Download or read book Porphyry s Commentary on Ptolemy s Harmonics written by and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Porphyry's Commentary, the only surviving ancient commentary on a technical text, is not merely a study of Ptolemy's Harmonics. It includes virtually free-standing philosophical essays on epistemology, metaphysics, scientific methodology, aspects of the Aristotelian categories and the relations between Aristotle's views and Plato's, and a host of briefer comments on other matters of wide philosophical interest. For musicologists it is widely recognised as a treasury of quotations from earlier treatises, many of them otherwise unknown; but Porphyry's own reflections on musical concepts (for instance notes, intervals and their relation to ratios, quantitative and qualitative conceptions of pitch, the continuous and discontinuous forms of vocal movement, and so on) and his snapshots of contemporary music-making have been undeservedly neglected. This volume presents the first English translation and a revised Greek text of the Commentary, with an introduction and notes designed to assist readers in engaging with this important and intricate work.
Download or read book Porphyry s Commentary on Ptolemy s Harmonics written by Andrew Barker and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Scientific Method in Ptolemy s Harmonics written by Andrew Barker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The science called 'harmonics' was one of the major intellectual enterprises of Greek antiquity. Ptolemy's treatise seeks to invest it with new scientific rigour; its consistently sophisticated procedural self-awareness marks it as a key text in the history of science. This book is a sustained methodological exploration of Ptolemy's project. After an analysis of his explicit pronouncements on the science's aims and the methods appropriate to it, it examines Ptolemy's conduct of his investigation in detail, concluding that despite occasional uncertainties, the declared procedure is followed with remarkable fidelity. Ptolemy pursues tenaciously his novel objective of integrating closely the project's theoretical and empirical phases and shows astonishing mastery of the concept, the design and the conduct of controlled experimental tests. By opening up this neglected text to historians of science, the book aims to provide a point of departure for wider studies of Greek scientific method.
Download or read book Music and Philosophy in the Roman Empire written by Francesco Pelosi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is music just matter of hearing and producing notes? And is it of interest just to musicians? By exploring different authors and philosophical trends of the Roman Empire, from Philo of Alexandria to Alexander of Aphrodisias, from the rebirth of Platonism with Plutarch to the last Neoplatonists, this book sheds light on different ways in which music and musical notions were made a crucial part of philosophical discourse. Far from being mere metaphors, notions such as harmony, concord and attunement became key philosophical tools in order to better grasp and conceptualise fundamental notions in philosophical debates from cosmology to ethics and from epistemology to theology. The volume is written by a distinguished international team of contributors.
Download or read book A New History of Greek Mathematics written by Reviel Netz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-09 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging and comprehensive history of Greek mathematics, with full attention to social contexts and its place in world history.
Download or read book The Philosophy of the Few against the Christians written by Pier Franco Beatrice and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-11-13 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gives us a new perspective on the Philosophy according to the Chaldean Oracles by Porphyry of Tyre (ca. 232/305 CE), demonstrating that much of what we thought we knew about this work and its fragments is mistaken. Here, for the first time, the attempt is made at reconstructing the original text by following the vicissitudes of its reception and transmission from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance up to modern scholarship. The extensive and painstaking study of the surviving fragments leads to the radically innovative conclusion that this encyclopedic treatise, written by Porphyry in the last decades of the 3rd century CE, consisted of fifteen books organized in various sections. After an initial discussion of the nature of theurgy and of its subordinate role with respect to philosophy, Porphyry describes the entire history of Greek philosophy from Homer up to his own teacher Plotinus, to then go on to present “introductions” to the seven encyclical disciplines whose study is required for the comprehension of theosophy, that is, the esoteric speculation on the three parts of philosophy: anthropology-ethics, physics, and metaphysics-theology. By harmonizing the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Chaldean Oracles, Porphyry intends to present the complete and definitive philosophic system, with the aim of showing the universal way for the liberation of the souls of initiates and of contextually fighting the final battle of the Greco-Roman civilization against Christianity.
Download or read book Hellenistic Astrology written by Chris Brennan and published by Amor Fati Publications. This book was released on 2017-02-10 with total page 696 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hellenistic astrology is a tradition of horoscopic astrology that was practiced in the Mediterranean region from approximately the first century BCE until the seventh century CE. It is the source of many of the modern traditions of astrology that still flourish around the world today, although it is only recently that many of the surviving texts of this tradition have become available again for astrologers to study. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune is one of the first comprehensive surveys of this tradition in modern times. The book covers the history, philosophy, and techniques of ancient astrology, with a special focus on demonstrating how many of the fundamental concepts underlying the practice of western astrology originated during the Hellenistic period.
Download or read book Theophrastus of Eresus Commentary Volume 9 1 written by Massimo Raffa and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theophrastus of Eresus: Commentary Volume 9.1 concerns the extant ancient testimonies on Theophrastus’ thought on music, which strike the reader as surprisingly original and modern. Music is regarded as something that originates from the soul and comes into existence through the body.
