What does it mean to say that a human being is body and soul, and how does each affect the other? Late antique philosophers, Christians included, asked these central questions. The papers collected here explore their answers, and use those answers to ask further questions, reading Iamblichus, Porphyry, Augustine and others in their social and intellectual context. Among the topics dealt with are the following. Humans are mortal rational beings, so how does the mortal body affect the rational soul? The body needs food: what foods are best for the soul, and is it right to eat animal foods if animals are less rational than humans? The body is gendered for reproduction: are reason and the soul also gendered? Ascetic lifestyles may free our bodies from the limitations of gender and desire, so that our souls are free to reconnect with the divine; but this need must be balanced with the claims of family and society. Philosophers asked whether life in the body is exile for the soul; Christians defended their claim that body as well as soul would live after death, and even the smallest fragment of a martyr's body is proof of resurrection.

Ancient philosophers

This wide-ranging collection of essays by European and American scholars presents some of the most interesting and important work now being done on the political philosophy of Aristotle. Part One investigates what is arguably the most urgent and controversial question of concern to students of Aristotle today, namely, the possibility of grounding moral and political action in some version of Aristotelian rationalism. Part Two considers a series of specific questions arising from the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, among which are Aristotle's understanding of moral virtue; the problem of evil; justice, and the very idea of "common good," friendship; the status of the philosophic life vis-a-vis the political; and the outlines of the best possible political community.

The Epicureans were notorious in antiquity for denigrating most forms of civic participation and for rejecting those cultural activities (such as poetry, music, and rhetoric) which are broadly labelled "paideia." In this, as in all else, they ostensibly took their cue from Epicurus and the other founders of the School. In contrast to this, the Epicurean Philodemus, who lived and wrote in Italy in the first century B.C., presents an interesting case. For a substantial portion of his surviving work is preoccupied with investigations into this "paideia" and with demonstrating how an orthodox Epicurean is to approach them. This book selects one of those investigations, the first two books of Philodemus' "On Rhetoric," An annotated translation is provided of the most recent edition of this text (Longo Auricchio 1977) which is followed by a series of essays which aim to clarify Philodemus' conception of, and approach to, the problem of rhetoric for Epicureans, and in particular the way he manages citations from the works of the founders to support his arguments against other Epicureans who take a different view. The book constitutes a very helpful guide to this fragmentary and difficult text.

This new translation presents two works, one by Epictetus and the other by Cebes, two ancient Greek philosophers of the Imperial period, in new translations of clear, straightforward English. In this book, readers will learn how to sustain emotional harmony and a 'good flow of life' whatever fortune may hold in store for them. This modern English translation of the complete Handbook is supported by and includes: * the first thorough commentary since that of Simplicius, 1500 years ago * a detailed introduction * extensive glossary * index of key terms * chapter-by-chapter discussion of themes * helpful tables that clarify Stoic ethical doctrines as a glance. Accompanying the Handbook is the Tablet of Cebes, a curious and engaging text. In complete contrast, yet complementing the Handbook's more conventional philosophical presentation, the Tablet shows progress to philosophical wisdom as a journey through a landscape inhabited by personifications of happiness, fortune, the virtues and vices.

A vivid and accessible new translation of Cicero's influential writings on the Stoic idea of the divine Most ancient Romans were deeply religious and their world was overflowing with gods-from Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars to countless local divinities, household gods, and ancestral spirits. One of the most influential Roman perspectives on religion came from a nonreligious belief system that is finding new adherents even today: Stoicism. How did the Stoics think about religion? In How to Think about God, Philip Freeman presents vivid new translations of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods and The Dream of Scipio. In these brief works, Cicero offers a Stoic view of belief, divinity, and human immortality, giving eloquent expression to the religious ideas of one of the most popular schools of Roman and Greek philosophy. On the Nature of the Gods and The Dream of Scipio are Cicero's best-known and most important writings on religion, and they have profoundly shaped Christian and non-Christian thought for more than two thousand years, influencing such luminaries as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Thomas Jefferson. These works reveal many of the religious aspects of Stoicism, including an understanding of the universe as a materialistic yet continuous and living whole in which both the gods and a supreme God are essential elements. Featuring an introduction, suggestions for further reading, and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Think about God is a compelling guide to the Stoic view of the divine.

