Zusammenfassung: This collection of original articles draws from a cross section of distinguished scholars of ancient Greek philosophy. It is focussed primarily on the philosophy of Aristotle but comprises as well studies of the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Epicurus. Its authors explore a range of complementary topics in value theory, moral psychology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, political theory, and methodology, highlighting the rich and lasting philosophical contributions of the thinkers investigated. Opening with an engaging intellectual autobiography of its honoree, Fred D. Miller, Jr., the volume offers treatments of Socrates as a citizen; Plato's attitude towards poetry; Socratic self-knowledge; Plato's conception of law in his Republic; explorations of reason, goodness, and moral conduct in Plato; Platonic metaphysics; Aristotelian causation; Aristotelian metaphysics and normativity; natural philosophy in Aristotle; Aristotelian logic; political theory and approaches to justice in Aristotle's Politics; methodological reflections on how best to approach Aristotle's indefensible ideas; and closes with a reconsideration of Epicurus on death and the art of dying. Altogether, the volume reflects the richness of the ongoing community of philosophical scholars dedicated to reconstructing, assessing, and criticizing the principal philosophers of the ancient world, whose epoch-forming explorations of the key elements of human life--considered socially, politically, psychologically, and metaphysically--remain topics of lively investigation today. It will be of interest to philosophers of many stripes, including those with a primary interest in ancient philosophy but extending as well to those with systematic interests in the themes it explores. This volume will be a valuable addition to all libraries serving communities dedicated to researching and studying the origins of Western philosophy

This work investigates how ancient philosophers understood productive knowledge or technê and used it to explain ethics, rhetoric, politics and cosmology. In eleven chapters leading scholars set out the ancient debates about technê from the Presocratic and Hippocratic writers, through Plato and Aristotle and the Hellenistic age (Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics), ending in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus. Amongst the many themes that come into focus are: the model status of ancient medicine in defining the political art, the similarities between the Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of technê, the use of technê as a paradigm for virtue and practical rationality, technê ́s determining role in Platonic conceptions of cosmology, technê ́s relationship to experience and theoretical knowledge, virtue as an 'art of living', the adaptability of the criteria of technê to suit different skills, including philosophy itself, the use in productive knowledge of models, deliberation, conjecture and imagination.

This collection of original articles draws from a cross section of distinguished scholars of ancient Greek philosophy. It is focussed primarily on the philosophy of Aristotle but comprises as well studies of the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Epicurus. Its authors explore a range of complementary topics in value theory, moral psychology, metaphysics, natural philosophy, political theory, and methodology, highlighting the rich and lasting philosophical contributions of the thinkers investigated. Opening with an engaging intellectual autobiography of its honoree, Fred D. Miller, Jr., the volume offers treatments of Socrates as a citizen; Plato’s attitude towards poetry; Socratic self-knowledge; Plato’s conception of law in his Republic; explorations of reason, goodness, and moral conduct in Plato; Platonic metaphysics; Aristotelian causation; Aristotelian metaphysics and normativity; natural philosophy in Aristotle; Aristotelian logic; political theory and approaches to justice in Aristotle’s Politics; methodological reflections on how best to approach Aristotle’s indefensible ideas; and closes with a reconsideration of Epicurus on death and the art of dying. Altogether, the volume reflects the richness of the ongoing community of philosophical scholars dedicated to reconstructing, assessing, and criticizing the principal philosophers of the ancient world, whose epoch-forming explorations of the key elements of human life—considered socially, politically, psychologically, and metaphysically—remain topics of lively investigation today. It will be of interest to philosophers of many stripes, including those with a primary interest in ancient philosophy but extending as well to those with systematic interests in the themes it explores. This volume will be a valuable addition to all libraries serving communities dedicated to researching and studying the origins of Western philosophy.

In fourth-century Greece (BCE), the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths (the 'spectator theory of knowledge'). This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria (state pilgrimage). In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies.

Until rather recently, philosophy, when practiced as a way of life, was, for most, a communal enterprise of mutually reinforced personal cultivation. It is time, yet again, to revitalize this lost, but vital, intercultural mode of philosophy.

The ancient Greeks were not only the founders of western philosophy, but the actual term 'philosophy' is Greek in origin, most likely dating back to the late sixth century BC. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Euclid, and Thales are but a few of the better-known philosophers of ancient Greece. During the amazingly fertile period running from roughly the middle of the first millennium BC to the middle of the first millennium AD, the world saw the rise of science, numerous schools of thought, and_many believe_the birth of modern civilization. The Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Philosophy presents the history of Greek philosophy and the philosophers who made it famous. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introduction, a glossary, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on important philosophers, concepts, issues, and events.

Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy examines the role that allegory plays in Greek thought, particularly in the transition from the mythic tradition of the archaic poets to the philosophical traditions of the Presocratics and Plato. It explores how a mode of speech that "says one thing, but means another" is integral to philosophy, which otherwise seeks to achieve clarity and precision in its discourse. By providing the early Greek thinkers with a way of defending and appropriating the poetic wisdom of their predecessors, allegory enables philosophy to locate and recover its own origins in the mythic tradition. Allegory allows philosophy simultaneously to move beyond mythos and express the whole in terms of logos, a rational account in which reality is represented in a more abstract and universal way than myth allows.