The Relay Race of Virtue

The Relay Race of Virtue PDF Author: William H. F. Altman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490933
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 487

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Book Description
The ancient view that Plato and Xenophon were rivals at least had the merit of allowing them to respond to each other; in modern times, the view that Plato wrote first eliminates the possibility of an exchange between the only two Socratics whose writings are preserved intact. Challenging the chronological assumptions on which Plato's across-the-board priority currently rests, the purpose of The Relay Race of Virtue is to show that Plato and Xenophon were responding to each other and that we can gain a greater appreciation for both by recognizing the back-and-forth nature of their friendly dialogue. Instead of regarding Xenophon as Plato's inept copyist, William H. F. Altman presents him as first blazing the trail for his fellow Socratic and then learning from Plato in return. By emphasizing "Plato's Debts to Xenophon," Altman is charitable to both, justifying Socrates' belief (Memorabilia 1.2.8) "that those of his companions who adopted his principles of conduct would throughout life be good friends to him and to each other."

The Relay Race of Virtue

The Relay Race of Virtue PDF Author: William H. F. Altman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490933
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 487

Get Book Here

Book Description
The ancient view that Plato and Xenophon were rivals at least had the merit of allowing them to respond to each other; in modern times, the view that Plato wrote first eliminates the possibility of an exchange between the only two Socratics whose writings are preserved intact. Challenging the chronological assumptions on which Plato's across-the-board priority currently rests, the purpose of The Relay Race of Virtue is to show that Plato and Xenophon were responding to each other and that we can gain a greater appreciation for both by recognizing the back-and-forth nature of their friendly dialogue. Instead of regarding Xenophon as Plato's inept copyist, William H. F. Altman presents him as first blazing the trail for his fellow Socratic and then learning from Plato in return. By emphasizing "Plato's Debts to Xenophon," Altman is charitable to both, justifying Socrates' belief (Memorabilia 1.2.8) "that those of his companions who adopted his principles of conduct would throughout life be good friends to him and to each other."

Xenophon the Athenian

Xenophon the Athenian PDF Author: William Edward Higgins
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780873953696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This book is a fresh study of the fourth century B.C. Greek adventurer, writer, and student of Socrates, Xenophon. An innovating author of many guises, an important source for the history of his time, a wit and a philosopher, he no longer enjoys the reputation he once did. Suggesting that such a radical de-valuation is more a reflection on nineteenth- and twentieth-century attitudes and scholarship than on the worth of Xenophon, the author in this book attempts to reassert Xenophon's rightful position by offering a close, literary-historical reading of all of Xenophon's writings and by focusing in this process on the alluring reticence and ironic subtlety many have often failed to appreciate before offering what turn out to be their too hasty criticisms. It is hoped that this study will help to bring about the realization that Xenophon, when properly read and read without preconceptions, may yet prove an invaluable guide to the development of Greek thought in general and the world of fourth-century Greece in particular. Xenophon emerges as one of the last great representatives of that civilization which reached its height in Athens, and it is in this context that he is best understood, not, as so often previously, against the Peloponnesian and especially Spartan background where he had friends and where he spent a long exile.

Xenophon’s Virtues

Xenophon’s Virtues PDF Author: Gabriel Danzig
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111314006
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
While Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of virtue have received extensive scholarly attention, less work has been done on Xenophon’s portraits of virtue and on his attitude towards the theoretical issues connected with it. And yet, Xenophon offers one of the best sources we have for thinking about virtue in ancient Greece, because he combines the analytical interests of a Socratic with a historian’s interest in real life. Until recently, scholars of Xenophon tended to focus either on the historiographical writings or on the philosophical writings (chiefly Memorabilia, with some attention to the other Socratic writings and Hiero). Cyropaedia was treated as a separate entity, and Xenophon’s short and more technical treatises were generally studied only by those with particular interest in their specialized topics (such as horsemanship, hunting, and Athenian finances). But recent work by Vincent Azoulay and by Vivienne Gray have shown the essential unity of his writings. This volume continues this pan-Xenophontic trend by studying the virtues across Xenophon’s oeuvre and connecting them with a wide range of Greek literature, from Homer and the tragedians to Herodotus and Thucydides, the orators, Plato, and Aristotle.

Plotinus the Master and the Apotheosis of Imperial Platonism

Plotinus the Master and the Apotheosis of Imperial Platonism PDF Author: William H. F. Altman
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1666944408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
With both the Roman Empire and contemporary scholarship as backdrop, this book contrasts the Imperial Platonism of Plotinus with Plato's own by distinguishing one as a master enlightening disciples, and the other as an Athenian teacher who taught students to discover the truth for themselves in the Academy.

