Middle' Platonism has some claim to be the single most influential philosophical movement of the last two thousand years, as the common background to 'Neoplatonism' and the early development of Christian theology. This book breaks with the tradition of considering it primarily in terms of its sources, instead putting its contemporary philosophical engagements front and centre to reconstruct its philosophical motivations and activity across the full range of its interests. The volume explores the ideas at the heart of Platonist philosophy in this period and includes a comprehensive selection of primary sources, a significant number of which appear in English translation for the first time, along with dedicated guides to the questions that have been, and might be, asked about the movement. The result is a tool intended to help bring the study of Middle Platonism into mainstream discussions of ancient philosophy.
Polemon of Laodicea's "Physiognomy" is a manual on how to tell character from appearance, thus enabling its readers to choose friends and avoid enemies on sight. The present volume is the work of a team of leading Classicists and Arabists. The main surviving versions in Greek and Latin are translated into English for the first time.
The first English translation of Greek Theology The first-century CE North African philosopher Cornutus lived in Rome as a philosopher and is best known today for his surviving work Greek Theology, which explores the origins and names of the Greek gods. However, he was also interested in the language and literature of the poets Persius and Lucan and wrote one of the first commentaries on Virgil. This book collects and translates all of our evidence for Cornutus for the first time and includes the first published English translation of Greek Theology. This collection offers entirely fresh insight into the intellectual world of the first century. Features Translation based on the latest critical text The first truly holistic picture of Cornutus’s intellectual profile A new account of the early debate over Aristotle’s Categories and the Stoic contribution to it
In addition to works by Plato and Xenophon, we know of dozens of treatises and dialogues written by followers of Socrates that are now lost. The surviving evidence for these writings constitutes an invaluable resource for our understanding of Socrates and his philosophical legacy. The Circle of Socrates presents new -- sometimes the first -- English translations of a representative selection of this evidence, set alongside extracts from Plato and Xenophon. The texts are arranged according to theme, with concise introductions that provide an overview of the topics and the main lines of thought within them. The aim is to give a fuller account of the philosophical activity of Socrates immediate followers: both to shed light on less well known figures (some of whom inspired schools and movements that were influential in the development of later thought), and also to improve our grasp of the intellectual context within which Plato and Xenophon, the most important of the Socratics, lived and wrote. Included are a general introduction to the history, content, and character of these writings; a bibliography; an index of sources; and an index of the Socratics and their works.
This new edition introduces the reader to the philosophy of early Christianity in the second to fourth centuries AD, and contextualizes the philosophical contributions of early Christians in the framework of the ancient philosophical debates. It examines the first attempts of Christian thinkers to engage with issues such as questions of cosmogony and first principles, freedom of choice, concept formation, and the body–soul relation, as well as later questions like the status of the divine persons of the Trinity. It also aims to show that the philosophy of early Christianity is part of ancient philosophy as a distinct school of thought, being in constant dialogue with the ancient philosophical schools, such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism and Scepticism. This book examines in detail the philosophical views of Christian thinkers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Basil, and Gregory of Nyssa, and sheds light in the distinct ways they conceptualized traditional philosophical issues and made some intriguing contributions. The book’s core chapters survey the central philosophical concerns of the early Christian thinkers and examines their contributions. These range across natural philosophy, metaphysics, logic and epistemology, psychology, and ethics, and include such questions as how the world came into being, how God relates to the world, the status of matter, how we can gain knowledge, in what sense humans have freedom of choice, what the nature of soul is and how it relates to the body, and how we can attain happiness and salvation. This revised edition takes into account the recent developments in the area of later ancient philosophy, especially in the philosophy of Early Christianity, and integrates them in the relevant chapters, some of which are now heavily expanded. The Philosophy of Early Christianity remains a crucial introduction to the subject for undergraduate and postgraduate students of ancient philosophy and early Christianity, across the disciplines of classics, history, and theology.
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