Hellenistic and Later Ancient Philosophy

The purpose of this essay is to highlight the internal logic of Augustine’s thought as expressed in his De pulchro et apto, in order to provide a general interpretative key enabling the mapping of the various indications of sources, passages and concepts used by Augustine. Accordingly, this purpose is essentially twofold: (1) a logical and doctrinal exploration of Augustine’s De pulchro et apto (which is not just a treatment of the problem of beauty in a Manichaean perspective, but an exposition (...) of the whole philosophy of the young, Manichean Augustine, in metaphysics, ethics, physics, cosmology, aesthetics, psychology and theology), and (2) a bibliographical update concerning the contents of this work and its Manichean cultural and philosophical context. (shrink)

Raccolta di saggi dedicati al Prof. Franco De Capitani.

The Greek inscription set up by the Epicurean philosopher Diogenes of Oinoanda, probably in the first half of the second century AD, is a document of extraordinary interest and importance. It is the longest inscription known from the ancient world, perhaps running to about 25,000 words, and the only one to give a detailed exposition of a philosophical system. Since 1884 a total of 299 pieces of the inscription have been found scattered about the ruins of Oinoanda in the mountains (...) of southwest Turkey - substantial finds, but still not even a third of the complete work. Of these fragments 76 were found in the ten years 2003-2012, all but one of them during a new epigraphical and architectural survey of Oinoanda directed by Martin Bachmann in 2007-2012. Jürgen Hammerstaedt and Martin Ferguson Smith recorded and edited the new finds. The present volume brings together all the articles in which they presented the new texts and revisions of "old" ones and described the survey. It contains also three new sections, including indices of Greek names and words. (shrink)

A collection of eight studies on Theophrastus' Metaphysics, presenting an overview of the first reception of Aristotle.

Linda I. Meyers was twenty-eight and the mother of three little boys when her mother, after a lifetime of threats, killed herself. Staggered by conflicting feelings of relief and remorse, Linda believed that the best way to give meaning to her mother's death was to make changes to her own life. Bolstered by the women's movement of the seventies, she left her marriage, went to college, started a successful family acting business, and established a fulfilling career. Written with irony and (...) humour and sprinkled with Yiddish, The Tell is one woman's inspirational story of before and after, and ultimately of emancipation and purpose." -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Dans le De fato, Alexandre construit une théorie péripatéticienne du destin et réfute les Stoïciens, partisans dune conception dure du destin. Par là il offre un document majeur sur le déterminisme dans lAntiquité. Louvrage montre comment lexégèse dAristote lui permet de proposer une conception nouvelle de la responsabilité.

This English translation of On Anger provides a newly read and supplemented Greek text of one of the most important "Herculaneum papyri," the only collection of literary texts to survive the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. On Anger is our sole evidence for the Epicurean view of what constitutes natural and praiseworthy anger, as distinguished from unnatural pleasure in vengeance and cruelty for their own sake, a view that can be shown to have influenced Latin authors like Cicero, Horace (...) and Virgil. (shrink)

In "Saving One Another: Philodemus and Paul on Moral Formation in Community" Justin Reid Allison compares how the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus and the Christian apostle Paul envisioned the members of their communities helping one another to grow into moral maturity. Allison establishes that Philodemus and Paul are more similar than previously noticed in their conception and practice of moral formation in community, and that these similarities offer a critical opportunity to consider important differences between the two as well. By deepening (...) the comparison to include differences alongside similarities, and to include theological and socio-economic facets of communal moral formation, Allison shows that Philodemus and Paul uniquely shed fresh light on one another's texts when understood in comparative perspective. (shrink)

The story of Sosipatra of Pergamon (4th century C.E.) as told by her biographer, Eunapius of Sardis in his Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, is a remarkable tale. It is the story of an elite young girl from the area of Ephesus, who was educated by traveling spirits (daemons), and who grew up to lead her own philosophy school on the west coast of ancient Asia Minor. She was also a prophet of sorts, channeling divine messages to her students, (...) family, and friends, capable of mentally viewing events that were happening in other locations, and foretelling the future. This volume is the first sustained, book length, attempt to tell the story of this mysterious woman. It presents a rich contextualization of the brief, sketchy, and highly fictionalized portrait provided by Eunapius. (shrink)

