One of the most influential works in the history of political theory, Aristotle's Politics is a treatise in practical philosophy, intended to inform legislators and to create the conditions for virtuous and self-sufficient lives for the citizens of a state. In this Companion, distinguished scholars offer new perspectives on the work and its themes. After an opening exploration of the relation between Aristotle's ethics and his politics, the central chapters follow the sequence of the eight books of the Politics, taking up questions such as the role of reason in legitimizing rule, the common good, justice, slavery, private property, citizenship, democracy and deliberation, unity, conflict, law and authority, and education. The closing chapters discuss the interaction between Aristotle's political thought and contemporary democratic theory. The volume will provide a valuable resource for those studying ancient philosophy, classics, and the history of political thought.

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. "'Have you seen the latest OSAP?' is what scholars of ancient philosophy say to each other when they meet in corridors or on coffee breaks. Whether you work on Plato or Aristotle, on Presocratics or sophists, on Stoics, Epicureans, or Sceptics, on Roman philosophers or Greek Neoplatonists, you are liable to find OSAP articles now dominant in the bibliography of much serious published work in your particular subject: not safe to miss." - Malcolm Schofield, Cambridge University "OSAP was founded to provide a place for long pieces on major issues in ancient philosophy. In the years since, it has fulfilled this role with great success, over and over again publishing groundbreaking papers on what seemed to be familiar topics and others surveying new ground to break. It represents brilliantly the vigour-and the increasingly broad scope-of scholarship in ancient philosophy, and shows us all how the subject should flourish." - M.M. McCabe, King's College London

divisibility in Physics VI. I had been assuming at that time that Aristotle's elimination of reference to the infinitely large in his account of the potential inf inite--like the elimination of the infinitely small from nineteenth century accounts of limits and continuity--gave us everything that was important in a theory of the infinite. Hilbert's paper showed me that this was not obviously so. Suddenly other certainties about Aristotle's (apparently) judicious toning down of (supposed) Platonic extremisms began to crumble. The upshot of work I had been doing earlier on Plato's 'Third Man Argument' began to look different from the way it had before. I was confronted with a possibility I had not till then so much as entertained. What if the more extreme posi tions of Plato on these issues were the more likely to be correct? The present work is the first instalment of the result ing reassessment of Plato's metaphysics, and especially of his theory of Forms. It has occupied much of my teaching and scholarly time over the past fifteen years and more. The central question wi th which I concern myself is, "How does Plato argue for the existence of his Forms (if he does )7" The idea of making this the central question is that if we know how he argues for the existence of Forms, we may get a better sense of what they are."

From Socrates and Plato onwards, the Sophists were often targeted by the authoritative philosophical tradition as being mere charlatans and poor teachers. This book, translated and significantly updated from its most recent Italian version (2nd edition, 2013), challenges these criticisms by offering an overall interpretation of their thought, and by assessing the specific contributions of thinkers like Protagoras, Gorgias and Antiphon. A new vision of the Sophists emerges: they are protagonists and agents of fundamental change in the history of ancient philosophy, who questioned the grounds of morality and politics, as well as the nature of knowledge and language. By shifting the focus from the cosmos to man, the Sophists inaugurate an alternative form of philosophy, whose importance is only now becoming clear.

This book provides an interpretation of Plato's Euthydemus as a unified piece of literature, taking into account both its dramatic and its philosophical aspects. It aims to do justice to a major Platonic work which has so far received comparatively little treatment. Except for the sections of the dialogue in which Socrates presents an argument on the pursuit of eudaimonia, the Euthydemus seems to have been largely ignored. The reason for this is that much of the work's philosophical import lies hidden underneath a veil of riotous comedy. This book shows how a reading of the dialogue as a whole, rather than a limited focus on the Socratic scenes, sheds light on the work's central philosophical questions. It argues the Euthydemus points not only to the differences between Socrates and the sophists, but also to actual and alleged similarities between them. The framing scenes comment precisely on this aspect of the internal dialogue, with Crito still lumping together philosophy and eristic shortly before his discussion with Socrates comes to an end. Hence the question that permeates the Euthydemus is raised afresh at the end of the dialogue: what is properly to be termed philosophy?

