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11456 results in Ancient philosophy

Page 1 of 573

Pythagorean Philosophy, 250 BCE–200 CE
  • An Introduction and Collection of Sources in Translation
  • Phillip Sidney Horky
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2027
    Print publication:
    30 April 2027
  • Pythagoreanism stands as one the most influential – and obscure – philosophical movements in antiquity. Most ancients identified Pythagoras as the originator of the concept of philosophy, or “love of wisdom”; but his philosophy is often assumed to fade away with the dispersal of the Pythagorean communities in the fourth century BCE. This pathbreaking book presents the afterlife of Pythagoreanism, identifying the wide range of philosophical views that Pythagoreans developed in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, when the legacy of Pythagoras and his students was contested. Through careful analysis and synthesis of hundreds of ancient Greek passages never before translated into English, as well as extensive subject introductions, it gives shape to later Pythagorean philosophy as a whole, and in its parts, for the very first time.

Plato's Biology
  • Douglas R. Campbell
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027
  • From cosmology, to physics, to theology, Plato approached biological research as an opportunity to apply the full breadth of his wider scientific and philosophical principles. This step-by-step assessment of the comprehensive biological system developed in Plato's Timaeus establishes his status as a biological thinker, asserting his essential place in the history of science. In a philosophical tour of the human body, each chapter of this volume explores Plato's theories of a different system of the body, accompanied by an encyclopedic appendix of the tissues and organs of the body according to Plato. This exploration of Plato's biology enriches our understanding of his full philosophical worldview, providing answers to questions not only about the causes of diseases, but also about our relationship to nature and the divine, and about what it means to be human.

The Fundamental Bodies of Stoic Physics
  • Ian Hensley
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2027
    Print publication:
    31 January 2027
  • Stoic physics is an early physicalist philosophy which explains the world in terms of bodies and their interactions. This worldview is combined with a distinctive theology in which an omnipresent deity crafts the world. The details of early Stoics' views are handed down to us by second-hand ancient sources, including critics, doxographers, and later Stoics, and the second-hand nature of these reports sometimes obscures the original theory. By focusing on evidence that preserves the views of the early leaders-Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus-this book identifies the most important bodies in Stoic physics, including matter and substance, the four elements, pneuma, and the cosmos itself. It examines the metaphysical relationships between these bodies, and explains how the Stoics' god fits into their cosmology. The book aims to make the ancient Stoic worldview understandable to a contemporary audience, while developing and defending new interpretations of Stoicism that will advance the discussion among specialists.

Pythagoreanism and Plato
  • Selected Studies
  • Bruno Centrone
  • Edited by Laura M. Castelli, Federico M. Petrucci, Diana Quarantotto, Simone G. Seminara, Angela Ulacco
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2026
    Print publication:
    30 November 2026
  • This volume collects ten revised and translated essays by Bruno Centrone, one of Italy's leading scholars of ancient philosophy. Together they trace a rich and coherent intellectual narrative from Plato's metaphysics, ethics, and psychology to their reinterpretation to later Pythagoreanizing writings. Centrone's studies combine meticulous philological accuracy with philosophical depth, shedding new light on Plato's conception of truth, being, virtue, and the soul, as well as on the complex processes through which later thinkers reshaped Platonic doctrines. A particular strength of the book lies in its treatment of post-Hellenistic pseudo-Pythagorean texts, for which Centrone's work remains foundational. By collecting and making these landmark studies available in English, this volume provides an essential resource for scholars, graduate students, and libraries, and a crucial bridge between Italian and anglophone traditions of scholarship on ancient philosophy.

Divine and Human Agency in Ancient Greek Thought
  • Edited by Alexandre Johnston, Rebecca Van Hove
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • This book explores the ways in which divine and human agency interacted in ancient Greek thought. It offers new interpretations of a wide array of texts and sources, from Homeric epic, Aeschylean tragedy and Herodotus to Neoplatonist thought, emphasising the fascinating diversity, ambiguity and complexity of ancient Greek responses to divine intervention, and asking what these can tell us about how the Greeks related to their gods. At the same time, the volume charts the intellectual history of debates on divine and human agency, from ancient philosophy to twentieth-century scholarship. Most radically, it considers whether commonly used concepts such as 'double motivation' and 'over-determination' have outlived their purpose; and puts forward potential alternative approaches. By engaging with all these questions, the book yields novel insights into how the ancient Greeks responded to the idea of divine intervention, and, by extension, into how they experienced and interpreted the world around them.

