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In this innovative work, Salman H. Bashier challenges traditional views of Islamic philosophy. While Islamic thought from the crucial medieval period is often depicted as a rationalistic elaboration on Aristotelian philosophy and an attempt to reconcile it with the Muslim religion, Bashier puts equal emphasis on the influence of Plato's philosophical mysticism. This shift encourages a new reading of Islamic intellectual tradition, one in which boundaries between philosophy, religion, mysticism, and myth are relaxed. Bashier shows the manner in which medieval Islamic philosophers reflected on the relation between philosophy and religion as a problem that is intrinsic to philosophy and shows how their deliberations had the effect of redefining the very limits of their philosophical thought. The problems of the origin of human beings, human language, and the world in Islamic philosophy are discussed. Bashier highlights the importance of Ibn Ṭufayl's Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, a landmark work often overlooked by scholars, and the thought of the great Sufi mystic Ibn al-ʿArabī to the mainstream of Islamic philosophy.
The collection of nineteen articles in Jaap Mansfeld’s Studies in Early Greek Philosophy span the period from Anaximander to Socrates. Solutions to problems of interpretation are offered through a scrutiny of the sources, and also of the traditions of presentation and reception found in antiquity. Excursions in the history of scholarship help to diagnose discussions of which the primum movens may have been forgotten. General questions are treated, for instance the phenomenon of detheologization in doxographical texts, while problems relating to individual philosophers are also discussed. For example, the history of Anaximander’s cosmos, the status of Parmenides’ human world, and the reliability of what we know about the soul of Anaximenes, and of what Philoponus tells us about the behaviour of Democritus’ atoms.
Daniele Pevarello analyzes the Sentences of Sextus, a second century collection of Greek aphorisms compiled by Sextus, an otherwise unknown Christian author. The specific character of Sextus' collection lies in the fact that the Sentences are a Christian rewriting of Hellenistic sayings, some of which are still preserved in pagan gnomologies and in Porphyry. Pevarello investigates the problem of continuity and discontinuity between the ascetic tendencies of the Christian compiler and aphorisms promoting self-control in his pagan sources. In particular, he shows how some aspects of the Stoic, Cynic, Platonic and Pythagorean moral traditions, such as sexual restraint, voluntary poverty, the practice of silence and of a secluded life were creatively combined with Sextus' ascetic agenda against the background of the biblical tradition. Drawing on this adoption of Hellenistic moral traditions, Pevarello shows how great a part the moral tradition of Greek paideia played in the shaping and development of self-restraint among early Christian ascetics.
Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aeschylus explores the various ways Aeschylus’ tragedies have been discussed, parodied, translated, revisioned, adapted, and integrated into other works over the course of the last 2500 years. Immensely popular while alive, Aeschylus’ reception begins in his own lifetime. And, while he has not been the most reproduced of the three Attic tragedians on the stage since then, his receptions have transcended genre and crossed to nearly every continent. While still engaging with Aeschylus’ theatrical reception, the volume also explores Aeschylus off the stage--in radio, the classroom, television, political theory, philosophy, science fiction and beyond.
The importance of the rich corpus of “Masters Literature” that developed in early China since the fifth century BCE has long been recognized. But just what are these texts? Scholars have often approached them as philosophy, but these writings have also been studied as literature, history, and anthropological, religious, and paleographic records. How should we translate these texts for our times? This book explores these questions through close readings of seven examples of Masters Literature and asks what proponents of a “Chinese philosophy” gained by creating a Chinese equivalent of philosophy and what we might gain by approaching these texts through other disciplines, questions, an...
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Includes entries for maps and atlases.
Ugo Spirito's Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is the intellectual autobiography of one of the most original and anticonformist contemporary Italian philosophers. In it, Spirito makes an evaluation of his long career (spanning from the decade of the 20's to that of the 70's of the twentieth century) as a thinker who was never satisfied with any theoretical or philosophical system, while constantly aiming at finding a definitive truth: the “incontrovertible” or absolute. The various stages of his search deal with different philosophical and scientific systems - from positivism to actual idealism, from problematicism to omnicentrism, from scientism to neoproblematicism - revealing at the s...
Giovanni Gentile was one of the most important and controversial thinkers of twentieth-century Italy. His philosophy and fascist ideas reflect the defining characteristics of the Italian romantic rebellion against European and English enlightenment thinking. The Ariadne's thread, which runs through and unifies all of Gentile's thought, originates accordingly from his neo-Hegelian reaction to the philosophy of Kant and of Kant's immediate predecessors. The range of Gentile's ideas on pedagogy, logic, metaphysics, political theory, and aesthetics; the original way in which he developed and adapted the thoughts of Hegel, Fichte, and Marx; and finally, his description of himself as the philosopher of fascism all encourage us to revisit and re-evaluate his system. This book reveals how Gentile came to advocate his «actual idealism» and evaluates his systematic philosophy by making explicit inconsistencies that arise from within his system and by questioning his idealist assumptions.
Inspired by analogies betwen the construction of heresy and the representation of madness described by Michael Foucault in in Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (Madness and Civilization), The Notion of Heresy in Greek Literature in the Second and Third Centuries demonstrates how the concept of heresy emerges in the work of Justin Matyr. It shows that this invention created a concept capable of dominating every current suspected of endangering ecclesial harmony, and transformed the tradition of Greek historiography of philosophical schools by combining it with the apocalyptic theme of diabolical conspiracy. Le Boulluec examines how this model is refined by Irenaeus, then modified by Cl...