Category Archives: Books

Books

Becoming Socrates: Political Philosophy in Plato’s Parmenides

Alex Priou

Interpreters of Plato’s Parmenides have long agreed that it is a canonical work in the history of ontology. In the first part, the aged Parmenides presents a devastating critique of Platonic ontology, followed in the second by what purports to be a response to that critique. But despite the scholarly agreement as to the general subject matter of the dialogue, what makes it one whole has nevertheless eluded its readers, so much so that some have even speculated it to be a patchwork of two dimly related dialogues.

In Becoming Socrates, Alex Priou shows that the Parmenides’ unity remains elusive due to scholarly neglect of a particular passage in Parmenides’ critique—a passage Parmenides identifies as the hinge between the dialogue’s two parts and as the “greatest impasse” facing Platonic ontology. There Parmenides situates the concern with ontology or the question of being within the concern with political philosophy or the question of good rule. In this way, the Parmenides shows us how a youthful Socrates first learned of the centrality of political philosophy that would become the hallmark of his life—that it, and not ontology, is “first philosophy.”

“Alex Priou addresses here the crucial role that the Parmenides plays in Plato’s account of the ‘Socratic turn,’ that is, in the thinking that led Socrates to turn away from natural philosophy and initiate a new way of philosophizing that we now call political philosophy. This impressive and valuable new interpretation helps us to understand better a notoriously difficult Platonic dialogue about the beginning of both political theory and the tradition of Western rationalism.”

– Mark J. Lutz, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“For the first time, Plato’s presentation of the young Socrates being schooled by the great Parmenides in ontology is shown to illuminate, and to be illuminated by, Plato’s presentation of the mature Socrates analyzing justice in the Republic. What results is a deeply thought provoking new perspective on Platonic-Socratic political philosophy.”

– Thomas L. Pangle, University of Texas at Austin

Books

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy

Sean D. Kirkland

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of essays on a broad range of themes and figures spanning the entire period extending from the Pre-Socratics to Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic thinkers.

Rather than offering synoptic and summary treatments of preestablished positions and themes, these essays engage with the ancient texts directly, focusing attention on concepts that emerge as urgent in the readings themselves and then clarifying those concepts interpretively. Indeed, this is a companion volume that takes a very serious and considered approach to its designated task—accompanying readers as they move through the most crucial passages of the infinitely rich and compelling texts of the ancients. Each essay provides a tutorial in close reading and careful interpretation.

Because it offers foundational treatments of the most important works of ancient philosophy and because it, precisely by doing so, arrives at numerous original interpretive insights and suggests new directions for research in ancient philosophy, this volume should be of great value both to students just starting off reading the ancients and to established scholars still fascinated by philosophy’s deepest abiding questions.

Books

Knowledge and Ignorance of the Self in Platonic Philosophy

Andy German

This is the first volume of essays dedicated to the whole question of self-knowledge and its role in Platonic philosophy. It brings together established and rising scholars from every interpretative school of Plato studies, and a variety of texts across Plato’s corpus – including the classic discussions of self-knowledge in the Charmides and Alcibiades I, as well as dialogues like the Republic, Theaetetus and Theages, which are not often enough mined for insights on this crucial philosophical topic. The rich variety of readings and hermeneutical methods (together with the comprehensive research bibliography included in the volume) allows for an encompassing view of the relevant scholarly debates. The volume is intended to serve as a standard resource for further research on Platonic self-knowledge and will highlight the relevance of Plato’s thought to contemporary debates on selfhood, reflection and subjectivity.

Contributors: Sara Ahbel-Rappe, James M. Ambury, Jeremy Bell, Sara Brill, Andy German, Lloyd P. Gerson, Drew A. Hyland, Danielle A. Layne, Brian Marrin, Marina McCoy, Eric Sanday, Harold Tarrant, Thomas Tuozzo

Books

New Journal for 2019 – Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI

Ruth Campbell

Ancient Philosophy Today: DIALOGOI provides a forum for the mutual engagement between ancient and contemporary philosophy.

