Today, “simple living” is a rallying cry for anti-consumerists, environmentalists, and anyone concerned with humanity’s effect on the planet. But what is so revolutionary about a simple life? And why are we so fascinated with simplicity today? A Philosophy of Simple Living charts the ideas, motivations, and practices of simplicity from antiquity to the present day. Bringing together an array of people, practices, and movements, from Henry David Thoreau to Steve Jobs, and from Cynics and Shakers to the “slow movement,” voluntary simplicity, and degrowth, this book is as comprehensive as it is concise. Written in elegant, spare prose, A Philosophy of Simple Living will be of great benefit to all who wish to declutter and pare back their complicated, modern lives.

The object of this work is to apply the historico-critical method to Spinoza’s Ethics. Starting with the assumption that the Ethics is primarily a criticism of the fundamental problems of mediaeval philosophy, the work proceeds to analyze these problems, to set forth their salient features, to construct hypothetically the arguments of which the criticism is made up, and to show how these arguments and criticism underlie the statements which we have before us in the Ethics. The Ethics thus emerges as a logically constructed work, throughout which there is order and sequence and continuity; propositions apparently disconnected group themselves into unified and coherent chapters; words, phrases, and passages, apparently meaningless or commonplace, assume meaning and significance; and the philosophy of Spinoza, as a systematic whole and in all its fullness of detail, appears in a new light and in its true historical setting. Within the framework of this study of the Ethics are woven interpretations of relevant passages from the other writings of Spinoza.

Harvard University Press takes pride in publishing the third edition of a work whose depth, scope, and wisdom have gained it international recognition as a classic in its field. Harry Austryn Wolfson, world-renowned scholar and most lucid of scholarly writers, here presents in ordered detail his long-awaited study of the philosophic principles and reasoning by which the Fathers of the Church sought to explain the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Professor Wolfson first discusses the problem of the relation of faith and reason. Starting with Paul, who, differentiating between the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world, averred that he was not going to adorn his teachings with persuasive arguments based on the wisdom of the world, Professor Wolfson describes the circumstances and influences which nevertheless brought about the introduction of philosophy into matters of faith and analyzes the various attitudes of the Fathers towards philosophy.

The Trinity and the Incarnation are Professor Wolfson’s next concern. He analyzes the various ways in which these topics are presented in the New Testament, and traces the attempts on the part of the Fathers to harmonize these presentations. He shows how the ultimate harmonized formulation of the two doctrines was couched in terms of philosophy; how, as a result of philosophic treatment, there arose with regard to the Trinity the problem of three and one and with regard to the Incarnation the problem of two and one; and how, in their attempts to solve these problems, the Fathers drew upon principles which in philosophy were made use of in the solution of certain aspects of the problem of the one and the many. In the final part of this volume, entitled “The Anathematized,” he deals with Gnosticism and other heresies which arose during the Patristic period with regard to the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Harry Wolfson was renowned throughout the world for the depth, scope, and wisdom of his monumental volumes on the structure and growth of philosophic systems from Plato to Spinoza. It was not only his extraordinary erudition that commanded respect, his awesome mastery of all the primary sources, Greek, Christian, Judaic, and Muslim; it was also his penetrating insight and his original and groundbreaking interpretations.

In this long-awaited volume, on which he worked for twenty years, Wolfson describes the body of doctrine known as the Kalam. Kalam, an Arabic term meaning "speech" and hence "discussion," was applied to early attempts in Islam to adduce philosophic proofs for religious beliefs. It later came to designate a system of religious philosophy which reached its highest point in the eleventh century; the masters of Kalam, known as Mutakallimum, were in many respects the Muslim equivalent of the Christian Church Fathers. Wolfson studies the Kalam systematically, unfolding its philosophic origins and implications and observing its repercussions in other religions. He scrutinizes the texts of Muslim writers for their treatment of such crucial problems as the attributes of God, the Creation, causality, predestination and free will. In the process he shows how the teachings of the Koran were constantly interwoven with ideas from Greek and Oriental philosophies, Judaism, and Christianity as Islamic thought developed.

As lucidly written and intellectually stimulating as all the author's earlier books, this volume is a fitting capstone to a notable career.

Over the past twenty years, Joshua Cohen has explored the most controversial issues facing the American public: campaign finance and political equality, privacy rights and robust public debate, hate speech and pornography, and the capacity of democracies to address important practical problems. In this highly anticipated volume, Cohen draws on his work in these diverse topics to develop an argument about what he calls, following John Rawls, “democracy’s public reason.” He rejects the conventional idea that democratic politics is simply a contest for power, and that philosophical argument is disconnected from life. Political philosophy, he insists, is part of politics, and its job is to contribute to the public reasoning about what we ought to do.At the heart of Cohen’s normative vision for our political life is an ideal of democracy in which citizens and their representatives deliberate about the requirements of justice and the common good. It is an idealistic picture, but also firmly grounded in the debates and struggles in which Cohen has been engaged over nearly three decades. Philosophy, Politics, Democracy explores these debates and considers their implications for the practice of democratic politics.

