SUNY in Ancient Greek Philosophy
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Conflict in Aristotle's Political Philosophy
by Steven C. Skultety
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Offers a careful analysis of how Aristotle understands civil war, partisanship, distrust in government, disagreement, and competition, and explores ways in which these views are relevant to contemporary political theory.
Do only modern thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes accept that conflict plays a significant role in the origin and maintenance of political community? In this book, Steven Skultety argues that Aristotle not only took conflict to be an inevitable aspect of political life, but further recognized ways in which conflict promotes the common good. While many scholars treat Aristotelian conflict as an absence of substantive communal ideals, Skultety argues that Aristotle articulated a view of politics that theorizes profoundly different kinds of conflict. Aristotle comprehended the subtle factors that can lead otherwise peaceful citizens to contemplate outright civil war, grasped the unique conditions that create hopelessly implacable partisans, and systematized tactics rulers could use to control regrettable, but still manageable, levels of civic distrust. Moreover, Aristotle conceived of debate, enduring disagreement, social rivalries, and competitions for leadership as an indispensable part of how human beings live well together in successful political life. By exploring the ways in which citizens can be at odds with one another, Conflict in Aristotle's Political Philosophy presents a dimension of ancient Greek thought that is startlingly relevant to contemporary concerns about social divisions, constitutional crises, and the range of acceptable conflict in healthy democracies.
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Logoi and Muthoi
by Various Authors
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Essays on Greek philosophy and literature from Homer and Hesiod to Aristotle.
In Logoi and Muthoi, William Wians builds on his earlier volume Logos and Muthos, highlighting the richness and complexity of these terms that were once set firmly in opposition to one another as reason versus myth or rationality versus irrationality. It was once common to think of intellectual history representing a straightforward progression from mythology to rationality. These volumes, however, demonstrate the value of taking the two together, opening up and analyzing a range of interactions, reactions, tensions, and ambiguities arising between literary and philosophical forms of discourse, including philosophical themes in works not ordinarily considered in the canon of Greek philosophical texts. This new volume considers such topics as the pre-philosophical origins of Anaximander's calendar, the philosophical significance of public performance and claims of poetic inspiration, and the complex role of mythic figures (including perhaps Socrates) in Plato. Taken together, the essays offer new approaches to familiar texts and open up new possibilities for understanding the roles and relationships between muthos and logos in ancient Greek thought.
William Wians is Professor of Philosophy at Merrimack College. His books include Logos and Muthos: Philosophical Essays in Greek Literature, also published by SUNY Press, and Reading Aristotle: Argument and Exposition (coedited with Ron Polansky).
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One Over Many
by Necip Fikri Alican
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Corrective intervention in Plato's metaphysics replacing the standard view of Plato as a metaphysical dualist with a novel and revolutionary paradigm of unitary pluralism in a single reality built on ontological diversity.
One over Many is a groundbreaking interpretation of Plato's philosophical outlook, solving longstanding problems in the scholarly literature. Its originality and its strength consist in replacing the metaphysical dualism of the traditional interpretation with the paradigm of unitary pluralism: one world with a gradation of reality, including three different types of Forms, as well as the entire spectrum of sensible phenomena, with intermediate ontological constructs in between. The model thus combines a monism of worlds with a pluralism of things, positing a unitary reality of infinite possibilities through ontological stratification. This tightly integrated collection of essays, conceived and developed by the author in pursuit of corrective intervention in Plato's metaphysics, combines his previously published work with newly drafted material for the present volume. The book replaces the standard view of Plato as a metaphysical dualist with a novel interpretation providing greater explanatory power through the paradigm of unitary pluralism in a single reality built on ontological diversity.
Necip Fikri Alican is a philosopher specializing in ethics and metaphysics, both especially from a historical perspective.
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Plato's Laughter
by Sonja Madeleine Tanner
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Counters the long-standing, solemn interpretation of Plato's dialogues with one centered on the philosophical and pedagogical significance of Socrates as a comic figure.
