Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy

Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy

Author: Andrea Wilson Nightingale

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-08-12

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1139454641

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In fourth-century Greece (BCE), the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths (the 'spectator theory of knowledge'). This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria (state pilgrimage). In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies.


Ancient Models of Mind

Ancient Models of Mind

Author: Andrea Nightingale

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-11-11

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1139489763

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How does God think? How, ideally, does a human mind function? Must a gap remain between these two paradigms of rationality? Such questions exercised the greatest ancient philosophers, including those featured in this book: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Plotinus. This volume encompasses a series of studies by leading scholars, revisiting key moments of ancient philosophy and highlighting the theme of human and divine rationality in both moral and cognitive psychology. It is a tribute to Professor A. A. Long, and reflects multiple themes of his own work.


The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece

The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece

Author: H. A. Shapiro

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-05-07

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1139826999

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece provides a wide-ranging synthesis of history, society, and culture during the formative period of Ancient Greece, from the Age of Homer in the late eighth century to the Persian Wars of 490–480 BC. In ten clearly written and succinct chapters, leading scholars from around the English-speaking world treat all aspects of the civilization of Archaic Greece, from social, political, and military history to early achievements in poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. Archaic Greece was an age of experimentation and intellectual ferment that laid the foundations for much of Western thought and culture. Individual Greek city-states rose to great power and wealth, and after a long period of isolation, many cities sent out colonies that spread Hellenism to all corners of the Mediterranean world. This Companion offers a vivid and fully documented account of this critical stage in the history of the West.


Once Out of Nature

Once Out of Nature

Author: Andrea Nightingale

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2011-05-30

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 0226585751

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Introduction -- Edenic and resurrected transhumans -- Scattered in time -- The unsituated self -- Body and book -- Unearthly bodies -- Epilogue: "mortal interindebtedness"--Appendix: Augustine on Paul's notion of the flesh and the body.


Ontology Without Borders

Ontology Without Borders

Author: Jody Azzouni

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-20

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0190622571

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for example, and they appear to move independently of a background of other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be, aren't projections. Azzouni shows how the resulting austere metaphysics tames a host of ancient philosophical problems about constitution ("Ship of Theseus," "Sorities"), as well as contemporary puzzles about reductionism. In addition, it's shown that the same sorts of individuation conditions for properties, which philosophers use to distinguish between various kinds of odd abstracta-universals, tropes, and so on, are also projections. Accompanying our notion of an object is a background logic that makes cogent ontological debate about anything from Platonic objects to Bigfoot. Contemporary views about this background logic ("quantifier variance") make ontological debate incoherent. Azzouni shows how a neutral interpretation of quantifiers and quantifier domains makes sense of both philosophical and pre-philosophical ontological debates. Azzouni also shows how the same apparatus makes sense of our speaking about a host of items--Mickey Mouse, unicorns, Martians--that nearly all of us deny exist. It's allowed by what Azzouni shows about the background logic of our ontological debates, as well as the semantics of the language of those debates that we can disagree over the existence of things, like unicorns, without that background logic and semantics forcing ontological commitments onto speakers that they don't have.


Genres in Dialogue

Genres in Dialogue

Author: Andrea Wilson Nightingale

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2000-04-13

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780521774338

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This 1995 book takes as its starting point Plato's incorporation of specific genres of poetry and rhetoric into his dialogues. The author argues that Plato's 'dialogues' with traditional genres are part and parcel of his effort to define 'philosophy'. Before Plato, 'philosophy' designated 'intellectual cultivation' in the broadest sense. When Plato appropriated the term for his own intellectual project, he created a new and specialised discipline. In order to define and legitimise 'philosophy', Plato had to match it against genres of discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens. By incorporating the text or discourse of another genre, Plato 'defines' his new brand of wisdom in opposition to traditional modes of thinking and speaking. By targeting individual genres of discourse Plato marks the boundaries of 'philosophy' as a discursive and as a social practice.


Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

Author: M. F. Burnyeat

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-06-14

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0521750725

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.


Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World

Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World

Author: Heather L. Reid

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-01-02

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1317984951

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book examines the relationship between athletics and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome focused on the connection between athleticism and virtue. It begins by observing that the link between athleticism and virtue is older than sport, reaching back to the athletic feats of kings and pharaohs in early Egypt and Mesopotamia. It then traces the role of athletics and the Olympic Games in transforming the idea of aristocracy as something acquired by birth to something that can be trained. This idea of training virtue through the techniques and practice of athletics is examined in relation to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then Roman spectacles such as chariot racing and gladiator games are studied in light of the philosophy of Lucretius, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The concluding chapter connects the book’s ancient observations with contemporary issues such as the use of athletes as role models, the relationship between money and corruption, the relative worth of participation and spectatorship, and the role of females in sport. The author argues that there is a strong link between sport and philosophy in the ancient world, calling them offspring of common parents: concern about virtue and the spirit of free enquiry. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Ethics and Sport.


Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome

Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome

Author: Tonio Hölscher

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2018-06-22

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 0520967887

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Visual culture was an essential part of ancient social, religious, and political life. Appearance and experience of beings and things was of paramount importance. In Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome, Tonio Hölscher explores the fundamental phenomena of Greek and Roman visual culture and their enormous impact on the ancient world, considering memory over time, personal appearance, conceptualization and representation of reality, and significant decoration as fundamental categories of art as well as of social practice. With an emphasis on public spaces such as sanctuaries, agora and forum, Hölscher investigates the ways in which these spaces were used, viewed, and experienced in religious rituals, political manifestations, and social interaction.