The journal aims to fruitfully connect interpretive work in ancient philosophy to current discussions in metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, and to assess the continuing relevance of ancient theories to current philosophical interests and debates.

Print ISSN: 2516-1156
Online ISSN: 2516-1164
https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/anph

Books

Glaucon’s Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato’s Republic

Jacob Howland

In the Republic, Socrates seeks to convince Plato’s brother Glaucon that the just life of philosophy is preferable to the unjust life of tyranny. Jacob Howland’s Glaucon’s Fate argues that he fails. The available evidence suggests that Glaucon joined his cousin Critias and his uncle Charmides in the regime of the so-called Thirty Tyrants, the brutal oligarchy that governed Athens in the immediate aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. If Howland is right, Plato’s intelligent and courageous brother—suspended as he was between the corruption of Athenian politics and the integrity of Socratic inquiry, between kinsmen who were leaders of the Thirty and a just friend who fell afoul of them—could not be saved even by the age’s most capable advocate of virtue and philosophy.

What went wrong? Howland’s exploration of this guiding question focuses on Socrates’ rivalry with Critias, with whom he competes for the attention of ambitious young aristocrats. The contrast between these two men is stark. Socrates offers young souls an escape through philosophy from the Cave of the city; Critias offers them a path to rule. Socrates’ erotic path is reliant on the knowledge of one’s ignorance and neediness; Critias’s thumotic one is rooted in the presumption of an abstract and impersonal perfection. Socrates seeks truth; Critias supposes he already possesses it. Yet in the Republic, Socrates professes admiration for Callipolis, a totalitarian regime strikingly similar to the one implemented in Athens by the Thirty. Why would he do so? What responsibility does he have for Glaucon’s fate? What was he hoping to achieve when he accompanied Glaucon to the Piraeus, and what does he accomplish in the Republic? In approaching these questions, Glaucon’s Fate examines the historical and literary context of the Republic—including Critias’s thought as presented in his own writings and in Plato’s Timaeus-Critias and Charmides—and explores the relationship between myth, character, action, and argument in the dialogue itself.

Glaucon’s Fate will be published by Paul Dry Books in November of 2018.

Books

The Emerging Good in Plato’s Philebus

JD Wilson

Plato’s Philebus presents a fascinating dialogue between the life of the mind and the life of pleasure. While Socrates decisively prioritizes the life of reason, he also shows that certain pleasures contribute to making the good life good. The Emerging Good in Plato’s “Philebus” argues that the Socratic pleasures of learning emphasize, above all, the importance of being open to change.

John V. Garner convincingly refines previous interpretations and uncovers a profound thesis in the Philebus: genuine learners find value not only in stable being but also in the process of becoming. Further, since genuine learning arises in pluralistic communities where people form and inform one another, those who are truly open to learning are precisely those who actively shape the betterment of humanity.

The Emerging Good in Plato’s “Philebus” thus connects the Philebus’s grand philosophical ideas about the order of values, on the one hand, to its intimate and personal account of the experience of learning, on the other. It shows that this dialogue, while agreeing broadly with themes in more widely studied works by Plato such as the Republic, Gorgias, and Phaedo, also develops a unique way of salvaging the whole of human life, including our ever-changing nature.

Books

Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics

JD Wilson

Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics seeks to demonstrate that living an ethical life requires a mode of perception that is best called ethical perception. Specifically, drawing primarily on Aristotle’s accounts of perception and ethics in De anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Eve Rabinoff argues that the faculty of perception (aisthesis), which is often thought to be an entirely physical phenomenon, is informed by intellect and has an ethical dimension insofar as it involves the perception of particulars in their ethical significance, as things that are good or bad in themselves and as occasions to act. Further, she contends, virtuous action requires this ethical perception, according to Aristotle, and ethical development consists in the achievement of the harmony of the intellectual and perceptual, rational and nonrational, parts of the soul.

Rabinoff’s project is philosophically motivated both by the details of Aristotle’s thought and more generally by an increasing philosophical awareness that the ethical agent is an embodied, situated individual, rather than primarily a disembodied, abstract rational will.