Plato was described as a boor and it was said that he never laughed out loud. Yet his dialogues abound with puns, jokes, and humor. Sonja Madeleine Tanner argues that in Plato's dialogues Socrates plays a comical hero who draws heavily from the tradition of comedy in ancient Greece, but also reforms laughter to be applicable to all persons and truly shaming to none. Socrates introduces a form of self-reflective laughter that encourages, rather than stifles, philosophical inquiry. Laughter in the dialogues-both explicit and implied-suggests a view of human nature as incongruous with ourselves, simultaneously falling short of, and superseding, our own capacities. What emerges is a picture of human nature that bears a striking resemblance to Socrates' own, laughable depiction, one inspired by Dionysus, but one that remains ultimately intractable. The book analyzes specific instances of laughter and the comical from the Apology, Laches, Charmides, Cratylus, Euthydemus, and the Symposium to support this, and to further elucidate the philosophical consequences of recognizing Plato's laughter.
Sonja Madeleine Tanner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and the author of In Praise of Plato's Poetic Imagination.
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The Parthenon and Liberal Education
by Geoff Lehman
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Discusses the importance of the early history of Greek mathematics to education and civic life through a study of the Parthenon and dialogues of Plato.
The Parthenon and Liberal Education seeks to restore the study of mathematics to its original place of prominence in the liberal arts. To build this case, Geoff Lehman and Michael Weinman turn to Philolaus, a near contemporary of Socrates. The authors demonstrate the influence of his work involving number theory, astronomy, and harmonics on Plato's Republic and Timaeus, and outline its resonance with the program of study in the early Academy and with the architecture of the Parthenon. Lehman and Weinman argue that the Parthenon can be seen as the foremost embodiment of the practical working through of mathematical knowledge in its time, serving as a mediator between the early reception of Ancient Near-Eastern mathematical ideas and their integration into Greek thought as a form of liberal education, as the latter came to be defined by Plato and his followers. With its Doric architecture characterized by symmetria (commensurability) and harmonia (harmony; joining together), concepts explored contemporaneously by Philolaus, the Parthenon engages dialectical thought in ways that are of enduring relevance for the project of liberal education.
Geoff Lehman is on the faculty of Art History at Bard College Berlin. Michael Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin and the author of Language, Time, and Identity in Woolf's The Waves: The Subject in Empire's Shadow and Pleasure in Aristotle's Ethics.
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Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis
by David Roochnik
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An urgent, contemporary defense of Aristotle
In 1935, Edmund Husserl delivered his now famous lecture "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity," in which he argued that the "misguided rationalism" of modern Western science, dominated by the model of mathematical physics, can tell us nothing about the "meaning" of our lives. Today Husserl's conviction that the West faces a crisis is no longer an abstraction. With the ever-present threat of nuclear explosion, the degradation of the oceans, and the possibility that climate change will wreak havoc on civilization itself, people from all walks of life are wondering what has gone so terribly wrong and what remedies might be available.
In Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis, David Roochnik makes a lucid and powerful case that Aristotle offers a philosophical resource that even today can be of significant therapeutic value. Unlike the scientific revolutionaries of the seventeenth century, he insisted that both ordinary language and sense-perception play essential roles in the acquisition of knowledge. Centuries before Husserl, Aristotle was a phenomenologist who demanded that a successful theory remain faithful to human experience. His philosophy can thus provide precisely what modern European rationalism now so painfully lacks: an understanding and appreciation of the world in which human beings actually make their homes.
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Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship
by Suzanne Stern-Gillet
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Charts the stages of the history of friendship as a philosophical concept in the Western world.
Focusing on Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, and early Christian and Medieval sources, Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship brings together assessments of different philosophical accounts of friendship. This volume sketches the evolution of the concept from ancient ideals of friendship applying strictly to relationships between men of high social position to Christian concepts that treat friendship as applicable to all but are concerned chiefly with the soul's relation to God-and that ascribe a secondary status to human relationships. The book concludes with two essays examining how this complex heritage was received during the Enlightenment, looking in particular to Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Hölderlin.
Suzanne Stern-Gillet is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Bolton and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Aristotle's Philosophy of Friendship, also published by SUNY Press. Gary M. Gurtler, S.J. is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He is the author of Plotinus: The Experience of Unity.
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Contemplating Friendship in Aristotle's Ethics
by Ann Ward
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Examines how Aristotle posits political philosophy and the experience of friendship as a means to bind strictly intellectural virtue with morality.
