Aristotle and Other Platonists

Aristotle and Other Platonists

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  • Author: Lloyd P. Gerson
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • ISBN: 1501716964
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 348

"Aristotle versus Plato. For a long time that is the angle from which the tale has been told, in textbooks on the history of philosophy and to university students. Aristotle's philosophy, so the story goes, was au fond in opposition to Plato's. But it was not always thus."—from the Introduction In a wide-ranging book likely to cause controversy, Lloyd P. Gerson sets out the case for the "harmony" of Platonism and Aristotelianism, the standard view in late antiquity. He aims to show that the twentieth-century view that Aristotle started out as a Platonist and ended up as an anti-Platonist is seriously flawed. Gerson examines the Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle based on their principle of harmony. In considering ancient studies of Aristotle's Categories, Physics, De Anima, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, the author shows how the principle of harmony allows us to understand numerous texts that otherwise appear intractable. Gerson also explains how these "esoteric" treatises can be seen not to conflict with the early "exoteric" and admittedly Platonic dialogues of Aristotle. Aristotle and Other Platonists concludes with an assessment of some of the philosophical results of acknowledging harmony.


Plato and Aristotle in Agreement?

Plato and Aristotle in Agreement?

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  • Author: George E. Karamanolis
  • Publisher: Oxford University Press
  • ISBN: 0199264562
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 430

George Karamanolis breaks new ground in the study of later ancient philosophy by examining the interplay of the two main schools of thought, Platonism and Aristotelianism, from the first century BC to the third century AD. Arguing against prevailing scholarly assumption, he argues that the Platonists turned to Aristotle only in order to elucidate Plato's doctrines and to reconstruct Plato's philosophy, and that they did not hesitate to criticize Aristotle when judging him to be at odds with Plato. Karamanolis offers much food for thought to ancient philosophers and classicists.


Platonism and the Objects of Science

Platonism and the Objects of Science

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  • Author: Scott Berman
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
  • ISBN: 1350080225
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 193

What are the objects of science? Are they just the things in our scientific experiments that are located in space and time? Or does science also require that there be additional things that are not located in space and time? Using clear examples, these are just some of the questions that Scott Berman explores as he shows why alternative theories such as Nominalism, Contemporary Aristotelianism, Constructivism, and Classical Aristotelianism, fall short. He demonstrates why the objects of scientific knowledge need to be not located in space or time if they are to do the explanatory work scientists need them to do. The result is a contemporary version of Platonism that provides us with the best way to explain what the objects of scientific understanding are, and how those non-spatiotemporal things relate to the spatiotemporal things of scientific experiments, as well as everything around us, including even ourselves.


Aristotle and Early Christian Thought

Aristotle and Early Christian Thought

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  • Author: Mark Edwards
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1315520192
  • Category : Religion
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 248

In studies of early Christian thought, ‘philosophy’ is often a synonym for ‘Platonism’, or at most for ‘Platonism and Stoicism’. Nevertheless, it was Aristotle who, from the sixth century AD to the Italian Renaissance, was the dominant Greek voice in Christian, Muslim and Jewish philosophy. Aristotle and Early Christian Thought is the first book in English to give a synoptic account of the slow appropriation of Aristotelian thought in the Christian world from the second to the sixth century. Concentrating on the great theological topics – creation, the soul, the Trinity, and Christology – it makes full use of modern scholarship on the Peripatetic tradition after Aristotle, explaining the significance of Neoplatonism as a mediator of Aristotelian logic. While stressing the fidelity of Christian thinkers to biblical presuppositions which were not shared by the Greek schools, it also describes their attempts to overcome the pagan objections to biblical teachings by a consistent use of Aristotelian principles, and it follows their application of these principles to matters which lay outside the purview of Aristotle himself. This volume offers a valuable study not only for students of Christian theology in its formative years, but also for anyone seeking an introduction to the thought of Aristotle and its developments in Late Antiquity.


