion of human desire, such a society has eliminated the values embodied in the tradition of human folly as understood by Brant, Erasmus, and others.

Focusing in particular on the traditions of some of the late Greeks and the Romans, Renaissance humanism, and the thought of Giambattista Vico, this book's concern is to revive the ancient Delphic injunction, "Know thyself", an idea of civil wisdom Verene finds has been missing since Descartes. The author recovers the meaning of the vital relations that poetry, myth, and rhetoric had with philosophy in thinkers like Cicero, Quintilian, Isocrates, Pico, Vives, and Vico. He arrives at a conception of philosophy as a form of memory that requires both rhetoric and poetry to accomplish self-knowledge.