Category Archives: Books

Books

Aristotle on the Matter of Form: A Feminist Metaphysics of Generation

Adriel M. Trott

Situating her argument in the debates between Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler over efforts to resuscitate the meaning and role of matter in the history of philosophy, Trott argues for a robust sense of matter in Aristotle’s account of generation. Specifically, Trott argues that form in the figure of semen in Aristotle’s account of generation is dependent on material power to do its work. This argument shows how matter has its own power in Aristotle in such a way that makes the relationship of form to matter in Aristotle’s causal structure akin to that of a Möbius strip. The book establishes a positive contribution of material, which Aristotle associates with the female, while also showing the dependence of form, which Aristotle associates with the male, on the material power of elemental forces, specifically of heat.

Books

Plato’s Timaeus and the Missing Fourth Guest: Finding the Harmony of the Spheres

Donna Adler

Donna M. Altimari Adler, Ph.D., long time member of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, is pleased to announce that Brill Academic Publishers will be releasing her new book, Plato’s Timaeus and the Missing Fourth Guest: Finding the Harmony of the Spheres on December 24, 2019. This technical work in ancient philosophy solves a very old puzzle and will be most useful to scholars of ancient cosmology, the history of ideas, and the roots of western music theory.

Books

Sapiens and Sthitaprajna: A Comparative Study in Seneca’s Stoicism and the Bhagavadgita

Ashwini Mokashi

Sapiens and Sthitaprajna studies the concept of a wise person in the Stoic Seneca and in the Bhagavadgita. Although the Gita and Seneca’s writings were composed at least two centuries apart and a continent apart, they have much in common in recommending a well-lived life. This book describes how in both a wise person is endowed with both virtue and wisdom, is moral, makes right judgements and takes responsibility for actions. A wise and virtuous person always enjoys happiness, as happiness consists in knowing that one has done the right thing at the right time. Both Seneca and the Gita demand intellectual rigour and wisdom for leading a virtuous and effective life. They provide guidelines for how to become and be wise. Both systems demand a sage to be emotionally sound and devoid of passions. This leads to mental peace and balance, and ultimately tranquillity and happiness. While surveying these similarities, this study also finds differences in their ways of application of these ideas. The metaphysics of the Gita obliges the sage to practise meditation, while the Stoics require a sage to be a rational person committed to analysing and intellectualizing any situation. This comparative study will be of interest to students of both Ancient Western and Ancient Indian Philosophy. Practitioners of Stoicism and followers of the Gita should find the presence of closely-related ideas in a very different tradition of interest while perhaps finding somewhat different prescriptions a spur to action.

Books

Interconnectedness. The Living World of the Early Greek Philosophers

Claudia Zatta

What did the early Greek philosophers think about animals and their lives? How did they view plants? And, ultimately, what type of relationship did they envisage between all sorts of living beings? On these topics there is evidence of a prolonged investigation by several Presocratics. However, scholarship has paid little attention to these issues and to the surprisingly “modern” development they received in Presocratics’ doctrines. This book fills this lacuna through a detailed (and largely unprecedented) analysis of the extant evidence.

The volume includes also the first extensive collection of the ancient sources pertaining to living beings and life in early Greek philosophy, organized chronologically and thematically.

Books

Remaking Boethius. The English Language Translation Tradition of The Consolation of Philosophy

Bram Roosen

This volume is a reference work, organized chronologically in its sections, with a separate entry for each translator’s work. The sections are defined by the type of translations they comprise. The plan of the book is encyclopedic in nature: some biographical material is provided for each translator; the translations are described briefly, as are their linguistic peculiarities, their implied audiences, their links with other translations, and their general reception. Sample passages from the translations are provided, and where possible these samples are taken from two of the most well-known moments in the Consolatio: the appearance of Lady Philosophy, narrated by the Prisoner, and the cosmological hymn to the Deus of the work, sung by Lady Philosophy.

