George Rudebusch addresses the question of whether Socrates was a hedonist -- that is, if he believed that the good is, at bottom, a matter of pleasure. Rudebusch claims that this issue is so basic that, unless it is resolved, no adequate assessment of the Socratic dialogues' place in the history of philosophy can be made. In attempting to determine Socrates's position, Rudebusch examines the passages in Plato's early dialogues that are most important to this controversy and draws important distinctions between two kinds of pleasure and between hedonism and Protagoreanism. His conclusion, that Socrates was a "modal hedonist," rather than a "sensate pleasure" hedonist, is supported by some very original readings of the early dialogues.

Alan Bailey offers a clear and vigorous exposition and defence of the philosophy of Sextus Empiricus, one of the most influential of ancient thinkers, the father of philosophical scepticism. The subsequent sceptical tradition in philosophy has not done justice to Sextus: his views stand up today as remarkably insightful, offering a fruitful way to approach issues of knowledge, understanding, belief, and rationality. Bailey's refreshing presentation of Sextus to a modern philosophical readership rescues scepticism from the sceptics.

In Science before Socrates, Daniel Graham argues against the prevalent belief that the Presocratic philosophers did not produce any empirical science and that the first major Greek science, astronomy, did not develop until at least the time of Plato. Instead, Graham proposes that the advances made by Presocratic philosophers in the study of astronomy deserve to be considered as scientific contributions. Whereas philosophers of the sixth century BC treated astronomical phenomena as ephemeral events continuous with weather processes, those of the fifth century treated heavenly bodies as independent stony masses whirled in a cosmic vortex. Two historic events help to date and account for the change: a solar eclipse in 478 BC and a meteoroid that fell to earth around 466. Both events influenced Anaxagoras, who transformed insights from Parmenides into explanations of lunar and solar eclipses, meteors, and rainbows. Virtually all philosophers came to accept Anaxagoras' theory of lunar light and eclipses. Aristotle endorsed Anaxagoras' theory of eclipses as a paradigm of scientific explanation. Anaxagoras' theories launched a geometrical approach to astronomy and were accepted as foundational principles by all mathematical astronomers from Aristarchus to Ptolemy to Copernicus and Galileo-and to the present day.

This book provides an introduction to the Stoics, ideal for undergraduate students taking courses in Ethics and Ancient Philosophy.Stoicism was a key philosophical movement in the Hellenistic period. Today, the Stoics are central to the study of Ethics and Ancient Philosophy. In "The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed", M. Andrew Holowchak sketches, from Zeno to Aurelius, a framework that captures the tenor of Stoic ethical thinking in its key terms.Drawing on the readily available works of Seneca, Epictetus and Aurelius, "The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed" makes ancient texts accessible to students unfamiliar with Stoic thought. Providing ancient and modern-day examples to illustrate Stoic principles, the author guides the reader through the main themes and ideas of Stoic thought: Stoic cosmology, epistemology, views of nature, self-knowledge, perfectionism and, in particular, ethics. Holowchak also endeavours to present Stoicism as an ethically viable way of life today through rejecting their notion of ethical perfectionism in favour of a type of ethical progressivism consistent with other key Stoic principles. Thus, "The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed" is the ideal companion to the study of Stoic thinking in 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 book examines what we can reliably know about Plato and the historical Socrates. It shows how pervasively the sources of information were biased by Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism. It gives a source-critical account of how the climate of opinion in fourth-century Athens was captured by the Pythagoreans and how Speusippos's Academy also came to be pythagorized--adding definitional idealism to Pythagorean number idealism, and elevating Plato to a divine level that makes him into a coequal of Pythagoras, thus capturing Plato for Pythagoreanism. By showing how Plato's dialogues were dedramatized, dedialogized, and read or understood as if they were works expounding pythagorizing doctrine, Tejera has created a provocative reappraisal for scholars of ancient Greek philosophy.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a volume of original articles on all aspects of ancient philosophy. The articles may be of substantial length, and include critical notices of major books. OSAP is published twice yearly, in both hardback and paperback. 'unique value as a collection of outstanding contributions in the area of ancient philosophy.' Sara Rubinelli, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a volume of original articles on all aspects of ancient philosophy. The articles may be of substantial length, and include critical notices of major books. OSAP is now published twice yearly, in both hardback and paperback. In this volume, articles range from Heraclitus to Proclus, with several on each of Aristotle and Plato.
Editor: David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, University of Cambridge.
"Standard reading among specialists in ancient philosophy."--Brad Inwood, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Ancient doxography, particularly as distilled in the work on problems of physics by A tius, is a vital source for our knowledge of early Greek philosophy up to the first century BCE. But its purpose and method, and also its wider intellectual context, are by no means easy to understand. The present volume contains 19 essays written between 1989 and 2009 in which the authors grapple with various aspects of the doxographical tradition and its main representatives. The essays examine the origins of the doxographical method in the work of Aristotle and Theophrastus and also provide valuable insights into the works of other authors such as Epicurus, Chrysippus, Lucretius, Cicero, Philo of Alexandria and Seneca. The collection can be read as a companion collection to the two earlier volumes of A tiana published by the two authors in this series (1997, 2009).

