A central figure in Victorian science, William Whewell (1794–1866) held professorships in Mineralogy and Moral Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, before becoming Master of the college in 1841. His mathematical textbooks, such as A Treatise on Dynamics (1823), were instrumental in bringing French analytical methods into British science. This three-volume history, first published in 1837, is one of Whewell's most famous works. Taking the 'acute, but fruitless, essays of Greek philosophy' as a starting point, it provides a history of the physical sciences that culminates with the mechanics, astronomy, and chemistry of 'modern times'. Volume 3 first covers the mechanico-chemical sciences, emphasizing the convergence of mechanical and chemical theories in discoveries pertaining to electricity, magnetism and thermodynamics. A section on chemistry surveys Becher and Stahl's phlogiston theory, Lavoisier's theory of oxygen, and Faraday's laws of electromagnetic induction. The volume also
A central figure in Victorian science, William Whewell (1794–1866) held professorships in Mineralogy and Moral Philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge, before becoming Master of the college in 1841. His mathematical textbooks, such as A Treatise on Dynamics (1823), were instrumental in bringing French analytical methods into British science. This three-volume history, first published in 1837, is one of Whewell's most famous works. Taking the 'acute, but fruitless, essays of Greek philosophy' as a starting point, it provides a history of the physical sciences that culminates with the mechanics, astronomy, and chemistry of 'modern times'. Volume 1 focuses on ancient Greek physics and metaphysics and their reception during the middle ages. Volume 2 discusses the rise of modern mechanics and emphasises the paradigmatic shift from mere observation to the explanation of causes. Volume 3 highlights the convergence of mechanical and chemical theories in discoveries about electricity, magnetis
This series provides individual textbooks on early Greek poetry, on Greek drama, on philosophy, history and oratory, and on the literature of the Hellenistic period and of the Empire. Each part has its own appendix of authors and works, a list of works cited, and an index. This volume studies the revolutionary movement represented by the more creative of the Hellenistic poets and finally the very rich range of authors surviving from the imperial period, with rhetoric and the novel contributing a distinctive flavour to the culture of the time. Appropriately enough, the volume closes with a survey of books and readers in the ancient world, which draws attention to the bookish nature of Greek literature from the Hellenistic period onwards and points forward to its survival into the Middle Ages.
Late Hellenistic Greek literature, both prose and poetry, stands out for its richness and diversity. Recent work has tended to take an author-by-author approach that underestimates the interconnectedness of the literary culture of the period. The chapters assembled here set out to change that by offering new readings of a wide range of late Hellenistic texts and genres, including historiography, geography, rhetoric and philosophy, together with many verse texts and inscriptions. In the process, they offer new insights into the various ways in which late Hellenistic literature engaged with its social, cultural and political contexts, while interrogating and revising some of the standard narratives of the relationship between late Hellenistic and imperial Greek literary culture, which are too often studied in isolation from each other. As a whole the book prompts us to rethink the place of late Hellenistic literature within the wider landscape of Greek and Roman literary history.
This 1982 book is a history of the great age of scholastism from Abelard to the rejection of Aristotelianism in the Renaissance, combining the highest standards of medieval scholarship with a respect for the interests and insights of contemporary philosophers, particularly those working in the analytic tradition. The volume follows on chronologically from The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, though it does not continue the histories of Greek and Islamic philosophy but concentrates on the Latin Christian West. Unlike other histories of medieval philosophy that divide the subject matter by individual thinkers, it emphasises the parts of more historical and theological interest. This volume is organised by those topics in which recent philosophy has made the greatest progress.
This book offers a comprehensive study of the views of ancient philosophers on mental disorders. Relying on the original Greek and Latin textual sources, the author describes and analyses how the anci
Death and immortality played a central role in Greek and Roman thought, from Homer and early Greek philosophy to Marcus Aurelius. In this book A. G. Long explains the significance of death and immortality in ancient ethics, particularly Plato's dialogues, Stoicism and Epicureanism; he also shows how philosophical cosmology and theology caused immortality to be re-imagined. Ancient arguments and theories are related both to the original literary and theological contexts and to contemporary debates on the philosophy of death. The book will be of major interest to scholars and students working on Greek and Roman philosophy, and to those wishing to explore ancient precursors of contemporary debates about death and its outcomes.
Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is often characterised in terms of competitive individuals debating orally with one another in public arenas. But it also developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge some other particular philosopher or group of philosophers as an authority and offer to that authority explicit intellectual allegiance. This is most obvious in the development after the classical period of the philosophical 'schools' with agreed founders and, most importantly, canonical founding texts. There also developed a tradition of commentary, interpretation, and discussion of texts which itself became a mode of philosophical debate. As time went on, the weight of a growing tradition of reading and appealing to a certain corpus of foundational texts began to shape how later antiquity viewed its philosophical past and also how philosophical debate and inquiry was conducted. In this book leading scholars explore aspects of these important developme
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new ways of storytelling and inventing fictions appeared in the French-speaking areas of Europe. This new art still influences our global culture of fiction. Virginie Greene explores the relationship between fiction and the development of neo-Aristotelian logic during this period through a close examination of seminal literary and philosophical texts by major medieval authors, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Abélard, and Chrétien de Troyes. This study of Old French logical fictions encourages a broader theoretical reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy and literature. Additional close readings of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and modern analytic philosophy including the work of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, demonstrate peculiar traits of Western rationalism and expose its ambivalent relationship to fiction.
