Author : H. J. Blumenthal
Publisher : Bloomsbury Academic
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 32,60 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Philosophy
ISBN :
Most philosophical writing in late antiquity took the form of commentaries, most frequently on the works of Plato and Aristotle. The commentators tended to proceed on the assumption that there was a Platonist philosophy to which Aristotle, and they themselves, subscribed. This led them to use their expository writings as a means of expressing their own Neoplatonist philosophy.
Author : H. J. Blumenthal
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 46,77 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780801433368
"H. J. Blumenthal is such an eminent scholar in the field of Neoplatonic Studies, and the scholarship exhibited by this book is so wide-ranging and impressive, that I would venture to say that this is the most important book on Neoplatonism to be published since Dominic O'Meara's Pythagoras Revived." —Steven Strange, Emory UniversityScholars have traditionally used the Aristotelian commentators as sources for lost philosophical works and occasionally also as aids to understanding Aristotle. In H. J. Blumenthal's view, however, the commentators often assumed that there was a Platonist philosophy to which not only they but Aristotle himself subscribed. Their expository writing usually expressed their versions of Neoplatonist philosophy. Blumenthal here places the commentators in their intellectual and historical contexts, identifies their philosophical views, and demonstrates their tendency to read Aristotle as if he were a member of their philosophical circle.This book focuses on the commentators' exposition of Aristotle's treatise De anima (On the Soul), because it is relatively well documented and because the concept of soul was so important in all Neoplatonic systems. Blumenthal explains how the Neoplatonizing of Aristotle's thought, as well as the widespread use of the commentators' works, influenced the understanding of Aristotle in both the Islamic and Judaeo-Christian traditions.H. J. Blumenthal is the author or coeditor of six previous books and is currently preparing a two-volume translation, with introduction and commentary, of Simplicius' Commentary on "De anima" for publication in Cornell's series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle.
Author : Lloyd P. Gerson
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 36,48 MB
Release : 2017-12-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1501716964
"Aristotle versus Plato. For a long time that is the angle from which the tale has been told, in textbooks on the history of philosophy and to university students. Aristotle's philosophy, so the story goes, was au fond in opposition to Plato's. But it was not always thus."—from the Introduction In a wide-ranging book likely to cause controversy, Lloyd P. Gerson sets out the case for the "harmony" of Platonism and Aristotelianism, the standard view in late antiquity. He aims to show that the twentieth-century view that Aristotle started out as a Platonist and ended up as an anti-Platonist is seriously flawed. Gerson examines the Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle based on their principle of harmony. In considering ancient studies of Aristotle's Categories, Physics, De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the author shows how the principle of harmony allows us to understand numerous texts that otherwise appear intractable. Gerson also explains how these "esoteric" treatises can be seen not to conflict with the early "exoteric" and admittedly Platonic dialogues of Aristotle. Aristotle and Other Platonists concludes with an assessment of some of the philosophical results of acknowledging harmony.
Author : Dmitri Nikulin
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 45,18 MB
Release : 2019-05-14
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0190662387
This book is a philosophical study of two major thinkers who span the period of late antiquity. While Plotinus stands at the beginning of its philosophical tradition, setting the themes for debate and establishing strategies of argument and interpretation, Proclus falls closer to its end, developing a grand synthesis of late ancient thought. The book discusses many central topics of philosophy and science in Plotinus and Proclus, such as the one and the many, number and being, the individuation and constitution of the soul, imagination and cognition, the constitution of number and geometrical objects, indivisibility and continuity, intelligible and bodily matter, and evil. It shows that late ancient philosophy did not simply embrace and borrow from the major philosophical traditions of earlier antiquity--Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism--by providing marginal comments on widely-known philosophical texts. Rather, Neoplatonism offered a set of highly original and innovative insights into the nature of being and thought, which can be distinguished in much subsequent philosophical thought, up until modernity.
Author : Panagiōtēs Tzamalikos
Publisher : de Gruyter
Page : 1793 pages
File Size : 29,21 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783110419467
This book presents a ground-breaking exposition of Anaxagoras' legacy to Classical and Late Antiquity, critically assessing Aristotle's distorted representation of Anaxagoras. Origen, formerly a Greek philosopher of note, is placed in the history of
Author : Lloyd P. Gerson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 1584 pages
File Size : 38,52 MB
Release : 2015-12-10
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1316175936
The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity comprises over forty specially commissioned essays by experts on the philosophy of the period 200–800 CE. Designed as a successor to The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (edited by A. H. Armstrong), it takes into account some forty years of scholarship since the publication of that volume. The contributors examine philosophy as it entered literature, science and religion, and offer new and extensive assessments of philosophers who until recently have been mostly ignored. The volume also includes a complete digest of all philosophical works known to have been written during this period. It will be an invaluable resource for all those interested in this rich and still emerging field.
Author : Richard Sorabji
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 570 pages
File Size : 40,31 MB
Release : 1990
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780801424328
Author : Dominic J. O'Meara
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 39,65 MB
Release : 2003-05
Category : History
ISBN : 0199257582
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Platonist philosophers of Late Antiquity, from Plotinus (third century) to the sixth-century schools in Athens and Alexandria, neglected the political dimension of their Platonic heritage in their concentration on an otherworldly life. Dominic O'Meara presents a revelatory reappraisal of these thinkers, arguing that their otherworldliness involved rather than excluded political ideas, and he proposes for the first time a reconstruction of theirpolitical philosophy, their conception of the function, structure, and contents of political science, and its relation to political virtue and to the divinization of soul and state.Among the topics discussed by O'Meara are: philosopher-kings and queens; political goals and levels of reform: law, constitutions, justice, and penology; the political function of religion; and the limits of political science and action. He also explores various reactions to these political ideas in the works of Christian and Islamic writers, in particular Eusebius, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and al-Farabi.Filling a major gap in our understanding, Platonopolis will be of substantial interest to scholars and students of ancient philosophy, classicists, and historians of political thought.
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 358 pages
File Size : 50,29 MB
Release : 2020-06-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9004429565
The essays in Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy provide valuable insights into the central role of philosophical ideas in a period when paganism was in decline and Eastern Christians were forging their community identities.
Author : Mark Edwards
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 26,46 MB
Release : 2019-03-13
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1315520192
In studies of early Christian thought, ‘philosophy’ is often a synonym for ‘Platonism’, or at most for ‘Platonism and Stoicism’. Nevertheless, it was Aristotle who, from the sixth century AD to the Italian Renaissance, was the dominant Greek voice in Christian, Muslim and Jewish philosophy. Aristotle and Early Christian Thought is the first book in English to give a synoptic account of the slow appropriation of Aristotelian thought in the Christian world from the second to the sixth century. Concentrating on the great theological topics – creation, the soul, the Trinity, and Christology – it makes full use of modern scholarship on the Peripatetic tradition after Aristotle, explaining the significance of Neoplatonism as a mediator of Aristotelian logic. While stressing the fidelity of Christian thinkers to biblical presuppositions which were not shared by the Greek schools, it also describes their attempts to overcome the pagan objections to biblical teachings by a consistent use of Aristotelian principles, and it follows their application of these principles to matters which lay outside the purview of Aristotle himself. This volume offers a valuable study not only for students of Christian theology in its formative years, but also for anyone seeking an introduction to the thought of Aristotle and its developments in Late Antiquity.