In this book, Ann Ward explores Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, focusing on the progressive structure of the argument. Aristotle begins by giving an account of moral virtue from the perspective of the moral agent, only to find that the account itself highlights fundamental tensions within the virtues that push the moral agent into the realm of intellectual virtue. However, the existence of an intellectual realm separate from the moral realm can lead to lack of self-restraint. Aristotle, Ward argues, locates political philosophy and the experience of friendship as possible solutions to the problem of lack of self-restraint, since political philosophy thinks about the human things in a universal way, and friendship grounds the pursuit of the good which is happiness understood as contemplation. Ward concludes that Aristotle's philosophy of friendship points to the embodied intellect of timocratic friends and mothers in their activity of mothering as engaging in the highest form of contemplation and thus living the happiest life.
Ann Ward is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Politics and International Studies at Campion College at the University of Regina, Canada. She is the author and editor of several books, including Herodotus and the Philosophy of Empire and Socrates and Dionysus: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue.
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On the Good Life
by Cristina Ionescu
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Argues that mediation is a central theme in this Platonic dialogue dedicated to the exploration of what it means to live a good life.
Plato's Philebus continues to fascinate us with its reflections on what it means to live a good life by aiming at the right combination of pleasure and knowledge. In this book, Cristina Ionescu argues that mediation is a central theme in the dialogue. Whether we talk about mediating between distinct ontological levels, between steps of reasoning, between pleasure and knowledge, between distinct types of pleasure, or between concrete circumstances and ideals, the steps in between remain essential to a good life. Focusing on ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical aspects of the dialogue, Ionescu occasionally steps beyond the letter of the text, while remaining faithful to its spirit, as she tries to illuminate what is only hinted at.
Cristina Ionescu is Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. She is the author of Plato's Meno: An Interpretation.
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Otherwise Than the Binary
by Various Authors
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Otherwise Than the Binary approaches canonical texts and concepts in Ancient Greek philosophy and culture that have traditionally been understood, as examples of binary thinking, particularly concerning sexual difference. In contrast to such patriarchal logic, the essays within this volume explore how many of these seemingly strict binaries in ancient culture and thought were far more permeable and philosophically nuanced. Each contribution asks if there are ways of thinking of antiquity differently-namely, to examine canonical works through a lens that expounds and even celebrates philosophies of difference, so as to discover instances where authors of antiquity valorize and uphold the necessity of what has been seen as feminine, foreign, and/or irrational. As contemporary thinkers turn toward new ways of reading antiquity, these selected studies will inspire other readings of ancient texts through new feminist methodologies and critical vantage points. When examining the philosophers and notable figures of antiquity alongside their overt patriarchal and masculinist agendas, readers are invited to rethink their current biases while also questioning how particular ideas and texts are received and read.
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Animals in the World
by Pierre Pellegrin
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In “Animals in the World”, renowned Aristotle scholar Pierre Pellegrin attempts to demonstrate that Aristotle, by proposing an original version of natural perfection, opposes the whole of the Greek tradition. Nature is perfect, not only in its harmony of a complete and well-organized whole, but also because it brings together functionally perfect individuals.
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The Relay Race of Virtue
by William H. F. Altman
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The ancient view that Plato and Xenophon were rivals at least had the merit of allowing them to respond to each other; in modern times, the view that Plato wrote first eliminates the possibility of an exchange between the only two Socratics whose writings are preserved intact. Challenging the chronological assumptions on which Plato's across-the-board priority currently rests, the purpose of “The Relay Race of Virtue” is to show that Plato and Xenophon were responding to each other and that we can gain a greater appreciation for both by recognizing the back-and-forth nature of their friendly dialogue. Instead of regarding Xenophon as Plato's inept copyist, William H. F. Altman presents him as first blazing the trail for his fellow Socratic and then learning from Plato in return. By emphasizing "Plato's Debts to Xenophon," Altman is charitable to both, justifying Socrates' belief (Memorabilia 1.2.8) "that those of his companions who adopted his principles of conduct would throughout life be good friends to him and to each other."
