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It has long been thought that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously as part of the workings of nature, and that therefore their natural philosophy was both primitive and marginal. In this book Sylvia Berryman challenges that assumption, arguing that the idea that the world works 'like a machine' can be found in ancient Greek thought, predating the early modern philosophy with which it is most closely associated. Her discussion ranges over topics including balancing and equilibrium, lifting water, sphere-making and models of the heavens, and ancient Greek pneumatic theory, with detailed analysis of thinkers such as Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hero of Alexandria. Her book shows scholars of ancient Greek philosophy why it is necessary to pay attention to mechanics, and shows historians of science why the differences between ancient and modern reactions to mechanics are not as great as was generally thought.
Aristotle on the Sources of the Ethical Life challenges the common belief that Aristotle's ethics is founded on an appeal to human nature, an appeal that is thought to be intended to provide both substantive ethical advice and justification for the demands of ethics. Sylvia Berryman argues that this is not Aristotle's intent, while resisting the view that Aristotle was blind to questions of the source or justification of his ethical views. She interprets Aristotle's views as a 'middle way' between the metaphysical grounding offered by Platonists, and the scepticism or subjectivist alternatives articulated by others. The commitments implicit in the nature of action figure prominently in this account: Aristotle reinterprets Socrates' famous paradox that no-one does evil willingly, taking it to mean that a commitment to pursuing the good is implicit in the very nature of action.
Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a volume of original articles on all aspects of ancient philosophy. The articles may be of substantial length, and include critical notices of major books. Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics are the focuses of discussion in this volume.Editor: David Sedley, Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, University of Cambridge.'standard reading among specialists in ancient philosophy' Brad Inwood, Bryn Mawr Classical Review
This book argues against the assumption that the ancient Greeks did not take mechanics seriously.
Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. --
Explores Greek and Roman theories about the relationship of soul and body in the centuries after Aristotle.
Physics in Neoplatonist thought, the subject which occupies the second volume of this sourcebook, was innovative: the world of space and time was causally ordered by a nonspatial, nontemporal world, and this view required original thinking
The third volume of this invaluable sourcebook covers three main subject areas. First, the metaphysics of Aristotle's logical works: the concepts of universal and particular underwent surprising transformations in this period, which gave rise to debates, still raging today, on personal survival after an interruption such as death. Second, logic in a more conventional sense: perhaps the most impressive debate was on the existence of the subject in singular and universal statements. There was also debate about the very different Aristotelian and Stoic conceptions of syllogism, of modal logic, of induction, of the nature of mathematics, and of philosophy of language. Third, the higher metaphysi...
The third volume of this invaluable sourcebook covers three main subject areas: the metaphysics of Aristotle's logical works; logic; and the higher metaphysics of Neoplatonism.
The book contains a new critical edition of the Greek text of Aristotle's De Motu Animalium and an English translation of the new text by Benjamin Morison, preceded by an introduction by Christof Rapp and Oliver Primavesi. The introduction comes in two parts: (i) a philosophical introduction by Christof Rapp that aims at drawing a kind of balance of more than three decades of scholarly debate on our treatise and related issues since the publication of Martha Nussbaum's edition and commentary in 1978; (ii) a textual introduction by Oliver Primavesi that sums up the history of textual research on the transmission of De Motu Animalium up to and including the discovery of a new branch of transmission.