Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity


Book Description

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which ancient readers responded to Plato, as philosopher, as author, and more generally as a central figure in the intellectual heritage of Classical Greece, from his death in the fourth century BCE until the Platonist and Aristotelian commentators in the sixth century CE. The volume is divided into three sections: ‘Early Developments in Reception’ (four chapters); ‘Early Imperial Reception’ (nine chapters); and ‘Early Christianity and Late Antique Platonism’ (eighteen chapters). Sectional introductions cover matters of importance that could not easily be covered in dedicated chapters. The book demonstrates the great variety of approaches to and interpretations of Plato among even his most dedicated ancient readers, offering some salutary lessons for his modern readers too.




Brill's Companion to the Reception of Socrates


Book Description

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates, edited by Christopher Moore, provides almost unbroken coverage, across three-dozen studies, of 2450 years of philosophical and literary engagement with Socrates – the singular Athenian intellectual, paradigm of moral discipline, and inspiration for millennia of philosophical, rhetorical, and dramatic composition. Following an Introduction reflecting on the essentially “receptive” nature of Socrates’ influence (by contrast to Plato’s), chapters address the uptake of Socrates by authors in the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique (including Latin Christian, Syriac, and Arabic), Medieval (including Byzantine), Renaissance, Early Modern, Late Modern, and Twentieth-Century periods. Together they reveal the continuity of Socrates’ idiosyncratic, polyvalent, and deep imprint on the history of Western thought, and witness the value of further research in the reception of Socrates.




Brill's Companion to German Platonism


Book Description

For six centuries, Plato has held German philosophy in his grip. Brill’s Companion to German Platonism examines how German thinkers have interpreted Plato and how in turn he has decisively influenced their thought. Under the editorship of Alan Kim, this companion gathers the work of scholars from four continents, writing on figures from Cusanus and Leibniz to Husserl and Heidegger. Taken together, their contributions reveal a characteristic pattern of “transcendental” interpretations of the mind’s relation to the Platonic Forms. In addition, the volume examines the importance that the dialogue form itself has assumed since the nineteenth century, with essays on Schleiermacher, the Tübingen School, and Gadamer. Brill’s Companion to German Platonism presents both Plato and his German interpreters in a fascinating new light.




Brill's Companion to the Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought


Book Description

"In Brill's Companion to the Reception of Presocratic Natural Philosophy in Later Classical Thought, contributions by Gottfried Heinemann, Andrew Gregory, Justin Habash, Daniel W. Graham, Oliver Primavesi, Owen Goldin, Omar D. Álvarez Salas, Christopher Kurfess, Dirk L. Couprie, Tiberiu Popa, Timothy J. Crowley, Liliana Carolina Sánchez Castro, Iakovos Vasiliou, Barbara Sattler, Rosemary Wright, and a foreword by Patricia Curd explore the influences of early Greek science (6-4th c. BCE) on the philosophical works of Plato, Aristotle, and the Hippocratics. Rather than presenting an unified narrative, the volume supports various ways to understand the development of the concept of nature, the emergence of science, and the historical context of topics such as elements, principles, soul, organization, causation, purpose, and cosmos in ancient Greek philosophy"--




Brill's Companion to the Reception of Cicero


Book Description

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Cicero is a collection of essays by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars that situates Cicero in the context of his use and abuse from antiquity to the present, and is intended to provide readers with several good reasons to return to the study of Cicero's writings with greater interest and respect.




Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde


Book Description

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Classics in International Modernism and the Avant-Garde examines how the writers and artists who lived from roughly the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth sought to build a new world from the ashes of one marked by two world wars, global economic depression, the rise of nationalism, and the collapse of empires. By surveying the modernist appropriation of Ancient Greece and Rome, the fourteen chapters in this volume demonstrate how the Classics, as foundational texts of the old order, were nevertheless adapted to suit the stylistic innovation and formal experimentation that characterized modernist and avant-garde literature and art.




The Reception of Plato’s ›Phaedrus‹ from Antiquity to the Renaissance


Book Description

This volume explores the tremendous influence of Plato’s Phaedrus on the philosophical, religious, scientific and literary discussions in the West. Ranging from Plato’s first readers, over the Church Fathers and the Platonic commentators, to Byzantine and Renaissance thinkers, the papers collected here introduce the reader to the first two millennia of the dialogue’s reception history. Thirteen contributions by both junior and established scholars study the engagement with the Phaedrus by such major figures as Aristotle, Galen, Origen, Clemens of Alexandria, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Psellus, Ficino, Erasmus, and many others. Together, they cover the wide range of topics discussed in the dialogue: the value of myth and allegory, religion and theology, love and beauty, the soul and its immortality, teaching and learning, metaphysics and epistemology, rhetoric and dialectic, as well as the role and the limits of writing. By placing the dialogue in this broad perspective, the volume will appeal to readers interested in the Phaedrus itself, as well as to classicists, literary theorists, and historians of philosophy, science and religion concerned with the dialogue’s reception history and its main protagonists.




Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany


Book Description

The first ever guide to the manifold uses and reinterpretations of the classical tradition in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, Brill’s Companion to the Classics, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany explores how political propaganda manipulated and reinvented the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome in order to create consensus and historical legitimation for the Fascist and National Socialist dictatorships. The memory of the past is a powerful tool to justify policy and create consensus, and, under the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the legacy of classical antiquity was often evoked to promote thorough transformations of Italian and German culture, society, and even landscape. At the same time, the classical past was constantly recreated to fit the ideology of each regime.




Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition


Book Description

George Grote’s (1794-1871) extensive publications on ancient Greek history and philosophy remain landmarks in the history of classical scholarship. Since the late 20thcentury, lively interest in the works of Grote has seen his profile revived and his ongoing significance highlighted: he has taken up his rightful place among the most celebrated nineteenth-century classical intellectuals. Grote’s critical engagement with Greek historiography and philosophy revolutionized classical studies in his day – a revolution set against both long-established interpretations and prevailing trends in German Altertumswissenschaft. Twenty-first-century scholarship shows that Grote’s works remain lively, sparkling and relevant, as they offers valuable insights that cut across the intellectual borders of the Victorian age. His diligent scholarship, fascination with evidence and sound judgement, intertwined with intriguing and insightful narrative prose, continue to captivate the attention of modern readers. In Brill’s Companion to George Grote and the Classical Tradition Kyriakos N. Demetriou leads a team of prominent scholars to contextualize, unravel and explore Grote’s works as well as provide a critical assessment of his posthumous legacy.




The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity


Book Description

In The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity, Cristina Pepe offers a complete overview of the concept of speech genre within ancient rhetoric. By analyzing sources dating from the 5th-4th century BC, the author proves that the well-known classification in three rhetorical genres (deliberative, judicial, epideictic), introduced by Aristotle, was rooted in the debate concerning the forms and functions of the art of persuasion in classical Athens. Genres play a leading role in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and the analysis of considerable sections of the treatise shows profound links between the characterization of the rhetorical genres and Aristotelian philosophy as a whole. Finally, the volume explores the developments of the theory of genres in Hellenistic and Imperial rhetoric.