Providing the only full-length study of the compendium of Greek philosophy attributed to Arius Didymus, court philosopher to the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus, this volume elucidates Stoic and Peripatetic ethics for classicists and philosophers. The authors provide careful textual analysis of important passages by this synthesizer of the major schools of Greek thought. Essays include translations of major passages.

Offers a re-appraisal of the sources and philosophical significance of Peripatetic ethics as interpreted and appropriated by Antiochus of Ascalon.

From the earliest times, philosophers and others have thought deeply about ethical questions. But it was Aristotle who founded ethics as a discipline with clear principles and well-defined boundaries. Ethics After Aristotle focuses on the reception of Aristotelian ethical thought in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, underscoring the thinker’s enduring influence on the philosophers who followed in his footsteps from 300 BCE to 200 CE. Beginning with Aristotle’s student and collaborator Theophrastus, Brad Inwood traces the development of Aristotelian ethics up to the third-century Athenian philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias. He shows that there was no monolithic tradition in the school, but a rich variety of moral theory. The philosophers of the Peripatetic school produced surprisingly varied theories in dialogue with other philosophical traditions, generating rich insight into human virtue and happiness. What unifies the different strands of thought—what makes them distinctively Aristotelian—is a form of ethical naturalism: that our knowledge of the good and virtuous life depends first on understanding our place in the natural world, and second on the exercise of our natural dispositions in distinctively human activities. What is now referred to as “virtue ethics,” Inwood argues, is a less important part of Aristotle’s legacy than the naturalistic approach Aristotle articulated and his philosophical descendants developed further. Offering a wide range of ways of thinking about ethics from an ancient perspective, Ethics After Aristotle is a penetrating study of how philosophy evolves in the wake of an unusually powerful and original thinker.

This book explores the process during 100 BCE-100 CE by which dualistic Platonism became the reigning school in philosophy.

This book provides a collection of sources, many of them fragmentary and previously scattered and hard to access, for the development of Peripatetic philosophy in the later Hellenistic period and the early Roman Empire. It also supplies the background against which the first commentator on Aristotle from whom extensive material survives, Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. AD 200), developed his interpretations which continue to be influential even today. Many of the passages are here translated into English for the first time, including the whole of the summary of Peripatetic ethics attributed to 'Arius Didymus'.

"Long's discussions enjoy consistently thorough contextualization; psychology cannot be understood without natural philosophy, nor dialectic without ethics, and Long's case studies show both that and how that is the case, in persuasive detail and with enviable clarity. The pieces fall into three subject areas: intellectual and cultural inheritance, ethics, and psychology."—Catherine Atherton, New College, Oxford "A. A. Long's Stoic Studies does far more than bring together a set of important papers on Stoicism. Read together, the papers in this collection paint two pictures. One is of the author and his broad-minded pursuit of an intellectual 'fascination,' a pursuit carried out with historical and literary rigour as well as considerable philosophical ingenuity. The other is of the Stoic school itself, emerging from a passion for Socratic arguments... It is a long and remarkably rich philosophical history, and Tony Long has done a very great deal to help others feel its fascination."—Brad Inwood, University of Toronto "Long writes in a lucid, engaging way, even when treating difficult subjects or referring to complex scholarly and philosophical debates. He has a special gift for combining, in thirty pages or so, an illuminating survey of a topic with at least one sustained analysis of a key text or theory. As a result, this collection has a coherence and internal development that makes it comparable with a good monograph."—Christopher Gill, University of Exeter

Stoicism (third century BC to second century AD) is one of the richest and most influential intellectual traditions of antiquity. Leading scholars here contribute new studies of a set of topics which are the focus of current research in this area. They combine careful analytical attention tothe original texts with historical sensitivity and philosophical acuity, to provide the basis for a better understanding of Stoic ethics, political theory, logic, and physics. Whereas till recently the study of Hellenistic philosophy has been mainly a historical enterprise, these essays demonstratethat a proper treatment of Stoicism engages us in philosophical questions of considerable current relevance and interest.