Nietzsche characterized the philosopher as the man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow--a description befitting Stanley Cavell, with his longtime interest in freedom in the face of an uncertain future. This interest, particularly in the role of language in freedom of the will, is fully engaged in this volume, a collection of retrospective and forward-thinking essays on performative language and on performances in which the question of freedom is the underlying concern.

Seeking for philosophy the same spirit and assurance conveyed by an artist like Fred Astaire, Cavell presents essays that explore the meaning of grace and gesture in film and on stage, in language and in life. Cavell's range is broad--from Astaire to Shakespeare's soulful Cordelia. He also analyzes filmic gestures that bespeak racial stereotypes, opening a key topic that runs through the book: What is the nature of praise? The theme of aesthetic judgment, viewed in the light of "passionate utterance," is everywhere evident in Cavell's effort to provoke a renaissance in American thought. Critical to such a rebirth is a recognition of the centrality of the "ordinary" to American life. Here Cavell, who has alluded to Thoreau throughout, takes up the quintessential American philosopher directly, and in relation to Heidegger; he also returns to his great philosophical love, Wittgenstein. His collection of essays ends, appropriately enough, with an essay on collecting.

Pagan rhetor, (Neo-)Platonist philosopher, Christian theologian

This collection of essays is devoted to the rhetoric, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Christian theology of Marius Victorinus, a mid-fourth-century professor of rhetoric and philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life. Scholars from eight different countries, some of whom have not previously published in English, reflect on debates about his writings and theological development. These topics include Victorinus's deployment of philosophical sources for trinitarian theology, possible connections in his work to Origen, Augustine, Plotinus, Porphyry, and Gnosticism, as well as his contributions to Latin rhetoric and dialectic. Contributors include Jan Dominik Bogataj, Michael Chase, Nello Cipriani, Stephen A. Cooper, Volker Henning Drecoll, Lenka Karfíková, Josef Lössl, Václav Němec, Thomas Riesenweber, Guadalupe Lopetegui Semperena, Miran Špelič, Chiara O. Tommasi, John D. Turner, and Florian Zacher. The chapters in this volume are of great interest to students of late antique philosophy, Christian theology, and Latin rhetoric.

Lysaker examines the relationship between philosophical thought and the act of writing to explore how this dynamic shapes the field of philosophy.

Philosophy’s relation to the act of writing is John T. Lysaker’s main concern in Philosophy, Writing, and the Character of Thought. Whether in Plato, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, or Derrida, philosophy has come in many forms, and those forms—the concrete shape philosophizing takes in writing—matter. Much more than mere adornment, the style in which a given philosopher writes is often of crucial importance to the point he or she is making, part and parcel of the philosophy itself.

Considering how writing influences philosophy, Lysaker explores genres like aphorism, dialogue, and essay, as well as logical-rhetorical operations like the example, irony, and quotation. At the same time, he shows us the effects of these rhetorical devices through his own literary experimentation. In dialogue with such authors as Benjamin, Cavell, Emerson, and Lukács, he aims to revitalize philosophical writing, arguing that philosophy cannot fulfill its intellectual and cultural promise if it keeps to professional articles and academic prose. Instead, philosophy must embrace writing as an essential, creative activity, and deliberately reform how it approaches its subject matter, readership, and the evolving social practices of reading and reflection.

Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N. Rodowick, is a revitalized concept of theory that can assess the limits of scientific explanation and defend the unique character of humanistic understanding.

Philosophy’s Artful Conversation is a timely and searching examination of theory’s role in the arts and humanities today. Expanding the insights of his earlier book, Elegy for Theory, and drawing on the diverse thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. H. von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, Rodowick provides a blueprint of what he calls a “philosophy of the humanities.” In a surprising and illuminating turn, he views the historical emergence of theory through the lens of film theory, arguing that aesthetics, literary studies, and cinema studies cannot be separated where questions of theory are concerned. These discourses comprise a conceptual whole, providing an overarching model of critique that resembles, in embryonic form, what a new philosophy of the humanities might look like.

Rodowick offers original readings of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell, bringing forward unexamined points of contact between two thinkers who associate philosophical expression with film and the arts. A major contribution to cross-disciplinary intellectual history, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation reveals the many threads connecting the arts and humanities with the history of philosophy.

