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An engaging look at the founder of one of the most important
philosophical schools of ancient Greece. The ancient philosopher
Diogenes—nicknamed "The Dog" and decried by Plato as a "Socrates
gone mad"—was widely praised and idealized as much as he was
mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculptors and painters
since the Renaissance, his notoriety is equally due to his
infamously eccentric behavior, scorn of conventions, and biting
aphorisms, and to the role he played in the creation of the Cynic
school, which flourished from the 4th century B.C. to the Christian
era. In this book, Jean-Manuel Roubineau paints a new portrait of
an atypical philosopher whose life left an indelible mark on the
Western collective imagination and whose philosophy courses through
various schools of thought well beyond antiquity. Roubineau sifts
through the many legends and apocryphal stories that surround the
life of Diogenes. Was he, the son of a banker, a counterfeiter in
his hometown of Sinope? Did he really meet Alexander the Great? Was
he truly an apologist for incest, patricide, and anthropophagy? And
how did he actually die? To answer these questions, Roubineau
retraces the known facts of Diogenes' existence. Beyond the
rehashed clichés, this book inspires us to rediscover Diogenes'
philosophical legacy—whether it be the challenge to the
established order, the detachment from materialism, the choice of a
return to nature, or the formulation of a cosmopolitan ideal
strongly rooted in the belief that virtue is better revealed in
action than in theory.
The political allegiances of major Roman poets have been
notoriously difficult to pin down, in part because they often shift
the onus of political interpretation from themselves to their
readers. By the same token, it is often difficult to assess their
authorial powerplays in the etymologies, puns, anagrams,
telestichs, and acronyms that feature prominently in their poetry.
It is the premise of this volume that the contexts of composition,
performance, and reception play a critical role in constructing
poetic voices as either politically favorable or dissenting, and
however much the individual scholars in this volume disagree among
themselves, their readings try to do justice collectively to
poetry's power to shape political realities. The book is aimed not
only at scholars of Roman poetry, politics, and philosophy, but
also at those working in later literary and political traditions
influenced by Rome's greatest poets.
Questions about how ancient Greek texts establish their authority,
reflect on each other, and project their own truths have become
central for a wide range of recent critical discourses. In this
volume, an influential group of international scholars examines
these themes in a variety of poetic and rhetorical genres. The
result is a series of striking and original readings from different
critical perspectives that display the centrality of these
questions for understanding the poetic and rhetorical aims of
ancient Greek texts. Characterized by a combination of close
attention to philological detail and theoretical sophistication,
the essays in this volume make a compelling case for this kind of
focused, critically informed dialogue about the nature of ancient
textual praxis. Students of classical literature will find a wealth
of critical insights and challenging new readings of many familiar
texts.
The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BCE), though often
despised for his materialism, hedonism, and denial of the
immortality of the soul during many periods of history, has at the
same time been a source of inspiration to figures as diverse as
Vergil, Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, and Bentham. This volume offers
authoritative discussions of all aspects of Epicurus's philosophy
and then traces out some of its most important subsequent
influences throughout the Western intellectual tradition. Such a
detailed and comprehensive study of Epicureanism is especially
timely given the tremendous current revival of interest in Epicurus
and his rivals, the Stoics. The thirty-one contributions in this
volume offer an unmatched resource for all those wishing to deepen
their knowledge of Epicurus' powerful arguments about happiness,
death, and the nature of the material world and our place in it. At
the same time, his arguments are carefully placed in the context of
ancient and subsequent disputes, thus offering readers the
opportunity of measuring Epicurean arguments against a wide range
of opponents—from Platonists, Aristotelians and Stoics, to Hegel
and Nietzsche, and finally on to such important contemporary
philosophers as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams. The volume
offers separate and detailed discussions of two fascinating and
ongoing sources of Epicurean arguments, the Herculaneum papyri and
the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Our understanding of
Epicureanism is continually being enriched by these new sources of
evidence and the contributors to this volume have been able to make
use of them in presenting the most current understanding of
Epicurus's own views. By the same token, the second half of the
volume is devoted to the extraordinary influence of Epicurean
doctrines, often either neglected or misunderstood, in literature,
political thinking, scientific innovation, personal conceptions of
freedom and happiness, and in philosophy generally. Taken together,
the contributions in this volume offer the most comprehensive and
detailed account of Epicurus and Epicureanism available in English.
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