People have pondered conflicts between science and religion since at least the time of Christ. The millennia-long debate is well documented in the literature in the history and philosophy of science a
The Hermetica are a body of theological-philosophical texts written in late antiquity, but long believed to be much older. Their supposed author, Hermes Trismegistus, was thought to be a contemporary of Moses, and the Hermetic philosophy was regarded as an ancient theology, parallel to the received wisdom of the Bible. This first English translation based on reliable texts, together with Brian P. Copenhaver's comprehensive introduction, provide an indispensable resource to scholars in ancient philosophy and religion, early Christianity, Renaissance literature, and history, the history of science, and the occultist tradition in which the Hermetica have become canonical texts.
The conceptualization of the vital force of living beings as a kind of breath and heat is at least as old as Homer. The assumptions that life and living things were somehow causally related to 'heat' and 'breath' (pneuma) would go on to inform much of ancient medicine and philosophy. This is the first volume to consider the relationship of the notions of heat, breath (pneuma), and soul in ancient Greek philosophy and science from the Presocratics to Aristotle. Bringing together specialists both on early Greek philosophy and on Aristotle, it brings an approach drawn from the history of science to the study of both fields. The chapters give fresh and detailed interpretations of the theory of soul in Heraclitus, Empedocles, Parmenides, Diogenes of Appolonia, and Democritus, as well as in the Hippocratic Corpus, Plato's Timaeus, and various works of Aristotle.
Ekphrasis is familiar as a rhetorical tool for inducing enargeia, the vivid sense that a reader or listener is actually in the presence of the objects described. This book focuses on the ekphrastic techniques used in ancient Greek and Roman literature to describe technological artifacts. Since the literary discourse on technology extended beyond technical texts, this book explores 'technical ekphrasis' in a wide range of genres, including history, poetry, and philosophy as well as mechanical, scientific, and mathematical works. Technical authors like Philo of Byzantium, Vitruvius, Hero of Alexandria, and Claudius Ptolemy are put into dialogue with close contemporaries in other genres, like Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Ovid, and Aelius Theon. The treatment of 'technical ekphrasis' here covers the techniques of description, the interaction of verbal and visual elements, the role of instructions, and the balance between describing the artifact's material qualities and the other bodies of kno
The Greeks have long been regarded as innovators across a wide range of fields in literature, culture, philosophy, politics and science. However, little attention has been paid to how they thought and felt about novelty and innovation itself, and to relating this to the forces of traditionalism and conservatism which were also present across all the various societies within ancient Greece. What inspired the Greeks to embark on their unique and enduring innovations? How did they think and feel about the new? This book represents the first serious attempt to address these issues, and deals with the phenomenon across all periods and areas of classical Greek history and thought. Each chapter concentrates on a different area of culture or thought, while the book as a whole argues that much of the impulse towards innovation came from the life of the polis which provided its setting.
This work is a substantial contribution to the history of philosophy. Its subject, the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, developed a form of idealism that owed as much to the Greek Neoplatonic tradition as to the Latin fathers and anticipated the priority of the subject in its modern, most radical statement: German idealism. Moran has written the most comprehensive study yet of Eriugena's philosophy, tracing the sources of his thinking and analyzing his most important text, the Periphyseon. This volume will be of special interest to historians of mediaeval philosophy, history, and theology.
Miletos, on the coast of Asia Minor, was one of the most important Greek cities – a key economic power as well as a centre of philosophy and learning. Yet with historical sources scarce, and the mass
Beginning with a long and extensively rewritten introduction surveying the predecessors of the Presocratics, this book traces the intellectual revolution initiated by Thales in the sixth century BC to its culmination in the metaphysics of Parmenides and the complex physical theories of Anaxagoras and the Atomists in the fifth century it is based on a selection of some six hundred texts, in Greek and a close English translation which in this edition is given more prominence. These provide the basis for a detailed critical study of the principal individual thinkers of the time. Besides serving as an essential text for undergraduate and graduate courses in Greek philosophy and in the history of science, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers with interests in philosophy, theology, the history of ideas and of the ancient world, and indeed to anyone who wants an authoritative account of the Presocratics.
This book presents an up-to-date overview of the main new directions taken by ancient philosophy in the first century BC, a period in which the dominance exercised in the Hellenistic age by Stoicism, Epicureanism and Academic Scepticism gave way to a more diverse and experimental philosophical scene. Its development has been much less well understood, but here a strong international team of leading scholars of the subject reconstruct key features of the changed environment. They examine afresh the evidence for some of the central Greek thinkers of the period, as well as illuminating Cicero's engagement with Plato both as translator and in his own philosophising. The intensity of renewed study of Aristotle's Categories and Plato's Timaeus is an especially striking outcome of their discussions. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and students interested in the history of Platonism and Aristotelianism.
This book presents an up-to-date overview of the main new directions taken by ancient philosophy in the first century BC, a period in which the dominance exercised in the Hellenistic age by Stoicism, Epicureanism and Academic Scepticism gave way to a more diverse and experimental philosophical scene. Its development has been much less well understood, but here a strong international team of leading scholars of the subject reconstruct key features of the changed environment. They examine afresh the evidence for some of the central Greek thinkers of the period, as well as illuminating Cicero's engagement with Plato both as translator and in his own philosophising. The intensity of renewed study of Aristotle's Categories and Plato's Timaeus is an especially striking outcome of their discussions. The volume will be indispensable for scholars and students interested in the history of Platonism and Aristotelianism.