Continental and postmodern thinking has misidentified the source of violence as originating from Western metaphysics. It has further failed to acknowledge the Judeo- Christian source of its ethic—the ethic of concern for victims. In this volume Duane Armitage attempts a critique of continental philosophy and postmodernism through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory. This critique is directed primarily at the philosophies of Nietzsche and Heidegger, both among the foremost representatives of continental and postmodern thought. Armitage argues that Girard’s engagement with Heidegger and Nietzsche radically alters many of the axioms of current postmodern continental philosophy, in particular the overcoming of metaphysics on the theoretical level and continental philosophy’s tacit commitments to (neo-)Marxism on the practical level. Detailed attention to the implications of Girard’s philosophical thought results in a paradigm shift that deals perhaps a deadly blow to continental and postmodern thinking. Armitage further argues that Girard’s thinking solves the very problems that continental and postmodern thinking sought (but failed) to solve, namely the problems of violence and victimization, particularly within the context of the aftermath of the Second World War. Ultimately, this volume shows that at the heart of postmodern thinking lies an entanglement with the violent sacred.

Photography has a unique relationship to chance. Anyone who has wielded a camera has taken a picture ruined by an ill-timed blink or enhanced by an unexpected gesture or expression. Although this proneness to chance may amuse the casual photographer, Robin Kelsey points out that historically it has been a mixed blessing for those seeking to make photographic art. On the one hand, it has weakened the bond between maker and picture, calling into question what a photograph can be said to say. On the other hand, it has given photography an extraordinary capacity to represent the unpredictable dynamism of modern life. By delving into these matters, Photography and the Art of Chance transforms our understanding of photography and the work of some of its most brilliant practitioners.

The effort to make photographic art has involved a call and response across generations. From the introduction of photography in 1839 to the end of the analog era, practitioners such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederick Sommer, and John Baldessari built upon and critiqued one another’s work in their struggle to reconcile aesthetic aspiration and mechanical process. The root problem was the technology’s indifference, its insistence on giving a bucket the same attention as a bishop and capturing whatever wandered before the lens. Could such an automatic mechanism accommodate imagination? Could it make art? Photography and the Art of Chance reveals how daring innovators expanded the aesthetic limits of photography to create art for a modern world.

The William of Moerbeke Translation Series, under the general editorship of Stuart D. Warner, is devoted to publishing translations of important works - ancient, medieval, and modern - regardless of the original language, in every area of scholarly endeavor, including philosophy, political science, theology, literature, history, economics, and law. The aim of the series is to bring the reader as close as possible to the letter and spirit of the original work. Each volume will contain a scholarly introduction and notes. We welcome all inquiries and suggestions. Physics, Or Natural Healing is the first volume of this series.

Natural causes.

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:

I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.
II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.
III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV Metaphysics: on being as being.
V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library® edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

Natural causes.

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BC, was the son of a physician. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367–347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil in Asia Minor. After some time at Mitylene, in 343–342 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip’s death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of “Peripatetics”), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander’s death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.

Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows:

I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices.
II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica.
III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc.
IV Metaphysics: on being as being.
V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics.
VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship.
VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics, and metaphysics.

The Loeb Classical Library® edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.

In this wide-ranging book, one of the boldest thinkers in modern neuroscience confronts an ancient philosophical problem: can we know the world as it really is?

Drawing on provocative new findings about the psychophysiology of perception and judgment in both human and nonhuman primates, and also on the cultural history of science, Jean-Pierre Changeux makes a powerful case for the reality of scientific progress and argues that it forms the basis for a coherent and universal theory of human rights. On this view, belief in objective knowledge is not a mere ideological slogan or a naïve confusion; it is a characteristic feature of human cognition throughout evolution, and the scientific method its most sophisticated embodiment. Seeking to reconcile science and humanism, Changeux holds that the capacity to recognize truths that are independent of subjective personal experience constitutes the foundation of a human civil society.

One of the major contributions of Husserl’s phenomenology has been to show that things present themselves to us in strikingly different ways. There are various kinds of presentations and something like logical structures in them that allow the truth of things to appear. Being pictured is different from being named, and also different from being distinguished from something else. The fourteen essays in this volume provide concrete and colorful examples of strategic forms of presentation, and they also shed light on us as persons who exercise our intelligence when we let things appear in these various ways. Even our moral conduct takes place because something appears to us as to be done or to be avoided in a situation that calls for action. When we quote what someone has said, for example, we express things as they have been expressed by someone else, and we invoke the authority of that other speaker. In measurement, we either bring external units, such as inches or yards, to determine the “how much” of things; or we engage in “internal measurement” and use one part of the object to determine the size of the whole. In moral action, the deep core of what we do involves either benevolence or malevolence, and in such conduct we shape or confirm ourselves as good or bad. Even the timing of things, the measurement of their motions and the determination of their before and after, in both clock and calendar time, cannot take place without the involvement of the person’s own interwoven perceptions, remembrances, and anticipations, all held together by the underlying flow of personal as well as worldly temporality. The essays in this book are an attempt to blend the philosophical approaches of Aristotle and Husserl, the classical and the modern, to help us appreciate what Aristotle called “being as the true,” and to show how the human person is involved in this enterprise.

