Category Archives: Books

Books

Politeia: New Readings in the History of Philosophy

Anne Mamary

Edited by Anne J. Mamary
Edited by Meredith Trexler Drees

Subjects: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Aristotle, Plato
Series: SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy

Hardcover : 9798855803013, 325 pages, July 2025
Paperback : 9798855803006, 325 pages, January 2026

In classical Greece, the word politeia in its largest sense meant the citizens’ engagement with the shared project that is the lived life of their polis, city, civic society. Ancient philosophers, poets, historians, and orators constantly reflected on what this shared project should be and how citizens could participate in it. The chapters in this collection, inspired by the work of Anthony Preus, examine some of the products of their reflections, both the written works themselves and the variety of comparative contexts into which they can be put, from the Greeks’ neighboring Asian polities to contemporary philosophical engagements with similar issues. The essays in Politeia hope to inspire readers to think about their own lives in conversation with the lives of the many communities to which we belong—to not only demonstrate the idea of politeia but to bring to life politeia’s connection of the individual to the collective, something that seems to be of central importance in a world of division and to be the beating heart of the discipline of philosophy.

https://sunypress.edu/Books/P/Politeia2

Books

Materia Philosophiae: Material Dimensions of Ancient Philosophy

William Wians

Materia Philosophiae. Material Dimensions of Ancient Philosophy

Series: 

Volume Editors:   and 
 
Ever since Thales fell into the well, popular imagination has pictured philosophers as abstracted from everyday reality. Materia Philosophiae: The Material Dimensions of Ancient Philosophy counters that view. Philosophy in ancient Greece grew out of and remained closely connected to the material realities around it—difficulties of travel, reliance on cumbersome scrolls, learning acquired literally at the foot of a master; but also the spread of coinage, contemporaneous achievements in technology and engineering, and contact with everyday household objects. By resituating philosophers in their material contexts, Materia Philosophiae opens research avenues that have not previously been explored in a single volume.

Books

Parmenides & Translation: Figures of Motion, Figures of Being

D. M. Spitzer

How has translation, understood in an expansive sense that includes reception, interpretation, and editing, transformed an orally performed poem from the Greek Archaic period into a foundational text of philosophy? In what ways might translation open new interpretive possibilities? Through activating translation in multiple ways, ranging from translation as thinking, transfictional readings of canonical texts, and a provocative new translation, in Parmenides & Translation: Figures of Motion, Figures of Being D. M. Spitzer explores these questions, seeking to develop and inspire new approaches to the poem of Parmenides and beyond. With a style that continually reminds readers of the inalienable links between literature and philosophy, the book enhances the emerging research area on the intersections of translation and philosophy.
https://www.peterlang.com/document/1398280#

Books

The Theory of Incorporeals in Ancient Stoicism Logic, Expression, Materialism

This classic essay from one of the twentieth-century’s leading historians of European philosophy was formative to twentieth-century French thought

The first English translation of a seminal text on ancient philosophy
Includes two new essays from leading scholars on historical and contemporary French thought
Unearths the overlooked influence of Bréhier’s essay on twentieth-century French thinkers
Fills in a crucial yet often overlooked chapter in Deleuze Studies
Engages one of the most provocative themes in ancient materialism: incorporeality
Expands on continental returns to antiquity that focus on metaphysics, e.g., speculative realism, new materialism, affect theory, posthumanism, Althusserian and post-Althusserian approaches

Émile Bréhier’s creative interpretations of Stoicism inspired the next generation of thinkers – from Jean-Paul Sartre to Luce Irigaray – to rethink the history of philosophy. Perhaps most of all, Bréhier’s thinking about the Stoic theory of incorporeality was pivotal to Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of Ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, especially the Stoics, and formative for his own materialistic metaphysics. To understand the metaphysics, philosophy of language, and interpretations of psychoanalysis in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense, Bréhier’s influence remains to be fully elucidated.

Yet such influence has been largely unknown in Anglophone philosophy – until now. For the first time since its publication nearly a century ago, Bréhier’s groundbreaking essay finally appears in English. To frame its history and convey its importance for the future of philosophy, two new essays by a leading French philosopher and a British-Canadian philosopher bookend the translation.

Books

Aristotle and Tragic Temporality

Sean D. Kirkland

Aristotle and Tragic Temporality treats a theme that has drawn scholarly attention for millennia: Aristotle on time and our experience of it. It does so, however, in a wholly unprecedented way, grounding its interpretation in his Poetics and Ethics, rather than the natural philosophy of the Physics.

Sean D. Kirkland first takes up Aristotle’s discussion of our tragic temporal situatedness—our having to act, think, and live always between a determining past we can never fully master and a projected future we can never fully anticipate. It is this condition that comes powerfully to light for Aristotle on stage in the performance of a tragic drama. The familiar Aristotelian ‘virtue ethics’ then becomes something radically new in the transforming light of the Poetics’ temporality – an outline of how humans can inhabit that irremediably tragic condition, never overcoming or suspending it, and arrive nonetheless at something like happiness and excellence.

Books

Inquiring into Being: Essays on Parmenides

Colin Smith

Inquiring into Being is a study of Parmenides, the early Greek pre-Socratic philosopher often credited as the first metaphysician and whose sole written work was a philosophical poem. In his poem, Parmenides has a narrating goddess character indicate the sense of being that must be and cannot be as a corrective to the errors mortals make when accounting for the ultimate nature of reality while showing a keen scientific understanding of natural phenomena. Inquiring into Being brings together and further develops recent work on Parmenides and the surviving fragments of his text through twelve chapters by scholars from the United States and United Kingdom working in analytic and continental philosophy, classics, political theory, literary theory, and the history of science. It serves as a guide through many of the interpretive controversies in Parmenides’s poem while offering new insights into Parmenides’s role as poet, scientist, natural philosopher, and investigator into the nature of being.

