Category Archives: Books

Soul and Life: Psyche in Seminal Ancient Greek Thinkers

SOUL AND LIFE brings together essays on Greek ontology, psychology, politics, and theories of soul in Socratic thought, Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus. Among the included perspectives, there is the recognition in common that the soul (psyche) is not a mere hypostatization or reification of the object of cognitive studies. Instead, these essays attempt to understand the soul as distinguished by life itself and as setting out ways of being in the world. The essays in Part I focus on political psychology, pursue feminist themes, and engage with issues in ethics and education. Contributions in Part II argue that the soul situates the fundamental structures in ontology and the study of Being as such. The authors in Part II further approach ancient psychology in terms of new ways of understanding the capacities of living beings for nutrition and generation and articulate the soul as a central concept in the constitution of the world as knowable.

Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition

For Martin Heidegger, our inherited traditions provide the concepts through which we make our world intelligible. Concepts we can also oppose, disrupt, and even exceed. First, however, if Western philosophy is our inheritance, we must submit it to Destruktion —starting with Aristotle. Heidegger and the Destruction of On How to Read the Tradition presents a new conception of Heidegger’s “destruction” as a way of reading.

Situated between Nietzschean genealogy and Derridean deconstruction, this method uncovers in Aristotle the most vital originating articulations of the Western tradition and gives us the means to confront it. Sean D. Kirkland argues this is not a rejection of the past but a sophisticated and indeed timely hermeneutic tool—a complex, illuminating, and powerful method for interpreting historical texts at our present moment. Acknowledging the historical Heidegger as a politically compromised and still divisive figure, Kirkland demonstrates that Heideggerian destruction is a method of interpreting history that enables us to reorient and indeed transform its own most troubling legacies.

Dealing with Disagreement. The Construction of Traditions in Later Ancient Philosophy

This book treats both Christian and non-Christian texts from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE, and suggests that dealing with disagreement helped philosophers define their own traditions while creating a conceptual common ground.

Ancient philosophy is known for its organisation into distinct schools. But those schools were not locked into static dogmatism. As recent scholarship has shown, lively debate persisted between and within traditions. Yet the interplay between tradition and disagreement remains underexplored. This volume asks, first, how philosophers talked about differences of opinion within and between traditions and, second, how such debates affected the traditions involved. It covers the period from the first century BCE, which witnessed a turn to authoritative texts in different philosophical movements, through the rise of Christianity, to the golden age of Neoplatonic commentaries in the fifth and sixth centuries CE.

By studying various philosophical and Christian traditions alongside and in interaction with each other, this volume reveals common philosophical strategies of identification and differentiation. Ancient authors construct their own traditions in their (polemical) engagements with dissenters and opponents. Yet this very process of dissociation helped establish a common conceptual ground between traditions. This volume will be an important resource for specialists in late ancient philosophy, early Christianity, and the history of ideas.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Albert Joosse and Angela Ulacco — Introduction

Riccardo Chiaradonna — The Early Peripatetic Interpreters of Aristotle’s Categories and the Previous Philosophical Tradition

Franco Ferrari — È esistita un’eterodossia nel medioplatonismo?

Teun Tieleman — Galen on Disagreement: Sects, Philosophical Methods and Christians

Albert Joosse — Γνῶθι σαυτόν and the Platonic Tradition in Clement of Alexandria

Sébastien Morlet — L’accusation de mauvaise entente (παρακοή) dans la polémique entre païens et chrétiens à la fin de l’Antiquité

Robbert M. van den Berg — Plato’s Violent Readers: Pagan Neoplatonists against Christian Appropriations of Plato’s Timaeus

Helmut Seng — Mythenkritik und Kultpolemik bei Firmicus Maternus

Alexandra Michalewski — « L’âme est le lieu des formes » Une réponse à l’argument du troisième homme à travers la symphônia de Platon et d’Aristote dans le Commentaire à la Métaphysique d’Asclépius de Tralles

Mareike Hauer — The Use of Stoic References in Simplicius’ Discussion of Quality

Index

Bibliography

Peter of Ireland, Writings on Natural Philosophy. Commentary on Aristotle’s On Length and Shortness of Life and the Determinatio Magistralis

226 p., 156 x 234 mm, PB, ISBN: 978-2-503-60568-5 / eISBN: 978-2-503-60569-2
Series: Brepols Library of Christian Sources, vol. 9

This book contains a study and translation of the works on natural philosophy by the 13th-century thinker Peter of Ireland, who taught Thomas Aquinas at the University of Naples.