Plato's Sophist in Antiquity
  • Edited by Roberto Granieri, Francesco Fronterotta
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • Plato's Sophist in Antiquity offers the first comprehensive account of how one of Plato's most challenging and influential dialogues was read, interpreted, and transformed throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Spanning from the Early Academy to Late Neoplatonism, the volume unites leading scholars in a systematic investigation of the Sophist's complex afterlife. Combining historical depth with philosophical insight, it uncovers how ancient thinkers – Aristotle, the Stoics, Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and others – engaged with the dialogue's central questions about being, non-being, truth and falsehood, identity and difference, linguistic reference, and much else. By tracing these rich trajectories of reception, the book not only fills a major gap in Platonic studies but also demonstrates the continuing vitality of the Sophist for contemporary debates in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.
Plato’s Medicinal Politics and Its Hippocratic Entwinement

Plato’s Medicinal Politics and Its Hippocratic Entwinement
  • Illness, Paideia, and the Decline of an Ideal City
  • Wenjin Liu
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    October 2026
    Print publication:
    31 October 2026
  • This Element argues that Plato's medical language in political contexts is not mere metaphor but a medical model of political analysis. Centering on the Republic, it shows how Plato adopts, critiques, and reworks Hippocratic ideas to diagnose, explain, evaluate, and treat political conditions. The payoff is a solution to a central puzzle: how the ideal city can be exceptionally stable yet liable to degenerate into vice. Its stability, I argue, consists in a robustness and resilience analogous to bodily health, sustained by protective institutions and practices; its fragility lies in the inevitable fallibility of those protections, which cannot indefinitely prevent, arrest, or reverse corruption over time. The Element then identifies a corrupt paideia-understood as a city-wide system of acculturation-as the singular, foundational cause of political degeneration, and closes by drawing lessons about the limits and prospects of genuine reform.

Lucretius On Animals
  • Pamela Zinn
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • In Lucretius' De rerum natura, animals are fundamentally like humans and deserve to be treated accordingly. Animals also have much to teach us, including about how to treat each other and, indeed, (other) animals. That is not merely poetic imagery, but also scientific argument. Lucretius' analysis of animal nature is thoroughly integrated with his broader philosophical arguments and integral to many. Animals likewise serve as moral exemplars in his didactic programme and even as symbols of it. Positing a continuum of life, rather than a hierarchy of being, Lucretius thus offers a thorough, systematic challenge to the anthropocentric worldview exemplified by Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. His position on animal intelligence and its ethical implications is an original contribution to the Epicurean tradition and a landmark in the history of ideas. It prefigures modern debates on subjects ranging from cognition and bioethics to ecology.

Truth and Relativism in Ancient Philosophy
  • Edited by Tamer Nawar, Matthew Duncombe
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • This volume offers a sustained examination of ancient Greek philosophical accounts of truth. Thinkers from the Sophists and Presocratics to the Hellenistic schools gave substantial attention to the nature of truth, to what kinds of things are capable of being true, and to how truth may vary with perspective, context, or standards of assessment. A distinguished cast of world-leading scholars examine these diverse positions, showing how ancient philosophers grappled with questions that remain central today: whether truth is absolute or relative, how faultless disagreement is possible, and what it is for a statement to be correct relative to different parameters of assessment. The result is a rich historical and philosophical account showing the complexity of ideas about truth in Greek antiquity.

Aristotle on Justice
  • The Virtues of Citizenship and Constitutions
  • Thornton Lockwood
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Aristotle's account of justice has inspired thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Martha Nussbaum. Concepts such as distributive justice, equity, the common good, and the distinction between just and unjust political organizations find articulations in his writings. But although Aristotle's account of justice remains philosophically relevant, its intellectual, social, and political origins in the Mediterranean world of the fourth century BCE have often been overlooked. This book places Aristotle's account of justice in dialogue with his fourth-century intellectual colleagues such as Plato, Xenophon, and Isocrates, and allows it to be understood within the framework of fourth-century institutions as they were experienced by citizens of ancient Greek political communities. It thus provides the modern reader with the framework which Aristotle presupposed for his original work in antiquity, including the intellectual debates which formed its context.

