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287 results in Classical philosophy

Page 1 of 15

‘Anonymus Iamblichi’

Contemplation and Society in Plato and Aristotle
  • Dominic Scott
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • This Element concerns the civic value of contemplation in Plato and Aristotle: how does intellectual contemplation contribute to the happiness of the ideal state? The texts discussed include the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, works in which contemplation is viewed from a political angle. The Element concludes that in the Republic contemplation has purely instrumental value, whereas in the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics it has purely intrinsic value. To do justice to the complexity of the issues involved, the author addresses a broader question about the nature of civic happiness: whether it is merely the aggregate of individual happiness or an organic quality that arises from the structure of the state. Answering this question has implications for how contemplation contributes to civic happiness. The Element also discusses how many citizens Plato and Aristotle expected to be engaged in contemplation in the ideal state.

Aristotle on Accidental Causation
  • Tyler Huismann
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • In this major new study, Tyler Huismann connects Aristotle's natural philosophy to modern theories of causation and provides fresh interpretations of classic issues. He links two of the most important notions in Aristotle's philosophy, accidents and causes, and using the concept of accidental causation as a guide, argues for ground-breaking proposals on some of the most foundational areas of Aristotle's thought: the relation between substances and accidents, the nature of efficient causation, the workings of 'qua,' the possibility of uncaused events, and the role of accidental causation in the natural world. Structured around close readings of Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics and informed by contemporary theories of causation, Huismann's book offers students an accessible treatment of some of Aristotle's core texts, and provides specialists with a series of provocative interpretations.

Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World
  • Faces of Being and Mirrors of Intellect
  • Mateusz Stróżyński
  • Published online:
    03 September 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • In this study, Mateusz Stróżyński offers an experiential and practical way of understanding Plotinus' thought and philosophy through a focus on the act of contemplation. He argues that contemplation, or direct seeing of the principles of reality, is not merely a part of Plotinus' thought, but rather a significant dimension of it. Moreover, he argues that Plotinus understands metaphysics as a conceptual and propositional description of reality from a third-person perspective, as well as an expression of an experience of that reality from a first-person perspective. Stróżyński focuses on the first phase of the journey to the Good, namely, on the contemplation of the intelligible world: Nature, Soul, and Intellect. He describes the fall of the soul and her return through the lens of the so-called “Great Kinds”: Being, Movement, Rest, Difference, and Identity. Stróżyński also shows how this concept, derived from Plato's Sophist, is creatively used by Plotinus to explain both the loss and the restoration of our ability to contemplate through philosophical practice.

Plato's Gorgias
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by J. Clerk Shaw
  • Published online:
    25 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • Plato's Gorgias depicts a conversation between Socrates and a number of guests, which centers on the question of how one should live. This "choice of lives" is presented both as a choice between philosophy and ordinary political rhetoric, and as a choice between justice and injustice. The essays in this Critical Guide offer detailed analyses of each of the main candidates in the choice of lives, and of how the advocates for these ways of life understand and argue with each other. Several essays also relate the Gorgias to the philosophical and political context of its time and place. Together, these features of the volume illuminate the interpretive issues in the Gorgias and enable readers to achieve a thorough understanding of the philosophical issues which the work raises.

Neoplatonic Pedagogy and the Alcibiades I
  • Crafting the Contemplative
  • James M. Ambury
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • Many philosophers in the ancient world shared a unitary vision of philosophy – meaning 'love of wisdom' – not just as a theoretical discipline, but as a way of life. Specifically, for the late Neoplatonic thinkers, philosophy began with self-knowledge, which led to a person's inner conversion or transformation into a lover, a human being erotically striving toward the totality of the real. This metamorphosis amounted to a complete existential conversion. It was initiated by learned guides who cultivated higher and higher levels of virtue in their students, leading, in the end, to their vision of the Good, or the One. In this book, James M. Ambury closely analyses two central texts in this tradition: the commentaries by Proclus (412–485 AD) and Olympiodorus (495–560 AD) on the Platonic Alcibiades I. Ambury's powerful study illuminates the way philosophy was conceived during a crucial period of its history, in the lecture halls of late antiquity.

