Category Archives: Books

Books

Aristotle on Perceiving Objects

How can we explain the structure of perceptual experience? What is it that we perceive? How is it that we perceive objects and not disjoint arrays of properties? By which sense or senses do we perceive objects? Are our five senses sufficient for the perception of objects?

Aristotle investigated these questions by means of the metaphysical modeling of the unity of the perceptual faculty and the unity of experiential content. His account remains fruitful-but also challenging-even for contemporary philosophy.

This book offers a reconstruction of the six metaphysical models Aristotle offered to address these and related questions, focusing on their metaphysical underpinning in his theory of causal powers. By doing so, the book brings out what is especially valuable and even surprising about the topic: the core principles of Aristotle’s metaphysics of perception are fundamentally different from those of his metaphysics of substance. Yet, for precisely this reason, his models of perceptual content are unexplored territory. This book breaks new ground in offering an understanding of Aristotle’s metaphysics of the content of perceptual experience and of the composition of the perceptual faculty.

Books

Aristotle’s Empiricism: Experience and Mechanics in the 4th Century BC

In Aristotle’s Empiricism, Jean De Groot argues that an important part of Aristotle’s natural philosophy has remained largely unexplored. She shows that much of Aristotle’s analysis of natural movement is influenced by mathematical mechanics that emerged from late Pythagorean thought. De Groot draws upon the pseudo-Aristotelian Physical Problems XVI to reconstruct the context of mechanics of Aristotle’s time and to trace the development of kinematic thinking from Archytas to the Aristotelian Mechanics. She argues that the influence of kinematics on Aristotle pinpoints the original meaning of his concept of power, or potentiality, as a physicalistic meaning addressed to the problem of movement.
De Groot identifies epistemic features of kinematics as a scientific enterprise, including economy of explanation and direct inference to a principle. She shows how these features are woven into Aristotle’s thinking in the motion books of the Physics, On the Heavens, and Movement of Animals. The book places in doubt both the view that Aristotle’s natural philosophy codifies opinions held by convention and, alternatively, the view that the cogency of his scientific ideas depends on metaphysics.

Books

Semantik und Ontologie. Drei Studien zu Aristoteles

The focus of the book, that consists in three studies, can be described in the following aspects: Considerations on Aristotle’s universals, reconstruction of Aristotle’s critics to Plato’ s ideas in Aristotle’s lost work “On Ideas”, analysis of Aristotle’s substance in the works Categories, Metaphysics, On the Soul, Posterior Analytics, Physics. My point of view is that Aristotle refuses every aspect of Plato’s ideas in a radical way. I analyze Aristotle’s conditions for a synonymy of predication and compare them with the condition for a not-homonymy of predication in the Argument from Relatives of “On Ideas”. My reflections on substance plead for the presence of a plurality of values of substance in the works of Aristotle: substance can be, for instance, the individual biological entity (plant or animal) or the essence/nature/form of a biological entity; a co-existence of both values can be noticed in the different works of Aristotle.

Books

Aristotle on the Nature of Community

Aristotle on the Nature of Community
Adriel Trott

This reading of Aristotle’s Politics builds on the insight that the history of political philosophy is a series of configurations of nature and reason. Aristotle’s conceptualization of nature is unique because it is not opposed to or subordinated to reason. Adriel M. Trott uses Aristotle’s definition of nature as an internal source of movement to argue that he viewed community as something that arises from the activity that forms it rather than being a form imposed on individuals. Using these definitions, Trott develops readings of Aristotle’s four arguments for the naturalness of the polis, interprets deliberation and the constitution in Politics as the form and final causes of the polis, and reconsiders Aristotle’s treatment of slaves and women. Trott then argues that Aristotle is relevant for contemporary efforts to improve and encourage genuine democratic practices.

Books

Ewegen Publishes “Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language”

The APS is pleased to announce that S. Montgomery Ewegen has just published Plato’s Cratylus: The Comedy of Language with the Indiana University Press.

Congratulations, Shane.

