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11517 results in Ancient philosophy

Page 153 of 576

Plato: Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras
  • Edited by Malcolm Schofield
  • Translated by Tom Griffith
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    19 November 2009
  • Presented in the popular Cambridge Texts format are three early Platonic dialogues in a new English translation by Tom Griffith that combines elegance, accuracy, freshness and fluency. Together they offer strikingly varied examples of Plato's critical encounter with the culture and politics of fifth and fourth century Athens. Nowhere does he engage more sharply and vigorously with the presuppositions of democracy. The Gorgias is a long and impassioned confrontation between Socrates and a succession of increasingly heated interlocutors about political rhetoric as an instrument of political power. The short Menexenus contains a pastiche of celebratory public oratory, illustrating its self-delusions. In the Protagoras, another important contribution to moral and political philosophy in its own right, Socrates takes on leading intellectuals (the 'sophists') of the later fifth century BC and their pretensions to knowledge. The dialogues are introduced and annotated by Malcolm Schofield, a leading authority on ancient Greek political philosophy.

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics
  • 2nd edition
  • Aristotle
  • Edited and translated by Roger Crisp
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    20 November 2014
  • This new edition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is an accurate, readable and accessible translation of one of the world's greatest ethical works. Based on lectures Aristotle gave in Athens in the fourth century BCE, Nicomachean Ethics is one of the most significant works in moral philosophy, and has profoundly influenced the whole course of subsequent philosophical endeavour. It offers seminal, practically oriented discussions of many central ethical issues, including the role of luck in human well-being, moral education, responsibility, courage, justice, moral weakness, friendship and pleasure, with an emphasis on the exercise of virtue as the key to human happiness. This second edition offers an updated editor's introduction and suggestions for further reading, and incorporates the line numbers as well as the page numbers of the Greek text. With its emphasis on accuracy and readability, it will enable readers without Greek to come as close as possible to Aristotle's work.

Plato: Laws
  • Plato
  • Edited by Malcolm Schofield
  • Translated by Tom Griffith
  • Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    08 September 2016
  • Plato's Laws is one of the most important surviving works of ancient Greek political thought. It offers sustained reflection on the enterprise of legislation, and on its role in the social and religious regulation of society in all its aspects. Many of its ideas were drawn upon by later political thinkers, from Aristotle and Cicero to Thomas More and Montesquieu. This book presents the first translation of the complete text of the Laws for thirty-five years, in Tom Griffith's readable and reliable English. Malcolm Schofield, a leading scholar of Greek philosophy, introduces the main themes and characteristics of the work, as well as supplying authoritative notes on the structure and detail of Plato's argument, together with a guide to further reading. The book will be a key resource for those interested in Greek philosophy and of the history of political thought.

Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation
  • Matthew D. Walker
  • Published online:
    11 May 2018
    Print publication:
    31 May 2018
  • Traditionally, Aristotle is held to believe that philosophical contemplation is valuable for its own sake, but ultimately useless. In this volume, Matthew D. Walker offers a fresh, systematic account of Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good. The book situates Aristotle's views against the background of his wider philosophy, and examines the complete range of available textual evidence (including neglected passages from Aristotle's Protrepticus). On this basis, Walker argues that contemplation also benefits humans as perishable living organisms by actively guiding human life activity, including human self-maintenance. Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good thus cohere with his broader thinking about how living organisms live well. A novel exploration of Aristotle's views on theory and practice, this volume will interest scholars and students of both ancient Greek ethics and natural philosophy. It will also appeal to those working in other disciplines including classics, ethics, and political theory.

  • Chapter 6 - Self-Determination

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 152-175

  • Summary

    Plotinus develops his theory of self-determination by reference to an ideal. He describes what a perfectly rational soul is and how it acts, as a way of saying what we ought to be and how we ought to act. Achieving this ideal involves establishing right reason in charge of our embodied lives, and deriving the premises for our actions from Intellect. The highest layer of consciousness makes this possible. In order for us to achieve this idealized state we must first become aware of the authority of our intellect and place it in charge of our embodied lives. The reason we can attribute a notion of subjectivity to Plotinus without committing him to the modern notion of self-consciousness, deriving from the post-Cartesian tradition, is that the regulative ideals for correct reasoning (orthos logos) and correct action (katorthôsis) are ultimately derived from Intellect. It is Intellect’s contemplative activity that provides the basis for right action, not our own subjective experience. This chapter is thus the capstone for how subjectivity fits into Plotinus’ theory of consciousness.

  • Chapter 5 - Third Layer

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 119-151

  • Summary

    The third layer unites the higher soul with Intellect, which enables it to return to a state of identity with intelligible being. Intellect is paradigmatic due to being the primary actuality. It is a divine intellect, which is reflexively aware of itself as the subject of its self-thinking. Awareness is a first-order property of its self-thinking, since its activity essentially involves awareness and the intelligible objects with which it is identical are holistic and transparent. When we assimilate to Intellect, we become integrated into its nature and exhibit the properties of its self-thinking. However, when we are united to Intellect we do not become the primary actuality. We become integrated into the primary actuality as a part, which contains within itself the totality of intelligible being, similar to the way one Form contains the rest. However, since our contemplation of individual Forms involves a focusing of attention (enapereisis) and this narrowing of focus provides our intellect with a point of view, our contemplation is tied to individualized perspectives. The notion of subjectivity I am attributing to Plotinus at this level is related to having this point of view or perspective on the intelligible world.

  • Chapter 7 - Conclusion

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 176-178

  • Summary

    It is commonplace to use the term dualist to describe Plotinus’ psychology, since he sharply distinguishes the soul from the body, and he locates cognition and consciousness exclusively in the soul. However, my analysis of Plotinus’ theory of consciousness shows that his theory of the relation between the soul and the body is sui generis. A more appropriate term to characterize his psychology is multi-layered. Plotinus’ theory shows that there is more to being a conscious, mental state than we find in ordinary introspection, and that there is more to being a conscious human being than we find in the operations of the natural world.

  • Introduction

  • D. M. Hutchinson, St Olaf College, Minnesota
  • Book:
    Plotinus on Consciousness
    Published online:
    24 April 2018
    Print publication:
    26 April 2018, pp 1-5

  • Summary

    An influential dogma in philosophy of mind and cognitive science is that consciousness studies originates in the seventeenth century with René Descartes. I aim to dispel this dogma by explaining Plotinus’ theory of consciousness. The key feature of his theory is that it involves multiple-layers of experience. Central to my argument is that each layer of consciousness has unique capacities, that the higher the layer the more unifying the capacity, and that the more unifying the capacity the closer together are thought and being. The turn inwards and ascent upwards culminates in the highest layer, which enables us to assimilate to the rationality of Intellect and the self-sufficiency of the One. Unity is the governing principle in Plotinus’ theory. The more unified we are, the less we are in need of being completed by things that are external to ourselves and beyond our control. This multi-layered model shows that in order to understand a conscious mental state, one has to understand the entire cognitive architecture of the mind, and one needs to take into account the lower levels of consciousness a conscious mental state is completing and the higher levels it is drawing on.

Page 153 of 576