Dialogue and Discovery

Dialogue and Discovery PDF Author: Kenneth Seeskin
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438419325
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book examines the Socratic method of elenchus, or refutation. Refutation by its very nature is a conflict, which in the hands of Plato becomes high drama. The continuing conversation in which it occurs is more a test of character than of intellect. Dialogue and Discovery shows that, in his conversations, Socrates seeks to define moral qualities—moral essences—with the goal of improving the soul of the respondent. Ethics underlies epistemology because the discovery of philosophic truth imposes moral demands on the respondent. The recognition that moral qualities such as honesty, humility, and courage are necessary to successful inquiry is the key to the understanding of the Socratic paradox that virtue is knowledge. The dialogues receiving the most emphasis are the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, and Meno.

Ascent to the Beautiful

Ascent to the Beautiful PDF Author: William H. F. Altman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793615969
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 619

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Book Description
With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues. This book covers Plato’s elementary dialogues, grappling from the start with F. D. E. Schleiermacher, who created an enduring prejudice against the works Plato wrote for beginners. Recognized in antiquity as the place to begin, Alcibiades Major was banished from the canon but it was not alone: with the exception of Protagoras and Symposium, Schleiermacher rejected as inauthentic all seven of the dialogues this book places between them. In order to prove their authenticity, Altman illuminates their interconnections and shows how each prepares the student to move beyond self-interest to gallantry, and thus from the doctrinal intellectualism Aristotle found in Protagoras to the emergence of philosophy as intermediate between wisdom and ignorance in Symposium, en route to Diotima’s ascent to the transcendent Beautiful. Based on the hypothesis that it was his own eminently teachable dialogues that Plato taught—and bequeathed to posterity as his Academy’s eternal curriculum—Ascent to the Beautiful helps the reader to imagine the Academy as a school and to find in Plato the brilliant teacher who built on Homer, Thucydides, and Xenophon.

The Dad School

The Dad School PDF Author: Carl Goodwill
Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1685260780
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
We need more dads! The Dad School defines the word dad as a supportive father. This book helps future and current fathers become dads. Children benefit from supportive fathers. Let’s help children have fathers who support the process of raising them. Let’s make more dads!

Plato and Demosthenes

Plato and Demosthenes PDF Author: William H. F. Altman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666920061
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Universally regarded as Plato’s student in antiquity, it is the eloquent and patriotic orator Demosthenes—not the pro-Macedonian Aristotle who tutored Alexander the Great—who returned to the dangerous Cave of political life, and thus makes it possible to recover the Old Academy. In Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the Old Academy, William H. F. Altman explores how Demosthenes—along with Phocion, Lycurgus, and Hyperides—add external and historical evidence for the hypothesis that Plato’s brilliant and challenging dialogues constituted the Academy’s original curriculum. Altman rejects the facile view that the eloquent Plato, a master speech-writer as well as the proponent of the transcendent and post-eudaemonist Idea of the Good, was rhetoric’s enemy. He shows how Demosthenes acquired the discipline necessary to become a great orator, first by shouting at the sea and then by summoning the Athenians to self-sacrifice in defense of their waning freedom. Demosthenes thus proved Socrates’ criticism of democracy and the democratic man wrong, just as Plato the Teacher had intended that his best students would, and as he continues to challenge us to do today.

Inexcusabiles: Salvation and the Virtues of the Pagans in the Early Modern Period

Inexcusabiles: Salvation and the Virtues of the Pagans in the Early Modern Period PDF Author: Alberto Frigo
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030400174
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This thought provoking book deals with religious scholarship and important controversies of the early modern period, specifically those relating to the question of the salvation of the pagans and the afterlife. From the Reformation, through the Renaissance and on to the seventeenth and eighteenth century, this was a time when religious scholarship was updated with the discoveries of the New World and colonial expansion. These chapters present new work, shedding light on the interplay of philosophy and theology in key thinkers such as Montaigne, Leibniz, Bayle and Spinoza, but also in less known authors such as Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Sebastian Castellio. Readers will discover analysis of the reshaping of specific theological issues, focussing on the reception of ancient philosophical traditions such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, and scepticism. The authors investigate the relationship between the ethical models inspired by the heroes and philosophers of antiquity and the ‘new philosophy’. Above all, this book enables exploration of the ways in which discussions of the salvation and virtues of pagans intersected with the early modern reception of ancient philosophy, including a reassessment of the question of the moral status of unbelievers in the early modern period. Students and faculty working on early modern intellectual history will find that this book both inspires and enriches their knowledge. Those with an interest in Renaissance humanism, the history of early modern philosophy and science, in theology, or the history of religion will also appreciate the new contributions that it makes.

Going Home Grown Up

Going Home Grown Up PDF Author: Anne F. Grizzle
Publisher: Shaw Books
ISBN: 0877882320
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Psychotherapist Anne Grizzle outlines a path wholesome independence from parents for adult children who revert to destructive, immature patterns in their relationships with mothers and fathers.t