Knowledge, however, is an attribute of the soul, and so are perception, opinion, desire, wish, and appetency generally; animal locomotion also is produced by the soul; and likewise growth, maturity, and decay. Shall we then say that each of these belongs to the whole soul, that we think, that is, and perceive and are moved and in each of the other operations act and are acted upon with the whole soul, or that the different operations are to be assigned to different parts? -from Book I The writings of Greek philosopher ARISTOTLE (384Bi322Be-student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the Great-are among the most influential on Western thought, and indeed upon Western civilization itself. From theology and logic to politics and even biology, there is no area of human knowledge that has not been touched by his thinking. In De Anima-which means, literally, On the Soul-the philosopher ponders the very nature of life itself. What is the essence of the lifeforce? Can we consider that plants and animals have souls? How does human intellect divide us from other animals? Is the human mind immortal? All these questions, and others that seem unanswerable, are explored in depth in this, one of the most important works ever written on such eternal questions. Students and armchair philosophers will find it a challenging-and rewarding-read.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is an annual publication which includes original articles, which may be of substantial length, on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books. Contributors to this volume; Jonathan Barnes, Roger Crisp, T.H. Irwin, Christopher Janaway, Richard J. Ketchum, Voula Tsouna McKirahan, Martha Nussbaum, Dirk Obbink, and Allan Silverman.

An ancient doctor who advocated the therapeutic benefits of wine and passive exercise was bound to be successful. However, Asclepiades of Bithynia did far more than reform much of traditional Hippocratic therapeutic practice; he devised an extraordinary physical theory which he used to explain all biological phenomena in uniformly simple terms. His work laid the theoretical basis for the anti-theoretical medical sect called Methodism. For his trouble he was despised by his intellectual progeny and, more importantly perhaps, by Galen. None of his work survives intact, but copious ancient testimonia relating to him allow us to reconstruct many details of the theory. His ideas offer us a fascinating glimpse of how Hellenistic philosophy and medicine interacted, and provide an introduction to one of the most intriguing doctrinal disputes in Greek science.

The purpose of the conference "On Pythagoreanism", held in Brasilia in 2011, was to bring together leading scholars from all over the world to define the status quaestionis for the ever-increasing interest and research on Pythagoreanism in the 21st century. The papers included in this volume exemplify the variety of topics and approaches now being used to understand the polyhedral image of one of the most fascinating and long-lasting intellectual phenomena in Western history. Cornelli's paper opens the volume by charting the course of Pythagorean studies over the past two centuries. The remaining contributions range chronologically from Pythagoras and the early Pythagoreans of the archaic period (6th-5th centuries BCE) through the classical, hellenistic and late antique periods, to the eighteenth century. Thematically they treat the connections of Pythagoreanism with Orphism and religion, with mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology and with politics and the Pythagorean way of life.

The art of rhetoric, or persuasive public speaking, was brought to perfection in classical Athens. During the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., rhetoric came under the scrutiny of the philosophers. While Plato dismissed public speaking as mere hackwork devoid of a rational basis, Aristotle defended it as a true art. In his great work, "Treatise on Rhetoric", which laid the foundations of philosophical rhetoric, Aristotle deals at length with the processes of argument and with style, including rhythm and meter. For Aristotle, rhetoric is a brand of the art of reasoning; its function he defends not as mere persuasion, but as 'the observing of all of the available means of persuasion'.

Aristotle is known as a philosopher and as a theorist of poetry, but he was also a composer of songs and verse. This is the first comprehensive study of Aristotle's poetic activity, interpreting his remaining fragments in relation to the earlier poetic tradition and to the literary culture of his time. Its centerpiece is a study of the single complete ode to survive, a song commemorating Hermias of Atarneus, Aristotle's father-in-law and patron in the 340's BCE. This remarkable text is said to have embroiled the philosopher in charges of impiety and so is studied both from a literary perspective and in its political and religious contexts.
Aristotle's literary antecedents are studied with an unprecedented fullness that considers the entire range of Greek poetic forms, including poems by Sappho, Pindar, and Sophocles, and prose texts as well. Apart from its interest as a complex and subtle poem, the Song for Hermias is noteworthy as one of the first Greek lyrics for which we have substantial and early evidence for how and where it was composed, performed, and received. It thus affords an opportunity to reconstruct how Greek lyric texts functioned as performance pieces and how they circulated and were preserved. The book argues that Greek lyric poems profit from being read as scripts for performances that both shaped and were shaped by the social occasions in which they were performed. The result is a thorough and wide-ranging study of a complex and fascinating literary document that gives a fuller view of literature in the late classical age.

The fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is devoted to essays in honor of Professor John Ackrill on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Contributors include: David Wiggins, Colin Strand, Julius Moravcsik, Lesley Brown, Gail Fine, Julia Annas, David Charles, Michael Woods, Christopher Kirwan, Bernard Williams, Jonathan Barnes, and Richard Sorabji.

Scholarship on Plato's dialogues persistently divides its focus between the dramatic or literary and the philosophical or argumentative dimensions of the texts. But this hermeneutic division of labor is naive, for Plato's arguments are embedded in dramatic dialogues and developed through complex, largely informal exchanges between literary characters. Consequently, it is questionable how readers can even attribute arguments and theses to the author himself. The answer to this question lies in transcending the scholarly divide and integrating the literary and philosophical dimensions of the texts. This is the task of Trials of Reason.
The study focuses on a set of fourteen so-called early dialogues, beginning with a methodological framework that explains how to integrate the argumentation and the drama in these texts. Unlike most canonical philosophical works, the early dialogues do not merely express the results of the practice of philosophy. Rather, they dramatize philosophy as a kind of motivation, the desire for knowledge of goodness. They dramatize philosophy as a discursive practice, motivated by this desire and ideally governed by reason. And they dramatize the trials to which desire and reason are subject, that is, the difficulties of realizing philosophy as a form of motivation, a practice, and an epistemic achievement. In short, Trials of Reason argues that Plato's early dialogues are as much works of meta-philosophy as philosophy itself.

Paul Lettinck has restored a lost text of Philoponus by translating it for the first time from Arabic (only limited fragments have survived in the original Greek). The text, recovered from annotations in an Arabic translation of Aristotle, is an abridging paraphrase of Philoponus' commentary on Physics Books 5-7, with two final comments on Book 8. The Simplicius text, which consists of his comments on Aristotle's treatment of the void in chapters 6-9 of Book 4 of the Physics, comes from Simplicius' huge commentary on Book 4. Simplicius' comments on Aristotle's treatment of place and time have been translated by J. O. Urmson in two earlier volumes of this series.

Aristotle's modal syllogistic has been an object of study ever since the time of Theophrastus; but these studies (apart from an intense flowering in the Middle Ages) have been somewhat desultory. Remarkably, in the 1990s several new lines of research have appeared, with series of original publications by Fred Johnson, Richard Patterson and Ulrich Nortmann. Johnson presented for the first time a formal semantics adequate to a de re reading of the apodeictic syllogistic; this was based on a simple intuition linking the modal syllogistic to Aristotelian metaphysics. Nortmann developed an ingenious de dicto analysis. Patterson articulated the links (both theoretical and genetic) between the modal syllogistic and the metaphysics, using an analysis which strictly speaking is neither de re nor de dicto. My own studies in this field date from 1976, when my colleague Peter Roeper and I jointly wrote a paper "Aristotle's apodeictic syllogisms" for the XXIInd History of Logic Conference in Krakow. This paper contained the disjunctive reading of particular affirmative apodeictic propositions, which I still favour. Nonetheless, I did not consider that paper's results decisive or comprehensive enough to publish, and my 1981 book The Syllogism contained no treatment of the modal syllogism. The paper's ideas lay dormant till 1989, when I read Johnson's and Patterson's initial articles. I began publishing on the topic in 1991. Gradually my thoughts acquired a certain comprehensiveness and systematicity, till in 1993 I was able to take a semester's sabbatical to write up a draft of this book.