Aristotle, Aristotelianism and Ancient Medicine
  • Philip J. van der Eijk
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2026
    Print publication:
    30 September 2026
  • Aristotle had a decisive impact on the development of ancient medicine. He and his followers conducted a dialogue about life and living beings, body and soul, and health and disease with doctors from the Classical period down to late antiquity: interlocutors who included key figures like Galen and the Hippocratic commentator Stephanus of Alexandria. Philip van der Eijk's magisterial and attractively written book describes and analyses this dialogue and argues that Aristotle strategically positioned himself within these discussions while making important and innovative contributions to them. The author further uncovers unpublished evidence showing how Aristotle's philosophy itself – and also the way it was elaborated by its later advocates and exegetes – was influenced by its close engagement with medical theory and practice. This important and much-anticipated book will transform both the study of Aristotle and his followers and that of Greek and Roman medicine.
Aristotle's Theory of Justice in Exchange

Aristotle's Theory of Justice in Exchange
  • John-Stewart Gordon
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • This Element provides a systematic analysis of Aristotle's theory of justice in exchange as developed in Nicomachean Ethics Book V. It examines Aristotle's distinction between voluntary exchanges (commutative justice) and involuntary transactions (corrective justice), explaining how proportional reciprocity in voluntary exchange secures an equitable balance between parties of different contributions, while corrective justice redresses unjust gains and losses in involuntary transgressions. Key concepts such as proportional reciprocity and the arithmetic mean are explored to show how Aristotle's vision of fair exchange underpins civic stability. The analysis also highlights Aristotle's notion of fairness (epieikeia) as a principled adjustment of rigid legal norms, illustrating how equitable judgement supplements strict justice to accommodate particular cases. Overall, the Element clarifies Aristotle's distinctions and principles, linking the ethics of equality and reciprocity to their practical application in law and commerce.
Leo Tolstoy and Platonic Inspiration

Leo Tolstoy and Platonic Inspiration
  • Dominic Scott
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    August 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Leo Tolstoy had a deep and long-lasting interest in Plato. This study looks at the way some particularly well-known Platonic themes can be found in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The themes in question include the journey between the mundane and the eternal (most famously represented in the allegory of the cave), the theory of recollection, and the need to purify the soul of bodily passions. The study begins with an account of Tolstoy's interest in Plato and an overview of the three central themes as they appear in the Phaedo, Republic, Symposium and Phaedrus. It then turns to specific episodes in War and Peace and Anna Karenina where a central character experiences an epiphany or a similar process of inspiration. Cathartic in nature, these episodes show the character rising from a mundane level of experience towards an entirely new level, variously described as infinite, eternal or divine.

The Platonism of Proclus
  • Taking Plato Seriously
  • Lloyd P. Gerson
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    13 August 2026
  • This book argues that the key to understanding the philosophical connections between Plato and Proclus is found in Proclus' extant commentaries on the dialogues. Although none are complete, they comprise some 3000 pages of detailed exegesis and philosophical argument. Lloyd P. Gerson examines each of these commentaries and demonstrates how Proclus' constructive metaphysics is dedicated to filling in 'gaps' in Plato's own presentation of a philosophical system, gaps that Plato himself repeatedly flags in the dialogues. He shows that Proclus draws out many of the implications of what Plato says, supplies major premises in arguments that are missing, and makes crucial distinctions in terminology that are only implicit in Plato. Gerson asks whether Plato's philosophy and Proclus' philosophy stand or fall together and argues that the answer is highly relevant to understanding the nature of the dominant philosophical doctrine in the West for 2,000 years, namely, Platonism.

Galen: Writings on Plato's Timaeus
  • Compendium of Plato's Timaeus; Commentary on the Medical Statements in Plato's Timaeus
  • Edited and translated by Aileen R. Das, Pauline Koetschet, Mark Schiefsky
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    06 August 2026
  • To Galen, Plato was the great authority in philosophy but also had important things to say on health, disease, and the human body. The Timaeus was of enormous significance to Galen's thought on the body's structure and functioning as well as being a key source of inspiration for his teleological world view, in which the idea of cosmic design by a personified creative Nature, the Craftsman, plays a fundamental role. This volume provides critical English translations of key readings of the Timaeus by Galen that were previously accessible only in fragmentary Greek and Arabic and Arabo-Latin versions. The introductions highlight Galen's creative interpretations of the dialogue, especially compared to other imperial explanations, and show how his works informed medieval Islamicate writers' understanding of it. The book should provoke fresh attention to texts that have been unjustly marginalized in the history of Platonism in both the west and Middle East.
The Diarist in <i>Stages on Life's Way</i>

