Parmenides of Elea is widely regarded as the most important of the Presocratic philosophers and one of the most influential thinkers of all time. He is famous, or notorious, for asserting that change, movement, generation and perishing are illusions arising from our senses, that past and future do not exist, and that the universe is a single, homogeneous, static sphere. This picture of the world is not only contrary to the experience of every conscious moment of our lives, it is also unthinkable, since thoughts themselves are events that come into being and pass away. In this important new book, Raymond Tallis critically examines Parmenides conclusions and argues that, although his views have had a huge influence, they are in fact the result of a failure to allow for possibility, for what-might-be, which neither is nor is not. Without possibility, there is neither truth nor falsehood. Tallis explores the limits of Parmenides ideas, his influence on Plato and, through him, Aristotle and finally, why Parmenides is still relevant today.

"Continuum's Reader's Guides" are clear, concise and accessible introductions to classic works of philosophy. Each book explores the major themes, historical and philosophical context and key passages of a major philosophical text, guiding the reader toward a thorough understanding of often demanding material. Ideal for undergraduate students, the guides provide an essential resource for anyone who needs to get to grips with a philosophical text. Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" is one of the most significant works of moral philosophy ever written. It is certainly among the most widely read and studied, a staple of undergraduate courses that continues to inspire ethical thought to this day. As such, it is a hugely important and exciting, yet challenging, piece of philosophical writing. In "Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics': A Reader's Guide", Christopher Warne offers a clear and thorough account of this key philosophical work. The book sets Aristotle's work in context, introduces the major themes and provides a detailed discussion of the key sections and passages of the text. Warne goes on to explore some of the areas of thought that the "Nicomachean Ethics" has impacted upon and provides useful information on further reading. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential and challenging of texts.

Addressing classicists, philosophers, students, and general readers alike, this volume emphasizes the unity of Seneca's work and his originality as a translator of Stoic ideas in the literary forms of imperial Rome. It features a vitalizing diversity of contributors from different generations, disciplines, and research cultures. Several prominent Seneca scholars publishing in other languages are for the first time made accessible to anglophone readers.

Plato on Knowledge and Forms brings together a set of connected essays by Gail Fine, in her main area of research since the late 1970s: Plato's metaphysics and epistemology. She discusses central issues in Plato's metaphysics and epistemology, issues concerning the nature and extent of knowledge, and its relation to perception, sensibles, and forms; and issues concerning the nature of forms, such as whether they are universals or particulars, separate or immanent, and whether they are causes. A specially written introduction draws together the themes of the volume, which will reward the attention of anyone interested in Plato or in ancient metaphysics and epistemology.

While the dramatic approach to Plato's dialogues has become popular over the last decade, little attention has been paid to the poetic quality of Plato's writing, and the received view of Platonic philosophy still depends on an unpoetic and largely literalist reading of the dialogues. The authors of this volume focus on the text of selected dialogues to identify the thread that unifies each of them from a literary point of view. The conclusions they reach in practicing this kind of reading are diametrically opposed to the largest stream of Platonic scholarship and show the fallacy of important metaphysical, epistemological, political, and ethical positions frequently attributed to Plato.

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.

Aristotle is considered by many to be the founder of "faculty psychology"--the attempt to explain a variety of psychological phenomena by reference to a few inborn capacities. In The Powers of Aristotle's Soul, Thomas Kjeller Johansen investigates his main work on psychology, the De Anima, from this perspective. He shows how Aristotle conceives of the soul's capacities and how he uses them to account for the souls of living beings. Johansen offers an original account of how Aristotle defines the capacities in relation to their activities and proper objects, and considers the relationship of the body to the definition of the soul's capacities. Against the background of Aristotle's theory of science, Johansen argues that the capacities of the soul serve as causal principles in the explanation of the various life forms. He develops detailed readings of Aristotle's treatment of nutrition, perception, and intellect, which show the soul's various roles as formal, final and efficient causes, and argues that the so-called 'agent' intellect falls outside the scope of Aristotle's natural scientific approach to the soul. Other psychological activities, various kinds of perception (including "perceiving that we perceive"), memory, imagination, are accounted for in their explanatory dependency on the basic capacities. The ability to move spatially is similarly explained as derivative from the perceptual or intellectual capacities. Johansen claims that these capacities together with the nutritive may be understood as "parts" of the soul, as they are basic to the definition and explanation of the various kinds of soul. Finally, he considers how the account of the capacities in the De Anima is adopted and adapted in Aristotle's biological and minor psychological works.

Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In four groups of essays, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations? And, can a scientific world view make room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic? Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy.

From Plato's Timaeus onwards, the world or cosmos has been conceived of as a living, rational organism. Most notably in German Idealism, philosophers still talked of a 'Weltseele' (Schelling) or 'Weltgeist' (Hegel). This volume is the first collection of essays on the origin of the notion of the world soul (anima mundi) in Antiquity and beyond. It contains 14 original contributions by specialists in the field of ancient philosophy, the Platonic tradition and the history of theology. The topics range from the 'obscure' Presocratic Heraclitus, to Plato and his ancient readers in Middle and Neoplatonism (including the Stoics), to the reception of the idea of a world soul in the history of natural science. A general introduction highlights the fundamental steps in the development of the Platonic notion throughout late Antiquity and early Christian philosophy. Accessible to Classicists, historians of philosophy, theologians and invaluable to specialists in ancient philosophy, the book provides an overview of the fascinating discussions surrounding a conception that had a long-lasting effect on the history of Western thought.

This special supplementary volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy contains the proceedings of the Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy held at Oberlin, Ohio in 1986. The exceptionally high quality of the papers, and the format of speaker, reply, and speaker's reply, has resulted in a volume which furthers some issues which are currently the object of keen controversy in ancient philosophy. Contributors include Michael Frede, Terence Irwin, and Martha Nussbaum.

In his utopian novel Hiera Anagraphe (Sacred History) Euhemerus of Messene (ca. 300 B.C.) describes his travel to the island Panchaia in the Indian Ocean where he discovered an inscribed stele in the temple of Zeus Triphylius. It turned out that the Olympian gods (Uranos, Kronos, Zeus) were deified kings. The travels of Zeus allowed to describe peoples and places all over the world. Winiarczyk investigates the sources of the theological views of Euhemerus. He proves that Euhemerus' religious views were rooted in old Greek tradition (the worship of heroes, gods as founders of their own cult, tombs of gods, euergetism, rationalistic interpretation of myths, the explanations of the origin of religion by the sophists, the ruler cult). The description of the Panchaian society is intended to suggest an archaic and closed culture, in which the stele recording res gestae of the deified kings might have been preserved. The translation of Ennius' Euhemerus sive Sacra historia (ca. 200 - ca. 194) is a free prose rendering, which Lactantius knew only indirectly. The book is concluded by a short history of Euhemerism in the pagan, Christian and Jewish literature.

Does the soul have parts? What kind of parts? And how do all the parts make together a whole? Many ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers discussed these questions, thus providing a mereological analysis of the soul. Their starting point was a simple observation: we tend to describe the soul of human beings by referring to different types of activities (perceiving, imagining, thinking, etc.). Each type of activity seems to be produced by a special part of the soul. But how can a simple, undivided soul have parts? Classical thinkers gave radically different answers to this question. While some claimed that there are indeed parts, thus assigning an internal complexity to the soul, others emphasized that there can only be a plurality of functions that should not be conflated with a plurality of parts. The eleven chapters reconstruct and critically examine these answers. They make clear that the metaphysical structure of the soul was a crucial issue for ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers.

This book proposes to rethink the relationship between philosophy and literature through an engagement with Plato's dialogues. The dialogues have been seen as the source of a long tradition that subordinates poetry to philosophy, but they may also be approached as a medium for understanding how to overcome this opposition. Paradoxically, Plato then becomes an ally in the attempt "to overturn Platonism," which Gilles Deleuze famously defined as the task of modern philosophy. Max Statkiewicz identifies a "rhapsodic mode" initiated by Plato in the dialogues and pursued by many of his modern European commentators, including Nietzsche, Heidegger, Irigaray, Derrida, and Nancy. The book articulates this rhapsodic mode as a way of entering into true dialogue (dia-logos), which splits any univocal meaning and opens up a serious play of signification both within and between texts. This mode, he asserts, employs a reading of Plato that is distinguished from interpretations emphasizing the dialogues as a form of dogmatic treatise, as well as from the dramatic interpretations that have been explored in recent Plato scholarship--both of which take for granted the modern notion of the subject. Statkiewicz emphasizes the importance of the dialogic nature of the rhapsodic mode in the play of philosophy and poetry, of Platonic and modern thought--and, indeed, of seriousness and play. This highly original study of Plato explores the inherent possibilities of Platonic thought to rebound upon itself and engender further dialogues.