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is an annual volume of original articles, which may be of substantial length, on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books. The 1998 volume is broad in scope, as ever, featuring four pieces on Aristotle, two on Plato, and one each on Xenophanes, the Atomists, and Plutarch. 'An excellent periodical.' Mary Margaret MacKenzie, Times Literary Supplement 'This ... annual collection ... has become standard reading among specialists in ancient philosophy ... Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy continues to reflect the vigour of a challenging but vital sub-discipline within Classical Studies and Philosophy.' Brad Inwood, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

This volume focuses on the under-explored topic of emotions' implications for ancient medical theory and practice, while it also raises questions about patients' sentiments. Ancient medicine, along with philosophy, offer unique windows to professional and scientific explanatory models of emotions. Thus, the contributions included in this volume offer comparative ground that helps readers and researchers interested in ancient emotions pin down possible interfaces and differences between systematic and lay cultural understandings of emotions. Although the volume emphasizes the multifaceted links between medicine and ancient philosophical thinking, especially ethics, it also pays due attention to the representation of patients' feelings in the extant medical treatises and doctors' emotional reticence. The chapters that constitute this volume investigate a great range of medical writers including Hippocrates and the Hippocratics, and Galen, while comparative approaches to medical writings and philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, dwell on the notion of wonder/admiration (thauma), conceptualizations of the body and the soul, and the category pathos itself. The volume also sheds light on the metaphorical uses of medicine in ancient thinking.

Is music just matter of hearing and producing notes? And is it of interest just to musicians? By exploring different authors and philosophical trends of the Roman Empire, from Philo of Alexandria to Alexander of Aphrodisias, from the rebirth of Platonism with Plutarch to the last Neoplatonists, this book sheds light on different ways in which music and musical notions were made a crucial part of philosophical discourse. Far from being mere metaphors, notions such as harmony, concord and attunement became key philosophical tools in order to better grasp and conceptualise fundamental notions in philosophical debates from cosmology to ethics and from epistemology to theology. The volume is written by a distinguished international team of contributors.

The acquisition of self-knowledge is often described as one of the main goals of philosophical inquiry. At the same time, some sort of self-knowledge is often regarded as a necessary condition of our being a human agent or human subject. Thus self-knowledge is taken to constitute both the beginning and the end of humans' search for wisdom, and as such it is intricately bound up with the very idea of philosophy. Not surprisingly therefore, the Delphic injunction 'Know thyself' has fascinated philosophers of different times, backgrounds, and tempers. But how can we make sense of this imperative? What is self-knowledge and how is it achieved? What are the structural features that distinguish self-knowledge from other types of knowledge? What role do external, second- and third-personal, sources of knowledge play in the acquisition of self-knowledge? How can we account for the moral impact ascribed to self-knowledge? Is it just a form of anthropological knowledge that allows agents to act in accordance with their aims? Or, does self-knowledge ultimately ennoble the self of the subjects having it? Finally, is self-knowledge, or its completion, a goal that may be reached at all? The book addresses these questions in fifteen chapters covering approaches of many philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Edmund Husserl or Elisabeth Anscombe. The short reflections inserted between the chapters show that the search for self-knowledge is an important theme in literature, poetry, painting and self-portraiture from Homer.

Overcoming Uncertainty in Ancient Greek Political Philosophy makes an historical and theoretical contribution by explaining the role of opinion in ancient Greek political philosophy, showing its importance for Aristotle's theory of deliberation, and indicating a new model for a deliberative republic. Currently, there are no studies of opinion in ancient Greek political theory and so the book breaks new historical ground. The book establishes that opinion is key for the political theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics because each sees uncertainty as a problem that needs to be overcome if one is to establish a virtuous polity. Since they have different notions of the nature of the uncertainty of opinion, they develop very different political strategies to overcome it. The book explains that Plato's and the Stoics' analyses of uncertainty support oligarchy and monarchy, respectively, and that theoretical support for deliberate politics requires a more nuanced understanding of uncertainty that only Aristotle provides.

This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide. The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence - uncovered in some of the chapters of this book - that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.

"Phaedo is one of Plato's most important works, exploring the nature of life, death, and the soul. Socrates has been sentenced to death for corrupting the youth of Athens. In the hours before he is forced to drink hemlock, he talks with his followers and friends, arguing in favor of in the immortality of the soul, and concluding that death holds no fear for the true philosopher. In the process, he lays the metaphysical foundations for Platonic thought. While being primarily a philosophical treatise, Phaedo is also a moving account of the untimely death of a beloved teacher. It is this dual character which makes it highly regarded as a work of literature.

50 years before Philoponus, two Christians from Gaza, seeking to influence Alexandrian Christians, defended the Christian belief in resurrection and the finite duration of the world, and attacked rival Neoplatonist views. Aeneas addresses an unusual version of the food chain argument against resurrection, that our bodies will get eaten by other creatures. Zacharias attacks the Platonist examples of synchronous creation, which were the production of light, of shadow, and of a footprint in the sand. A fragment survives of a third Gazan contribution by Procopius. Zacharias lampoons the Neoplatonist professor in Alexandria, Ammonius, and claims a leading role in the riot which led to the cleverest Neoplatonist, Damascius, fleeing to Athens. It was only Philoponus, however, who was able to embarrass the Neoplatonists by arguing against them on their own terms. This volume contains an English translation of the works by Aeneas of Gaza and Zacharias of Mytilene, accompanied by a detailed introduction, explanatory notes and a bibliography.