Tian, or Heaven, had multiple meanings in early China. It had been used since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god, and later came to be regarded as a force driving the movement of the cosmos and as a home to deities and imaginary animals. By the Han dynasty, which saw an outpouring of visual materials depicting Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompassed an immortal realm to which humans could ascend after death.

Using excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han artisans transformed various notions of Heaven—as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky—into pictorial entities. The Han Heaven was not indicated by what the artisans looked at, but rather was suggested by what they looked into. Artisans attained the visibility of Heaven by appropriating and modifying related knowledge of cosmology, mythology, astronomy. Thus the depiction of Heaven in Han China reflected an interface of image and knowledge.

By examining Heaven as depicted in ritual buildings, on household utensils, and in the embellishments of funerary settings, Tseng maintains that visibility can hold up a mirror to visuality; Heaven was culturally constructed and should be culturally reconstructed.

An interdisciplinary approach to invisibility through the lens of the arts and sciences.

Picturing the Invisible presents different disciplinary approaches to articulating the invisible, that which is not known or not provable. The challenge is how to articulate these concepts, not only to those within a particular academic field but beyond, to other disciplines and society at large. As our understanding of the complexity of the world grows incrementally, so does our realization that issues and problems can rarely be resolved within neat demarcations. Therefore, the authors argue, the importance of finding means of communicating across disciplines and fields must become a priority. This book brings together insights from leading academics from a wide range of disciplines, including art and design, curatorial practice, literature, forensic science, medical science, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, philosophy, astrophysics, and architecture, who share an interest in exploring how in each discipline we strive to find expression for the invisible or unknown and to draw out and articulate some of the explicit and tacit ways of communicating those concepts that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China’s primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-Shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.

This book’s structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism—aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral—and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart.

This book is an invitation to the life of philosophy in the United States, as Emerson once lived it and as Stanley Cavell now lives it—in all its topographical ambiguity. Cavell talks about his vocation in connection with what he calls voice—the tone of philosophy—and his right to take that tone, and to describe an anecdotal journey toward the discovery of his own voice.

Today we associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry and consider it a source of injustice. So how can prejudice have a legitimate place in moral and political judgment? In this ambitious work, Adam Sandel shows that prejudice, properly understood, is not an unfortunate obstacle to clear thinking but an essential aspect of it. The aspiration to reason without preconceptions, he argues, is misguided.

Ranging across philosophy from Aristotle to Heidegger and Gadamer, Sandel demonstrates that we inherit our "prejudice against prejudice" from the Enlightenment. By detaching reason from habit and common opinion, thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant invented prejudice--as we understand it today--as an obstacle to freedom and a failure to think for oneself.

The Place of Prejudice presents a powerful challenge to this picture. The attempt to purge understanding of culture and history leads not to truth, Sandel warns, but to shallowness and confusion. A purely detached notion of reason deprives judgment of all perspective, disparages political rhetoric as mere pandering, and denies us the background knowledge we need to interpret literature, law, and the past. In a clear, eloquent voice, Sandel presents instead a compelling case for reasoning within the world.

This book weaves together Reiner Schürmann’s work on art and politics, drawing on a range of the most important thinkers and poets of the twentieth century and beyond.

The Place of the Symbolic gathers Reiner Schürmann’s essays on the nexus of art and politics. In keeping with his translation of the destruction of metaphysics into an an-archic philosophy of practice, Schürmann develops a radical theory of the place of symbols, irreducible either to idealist theories of symbols or structuralist accounts of the symbolic. Symbols, Schürmann argues, may provide a bridge between ontological difference and politics. They resist being grasped metaphysically, in terms of representation. Instead, their understanding requires a specific way of existence: attending to the coming-to-presence of phenomena. As such, the understanding of symbols discloses a form of praxis that abandons ultimate grounds and opens onto the manifold.

Alongside Schürmann’s theory of symbols, the collection includes essays on the relation between metaphysics, tragedy, and technology; on the “there is” in poetry; as well as on judgment. Throughout these characteristically lucid interventions, Schürmann’s most urgent concern remains a consideration of singular and finite practices that enact a release from universal principles. Art and politics appear here as the unworking of ultimate grounds; that is, as practices attuned to a truly groundless form of life.
 

A new theoretical perspective on place in photography.
 