This new translation presents two works, one by Epictetus and the other by Cebes, two ancient Greek philosophers of the Imperial period, in new translations of clear, straightforward English. In this book, readers will learn how to sustain emotional harmony and a 'good flow of life' whatever fortune may hold in store for them. This modern English translation of the complete Handbook is supported by and includes: * the first thorough commentary since that of Simplicius, 1500 years ago * a detailed introduction * extensive glossary * index of key terms * chapter-by-chapter discussion of themes * helpful tables that clarify Stoic ethical doctrines as a glance. Accompanying the Handbook is the Tablet of Cebes, a curious and engaging text. In complete contrast, yet complementing the Handbook's more conventional philosophical presentation, the Tablet shows progress to philosophical wisdom as a journey through a landscape inhabited by personifications of happiness, fortune, the virtues and vices.

With selections of philosophers from Thales to Sextus Empiricus, this new anthology provides significant learning support and historical context for the readings along with a wide variety of pedagogical assists. Biographical headnotes, reading introductions, study questions, and special "Prologues" and "Philosophical Overviews" help students understand and appreciate the philosophical concepts under discussion. "Philosophical Bridges" discuss how the work of earlier thinkers would influence philosophers to come, and place major movements in a contemporary context showing students how the schools of philosophy interrelate and how various philosophies apply to the world today. In addition to this volume of Ancient Philosophy, a comprehensive survey of the whole of Western philosophical history and other individual volumes for each of the major historical eras are also available for specialized courses.

"Physics Book 4" is one of Aristotle's most interesting works, discussing place, time and vacuum. Themistius was a fourth-century AD orator and essayist, not only a philosopher, and he thought that only paraphrases of Aristotle were needed, because there were already such comprehensive commentaries. Nonetheless, his paraphrastic commentaries are full of innovative comment. According to Aristotle, there is no such thing as 3-dimensional space. A thing's exactly-fitting place is a surface, the inner surface of its immediate surroundings. One problem that this created was that the outermost stars, on Aristotle's view, have no surroundings, and so no place. Themistius suggests that we might think instead of the neighbouring bodies which they surround as providing their place. Aristotle time as something countable, and concluded that it depends for its existence on that of conscious beings to do the counting. Themistius is in the minority among commentators in disagreeing. Themistius concurs with Aristotle in denying the existence of vacuum. We cannot think that a space formerly empty of body penetrates right through a body inserted into it. If one extension could penetrate another, says Themistius, a body could penetrate a body, because bodies occupy places solely in virtue of being extended.

The Metaphysics of Good and Evil is the first, full-length contemporary defence, from the perspective of analytic philosophy, of the Scholastic theory of good and evil - the theory of Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and most medieval and Thomistic philosophers. Goodness is analysed as obedience to nature. Evil is analysed as the privation of goodness. Goodness, surprisingly, is found in the non-living world, but in the living world it takes on a special character. The book analyses various kinds of goodness, showing how they fit into the Scholastic theory. The privation theory of evil is given its most comprehensive contemporary defence, including an account of truthmakers for truths of privation and an analysis of how causation by privation should be understood. In the end, all evil is deviance - a departure from the goodness prescribed by a thing's essential nature. Key Features: Offers a comprehensive defence of a venerable metaphysical theory, conducted using the concepts and methods of analytic philosophy. Revives a much neglected approach to the question of good and evil in their most general nature. Shows how Aristotelian-Thomistic theory has more than historical relevance to a fundamental philosophical issue, but can be applied in a way that is both defensible and yet accessible to the modern philosopher. Provides what, for the Scholastic philosopher, is arguably the only solid metaphysical foundation for a separate treatment of the origins of morality.

Aristotle holds that we desire things because they appear good to us--a view still dominant in philosophy now. But what is it for something to appear good? Why does pleasure in particular tend to appear good, as Aristotle holds? And how do appearances of goodness motivate desire and action? No sustained study of Aristotle has addressed these questions, or even recognized them as worth asking. Jessica Moss argues that the notion of the apparent good is crucial to understanding both Aristotle's psychological theory and his ethics, and the relation between them.
Beginning from the parallels Aristotle draws between appearances of things as good and ordinary perceptual appearances such as those involved in optical illusion, Moss argues that on Aristotle's view things appear good to us, just as things appear round or small, in virtue of a psychological capacity responsible for quasi-perceptual phenomena like dreams and visualization: phantasia ("imagination"). Once we realize that the appearances of goodness which play so major a role in Aristotle's ethics are literal quasi-perceptual appearances, Moss suggests we can use his detailed accounts of phantasia and its relation to perception and thought to gain new insight into some of the most debated areas of Aristotle's philosophy: his accounts of emotions, akrasia, ethical habituation, character, deliberation, and desire. In Aristotle on the Apparent Good, Moss presents a new--and controversial--interpretation of Aristotle's moral psychology: one which greatly restricts the role of reason in ethical matters, and gives an absolutely central role to pleasure.

