There is a difference between being a philosopher and mastering the technical aspects of philosophy. The technician is at home with axioms and abstract problems. Although the philosopher can weave his way through apparently pathless conundra, the conundra are not the philosopher’s home; his home is reality: the τὸ τί ἐστι (being of things) that tend toward ὁ ἀγαθός (the good) and ἡ ἀλήθεια (the truth). When Boethius was unjustly condemned to death, he was a blind man when it came to reality: despite his technical prowess, he was stumped by the problem of evil. The Consolatio is an account of the ascent of the mind of a technician imprisoned by the painful experience of injustice to the mind of the philosopher who can see Providence at work in creation.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical dialogue in the “prosimetric” or mixed form (prose and poetry), has attracted broad literary and philosophical readerships in both the Latin West and Greek East from the ninth century on. The two readerships, however, have not regularly overlapped or engaged with one another in their respective efforts to interpret the work. The purposes of this study are to enable a more informed appreciation of the philosophical implications of its more “literary” books (I–II) and the literary significance of its more transparently philosophical ones (III–V), and to bring its overall architecture into clearer focus. To these ends, a case is made at the outset for the complete state of the transmitted text of the work.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most influential texts in medieval Europe. Yet it does not receive enough attention in contemporary scholarship on medieval philosophy. This is in part explained by the content and literary form of the Consolation. The direct influence of Plato and late antique Neoplatonism, the dialogue form, the alternating prose and poetry sections, and the wealth of references to classical literature and mythology contrast sharply with the sort of texts most contemporary scholars of medieval philosophy focus on. The essays in this volume tackle these interpretive challenges and reveal some of the rich philosophical insights the Consolation offers. Chapters 1–3 directly address its literary features and their philosophical significance. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the relationship between the Consolation and Boethius’ Christianity. Chapters 6–8 offer three different takes on the philosophy of selfhood, or philosophical anthropology, so central to the Consolation. Chapters 9–13 deal with the more standard metaphysical and theological issues, such as Boethius’ accounts of goodness, being, God, time, eternity, and human freedom.

Nietzsche’s late text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has an important formal aim: to release images from the demands of reason. It also has a moral aim – to release the human will from its enslavement to preordained images, including from the image of itself. What would an image be for which its viewer still had to be invented? for which its viewer was being invented – in the image itself? This is the adventure of Nietzsche’s major work, which, like some literary works, is drunk with images, but they take a certain path of development, from knowing images to willing images. Instead of an image that presents knowledge for a knower, Nietzsche, through trial and error, develops a “willing image,” which first has a negative task, to liberate the will from its tie to established knowledge. But across the momentous book he also gradually sets aside images that stimulate an already existing will. The aim of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is thus like the aim of some literature, to give desire, wishing, wanting, hoping, and loving a new landscape in which it can change its genre and its objects, where it can learn to self-determine.

This chapter places Carnap in the history of twentieth-century philosophy by pointing out different tensions in canon formation of philosophy. It also introduces key concepts and notions of the volume, along with chapter summaries.

Frederick Denison Maurice’s writings on the history of philosophy, from his 1839 Encyclopaedia Metropolitana article on ‘Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy’ to the various iterations of the multi-volume book that grew out of this text, are a vital and underappreciated aspect of his life’s work. Maurice ran together an idiosyncratic reading of the Old Testament with his marginally less wilful view of ancient Greek philosophy to provide a unique answer to the question of how biblical and classical heritages might be reconciled by Christians. But his history did more than this, building on the ideas of Coleridge to trace essential connections between philosophy, morality, and politics and telling a story about the development of the family, the nation, and the church, in a way that provides distinctive insight into Maurice’s core commitments. The resulting narrative was also capacious enough to change emphasis over different editions, most obviously as Maurice’s interest in various other global religious and intellectual traditions grew, and he began to seek a history that was more about the place of Anglicanism in the world, and not simply about its place in the polity.

