Early Greek Ethics is the first volume devoted to philosophical ethics in its "formative" period. It explores contributions from the Presocratics, figures of the early Pythagorean tradition, sophists, and anonymous texts, as well as topics influential to ethical philosophical thought such as Greek medicine, music, friendship, and justice.
This book is devoted to the last part of Aristotle’s collection of short treatises known today as the Parva Naturalia, i.e. the treatise On Youth and Old Age, on Life and Death, on Respiration. In the three main sections of the book, the author offers a translation, a commentary and a thorough analysis of this work. The author argues in favour of the unity of the work and contextualises its ideas within Aristotle’s corpus and the medical tradition of his time. After an Introduction to the nature of the work and its significance for the history of natural philosophy and science, a new English translation follows, along with a detailed commentary of Chapters 1-6, which combines philosophical discussion with philological observations. The book includes four interpretive essays, which tackle problems related to the whole treatise on a more philosophical basis, including questions about the structure and unity of the work, the organisation of the material, Aristotle’s methodological principles, his aims and target audience as well as the relevance of his selected themes to the thematic agenda of some Hippocratic writings. This book is of interest to students and researchers in Aristotle’s psychophysiology, and his views about the embodied mind, as well as to anyone concerned with the history of natural philosophy and science more generally.
The earliest phase of philosophy in Europe saw the beginnings of cosmology and rational theology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethical and political theory. It saw the development of a wide range of radical and challenging ideas: from Thales' claim that magnets have souls and Parmenides' account that there is only one unchanging existent to the development of an atomist theory of the physical world. This general account of the Presocratics introduces the major Greek philosophical thinkers from the sixth to the middle of the fifth century BC. It explores how we might go about reconstructing their views and understanding the motivation and context for their work as well as highlighting the ongoing philosophical interest of their often surprising claims. Separate chapters are devoted to each of the major Presocratic thinkers, including Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus, and an introductory chapter sets the scene by describing their intellectual world and the tradition through which their philosophy has been transmitted and interpreted. With a useful chronology and guide to further reading, the book is an ideal introduction for the student and general reader.
Atheology is the intellectual effort to understand atheism, defend the reasonableness of unbelief, and support nonbelievers in their encounters with religion. This book presents a historical overview of the development of atheology from ancient thought to the present day. It offers in-depth examinations of four distinctive schools of atheological thought: rationalist atheology, scientific atheology, moral atheology, and civic atheology. John R. Shook shows how a familiarity with atheology’s complex histories, forms, and strategies illuminates the contentious features of today’s atheist and secularist movements, which are just as capable of contesting each other as opposing religion. The result is a book that provides a disciplined and philosophically rigorous examination of atheism’s intellectual strategies for reasoning with theology. Systematic Atheology is an important contribution to the philosophy of religion, religious studies, secular studies, and the sociology and psychology of nonreligion.
Drawing a new portrait of late medieval conflicts between atomists and anti-atomists, this book offers a new outlook on the fourteenth century's development of sciences.
