Download or read book Themistius On Aristotle On the Soul written by Robert B. Todd and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Themistius ran his philosophical school in Constantinople in the middle of the fourth century A.D. His paraphrases of Aristotle's writings are unlike the elaborate commentaries produced by Alexander of Aphrodisias, or the later Neoplatonists Simplicius and Philoponus. His aim was to provide a clear and independent restatement of Aristotle's text which would be accessible as an elementary exegesis. But he also discusses important philosophical problems, reports and disagrees with other commentaries including the lost commentary of Porphyry, and offers interpretations of Plato. Themistius' paraphrase of Aristotle's On the Soul is his most important and influential work. It is also the first extant commentary on this work of Aristotle to survive from antiquity. A rival to that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, it represents one of the main interpretations of Aristotle's theory of the intellect, which was debated throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It continues to be an important text for the reconstruction of Aristotle's philosophical psychology today.

Download or read book Paraphrase of Aristotle De anima written by Themistius and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-07-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The enormous influence of Aristotle's psychology has been always related to the reception and interpretation of his De Anima. The Paraphrase by Themistius, who ran his own philosophical school in Constantinople in the mid-fourth century, has been one of the most important texts in the Aristotelian tradition. This is mainly due to the influence of his interpretation of Aristotle’s noetic on the great medieval thinkers, especially Averroes and Thomas Aquinas. That influence was also prominent on Renaissance Aristotelians and on later scholasticism. Themistius offered an interpretation of the account of the so called active intellect in the De Anima III.5 that rejected the identification of that intellect with God previously proposed by Alexander of Aphrodisias. But he also discussed other philosophical problems. His method was largely pedagogical. Themistius aimed to provide a clear restatement of Aristotle’s textual basis which would be accessible as an elementary exegesis. To do so, he executed an interpretation of Aristotle’s psychology that was faithful to the original text. But he was also aware of the need for some reconstruction and reformulation of those ideas that were far from being perfectly delimited by Aristotle himself in his text. This new critical edition is based on a thorough analysis of the manuscript tradition, which has been arranged and schematized by means of a stemma codicum. Medieval translations have also been considered, as well as the various printed versions of the text from the Aldine edition to the 19th century.

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 Phantasia in Aristotle s Ethics written by Jakob Leth Fink and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that a moral principle 'does not immediately appear to the man who has been corrupted by pleasure or pain'. Phantasia in Aristotle's Ethics investigates his claim and its reception in ancient and medieval Aristotelian traditions, including Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. While contemporary commentators on the Ethics have overlooked Aristotle's remark, his ancient and medieval interpreters made substantial contributions towards a clarification of the claim's meaning and relevance. Even when the hazards of transmission have left no explicit comments on this particular passage, as is the case in the Arabic tradition, medieval responders still offer valuable interpretations of phantasia (appearance) and its role in ethical deliberation and action. This volume casts light on these readings, showing how the distant voices from the medieval Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin Aristotelian traditions still contribute to contemporary debate concerning phantasia, motivation and deliberation in Aristotle's Ethics.

Download or read book Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 written by G. W. Pigman III and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceptions of Dreaming from Homer to 1800 traces the history of ideas about dreaming during the period when the admonitory dream was the main focus of learned interest—from the Homeric epics through the Renaissance—and the period when it began to become a secondary focus—the eighteenth century. The book also considers the two most important dream theorists at the turn of the twentieth century, Sigmund Freud and Sante de Sanctis. While Freud is concerned with questions of what a dream means and how to interpret it, de Sanctis offers a synthesis of nineteenth-century research into what a dream is and represents the Enlightenment transition from particular facts to general laws.

Download or read book Brill s Companion to the Reception of Aristotle in Antiquity written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-04-18 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristotle provides a systematic yet accessible account of the reception of Aristotle’s philosophy in Antiquity. To date, there has been no comprehensive attempt to explain this complex phenomenon. This volume fills this lacuna by offering broad coverage of the subject from Hellenistic times to the sixth century AD. It is laid out chronologically and the 23 articles are divided into three sections: I. The Hellenistic Reception of Aristotle; II. The Post-Hellenistic Engagement with Aristotle; III. Aristotle in Late Antiquity. Topics include Aristotle and the Stoa, Andronicus of Rhodes and the construction of the Aristotelian corpus, the return to Aristotle in the first century BC, and the role of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Porphyry in the transmission of Aristotle's philosophy to Late Antiquity.