Peter of Ireland (Petrus de Ybernia) was born sometime around the beginning of the thirteenth century in Ireland, probably of a Norman family. He probably left Ireland aged around age 15 to pursue his studies abroad. His interest in medical and scientific questions would suggest a stay at Oxford, whereas his approach to logic would suggest a Parisian influence. By the middle of the century he was Professor of Logic and Natural Philosophy at the University at Naples. Peter is perhaps one of the best known of medieval Irish thinkers on the continent owing to the fact that he was held to be the teacher of the young Thomas Aquinas at Naples University from 1239–44. As such, it would be he who, in all likelihood, first introduced Thomas to the study of Aristotle and perhaps also to the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes. The works presented here date from at least a decade later, and relate to lectures given at Naples in the 1250s and 1260s. The extent to which he was held in respect by his contemporaries is to be seen in his solution (determinatio) to the disputed question on the origin of the design of an animal’s body which was held before King Manfred around 1260. It was, perhaps the culmination of a famous scholarly career.

Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory

The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in The Sophist. In that dialogue Plato introduced the idea of statements as being either true or false, where the distinction between falsity and truth rests on a deeper discrepancy between appearance and reality, or seeming and being.

Robin Reames’s Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship—the rise and subsequent marginalization of “orality and literacy theory,” Heidegger’s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues—Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato’s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.

Plato and Aristophanes: Comedy, Politics, and the Pursuit of a Just Life

In Plato and Aristophanes, Marina Marren contends that our search for communal justice must start with self-examination. The realization that there are things that we cannot know about ourselves unless we become the
subject of a joke is integral to such self-scrutiny. Jokes provide a new perspective on our politics and ethics; they are essential to our civic self-awareness.

Marren makes this case by delving into Plato’s Republic, a foundational work of political philosophy. While the Republic straightforwardly condemns the decadence and greed of a tyrant, Plato’s attack on political idealism is both solemn and comedic. In fact, Plato draws on the same comedic stock and tropes as Aristophanes’s plays. Marren’s book strikes up an innovative conversation between three works by Aristophanes—Assembly Women, Knights, and Birds—and Plato’s philosophy, prompting important questions about individual convictions and one’s personal search for justice. These dialogic works offer critiques of tyranny that are by turns brilliant, scathing, and exuberant, making light of faults and ideals alike. Philosophical comedy exposes despotism in individuals as well as systems of government claiming to be just and good. This critique holds as much bite against contemporary injustices as it did at the time of Aristophanes and Plato.

Purchase Here (https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810144187/plato-and-aristophanes/)

Biopolitics and Ancient Thought

Biopolitics and Ancient Thought. Edited by Jussi Backman and Antonio Cimino. (Classics in Theory.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 240 pages.

The volume studies, from different perspectives, the relationship between ancient thought and biopolitics, that is, theories, discourses, and practices in which the biological life of human populations becomes the focal point of political government. It thus continues and deepens the critical examination, in recent literature, of Michel Foucault’s claim concerning the essentially modern character of biopolitics. The nine contributions comprised in the volume explore and utilize the notions of biopolitics and biopower as conceptual tools for articulating the differences and continuities between antiquity and modernity and for narrating Western intellectual and political history in general. Without committing itself to any particular thesis or approach, the volume evaluates both the relevance of ancient thought for the concept and theory of biopolitics and the relevance of biopolitical theory and ideas for the study of ancient thought. The volume is divided into three main parts: part I studies instances of biopolitics in ancient thought; part II focuses on aspects of ancient thought that elude or transcend biopolitics; and part III discusses several modern interpretations of ancient thought in the context of biopolitical theory.