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Opining Beauty Itself
by Naomi Reshotko
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In “Opining Beauty Itself”, Naomi Reshotko examines Plato's discussions of epistemological states that fall short of knowledge. Wary that interpretations of Plato's epistemology often omit a detailed analysis of the way he deploys the epistemological concepts that are inferior to, but often prerequisites for, knowledge, Reshotko argues that we must understand these inferior prerequisite states, especially belief (doxa), before we can understand what Plato thought about knowledge. Examining how recollection provides what is required for inquiry, Reshotko argues that recollection does not afford doxa-let alone what contemporary philosophers call 'true belief.' Rather, recollection is responsible for an ability to refer to that is a condition for every kind of doxa and for knowledge. Reshotko concludes that Plato regards doxa as the fabric of all the other epistemic states that fall short of knowledge and develops a comprehensive view of Plato's deployment of doxa that can serve as a foundation for further interpretation of Plato's epistemology. In the process, Reshotko shows that, for Plato, ordinary people do opine the Forms and can make progress toward knowledge of them, even if that knowledge is never achieved.
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Plato's Reasons
by Christopher W. Tindale
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This book explores Plato's implicit understanding of argumentation by reviewing his standing as a logician, rhetorician, and dialectician. The question of his "standing" on these matters is approached on his terms (gleaned from the dialogues) rather than simply from the judgments of commentators. Traditionally, arguments are distinguished as logical, rhetorical, or dialectical, and the source of these distinctions is taken to be Aristotle. This book proceeds on the assumption that Aristotle's tripartite theory of argumentation did not arise in a vacuum and explores the different degrees to which substantive antecedents of parts of that model can be traced to Plato.
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Politeia
by Various Authors
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Innovative readings and creative reinterpretations of significant works in the field of ancient philosophy.
In classical Greece, the word politeia in its largest sense meant the citizens' engagement with the shared project that is the lived life of their polis, city, civic society. Ancient philosophers, poets, historians, and orators constantly reflected on what this shared project should be and how citizens could participate in it. The chapters in this collection, inspired by the work of Anthony Preus, examine some of the products of their reflections, both the written works themselves and the variety of comparative contexts into which they can be put, from the Greeks' neighboring Asian polities to contemporary philosophical engagements with similar issues. The essays in Politeia hope to inspire readers to think about their own lives in conversation with the lives of the many communities to which we belong-to not only demonstrate the idea of politeia but to bring to life politeia's connection of the individual to the collective, something that seems to be of central importance in a world of division and to be the beating heart of the discipline of philosophy.
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E-Co-Affectivity
by Marjolein Oele
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Offers an interdisciplinary investigation of affectivity in various forms of life.
E-Co-Affectivity is a philosophical investigation of affectivity in various forms of life: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. Combining biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies, Marjolein Oele thinks through the concrete, living places that show the receptive, responsive power of living beings to be affected and to affect. She focuses on these localized interfaces to explain how affectivity emerges in places that are always evolving, creative, porous, and fluid. Every interface is material, but is also "more" than its current materiality in cocreating place, time, and being. After extensively describing the effects of the milieu and community within which each example of affectivity takes place, in the final chapter Oele adds a prescriptive, ethical lens that formulates a new epoch beyond the Anthropocene, one that is sensitive to the larger ecological, communal concerns at stake.
Marjolein Oele is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. She is the coeditor (with Gerard Kuperus) of Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations.
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Topography and Deep Structure in Plato
by Clinton DeBevoise Corcoran
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A literary and historical analysis of the structure and meaning of recurrent symbols, images, and actions employed in Plato's dialogues.
In this book, Clinton DeBevoise Corcoran examines the use of place in Plato's dialogues. Corcoran argues that spatial representations, such as walls, caves, and roads, as well as the creation of eternal patterns and chaotic images in the particular spaces, times, characterizations, and actions of the dialogues, provide clues to Plato's philosophic project. Throughout the dialogues, the Good serves as an overarching ordering principle for the construction of place and the proper limit of spaces, whether they be here in the world, deep in the underworld, or in the nonspatial ideal realm of the Forms. The Good, since it escapes the limits of space and time, equips Plato with a powerful mythopoetic tool to create settings, frames, and arguments that superimpose different dimensions of reality, allowing worlds to overlap that would otherwise be incommensurable. The Good also serves as a powerful ethical tool for evaluating the order of different spaces. Corcoran explores how Plato uses wrestling and war as metaphors for the mixing of the nonspatial, eternal forms in the world and history, and how he uses spatial images throughout the dialogues to critique Athens's tragic overreach in the Peloponnesian War. Far from merely an incidental backdrop in the dialogues, place etches the tragic intersection of the mortal and the immortal, good and evil, and Athens's past, present, and future.
