Michael Woods provides us with a very fine literal translation of Books I, II, and VIII Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics. Apart from the books common to both the Eudemian Ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics, these are the most important for understanding this work. Book I presents a preliminary overview of happiness by means of those opinions Aristotle regards as most significant. This book corresponds to the first six chapters of Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics. Woods's commentary is most detailed and (...) helpful for Chapter 8, the final chapter of Book I, which deals with the criticism of the Form of the Good. He also has useful discussions of the Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia, the distinction between practical and theoretical inquiries, and the various candidates for the good life. Book II discusses in outline what happiness is, the general nature of virtue of character, including a presentation of the doctrine of the mean, and the voluntary, including choice. It corresponds to Book I. 7 and Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics. Woods analyzes the chapters on the voluntary very thoroughly and his commentary on the important first chapter, with its similarity to Book I.7 of the Nichomachean Ethics, is also very detailed. Book VIII contains a first chapter on the connection between virtue and knowledge, a second chapter on good fortune, and a third chapter on nobility or complete virtue, concluding with several references to "the god," which Woods interprets as meaning the unmoved mover of the Metaphysics in contradistinction to the view of the German commentator, Dirlmeier, who takes it to be theoretical reason. This book does not really correspond to any book of the Nicomachean Ethics but is unique. (shrink)

This excellent work on Platos most influential dialogue deserves the serious consideration of all who are interested in contemporary philosophy as well as those who concern themselves with ancient philosophy, especially Plato. Philo and Augustine, creators of medieval thought could engage Scripture in a dialogue with the first part of Timaeus speech; Kepler and Galileo, who helped to bring about modern thought, worked at perfecting the use of mathematics for the study of physical nature, inspired by the second beginning of (...) Timaeus speech, but a contemporary philosophical reflection similar to these has been unavailable. That desideratum has now been met with the publication of John Salliss book, appearing at the crossing of the old millennium with that of the new. His work continues the process of revisiting the past and heralding the future. It achieves this double goal by showing how Platos Timaeus displaces an account of the universe modeled on technical production with that of natural procreation and displaces the tentative distinction between the intelligible and the sensible by that of the chora, which both determines and limits that distinction and escapes being defined by either pole. The originary locus of the so-called Platonism of the West is revealed as the source of its most trenchant critique. (shrink)

Dr. Rhoades explains in his opening chapter that “Plato’s constant dramatic refrain is that the healing of a tyrannical eros is necessary to political wisdom. This implies that the study of eros is the study of politics and vice versa. Thus, the Platonic dialogues that we perceive as erotic are also political, and the dialogues that we classify as political are also erotic”. The working out of this thesis in his analysis of the Symposium and the Phaedrus constitute the bulk (...) of this work. But because Rhoades holds that Plato presents Socrates as having knowledge of eros, which is one of the greatest things, and maintains in the Seventh Letter that serious matters are in no way a spoken thing nor should they be written about, it becomes necessary to articulate where Plato and his Socrates stand on what Rhoades calls “their policy of refraining from writing or speaking about serious things” to which he gives the name “Silence.” The investigation of this issue requires a chapter on nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators on Plato and another chapter presenting an extended reading of Plato’s Seventh Letter. (shrink)

This volume contains eleven essays with an introduction by James Bogen. Bogen's essay is a fine overall presentation of the issues that the papers encompass, all of which arose out of a working conference on predication and the history of philosophy and science at Pitzer College in 1981. The first five essays have as their primary focus the logical theories of Plato and Aristotle. The next two essays are respectively on Ockham and Buridan with the two following on Leibniz. The (...) collection concludes with an essay by Wilfrid Sellars on his own theory of predication and an appendix on "The Third Man Argument" by Alan Code. This work thus provides a fairly well-rounded presentation of the basic logical issues that have concerned several major philosophers from ancient times through the medieval period to the present. (shrink)

Viewable as either a development or an introduction to Dr. Sallis's earlier work, Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus, the present volume exhibits the continuing relevance of the thought of the Platonic dialogues from Plotinus and Augustine to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Arendt, along with the writings of more recent philosophers and scholars, including Reiner Schuermann, Charles Scott, and Dennis J. Schmidt. These eight carefully crafted essays are superb dialogues with these writers and their thinking on Platonism, developing, enlarging, and supplementing (...) those thoughts in relation to Platonic texts. These essays anticipate, reflect, and recollect one another; it would require more than a simple review to reveal the riches of even one of them. The work also contains a general index, which includes reference to thirty-nine German words or phrases and a separate Greek index of ninety-seven words and phrases. (shrink)

This work is the most complete study of the Sophist in any language and the most original account of this dialogue to appear in many years. Virtually every line is subject to exhaustive scrutiny. The major contemporary approaches to reading the Sophist, especially the analytic, are also carefully criticized. The current analytic position maintains or presupposes--and usually little argumentation is given on this point--that the "combination of forms" presented in the Sophist is best understood on the model of grammatical predication. (...) Such an interpretation Rosen argues transposes that doctrine into an Aristotelian or Fregean framework, with which it is wholly incompatible. While predicates are contained in their subjects, the forms combine but remain monoeidetic, for as primary units they do not undergo internal articulation. Furthermore, a study of the text shows that the Eleatic Stranger always distinguishes between language and the forms, making it impossible for the latter to be legitimately subsumed under the former. (shrink)

This study is a comprehensive account of Plato's ontology as found in the dialogues. The author shows a thorough knowledge of most of the work done in the English speaking analytic tradition on Plato. The work's major thesis is that there are a number of significant changes in Plato's works, which either reflect a clear development or a radical revision of both methods and interests. The author is especially against a unitarian interpretation of the dialogues, which sees the Forms as (...) the major topic throughout Plato's works. He does not, though, simply side with a revisionist interpretation, for he presents Plato as returning to previous approaches even in a late dialogue. (shrink)

Prior to the appearance of this work, the posthumously published book, Plato's "Charmides" by T. G. Tuckey was the only book-length commentary in English on the Charmides. Unlike Tuckey and the more recent German writers on this dialogue Hyland has broader aims than explicating Plato's analysis of sophrosyne, although he does that as well. Hyland sees the present philosophical and cultural scene pervaded by the two apparently opposite but intimately interrelated stances of mastery and submission. To these he proposes an (...) alternative--the interrogative stance maintained by Socrates in the Platonic dialogues. Such an orientation maintains "a precarious balance" between mastery and submission. One neither accepts any answer as completely satisfactory nor does one despair of any meaningfulness to the range of answers available. Thus one avoids imposing a theory upon the facts as well as being overly submissive to whatever events are present as the manifestation of Being. This attitude, also called "responsive openness," is believed by Hyland to be the real meaning of sophrosyne, the virtue investigated in the Charmides. Such a stance is the existential attitude adopted by the philosopher; indeed, it is the virtue of philosophy. In the Charmides Socrates is presented as the mean between the submission exhibited by Chaerephon, who too uncritically accepts Socrates' way of life, and Charmides and Critias, who exhibit potential tyrannical qualities in their attempts to master those around them. (shrink)