Edited by Richard McKeon, with an introduction by C.D.C. Reeve Preserved by Arabic mathematicians and canonized by Christian scholars, Aristotle’s works have shaped Western thought, science, and religion for nearly two thousand years. Richard McKeon’s The Basic Works of Aristotle—constituted out of the definitive Oxford translation and in print as a Random House hardcover for sixty years—has long been considered the best available one-volume Aristotle. Appearing in ebook at long last, this edition includes selections from the Organon, On the Heavens, The Short Physical Treatises, Rhetoric, among others, and On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and Poetics in their entirety.

The famous library of Alexandria, founded around 295 BCE by Ptolemaios I, housed the greatest collection of texts in the ancient world and was a fertile site of Hellenistic scholarship. Rudolf Blum’s landmark study, originally published in German in 1977, argues that Kallimachos of Kyrene was not only the second director of the Alexandrian library but also the inventor of two essential scholarly tools still in use to this day: the library catalog and the “biobibliographical” reference work. Kallimachos expanded the library’s inventory lists into volumes called the Pinakes, which extensively described and categorized each work and became in effect a Greek national bibliography and the source and paradigm for most later bibliographic lists of Greek literature. Though the Pinakes have not survived, Blum attempts a detailed reconstruction of Kallimachos’s inventories and catalogs based on a careful analysis of surviving sources, which are presented here in full translation.

This book develops a new interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics. By exploring the significance of the long ignored distinction between being with regard to categories and being with regard to potentiality and actuality, the author presents that Aristotle's science of being has two distinct aspects: an investigation of the basic constituents of reality in terms of categories, predication, and definition, and an investigation which deals with change, process, and order of the world.

This examines the papyrus books collected by Plato himself, a habit which began when he was still 'studying' under Socrates and continued throughout his years of teaching in the Academy. The book deals extensively with the works of the Ionian and Eleatic Natural Philosophers, as well as of the Pyhagoreans, which informed the composition of Plato's Dialogues. Furthermore, through this process the fabric of Sophistic literature composed at Athens is unfolded and the pioneers who introduced the study of Mathematics in the Academy are discussed in brief. Finally, a large chapter in the book deals with the architecture of the Academy, including topographical surveys and scale plans which reveal interesting facts about the ideas that went into its design, and the use of its facilities.

This superb edition contains two of Aristotle's greatest writings in authoritative translations. The Rhetoric is translated by Cambridge scholar John Henry Freese, and The Poetics is translated by Oxford scholar of classics Ingram Bywater. Aristotle's legendary treatise on speech explains and instructs on the powers of oratory to move and persuade people. Composed amid the popular Greek culture, in which aspiring and reigning politicians would perfect the oratorical arts to influence voting and their subjects, Rhetoric is a summation of an art whose poignancy and power could change the face of an entire society. The Poetics of Aristotle sets out the essential nature of drama and the performing arts. Each chapter deals with a different element of drama and its composition, discussing the process by which Greek society had come to define its written literature.