In Predication and Ontology A. Kalbarczyk provides the first monograph-length study of the Arabic reception of Aristotle's Categories. At the center of attention is the critical reappraisal of that treatise by Ibn Sina (d. 428 AH/1037 AD), better known in the Latin West as Avicenna. Ibn Sina's reading of the Categories is examined in the context of his wider project of rearranging the transmitted body of philosophical knowledge. Against the background of the late ancient commentary tradition and subsequent exegetical efforts, Ibn Sina's Kitab al-Maqulat of the Sifa' is interpreted as a milestone in the gradual reshuffle of the relationship between logic proper and ontology. In order to assess the philosophical impact of this realignment, some of the subsequent developments in Ibn Sina's writings and in the emerging post-Avicennian tradition are also taken into account. The thematic focus lies on the two fundamental classification schemes which Aristotle introduces in the treatise: the fourfold division of Cat. 2 ("of a subject"/"in a subject") and the tenfold scheme of Cat. 4 (i.e., substance and the nine genera of accidents). They both pose the question of whether and how the manner in which an expression is predicated relates to extra-linguistic reality. As the study intends to show, this question is one of the driving forces of Ibn Sina's momentous reform of the Aristotelian curriculum. This monograph has been awarded the Iran World Award for Book of the Year (2020).

In the reincarnation myth in Book X of Plato's Republic, the unnamed first soul, who has lived a good life and has been rewarded in the afterlife, chooses a new life and fate, and chooses catastrophically badly. He finds himself fated to eat his own children. Despite being warned to blame only himself, he wails and blames anything and everything else in his conviction that his fate is undeserved. Though he should not be shocked because he has made this choice himself, he is incredulous because he has completely misunderstood the nature of his choice. Starting with Plato's myth, this book looks at the errors this soul has made and considers these errors through both the Republic and a series of paired Shakespeare plays. Reading the Republic along with Othello and The Comedy of Errors, the first section focuses on the misreading of comedy and tragedy in the life of the individual; returning to the Republic and using The Merchant of Venice and Pericles, Part II focuses on the broadened context of the misuse of political and economic forces; returning again to the Republic and reading Timon of Athens and Measure for Measure, Part III focuses on the broadest context, the misunderstanding of the inseparability of birth and infinite debt. The hope of the text, and the hope of human life, is to help us avoid choosing lives that devour what we most love.

A comprehensive and authoritative account of the 'heretic' Marcion, this volume traces the development of the concept and language of heresy in the setting of an exploration of second-century Christian intellectual debate. Judith M. Lieu analyses accounts of Marcion by the major early Christian polemicists who shaped the idea of heresy, including Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Epiphanius of Salamis, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Ephraem Syrus. She examines Marcion's Gospel, Apostolikon, and Antitheses in detail and compares his principles with those of contemporary Christian and non-Christian thinkers, covering a wide range of controversial issues: the nature of God, the relation of the divine to creation, the person of Jesus, the interpretation of Scripture, the nature of salvation, and the appropriate lifestyle of adherents. In this innovative study, Marcion emerges as a distinctive, creative figure who addressed widespread concerns within second-century Christian diversity.

The first edition of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), edited by Richard Kraut, shaped scholarly research and guided new students for thirty years. This new edition introduces students to fresh approaches to Platonic dialogues while advancing the next generation of research. Of its seventeen chapters, nine are entirely new, written by a new generation of scholars. Six others have been thoroughly revised and updated by their original authors. The volume covers the full range of Plato's interests, including ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, religion, mathematics, and psychology. Plato's dialogues are approached as unified works and considered within their intellectual context, and the revised introduction suggests a way of reading the dialogues that attends to the differences between them while also tracing their interrelations. The result is a rich and wide-ranging volume which will be valuable for all students and scholars of Plato.

This volume addresses issues of moral pluralism and polarization by drawing attention to the transcendent character of the good. It probes the history of Christian theology and moral philosophy to investigate the value of this idea and then relates it to contemporary moral issues.

This book argues that according to Metaphysics Zeta, substantial forms constitute substantial being in the sensible world, and individual composites make up the basic constituents that possess this kind of being. The study explains why Aristotle provides a reexamination of substance after the Categories, Physics, and De Anima, and highlights the contribution Z is meant to make to the science of being. Norman O. Dahl argues that Z.1-11 leaves both substantial forms and individual composites as candidates for basic constituents, with Z.12 being something that can be set aside. He explains that although the main focus of Z.13-16 is to argue against a Platonic view that takes universals to be basic constituents, some of its arguments commit Aristotle to individual composites as basic constituents, with Z.17's taking substantial form to constitute substantial being is compatible with that commitment. .