Where possible, an attempt also has been made to keep the general appearance of the original printed pages. Orthographic peculiarities (in spelling, capitalization, indentation, etc.) except for the elongated “s” have been maintained. Notes inserted by the translators or editors upon the passages transcribed in this volume are maintained as footnotes. These notes are included because they reveal much about the scholarship that the translators bring to their work of translating. The notes signal the translators’ familiarity with commentaries and earlier Consolatio translations, and they help to identify the types of audiences targeted by the translators (whether general or scholarly). The notes indicate points in the text (either grammatical or cultural) that translators or editors deemed needful of clarification for their readers, but the notes often also represent actual borrowings of notes, sometimes verbatim, from earlier translations. Such “borrowed notes” help to establish or verify lines of affiliation between the translations.

Books

Looking at Beauty: to Kalon in Western Greece

Heather L. Reid

The ancient Greek word kalon can be translated as beautiful, good, noble, or fine— yet somehow it transcends any one of those concepts. In art and literature, it can apply straightforwardly to figures like Helen or Aphrodite, or enigmatically to the pais kalos: the youthful athlete that decorates so much sympotic pottery. In the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, meanwhile, it takes on an ethical, even transcendent dimension. And yet, the thread between a beautiful painting and the Platonic form of the beautiful is never completely broken. In the summer of 2018, a group of scholars from varying disciplines gathered in Siracusa, Sicily – a place of not indifferent beauty itself – to discuss the nature of to kalon in ancient Greek culture. We were especially interested in the large part of that heritage that derives from or was influenced by Western Greece – the ancient Hellenic cities of Sicily and Southern Italy. The result is a volume that considers art, literature, rhetoric, and philosophy in exploring the nature of beauty.

Books

How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

Sara Beth Haring

In “How to Think Like a Roman Emperor,” Donald Robertson teaches the life-changing principles of Stoicism through the story of its most famous proponent, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Robertson, who is a cognitive psychotherapist, shows how Aurelius used philosophical doctrines and therapeutic practices to build emotional resilience and endure tremendous adversity. Whether you are new to Stoicism or a long-time student of it, this book will help readers succeed in applying the same methods to their own lives. It is an essential guide to helping people handle the ethical and psychological challenges we face today.

Books

When Wisdom Calls: Philosophical Protreptic in Antiquity

Bram Roosen

517 p., 156 x 234 mm, 2018, ISBN: 978-2-503-56855-3, € 100 excl. tax
Series: Monothéismes et Philosophie, vol. 24

Philosophy has never been an obvious life choice, especially in the absence of apparent practical usefulness. The intellectual effort and moral discipline it exacts appeared uninviting “from the outside.” However, the philosophical ideals of theoretical precision and living virtuously are what has shaped the cultural landscape of the West since Antiquity. This paradox arose because the ancients never confined their philosophy to the systematic exposition of doctrine. Orations, treatises, dialogues and letters aimed at persuading people to become lovers of wisdom, not metaphorically, but truly and passionately. Rhetorical feats, logical intricacies, or mystical experience served to recruit adherents, to promote and defend philosophy, to support adherents and guide them towards their goal. Protreptic (from the Greek, “to exhort,” “to convert”) was the literary form that served all these functions. Content and mode of expression varied considerably when targeting classical Greek aristocracy, Hellenistic schoolrooms or members of the early Church where the tradition of protreptic was soon appropriated. This volume seeks to illuminate both the diversity and the continuity of protreptic in the work of a wide range of authors, from Parmenides to Augustine. The persistence of the literary form bears witness to a continued fascination with the call of wisdom.