Clinton DeBevoise Corcoran is Professor of Religion and Philosophy at High Point University.
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Eros and the Intoxications of Enlightenment
by Steven Berg
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Provocative reinterpretation of Plato's Symposium.
An original analysis of one of Plato's most well-known and pivotal dialogues, this study is based upon the effort to think together the most manifest themes of the Symposium (the nature of eros and the relation between poetry and philosophy) with its less obvious but no less essential themes (the character of the city and the nature and limitations of sophistic enlightenment). Author Steven Berg offers an interpretation of this dialogue wherein all the speakers at the banquet-with the exception of Socrates-not only offer their views on the nature of love, but represent Athens and the Athenian enlightenment. Accordingly, Socrates' speech, taken in relation to the speeches that precede it, is shown to articulate the relation between Socrates and the Athenian enlightenment, to expose the limitations of that enlightenment, and therefore finally to bring to light the irresolvable tension between Socrates and his philosophy and the city of Athens even at her most enlightened.
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Being Measured
by Mark R. Wheeler
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Advances an interpretation of Aristotle's theory of truth in terms of accurate measurement.
On the basis of careful textual exegesis and philosophical analysis of Aristotle's Metaphysics, Mark R. Wheeler offers a groundbreaking interpretation of Aristotle's theory of truth in terms of measurement. Wheeler demonstrates that Aristotle's investigation of truth and falsehood in the Metaphysics is rigorously methodical, that Aristotle's conceptions of truth contribute to the main lines of thought in the treatise, and that the Metaphysics, taken as a whole, contributes fundamentally to Aristotle's theory of truth. Wheeler provides not only an excellent introduction to the main problems in the theory of truth but also provides contemporary truth theorists with a rigorous explanation of Aristotle's theory of truth.
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Endangered Excellence
by Pierre Pellegrin
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A fresh look at Aristotle's political theory with attention to the resonance of his thought for contemporary concerns.
In Endangered Excellence, Pierre Pellegrin provides a fresh interpretation of Aristotle's Politics, revealing the extent to which Aristotle diverged from other ancient writers on politics, and the extent to which many of his positions resemble modern attitudes in political philosophy. Pellegrin highlights a number of strikingly original positions in his thought. Aristotle took humans to be inherently political, for example, even as he believed this characteristic developed more completely in men than in women, and in Greeks more than in barbarians. He maintained a nuanced and flexible conception of the way that cities ought to develop their constitutions, one that would be responsive to their particular social and historical contexts. Realist enough to recognize that virtuous men are rare and that class conflict is inevitable, Aristotle envisioned a political system that would be resilient in navigating the choppy waters of civic life. With this original approach to Aristotle's Politics, and incorporating key developments in European and English-language scholarship on the subject, Pellegrin demonstrates Aristotle's important and often unrecognized innovations in understanding political life.
Pierre Pellegrin is Director of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France. His books include Aristotle's Classification of Animals: Biology and the Conceptual Unity of the Aristotelian Corpus (translated by Anthony Preus) and A Companion to Ancient Philosophy (coedited with Mary Louise Gill). Anthony Preus is Distinguished Teaching Professor in Philosophy at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author and editor of many books, including Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Philosophy.
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Seeing With Free Eyes
by Marlene K. Sokolon
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Examines the ideas of justice in Euripidean tragedy which reveals the human experience of justice to be paradoxical and reminds us of the need for humility in our unceasing quest for a just world.
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Image and Argument in Plato's Republic
by Marina Berzins McCoy
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Argues that images are at the heart of the dialogue's philosophical argumentation.
Although Plato has long been known as a critic of imagination and its limits, Marina Berzins McCoy explores the extent to which images also play an important, positive role in Plato's philosophical argumentation. She begins by examining the poetic educational context in which Plato is writing and then moves on to the main lines of argument and how they depend upon a variety of uses of the imagination, including paradigms, analogies, models, and myths. McCoy takes up the paradoxical nature of such key metaphysical images as the divided line and cave: on the one hand, the cave and divided line explicitly state problems with images and the visible realm. On the other hand, they are themselves images designed to draw the reader to greater intellectual understanding. The author gives a perspectival reading, arguing that the human being is always situated in between the transcendence of being and the limits of human perspective. Images can enhance our capacity to see intellectually as well as to reimagine ourselves vis-à-vis the timeless and eternal. Engaging with a wide range of continental, dramatic, and Anglo-American scholarship on images in Plato, McCoy examines the treatment of comedy, degenerate regimes, the nature of mimesis, the myth of Er, and the nature of Platonic dialogue itself.
