Likeness and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato

Likeness and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato
Author: Jenny Bryan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521762944

Studies the philosophical development of the meaning of the Greek word eoikos, which can be used to describe similarity, plausibility or even suitability. It focuses on Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato's Timaeus and shows how such a study serves to enhance our understanding of their epistemology and methodology.

Plato's Theaetetus as a Second Apology

Plato's Theaetetus as a Second Apology
Author: Zina Giannopoulou
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2013-06-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0199695296

Zina Giannopoulou offers a new reading of Theaetetus, Plato's most systematic examination of knowledge, alongside Apology, Socrates' speech in defence of his philosophical practice, and argues that the former text is a philosophical elaboration of the latter.

Cosmos and Perception in Plato’s Timaeus

Cosmos and Perception in Plato’s Timaeus
Author: Mark Eli Kalderon
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2023-05-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000862305

This volume offers a wide-ranging study on perception in the Timaeus, not only discussing senses such as touch, taste, and olfaction alongside audition and vision but also engaging with Timaeus’ wider cosmological project. Most studies of perception in the Timaeus focus on a few narrow passages on vision and audition. By taking the broader approach of this volume, important lessons about the nature of perception may be gleaned from Timaeus’ cosmogony, psychogony, and anthropogony. While there is an emerging modern consensus that the Timaeus should be read literally, this study argues against a literal interpretation of the spatial and kinetic properties of the soul in favour of a metaphorical understanding. Not only does this yield a rich account of the intentionality of cognition but also sheds light onto the nature of the soul-body union. In addition, this volume argues for the largely overlooked significance of Timaean anatomy, as it contributes to our understanding of the providential scheme of Timaeus’ cosmology more generally. Cosmos and Perception in Plato’s Timaeus is of interest to students and scholars of the Timaeus and Plato’s thought more broadly, as well as those working on ancient theories of perception and the philosophy of mind.

Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues

Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues
Author: Andrea Nightingale
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1108945031

In ancient Greece, philosophers developed new and dazzling ideas about divinity, drawing on the deep well of poetry, myth, and religious practices even as they set out to construct new theological ideas. Andrea Nightingale argues that Plato shared in this culture and appropriates specific Greek religious discourses and practices to present his metaphysical philosophy. In particular, he uses the Greek conception of divine epiphany - a god appearing to humans - to claim that the Forms manifest their divinity epiphanically to the philosopher, with the result that the human soul becomes divine by contemplating these Forms and the cosmos. Nightingale also offers a detailed discussion of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic Mysteries and shows how these mystery religions influenced Plato's thinking. This book offers a robust challenge to the idea that Plato is a secular thinker.

Plato's Timaeus and the Latin Tradition

Plato's Timaeus and the Latin Tradition
Author: Christina Hoenig
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2018-08-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108415806

The book explores the development of Platonic philosophy by Roman writers between the first century BCE and the early fifth century CE. Discusses the interpretation of Plato's Timaeus by Cicero, Apuleius, Calcidius, and Augustine, and examines how they contributed to the construction of the complex and multifaceted genre of Roman Platonism.

Sculpture, weaving, and the body in Plato

Sculpture, weaving, and the body in Plato
Author: Zacharoula Petraki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2023-08-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3111178757

Plato’s Timaeus is unique in Greek Antiquity for presenting the creation of the world as the work of a divine demiurge. The maker bestows order on sensible things and imitates the world of the intellect by using the Forms as models. While the creation-myth of the Timaeus seems unparalleled, this book argues that it is not the first of Plato’s dialogues to use artistic language to articulate the relationship of the objects of the material world to the world of the intellect. The book adopts an interpretative angle that is sensitive to the visual and art-historical developments of Classical Athens to argue that sculpture, revolutionized by the advent of the lost-wax technique for the production of bronze statues, lies at the heart of Plato’s conception of the relation of the human soul and body to the Forms. It shows that, despite the severe criticism of mimēsis in the Republic, Plato’s use of artistic language rests on a positive model of mimēsis. Plato was in fact engaged in a constructive dialogue with material culture and he found in the technical processes and the cultural semantics of sculpture and of the art of weaving a valuable way to conceptualise and communicate complex ideas about humans’ relation to the Forms.