PART I: BIOPOLITICS IN ANCIENT THOUGHT
1:Biopolitics and the “boundless people”: An Iliadic model (Sara Brill)
2:Plato and the biopolitical purge of the city-state (Mika Ojakangas)
3:Sovereign power and social justice: Plato and Aristotle on justice and its biopolitical basis in heterosexual copulation, procreation, and upbringing (Kathy L. Gaca)

PART II: ANCIENT THOUGHT BEYOND BIOPOLITICS
4:Otherwise than (bio)politics: Nature and the sacred in tragic life (Kalliopi Nikolopoulou)
5:Beyond biopolitics and juridico-institutional politics: Aristotle on the nature of politics (Adriel M. Trott)
6:Bene vivere politice: On the (meta)biopolitics of “happiness” (Jussi Backman)

PART III: BIOPOLITICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF ANCIENT THOUGHT
7:Hannah Arendt’s genealogy of biopolitics: From Greek materialism to modern human superfluity (Ville Suuronen)
8:From biopolitics to biopoetics and back again: On a counterintuitive continuity in Foucault’s thought (Sergei Prozorov)
9:Agamben’s Aristotelian biopolitics: Conceptual and methodological problems (Antonio Cimino)

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/biopolitics-and-ancient-thought-9780192847102?cc=nl&lang=en
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192847102.001.0001

Deleuze, A Stoic & The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter

Deleuze, A Stoic shows Deleuze’s engagement with Stoicism produced many of his most singular and powerful ideas, reveals a lasting influence on Gilles Deleuze by mapping his provocative reading of ancient Stoicism, unearths new possibilities for bridging contemporary philosophy and classics by engaging a vital yet recently rising area of scholarship: continental philosophy’s relationship to ancient philosophy, and introduces the untranslated Stoic scholarship published by pre- and post-Deleuzian French philosophers of antiquity to the English-reading world. Deleuze dramatises the story of ancient philosophy as a rivalry of four types of thinkers: the subverting pre-Socratics, the ascending Plato, the interiorising Aristotle and the perverting Stoics. Deleuze assigns the Stoics a privileged place because they introduced a new orientation for thinking and living that turns the whole story of philosophy inside out.

Review: “Johnson has produced a profound and erudite study of the stoic roots of Deleuze’s philosophy. This work is of vital importance for those interested in Deleuze, the continuing relevance of the stoic tradition, and, more fundamentally, the ethics of materialism.” – Dr. Henry Somers-Hall, Royal Holloway, University of London

The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter explores how Deleuze’s thought was shaped by Lucretian atomism – a formative but often-ignored influence from ancient philosophy. More than any other 20th-century philosopher, Deleuze considers himself an apprentice to the history of philosophy. But scholarship has ignored one of the more formative influences on Deleuze: Lucretian atomism. Deleuze’s encounter with Lucretius sparked a way of thinking that resonates throughout all his writings: from immanent ontology to affirmative ethics, from dynamic materialism to the generation of thought itself. Filling a significant gap in Deleuze Studies, Ryan J. Johnson tells the story of the Deleuze-Lucretius encounter that begins and ends with a powerful claim: Lucretian atomism produced Deleuzianism.

Review:” Readers will be surprised and charmed at the parallels Ryan Johnson finds between Deleuze and Lucretius. The lines he draws from Ancient atomist ideas about relations, movements, and speeds, through to Deleuzian materialism are exciting and convincing. The book is packed with interesting ideas and twists and is exacting in its scholarship. On top of that, it is beautifully written.” – Jay Lampert, Duquesne University

Le philosophe dans la cité: Sénèque et l’otium philosophique

Ce livre étudie l’acclimatation, à Rome, du débat hellénistique sur les genres de vie et plus spécifiquement la conception de l’otium développée par Sénèque.

Quel est le rôle du philosophe dans la cité ? Comment celui que l’on appellerait aujourd’hui « l’intellectuel » remplit-il au mieux ses devoirs d’homme et de citoyen ? Est-ce en choisissant l’action, notamment politique, dans la sphère publique ? Est-ce plutôt en « contemplant », c’est-à-dire en se consacrant à la recherche et à l’écriture ? Ou encore en enseignant ? Ces questions sont centrales dans l’Antiquité. Présent dès Platon, le débat sur les genres de vie devient prégnant dans les philosophies hellénistiques et prend une tournure singulière à Rome, où les concepts grecs de praxis et de theoria rencontrent les notions d’otium et de negotium.
L’œuvre de Sénèque s’avère, sur cette question, tout à fait novatrice. Dans une approche qui mêle des enjeux philosophiques et culturels, mais aussi linguistiques et littéraires, le philosophe romain renouvelle à la fois le débat philosophique et la notion romaine d’otium, synonyme chez lui de retraite philosophique. Prolongeant les réflexions de Cicéron sur la légitimité de l’étude philosophique, mais poussant plus loin que ce dernier la promotion de la contemplation et précisant la posture sociale du philosophe, Sénèque est le premier penseur romain à construire une véritable éthique de l’otium. L’intérêt philosophique de l’œuvre sénéquienne se double d’un intérêt littéraire dans la mesure où l’écriture est une activité majeure du philosophe retiré dans l’otium. La réflexion de Sénèque sur l’activité intellectuelle du philosophe est aussi une réflexion littéraire sur la fonction et les modalités de l’écriture philosophique.