EVE RABINOFF is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.

“Stimulating and insightful, this is a very important book on Aristotle’s claims about ethical life and its relation to embodiment, and issues of ethical life more generally. The book stands on its own as a major contribution to this literature.” –Drew A. Hyland, author of Questioning Platonism: Continental Interpreters of Plato and Plato and the Question of Beauty

Books

Epicurus on the Self

Attila Németh

Epicurus on the Self reconstructs a part of Epicurean ethics, which only survives on the fragmentary papyrus rolls excavated from an ancient library in Herculaneum, On Nature XXV. The aim of this book is to contribute to a deeper understanding of Epicurus’ moral psychology, ethics and of its robust epistemological framework and to show how the notion of the self emerges in Epicurus’ struggle to express the individual perspective of oneself in the process of one’s holistic self-reflection as an individual psychophysical being.

Attila Németh is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, currently looking for an academic position.

“Németh’s book is an original and valuable contribution to our understanding of Epicureanism, exploring Epicurus’ notion of the self in a comprehensive manner, throwing light on its many different aspects: physical, psychological, epistemic, moral, and spiritual. To my knowledge, this is the only published study to undertake and successfully accomplish such a broad task.”

– Voula Tsouna, University of California at Santa Barbara

“This monograph represents a very significant body of independent work, re-evaluating in a constructive and supportive spirit some central areas of Epicurean philosophy – notably self-cognition, agent autonomy and friendship – and displaying probable interconnections among those areas that have remained unnoticed or at least under-exploited in the existing scholarship. This is a considerable achievement. …Chapter 1’s bold reconstruction, from very fragmentary textual material that is rarely made accessible to readers, of an Epicurean theory of self-cognition breaks a good deal of new ground; and the novel approach to Epicurean friendship in chapter 5 is both philosophically and historically attractive. …What this monograph offers is a major new set of perspectives on current debates, able to reshape, challenge and enrich future discussions.”

– David Sedley, University of Cambridge

“The topic is a good one and Németh makes some interesting and important new claims, bringing together discussions of Epicurean moral psychology, ethical improvement and moral responsibility in a way that shows the integrated and holistic nature of the Epicurean system. …Németh makes good use of difficult evidence from Nat. XXV, perhaps for the first time showing what can be done with it beyond the well-worn topic of moral responsibility. …Németh also has interesting and often novel things to say about some other central questions in Epicureanism, such as the atomic swerve.”

– James Warren, University of Cambridge

Available in the Issues in Ancient Philosophy series, Routledge:

https://www.routledge.com/Epicurus-on-the-Self/Nemeth/p/book/9781138633858

Books

Plotinus, Ennead II.9. Against the Gnostics. Translation, With an Introduction and Commentary

Sebastian Gertz

How was the universe created, and what is our place within it? These are the questions at the heart of Plotinus’ Against the Gnostics. For the Gnostics, the universe came into being as a result of the soul’s fall from intelligible reality—it is the evil outcome of a botched creation. Plotinus challenges this narrative and insists that the soul’s creation of the world is the necessary consequence of its contemplation of the ideal forms. While the Gnostics claim to despise the visible universe, Plotinus argues that such contempt displays their ignorance of the higher realities of which the cosmos is a beautiful image.

Against the Gnostics is a polemical text. It aims to show the superiority of Plotinus’ philosophy over that of his Gnostic rivals and poses unique challenges: Plotinus nowhere identifies his opponents by name, he does not set out their doctrines in any great detail, and his arguments are frequently elliptical. The detailed commentary provides a guide through these difficulties, making Plotinus’ meandering train of thought in this important treatise accessible to the reader.

Books

An Aristotelian Feminism

Sarah Borden Sharkey

This book articulates the theoretical outlines of a feminism developed from Aristotle’s metaphysics, making a new contribution to feminist theory. Readers will discover why Aristotle was not a feminist and how he might have become one, had he been truer to his best insights.