This is so convincing a reading of Plato’s Cratylus that it may well open up discussion of the dialogue and make it much more widely studied than it is presently. —Drew A. Hyland, Trinity College

Plato’s dialogue Cratylus focuses on being and human dependence on words, or the essential truths about the human condition. Arguing that comedy is an essential part of Plato’s concept of language, S. Montgomery Ewegen asserts that understanding the comedic is key to an understanding of Plato’s deeper philosophical intentions. Ewegen shows how Plato’s view of language is bound to comedy through words and how, for Plato, philosophy has much in common with playfulness and the ridiculous. By tying words, language, and our often uneasy relationship with them to comedy, Ewegen frames a new reading of this notable Platonic dialogue.

Books

Kirkland Publishes The Ontology of Socratic Questioning

The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues

UPDATE: The Ontology of Socratic Questioning has won the 2013 Symposium Book Award of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. Congratulations Sean!

The APS is happy to call your attention to the appearance of Sean Kirkland’s The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues with the SUNY University Press.

This study offers an encompassing (because fundamental) re-interpretation of the philosophical project of Socrates as depicted in Plato’s early dialogues. Throughout the works generally deemed early and authentic, the author finds a fairly uniform presentation of Socratic philosophizing, but one which upon careful review requires a radical new interpretation. Indeed, departing at the most basic level from orthodox approaches to these works,The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues does greater justice to the Platonic text, often going deeply into the etymological complexities and various resonances of Plato’s Greek. And precisely in so doing, it allows these ancient works to speak illuminatingly to one of the most central philosophical issues with which we find ourselves confronted in our present historical moment—how to think philosophically beyond the subject/object relation. Over the course of these chapters, Socratic questioning proves to be aimed at the being of virtue conceived as something other than objective reality and it proves to be undertaken by a philosophizing self conceived as something other than a subject.

Please join us in congratulating Sean on this accomplishment.

Books

Schultz Publishes Plato’s Socrates as Narrator

Plato's Socrates as Narrator: A Philosophical Muse

The APS is very pleased to announce the appearance of Anne-Marie Schultz’s new book, Plato at Narrator: A Philosophical Muse, published by Lexington Books.

Jill Gordon writes of the book:

In this original work, Schultz draws our attention to the dialogues in which Plato has Socrates serve as narrator, and she opens a new window onto his role and function in the dialogues. Schultz provides rich interpretations of the individual dialogues she examines, while at the same time revealing a powerful lens through which to view Plato’s project and his use of Socratic narrative to further particular philosophical ends. In the process, she offers new insights that enhance scholars’ understanding of Socratic intellectualism, the role of the emotions in philosophical endeavors, various models of virtue portrayed in the dialogues, and Socrates’ relation to Homeric and other foundational narratives in Greek culture. In the end, Schultz offers a provocative and persuasive account of how Socrates as narrator of certain Platonic dialogues entices and exhorts his auditors—and Plato’s readers—to good philosophical practices.

Ryan Drake writes:

In Plato’s Socrates as Narrator, Dr Schultz provides an invaluable entry into reflections on the interrelations between the practice of philosophy, on the one hand, and its transmission, on the other, arguing in effect that the retelling of Socrates’ philosophical encounters as we find them in the Platonic corpus belongs to the work of philosophy itself. While Plato scholarship in recent years has become increasingly attuned to the ways in which the literary and dramatic aspects of the dialogues operate as integral to their philosophical content, Prof. Schultz takes such scholarship a step further to demonstrate how the status of particular dialogues as narrated contributes as well to a fuller understanding of Plato’s conception of philosophy. From the vantage point achieved through mediation on particular dialogues in their status as narrated encounters Prof. Schultz brings to light the character of philosophy not simply as an intellectual pursuit composed of explicit propositions, but also as a basic human comportment involving the motives, affects, and social position of specific character types. Both accessibly written and rigorously developed, Prof. Schultz’ investigations into the narrative and literary aspects of the Platonic corpus speak to the interests of advanced Plato scholars and beginning students alike.

To hear a discussion of the book with the author, listen to Digital Dialogue 60: Socratic Narrative.

Congratulations to Anne-Marie for the publication of this important book.

