Aristotle's Topics is a handbook for dialectic, i.e. the exercise for philosophical debates between a questioner and a respondent. Alexander takes the Topics as a sort of handbook teaching how to defend and how attack any philosophical claim against philosophical adversaries. In book 3, Aristotle develops strategies for arguing about comparative claims, in which properties are said to belong to subjects to a greater, lesser, or equal degree. Aristotle illustrates the different argumentative patterns that can be used to establish or refute a comparative claim through one single example: whether something is more or less or equally to be chosen or to be avoided than something else. In his commentary on Topics 3, here translated for the first time into English, Alexander of Aphrodisias spells out Aristotle's text by referring to issues and examples from debates with other philosophical school (especially: the Stoics) of his time. The commentary provides new evidence for Alexander's views on the logic of comparison and is a relatively neglected source for Peripatetic ethics in late antiquity. This volume will be valuable reading for students of Aristotle and of the developments of Peripatetic logic and ethics in late antiquity.

Do animals have legal rights? This pioneering book tells readers everything they need to know about animal rights law. Using straightforward examples from over 30 legal systems from both the civil and common law traditions, and based on popular courses run by the authors at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights, the book takes the reader from the earliest anti-cruelty laws to modern animal welfare laws, to recent attempts to grant basic rights and personhood to animals. To help readers understand this legal evolution, it explains the ethics, legal theory, and social issues behind animal rights and connected topics such as property, subjecthood, dignity, and human rights. The book's companion website (bloomsbury.pub/animal-rights-law) provides access to briefs on the latest developments in this fast-changing area, and gives readers the tools to investigate their own legal systems with a list of key references to the latest cases, legislation, and jurisdiction-specific bibliographic references. Rich in exercises and study aids, this easy-to-use introduction is a prime resource for students from all disciplines and for anyone else who wants to understand how animals are protected by the law.

Reading Augustine is a new line of books offering personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars. The aim of the series is to make clear Augustine's importance to contemporary thought and to present Augustine not only or primarily as a pre-eminent Christian thinker but as a philosophical, spiritual, literary and intellectual icon of the West. Why did the ancients come to adopt monotheism and Christianity? On God, The Soul, Evil and the Rise of Christianity introduces possible answers to that question by looking closely at the development of the thought of Augustine of Hippo, whose complex spiritual trajectory included Gnosticism, academic skepticism, pagan Platonism, and orthodox Christianity. What was so compelling about Christianity and how did Augustine become convinced that his soul could enter into communion with a transcendent God? The apparently sudden shift of ancient culture to monotheism and Christianity was momentous, defining the subsequent nature of Western religion and thought. John Peter Kenney shows us that Augustine offers an unusually clear vantage point to understand the essential ideas that drove that transition.