Interpretation of ancient Greek literature is often enough distorted by the preconceptions of modern times, especially on ancient morality. This is often equivalent to begging the question. If we think e.g. of arete, which has different meanings in different contexts, we shall think in English (or in Modern Greek or in French or in German) and shall falsify the phenomena. If we are to understand the Greek concept e.g. of arete we must study the nature of the situations in which it is applied. For it is an important fact in the study of Greek society that the Greeks used the one word (e.g. arete) where we use different words. If we are to understand properly the texts, we have to view them in their historical and social context. Ancient Greek thought needs to be studied together with politics, ethics, and economic behaviour. Moreover, the best insights can be found in those who confine themselves to the terms of each ancient author's analysis. From this principle each of the contributions of the volume begins.

The distinguished scholar of ancient philosophy J.L. Ackrill here presents the best of his essays on Plato and Aristotle from the past forty years. He brings philosophical acuity and philological expertise to a range of texts and topics in ancient thought - from ethics and logic to epistemology and metaphysics - which continue to be widely discussed today.

Nietzsche's work was shaped by his engagement with ancient Greek philosophy. Matthew Meyer analyzes Nietzsche's concepts of becoming and perspectivism and his alleged rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, and he traces these views back to the Heraclitean-Protagorean position that Plato and Aristotle critically analyze in the Theaetetus and Metaphysica IV, respectively. At the center of this Heraclitean-Protagorean position is a relational ontology in which everything exists and is what it is only in relation to something else. Meyer argues that this relational ontology is not only theoretically foundational for Nietzsche's philosophical project, in that it is the common element in Nietzsche's views on becoming, perspectivism, and the principle of non-contradiction, but also textually foundational, in that Nietzsche implicitly commits himself to such an ontology in raising the question of opposites at the beginning of both Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good and Evil.

Organization, Society and Politics helps readers understand the strengths and limitations of Western civilization's most influential social theorist. Would you like to know why Aristotle said we are 'political animals' (and what that really means); or see how his Politics can be used to evaluate the legacy of the Blair government, and examine David Cameron's 'Big Society'? How does the Nicomachean Ethics help us understand the 2011 UK riots? Perhaps you are suspicious of claims that 'good ethics is good business' and would like to be able to say why, or curious to see how Aristotle's Poetics can be used to teach about revolution, or glimpse the rhetorical skills of Barack Obama? This thought-provoking volume explores these topics amongst many others. Specialists will welcome the attention to original texts, whilst non-specialists will appreciate the lucid summaries and applications that make Aristotle fascinatingly accessible and relevant across politics, business studies, and social science.

This book presents 17 articles by Woldemar Gvrler, published during the last 25 years, some of them not easily accessible hitherto. Most of them treat details of the history of the Hellenistic Academy and Cicero. Other papers explore the aftermath of Hellenistic thought in Lucilius, Lucretius, and Seneca, the literary form of Roman philosophical treatises, and Cicero's personal interpretation of Academic scepticism.
All contributions are based on close reading of the source material. No attempt is made to harmonize conflicting evidence. Instead, different stages of the school discussions and some gradual changes in philosophical doctrine emerge more clearly. Special attention is paid to the conversion of Greek terms into Latin, in some cases implying unexpected consequences in meaning.

Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history. A penetrating, near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, it demonstrates how the elements of plot, character and spectacle combine to produce 'pity and fear' - and why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. It introduces the crucial concepts of mimesis ('imitation'), hamartia ('error') and katharsis, which have informed serious thinking about drama ever since. It examines the mythological heroes, idealized yet true to life, whom Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides brought on to the stage. And it explains how the most effective plays rely on complication and resolution, recognitions and reversals. Essential reading for all students of Greek literature and of the many Renaissance and post-Renaissance writers who consciously adopted Aristotle as a model, the Poetics is equally stimulating for anyone interested in theatre today.

