Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy

Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy PDF Author: Andrea Wilson Nightingale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139454641
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
In fourth-century Greece (BCE), the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths (the 'spectator theory of knowledge'). This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria (state pilgrimage). In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies.

Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy

Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy PDF Author: Andrea Wilson Nightingale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139454641
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Get Book Here

Book Description
In fourth-century Greece (BCE), the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths (the 'spectator theory of knowledge'). This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria (state pilgrimage). In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies.

The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece

The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece PDF Author: H. A. Shapiro
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139826999
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece provides a wide-ranging synthesis of history, society, and culture during the formative period of Ancient Greece, from the Age of Homer in the late eighth century to the Persian Wars of 490–480 BC. In ten clearly written and succinct chapters, leading scholars from around the English-speaking world treat all aspects of the civilization of Archaic Greece, from social, political, and military history to early achievements in poetry, philosophy, and the visual arts. Archaic Greece was an age of experimentation and intellectual ferment that laid the foundations for much of Western thought and culture. Individual Greek city-states rose to great power and wealth, and after a long period of isolation, many cities sent out colonies that spread Hellenism to all corners of the Mediterranean world. This Companion offers a vivid and fully documented account of this critical stage in the history of the West.

Ancient Models of Mind

Ancient Models of Mind PDF Author: Andrea Nightingale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139489763
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
How does God think? How, ideally, does a human mind function? Must a gap remain between these two paradigms of rationality? Such questions exercised the greatest ancient philosophers, including those featured in this book: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Plotinus. This volume encompasses a series of studies by leading scholars, revisiting key moments of ancient philosophy and highlighting the theme of human and divine rationality in both moral and cognitive psychology. It is a tribute to Professor A. A. Long, and reflects multiple themes of his own work.

Ontology Without Borders

Ontology Without Borders PDF Author: Jody Azzouni
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190622571
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for example, and they appear to move independently of a background of other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be, aren't projections. Azzouni shows how the resulting austere metaphysics tames a host of ancient philosophical problems about constitution ("Ship of Theseus," "Sorities"), as well as contemporary puzzles about reductionism. In addition, it's shown that the same sorts of individuation conditions for properties, which philosophers use to distinguish between various kinds of odd abstracta-universals, tropes, and so on, are also projections. Accompanying our notion of an object is a background logic that makes cogent ontological debate about anything from Platonic objects to Bigfoot. Contemporary views about this background logic ("quantifier variance") make ontological debate incoherent. Azzouni shows how a neutral interpretation of quantifiers and quantifier domains makes sense of both philosophical and pre-philosophical ontological debates. Azzouni also shows how the same apparatus makes sense of our speaking about a host of items--Mickey Mouse, unicorns, Martians--that nearly all of us deny exist. It's allowed by what Azzouni shows about the background logic of our ontological debates, as well as the semantics of the language of those debates that we can disagree over the existence of things, like unicorns, without that background logic and semantics forcing ontological commitments onto speakers that they don't have.

The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy PDF Author: A. A. Long
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521446679
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book Here

Book Description
A 1999 Companion to Greek philosophy, invaluable for new readers, and for specialists.

Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues

Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues PDF Author: Andrea Nightingale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108837301
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Get Book Here

Book Description
Challenges the idea that Plato is a secular thinker, exploring the interaction of philosophy and Greek religion in the dialogues.

Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy PDF Author: M. F. Burnyeat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521750725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.

Once Out of Nature

Once Out of Nature PDF Author: Andrea Nightingale
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226585751
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book Here

Book Description
Introduction -- Edenic and resurrected transhumans -- Scattered in time -- The unsituated self -- Body and book -- Unearthly bodies -- Epilogue: "mortal interindebtedness"--Appendix: Augustine on Paul's notion of the flesh and the body.

Genres in Dialogue

Genres in Dialogue PDF Author: Andrea Wilson Nightingale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521774338
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
This 1995 book takes as its starting point Plato's incorporation of specific genres of poetry and rhetoric into his dialogues. The author argues that Plato's 'dialogues' with traditional genres are part and parcel of his effort to define 'philosophy'. Before Plato, 'philosophy' designated 'intellectual cultivation' in the broadest sense. When Plato appropriated the term for his own intellectual project, he created a new and specialised discipline. In order to define and legitimise 'philosophy', Plato had to match it against genres of discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens. By incorporating the text or discourse of another genre, Plato 'defines' his new brand of wisdom in opposition to traditional modes of thinking and speaking. By targeting individual genres of discourse Plato marks the boundaries of 'philosophy' as a discursive and as a social practice.

Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World

Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World PDF Author: Heather L. Reid
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317984951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the relationship between athletics and philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome focused on the connection between athleticism and virtue. It begins by observing that the link between athleticism and virtue is older than sport, reaching back to the athletic feats of kings and pharaohs in early Egypt and Mesopotamia. It then traces the role of athletics and the Olympic Games in transforming the idea of aristocracy as something acquired by birth to something that can be trained. This idea of training virtue through the techniques and practice of athletics is examined in relation to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then Roman spectacles such as chariot racing and gladiator games are studied in light of the philosophy of Lucretius, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The concluding chapter connects the book’s ancient observations with contemporary issues such as the use of athletes as role models, the relationship between money and corruption, the relative worth of participation and spectatorship, and the role of females in sport. The author argues that there is a strong link between sport and philosophy in the ancient world, calling them offspring of common parents: concern about virtue and the spirit of free enquiry. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Ethics and Sport.