Drawing on theoretical insights from geography and philosophy, Ali Shobeiri examines how six fundamentals of photography—the photographer, camera, photograph, image, spectator, and genre—manifest unique, contingent notions of “place.” The geophilosophy that emerges offers a new language for understanding how “place” encapsulates everything that invites and resists location, identity, story, function, and meaning.

An ancient compendium of ancient philosophy.

Placita (Tenets), generally attributed to an author named Aëtius and dating from the late first or early second century AD, was a compendium setting out in summary fashion the principal doctrines and opinions of philosophers and philosophical schools in response to questions and topics in the domain of natural philosophy. Now lost, Placita can be largely reconstructed from the work of three authors working in the period from the second to the fifth century (Pseudo-Plutarch, Stobaeus, and Theodoret) who quote from it extensively.

Placita is organized into five books: First Principles; Cosmology; Meteorology and the Earth; Psychology; and Physiology. Each chapter contains a list of short opinions or tenets, which are ascribed to an individual philosopher and/or school and usually arranged in sections that stress the variety and contrast of the teachings concerned.

Designed as a multi-purpose resource, Placita long served as a manual of neatly packaged doxographic material on a wide variety of topics, to be used for study, as an aide-mémoire, for displays of erudition, for persuasion in rhetorical or apologetic contexts, and for personal enlightenment, and it remains a valuable source for our knowledge of Presocratic and Hellenistic philosophy.

This edition of Aëtius’ Placita offers a fresh translation, ample annotation, and a text fully informed by the latest scholarship.

Winner of the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities
Winner of the Istvan Hont Book Prize

An ambitious reinterpretation and defense of Plato’s basic enterprise and influence, arguing that the power of his myths was central to the founding of philosophical rationalism.

Plato’s use of myths—the Myth of Metals, the Myth of Er—sits uneasily with his canonical reputation as the inventor of rational philosophy. Since the Enlightenment, interpreters like Hegel have sought to resolve this tension by treating Plato’s myths as mere regrettable embellishments, irrelevant to his main enterprise. Others, such as Karl Popper, have railed against the deceptive power of myth, concluding that a tradition built on Platonic foundations can be neither rational nor desirable.

Tae-Yeoun Keum challenges the premise underlying both of these positions. She argues that myth is neither irrelevant nor inimical to the ideal of rational progress. She tracks the influence of Plato’s dialogues through the early modern period and on to the twentieth century, showing how pivotal figures in the history of political thought—More, Bacon, Leibniz, the German Idealists, Cassirer, and others—have been inspired by Plato’s mythmaking. She finds that Plato’s followers perennially raised the possibility that there is a vital role for myth in rational political thinking.

Plato’s dialogues are some of the most widely read texts in Western philosophy, and one would imagine them fully mined for elemental material. Yet, in Plato and Tradition, Patricia Fagan reveals the dialogues to be continuing sources of fresh insight. She recovers from them an underappreciated depth of cultural reference that is crucial to understanding their central philosophical concerns. Through careful readings of six dialogues, Fagan demonstrates that Plato’s presentation of Socrates highlights the centrality of tradition in political, erotic, and philosophic life. Plato embeds Socrates’s arguments and ideas in traditional references that would have been familiar to contemporaries of Socrates or Plato but that today’s reader typically passes over. Fagan’s book unpacks this cultural and literary context for the proper and full understanding of the philosophical argument of the Platonic dialogues. She concludes that, as Socrates demonstrates in word and deed, tradition is essential to successful living. But we must take up tradition with a critical openness to questioning its significance and future. Her original and compelling analyses may change the views of many readers who think themselves already well versed in the dialogues.

What is the best possible society? How would its rulers govern and its citizens behave? Such questions are sometimes dismissed as distractions from genuine political problems, but in an era when political idealism seems a relic of the past, says Jonny Thakkar, they are more urgent than ever. A daring experiment in using ancient philosophy to breathe life into our political present, Plato as Critical Theorist takes seriously one of Plato’s central claims: that philosophers should rule. What many accounts miss is the intimate connection between Plato’s politics and his metaphysics, Thakkar argues. Philosophy is the activity of articulating how parts and wholes best fit together, while ruling is the activity that shapes the parts of society into a coherent whole conducive to the good life. Plato’s ideal society is thus one in which ideal theory itself plays a leading role.

Today’s liberal democracies require not philosopher-kings legislating from above but philosopher-citizens willing to work toward a vision of the best society in their daily lives. Against the claim that such idealism is inherently illiberal, Thakkar shows that it is fully compatible with the liberal theories of both Popper and Rawls while nevertheless pushing beyond them in providing a new vantage point for the Marxian critique of capitalism.

This collection of papers is devoted to the significance of particular formal and literary aspects of the Platonic dialogues.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato.

A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato.

A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato.