Download or read book Aristotle on the Apparent Good written by Jessica Moss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aristotle holds that we desire things because they appear good to us—a view still dominant in philosophy now. But what is it for something to appear good? Why does pleasure in particular tend to appear good, as Aristotle holds? And how do appearances of goodness motivate desire and action? No sustained study of Aristotle has addressed these questions, or even recognized them as worth asking. Jessica Moss argues that the notion of the apparent good is crucial to understanding both Aristotle's psychological theory and his ethics, and the relation between them. Beginning from the parallels Aristotle draws between appearances of things as good and ordinary perceptual appearances such as those involved in optical illusion, Moss argues that on Aristotle's view things appear good to us, just as things appear round or small, in virtue of a psychological capacity responsible for quasi-perceptual phenomena like dreams and visualization: phantasia ('imagination'). Once we realize that the appearances of goodness which play so major a role in Aristotle's ethics are literal quasi-perceptual appearances, Moss suggests we can use his detailed accounts of phantasia and its relation to perception and thought to gain new insight into some of the most debated areas of Aristotle's philosophy: his accounts of emotions, akrasia, ethical habituation, character, deliberation, and desire. In Aristotle on the Apparent Good, Moss presents a new—and controversial—interpretation of Aristotle's moral psychology: one which greatly restricts the role of reason in ethical matters, and gives an absolutely central role to pleasure.

Download or read book Themistius On Aristotle Physics 5 8 written by Themistius, and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Themistius' treatment of Books 5-8 of Aristotle's Physics shows this commentator's capacity to identify, isolate and discuss the core ideas in Aristotle's account of change, his theory of the continuum, and his doctrine of the unmoved mover. His paraphrase offered his ancient students, as they will now offer his modern readers, an opportunity to encounter central features of Aristotle's physical theory, synthesized and epitomized in a manner that has always marked Aristotelian exegesis but was raised to a new level by the innovative method of paraphrase pioneered by Themistius. Taking selective but telling accounts of the earlier Peripatetic tradition (notably Theophrastus and Alexander of Aphrodisias), this commentator creates a framework that can still be profitably used by Aristotelian scholars today.

Download or read book The Philosophy of the Commentators 200 600 AD Psychology with ethics and religion written by Richard Sorabji and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 metaphysics of the Neoplatonists taught Augustine, and indirectly Descartes, to look for truth within themselves. The Neoplatonists struggled with the question whether our higher intellectual selves have distinct individuality, and thus they fed both sides in the great medieval debate between Aquinas and the followers of Averroes on individual human immortality. All sources appear in English translation and are carefully linked and cross-referenced by editorial comment and explanation. Bibliographies are provided throughout.

Download or read book Introduction to Aristotle s Theory of Being as Being written by W. Marx and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy finds itself "between tradition and another beginning." 1 For this reason it seems necessary to reconsider the foundations of traditional philosophy in the hope that out of these considerations new questions may arise which may lead to a new philosophical foundation. To this end neither the large manual nor the monograph is well suited. What is required, instead, is to take a few steps which lead our thoughts directly into the problems of a given, traditional, philosophical foun dation. In this sense the present work wishes to provide an "introduction" into that philosophical foundation which, until Hegel, had a decisive influence upon traditional philosophy_ Consequently, it does not see its task in providing a survey of this whole complex of problems. Nor does it offer solutions to questions about difficult passages which have been the subject of two thousand years of Aristotelian scholarship_ Instead, it follows a definite path which might bring this Aristotelian science, the theory which seeks to determine being as being, on hei on, closer to the student of philosophy.

Download or read book Themistius On Aristotle Physics 1 3 written by Themistius, and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Themistius' treatment of Books 1-3 of Aristotle's Physics presents central features of Aristotle's thought about principles, causation, change and infinity. The tradition of synthesising and epitomising exegesis is here raised to a new level by the innovative method of paraphrase pioneered by Themistius. Taking a selective, but telling, account of the earlier Peripatetic and Presocratic tradition, Themistius creates a framework that can still be profitably used in the study of Aristotle. This volume contains the first English translation of Themistius' commentary, accompanied by a detailed introduction, extensive explanatory notes and a bibliography.

Download or read book Themistius On Aristotle Physics 4 written by Themistius, and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-04-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Physics Book 4 is one of Aristotle's most interesting works, discussing place, time and vacuum. Themistius was a fourth-century AD orator and essayist, not only a philosopher, and he thought that only paraphrases of Aristotle were needed, because there were already such comprehensive commentaries. Nonetheless, his paraphrastic commentaries are full of innovative comment. According to Aristotle, there is no such thing as 3-dimensional space. A thing's exactly-fitting place is a surface, the inner surface of its immediate surroundings. One problem that this created was that the outermost stars, in Aristotle's view, have no surroundings, and so no place. Themistius suggests that we might think instead of the neighbouring bodies which they surround as providing their place. Aristotle saw time as something countable, and concluded that it depends for its existence on that of conscious beings to do the counting. Themistius is in the minority among commentators in disagreeing. Themistius concurs with Aristotle in denying the existence of vacuum. We cannot think that a space formerly empty of body penetrates right through a body inserted into it. If one extension could penetrate another, says Themistius, a body could penetrate a body, because bodies occupy places solely in virtue of being extended.

