Authors and Authorities in Ancient Philosophy

Jenny Bryan, Robert Wardy, James Warren

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781316510049
• eBook ISBN:
  9781108585965
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

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 developments.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Frontispiece
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Authorship and Authority in Ancient Philosophy
• Chapter 1 Reconsidering the Authority of Parmenides’ Doxa
• Chapter 2 Authority and the Dialectic of Socrates
• Chapter 3 Socratic Discussions of Death and Immortality in Plato
• Chapter 4 A Superannuated Student: Aristotle and Authority in the Academy
• Chapter 5 Words, Deeds, and Lovers of Truth in Aristotle
• Chapter 6 Aristotle’s Categories 7 Adopts Plato’s View of Relativity
• Chapter 7 Theophrastus and the Authority of the de Sensibus
• Chapter 8 Pseudo-Archytas and the Categories
• Chapter 9 Numenius on Intellect, Soul, and the Authority of Plato
• Chapter 10 Demetrius of Laconia on Epicurus On the Telos (Us. 68)
• Chapter 11 Lucretius the Madman on the Gods
• Chapter 12 In and Out of the Stoa: Diogenes Laertius on Zeno
• Chapter 13 The Emergence of Platonic and Aristotelian Authority in the First Century BCE
• Chapter 14 Cicero on Auctoritas
• Chapter 15 Authors and Authorities in Ancient China: Some Comparative Observations
• Chapter 16 Antique Authority?
• References
• Index Locorum
• General Index