Category Archives: Books

Books

Aristotle and Tragic Temporality

Sean D. Kirkland

Aristotle and Tragic Temporality treats a theme that has drawn scholarly attention for millennia: Aristotle on time and our experience of it. It does so, however, in a wholly unprecedented way, grounding its interpretation in his Poetics and Ethics, rather than the natural philosophy of the Physics.

Sean D. Kirkland first takes up Aristotle’s discussion of our tragic temporal situatedness—our having to act, think, and live always between a determining past we can never fully master and a projected future we can never fully anticipate. It is this condition that comes powerfully to light for Aristotle on stage in the performance of a tragic drama. The familiar Aristotelian ‘virtue ethics’ then becomes something radically new in the transforming light of the Poetics’ temporality – an outline of how humans can inhabit that irremediably tragic condition, never overcoming or suspending it, and arrive nonetheless at something like happiness and excellence.

Books

Inquiring into Being: Essays on Parmenides

Colin Smith

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.

Books

Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice

Ryan Johnson

Continental philosophers and contemporary artists transform the classics into living practices

– A volume of original essays, four previously untranslated articles, novel visual art, and reproduced images, by an international lineup of today’s leading thinkers and practitioners
– Features non-expository or non-argumentative elements, such as exhortative, prescriptive, or didactic dimensions (telling the reader to do something specific, such as, do an exercise, write something, etc.)
– Thinkers and art-practitioners collaborate to produce a combined written and visual contribution
– The book gathers new continental approaches to ancient philosophy outside of the dominant interpretive milieus of phenomenology, hermeneutics, historicism, and analytic philosophy

This volume collects written and visual works that engage with opportunities of ancient practice from within the continental tradition. More than surveying ancient ethical or political ideas, the chapters develop divergent yet resonant approaches to concrete ways of living, acting, reflecting, and being with others found in antiquity and its reception. The practices involve the habits, exercises, activities, philosophies, and lives of today’s readers; and so most chapters encourage the reader to do something, to put the ideas into practice. Withstanding a temptation to simply theorize practice, it insists on the embodied and shared materiality of living in singular times and places. The practical encounters between this book and its readers range across antiquity and the contemporary world, from political theatre, casuistry, and slavery to book production, friendship, and our own mortality. Through thinker-practitioner collaborations, occasional pieces, exhortations to readers, and recipes for action, this work strives to articulate and cultivate old and new practices for our lives.

Books

Teaching Plato in Italian Renaissance Universities

During the Renaissance, the Arts curriculum in universities was based almost exclusively on the teaching of Aristotle. With the revival of Plato, however, professors of philosophy started to deviate from the official syllabus and teach Plato’s dialogues. This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive overview of Platonic teaching in Italian Renaissance universities, from the establishment of a Platonic professorship at the university of Florence-Pisa in the late 15th century to the introduction of Platonic teaching in the schools and universities of Bologna, Padua, Venice, Pavia and Milan in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays draw from new evidence found in manuscripts and archival material to explore how university professors adapted the format of Plato’s dialogues to suit their audience and defended the idea that Plato could be accommodated to university teaching. They provide significant and fundamental insight into how Platonism spread during the 16th and 17th centuries and how a new interpretation of Plato emerged, distinct from the Neoplatonic tradition revived by Marsilio Ficino.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Maude Vanhaelen, “Teaching Plato in Sixteenth-Century Italy”

Chapter 2 – Simone Fellina, “Teaching Plato in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Florence and Pisa: from Francesco Cattani da Diacceto to Girolamo Bardi”

Chapter 3 – Barbara Bartocci, “Shifting Away from Aristotelianism towards Platonism. Paolo Beni’s Project”

Chapter 4 – Eva Del Soldato, “Plato between Pavia and Milan in the Sixteenth Century”

Bibliography
Index of Names

Books

Foreign Influences: The Circulation of Knowledge in Antiquity

Tasos Grigorakis

The essays collected in this volume focus on the Ancient Greeks’ perception of foreigners and of foreign lands as potential sources of knowledge. They aim at exploring the hypothesis that the most adventurous intellectuals saw foreign lands and foreigners as repositories of knowledge that the Greeks σοφοί had to engage with, in the hope of bringing back home valuables in the form of new ideas.