The study of the "Elenchos (c. 225 CE) involves the whole range of ancient interpretative traditions concerned with Greek Philosophy, from Aristotle to the Late Neoplatonists. The present inquiry places Hippolytus' important reports about the Greek philosophers in the context of these traditions and so is able to illuminate not only what he has to offer but also to increase our knowledge of the traditions he depends on. For him the Pythagoreanizing current in Pre-Neoplatonism is of paramount importance. Accordingly, he constructs a succession ("diadoche) starting with Pythagoras and including Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and argues that the "diadoche of the Gnostic heresiarchs is parasitical on its Pythagorean predecessor.
A new assessment of the sources used -- the first serious attempt since that of Diels in 1879 -- hinges on an analysis of Hippolytus' method of presentation, which is a blend of cento and exegesis geared to his anti-Gnostic purpose.

This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides, the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible. With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental framework with which we conceptualise motion today.

This book promotes the research of present-day women working in ancient and medieval philosophy, with more than 60 women having contributed in some way to the volume in a fruitful collaboration. It contains 22 papers organized into ten distinct parts spanning the sixth century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Each part has the same structure: it features, first, a paper which sets up the discussion, and then, one or two responses that open new perspectives and engage in further reflections. Our authors' contributions address pivotal moments and players in the history of philosophy: women philosophers in antiquity, Cleobulina of Rhodes, Plato, Lucretius, Bardaisan of Edessa, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Peter Abelard, Robert Kilwardby, William Ockham, John Buridan, and Isotta Nogarola. The result is a thought-provoking collection of papers that will be of interest to historians of philosophy from all horizons. Far from being an isolated effort, this book is a contribution to the ever-growing number of initiatives which endeavour to showcase the work of women in philosophy.

Nietzsche's Renewal of Ancient Ethics connects different strands in Nietzsche studies to progress a unique interpretation of friendship in his writings. Exploring this alternative approach to Nietzsche's ethics through the influence of ancient Greek ideals on his ideas, Neil Durrant highlights the importance of contest for developing strong friendships. Durrant traces the history of what Nietzsche termed a 'higher friendship' to the ancient Greek ideal of the Homeric hero. In this kind of friendship, neither person attempts to tyrannize or dominate the other but rather aims to promote the differences between them as a way of stimulating stronger and fiercer contests. Through this exchange, they discover new heights-new standards of excellence-both for themselves and for others. Durrant shows how the development of this approach to personal relationships relied on Nietzsche rejecting the Christian ideals of love and compassion to build an ethics which incorporated aspects of evolutionary biology into the ancient Homeric ideals he was himself wedded to. The resulting 'higher friendship' is strong enough to include not only love and compassion, but also enmity and opposition, expanding our notion of what is good and ethical in the process.

'All teaching and all intellectual learning come to be from pre-existing knowledge.' So begins Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, one of the most important, and difficult, works in the history of western philosophy. David Bronstein sheds new light on this challenging text by arguing that it is coherently structured around two themes of enduring philosophical interest: knowledge and learning. The Posterior Analytics, on Bronstein's reading, is a sustained examination of scientific knowledge: what it is and how it is acquired. Aristotle first discusses two principal forms of scientific knowledge (epist?m? and nous). He then provides a compelling account, in reverse order, of the types of learning one needs to undertake in order to acquire them. The Posterior Analytics thus emerges as an elegantly organized work in which Aristotle describes the mind's ascent from sense-perception of particulars to scientific knowledge of first principles. Bronstein also highlights Plato's influence on Aristotle's text. For each type of learning Aristotle discusses, Bronstein uncovers an instance of Meno's Paradox (a puzzle from Plato's Meno according to which inquiry and learning are impossible) and a solution to it. In addition, he argues, against current orthodoxy, that Aristotle is committed to the Socratic Picture of inquiry, according to which one should seek what a thing's essence is before seeking its demonstrable attributes and their causes. Aristotle on Knowledge and Learning will be of interest to students and scholars of ancient philosophy, epistemology, or philosophy of science.

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 Socrates to Alexander of Aphrodisias, with several on each of Aristotle and Plato. Editor: David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, University of Cambridge. 'unique value as a collection of outstanding contributions in the area of ancient philosophy.' Sara Rubinelli, Bryn Mawr Classical Review