Ancient Philosophy

Textual Paths and Historical Explorations

Lorenzo Perilli, Daniela P. Taormina, Lorenzo Perilli, Daniela P. Taormina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138668812
• eBook ISBN: 9781351716031
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

'We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts, have their root in Greece', the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote. It is in Greek that the questions which shaped the destiny of Western culture were asked, and so were the first attempts at an answer, and the search for a method of investigation. This book tries to rediscover the propulsive force that for over two millennia spread, and still lives in our system of thought. By systematically quoting the very words of the leading actors and by tracing their sources, it leads the reader along a path where they will be able to observe the establishment of philosophical ideas and language, in an updated and balanced picture of archaic lore, of the thought of the classical and hellenistic ages, and of the philosophy of late antiquity. The book looks closely at the progress of scientific thought and at its increasing autonomy, while following the evolution of the fruitful yet problematic relationship between the Greek world and the Near East.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Preface
• Bibliographical outline on the history of scholarship on ancient philosophy
• Abbreviations
• 1. East and West
• 2. Ancient Philosophy and the doxographical tradition
• Focus Box 1: The transmission of ancient philosophy
• 3. Philosophical stones: ancient philosophy as reflected in the mirror of inscriptions
• 4. Socio-Historical Outline of the Archaic period
• 5. ‘You Greeks are always children’: the infancy of wisdom
• 6. The Presocratics
• Focus Box 2: New discoveries of ancient philosophical and scientific texts
• 7. The sophists and Socrates
• Focus Box 3: The sophists: key figures
• 8. Socio-historical outline of the Classical and Hellenistic periods
• 9. Plato
• 10. The Academy from Plato to Polemo
• Focus Box 4: Academic philosophers (fourth-first century BCE)
• 11. Aristotle
• Focus Box 5: Aristotle’s Poetics
• 12. Hellenistic philosophy
• 13. Socio-historical outline of the Roman period
• 14. Some remarks on ancient science
• Focus Box 6: Logos and algorithms
• 15. Philosophy in Rome
• Focus Box 7: Lucretius: a failed subversion
• 16. Socio-historical outline of the later Roman empire
• 17. Platonism, Pythagoreanism, Aristotelianism
• 18. Greek philosophy and philosophers in the third–sixth century CE: from Plotinus to the last Alexandrian commentators
• 19. Augustine of Hippo and the new Christian culture
• Appendix: Aristotle’s Testament
• Index locorum (by Rosario Giovanni Scalia)
• Index (by Rosario Giovanni Scalia)