It is a common place to state that the “Greeks” displayed xenophobia, which is probably best exemplified in the binary and ethnocentric division of humanity in two groups: the Greek world (i.e., the hellenophones) and the others, the Barbarians – those who speak foreign languages. This attitude of insularism and defiance, however, did not hinder the curiosity of Greek and Roman societies towards strangers. Lycurgus, Pythagoras, Democritus, etc.: there is a long list of sages and philosophers who travelled around the world for a significant period of time. The Greeks had a rich and varied relationship with foreign lands and people, which made possible a real circulation of knowledge throughout the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic times; this is also true of the Roman Empire. Each of the articles included in this collective work explore one aspect of the “stranger” as a possible source of knowledge, with contributions mostly focused on Plato, Xenophon, Democritus, Aristotle, Diogenes, Cicero and Galen.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword — Benoît Castelnérac and Laetitia Monteils-Laeng

Remarques sur les emplois stylistiques de ξένος, ξενικός et γλῶττα — André Rehbinder

Democritus, B 299 (D.K.). Alien Wisdom, Geometry, and the Contemporary Prose Landscape — Ilaria Andolfi

Étrangèreté du vrai et politique chez Platon — Étienne Helmer

Cephalus: A Role Model for the Producers in Plato’s Kallipolis — Anna Schriefl

Xenophobia in Utopia: On the Metics in Plato’s Laws — David Merry

Social Science and Universalism in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus IV — Zoli Filotas

Aristotle on the Intellectual Achievements of Foreign Civilizations — Mor Segev

Carthage: Aristotle’s Best (non-Greek) Constitution? — Thornton C. Lockwood, Jr.

Translatio, Imitatio, Aemulatio: Assimilation of Greek Thought in Cicero’s Philosophical Writings — Katarzyna Borkowska

Étrangers ou étranges ? La sagesse des confins et la connaissance du monde dans la littérature grecque des premiers siècles de l’empire — Marine Glénisson

Déterminisme environnemental et influence culturelle : la vision de l’étranger chez Galien — Julien Devinant

Le privilège philosophique de l’étranger — Isabelle Chouinard

Index of Passages

Index of Ancient Names and Places

Books

Soul and Life: Psyche in Seminal Ancient Greek Thinkers

Kevin Marren

SOUL AND LIFE brings together essays on Greek ontology, psychology, politics, and theories of soul in Socratic thought, Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus. Among the included perspectives, there is the recognition in common that the soul (psyche) is not a mere hypostatization or reification of the object of cognitive studies. Instead, these essays attempt to understand the soul as distinguished by life itself and as setting out ways of being in the world. The essays in Part I focus on political psychology, pursue feminist themes, and engage with issues in ethics and education. Contributions in Part II argue that the soul situates the fundamental structures in ontology and the study of Being as such. The authors in Part II further approach ancient psychology in terms of new ways of understanding the capacities of living beings for nutrition and generation and articulate the soul as a central concept in the constitution of the world as knowable.

Books

Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition

Sean D. Kirkland

For Martin Heidegger, our inherited traditions provide the concepts through which we make our world intelligible. Concepts we can also oppose, disrupt, and even exceed. First, however, if Western philosophy is our inheritance, we must submit it to Destruktion —starting with Aristotle. Heidegger and the Destruction of On How to Read the Tradition presents a new conception of Heidegger’s “destruction” as a way of reading.

Situated between Nietzschean genealogy and Derridean deconstruction, this method uncovers in Aristotle the most vital originating articulations of the Western tradition and gives us the means to confront it. Sean D. Kirkland argues this is not a rejection of the past but a sophisticated and indeed timely hermeneutic tool—a complex, illuminating, and powerful method for interpreting historical texts at our present moment. Acknowledging the historical Heidegger as a politically compromised and still divisive figure, Kirkland demonstrates that Heideggerian destruction is a method of interpreting history that enables us to reorient and indeed transform its own most troubling legacies.