A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

This book explores the place of the sophists within the Greek wisdom tradition, and argues against their almost universal exclusion from serious intellectual traditions. By studying the sophists against the backdrop of the archaic Greek institutions of wisdom, it is possible to detect considerable intellectual overlap between them and their predecessors. This book explores the continuity of this tradition, suggesting that the sophists’ intellectual balkanization in modern scholarship, particularly their low standing in comparison to the Presocratics, Platonists, and Aristotelians, is a direct result of Plato’s condemnation of them and their practices. This book thus seeks to offer a revised history of the development of Greek philosophy, as well as of the potential—yet never realized—courses it might have followed.

Plato's Critique of Impure Reason offers a dramatic interpretation of the Republic, at the center of which lies a novel reading of the historical person of Socrates as the "real image" of the good

Plato’s Four Muses reconstructs Plato’s authorial self-portrait through a fresh reading of the Phaedrus, with an Introduction and Conclusion that contextualize the construction more broadly. The Phaedrus, it is argued, is Plato’s most self-referential dialogue, and Plato’s reference to four Muses in Phaedrus 259c–d is read as a hint at the “ingredients” of philosophical discourse, which turns out to be a form of provocatively old-fashioned mousikê.

Andrea Capra maintains that Socrates’s conversion to “demotic”—as opposed to metaphorical—music in the Phaedo closely parallels the Phaedrus and is apologetic in character, since Socrates was held responsible for dismissing traditional mousikê. This parallelism reveals three surprising features that define Plato’s works: first, a measure of anti-intellectualism (Plato counters the rationalistic excesses of other forms of discourse, thus distinguishing it from both prose and poetry); second, a new beginning for philosophy (Plato conceptualizes the birth of Socratic dialogue in, and against, the Pythagorean tradition, with an emphasis on the new role of writing); and finally, a self-consciously ambivalent attitude with respect to the social function of the dialogues, which are conceived both as a kind of “resistance literature” and as a preliminary move toward the new poetry of the Kallipolis.

An insightful commentary on Plato’s Laws, his complex final work.

The Laws was Plato’s last work, his longest, and one of his most difficult. In contrast to the Republic, which presents an abstract ideal, the Laws appears to provide practical guidelines for the establishment and maintenance of political order in the real world. Classicist Seth Benardete offers a rich analysis of each of the twelve books of the Laws, which illuminates Plato’s major themes and arguments concerning theology, the soul, justice, and education.

Most importantly, Benardete shows how music in a broad sense, including drama, epic poetry, and even puppetry, mediates between reason and the city in Plato’s philosophy of law. Benardete also uncovers the work’s concealed ontological dimension, explaining why it is hidden and how it can be brought to light. In establishing the coherence and underlying organization of Plato’s last dialogue, Benardete makes a significant contribution to Platonic studies.

Surveying many of Plato's dialogues from the early, middle, and late periods, prominent philosopher John M. Rist shows how Plato gradually came to realize the need for metaphysics to support his ethical position and that a rigorous ethics required a secure metaphysics grounded in universal values.

Since Friedrich Schleiermacher’s work in the 1800s, scholars interested in the literary dimension of Plato’s writings have sought to reconcile the dialogue form with the expository imperative of philosophical argument. It is now common for mainstream classicists and philosophers to attribute vital importance to literary form in Plato, which they often explain in terms of rhetorical devices serving didactic goals. This study brings the disciplines of literary and classical studies into methodological debate, questioning modern views of Plato’s dialogue form.

In the first part of this book, David Schur argues that the literary features of Plato’s dialogues—when treated as literary—cannot be limited to a single argumentative agenda. In the second part, he demonstrates the validity of this point by considering a rhetorical pattern of self-reflection that is prominent in the Republic. He emphasizes that Plato’s book consistently undermines the goal-driven conversation that it portrays. Offering a thought-provoking blend of methodological investigation and methodical close reading, Schur suggests that the Republic qualifies the authority of its conclusions by displaying a strong countercurrent of ongoing movement.

Understanding the significance of adult play in the life of modern societies

Within the social sciences, few matters are as significant as the study of human play--or as neglected. In Play Reconsidered, rather than viewing play simply as a preoccupation of the young and a vehicle for skill development, Thomas S. Henricks argues that it’s a social and cultural phenomenon of adult life, enveloped by wider structures and processes of society. In that context, he argues that a truly sociological approach to play should begin with a consideration of the largely overlooked writings on play and play-related topics by some of the classic sociological thinkers of the twentieth century.