Marina Berzins McCoy is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. She is the author of Wounded Heroes: Vulnerability as a Virtue in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy and Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists.
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Aristotle on God's Life-Generating Power and on Pneuma as Its Vehicle
by Abraham P. Bos
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Proposes an innovative rethinking of Aristotle's work as a system that integrates his theology with his doctrine of reproduction and life.
In this deep rethinking of Aristotle's work, Abraham P. Bos argues that scholarship on Aristotle's philosophy has erred since antiquity in denying the connection between his theology and his doctrine of reproduction and life in the earthly sphere. Beginning with an analysis of God's role in the Aristotelian system, Bos explores how this relates to other elements of his philosophy, especially to his theory of reproduction. The argument he develops is that in talking about the cosmos, Aristotle rejected Plato's metaphor of artisanal production by a divine Demiurge in favor of a biotic metaphor based on the transmission of life in reproduction, in which pneuma-not breath as it is often interpreted but the life-bearing spirit in animals and plants-plays a key and sustaining role as the vital principle in all that lives. In making this case, he defends the authenticity of the treatises De Mundo and De Spiritu as Aristotle's, and demonstrates Aristotle's works as a unified system that sharply and comprehensively refutes Plato's, and in particular replaces Plato's doctrine of the soul with a theory in which the soul is clearly distinguished from the intellect.
Abraham P. Bos is Professor Emeritus of Ancient and Patristic Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His books include Aristotle, On the Life-Bearing Spirit (De Spiritu): A Discussion with Plato and His Predecessors on Pneuma as the Instrumental Body of the Soul; The Soul and Its Instrumental Body: A Reinterpretation of Aristotle's Philosophy of Living Nature; and Cosmic and Meta-cosmic Theology in Aristotle's Lost Dialogues.
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The Metaphysics of the Pythagorean Theorem
by Robert Hahn
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Explores Thales's speculative philosophy through a study of geometrical diagrams.
Bringing together geometry and philosophy, this book undertakes a strikingly original study of the origins and significance of the Pythagorean theorem. Thales, whom Aristotle called the first philosopher and who was an older contemporary of Pythagoras, posited the principle of a unity from which all things come, and back into which they return upon dissolution. He held that all appearances are only alterations of this basic unity and there can be no change in the cosmos. Such an account requires some fundamental geometric figure out of which appearances are structured. Robert Hahn argues that Thales came to the conclusion that it was the right triangle: by recombination and repackaging, all alterations can be explained from that figure. This idea is central to what the discovery of the Pythagorean theorem could have meant to Thales and Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE. With more than two hundred illustrations and figures, Hahn provides a series of geometric proofs for this lost narrative, tracing it from Thales to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who followed, and then finally to Plato's Timaeus. Uncovering the philosophical motivation behind the discovery of the theorem, Hahn's book will enrich the study of ancient philosophy and mathematics alike.
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Plato and the Body
by Coleen P. Zoller
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Offers an innovative reading of Plato, analyzing his metaphysical, ethical, and political commitments in connection with feminist critiques.
For centuries, it has been the prevailing view that in prioritizing the soul, Plato ignores or even abhors the body; however, in Plato and the Body Coleen P. Zoller argues that Plato does value the body and the role it plays in philosophical life, focusing on Plato's use of Socrates as an exemplar. Zoller reveals a more refined conception of the ascetic lifestyle epitomized by Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, Symposium, Phaedrus, Gorgias, and Republic. Her interpretation illuminates why those who want to be wise and good have reason to be curious about and love the natural world and the bodies in it, and has implications for how we understand Plato's metaphysical and political commitments. This book shows the relevance of this broader understanding of Plato for work on a variety of relevant contemporary issues, including sexual morality, poverty, wealth inequality, and peace.
Coleen P. Zoller is Professor of Philosophy at Susquehanna University.
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Wine and Ecstasy in Plato
by Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides
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Examines inebriation as a culturally informed metaphor employed by Plato to defend the mind-altering effects of philosophy and its reception to the second-century CE.