Books

Dealing with Disagreement. The Construction of Traditions in Later Ancient Philosophy

Bram Roosen

This book treats both Christian and non-Christian texts from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE, and suggests that dealing with disagreement helped philosophers define their own traditions while creating a conceptual common ground.

Ancient philosophy is known for its organisation into distinct schools. But those schools were not locked into static dogmatism. As recent scholarship has shown, lively debate persisted between and within traditions. Yet the interplay between tradition and disagreement remains underexplored. This volume asks, first, how philosophers talked about differences of opinion within and between traditions and, second, how such debates affected the traditions involved. It covers the period from the first century BCE, which witnessed a turn to authoritative texts in different philosophical movements, through the rise of Christianity, to the golden age of Neoplatonic commentaries in the fifth and sixth centuries CE.

By studying various philosophical and Christian traditions alongside and in interaction with each other, this volume reveals common philosophical strategies of identification and differentiation. Ancient authors construct their own traditions in their (polemical) engagements with dissenters and opponents. Yet this very process of dissociation helped establish a common conceptual ground between traditions. This volume will be an important resource for specialists in late ancient philosophy, early Christianity, and the history of ideas.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Albert Joosse and Angela Ulacco — Introduction

Riccardo Chiaradonna — The Early Peripatetic Interpreters of Aristotle’s Categories and the Previous Philosophical Tradition

Franco Ferrari — È esistita un’eterodossia nel medioplatonismo?

Teun Tieleman — Galen on Disagreement: Sects, Philosophical Methods and Christians

Albert Joosse — Γνῶθι σαυτόν and the Platonic Tradition in Clement of Alexandria

Sébastien Morlet — L’accusation de mauvaise entente (παρακοή) dans la polémique entre païens et chrétiens à la fin de l’Antiquité

Robbert M. van den Berg — Plato’s Violent Readers: Pagan Neoplatonists against Christian Appropriations of Plato’s Timaeus

Helmut Seng — Mythenkritik und Kultpolemik bei Firmicus Maternus

Alexandra Michalewski — « L’âme est le lieu des formes » Une réponse à l’argument du troisième homme à travers la symphônia de Platon et d’Aristote dans le Commentaire à la Métaphysique d’Asclépius de Tralles

Mareike Hauer — The Use of Stoic References in Simplicius’ Discussion of Quality

Index

Bibliography

Books

Peter of Ireland, Writings on Natural Philosophy. Commentary on Aristotle’s On Length and Shortness of Life and the Determinatio Magistralis

226 p., 156 x 234 mm, PB, ISBN: 978-2-503-60568-5 / eISBN: 978-2-503-60569-2
Series: Brepols Library of Christian Sources, vol. 9

This book contains a study and translation of the works on natural philosophy by the 13th-century thinker Peter of Ireland, who taught Thomas Aquinas at the University of Naples.

Peter of Ireland (Petrus de Ybernia) was born sometime around the beginning of the thirteenth century in Ireland, probably of a Norman family. He probably left Ireland aged around age 15 to pursue his studies abroad. His interest in medical and scientific questions would suggest a stay at Oxford, whereas his approach to logic would suggest a Parisian influence. By the middle of the century he was Professor of Logic and Natural Philosophy at the University at Naples. Peter is perhaps one of the best known of medieval Irish thinkers on the continent owing to the fact that he was held to be the teacher of the young Thomas Aquinas at Naples University from 1239–44. As such, it would be he who, in all likelihood, first introduced Thomas to the study of Aristotle and perhaps also to the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes. The works presented here date from at least a decade later, and relate to lectures given at Naples in the 1250s and 1260s. The extent to which he was held in respect by his contemporaries is to be seen in his solution (determinatio) to the disputed question on the origin of the design of an animal’s body which was held before King Manfred around 1260. It was, perhaps the culmination of a famous scholarly career.

Books

Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory

Robin Reames

The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in The Sophist. In that dialogue Plato introduced the idea of statements as being either true or false, where the distinction between falsity and truth rests on a deeper discrepancy between appearance and reality, or seeming and being.

Robin Reames’s Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship—the rise and subsequent marginalization of “orality and literacy theory,” Heidegger’s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues—Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato’s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.