Download or read book The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity written by Leonid Zhmud and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive study of what remains of the writings of Aristotle's student Eudemus of Rhodes on the history of the exact sciences. These fragments are crucial to our understanding of the content, form, and goal of the Peripatetic historiography of science. The first part of the book presents an analysis of those trends in Presocratic, Sophistic and Platonic thought that contributed to the development of the history of science. The second part provides a detailed study of Eudemus' writings in their relationship with the scientific literature of his time, Aristotelian philosophy and the other historiographic genres practiced at the Lyceum: biography, medical and natural-philosophical doxography. Although Peripatetic historiography of science failed in establishing itself as a continuous genre, it greatly contributed both to the birth of the Arabic medieval historiography of science and to the development of this genre in Europe in the 16th-18th centuries.
Download or read book Greek Musical Writings Volume 2 Harmonic and Acoustic Theory written by Andrew Barker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vol. 1: The musician an d his art ; vol. 2: Harmonic and acoustic theory
Download or read book Aristotle Transformed written by Richard Sorabji and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-30 with total page 649 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide. The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence – uncovered in some of the chapters of this book – that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.
Download or read book Sound and the Ancient Senses written by Shane Butler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound leaves no ruins and no residues, even though it is experienced constantly. It is ubiquitous but fleeting. Even silence has sound, even absence resonates. Sound and the Ancient Senses aims to hear the lost sounds of antiquity, from the sounds of the human body to those of the gods, from the bathhouse to the Forum, from the chirp of a cicada to the music of the spheres. Sound plays so great a role in shaping our environments as to make it a crucial sounding board for thinking about space and ecology, emotions and experience, mortality and the divine, orality and textuality, and the self and its connection to others. From antiquity to the present day, poets and philosophers have strained to hear the ways that sounds structure our world and identities. This volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of sound still shape how and what we hear today. As the first comprehensive introduction to the soundscapes of antiquity, this volume makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning fields of sound and voice studies and is the final volume of the series, The Senses in Antiquity.
Download or read book Archytas of Tarentum written by Carl Huffman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-23 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Archytas of Tarentum is one of the three most important philosophers in the Pythagorean tradition, a prominent mathematician, who gave the first solution to the famous problem of doubling the cube, an important music theorist, and the leader of a powerful Greek city-state. He is famous for sending a trireme to rescue Plato from the clutches of the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius II, in 361 BC. This 2005 study was the first extensive enquiry into Archytas' work in any language. It contains original texts, English translations and a commentary for all the fragments of his writings and for all testimonia concerning his life and work. In addition there are introductory essays on Archytas' life and writings, his philosophy, and the question of authenticity. Carl A. Huffman presents an interpretation of Archytas' significance both for the Pythagorean tradition and also for fourth-century Greek thought, including the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.
Download or read book State and Nature written by Peter Adamson and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A much-maligned feature of ancient and medieval political thought is its tendency to appeal to nature to establish norms for human communities. From Aristotle's claim that humans are "political animals" to Aquinas' invocation of "natural law," it may seem that pre-modern philosophers were all too ready to assume that whatever is natural is good, and that just political arrangements must somehow be natural. The papers in this collection show that this assumption is, at best, too crude. From very early, for instance in the ancient sophists' contrast between nomos and physis, there was recognition that political arrangements may be precisely artificial, not natural, and it may be questioned whether even such supposed naturalists as Aristotle in fact adopt the quick inference from "natural" to "good." The papers in this volume trace the complex interrelations between nature and such concepts as law, legitimacy, and justice, covering a wide historical range stretching from Plato and the Sophists to Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, Cicero, the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, ancient Christian thinkers, and philosophers of both the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages.
Download or read book Forms and Concepts written by Christoph Helmig and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-12-19 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forms and Concepts is the first comprehensive study of the central role of concepts and concept acquisition in the Platonic tradition. It sets up a stimulating dialogue between Plato’s innatist approach and Aristotle’s much more empirical response. The primary aim is to analyze and assess the strategies with which Platonists responded to Aristotle’s (and Alexander of Aphrodisias’) rival theory. The monograph culminates in a careful reconstruction of the elaborate attempt undertaken by the Neoplatonist Proclus (6th century AD) to devise a systematic Platonic theory of concept acquisition.
Download or read book Proclus Commentary on Plato s Timaeus Volume 1 Book 1 Proclus on the Socratic State and Atlantis written by Proclus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-04-12 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proclus' Commentary on Plato's dialogue Timaeus is arguably the most important commentary on a text of Plato, offering unparalleled insights into eight centuries of Platonic interpretation. This edition offers the first new English translation of the work for nearly two centuries, building on significant recent advances in scholarship on Neoplatonic commentators. It provides an invaluable record of early interpretations of Plato's dialogue, while also presenting Proclus' own views on the meaning and significance of Platonic philosophy. The present volume, the first in the edition, deals with what may be seen as the prefatory material of the Timaeus. In it Socrates gives a summary of the political arrangements favoured in the Republic, and Critias tells the story of how news of the defeat of Atlantis by ancient Athens had been brought back to Greece from Egypt by the poet and politician Solon.
Download or read book The Monochord in Ancient Greek Harmonic Science written by David Creese and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the history of the monochord from its earliest appearance to Claudius Ptolemy (mid-second century AD).