"The Ideas of Socrates" offers a unique interpretation of the ideas (forms, eide) in Plato's writings. In this concise and accessible study, Matthew S. Linck makes four major claims. Firstly, the ideas as Socrates discusses them in the "Phaedo", "Parmenides", and "Symposium" are shown to be integral to the person of Socrates as presented in Plato's dialogues. Secondly, Linck argues that if we take Plato's dialogues as an integrated set of writings, then we must acknowledge that the mature Socrates is perfectly aware of the difficulties entailed in the positing of ideas. Thirdly, the book shows that Socrates' recourse to the ideas is not simply an epistemological issue but one of self-transformation. And finally Linck examines how Socrates relates to the ideas in two ways, one practical, the other speculative. As the only group of Plato's narrated dialogues that are not narrated by Socrates, the "Phaedo", "Parmenides", and "Symposium" constitute a unique collection. These three dialogues also contain accounts of Socrates as a young man, and all of these accounts explicitly discuss the ideas. "The Ideas of Socrates" serves as a commentary on the relevant passages of these dialogues and goes on to build up an explicit series of arguments about the ideas that will transform the way in which we approach these key texts. This important new book will be of interest to anyone involved in the study of Ancient Philosophy.

This is the first collection of original essays entirely devoted to a detailed study of the Pyrrhonian tradition. The twelve contributions collected in the present volume combine to offer a historical and systematic analysis of the form of skepticism known as "Pyrrhonism". They discuss whether the Pyrrhonist is an ethically engaged agent, whether he can claim to search for truth, and other thorny questions concerning ancient Pyrrhonism; explore its influence on certain modern thinkers such as Pierre Bayle and David Hume; and examine Pyrrhonian skepticism in relation to contemporary analytic philosophy.

The question of what it means for Christ to be the "image of God," or imago dei, lies at the heart of the Christological debates of the fourth century. Is an image a derivation from its source? Are they two separate substances? Does an image serve to reveal its source? Is an image ontologically inferior to its source? In this book, Gerald P. Boersma examines three Western pro-Nicene theologies of the imago dei, which tackle the question of whether human beings and Christ can both be considered to be the "image of God." Boersma goes on to examine Augustine's early theology of the imago dei, prior to his ordination (386-391). According to Boersma, Augustine's early thought posits that Christ is an image of equal likeness to God, while a human being is an image of unequal likeness. He argues that although Augustine's early theology of image builds on that of Hilary of Poitiers, Marius Victorinus, and Ambrose of Milan, Augustine was able to affirm, in ways that his predecessors were not, how both Christ and the human person can be considered the imago dei.

A distinguished group of Aristotelian scholars and contemporary metaphysicians discusses Aristotle's theory of the unity and identity of substances. The questions of ontology, explanation, and methodology with which they deal remain central to metaphysics today. This book sets a new agenda for Aristotelian metaphysics.

This is the first commentary on Lucretius' theory of atomic motion, one of the most difficult and technical parts of De rerum natura. The late Don Fowler sets new standards for Lucretian studies in his awesome command both of the ancient literary, philological, and philosophical background to this Latin Epicurean poem, and of the relevant modern scholarship.

Oxford Scholarly Classics is a new series that makes available again great academic works from the archives of Oxford University Press. Reissued in uniform series design, the reissues will enable libraries, scholars, and students to gain fresh access to some of the finest scholarship of the last century.