This chapter, which serves as the introduction, outlines the objectives and key questions of the volume, reviews existing scholarship on ancient women philosophers, and highlights the original philosophical contributions of each chapter. A substantial section is devoted to the specific challenges in the study of ancient women philosophers, with special focus on source issues, as well as the methods the contributors of the volume have adopted to face these challenges and approach these female thinkers philosophically. We argue that the study of ancient women philosophers has a special value for our understanding of the history of philosophy. While at first daunting, this unique set of thinkers and the available evidence both enrich our insight into the methodology of the history of philosophy and re-introduce philosophical contributions which would otherwise be lost.

Arete of Cyrene was daughter and disciple of the founder of the Cyrenaic school and mother and teacher of the figure who codified its principles. Our sources emphasize her as a link in the intellectual chain connecting the school it its Socratic roots, to the detriment of preserving her own philosophical ideas. In this chapter, I make a case for her philosophical contribution to the Cyrenaics, as revealed in a careful reading of the few sources we have. I follow this with methodological reflections on how we might access a figure like Arete. I argue that this task requires and licenses the adoption of severed methodological strategies related to an added open-mindedness to source material. I reflect on how these methodological points contribute to a wider project of recovering the thought of marginalized figures.

This chapter considers the place of Jacobi’s thought within the history of philosophy. Despite the prominent dismissal of his thought as unsystematic, misologist, and effectively incompatible with scientific philosophy, Jacobi’s critique of rationalist philosophy aptly situates him within the tradition of philosophical skepticism.

This chapter reexamines the question of Caesar’s putative Epicureanism. While there is no reason to believe that Caesar was a committed Epicurean, there exist tantalizing pieces of evidence that he may have adopted for himself a version of the tenet that “death is nothing to us.” These include his observation, in his speech about the convicted Catilinarians (as reported by Sallust), that death is not a punishment but the endpoint of all experience, and his late-in-life statement (versions of which are found in Cicero’s Pro Marcello and in Suetonius) that he had “lived enough.” The chapter concludes by considering the criteria scholars typically employ for gauging philosophical affiliation in antiquity, arguing for a broadening of definitions and for considering even a some-time Epicurean as Caesar as part of the history of Epicureanism.

Returns to Cassirer’s notion of function to argue that it continuously informs his conception of philosophy. Cassirer first develops this notion in his 1910 work Substance and Function: the mathematical idea of a function connects disparate elements under a variable rule, establishing a unity through diversity (8.1). Subsequently, his early historical writings (1906‒1919) invoke the idea of a functional unity in order to explain the continuity and progress in the history of thought while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of each historical epoch (8.2). Cassirer’s mature, systematic, writings (1923‒1942) reconcile the unity of human culture and the synchronic diversity of our cultural domains by means of the same idea (8.3). Finally, the ethical reflections that we find in Cassirer’s latest writings (1935‒1946) are also rooted in this ‘functional conception of philosophy’ (8.4).

Explains how Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant and his analysis of Dasein relate to the primary interest of his philosophical enterprise: the retrieval of the question of being. The introduction to Being and Time indicates that these three projects formally presuppose one another because Heidegger weds the ontological task of philosophy to its phenomenological and hermeneutical method (9.1). At the same time, this threefold conception of philosophy – ontology, phenomenology, hermeneutics – establishes a hermeneutic situation that informed Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant and Dasein (9.2). Heidegger admits to the circularity of this philosophical procedure, but defends it by distinguishing between a formal, a philosophical, and a factual ‘starting point’ of the ‘hermeneutical circle’ (9.3). At stake here is the relation between Dasein and philosophy, as well as Heidegger's contested choice to approach the meaning of being via our own existence.

This is the preliminary section to the structural history presented in Part I. It briefly describes the pan-European aversion to speculative and systematic philosophising c.1700, and contrasts it with the situation two centuries earlier. It asks how this remarkable transformation came about.