Centres and Peripheries in the History of Philosophical Thought. Essays in Honour of Loris Sturlese

The notions of ‘centre’ and ‘peripheries’ are the two paradigms guiding through a broad analysis of figures, places and topics within the history of philosophy.

This volume is an homage to the great intellectual contribution made by Loris Sturlese to the field of history of medieval philosophy. Its point of departure lies in a methodological line, which Sturlese has maintained throughout his whole academic career: the importance in the historical and conceptual reconstruction of medieval philosophical thought of focusing not only on the classical, most famous centers of knowledge production and transmission, but also on the often-neglected peripheries, which during the Middle Ages were increasingly more relevant in propelling the circulation of texts and ideas. In this volume, the notions of ‘center’ and ‘periphery’ are not understood in a merely geographical sense, but also in conceptual, linguistic, historical and literary terms. The richness of this approach is demonstrated by the broad spectrum of the contributions, which range from Islamic philosophy to Italian Renaissance, including the reception of ancient philosophy and of Arabic scientific works in the Latin world, and up to eighteenth-century French geography. Special attention is devoted to the philosophical thought developed in the German area. The volume does not lack in giving space to important medieval figures, such as Dante, as well as to more general philosophical notions, such as the concept of rationality.

The volume explores connections, ruptures, relations and affinities through the analysis of paradigmatic figures, places and topics within the micro- and macro-histories of philosophy.

Nadia Bray is Research fellow at the Università del Salento in History of Medieval philosophy. Her research focuses on the reception of ancient and late-ancient philosophy.

Diana Di Segni is Research fellow at the Thomas-Institut of the Universität zu Köln. Her research focuses on the reception of Jewish thought in the Latin Middles Ages.

Fiorella Retucci is Associate Professor in History of Medieval philosophy at the Università del Salento and at the Universität zu Köln. Her research focuses on medieval Latin philosophy and theology.

Elisa Rubino is Associate Professor in History of Medieval philosophy at the Università del Salento. Her research focuses on medieval German philosophy and on the reception of Aristotelian science in the Middle Ages.

Table of Contents

Nadia Bray, Diana Di Segni, Fiorella Retucci, Elisa Rubino, Introduction

Loris Sturlese, Bibliography

Ruedi Imbach, Ein nicht-existierender Gegenstand? Eine gelehrte und nichtsdestotrotz persönliche Geschichte der Bochumer Schule (1971-1995)

Carmela Baffioni, Il Linguaggio di Adamo, la Caduta di Adamo. Walter Benjamin alla luce di un inedito testo arabo medievale

Luca Bianchi, L’aristotelismo vernacolare nel Rinascimento italiano: un fenomeno ‘regionale’?

Charles Burnett, Cleaning up the Latin Language in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Basel: Antonius Stuppa’s purgation of Albohazen’s De iudiciis astrorum

Stefano Caroti, “Est autem testis Melissus pro cunctis temporis sui Philosophis, sed et pro omni antiquitate”. Le metamorfosi di Melisso

Giulio d’Onofrio, Dante dal centro al cerchio

Onorato Grassi, Per l’edizione critica delle opere di Pietro Aureoli

Mikhail Khorkov, Nicholas of Cusa’s marginalia to Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus as one of the forgotten sources of the supposed Cusanian Platonism

Catherine König-Pralong, Centri, periferie, luoghi e percorsi. Jules Michelet versus Victor Cousin

Freimut Löser, On the Margin. Some Notes on Meister Eckhart

Pasquale Porro, Da Tommaso al tomismo. Napoli come centro filosofico nel Medioevo

Valeria Sorge, Per una microstoria dell’umanesimo rinascimentale. Agostino Nifo e la cultura napoletana del Cinque-cento

Andreas Speer, Die Universalität der Vernunft und die Vielheit ihrer Sprachen

Markus Vinzent, The Self-Location of Meister Eckhart

Index of names

Index of manuscripts