Without the Least Tremor

Without the Least Tremor
Author: M. Ross Romero, SJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2016-03-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1438460198

A reading of the death of Socrates as a self-sacrifice, with implications for ideas about suffering, wisdom, and the soul’s relationship to the body. In Without the Least Tremor, M. Ross Romero considers the death of Socrates as a sacrificial act rather than an execution, and analyzes the implications of such an understanding for the meaning of the Phaedo. Plato’s recounting of Socrates’s death fits many of the conventions of ancient Greek sacrificial ritual. Among these are the bath, the procession, Socrates’s appearance as a bull, the libation, the offering of a rooster to Asclepius, the treatment of Socrates’s body and corpse, and Phaedo’s memorialization of Socrates. Yet in a powerful moment, Socrates’s death deviates from a sacrifice as he drinks the pharmakon “without the least tremor.” Developing the themes of suffering and wisdom as they connect to this scene, Romero demonstrates how the embodied Socrates is setting forth an eikôn of the death of the philosopher. Drawing on comparisons with tragedy and comedy, he argues that Socrates’s death is more fittingly described as self-sacrifice than merely an execution or suicide. After considering the implications of these themes for the soul’s immortality and its relationship to the body, the book concludes with an exploration of the place of sacrifice within ethical life.

The Oxford Handbook of Plato

The Oxford Handbook of Plato
Author: Gail Fine
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks
Total Pages: 793
Release: 2019
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190639733

Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. The updated and original essays in the second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Plato provide in-depth discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues, all serving several functions at once: they survey the current academic landscape; express and develop the authors' own views; and situate those views within a range of alternatives. The result is a useful state-of-the-art reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history. This second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Plato differs in two main ways from the first edition. First, six leading scholars of ancient philosophy have contributed entirely new chapters: Hugh Benson on the Apology, Crito, and Euthyphro; James Warren on the Protagoras and Gorgias; Lindsay Judson on the Meno; Luca Castagnoli on the Phaedo; Susan Sauvé Meyer on the Laws; and David Sedley on Plato's theology. This new edition therefore covers both dialogues and topics in more depth than the first edition did. Secondly, most of the original chapters have been revised and updated, some in small, others in large, ways.

Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe

Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe
Author: Paul North
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 194213049X

An imaginative new theory of likeness that ranges widely across history and subjects, from physics and evolution to psychology, language, and art A butterfly is like another butterfly. A butterfly is also like a leaf and at the same time like a paper airplane, an owl’s face, a scholar flying from book to book. The most disparate things approach one another in a butterfly, the sort of dense nodule of likeness that Roger Caillois once proposed calling a “bizarre-privileged item.” In response, critical theorist Paul North proposes a spiritual exercise: imagine a universe made up solely of likenesses. There are no things, only traits acting according to the law of series, here and there a thick overlap that appears “bizarre.” Centuries of thought have fixated on the concept of difference. This book offers a theory that begins from likeness, where, at any instant, a vast array of series proliferates and remote regions come into contact. Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe follows likenesses as they traverse physics and the physical universe; evolution and evolutionary theory; psychology and the psyche; sociality, language, and art. Divergent sources from an eccentric history help give shape to a new trans-science, “homeotics.”

Early Greek Ethics

Early Greek Ethics
Author: David Conan Wolfsdorf
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 828
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198758677

Early Greek Ethics is the first volume devoted to philosophical ethics in its "formative" period. It explores contributions from the Presocratics, figures of the early Pythagorean tradition, sophists, and anonymous texts, as well as topics influential to ethical philosophical thought such as Greek medicine, music, friendship, and justice.