Wine and Ecstasy in Plato examines Plato's use of inebriation as a metaphor for the experience of transcendence and traces its reception to the second century CE. Drawing on the premises of cognitive phenomenology, Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides explores Socratic inebriation as an imperfect yet surprisingly effective sense-mediated reference to the mental processes that produce consciousness. Given the radical dichotomy in Greek culture between getting drunk with virtue and vice, Plato defends the Socratic way of drinking against misinterpretation. Thus, he engages thoroughly with the political, medical, philosophical, religious, and literary undertones of his metaphor. By replacing other forms of ecstasy with sober philosophical insight, Plato seeks to normalize transcendence and accommodate inspiration in the ideal polis. Socratic inebriation fueled numerous debates about the value and method of pursuing new models of consciousness during the Hellenistic and Roman period. By tracing these debates across several thinkers, including Seneca, Horace, Lucian of Samosata, and importantly Philo of Alexandria, Anagnostou-Laoutides reveals an important chapter in the history of human thought where truth and happiness are always situated beyond reason.
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Inquiring Into Being
by Various Authors
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Inquiring into Being is a study of Parmenides, the early Greek pre-Socratic philosopher often credited as the first metaphysician and whose sole written work was a philosophical poem. In his poem, Parmenides has a narrating goddess character indicate the sense of being that must be and cannot be as a corrective to the errors mortals make when accounting for the ultimate nature of reality while showing a keen scientific understanding of natural phenomena. Inquiring into Being brings together and further develops recent work on Parmenides and the surviving fragments of his text through twelve chapters by scholars from the United States and United Kingdom working in analytic and continental philosophy, classics, political theory, literary theory, and the history of science. It serves as a guide through many of the interpretive controversies in Parmenides's poem while offering new insights into Parmenides's role as poet, scientist, natural philosopher, and investigator into the nature of being.
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Aristotle's Political Terminology
by J. J. Mulhern
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Comprehensive examination of the different senses in which Aristotle uses a group of the most important expressions in his political writings, with the aim of making possible a firmer understanding of his positions.
Aristotle's Political Terminology offers a fresh approach to Aristotle's political thought by examining the language he uses in a more complete way than was possible before the appearance of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. It allows the reader to see clearly the difficulty scholars have had in commenting on and translating Aristotle's political works, which often ends in sharp differences among scholars who approach Aristotle with differing prior philosophical, political, historical, or ideological commitments. The book addresses eleven words and cognates or phrases that are fundamental to understanding Aristotle's text, many of them related to one another. They include the Greek expressions often translated, and sometimes mistranslated, by nature, property, constitution, and ideal. Helpful in teaching both undergraduate and graduate students, this work gives examples of Aristotle's uses of an expression in a defined universe, as in the case of the 522 occurrences in the Politics alone of the word often rendered by constitution, to give a flavor for how Aristotle might be read to avoid misimpressions. These examples sometimes are accompanied by tabular worksheets so that readers may check the author's work more easily. Further, the pages use transliteration in the main text, with a few mandatory exceptions, as in quoted titles of articles, so that readers whose Greek is not strong can follow the argument; the Greek text is provided in footnotes.
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Plato's Politics of Passion
by Alan Pichanick
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An original reading of three Platonic dialogues concerned with the soul, tyranny, self-knowledge, and the beautiful.
Guided by the question "What is Socratic self-knowledge," this study begins with Plato's Charmides because it is within this work, more than any other, that the utility of self-knowledge becomes the predominant theme. In this dialogue, Socrates explores the possibility of the very culmination of his philosophical investigations-knowledge of ignorance. This happens through an investigation of the perplexing concept, sphrosunê. Alan Pichanick's approach offers a new perspective upon the perplexing exploration of sphrosunê in the Charmides by placing much greater emphasis on the neglected "erotic setting" in the dramatic introduction and argues that our reading of the rest of the dialogue should be done in light of this dramatic setting. The erotic setting of the Charmides combined with the discussion of philosophical wonder in the Symposium and tyrannical ers in the Republic gives guidance about how to think about the potential connection between Socratic self-knowledge and knowledge of the good and also shows why the characters of Charmides and Critias fail to come to such knowledge. Here we have the Platonic diagnosis of the tyrant, whose soul never wonders at anything beyond itself.
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