This volume explores the tremendous influence of Plato's Phaedrus on the philosophical, religious, scientific and literary discussions in the West. Ranging from Plato's first readers, over the Church Fathers and the Platonic commentators, to Byzantine and Renaissance thinkers, the papers collected here introduce the reader to the first two millennia of the dialogue's reception history. Thirteen contributions by both junior and established scholars study the engagement with the Phaedrus by such major figures as Aristotle, Galen, Origen, Clemens of Alexandria, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Psellus, Ficino, Erasmus, and many others. Together, they cover the wide range of topics discussed in the dialogue: the value of myth and allegory, religion and theology, love and beauty, the soul and its immortality, teaching and learning, metaphysics and epistemology, rhetoric and dialectic, as well as the role and the limits of writing. By placing the dialogue in this broad perspective, the volume will appeal to readers interested in the Phaedrus itself, as well as to classicists, literary theorists, and historians of philosophy, science and religion concerned with the dialogue's reception history and its main protagonists.

Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur: Between Text and Phenomenon calls attention to the dynamic interaction that takes place between hermeneutics and phenomenology in Ricoeur's thought. It could be said that Ricoeur's thought is placed under a twofold demand: between the rigor of the text and the requirements of the phenomenon. The rigor of the text calls for fidelity to what the text actually says, while the requirement of the phenomenon is established by the Husserlian call to return "to the things themselves." These two demands are interwoven insofar as there is a hermeneutic component of the phenomenological attempt to go beyond the surface of things to their deeper meaning, just as there is a phenomenological component of the hermeneutic attempt to establish a critical distance toward the world to which we belong. For this reason, Ricoeur's thought involves a back and forth movement between the text and the phenomenon. Although this double movement was a theme of many of Ricoeur's essays in the middle of his career, the essays in this book suggest that hermeneutic phenomenology remains implicit throughout his work. The chapters aim to highlight, in much greater detail, how this back and forth movement between phenomenology and hermeneutics takes place with respect to many important philosophical themes, including the experience of the body, history, language, memory, personal identity, and intersubjectivity.

Plato's Phaedo has never failed to attract the attention of philosophers and scholars. Yet the history of its reception in Antiquity has been little studied. The present volume therefore proposes to examine not only the Platonic exegetical tradition surrounding this dialogue, which culminates in the commentaries of Damascius and Olympiodorus, but also its place in the reflections of the rival Peripatetic, Stoic, and Sceptical schools. This volume thus aims to shed light on the surviving commentaries and their sources, as well as on less familiar aspects of the history of the Phaedo's ancient reception. By doing so, it may help to clarify what ancient interpreters of Plato can and cannot offer their contemporary counterparts.

The “Re-Inventing Organic Metaphors for the Social Sciences� is a volume with the specific goal: to challenge psychological understandings by connecting psychological approaches with  multidimensional perspectives of various other scientific streams, meanwhile imbedding the generated knowledge in metaphors that allows researchers to follow  phenomena into a deeper and more (w)holistic understanding of its appearance. This is particularly important when the humankind faces challenges due to systemic biological changes, as the phenomenological dynamics bonded to those challenges can be conserved in appropriated context. For this purpose, the organic metaphors  are introduced. A tool that has central advantage over mechanical metaphors as it can capture the complex and open-systemic nature of biological, psychological, and social phenomena.  For example—the widely used notion “mind as a computer� may be more productively replaced by “mind as a membrane�—with implications (e.g. focus on borders in-between, or in systems in themselves- exosystemic realities in our world). There are many other fertile opportunities not yet explored in the realms of psychology and other sciences.  Furthermore, the contributors  operated also as cross-reviewers for each other’s. In this occasion a new dimension, in chapter construction, will be introduced. Beside the traditional reviewing of another paper the reviewer has been asked to add a small list of extending questions toward the reviewed paper. These added questions have been introduced as potential questions that the authors were demanded to add into a final sub-chapter of their contribution. The subchapter has been titled as “Dialogue� (the author was free to select between the questions and ideas on those they believe could inhabit an especially worth for the future readers).