Conceptualising Concepts in Greek Philosophy
  • Edited by Gábor Betegh, Voula Tsouna
  • Published online:
    25 April 2024
    Print publication:
    02 May 2024
  • Concepts are basic features of rationality. Debates surrounding them have been central to the study of philosophy in the medieval and modern periods, as well as in the analytical and Continental traditions. This book studies ancient Greek approaches to the various notions of concept, exploring the early history of conceptual theory and its associated philosophical debates from the end of the archaic age to the end of antiquity. When and how did the notion of concept emerge and evolve, what questions were raised by ancient philosophers in the Greco-Roman tradition about concepts, and what were the theoretical presuppositions that made the emergence of a notion of concept possible? The volume furthers our own contemporary understanding of the nature of concepts, concept formation, and concept use. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Plato: Republic Book I
  • Edited with Introduction and Notes by David Sansone
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2024
    Print publication:
    14 September 2023
  • Plato's Republic is a central text in the Western philosophical tradition and also a specimen of its author's exceptional literary and dramatic skill. The first book introduces, and conspicuously fails to answer, the question: What is justice? It also introduces the sophist Thrasymachus, who is quite certain that he knows what justice is, namely that it is nothing other than what the dominant power in the state considers to be in its own interest. The contentious confrontation between Thrasymachus and Socrates sets the stage for Plato's controversial construction of an ideal state in which the true nature of justice will be revealed. The Commentary draws attention to the way Plato anticipates developments in later books, thus serving as an introduction to Republic as a whole. Particular attention is paid to Plato's language and style, so that students of Greek literature as well as philosophy are well served.

Epicurean Justice
  • Nature, Agreement, and Virtue
  • Jan Maximilian Robitzsch
  • Published online:
    07 March 2024
    Print publication:
    14 March 2024
  • The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and his followers advanced a sophisticated theory of justice that occupied a middle position between Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and some Sophists, on the other. They held that justice is neither fully natural nor fully conventional, that there is a robust virtue of justice, and that it is always better to be just than to be unjust, but it is not always better to obey the laws. In this book, the first English-language monograph on the topic, Jan Maximilian Robitzsch draws on a range of sources including papyrological evidence to give a comprehensive account of Epicurean justice. He shows how it relates to Epicurean philosophy as a whole and discusses to what extent it can be seen to anticipate modern positions such as contractarianism and legal positivism.

Reconstructing Empedocles' Thought
  • Chiara Ferella
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • To understand Empedocles' thought, one must view his work as a unified whole of religion and physics. Only a few interpreters, however, recognise rebirth as a positive doctrine within Empedocles' physics and attempt to reconcile its details with the cosmological account. This study shows how rebirth underlies Empedocles' cosmic system, being a structuring principle of his physics. It reconstructs the proem to his physical poem and then shows that claims to disembodied existence, individual identity and personal survival of death(s) prove central to his physics; that knowledge of the cosmos is the path to escape rebirth; that purifications are essential to comprehending the world and changing one's being, and that the cosmic cycle, with its ethical import, is the ideal backdrop for Empedocles' doctrine of rebirth. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Aristotle's Ontology of Artefacts
  • Marilù Papandreou
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • It is commonly believed that Aristotle merely uses artefacts as examples or analogical cases. This book, however, shows that Aristotle gives a specific, coherent account of artefacts that in various ways owes much to Plato. Moreover, it proposes a new, definitive solution to the problem of artefacts' substantiality, which comprises two controversial positions: (i) that Aristotle holds a binary view of substantiality according to which artefacts are not substances at all; (ii) that artefacts fail to be substances because they exhibit less of a unity than natural wholes. Finally, responding to the contemporary debate on ordinary objects, the book identifies the main propositions for an ontology of artefacts that aspires to use Aristotle as its authority and can serve as a guideline for current metaphysical discussions. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Medicine and Practical Ethics in Galen
  • Sophia Xenophontos
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    04 January 2024
  • Galen was notable in the ancient world for his creative intermingling of medicine and practical ethics. This book is the first authoritative analysis of Galen's psychological and ethical works alongside a large number of his technical tracts, both medical and philosophical, and offers a robust framework through which we can comprehend his role as a practical ethicist - an aspect of his intellectual profile that has been little understood until now. Sophia Xenophontos explores a wide range of literature on moralia in the Roman imperial period, as well as topics including the pathology of emotions, the social role of medicine, and character formation and social ethics, to show the sophisticated and complex ways in which moral themes and controversies from antiquity were adapted and reinvigorated by Galen. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A Less Familiar Plato
  • From Phaedo to Philebus
  • Kevin Corrigan
  • Published online:
    26 October 2023
    Print publication:
    09 November 2023
  • In this book, Kevin Corrigan sheds light on aspects of Plato's thought that are less familiar to contemporary readers. He reveals a Plato who believes in Forms but is not essentialist, who develops a scientific view of perception in the middle and late dialogues, and who offers positive models of art and science. Corrigan shows how Plato articulates a broader view of intelligible reality in which embodiment is affirmative and the mind-soul-body continuum has an eidetic structure, and where even failure and the imperfect are included. He also demonstrates that Plato developed an ideal, yet finely layered view of love that provided a practical guide throughout antiquity; and that the dialogues and unwritten teachings can be understood in a mutually open-ended, non-antagonistic way. Corrigan's book provides a guide to Plato in an unexpected key and poses important questions regarding imagination, divine inspiration, and Forms and the Good, among other topics.

