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Despite the common misconception that ancient philosophy was the domain of male thinkers, sources confirm that ancient women engaged in philosophical activity. Bringing together a collection of essays on ancient women thinkers, with special focus on their ideas and contributions to the history of philosophy, this volume is about the earliest women philosophers, their breakthroughs, and the methods we can use to excavate them. The essays survey the methodological strategies we can use to approach the surviving evidence, retrieve the largely unresearched thought and the original ideas of ancient women philosophers, and carve out a space for them in the canon. The broad focus includes women thinkers in ancient Indian, Chinese, and Arabic philosophy as well as in the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions. The volume will be valuable for a wide range of researchers, teachers, and students of ancient philosophy.
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.
Scholars tend to assume that the mathematical sciences and philosophy were distinct disciplines in antiquity, as they are today. From the fourth century B.C.E. onward, mathematicians and philosophers did distinguish themselves. They criticized each other’s work and, in some areas of the Greek world, strong rivalries developed between philosophers and mathematicians. I argue, however, that the distinction between philosophers and mathematicians did not entail that their fields of inquiry were distinct. This chapter examines the relationship between the mathematical sciences and philosophy from the perspective of the practitioners of the mathematical sciences, in particular, Archytas of Tarentum, Hero of Alexandria, and Claudius Ptolemy. I argue that these practitioners viewed the relationship between the mathematical sciences and philosophy as more complex, where the mathematical sciences are not only in relation to philosophy but, even stronger, forms of philosophy. Moreover, the mathematical sciences answer some of the most fundamental questions of philosophy, e.g., how to obtain knowledge, how to form a just society, and how to attain the good life.
According to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the scandal of modern philosophy is not that it has attempted unsuccessfully to prove the reality of the objective world, but that it has failed to offer the kind of knowledge that "essentially relates to existence". Søren Kierkegaard's affinity for ancient philosophy is widely recognized. Among Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authors, "Johannes Climacus" is one who seems to be especially preoccupied with this contrast between ancient Greek and modern European philosophy. For instance, Climacus alludes to the Greeks as proof that "inwardness" and "subjectivity" can exist outside of Christianity. He is not trying to change the subject, but he is trying to change the nature of the conversation. The plea for "essential knowing" is nothing other than an attempt to return philosophy, the love of wisdom, to a focus on wisdom as a "form of understanding that unites a reflective attitude and a practical concern".
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