The Diarist in Stages on Life's Way
  • Kevin Hoffman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 August 2026
  • Kierkegaard's Stages on Life's Way belongs to what by 1845 can be understood as the romantic tradition, itself containing members related by both blood and adoption to those in the Christian tradition. By far the greatest portion of this Element is devoted to the portrait of an ethically enervated, anonymous troubadour turned troglodyte whose peculiar diary is accidentally found locked in a box with the key inside at the bottom of a pond. To bring up and out what animates this central character, the initial portions of stages on the despairing ambivalence of a group of tipsy bachelors and the pedantic moralizing of an anonymous husband unfold the interpersonal ideals at play in pursuit of a meaningful life all told. Following suit, the diary recounts a troubled love affair, which is, as Kierkegaard says elsewhere, 'always a usable theme in relation to what it means to exist.'

Plato, Technē, and Philosophy as a Profession
  • Emily Hulme
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2026
    Print publication:
    20 August 2026
  • Who has a legitimate claim to wisdom? Emily Hulme argues that Plato's response to this question was shaped by the concept of technē (art, craft, expertise, profession) and that he developed the notion of philosophy as a genuine profession in the dialogues against the rival claims of practices like sophistry. The first part of the book concerns technē in general, drawing on literary, epigraphic, and art historical evidence to discuss this concept in Greek thought and culture and explaining the position of this term in Plato's epistemological vocabulary. The second part offers close readings of a handful of key dialogues: philosophy defined against sophistry in Euthydemus, Hippias Minor, Protagoras, and Gorgias; the profession of philosopher-rulers in the Republic; and philosophy versus politics in the Sophist and Statesman.
Kierkegaard's Journals, Notebooks, and Papers

Kierkegaard's Journals, Notebooks, and Papers
  • Jon Stewart
  • Published online:
    06 July 2026
    Print publication:
    30 July 2026
    • Element
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  • The nature and importance of the Nachlass from Kierkegaard's hand is not well known, especially to researchers outside Denmark. At his death, Kierkegaard left behind an enormous amount of unpublished material in various folders, journals, and notebooks, and on loose pieces of paper. This material includes observations and analyses on various topics, sketches and outlines for possible works, reading and lecture notes, as well as autobiographical reflections. This Element is an attempt to make this rich and interesting material better known to international Kierkegaard readers. It shows how Kierkegaard's posthumous writings are interesting and valuable on their own and serve to illuminate his well-known published works.
Hegel, Dewey, Democracy

Hegel, Dewey, Democracy
  • Terry Pinkard
  • Published online:
    03 July 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
    • Element
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  • Hegel referred to Geist as 'self-conscious life' as a being which exists within a 'web' of sense it spins for itself both collectively and individually. As Geist collectively develops itself in history and in theory, it ties 'knots' in various parts of its web which then form the settled basis for further progress. John Dewey spoke of the fundamental 'deposits' laid down in history in the same way Hegel spoke of 'knots.' Both Hegel and Dewey thought that the kinds of obligations necessary in modern political life could only be actualized in terms of a larger conception of the good life individually and collectively led. However, Dewey argued that given the fact of democracy as a 'way of life' and not merely a form of government was the necessary replacement for Hegel's concept of Sittlichkeit (ethical life) as the living good in which the watchword is freedom.
Hegel's Dialectic

Hegel's Dialectic
  • Dina Emundts
  • Published online:
    22 June 2026
    Print publication:
    31 July 2026
    • Element
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  • This element is a study on Hegel's dialectic. One motivation for turning to dialectic is the idea that in order to understand the complex and dynamic structure of reality and of our thinking itself, we need a different way of thinking from that provided by standard logic and by traditional philosophy. The aim of the book is to present Hegel's basic idea of dialectic and to explain it through an interpretation of the text, an account of its reception, and a survey of themes in the secondary literature. The main theses discussed are that Hegel's dialectic is primarily a method of thinking and that he develops a unified theory of dialectic in his various writings.

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