Books

Brill Publishes Plato on the Limits of Human Life

The APS is thrilled to call your attention to the appearance of Sara Brill’s book, Plato on the Limits of Human Life, published by Indiana University Press.

“Sara Brill takes on at least two significant issues in Platonic scholarship: the nature of the soul, and especially the language of immortality in its description, and the relationship between politics and psychology. She treats each one of these topics in a fresh and nuanced way. Her writing is beautiful and fluid.” —Marina McCoy, Boston College

Sara has been a long time member of the Society, serving as co-director from 2011-2013.

Here is the description from the Indiana University Press:

By focusing on the immortal character of the soul in key Platonic dialogues, Sara Brill shows how Plato thought of the soul as remarkably flexible, complex, and indicative of the inner workings of political life and institutions. As she explores the character of the soul, Brill reveals the corrective function that law and myth serve. If the soul is limitless, she claims, then the city must serve a regulatory or prosthetic function and prop up good political institutions against the threat of the soul’s excess. Brill’s sensitivity to dramatic elements and discursive strategies in Plato’s dialogues illuminates the intimate connection between city and soul.

Books, Of Interest

Recco and Sanday Edit Volume on Plato’s Laws

Two long time members of the APS have co-edited a volume entitled: Plato’s Laws: Force and Truth in Politics. 

Here is what Indiana University Press says:

Readers of Plato have often neglected the Laws because of its length and density. In this set of interpretive essays, notable scholars of the Laws from the fields of classics, history, philosophy, and political science offer a collective close reading of the dialogue “book by book” and reflect on the work as a whole. In their introduction, editors Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday explore the connections among the essays and the dramatic and productive exchanges between the contributors. This volume fills a major gap in studies on Plato’s dialogues by addressing the cultural and historical context of the Laws and highlighting their importance to contemporary scholarship.

Our own Marina McCoy of Boston College writes:

A diverse set of intelligent and original essays on the Laws featuring some of the best names in American scholarship.

Congratulations to Greg and Eric and to all the contributors published in this volume.

Books, Of Interest

The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins

The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins
Ed. Sean D. Kirkland

University of Chicago Press/Distributed for DePaul Art Museum

64 pages | 1 color plate, 31 halftones | 8 x 10 3/4

This exhibition catalogue presents a series of fascinating and challenging “nature drawings” by the Latvian, German-born, Chicago-based artist, Peter Karklins, drawings that are on display from July to November of 2012 at the DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago.

The book may well interest APS members for two reasons. On the one hand, the artist understands himself to present nature in a mode wholly at odds with the modern, scientific, technologically mastered conception thereof, even as he finds a profound resonance in the early Greeks’ experience of their world. On the other hand, a number of the mini-essays in the collection are contributed by long-time APS members, David Farrell Krell, Michael Naas, and William McNeill, and the volume is edited by Sean D. Kirkland, former APS co-director. The Nature Drawings of Peter Karklins is available through Amazon or the University of Chicago Press website.

“Peter Karklins once referred to his work as “Presocratic Realism,” a provocative title that suggests reality is found in the world before the time of systematic rationality, and, indeed, his images transport us to just such a place. His miniature works offer visions of another world in which the very fabric of the real is a strange hybrid of the biomorphic and the mechanically regularized, the sexual and the sterile, a world that holds itself uncomfortably between objectivity and fantasy, between objects we consciously observe and desires we unconsciously enact. Drawing primarily upon the insights of contemporary Continental philosophy, seventeen contributors from a variety of disciplines offer short, engaging responses that use the works to introduce powerful, contemporary reflections on the nature of art, of humanity, and of freedom.”

John Russon, Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph

 

“This is that rare, much to be coveted, invitation to the sort of event one only wishes happened more often. Gathered here are scholars of different fields all set in concerted focus on the marvelously strange miniature drawings of Peter Karklins. The creative dialogue that develops between these thinkers and the works in this volume stands as a testament to the value of bypassing the boundaries usually adhered to by the mainstream art industry, suggesting that the most refreshing engagements in art may happen well beyond them.”

Annika Marie, Department of Art and Design, Columbia College