Henricks explores Karl Marx’s analysis of creativity in human labor, examines Emile Durkheim’s observations on the role of ritual and the formation of collective consciousness, extends Max Weber’s ideas about the process of rationalization to the realm of expressive culture and play, surveys Georg Simmel’s distinctive approach to sociology and sociability, and discusses Erving Goffman’s focus on human conduct as process and play as “encounter.” These and other discussions of the contributions of more recent sociologists are framed by an initial consideration of Johan Huizinga’s famous challenge to understand the nature and significance of play. In a closing synthesis, Henricks distinguishes play from other forms of human social expression, particularly ritual, communitas, and work.

Play is a key part of human relationships, and we engage in it during every stage and in every facet of our lives. We develop games to include decision-making, risk, chance, competition, and cooperation, which mirror how we navigate social engagement in our everyday lives. In Playing Sociology: Theory and Games for Coping with Mimetic Crisis and Social Conflict, Martino Doni and Stefano Tomelleri employ gaming as a lens through which they analyze the underlying and sometimes hidden aspects of social relationships and conventions. They also provide five sociological games that can be played by teams in workplaces, classrooms, and other settings to encourage creative thinking and to create abstract ways to explore systemic or ongoing conflicts among group members. This research offers a new way to look at and participate in relational dynamics in both theory and practice.

Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) was one of the founders of philosophical anthropology, and his book The Stages of the Organic and Man, first published in 1928, has inspired generations of philosophers, biologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. This volume offers the first substantial introduction to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology in English, not only setting it in context with such familiar figures as Bergson, Cassirer, and Merleau-Ponty, but also showing Plessner’s relevance to contemporary discussions in a wide variety of fields in the humanities and sciences.

In Ennead I.5 Plotinus attempts to navigate a well-trodden path of inquiry by directly responding to a wide spectrum of popular theories on human flourishing, and insisting emphatically that well-being belongs to the present moment. Indeed, Aristotle—with his insistence that well-being be measured by “a complete life” (Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16–20) or a life measured by virtue, a modus vivendi sustained via the development of appropriate habits (hexis) and the avoidance of misfortunes—is one of Plotinus’ central targets. Nevertheless, it is also obvious that the Hellenistic schools, with their almost evangelical insistence that happiness is available to practitioners in the immediacy of the “now,” take pride of place in Plotinus’ short treatise on the subject. Layne analyzes in depth Plotinus’ unique conception of the value of the present moment by highlighting his dialogue with Aristotle and Hellenistic conceptions of the soul, pleasure and pain, time and eternity, and so forth.

On Our Allotted Guardian Spirit is a lively and at times perplexing text combining general reflections on the nature of the soul with a discussion of the phenomenon of a personal guardian spirit. Plotinus wants to interpret Plato, and aims to integrate Plato's various statements about daimones into one comprehensive theory. This leads to some views that are, if not exotic, then at least strange on first encounter. However, a closer reading reveals that Plotinus is not interested in demonology per se. Instead, the central concern of the treatise are ideas about the soul, the self, and self-consciousness. Plotinus' explorations produce a theory of the mind as the agent and activity responsible for a person’s ethical choices and conduct of life. The demon emerges as a philosophical tool passed down from Plato, but adapted and rationalized to try to explain motivation to action, the impulse toward the ethical life, and even the various differences in human ethical and psychological constitution. This innovative theory is a response to a strong and ongoing current of thought in the philosophical tradition.

The introduction offers an overview of ancient demonologies, starting with Homer and the Presocratics, and is followed by an in-depth examination of Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus, and later Neoplatonic developments. As such the book presents Plotinus’ specific rationalizing response to the idea of a guardian spirit in the context of ancient philosophical demonologies.

This early treatise is placed by Plotinus’ editor at the very end of the Enneads, as the culmination of his thought, matching Plotinus’ own last recorded instruction, “to bring the god in you back to the god in the all.” It is a cosmological sketch, arguing that the being of anything depends on its being unified by its orientation to its own good, and so also the being of Everything, the All. The One, or the Good, is at once the goal of all things both individually and collectively, and also the transcendent source of all that we experience, mediated through an intelligible order. But it is also, and perhaps more importantly, intended as a guide to the proper education and discipline of our own motives and experience. We are encouraged to put aside immediate sensory data, egoistic prejudice and sensual impulse, first to grasp at least a little of the intelligible order within which we all live, and at last to purge even those last intellectual attachments and experience what cannot be adequately described: the unity of being.

A Greek edition of Plotinus's philosophical works with notes for students of Classical Greek

Plotinus, the father of Neoplatonism, composed the treatise On Beauty (Ennead 1.6) as the first of a series of philosophical essays devoted to interpreting and elucidating Platonic ideas. This treatise is one of the most accessible and influential of Plotinus's works, and it provides a stimulating entrée into the many facets of his philosophical activity. In this volume Andrew Smith first introduces readers to the Greek of Plotinus and to his philosophy in general, then provides the Greek text of and English notes on Plotinus's systematic argument and engaging exhortation to foster the inner self. The volume ends with the text of and notes on Plotinus's complementary statements in On Intelligible Beauty (Ennead 5.8.1–2).

