Kategoria BISAC: Philosophy >> History & Surveys - Ancient & Classical

Metaphysics and possibility are fundamental concepts in philosophical thought. How are they related? Maaen analyzes two paradigmatic metaphysicians in the history of philosophy and shows that in their arguments, Aristotle and Nicholas of Cusa use a differentiated semantics of possibility to resolve problems of substance, language, and thought.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the history of the angle from Euclid to classical Arabic mathematics. The volume presents critically edited texts, with translations and commentaries, of Greek and Arabic philosophers and mathematicians including Euclid, Simplicius, al-Nayrīzī, Avicenna, Ibn al-Haytham, al-Tūsī, al-Shīrāzī, and al-Fārisī.

When Philip Sidney defends poetry by defending the methods used by poets and lawyers alike, he relies on the traditional association between fiction and legal procedure--an association that begins with Aristotle. In this study Kathy Eden offers a new understanding of this tradition, from its origins in Aristotle's Poetics and De Anima, through its development in the psychological and rhetorical theory of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to its culmination in the literary theory of the Renaissance.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the...

It has been much disputed to what extent thinkers in Greek and Roman antiquity adhered to ideas of evolution and progress in human affairs. Did they lack any conception of process in time, or did they anticipate Darwinian and Lamarckian hypotheses?

The Origins of Civilization in Greek and Roman Thought, first published in1986, comprehensively examines this issue. Beginning with creation myths - Mother Earth and Pandora, the anti-progressive ideas of the Golden Age, and the cyclical theories of Orphism - Professor Blundell goes on to explore the origins of scientific...

Intellectuals in Politics in the Greek World, first published in 1984, " "was the first comprehensive study of this recurrent theme in political sociology with specific reference to antiquity, and led to significant revaluation of the role of intellectuals in everyday political life.

The term intellectual is carefully defined, and figures as diverse as Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle; Isocrates, Heracleides of Ponteius and Clearchus of Soli are discussed. The author examines the difference between the success of an intellectual politician, like Solon, and the failure of those such as...

Julian: An Intellectual Biography, first published in 1981, presents a penetrating and scholarly analysis of Julian's intellectual development against the background of philosophy and religion in the late Roman Empire.

Professor Polymnia Athanassiadi tells the story of Julian's transformation from a reclusive and scholarly adolescent into a capable general and an audacious social reformer. However, his character was fraught with a great many contradictions, tensions and inconsistencies: he could be sensitive and intelligent, but also uncontrollably spontaneous and subject...

The Sophists, the Socratics and the Cynics had one important characteristic in common: they mainly used spoken natural language as their instrument of investigation, and they were more concerned to discover human nature in its various practical manifestations than the facts of the physical world.

The Sophists are too often remembered merely as the opponents of Socrates and Plato. Rankin discusses what social needs prompted the development of their theories and provided a market for their teaching. Five prominent Sophists Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias and Thrasymachus are...

Priscian of Lydia was one of the Athenian philosophers who took refuge in 531 AD with King Khosroes I of Persia, after the Christian Emperor Justinian stopped the teaching of the pagan Neoplatonist school in Athens. This was one of the earliest examples of the sixth-century diffusion of the philosophy of the commentators to other cultures.

Tantalisingly, Priscian fully recorded in Greek the answers provided by the Athenian philosophers to the king's questions on philosophy and science. But these answers survive only in a later Latin translation which understood both the Greek and the...

What is real? What is the relationship between ideas and objects in the world? Is God a concept or a being? Is reality a creation of the mind or a power beyond it? How does mental experience coordinate with natural laws and material phenomena? The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought is the definitive anthology of responses to these and other questions on the nature and limits of human knowledge by philosophers, theologians, and writers from Plato to Zizek.

The word transcendental is as prevalent and also as ambiguously defined as the name philosophy itself. There...

What is real? What is the relationship between ideas and objects in the world? Is God a concept or a being? Is reality a creation of the mind or a power beyond it? How does mental experience coordinate with natural laws and material phenomena? The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought is the definitive anthology of responses to these and other questions on the nature and limits of human knowledge by philosophers, theologians, and writers from Plato to Zizek.

The word transcendental is as prevalent and also as ambiguously defined as the name philosophy itself. There...

This book takes a new approach to the question, "Is the philosopher to be seen as universal human being or as eccentric?." Through a reading of the Theaetetus, Pappas first considers how we identify philosophers - how do they appear, in particular how do they dress? The book moves to modern philosophical treatments of fashion, and of "anti-fashion." He argues that aspects of the fashion/anti-fashion debate apply to antiquity, indeed that nudity at the gymnasia was an anti-fashion. Thus anti-fashion provides a way of viewing ancient philosophy's orientation toward a social world in...