Socrates' greatest philosophical contribution was to have initiated the search for definitions. In Definition in Greek Philosophy his views on definition are examined, together with those of his successors, including Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Galen, the Sceptics and Plotinus. Although definition was a major pre-occupation for many Greek philosophers, it has rarely been treated as a separate topic in its own right in recent years. This volume, which contains fourteen new essays by leading scholars, aims to reawaken interest in a number of central and relatively unexplored issues concerning definition. These issues are briefly set out in the Introduction, which also seeks to point out scholarly and philosophical questions which merit further study.

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. In this book, Ota Gal presents a new analysis of Plotinus' conception of beauty, beginning from a close reading of treatises I.6 and V.8, which link beauty with the unified multiplicity of Intellect. This account is subsequently placed in a hierarchical and structural context in VI.2 and VI.6 and connected to illumination in VI.7, enabling us to determine the meaning of the predicate "beauty" at different ontological levels. For Plotinus, beauty is ultimately the illuminated unity in multiplicity of Intellect, which, as the manifestation of the Good, simultaneously enables the soul's ascent and threatens to bind the soul to itself.

Historians often look to ancient Greece as the wellspring of Western civilization. Perhaps the most ingenious achievement of the Hellenic mind was the early development of the sciences. The names we give to science's many branches today--from physics and chemistry to mathematics, biology, and psychology--echo the Greek words that were first used to define these disciplines in ancient times and remain a testament to the groundbreaking discoveries of these pioneering thinkers. What was it about the Greeks, as opposed to the far older civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China, that gave rise to the uniquely Western, scientific mindset? This author explores this intriguing question in this authoritative yet accessible and eloquently told story about the origins of science. Going beyond individual Greek discoveries in the various branches of science, Bertman emphasizes why these early investigators were able to achieve what they did. Among the exceptional characteristics of Greek culture that created the seedbed for early science were:
- the Greek emphasis on rationalism--a conviction that human reason could successfully unravel the mysteries of nature and make sense of the cosmos
- an early form of humanism--a pride and confidence in human potential despite the frailty and brief tenure of individual lives
- the drive to excel in every arena from the battlefield to the Olympic games and arts competitions
- an insatiable curiosity that sought understanding of both human nature and the world
- a fierce love of freedom and individualism that promoted freedom of thought--the prelude to science.
Focusing on ten different branches of science, the author shows why the Greeks gravitated to each specialty and explains the fascinating theories they developed, the brilliant experiments they performed, and the practical applications of their discoveries. He concludes by recounting how these early insights and achievements--transmitted over the course of two thousand years--have shaped the scientific attitude that is the hallmark of today's world. This lively narrative captures the Greek genius and demonstrates the indelible influence of their discoveries on modern science and technology.

With the growth of interest in later Greek philosophy, the importance of Plotinus (AD 205-270) as a seminal influence on later thinkers, both pagan and Christian, is being increasingly recognized. The Enneads have been readily available for some time, both in Greek and in English translation, and there is no shortage of scholarly writing on the Enneads in general, and on particular aspects of Plotinus' thought. However, apart from Michael Atkinson's translation and commentary on Ennead V.1 (Clarendon Press, 1985), there has been no major commentary in English on any single treatise. Plotinus' Greek is notoriously obscure, and mere translation often sheds little light. Barrie Fleet's translation and commentary on Ennead III.6 elucidates the text of a major treatise in which Plotinus uses the concept of impassivity to shed light on three questions of importance to Platonists: the nature of change in the human soul; its analogue in the Sensible World; and the nature of Matter. Dr Fleet shows how texts of Plato and Aristotle, and Hellenistic commentaries on them, were central to the seminars held in Rome under the leadership of Plotinus. This treatise is the outcome of one such seminar. All Greek quotations in the commentary are translated into English, and all Greek terms are either translated or transliterated, making this edition fully accessible to readers with or without Greek.

This book examines the revival of antique philosophy in the Renaissance as a literary preoccupation informed by wit. Humanists were more inspired by the fictionalized characters of certain wise fools, including Diogenes the Cynic, Socrates, Aesop, Democritus, and Heraclitus, than by codified systems of thought. Rich in detail, this study offers a systematic treatment of wide-ranging Renaissance imagery and metaphors and presents a detailed iconography of certain classical philosophers. Ultimately, the problems of Renaissance humanism are revealed to reflect the concerns of humanists in the twenty-first century.