Features:

• An overview of Plotinus's life
• Background discussion of Plotinus's thought and outline of his philosophical system
• Analysis of the relationship of Plotinus's thought to Plato’s

In May 1908 William James, a gifted and popular lecturer, delivered a series of eight Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford, on “The Present Situation in Philosophy.” These were published a year later as A Pluralistic Universe.

During the preceding decade James, as he struggled with deep conflicts within his own philosophic development, had become increasingly preoccupied with epistemological and metaphysical issues. He saw serious inadequacies in the forms of absolute and monistic idealism dominant in England and the United States, and he used the lectures to attack the specific form that “vicious intellectualism” had taken. In A Pluralistic Universe James captures a new philosophic vision, at once intimate and realistic. He shares with his readers a view of the universe that is fresh, active, and novel. The message conveyed is as relevant today as it was in his time.

This is the fourth volume of The Works of William James in an authoritative edition sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. Prepared according to modern standards of textual scholarship, this series utilizes all available published and unpublished materials; its texts have been awarded the seal of approval of the Center for Editions of American Authors. Frederick Burkhardt is General Editor; Fredson Bowers, Textual Editor; Ignas K. Skrupskelis, Associate Editor.

A short, smart guide to living the good life through the teachings of Epicurus.

As long as there has been human life, we’ve searched for what it means to be happy. More than two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Epicurus came to his own conclusion: all we really want in life is pleasure. Though today we tend to associate the word “Epicurean” with indulgence in the form of food and wine, the philosophy of Epicurus was about a life well lived even in the hardest of times. As John Sellars shows in this concise, approachable guide, the ideal life envisioned by Epicurus and his followers was a life much more concerned with mental pleasures and the avoidance of pain. Their goal, in short, was a life of tranquility or contentment.
 
In The Pocket Epicurean Sellars walks us through the history of Epicureanism, starting with the private garden on the edge of ancient Athens where Epicurus and his students lived in the fourth century BC, and where women were as welcome as men. Sellars then moves on to ancient Rome, where Epicurean influence flourished thanks to the poet Lucretius and his cohort. Throughout the book, Sellars draws on the ideas of Epicurus to offer a constructive way of thinking about the pleasures of friendship and our place in the world.

 

To counter the daily anxieties, stress, and emotional swings caused by the barrage of stimuli that plagues modern life, many people have been finding unexpected solace in a philosophy from a very different and distant time: Stoicism. Today, more than 100,000 people are members of online communities for modern Stoics, and there are annual conferences, meet-ups, and workshops for those aspiring to walk the Stoic path. But what is Stoicism, and what makes it resonate so powerfully today?
 
As John Sellars shows in The Pocket Stoic, the popular image of the isolated and unfeeling Stoic hardly does justice to the rich vein of thought that we find in the work of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, the three great Roman Stoics. Their works are recognized classics, and for good reason—they speak to some of the perennial issues that face anyone trying to navigate their way through life. These writings, fundamentally, are about how to live—how to understand your place in the world, how to cope when things don’t go well, how to manage your emotions, how to behave toward others, and finally, how to live a good life. To be a Stoic is to recognize that much of the suffering in your life is due to the way you think about things, and that you have the ability to train your mind to look at the world in a new way—to recognize what you can and cannot control and to turn adversity into opportunity.
 
Concise and accessible, The Pocket Stoic provides a welcome introduction to the lives and thought of the key Stoics. It is also a perfect guide to help you start incorporating the practice of Stoicism into your everyday approach to life.

A stunning modern translation of a Buddhist classic that is also one of the oldest literary texts in the world written by women.

The Therīgāthā is one of the oldest surviving literatures by women, composed more than two millennia ago and originally collected as part of the Pali canon of Buddhist scripture. These poems were written by some of the first Buddhist women—therīs—honored for their religious achievements. Through imaginative verses about truth and freedom, the women recount their lives before ordination and their joy at attaining liberation from samsara. Poems of the First Buddhist Women offers startling insights into the experiences of women in ancient times that continue to resonate with modern readers. With a spare and elegant style, this powerful translation introduces us to a classic of world literature.

Poetic Cinema and the Spirit of the Gift in the Films of Pabst, Parajanov, Kubrick and Ruiz explores the poetic thinking of these master filmmakers, expressed in several of their key films. It examines theoretical ideas, including Maori anthropology of the gift and Sufi philosophy of the image, to conceive film as abundant gift. Elaborating on how this gift may be received, this book imagines film as our indispensable mentor - a wild mentor who teaches us how to think with moving images by learning to perceive evanescent forms that simply appear and disappear.