This volume is the first monograph devoted to the philosophy of Taurus of Beirut, and provides a long-awaited analysis of his texts and their first English translation. Through close examination of the extant witnesses, Petrucci gives a new account of Middle Platonism based on a fresh approach to the theological and cosmological view of Taurus. In this way, the book contributes substantially to the debate on Post-Hellenistic Platonism from the point of view of both exegetical methods and philosophical doctrines, and (...) offers a starting point for a new understanding of many aspects of ancient thought. (shrink)

This volume of 18 essays shows how leading philosophers address the problems of ancient metaphysics: one and the many, the potential and the actual, the material and immaterial, the divine and the world itself. Includes three original and previously unpublished translations of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Aubenque and Barbara Cassin.

Celsus penned the earliest known detailed attack upon Christianity. While his identity is disputed and his anti-Christian treatise, entitled the True Word, has been exclusively transmitted through the hands of the great Christian scholar Origen, he remains an intriguing figure. In this interdisciplinary volume, which brings together ancient philosophers, specialists in Greek literature, and historians of early Christianity and of ancient Judaism, Celsus is situated within the cultural, philosophical, religious and political world from which he emerged. While his work is (...) ostensibly an attack upon Christianity, it is also the defence of a world in which Celsus passionately believed. It is the unique contribution of this volume to give voice to the many dimensions of that world in a way that will engage a variety of scholars interested in late antiquity and the histories of Christianity, Judaism and Greek thought. (shrink)

This book offers a fresh analysis of the account of Peripatetic ethics in Cicero's On Ends 5, which goes back to the first-century BCE philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon. Georgia Tsouni challenges previous characterisations of Antiochus' philosophical project as 'eclectic' and shows how his reconstruction of the ethics of the 'Old Academy' demonstrates a careful attempt to update the ancient heritage, and predominantly the views of Aristotle and the Peripatos, in the light of contemporary Stoic-led debates. This results in both a (...) hermeneutically complex and a philosophically exciting reading of the old tradition. A case in point is the way Antiochus grounds the 'Old Academic' conception of the happy life in natural appropriation, thus offering a naturalistic version of Aristotelian ethics. (shrink)

_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.

In this essay, we consider the formal and ontological implications of one specific and intensely contested dialectical context from which Deleuze’s thinking about structural ideal genesis visibly arises. This is the formal/ontological dualism between the principles, ἀρχαί, of the One (ἕν) and the Indefinite/Unlimited Dyad (ἀόριστος δυάς), which is arguably the culminating achievement of the later Plato’s development of a mathematical dialectic.3 Following commentators including Lautman, Oskar Becker, and Kenneth M. Sayre, we argue that the duality of the One and (...) the Indefinite Dyad provides, in the later Plato, a unitary theoretical formalism accounting, by means of an iterated mixing without synthesis, for the structural origin and genesis of both supersensible Ideas and the sensible particulars which participate in them. As these commentators also argue, this duality furthermore provides a maximally general answer to the problem of temporal becoming that runs through Plato’s corpus: that of the relationship of the flux of sensory experiences to the fixity and order of what is thinkable in itself. Additionally, it provides a basis for understanding some of the famously puzzling claims about forms, numbers, and the principled genesis of both attributed to Plato by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and plausibly underlies the late Plato’s deep considerations of the structural paradoxes of temporal change and becoming in the Parmenides, the Sophist, and the Philebus. After extracting this structure of duality and developing some of its formal, ontological, and metalogical features, we consider some of its specific implications for a thinking of time and ideality that follows Deleuze in a formally unitary genetic understanding of structural difference. These implications of Plato’s duality include not only those of the constitution of specific theoretical domains and problematics, but also implicate the reflexive problematic of the ideal determinants of the form of a unitary theory as such. We argue that the consequences of the underlying duality on the level of content are ultimately such as to raise, on the level of form, the broader reflexive problem of the basis for its own formal or meta-theoretical employment. We conclude by arguing for the decisive and substantive presence of a proper “Platonism” of the Idea in Deleuze, and weighing the potential for a substantive recuperation of Plato’s duality in the context of a dialectical affirmation of what Deleuze recognizes as the “only” ontological proposition that has ever been uttered. This is the proposition of the univocity of Being, whereby “being is said in the same sense, everywhere and always,” but is said (both problematically and decisively) of difference itself. (shrink)