Plato's Pragmatism offers the first comprehensive defense of a pragmatist reading of Plato. According to Plato, the ultimate rational goal is not to accumulate knowledge and avoid falsehood but rather to live an excellent human life. The book contends that a pragmatic outlook is present throughout the Platonic corpus. The authors argue that the successful pursuit of a good life requires cultivating certain ethical commitments, and that maintaining these commitments often requires violating epistemic norms. In the course of defending the pragmatist interpretation, the authors present a forceful Platonic argument for the conclusion that the value of truth has its limits, and that what matters most are one's ethical commitments and the courage to live up to them. Their interpretation has far-reaching consequences in that it reshapes how we understand the relationship between Plato's ethics and epistemology. Plato's Pragmatism will appeal to scholars and advanced students of Plato and ancient philosophy. It will also be of interest to those working on current controversies in ethics and epistemology

Does a flourishing life involve pursuing passionate attachments? Can we choose what these passionate attachments will be? This book offers an original theory of how we can actively cultivate our passionate attachments. The author argues that not only do we have reason to view passionate attachments as susceptible to growth, change, and improvement, but we should view these entities as amenable to self-cultivation. He uses Pierre Hadot's and Michel Foucault's accounts of Hellenistic self-cultivation as vital conceptual tools to formulate a theory of cultivating our passionate attachments. First, their accounts offer the conceptual resources for a philosophical theory of how we can cultivate our passionate attachments. Second, the exercises of self-cultivation they focus on allow us to outline a practical method though which we can cultivate our passionate character. Doing this brings out a significantly new dimension to the role of the passionate attachments in the flourishing life and offers theoretical and practical accounts of how we can cultivate them based on the Hellenistic conception of self-directed character change. Cultivating Our Passionate Attachments will be of interest to advanced students and scholars working in virtue ethics, moral philosophy, and ancient philosophy.

This book provides a unified account of the connection between justice and the good life. It argues that the virtues of character require institutions, while good institutions enable persons to live together virtuously. Although virtue ethics and political philosophy are rich and sophisticated philosophical traditions, there has been an unfortunate divergence, in theory and practice, between the virtues of character and the virtues of institutions. This book has two primary purposes. First, it reorients political philosophy around the concept of the good life. To do so, the author addresses the problem of political authority from a virtue ethics perspective. He also considers whether a political theory oriented around the good life is compatible with Rawls's notion of reasonable pluralism. Second, the book explains the relationship between the virtues of institutions and the virtues of character. The author shows how institutions support the development and exercise of the virtues of character, while examining specific other-regarding virtues such as justice and friendship. The Authority of Virtue will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in virtue ethics, social and political philosophy, ancient philosophy, and political theory.

This scholarly volume proposes protreptic as a radically new way of reading Plato's dialogues leading to enhanced student engagement in learning and inquiry. Through analysis of Platonic dialogues including Crito, Euthyphro, Meno, and Republic, the text highlights Socrates' ways of fostering and encouraging self-examination and conscionable reflection. By focusing his work on Socrates' use of protreptic, Marshall proposes a practical approach to reading Plato, illustrating how his writings can be used to enhance intrinsic motivation amongst students, and help them develop the thinking skills required for democratic and civic engagement. This engaging volume will be of interest to doctoral students, researchers, and scholars concerned with Plato's dialogues, the philosophy of education, and ancient philosophy more broadly, as well as post-graduate students interested in moral and values education research.

The first English monograph entirely devoted to a theoretical investigation of Gorgias' epistemological thought

This distinctive collection of original articles features contributions from many of the leading scholars of ancient Greek philosophy. They explore the concept of reason and the method of analysis and the central role they play in the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They engage with salient themes in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political theory, as well as tracing links between each thinker s ideas on selected topics.

The volume contains analyses of Plato s Socrates, focusing on his views of moral psychology, the obligation to obey the law, the foundations of politics, justice and retribution, and Socratic virtue. On Plato s Republic, the discussions cover the relationship between politics and philosophy, the primacy of reason over the soul s non-rational capacities, the analogy of the city and the soul, and our responsibility for choosing how we live our own lives. The anthology also probes Plato s analysis of logos (reason or language) which underlies his philosophy including the theory of forms.A quartet of reflections explores Aristotelian themes including the connections between knowledge and belief, the nature of essence and function, and his theories of virtue and grace.

The volume concludes with an insightful intellectual memoir by David Keyt which charts the rise of analytic classical scholarship in the past century and along the way provides entertaining anecdotes involving major figures in modern academic philosophy.Blending academic authority with creative flair and demonstrating the continuing interest of ancient Greek philosophy, this book will be a valuable addition to the libraries of all those studying and researching the origins of Western philosophy.