Table of contents
Protreptic: A Protean Genre — Olga Alieva
Classical and Hellenistic World
Protreptic and Poetry: Hesiod, Parmenides, Empedocles — Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui
Protreptic and Pythagorean Sayings: Iamblichus’s Protrepticus — Johan C. Thom
Protreptic and Epideixis: Corpus Platonicum — Yuri Shichalin, Olga Alieva
Protreptic and Apotreptic: Aristotle’s dialogue Protrepticus — Douglas Stanley Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson
Protreptic and Epistolography: Epicurus — Jan Erik Heßler
Protreptique et exégèse : l’exhortation chez Philon d’Alexandrie — G. Hertz
Protreptic and Philosophical Dialogue: Cicero — G. Tsouni
Imperial Rome
Protreptique et auto-exhortation : les Lettres à Lucilius de Sénèque — Jordi Pià Comella
Protreptic and Paraenesis: The Second Epistle of Clement — James Starr
Protreptique et apologétique : Justin Martyr — Sophie Van der Meeren
Protreptic and Medicine: Galen — Vincenzo Damiani
Protreptic and Satire: Lucian — Markus Hafner
Protreptic and Rhetoric: Clement of Alexandria — Marco Rizzi
Protreptic and Mystagogy: Augustine’s Early Works — Paul van Geest
Protreptic and Autobiography: Dio’s Thirteenth Oration, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho and Cyprian’s To Donatus — Annemaré Kotzé
Protreptic and Biography: The Case of Marinus’s Vita Procli — Constantin Ionuț Mihai
Protreptique et isagogique : Les vestibules de la philosophie — Sophie Van der Meeren

Books

Becoming Socrates: Political Philosophy in Plato’s Parmenides

Alex Priou

Interpreters of Plato’s Parmenides have long agreed that it is a canonical work in the history of ontology. In the first part, the aged Parmenides presents a devastating critique of Platonic ontology, followed in the second by what purports to be a response to that critique. But despite the scholarly agreement as to the general subject matter of the dialogue, what makes it one whole has nevertheless eluded its readers, so much so that some have even speculated it to be a patchwork of two dimly related dialogues.

In Becoming Socrates, Alex Priou shows that the Parmenides’ unity remains elusive due to scholarly neglect of a particular passage in Parmenides’ critique—a passage Parmenides identifies as the hinge between the dialogue’s two parts and as the “greatest impasse” facing Platonic ontology. There Parmenides situates the concern with ontology or the question of being within the concern with political philosophy or the question of good rule. In this way, the Parmenides shows us how a youthful Socrates first learned of the centrality of political philosophy that would become the hallmark of his life—that it, and not ontology, is “first philosophy.”

“Alex Priou addresses here the crucial role that the Parmenides plays in Plato’s account of the ‘Socratic turn,’ that is, in the thinking that led Socrates to turn away from natural philosophy and initiate a new way of philosophizing that we now call political philosophy. This impressive and valuable new interpretation helps us to understand better a notoriously difficult Platonic dialogue about the beginning of both political theory and the tradition of Western rationalism.”

– Mark J. Lutz, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

“For the first time, Plato’s presentation of the young Socrates being schooled by the great Parmenides in ontology is shown to illuminate, and to be illuminated by, Plato’s presentation of the mature Socrates analyzing justice in the Republic. What results is a deeply thought provoking new perspective on Platonic-Socratic political philosophy.”

– Thomas L. Pangle, University of Texas at Austin

Books

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy

Sean D. Kirkland

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of essays on a broad range of themes and figures spanning the entire period extending from the Pre-Socratics to Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic thinkers.

Rather than offering synoptic and summary treatments of preestablished positions and themes, these essays engage with the ancient texts directly, focusing attention on concepts that emerge as urgent in the readings themselves and then clarifying those concepts interpretively. Indeed, this is a companion volume that takes a very serious and considered approach to its designated task—accompanying readers as they move through the most crucial passages of the infinitely rich and compelling texts of the ancients. Each essay provides a tutorial in close reading and careful interpretation.

Because it offers foundational treatments of the most important works of ancient philosophy and because it, precisely by doing so, arrives at numerous original interpretive insights and suggests new directions for research in ancient philosophy, this volume should be of great value both to students just starting off reading the ancients and to established scholars still fascinated by philosophy’s deepest abiding questions.