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.

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.

The Futility of Philosophical Ethics puts forward a novel account of the grounds of moral feeling with fundamental implications for philosophical ethics. It examines the grounds of moral feeling by both the phenomenology of that feeling, and the facts of moral feeling in operation - particularly in forms such as moral luck, vicious virtues, and moral disgust - that appear paradoxical from the point of view of systematic ethics. Using an analytic approach, James Kirwan engages in the ongoing debates among contemporary philosophers within metaethics and normative ethics. Instead of trying to erase the variety of moral responses that exist in philosophical analysis under one totalizing system, Kirwan argues that such moral theorizing is futile. His analysis counters currently prevalent arguments that seek to render the origins of moral experience unproblematic by finding substitutes for realism in various forms of noncognitivism. In reasserting the problematic nature of moral experience, and offering a theory of the origins of that experience in unavoidable individual desires, Kirwan accounts for the diverse manifestations of moral feeling and demonstrates why so many arguments in metaethics and normative ethics are necessarily irresolvable.