Now in paperback, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks offers a revelatory new book about the founding fathers, examining their educations and, in particular, their devotion to the ancient Greek and Roman classics—and how that influence would shape their ideals and the new American nation.

On the morning after the 2016 presidential election, Thomas Ricks awoke with a few questions on his mind: What kind of nation did we now have? Is it what was designed or intended by the nation’s founders? Trying to get as close to the source as he could, Ricks decided to go back and read the philosophy and literature that shaped the founders’ thinking, and the letters they wrote to each other debating these crucial works—among them the Iliad, Plutarch’s Lives, and the works of Xenophon, Epicurus, Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero. For though much attention has been paid the influence of English political philosophers, like John Locke, closer to their own era, the founders were far more immersed in the literature of the ancient world.

The first four American presidents came to their classical knowledge differently. Washington absorbed it mainly from the elite culture of his day; Adams from the laws and rhetoric of Rome; Jefferson immersed himself in classical philosophy, especially Epicureanism; and Madison, both a groundbreaking researcher and a deft politician, spent years studying the ancient world like a political scientist. Each of their experiences, and distinctive learning, played an essential role in the formation of the United States. In examining how and what they studied, looking at them in the unusual light of the classical world, Ricks is able to draw arresting and fresh portraits of men we thought we knew.

First Principles follows these four members of the Revolutionary generation from their youths to their adult lives, as they grappled with questions of independence, and forming and keeping a new nation. In doing so, Ricks interprets not only the effect of the ancient world on each man, and how that shaped our constitution and government, but offers startling new insights into these legendary leaders.

This title was first published in 2001. A collection of fifteen studies which explore topics in the psychology and philosophy of mind of Plotinus, Augustine, and Boethius, as well as the development of Augustine's views on history and Roman religion.

Were the most serious philosophers of the millennium 200 A.D. to 1200 A.D. just confused mystics? This book shows otherwise. John Martin rehabilitates Neoplatonism, founded by Plotinus and brought into Christianity by St. Augustine. The Neoplatonists devise ranking predicates like good, excellent, perfect to divide the Chain of Being, and use the predicate intensifier hyper so that it becomes a valid logical argument to reason from God is not (merely) good to God is hyper-good. In this way the relational facts underlying reality find expression in Aristotle's subject-predicate statements, and the Platonic tradition proves able to subsume Aristotle's logic while at the same time rejecting his metaphysics. In the Middle Ages when Aristotle's larger philosophy was recovered and joined again to the Neoplatonic tradition which was never lost, Neoplatonic logic lived along side Aristotle's metaphysics in a sometime confusing and unsettled way. Showing Neoplatonism to be significantly richer in its logical and philosophical ideas than it is usually given credit for, this book will be of interest not just to historians of logic, but to philosophers, logicians, linguists, and theologians.

Proclus' "On the Existence of Evils" is not a commentary, but helps to compensate for the dearth of Neoplatonist ethical commentaries. The central question addressed in the work is: how can there be evil in a providential world? Neoplatonists agree that it cannot be caused by higher and worthier beings. Plotinus had said that evil is matter, which, unlike Aristotle, he collapsed into mere privation or lack, thus reducing its reality. He also protected higher causes from responsibility by saying that evil may result from a combination of goods. Proclus objects: evil is real, and not a privation. Rather, it is a parasite feeding off good. Parasites have no proper cause, and higher beings are thus vindicated as being the causes only of the good off which evil feeds.

One of the most significant cultural achievements of Late Antiquity lies in the domains of philosophy and religion, more particularly in the establishment and development of Neoplatonism as one of the chief vehicles of thought and subsequent channel for the transmission of ancient philosophy to the medieval and renaissance worlds. Important, too, is the emergence of a distinctive Christian philosophy and theology based on a foundation of Greek pagan thought. This book provides an introduction to the main ideas of Neoplatonism and some of the ways in which they influenced Christian thinkers.