This volume contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during the academic year 2007-8. The papers discuss a wide range of topics related to Plato and Aristotle. On Plato, topics include false pleasures in the Philebus, the tripartite soul in the Republic, and rhetoric in the Phaedrus, and on Aristotle, the relation of the physical and psychological in De Anima, of virtue and happiness in the Ethics, of body and nature in the Physics, and the role of pros hen in the Metaphysics. One other paper argues for the Aristotelian origin of Stoic determinism.

Aristotle's Prior Analytics marks the beginning of formal logic. For Aristotle himself, this meant the discovery of a general theory of valid deductive argument, a project that he had described as either impossible or impracticable, probably not very long before he actually came up with syllogistic reasoning. A syllogism is the inferring of one proposition from two others of a particular form, and it is the subject of the Prior Analytics. The first book, to which this volume is devoted, offers a fairly coherent presentation of Aristotle's logic as a general theory of deductive argument.

Janet Coleman's two volume history of European political theorizing, from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance is the introduction which many have been waiting for. It treats some of the most influential writers who have been considered by educated Europeans down the centuries to have helped to construct their identity, their shared "languages of politics" about the principles and practices of good government, and the history of European philosophy. It seeks to uncover and reconstruct the emergence of the "state" and the various European political theories which justified it.

This volume continues the story by focusing on medieval and Renaissance thinkers and includes extensive discussion of the practices that underpinned medieval political theories and which continued to play crucial roles in the eventual development of early-modern political institutions and debates. Throughout the author draws on recent scholarly commentaries written by specialists in philosophy, contemporary political theory, and on medieval and Renaissance history and theology. She shows that the medieval and Renaissance theorists' arguments can be seen as logical and coherent if we can grasp the questions they thought it important to answer. Janet Coleman strikes a balance between trying to understand the philosophical cogency of medieval and Renaissance arguments on the one hand, and on the other, elucidating why historically-situated medieval and Renaissance thinkers, respectively, thought the ways they did about politics; and why we often think otherwise.

The volume will meet the needs of students of philosophy, history and politics, proving to be an indispensable secondary source which aims tosituate, explain, and provoke thought about the major works of political theory likely to be encountered by students of this period and beyond.

How were non-human animals treated in the Classical world, and how did ancient authors record their responses to animals in Greek and Roman life? The civilisations of Greece and Rome left detailed records of their experience and opinions of animals: in these societies, which practised mass sacrifice and large-scale public animal hunts, as well as being economically reliant on animal power and products, how were animals actually treated and how was it acceptable to treat them?
This sourcebook presents specially-prepared translations from Greek and Latin texts across several genres which give a wide-reaching sense of the place of the non-human animal in the moral register of Classical Greece and Rome. From theories of the origins of animal life and vegetarianism, literary uses of animal imagery and its role in formulating cultural identity, to vivid descriptions of vivisection, force-feeding, intensive farming, agricultural and military exploitation, and detailed accounts of animal-hunting and the trade in exotic animal products: the battleground of the modern animal rights debate is here given its historical foundation in a selection of nearly 200 passages of Classical authors from Homer to Porphyry.

Distinguished experts from a range of disciplines (Orientalists, philologists, philosophers, theologians, and historians) with a common interest in late antiquity probe the apparent paradox of pagan monotheism and reach a better understanding of the historical roots of Christianity.

'a wealth of detailed and resourceful argument that helps us to a deeper understanding of the major philosophical issues' Terence Irwin, Times Literary Supplement

In this book--the first volume in his groundbreaking trilogy on the emergence of western political thought--Francis Oakley explores the roots of secular political thinking by examining the political ideology and institutions of Hellenistic and late Roman antiquity and of the early European middle ages. By challenging the popular belief that the ancient Greek and Roman worlds provided the origins of our inherently secular politics, Oakley revises our understanding of the history of political theory in a fundamental and far-reaching manner that will reverberate for decades. This book lays the foundations for Oakley's next two volumes, which will develop his argument that it is in the Latin middle ages that we must seek the ideological roots of modern political secularism.

This book articulates the theoretical outlines of a feminism developed from Aristotle's metaphysics, making a new contribution to feminist theory. Readers will discover why Aristotle was not a feminist and how he might have become one, through an investigation of Aristotle and Aristotelian tradition. The author shows how Aristotle's metaphysics can be used to articulate a particularly subtle and theoretically powerful understanding of gender that may offer a highly useful tool for distinctively feminist arguments. This work builds on Martha Nussbaum's 'capabilities approach' in a more explicitly and thoroughly hylomorphist way. The author shows how Aristotle's hylomorphic model, developed to run between the extremes of Platonic dualism and Democritean atomism, can similarly be used today to articulate a view of gender that takes bodily differences seriously without reducing gender to biological determinations. Although written for theorists, this scholarly yet accessible book can be used to address more practical issues and the final chapter explores women in universities as one example. This book will appeal to both feminists with limited familiarity with Aristotle's philosophy, and scholars of Aristotle with limited familiarity with feminism.

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.

