M. F. Burnyeat taught for 14 years in the Philosophy Department of University College London, then for 18 years in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, 12 of them as the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, before migrating to Oxford in 1996 to become a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College. The studies, articles and reviews collected in these two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy were all written, and all but two published, before that decisive change. Whether designed for a scholarly audience or for a wider public, they range from the Presocratics to Augustine, from Descartes and Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. Their subject-matter falls under four main headings: 'Logic and Dialectic' and 'Scepticism Ancient and Modern', which are contained in this first volume; 'Knowledge' and 'Philosophy and the Good Life' make up the second volume. The title 'Explorations' well expresses Burnyeat's ability to discover new aspects of familiar texts, new ways of solving old problems. In his hands the history of philosophy becomes itself a philosophical activity.

The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.

M. F. Burnyeat taught for 14 years in the Philosophy Department of University College London, then for 18 years in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, 12 of them as the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, before migrating to Oxford in 1996 to become a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College. The studies, articles and reviews collected in these two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy were all written, and all but two published, before that decisive change. Whether designed for a scholarly audience or for a wider public, they range from the Presocratics to Augustine, from Descartes and Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. Their subject-matter falls under four main headings: 'Logic and Dialectic' and 'Scepticism Ancient and Modern', which make up the first volume, with 'Knowledge' and 'Philosophy and the Good Life' contained in this, the second volume. The title 'Explorations' well expresses Burnyeat's ability to discover new aspects of familiar texts, new ways of solving old problems. In his hands the history of philosophy becomes itself a philosophical activity.

Myles Burnyeat (1939-2019) was a major figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of this. After teaching positions in London and Cambridge, where he became Laurence Professor, in 1996 he took up a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, from which he retired in 2006. In 2012 he published two volumes collecting essays dating from before the move to Oxford. Two new posthumously published volumes bring together essays from his years at All Souls and his retirement. The essays in Volume 4 are addressed principally to scholars engaging first with fundamental issues in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology and in Aristotle's philosophical psychology. Then follow studies tackling problems in interpreting the approaches to physics and cosmology taken by Plato and Aristotle, and in assessing the evidence for early Greek exercises in optics.

This book meets the need to revise the standard interpretations of an apparently aporetic dialogue, full of eloquent silences and tricky suggestions, as it explores, among many other topics, the dramatis personae, including Plato's self-references behind the scene and the role of Socrates on stage, the question of method and refutation and the way dialectics plays a part in the dialogue. More especifically, it contains a set of papers devoted to perception and Plato's criticism of Heraclitus and Protagoras. A section deals with the problem of the relation between knowledge and thinking, including the the aviary model and the possibility of error. It also emphasizes some positive contributions to the classical Platonic doctrines and his philosophy of education. The reception of the dialogue in antiquity and the medieval age closes the analysis. Representing different hermeneutical traditions, prestigious scholars engage with these issues in divergent ways, as they shed new light on a complex controversial work.

Why does Stanley Cavell's philosophical thought matter for music? And how did Cavell's musical practice and appreciation of music give shape to his indelible philosophical claims about cinema, human speech, opera, the expression of skepticism, and ordinary language philosophy? Music with Stanley Cavell in Mind provides a first-of-its-kind intervention by leading philosophers and scholars of music into an intellectual landscape in need of such charting. As a performer who then trained as a philosopher, the arc of Cavell's wide-ranging investigation of music maps consistently with a proximate concern for the features of human experience that involve music and sound, including the sound of prose, authorial voice (its possession, its divestment, its arrogation), the presence/problem/potentiality of silence in communication, and related features of sonic phenomena central to life lived at the scale of the everyday. Despite widespread scholarly fascination with the intersection of “Cavell” and “music”--that music is famously a core theme for him--no book like this has yet appeared. Moreover, our efforts here are addressed to the serious student (at all levels) and the general reader alike arriving from many precincts of thought and practice: musical performance, literary theory, cultural studies, musicology, and philosophy.

In the Posterior Analytics Aristotle contrasts demonstrations with syllogisms through signs. In the Prior Analytics he defines a sign as a demonstrative premise. One is thus led to ask: is a sign a demonstration? This book reconstructs the history of the notion of “demonstration through signs” from roughly the third through to the thirteenth century. It examines the work of Aristotle’s Greek, Arabic, and Latin commentators, both within and outside the tradition of the Posterior Analytics.