Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

✍ Scribed by Myles Burnyeat

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 410
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Myles Burnyeat (1939-2019) was a major figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of this. After teaching positions in London and Cambridge, where he became Laurence Professor, in 1996 he took up a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, from which he retired in 2006. In 2012 he published two volumes collecting essays dating from before the move to Oxford. Two new posthumously published volumes bring together essays from his years at All Souls and his retirement. The essays in Volume 4 are addressed principally to scholars engaging first with fundamental issues in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology and in Aristotle's philosophical psychology. Then follow studies tackling problems in interpreting the approaches to physics and cosmology taken by Plato and Aristotle, and in assessing the evidence for early Greek exercises in optics.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I Ontology and epistemology
Chapter 1a Apology 30b2-4: Socrates, money, and the grammar of
γίγνεσθαι
The problem
Alternative translations
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle on the value of money
Being and becoming
Being in Plato
Being in Aristotle
Becoming in Aristotle
Becoming in Plato
The translation again
Hyperbaton
Chapter 1b On the source of Burnet's construal of Apology 30b2-4: a correction
Chapter 2 Plato on how not to speak of what is not: Euthydemus 283a-288a
The question
Judging what is not in the Theaetetus
Saying what is not in the Euthydemus
Love in the Euthydemus
The moral
Chapter 3 Platonism in the Bible: Numenius of Apamea on Exodus and eternity
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
Chapter 4 Kinesis vs. energeia: a much-read passage in (but not of) Aristotle's Metaphysics
Part I: Text
Part II: Meaning
Part III: A revised text
Part IV: Uniqueness
Postscript on Michael of Ephesus
Appendix 1: The Passage in M and C
M (Ambr. F 113 sup.)
C (Taur. B vii 23)
Postscript on C
Appendix 2: Did Plotinus, Enneads VI.1 [42].15-22, start a debate about the Passage?
Metaphysics: Modern editions; ancient, medieval, and modern commentaries; medieval and modern translations
Chapter 5 De Anima ii.5
Introduction
Setting out the endoxa
Developing the aporia
A preliminary lusis
The demand for distinctions
The triple scheme
A warning
Two types of potentiality, two kinds of transition
Differences between knowing and perceiving
How not to speak of knowing
A further refinement
Recapitulation
In search of more
Conclusion
Two controversial morals
Finale
Appendix 1: 417a30-b2
Appendix 2: 417b5-7
Bibliography: De Anima: modern editions, ancient and modern commentaries, modern translations
Chapter 6 Aquinas on 'spiritual change' in perception
A hierarchy of the senses
The hierarchy in the Summa Theologica
The hierarchy in the media of perception
Receiving form without matter
Bodily change
The meaning of 'physical'
The power of perception
The moral
Chapter 7 Epistēmē
Part II Physics and optics
Chapter 8
ΕΙΚΩΣΜΥΘΟΣ
Chapter 9 Aristotle on the foundations of sublunary physics
1 Generality
2 Foundations
3 Conclusion
Chapter 10 Archytas and optics
Chapter 11 'All the world's a stage-painting': scenery, optics, and Greek epistemology
Bibliography
Index locorum