O trabalho de reconstituição da história da filosofia na Antiguidade se confunde com aquele da investigação sobre os processos de transmissão, de recepção e de discussão dos textos. E, no caso dos Pré-Socráticos, isso se traduz no exame crítico dos testemunhos e comentários gerados no contexto da discussão de suas teses e dos fragmentos de obras originalmente elaboradas nos duzentos anos da primeira idade da filosofia grega, e citados ao longo de pelo menos um milênio por diversas gerações de autores antigos que se debruçaram sobre o seu pensamento. Estas são as nossas principais fontes para o estudo deste período da história do pensamento antigo: graças a esses autores dispomos de um material literário responsável por consolidar um rico e complexo fenómeno de recepção que permitiu, historicamente, a efetiva constituição de um legado dessas obras perdidas em sua original integridade. Nesse processo de transmissão, pelo menos duas perspectivas se distinguem e se complementam: aquela da historiografia filosófica e aquela da doxografia. Diante delas, uma habilidade se delineia e se impõe ao estudioso dos primeiros tempos da filosofia: é preciso saber ler os textos. Isso pressupõe, entre outras coisas, que se dê a devida atenção ao contexto em que cada fragmento de pensamento foi transmitido (quando isso é possível) e à discussão suscitada pelas teses nele expostas, à intertextualidade de cada uma das fontes de que dispomos para abordar um determinado pensador e suas ideias, além de um cuidadoso manuseio das ferramentas da paleografia e da filologia. Uma obra em particular foi responsável, no início do século XX, por atrair a atenção dos estudiosos para esse período da Filosofia Antiga. Trata-se dos Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,de Hermann Diels, coletânea posteriormente revista e incrementada com as contribuições de Walther Kranz. A coletânea por eles estabelecida se tornou uma primeira referência para os estudos que se seguiram sobre um ou outro autor, sobre uma ou outra tradição do que se convencionou denominar de "filosofia pré-socrática". Com efeito, para além do terreno das traduções e do estabelecimento de texto das coletâneas dos Pré-Socráticos, o âmbito dos estudos consagrados aos primeiros pensadores da tradição filosófica vem assistindo nos últimos anos a um crescimento significativo do número de pesquisadores, estudantes e professores que passaram a se interessar e se ocupar, de maneira mais direta e duradora, do pensamento filosófico desse período da Antiguidade Grega, que se inicia na transição do século VII para o VI a.C. e se estende até o século V a.C. Em toda a América Latina dissertações e teses, artigos, livros e capítulos de livros vêm sendo dedicados aos principais representantes deste período, abordando uma grande variedade de temas e problemas, e adotando diferentes perspectivas metodológicas, contribuindo para fomentar uma comunidade de estudiosos votados a este campo de estudo e pesquisa, que vem se consolidando nos últimos anos e se encontra em franco movimento de expansão. Os textos são apresentados na língua original e traduzidos para o inglês.
This volume focuses on the under-explored topic of emotions' implications for ancient medical theory and practice, while it also raises questions about patients' sentiments. Ancient medicine, along with philosophy, offer unique windows to professional and scientific explanatory models of emotions. Thus, the contributions included in this volume offer comparative ground that helps readers and researchers interested in ancient emotions pin down possible interfaces and differences between systematic and lay cultural understandings of emotions. Although the volume emphasizes the multifaceted links between medicine and ancient philosophical thinking, especially ethics, it also pays due attention to the representation of patients' feelings in the extant medical treatises and doctors' emotional reticence. The chapters that constitute this volume investigate a great range of medical writers including Hippocrates and the Hippocratics, and Galen, while comparative approaches to medical writings and philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, dwell on the notion of wonder/admiration (thauma), conceptualizations of the body and the soul, and the category pathos itself. The volume also sheds light on the metaphorical uses of medicine in ancient thinking.
Of the Presocratic thinkers traditionally credited with the foundation of Greek philosophy, Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles are exceptional for writing in verse. This is the first book-length, literary-critical study of their work. It locates the surviving fragments in their performative and wider cultural contexts, applying intertextual and intratextual analyses in order to reconstruct the significance and impact they conveyed for ancient audiences and readers. Building on insights from literary theory and the philosophy of literature, the book sheds new light on these authors' philosophical projects and enriches our appreciation of their works as literary artefacts. It also expands our knowledge of the genres in which they wrote, of the literary culture of the Western Greek world, and of the development of Greek poetics from the Archaic to the Classical periods, exposing the influence of these thinkers on more famous Sophistic and Platonic ideas about literature.
In ancient tradition, Pythagoras emerges as a wise teacher, an outstanding mathematician, an influential politician, and as a religious and ethical reformer. This volume offers a comprehensive study of Pythagoras, Pythagoreanism, and the early Pythagoreans through an analysis of the many representations of the individual and his followers.
This volume analyses in depth the reception of early Greek philosophy in the Epicurean tradition and provides for the first time in scholarship a comprehensive edition, with translation and commentary, of all the Herculanean testimonia to the Presocratics. Among the most significant scientific outcomes, it provides elements for the attribution of an earlier date to the attested tradition of Xenophanes’ scepticism; a complete reconstruction of the Epicurean reception of Democritus; a new reconstruction of the testimonia to Nausiphanes’ concept of physiologia, Anaxagoras’ physics and theology, and Empedocles’ epistemology; new texts for better comparing the doxographical sections of Philodemus’ On Piety with those of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods, which update H. Diels’ treatment of this subject in his Doxographi Graeci.