The Cambridge Companion to the Sophists
  • Edited by Joshua Billings, Christopher Moore
  • Published online:
    23 December 2023
    Print publication:
    19 October 2023
  • The Classical Greek sophists – Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, and Antiphon, among others – are some of the most important figures in the flourishing of linguistic, historical, and philosophical reflection at the time of Socrates. They are also some of the most controversial: what makes the sophists distinctive, and what they contributed to fifth-century intellectual culture, has been hotly debated since the time of Plato. They have often been derided as reactionaries, relativists or cynically superficial thinkers, or as mere opportunists, making money from wealthy democrats eager for public repute. This volume takes a fresh perspective on the sophists – who really counted as one; how distinctive they were; and what kind of sense later thinkers made of them. In three sections, contributors address the sophists' predecessors and historical and professional context; their major intellectual themes, including language, ethics, society, and religion; and their reception from the fourth century BCE to modernity.

Ancient Women Philosophers
  • Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives
  • Edited by Katharine R. O'Reilly, Caterina Pellò
  • Published online:
    17 August 2023
    Print publication:
    31 August 2023
  • 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.

Plato's Moral Realism
  • Lloyd P. Gerson
  • Published online:
    28 July 2023
    Print publication:
    24 August 2023
  • Plato's moral realism rests on the Idea of the Good, the unhypothetical first principle of all. It is this, as Plato says, that makes just things useful and beneficial. That Plato makes the first principle of all the Idea of the Good sets his approach apart from that of virtually every other philosopher. This fact has been occluded by later Christian Platonists who tried to identify the Good with the God of scripture. But for Plato, theology, though important, is subordinate to metaphysics. For this reason, ethics is independent of theology and attached to metaphysics. This book challenges many contemporary accounts of Plato's ethics that start with the so-called Socratic paradoxes and attempt to construct a psychology of action or moral psychology that makes these paradoxes defensible. Rather, Lloyd Gerson argues that Plato at least never thought that moral realism was defensible outside of a metaphysical framework.

How Plato Writes
  • Perspectives and Problems
  • Malcolm Schofield
  • Published online:
    27 July 2023
    Print publication:
    17 August 2023
  • Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narratives. In this book, world-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield illustrates the variety of the literary resources that Plato deploys to achieve his philosophical purposes. He draws key passages for discussion particularly, but not only, from Republic and the less well-known Laws and also shows how reconstructing the original historical context of a dialogue and of its assumed readership is essential to understanding Plato's approach. The book will open the eyes of readers of all levels of expertise to Plato's masterly ability as a writer and how an understanding of this is crucial if we are to appreciate his philosophy.

Plato's Charmides
  • Raphael Woolf
  • Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • Plato's Charmides is a rich mix of drama and argument. Raphael Woolf offers a comprehensive interpretation of its disparate elements that pays close attention to its complex and layered structure, and to the methodology of reading Plato. He thus aims to present a compelling and unified interpretation of the dialogue as a whole. The book mounts a strong case for the formal separation of Plato the author from his character Socrates, and for the Charmides as a Platonic defence of the written text as a medium for philosophical reflection. It lays greater emphasis than other readings on the centrality of eros to an understanding of Socratic procedure in the Charmides, and on how the dialogue's erotic and medical motifs work together. The book's critical engagement with the dialogue allows a worked-out account to be given of how temperance, the central object of enquiry in the work, is to be conceived.

Cicero's ‘De Officiis'
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Raphael Woolf
  • Published online:
    15 June 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • Cicero's De Officiis, perhaps his most influential philosophical work, ranges over a wide variety of themes, from the role of the family in society to the question of whether our duties can conflict with one another, and from the moral significance of offence to the question of whether it is right to kill a dictator. This Critical Guide, the first collection of essays devoted to the work, is helpfully organised in thematic sections and aims to illuminate both the main individual topics of De Officiis and their interconnections, with essays by an international team of contributors that will allow readers to appreciate the work's distinctive blend of philosophical theory and social and political reality. It will be valuable for a range of readers in fields including philosophy, classics and political theory.

Aristotle on Happiness, Virtue, and Wisdom
  • Bryan C. Reece
  • Published online:
    15 June 2023
    Print publication:
    29 June 2023
  • Aristotle thinks that happiness is an activity – it consists in doing something – rather than a feeling. It is the best activity of which humans are capable and is spread out over the course of a life. But what kind of activity is it? Some of his remarks indicate that it is a single best kind of activity, intellectual contemplation. Other evidence suggests that it is an overarching activity that has various virtuous activities, ethical and intellectual, as parts. Numerous interpreters have sharply disagreed about Aristotle's answers to such questions. In this book, Bryan Reece offers a fundamentally new approach to determining what kind of activity Aristotle thinks happiness is, one that challenges widespread assumptions that have until now prevented a dialectically satisfactory interpretation. His approach displays the boldness and systematicity of Aristotle's practical philosophy.

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