The Discovery of Things

The Discovery of Things

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  • Author: Wolfgang-Rainer Mann
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 9780691010205
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 260

Aristotle's Categories can easily seem to be a statement of a naïve, pre-philosophical ontology, centered around ordinary items. Wolfgang-Rainer Mann argues that the treatise, in fact, presents a revolutionary metaphysical picture, one Aristotle arrives at by (implicitly) criticizing Plato and Plato's strange counterparts, the "Late-Learners" of the Sophist. As Mann shows, the Categories reflects Aristotle's discovery that ordinary items are things (objects with properties). Put most starkly, Mann contends that there were no things before Aristotle. The author's argument consists of two main elements. First, a careful investigation of Plato which aims to make sense of the odd-sounding suggestion that things do not show up as things in his ontology. Secondly, an exposition of the theoretical apparatus Aristotle introduces in the Categories--an exposition which shows how Plato's and the Late-Learners' metaphysical pictures cannot help but seem inadequate in light of that apparatus. In doing so, Mann reveals that Aristotle's conception of things--now so engrained in Western thought as to seem a natural expression of common sense--was really a hard-won philosophical achievement. Clear, subtle, and rigorously argued, The Discovery of Things will reshape our understanding of some of Aristotle's--and Plato's--most basic ideas.


Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

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  • Author: M. F. Burnyeat
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 0521750725
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 393

The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.


Aristotelians and Platonists

Aristotelians and Platonists

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  • Author: Luigi Morelli
  • Publisher: iUniverse
  • ISBN: 1491781076
  • Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 391

At the heart of this book is Rudolf Steiners culmination in the twentieth century, or the convergence of the working of Aristotelians and Platonists for the renewal of culture. And questions arise. Where is the whole of the School of Michael at present? How can we characterize and honor one and the other stream, and avoid stereotypes and misunderstandings? This work approaches the matter in its historical unfolding, in three successive steps, in which Steiner/Aristotles and Plato/Schrers incarnations form a thread. The first tableau opens up in the previous Age of Michael, in Greece, when Plato and Aristotle inaugurated the work of the two Michaelic streams. The second addresses the Middle Ages, and centers around the contrast between Alain de Lille and Thomas Aquinas, between the School of Chartres and Scholasticism. Steiners and Schrers life tasks in the nineteenth century form the prelude to the present. The heart of the book, and its longest section, looks at the present. It contrasts the working of Aristotelians and Platonists in the natural sciences, in psychology and in the social sciences. From the ground of extensive observation and characterization, it then turns to pressing questions. What can Platonists learn from Aristotelians? And how about the reverse? Starting from the example of individuals meeting across the streams, how can we extend this understanding so that it becomes an ongoing practice and a cultural concern? How can Michaelic individuals and institutions work in ways that honor the whole of the Michaelic movement?


The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy

The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy

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  • Author: Hans Georg Gadamer
  • Publisher:
  • ISBN: 9780300034639
  • Category : Ethics, Ancient
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 182


Being, Essence and Substance in Plato and Aristotle

Being, Essence and Substance in Plato and Aristotle

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  • Author: Paul Ricoeur
  • Publisher: Polity
  • ISBN: 9780745660547
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 0

Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was one of the outstanding French philosophers of the 20th century and his work is widely read in the English-speaking world. This unique volume comprises the lectures that Ricoeur gave on Plato and Aristotle at the University of Strasbourg in 1953-54. The aim of these lectures is to analyse the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle and to discern in their work the ontological foundations of Western philosophy. The relation between Plato and Aristotle is commonly portrayed as a contrast between a philosophy of essence and a philosophy of substance, but Ricoeur shows that this opposition is too simple. Aristotelian ontology is not a simple antithesis to Platonism: the radical ontology of Aristotle stands in a far more subtle relation of continuity and opposition to that of Plato and it is this relation we have to reconstruct and understand. Ricoeur’s lectures offer a brilliant analysis of the great works of Plato and Aristotle which has withstood the test of time. They also provide a unique insight into the development of Ricoeur’s thinking in the early 1950s, revealing that, even at this early stage of his work, Ricoeur was focused sharply on issues of language and the text.


Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the First Century BC

Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the First Century BC

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  • Author: Malcolm Schofield
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 1139619802
  • Category : Philosophy
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 331

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.