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"PHILOSOPHY History "
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Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds
Peter Adamson offers an accessible, humorous tour through a period of eight hundred years when some of the most influential of all schools of thought were formed: from the third century BC to the sixth century AD. He introduces us to Cynics and Skeptics, Epicureans and Stoics, emperors and slaves, and traces the development of Christian and Jewish philosophy and of ancient science. Chapters are devoted to such major figures as Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, and Augustine. But in keeping with the motto of the series, the story is told 'without any gaps,' providing an in-depth look at less familiar topics that remain suitable for the general reader. For instance, there are chapters on the fascinating but relatively obscure Cyrenaic philosophical school, on pagan philosophical figures like Porphyry and Iamblichus, and extensive coverage of the Greek and Latin Christian Fathers who are at best peripheral in most surveys of ancient philosophy. A major theme of the book is in fact the competition between pagan and Christian philosophy in this period, and the Jewish tradition also appears in the shape of Philo of Alexandria. Ancient science is also considered, with chapters on ancient medicine and the interaction between philosophy and astronomy. Considerable attention is paid also to the wider historical context, for instance by looking at the ascetic movement in Christianity and how it drew on ideas from Hellenic philosophy. From the counter-cultural witticisms of Diogenes the Cynic to the subtle skepticism of Sextus Empiricus, from the irreverent atheism of the Epicureans to the ambitious metaphysical speculation of Neoplatonism, from the ethical teachings of Marcus Aurelius to the political philosophy of Augustine, the book gathers together all aspects of later ancient thought in an accessible and entertaining way.
Book
Philosophy and dietetics in the Hippocratic on regimen : a delicate balance of health
This book offers the first extended study published in English on the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen, one of the most important pre-Platonic documents of the discussion of human nature and other topics at the intersection of ancient medicine and philosophy.
eBook
Foundations of Modern International Thought
Between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, major European political thinkers first began to look outside their national borders and envisage a world of competitive, equal sovereign states inhabiting an international sphere that ultimately encompassed the whole globe. In this insightful and wide-ranging work, David Armitage – one of the world's leading historians of political thought – traces the genesis of this international turn in intellectual history. Foundations of Modern International Thought combines important methodological essays, which consider the genealogy of globalisation and the parallel histories of empires and oceans, with fresh considerations of leading figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham in the history of international thought. The culmination of more than a decade's reflection and research on these issues, this book restores the often overlooked international dimensions to intellectual history and recovers the intellectual dimensions of international history.
eBook
The ancient Greek roots of human rights
Although the era of the Enlightenment witnessed the rise of philosophical debates around benevolent social practice, the origins of European humane discourse date further back, to Classical Athens. The Ancient Greek Roots of Human Rights analyzes the parallel confluences of cultural factors facing ancient Greeks and eighteenth-century Europeans that facilitated the creation and transmission of humane values across history. Rachel Hall Sternberg argues that precursors to the concept of human rights exist in the ancient articulation of emotion, though the ancient Greeks, much like eighteenth-century European societies, often failed to live up to those values.Merging the history of ideas with cultural history, Sternberg examines literary themes upholding empathy and human dignity from Thucydides’s and Xenophon’s histories to Voltaire’s Candide, and from Greek tragic drama to the eighteenth-century novel. She describes shared impacts of the trauma of war, the appeal to reason, and the public acceptance of emotion that encouraged the birth and rebirth of humane values.
eBook
Nothing : a philosophical history
\"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Genesis 1:1-2 Creation stories try to explain how everything originates from nothing. They leave something out. Nothing also has a history. This book aims to tell it. Books about nothing go back for billions of years. So say astronomers who conjecture that civilizations formed soon after the universe cooled to form stars and planets. What did the antennas of these historians miss that might be captured in this book? The hominid side of nothing. I start with a cousin of homo sapiens who picked up a pebble with holes that seemed to make faces (figure 0.1). Many faces later (each chapter pairs a philosopher with an absence), I conclude with Bertrand Russell's precise analysis of how Caspar does not exist' could be true (chapter 22). About the fifth century BC, three civilizations independently and simultaneously began to philosophize about nothing: China (chapter 3), India (chapters 4 and 5), and Greece (chapters 6-10). They had previously focused on what is the case. Light poured on nature, architecture, and society. But then, in a cross-civilizational black-out, emerged disparate nay-sayers who shifted attention to what is not the case. Behold, the holes in a sponge are absences of sponge! Holes are what make the sponge useful for absorbing liquid. The sponge can exist without the holes. But the holes cannot \"exist\" without the sponge. They are parasites that depend on their host. Yet the two get along well. Without holes, there would not be so many sponges in your house. Your shadow is a more complex parasite. It is a hole you bore into the light. Your shadow depends on both you and the light. You and light are rather mysterious. Your shadow partakes of both mysteries. Omissions have a yet more complex relationship with action. Actions are events and so are not \"things.\" When you refrain from voting, you do not subtract from what is but rather from what might be. When you regret not voting, your emotion requires counterfactual history: If I had voted, my friend would have won. You are in the land of near-misses. Being is riddled with non-beings. Why are the riddles first posed 2,600 years ago? Why all at once? This negative turn in world philosophy is the coincidence that inspired me to write Nothing: A Philosophical History. My hope was to find some common factor that could explain the simultaneous and independent shift in perspective. The common cause I postulate in this book is the deployment of a cognitive trick dreamed up cave dwellers. Any waking experience of an event can also be explained by the parasitical hypothesis 'he event was merely dreamt.' The parasite takes over the consequences of the host hypothesis The event was perceived\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The edinburgh critical history of nineteenth-century philosophy
This volume begins with the rise of German Idealism and Romanticism, traces the developments of naturalism, positivism, and materialism and of later-century attempts to combine idealist and naturalist modes of thought.
Written by a team of leading international scholars this crucial period of philosophy is examined from the novel perspective of themes and lines of thought which cut across authors, disciplines, and national boundaries. This fresh approach will open up new ways for specialists and students to conceptualise the history of 19th-century thought within philosophy, politics, religious studies and literature.
eBook
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Cultureexamines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More'sUtopia, Shakespeare'sHamletandRomeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call \"culture,\" she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the \"question of the animal.\"
eBook