Aristotle's modal syllogistic is his study of patterns of reasoning about necessity and possibility. Many scholars think the modal syllogistic is incoherent, a 'realm of darkness'. Others think it is coherent, but devise complicated formal modellings to mimic Aristotle's results. This volume provides a simple interpretation of Aristotle's modal syllogistic using standard predicate logic. Rini distinguishes between red terms, such as 'horse', 'plant' or 'man', which name things in virtue of features those things must have, and green terms, such as 'moving', which name things in virtue of their non-necessary features. By applying this distinction to the "Prior Analytics," Rini shows how traditional interpretive puzzles about the modal syllogistic melt away and the simple structure of Aristotle's own proofs is revealed. The result is an applied logic which provides needed links between Aristotle's views of science and logical demonstration. The volume is particularly valuable to researchers and students of the history of logic, Aristotle's theory of modality, and the philosophy of logic in general.

We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in. A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where 'Critchley on Tragedy' is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy. Simon Critchley demolishes our common misconceptions about the poets, dramatists and philosophers of Ancient Greece - then presents these writers to us in an unfamiliar and original light.

The Parmenides is notorious for the criticisms it directs against Plato's own Theory of Forms, as presented in the middle period. But the second and major portion of the dialogue has generally been avoided, despite its being offered as Plato's response to the problems; the text seems intractably obscure, appearing to consist of a series of bad arguments leading to contradictory conclusions. Carefully analyzing these arguments and the methodological remarks which precede them, Meinwald shows that to understand Plato's response we need to recognize his important distinction between two kinds of predication. Read in the light of this distinction, the arguments can be seen to be sound, and the contradictions merely apparent. Meinwald then proceeds to demonstrate the direct application of Plato's crucial innovation in solving the problems of the first part of the dialogue, including the infamous Third Man. On Meinwald's interpretation, the new distinction is associated with developments in metaphysics which take Plato well beyond the problems commonly thought to tell against Platonism.

The Aurea Catena Homeri, written in German by Dr. Anton Josef Kirchweger, was first printed in 1723, though it was distributed in a handwritten format prior to that time. It is said to be one of the most important books ever created giving insight into alchemy-the idea that all creation, no matter what its nature, is closely interconnected, that a deeply secret connection pervades all of nature, that one thing relates to the next and things depend upon each other.

In "The Golden Chain of Homer," editors Gregory S. Hamilton and Philip N. Wheeler provide an English translation of Aurea Catena Homeri, complete with frequent, detailed footnotes and extensive commentary that offers a detailed analysis and insight into Kirchweger's work, considered a masterpiece of alchemical literature.

"The Golden Chain of Homer" shows Kirchweger's book in a new, enlightening way. Through this translation, it becomes easier to understand alchemical principles and unveil the mysteries that shroud the science of alchemy.

Metaphysics is the study of existence at the highest level of generality. It is traditionally characterised as the study of "being qua being" - of being in general rather than specifically of this or that sort. Accordingly, the salient task of the field is to achieve a clearer understanding of the concepts and principles of being, existence, and reality. As such, metaphysics has been an established sector of philosophy since the time of Aristotle's initial systematisation of the subject in the fourth century B.C.E.In line with tradition, distinguished philosopher Nicholas Rescher presents key topics that have always figured on the agenda of metaphysics: the nature and rationale of existence, the differentiation of what is actual from the unreal and mere possibility, and the prospects and limits of our knowledge of the real. Though a work of philosophical sophistication and logical rigour, "Metaphysics" displays a clarity of exposition that makes it suitable for use as a text or supplementary reader in upper-class undergraduate and graduate philosophy courses.

The writings of Greek philosopher ARISTOTLE (384Bi322Be-student of Plato, teacher of Alexander the Great-are among the most influential on Western thought, and indeed upon Western civilization itself. From theology and logic to ethics and even biology, there is no area of human knowledge that has not been touched by his thinking. In Politics-considered a companion piece to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics-the philosopher discusses the nature of the state, of citizenship, of public education and private wealth. In what is a response to the works of his teacher Plato, Aristotle explores the idea of the individual household as a microcosm and building block of the state; examines trade and the economy as functions of human affairs; discusses the battle between self-interest and nationalism; and much more. This edition features the classic introduction by H.W.C. Davis, the renowned English historian of the early 20th century. Students of philosophy, government, and human nature continue to find Aristotle's Politics a provocative work more than two millennia after it was written.