This comprehensive reference guide includes over 140 entries on every aspect of Plato's thought. Plato, mathematician, philosopher and founder of the Academy in Athens, is, together with his teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, universally considered to have laid the foundations of western philosophy. His philosophical dialogues remain among the most widely read and influential of all philosophical texts and his enduring influence on virtually every area of philosophical enterprise cannot be disputed. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Plato's life and times includes more than 140 entries, written by a team of leading experts in the field of ancient philosophy, covering every aspect of Plato's thought. The Companion presents details of Plato's life, historical, philosophical and literary context, synopses of all the dialogues attributed to Plato, a comprehensive overview of the various features, themes and topics apparent in the dialogues, and a thorough account of his enduring influence and the various interpretative approaches applied to his thought throughout the history of philosophy. This is an essential reference tool for anyone working in the field of ancient philosophy. "The Continuum Companions" series is a major series of single volume companions to key research fields in the humanities aimed at postgraduate students, scholars and libraries. Each companion offers a comprehensive reference resource giving an overview of key topics, research areas, new directions and a manageable guide to beginning or developing research in the field. A distinctive feature of the series is that each companion provides practical guidance on advanced study and research in the field, including research methods and subject-specific resources.

In the first part about the specific Stoic doctrine on moral progress (prokop) attention is first given to the subtle view developed by the early Stoics, who categorically denied the existence of any mean between vice and virtue, and yet succeeded in giving moral progress a logical and meaningful place within their ethical thinking. Subsequently, the position of later Stoics (Panaetius, Hecato, Posidonius, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) is examined. Most of them appear to adopt a basically 'orthodox' view, although each one of them lays his own accents and deals with Chrysippus' tenets from his own personal perspective. Occasionally, the 'heterodox' position of Aristo of Chios proves to have remained influential too. The second part of the study deals with the polemical reception of the Stoic doctrine of moral progress in (Middle-)Platonism. The first author who is discussed is Philo of Alexandria. Philo deals with the Stoic doctrine in a very ideosyncratical way. He never explicitly attacked the Stoic view on moral progress, although it is clear from various passages in his work that he favoured the Platonic-Peripatetic position rather than the Stoic one. Next, Plutarch's position is examined, through a detailed analysis of his treatise 'De profectibus in virtute'. Finally, attention is given to two school handbooks dating from the period of Middle-Platonism (Alcinous and Apuleius). In both of them, the Stoic doctrine is rejected without many arguments, which shows that a correct (and anti-Stoic) conception of moral progress was regarded in Platonic circles as a basic knowledge for beginning students.The whole discussion is placed into a broaderphilosophical-historical perspective by the introduction (on the philosophical tradition before the Stoa) and the epilogue (about later discussions in Neo-Platonism and early Christianity).

Consciousness: From Perception to Reflection in the History of Philosophy shows that the concept of consciousness was explicated relatively late in the tradition, but that its central features, such as reflexivity, subjectivity and aboutness, attained avid interest very early in philosophical debates. This book reveals how these features have been related to other central topics, such as selfhood, perception, attention and embodiment. At the same time, the articles display that consciousness is not just an isolated issue of philosophy of mind, but is bound to ontological, epistemological and moral discussions. Integrating historical inquiries into the systematic ones enables understanding the complexity and richness of conscious phenomena.

Timeless wisdom on generosity and gratitude from the great Stoic philosopher Seneca To give and receive well may be the most human thing you can do-but it is also the closest you can come to divinity. So argues the great Roman Stoic thinker Seneca (c. 4 BCE-65 CE) in his longest and most searching moral treatise, "On Benefits" (De Beneficiis). James Romm's splendid new translation of essential selections from this work conveys the heart of Seneca's argument that generosity and gratitude are among the most important of all virtues. For Seneca, the impulse to give to others lies at the very foundation of society; without it, we are helpless creatures, worse than wild beasts. But generosity did not arise randomly or by chance. Seneca sees it as part of our desire to emulate the gods, whose creation of the earth and heavens stands as the greatest gift of all. Seneca's soaring prose captures his wonder at that gift, and expresses a profound sense of gratitude that will inspire today's readers. Complete with an enlightening introduction and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Give is a timeless guide to the profound significance of true generosity.

The volume collects the most important papers Pierluigi Donini wrote in the last three decades with the aim of promoting a better assessment of post-hellenistic philosophy. The philosophical relevance of post-hellenistic philosophy is now widely (though not yet universally) recognized. Yet much remains to be done. The common practice of focusing each single school in itself detracts from a balanced assessment of the strategies exploited by many philosophers of the period. On the assumption that debates among schools play a major role in the philosophy of the commentators, Donini concentrates on the interaction between leading Aristotelians and Platonists and demonstrates that the developments of both systems of thought were heavily influenced by a continuous confrontation between the two schools. And whereas in cases such as Alcinous and Aspasius this is basically uncontroversial, for other authors such us Alexander, Antiochus and Plutarch the pioneering work of Donini paves the way for a better understanding of their doctrines and definitely confirms the intellectual importance of the first imperial age, when the foundations were laid of versions of both Aristotelianism and Platonism which were bound to influence the whole history of European thought, from Late Antiquity onwards.