Inventing Socrates is a book about the consequences of knowledge and the coming of age. It is written in knowledge's Western setting, making allegorical as well as literal use of the event known as the 'birth of philosophy' - an event that began in ancient Greece in the 6th-century B.C., when a handful of thinkers first looked at the natural world through the critical eyes of fledgling science. Very little of concrete fact is known about this first philosophy and its protagonists. Only scant fragments of their writings have survived; and these are nearly always poetical and esoteric, some no more than a single line. They are freighted with meanings that might take one in two different directions at once; and this ambidexterity between ancient and modern has always been their beguiling feature. Altogether these thinkers are known as the Presocratics, because they pioneered the rational methods that Socrates would take to the question of the good life. If Socrates stands today as an icon of Western self-esteem, these pioneers are said to show the emergence of that poise from the fug of myth and religion. Apparently they prove the evolution of Western intelligence and the value of living today - in the secular maturity of its latest, greatest hour. But what if their continuing readability and tactility were actually to become the demonstration against that? This is not just, then, a book about the foundations of Western thought. It is a book about all that we invest in the ideas of ancient and modern. Left to right is the Western way of learning and growing, but, as Miles Hollingworth shows, the truths of the human condition are subterranean corridors running psychologically and eternally.

Ranging from lively epistles to serious essays, these 124 letters selected from Epistulae Morales and Lucilium espouse the philosophy of Stoicism. This volume includes Tacitus's account of Seneca's death.

Fashion | Sense is designed to explode "fashion," and with it, the stigma in philosophy against fashion's superficiality. Fashion appears to be altogether differently occupied, disingenuous and insubstantial, even sophistic in its pretense to peddle surfaces as if they were something deep. But is fashion's apparent beguilement more philosophical than it seems? And is philosophy's longing for exposed depth concealing fashion in its anti-fashion stance? Using primarily ancient Greek texts, peppered with allusions to their echoes across the history of philosophy and contemporary fashion and pop culture, Gwenda-lin Grewal not only examines the rift between fashion and philosophy, but also challenges the claim that fashion is modern. Indeed, fashion's quarrel with philosophy may be at least as ancient as that infamous quarrel between philosophy and poetry alluded to in Plato's Republic. And the quest for fashion's origins, as if a quest for a neutrally-outfitted self, stripped of the self-awareness that comes with thinking, prompts questions about human agency and our immersion in time. The touch of reality's fabric bristles in our relationship to our looks, not simply through the structure of clothes but in the plot of our wearing them. Meanwhile, the fashion of our words sharpens our meaning like a cutting silhouette. Grewal's own writing is playfully and daringly self-conscious, aware of its style and the entrapment it arouses from the very first line. The reactions provoked by fashion's flair, not only among the philosophical set but also among those who would never deck themselves out in the title, "philosopher," show it forth as perhaps philosophy's most important and underestimated doppelganger.

Offers the latest research on this topic.

The Key Themes in Ancient Philosophy series provides concise books, written by major scholars and accessible to non-specialists, on important themes in ancient philosophy that remain of philosophical interest today. In this volume Professor Wolfsdorf undertakes the first exploration of ancient Greek philosophical conceptions of pleasure in relation to contemporary conceptions. He provides broad coverage of the ancient material, from pre-Platonic to Old Stoic treatments; and, in the contemporary period, from World War II to the present. Examination of the nature of pleasure in ancient philosophy largely occurred within ethical contexts but in the contemporary period has, to a greater extent, been pursued within philosophy of mind and psychology. This divergence reflects the dominant philosophical preoccupations of the times. But Professor Wolfsdorf argues that the various treatments are complementary. Indeed, the Greeks' examinations of pleasure were incisive and their debates vigorous, and their results have enduring value for contemporary discussion.

Jaap Mansfeld and Frans de Haas bring together in this volume a distinguished international team of ancient philosophers, presenting a systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of one of the key texts in Aristotle's science and metaphysics: the first book of On Generation and Corruption. In GC I Aristotle provides a general outline of physical processes such as generation and corruption, alteration, and growth, and inquires into their differences. He also discusses physical notions such as contact, action and passion, and mixture. These notions are fundamental to Aristotle's physics and cosmology, and more specifically to his theory of the four elements and their transformations. Moreover, references to GC elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus show that in GC I Aristotle is doing heavy conceptual groundwork for more refined applications of these notions in, for example, the psychology of perception and thought, and the study of animal generation and corruption. Ultimately, biology is the goal of the series of enquiries in which GC I demands a position of its own immediately after the Physics. The contributors deal with questions of structure and text constitution and provide thought-provoking discussions of each chapter of GC I. New approaches to the issues of how to understand first matter, and how to evaluate Aristotle's notion of mixture are given ample space. Throughout, Aristotle's views of the theories of the Presocratics and Plato are shown to be crucial in understanding his argument.

