1st Edition

Ancient Philosophy Textual Paths and Historical Explorations

Edited By Lorenzo Perilli, Daniela P. Taormina Copyright 2018
    836 Pages
    by Routledge

    836 Pages
    by Routledge

    ‘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.

    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

    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).

    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