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

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...

Olympiodorus (AD c. 500-570), possibly the last non-Christian teacher of philosophy in Alexandria, delivered 28 lectures as an introduction to Plato. This volume translates lectures 10-28, following from the first nine lectures and a biography of the philosopher published in translation in a companion volume, Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1-9 (Bloomsbury, 2014).

For us, these lectures can serve as an accessible introduction to late Neoplatonism. Olympiodorus locates the First Alcibiades at the start of the curriculum on Plato, because...

Aristotle is one of the most crucial figures in the history of Western thought, and his name and ideas continue to be invoked in a wide range of contemporary philosophical discussions. The Bloomsbury Companion to Aristotle brings together leading scholars from across the world and from a variety of philosophical traditions to survey the recent research on Aristotle's thought and its contributions to the full spectrum of philosophical enquiry, from logic to the natural sciences and psychology, from metaphysics to ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Further essays address aspects of the...

The resurgence of interest in Cicero's political philosophy in the last twenty years demands a re-evaluation of Cicero's ideal statesman and its relationship not only to Cicero's political theory but also to his practical politics.

Jonathan Zarecki proposes three original arguments: firstly, that by the publication of his De Republica in 51 BC Cicero accepted that some sort of return to monarchy was inevitable. Secondly, that Cicero created his model of the ideal statesman as part of an attempt to reconcile the mixed constitution of Rome's past with his belief in the...