This book explores the poetic articulations of a shift from a transcendent to an immanent worldview, as reflected in the manner of evaluation of body and soul in Goethe's Faust and Hafiz' Divan. Focusing on two lifeworks that illustrate their authors' respective intellectual histories, this cross-genre study goes beyond the textual confines of the two poets' Divans to compare important building blocks of their intellectual worlds.

Specifically focusing on the relationship between the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics, this collection of essays studies major themes from Aristotle's ethics. This volume builds on a recent revival of interest in Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics, which offers an invaluable complement to the Nicomachean Ethics in the study of the development of Aristotle's ethical ideas. It brings together a series of new studies by leading scholars covering the main points of inquiry raised by the relationship between the two works, exploring their continuities and divergences. At the same time, it showcases a variety of approaches to and perspectives on the main questions posed by Aristotle's ethical thought. Investigating the Relationship Between Aristotle's Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics is offered as a contribution to long-standing debates over Aristotle's ethical thinking, as well as an inspiration for new approaches, which take both of his surviving ethical treatises seriously. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars of ancient philosophy and ethics, particularly Aristotle's two ethics.

* Offers nuanced, non-traditional readings of Plato * Builds upon the dialogues by bringing them into conversation with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary Continental thought more broadly * Addresses a major gap in the literature, one which has been perpetuated down through the centuries; a gap caused by reading Plato as a metaphysician or moral or political philosopher and not, primarily, as a psychologist, a doctor of the human soul

* Offers nuanced, non-traditional readings of Plato * Builds upon the dialogues by bringing them into conversation with psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and contemporary Continental thought more broadly * Addresses a major gap in the literature, one which has been perpetuated down through the centuries; a gap caused by reading Plato as a metaphysician or moral or political philosopher and not, primarily, as a psychologist, a doctor of the human soul

The study of emotions and emotional displays has achieved a deserved prominence in recent classical scholarship. The emotions of the classical world can be plumbed to provide a valuable heuristic tool. Emotions can help us understand key issues of ancient ethics, ideological assumptions, and normative behaviors, but, more frequently than not, classical scholars have turned their attention to "social emotions" requiring practical decisions and ethical judgments in public and private gatherings. The emotion of disgust has been unwarrantedly neglected, even though it figures saliently in many literary genres, such as iambic poetry and comedy, historiography, and even tragedy and philosophy. This collection of seventeen essays by fifteen authors features the emotion of disgust as one cutting edge of the study of Greek and Roman antiquity. Individual contributions explore a wide range of topics. These include the semantics of the emotion both in Greek and Latin literature, its social uses as a means of marginalizing individuals or groups of individuals, such as politicians judged deviant or witches, its role in determining aesthetic judgments, and its potentialities as an elicitor of aesthetic pleasure. The papers also discuss the vocabulary and uses of disgust in life (Galli, actors, witches, homosexuals) and in many literary genres: ancient theater, oratory, satire, poetry, medicine, historiography, Hellenistic didactic and fable, and the Roman novel. The Introduction addresses key methodological issues concerning the nature of the emotion, its cognitive structure, and modern approaches to it. It also outlines the differences between ancient and modern disgust and emphasizes the appropriateness of "projective or second-level disgust" (vilification) as a means of marginalizing unwanted types of behavior and stigmatizing morally condemnable categories of individuals. The volume is addressed first to scholars who work in the field of classics, but, since texts involving disgust also exhibit significant cultural variation, the essays will attract the attention of scholars who work in a wide spectrum of disciplines, including history, social psychology, philosophy, anthropology, comparative literature, and cross-cultural studies.

Herodotus is the epochal authority who inaugurated the European and Western consciousness of collective identity, whether in an awareness of other societies and of the nature of cultural variation itself or in the fashioning of Greek self-awareness - and necessarily that of later civilizations in?uenced by the ancient Greeks - which was perpetually in dialogue and tension with other ways of living in groups. In this book, 14 contributors explore ethnicity - the very self-understanding of belonging to a separate body of human beings - and how it evolves and consolidates (or ethnogenesis). This inquiry is focussed through the lens of Herodotus as our earliest master of ethnography, in this instance not only as the stylized portrayal of other societies, but also as an exegesis on how ethnocultural di?erentiation may a?ect the lives, and even the very existence, of one's own people. Ethnicity and Identity in Herodotus is one facet of a project that intends to bring Portuguese and English-speaking scholars of antiquity into closer cooperation. It has united a cross-section of North American classicists with a distinguished cohort of Portuguese and Brazilian experts on Greek literature and history writing in English.