Ancient Philosophy
Textual Paths and Historical Explorations
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Book Description
‘We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece’, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote. It is in Greek that the questions which shaped the destiny of Western culture were asked, and so were the first attempts at an answer, and the search for a method of investigation. This book tries to rediscover the propulsive force that for over two millennia spread, and still lives in our system of thought. By systematically quoting the very words of the leading actors and by tracing their sources, it leads the reader along a path where they will be able to observe the establishment of philosophical ideas and language, in an updated and balanced picture of archaic lore, of the thought of the classical and hellenistic ages, and of the philosophy of late antiquity. The book looks closely at the progress of scientific thought and at its increasing autonomy, while following the evolution of the fruitful yet problematic relationship between the Greek world and the Near East.
Table of Contents
1. East and West
M. Laura Gemelli Marciano
2. Ancient philosophy and the doxographical tradition
Jaap Mansfeld
2a. The transmission of ancient philosophy
Lorenzo Perilli, Daniela P. Taormina, with Jaap Mansfeld
3. Philosophical Stones: Ancient philosophy as reflected in the mirror of inscriptions
Georg Petzl
4. Socio-historical outline of the Archaic period
Paolo Tuci
5. "You Greeks are always children": The infancy of wisdom
Lorenzo Perilli
6. The Presocratics
Lorenzo Perilli
6a. New discoveries of ancient philosophical and scientific texts
Lorenzo Perilli, Daniela P. Taormina
7. The sophists and Socrates
Rick Benitez
7a. The sophists: Key figures
Lorenzo Perilli, Daniela P. Taormina, with Rick Benitez
8. Socio-historical outline of the Classical and Hellenistic periods
Paolo Tuci
9. Plato
Maria Isabel Santa Cruz
10. The Academy from Plato to Polemo
Dimitri El Murr
10a. Academic philosophers (4th-1st cent. BC)
Tiziano Dorandi
11. Aristotle
James G. Lennox
11a. Aristotle’s poetics
Guido Paduano
12. Hellenistic philosophy
Keimpe Algra
13. Socio-historical outline of the Roman period
Federico De Romanis
14. Some remarks on ancient science
Lorenzo Perilli
14a. Logos and algorithms
Paolo Zellini
15. Philosophy in Rome
Therese Fuhrer
15a. Lucretius: a failed subversion
Luca Canali
16. Socio-historical outline of the later Roman empire
Umberto Roberto
17. Platonism, Pythagoreanism, Aristotelianism
Dominic J. O’Meara
18. Greek philosophy and philosophers in the 3rd-6th Cent. AD
From Plotinus to the last Alexandrian commentators
Daniela P. Taormina
19. Augustine of Hippo and the new Christian culture
Marta Cristiani
Aristotle’s Testament
Index
Editor(s)
Biography
Lorenzo Perilli is Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy, and the Director of the transdisciplinary Research Centre in Classics, Mathematics and Philosophy ‘Forms of Knowledge in the Ancient World’. His research interests include Ancient medicine and science, Presocratic philosophy, textual criticism, and humanities computing.
Daniela P. Taormina is Professor in Greek Philosophy at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy. Her research activity concerns especially the philosophy of Late Antiquity, from Middle-Platonism to the Platonic philosophers of the VI century AD and is focused in particular on the domains of psychology and post-Plotinian ontology. Most recently, she is co-editor and contributor of Plotinus and Epicurus. Matter, Perception, Pleasure (2016).
Reviews
This book gives an excellent overview of the development of philosophy in the classical world. Perilli and Taormina have put together an innovative history of ancient philosophy.
Teun Tieleman, Utrecht University, Netherlands