Socrates is one of the most influential philosophers in western civilisation, and Plato his most famous pupil. The Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito and the death scene from the Phaedo are Plato's account of Socrates' trial and execution, and together they provide the most important depiction of Socrates' ideas.
In this GuideBook, Brickhouse and Smith provide clear explanations of these texts for students coming to them for the first time. Situating the works in their historical context, the authors carefully go through each text, exploring the philosophical issues raised in an accessible way.
Plato and the Trial of Socrates is the ideal introduction to both the ideas of Socrates and the work of Plato.

This title was first published in 2000. This work identifies the differences between the Russian intellectual approach to reading Plato and that of other European countries. This study offers a complex perspective on Russian philosophical learnings up to 1930. The book contains five chapters with the first aiming to provide the general institutional context in which Russian 19th century Plato scholarship developed, caught as it were, between the rise of the historical sciences and the heavy hand of state interference in standardizing the educational system in the name of nation building and modernization. The second chapter attempts to illustrate how Plato served as a reference in Russian philosophical culture and the third deals with aspects of Russian philosophy of law. In the fourth chapter, the author shifts his approach to compare and contrast a number of reactions to a single dialogue, the "Republic" and in the final concluding chapter, addresses the question of whether it is legitimate to speak of a Russian Platonism.

Michail Peramatzis presents a new interpretation of Aristotle's view of the priority relations between fundamental and derivative parts of reality, following the recent revival of interest in Aristotelian discussions of what priority consists in and how it relates existents. He explores how in Aristotle's view, in contradistinction with (e.g.) Quinean metaphysical views, questions of existence are not considered central. Rather, the crucial questions are: what types of existent are fundamental and what their grounding relation to derivative existents consists in. It is extremely important, therefore, to return to Aristotle's own theses regarding priority and to study them not only with exegetical caution but also with an acutely critical philosophical eye. Aristotle deploys the notion of priority in numerous levels of his thought. In his ontology he operates with the notion of primary substance. His Categories, for instance, confer this honorific title upon particular objects such as Socrates or Bucephalus, while in the Metaphysics it is essences or substantial forms, such as being human, which are privileged with priority over certain types of matter or hylomorphic compounds (either particular compound objects such as Socrates or universal compound types such as the species human). Peramatzis' chief aim is to understand priority claims of this sort in Aristotle's metaphysical system by setting out the different concepts of priority and seeing whether and, if so, how Aristotle's preferred prior and posterior items fit with these concepts.

Title first published in 2003. In commemoration of the philosophical interests of Stanley Victor Keeling, the annual lectures in his memory highlight the interest and importance of ancient philosophy for contemporary study of the subject. This volume brings together the Keeling lectures from leading international figures in ancient and modern philosophy, presented between 1992 and 2002. Including contributions from Bernard Williams and Martha Nussbaum, lectures range across topics such as 'Intrinsic Goodness', Necessity, Fate and Determinism and Quality of Life, extending from Plato through Aristotle to the Stoics. Edited and with a preface by R. W. Sharples.

This work offers the first complete reinterpretation of Empedocles - one of the founding figures of Western philosophy - since the publication of the Strasbourg papyrus in 1999 brought new fragments of his lost work to light. Simon Trépanier reconstructs a single original philosophical poem, against previous interpretations which allocate our extant fragments on two works: a religious poem, The Purifications, and a scientific poem, On Nature.
The resulting single work is best understood as a philosophical masterpiece whose function was to persuade the hearer of a radically new conception of the universe, one that combined a belief in reincarnation and afterlife judgment with a rigorous and uncompromising physics, both conceived in response to puzzles about thought and Being. While remaining sensitive to philological detail and the full range of available evidence, this study presents a revolutionary approach to a challenging author. The unity of his thought, now discernible for the first time, allows Empedocles a more coherent

This book, first published in 1978, is a radical approach to the philosophical distinction between Being and beings, in which the life of Socrates is used as the metaphor for the theoretical life, in contrast to the continuous historical interest in that life as an object for biographical reconstruction and description. Professor Blum's main concern is to develop a story that coordinates stages of the theoretical life to practices which exemplify man's ideal relationship with language.

"The Platonic Theology" is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his "Platonic Theology," translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.This is the fourth of a projected six volumes.