A full account of the philosophy of the Greek and Roman worlds from the last days of Aristotle until 100 BC. Hellenistic philosophy, for long relatively neglected and unappreciated, has over the last decade been the object of a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Now available in paperback, this 1999 volume is a general reference work which pulls the subject together and presents an overview. The History is organised by subject, rather than chronologically or by philosophical school, with sections on (...) logic, epistemology, physics and metaphysics, ethics and politics. It has been written by specialists but is intended to be a source of reference for any student of ancient philosophy, for students of classical antiquity and for students of the philosophy of later periods. Greek and Latin are used sparingly and always translated in the main text. (shrink)

A new assessment of the philosophical traditions Hippolytus depends on and of his method of presentation. This book deals with the reception of the Presocratics, Plato and Aristotle in the first centuries CE, and is a major contribution to our knowledge of the various currents in Pre-Neoplatonic Greek philosophy.

This study of the practices and principles of a wide range of ancient scholars dealing with philosophical, scientific, biblical and other authors is an ...

v. 1. The sources -- v. 2., pt. 2. The compendium -- v. 3. Studies in the doxographical traditions of ancient philosophy.

A new reconstruction and edition of the _Placita_ of Aëtius (ca. 50 CE), arguably the most important work of ancient doxography covering the entire field of natural philosophy. Accompanied by a full commentary, it replaces the seminal edition of Herman Diels (1879).

The Cambridge Histories of philosophy, extending from Thales to the seventeenth century, are not a formal series. Nevertheless, they have a distinctive character: authoritative accounts that combine general coverage of a period with the individual contributions of their authors and indicate scholarly controversies. This volume is a worthy continuation of the tradition.

The short treatise On the Cosmos, which most scholars believe to be not by Aristotle, has confidently been attributed to Aristotle by G. Reale and A. P. Bos. I do not wish to enter into their arguments for this attribution, because I believe it can be proved to be untenable.

I argue for the interpretation of Anaximander's world as an unstable system. The inconsistency found by scholars in Theophrastus/Simplicius' text disappears when it is realized that the elemental forces of nature do not change into each other. They are in the Infinite in time as well as in space. To some extent preference is given to Aristotle's evidence over the doxographical vulgate habitually derived from Theophrastus, though of course the Theophrastean passage containing the verbatim quotation remains the primary witness.

Jaap Mansfeld’s _Studies in Early Greek Philosophy_ span the period from Anaximander to Socrates. General issues and particular problems of interpretation are tackled by a scrutiny of the sources, and of traditions of reception both ancient and modern.

This ground-breaking study offers the first full-length critical examination of H. Diel's Doxographi Graeci , focussing on the doxographer Aëtius, whose work Diels reconstructed from various later sources. Diel's theory is analysed, revised and improved at significant points.

Jaap Mansfeld and Frans de Haas bring together in this volume a distinguished international team of ancient philosophers, presenting a systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of one of the key texts in Aristotle's science and metaphysics: the first book of On Generation and Corruption. In GC I Aristotle provides a general outline of physical processes such as generation and corruption, alteration, and growth, and inquires into their differences. He also discusses physical notions such as contact, action and passion, and mixture. These notions (...) are fundamental to Aristotle's physics and cosmology, and more specifically to his theory of the four elements and their transformations. Moreover, references to GC elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus show that in GC I Aristotle is doing heavy conceptual groundwork for more refined applications of these notions in, for example, the psychology of perception and thought, and the study of animal generation and corruption. Ultimately, biology is the goal of the series of enquiries in which GC I demands a position of its own immediately after the Physics. The contributors deal with questions of structure and text constitution and provide thought-provoking discussions of each chapter of GC I. New approaches to the issues of how to understand first matter, and how to evaluate Aristotle's notion of mixture are given ample space. Throughout, Aristotle's views of the theories of the Presocratics and Plato are shown to be crucial in understanding his argument. (shrink)

These ten essays on Cicero's _Academic Books_ deal with various aspects of Academic scepticism, ancient epistemology, and the history of the Academy. The tradition from Socrates through to Galen is covered, with special emphasis on Carneades, Antiochus and, of course, Cicero himself.

_Aëtiana IV: Towards an Edition of the Aëtian Placita: Papers of the Melbourne Colloquium, 1–3 December 2015_ provides a critical discussion from various angles by a plurality of authors of the reconstruction of the _Placita_ and the relevance of the compendium for the history of Greek philosophy.

_Aëtiana IV: Towards an Edition of the Aëtian Placita: Papers of the Melbourne Colloquium, 1–3 December 2015_ provides a critical discussion from various angles by a plurality of authors of the reconstruction of the _Placita_ and the relevance of the compendium for the history of Greek philosophy.

This study investigates the methodology and tradition of Aëtius' Doxography of physics and provides a full reconstruction of Book II as a single unified text.

This collection of essays written between 1989 and 2009 records the authors’ exploration of the important but elusive genre of ancient doxography. Focusing primarily on the Placita of Aëtius, it can be used as a companion volume for the two earlier volumes of Aëtiana.

This study investigates the methodology and tradition of Aëtius' Doxography of physics and provides a full reconstruction of Book II as a single unified text.

In the "Doxographi Graeci" the preferred short heading of Aët. 2.31 (Greek text below, p. 28) is 'On Distances', though ps.Plutarch has a long heading. This chapter is about the distances of the sun and moon from each other and from the earth (lemmas 1 to 3, in both ps.Plutarch and Stobaeus), and of the real or apparent shape of the heaven relative to its distance from the earth (lemmas 4 and 5, Stobaeus only). Parallels from Ioann. Lydus and Theodoret (...) for what is in ps.Plutarch are given by Diels in apparatu. To the best of my knowledge it has not been noticed that a version of ps.Plutarch's text is preserved in a scholium on the "Almagest", which constitutes our earliest evidence for the text. The correctness of Diels' reconstruction is questionable. Though certainty, naturally, is beyond our reach it is quite possible that these two sets of lemmas represent two distinct Aëtian (or proto-Aëtian) chapters. These may have been coalesced by Stobaeus (or Aëtius), while ps.Plutarch abridged the second (or the two final lemmas) away. These considerations necessitate an inquiry into the parallels that are available, including material from an introduction to Aratus. The vexing question of short versus long(er) chapter headings is also relevant in this context. Furthermore, the contrasting views regarding cosmic distances are not only a feature of the Placita literature with a distant origin in Aristotle, but also, apparently, of the commentary literature on Plato's "Timaeus". Arguably in a passage in Plutarch's "De facie" these two traditions intersect. Finally, a case can be made out for Eudemus not Theophrastus as an intermediary source of Presocratic astronomical data in the Placita. (shrink)