Books

Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice

Ryan Johnson

Continental philosophers and contemporary artists transform the classics into living practices

– A volume of original essays, four previously untranslated articles, novel visual art, and reproduced images, by an international lineup of today’s leading thinkers and practitioners
– Features non-expository or non-argumentative elements, such as exhortative, prescriptive, or didactic dimensions (telling the reader to do something specific, such as, do an exercise, write something, etc.)
– Thinkers and art-practitioners collaborate to produce a combined written and visual contribution
– The book gathers new continental approaches to ancient philosophy outside of the dominant interpretive milieus of phenomenology, hermeneutics, historicism, and analytic philosophy

This volume collects written and visual works that engage with opportunities of ancient practice from within the continental tradition. More than surveying ancient ethical or political ideas, the chapters develop divergent yet resonant approaches to concrete ways of living, acting, reflecting, and being with others found in antiquity and its reception. The practices involve the habits, exercises, activities, philosophies, and lives of today’s readers; and so most chapters encourage the reader to do something, to put the ideas into practice. Withstanding a temptation to simply theorize practice, it insists on the embodied and shared materiality of living in singular times and places. The practical encounters between this book and its readers range across antiquity and the contemporary world, from political theatre, casuistry, and slavery to book production, friendship, and our own mortality. Through thinker-practitioner collaborations, occasional pieces, exhortations to readers, and recipes for action, this work strives to articulate and cultivate old and new practices for our lives.

Books

Teaching Plato in Italian Renaissance Universities

During the Renaissance, the Arts curriculum in universities was based almost exclusively on the teaching of Aristotle. With the revival of Plato, however, professors of philosophy started to deviate from the official syllabus and teach Plato’s dialogues. This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive overview of Platonic teaching in Italian Renaissance universities, from the establishment of a Platonic professorship at the university of Florence-Pisa in the late 15th century to the introduction of Platonic teaching in the schools and universities of Bologna, Padua, Venice, Pavia and Milan in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays draw from new evidence found in manuscripts and archival material to explore how university professors adapted the format of Plato’s dialogues to suit their audience and defended the idea that Plato could be accommodated to university teaching. They provide significant and fundamental insight into how Platonism spread during the 16th and 17th centuries and how a new interpretation of Plato emerged, distinct from the Neoplatonic tradition revived by Marsilio Ficino.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Maude Vanhaelen, “Teaching Plato in Sixteenth-Century Italy”

Chapter 2 – Simone Fellina, “Teaching Plato in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Florence and Pisa: from Francesco Cattani da Diacceto to Girolamo Bardi”

Chapter 3 – Barbara Bartocci, “Shifting Away from Aristotelianism towards Platonism. Paolo Beni’s Project”

Chapter 4 – Eva Del Soldato, “Plato between Pavia and Milan in the Sixteenth Century”

Bibliography
Index of Names

Books

Foreign Influences: The Circulation of Knowledge in Antiquity

Tasos Grigorakis

The essays collected in this volume focus on the Ancient Greeks’ perception of foreigners and of foreign lands as potential sources of knowledge. They aim at exploring the hypothesis that the most adventurous intellectuals saw foreign lands and foreigners as repositories of knowledge that the Greeks σοφοί had to engage with, in the hope of bringing back home valuables in the form of new ideas.

It is a common place to state that the “Greeks” displayed xenophobia, which is probably best exemplified in the binary and ethnocentric division of humanity in two groups: the Greek world (i.e., the hellenophones) and the others, the Barbarians – those who speak foreign languages. This attitude of insularism and defiance, however, did not hinder the curiosity of Greek and Roman societies towards strangers. Lycurgus, Pythagoras, Democritus, etc.: there is a long list of sages and philosophers who travelled around the world for a significant period of time. The Greeks had a rich and varied relationship with foreign lands and people, which made possible a real circulation of knowledge throughout the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic times; this is also true of the Roman Empire. Each of the articles included in this collective work explore one aspect of the “stranger” as a possible source of knowledge, with contributions mostly focused on Plato, Xenophon, Democritus, Aristotle, Diogenes, Cicero and Galen.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword — Benoît Castelnérac and Laetitia Monteils-Laeng

Remarques sur les emplois stylistiques de ξένος, ξενικός et γλῶττα — André Rehbinder

Democritus, B 299 (D.K.). Alien Wisdom, Geometry, and the Contemporary Prose Landscape — Ilaria Andolfi

Étrangèreté du vrai et politique chez Platon — Étienne Helmer

Cephalus: A Role Model for the Producers in Plato’s Kallipolis — Anna Schriefl

Xenophobia in Utopia: On the Metics in Plato’s Laws — David Merry

Social Science and Universalism in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus IV — Zoli Filotas

Aristotle on the Intellectual Achievements of Foreign Civilizations — Mor Segev

Carthage: Aristotle’s Best (non-Greek) Constitution? — Thornton C. Lockwood, Jr.

Translatio, Imitatio, Aemulatio: Assimilation of Greek Thought in Cicero’s Philosophical Writings — Katarzyna Borkowska

Étrangers ou étranges ? La sagesse des confins et la connaissance du monde dans la littérature grecque des premiers siècles de l’empire — Marine Glénisson

Déterminisme environnemental et influence culturelle : la vision de l’étranger chez Galien — Julien Devinant

Le privilège philosophique de l’étranger — Isabelle Chouinard

Index of Passages

Index of Ancient Names and Places

Books

Soul and Life: Psyche in Seminal Ancient Greek Thinkers

Kevin Marren

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.