Download or read book Introduction to Aristotle s Theory of Being as Being written by August Marx and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-21 with total page 74 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy finds itself "between tradition and another beginning." 1 For this reason it seems necessary to reconsider the foundations of traditional philosophy in the hope that out of these considerations new questions may arise which may lead to a new philosophical foundation. To this end neither the large manual nor the monograph is well suited. What is required, instead, is to take a few steps which lead our thoughts directly into the problems of a given, traditional, philosophical foun dation. In this sense the present work wishes to provide an "introduction" into that philosophical foundation which, until Hegel, had a decisive influence upon traditional philosophy_ Consequently, it does not see its task in providing a survey of this whole complex of problems. Nor does it offer solutions to questions about difficult passages which have been the subject of two thousand years of Aristotelian scholarship_ Instead, it follows a definite path which might bring this Aristotelian science, the theory which seeks to determine being as being, on hei on, closer to the student of philosophy.

Download or read book Themistius On Aristotle Metaphysics 12 written by Yoav Meyrav and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the only commentary on Aristotle's theological work, Metaphysics, Book 12, to survive from the first six centuries CE – the heyday of ancient Greek commentary on Aristotle. Though the Greek text itself is lost, a full English translation is presented here for the first time, based on Arabic versions of the Greek and a Hebrew version of the Arabic. In his commentary Themistius offers an extensive re-working of Aristotle, confirming that the first principle of the universe is indeed Aristotle's God as intellect, not the intelligibles thought by God. The identity of intellect with intelligibles had been omitted by Aristotle in Metaphysics 12, but is suggested in his Physics 3.3 and On the Soul 3, and later by Plotinus. Laid out here in an accessible translation and accompanied by extensive commentary notes, introduction and indexes, the work will be of interest for students and scholars of Neoplatonist philosophy, ancient metaphysics, and textual transmission.

Download or read book Aristotle on Perception written by Stephen Everson and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1997-02-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stephen Everson presents a comprehensive new study of Aristotle's account of perception and related mental capacities. Recent debate about Aristotle's theory of mind has focused on this account, which is Aristotle's most sustained and detailed attempt to describe and explain the behaviour of living things. Everson places it in the context of Aristotle's natural science as a whole, showing how he applies the explanatory tools developed in other works to the study of perceptual cognition. Everson demonstrates that, contrary to the claims of many recent scholars, Aristotle is indeed concerned to explain perceptual activity as the activity of a living body, in terms of material changes in the organs which possess the various perceptual capacities. By emphasizing the unified nature of the perceptual system, Everson is able to explain how Aristotle accounts for our ability to perceive not only such things as colours and sounds but material objects in our environment. This rich and broad-ranging book will be essential reading not only for students of Aristotle's theory of mind but for all those concerned to understand the explanatory principles of his natural science. 'No part of Aristotle's psychological theory has been of greater interest to scholars over the past few years than his account of perception. . . . this excellent book . . . will appeal to Aristotelian scholars and philosophers of mind alike . . . Everson manifests a thorough understanding of much of the literature on Aristotle's psychological theory and displays a talent for offering sophisticated arguments that are informed by the conceptual possibilities demarcated in both ancient and modern philosophy . . . Everson has presented a rich and insightful critique of a thesis which has had significant impact upon contemporary discussions of Aristotle's psychological theory. Further, in offering ths critique, he has avoided many of the snares and entanglements to which others have fallen prey.' John E. Sisko, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy

Download or read book Two Greek Aristotelian Commentators on the Intellect written by Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and published by Pims. This book was released on 1990 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Aristotelian doctrine had a greater influence on medieval philosophy and theology than that of the agent, or active, intellect. This influence, however, was mediated by a long tradition of exegesis in which the Greek commentaries of later antiquity played a dominant role. The two commentaries presented here were known to have been influential in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The first is a short treatise called the "De intellectu", attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias; the second a paraphrase of Aristotle's "De anima" (3.4-8) by Themistius, which also includes a major interpretation of "De anima" (3.5), the chapte on the active intellect.

Download or read book Themistius and Aristotle written by Elisa Coda and published by . This book was released on 2024-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book length examining closely Themistius' philosophical thought and his understanding of Aristotelian philosophy. Themistius, well known as an eloquent orator and political personality of Constantinople during the fourth century ad, is an influential commentator on works of Aristotle. By assessing both of these aspects of Themistius' intellectual accomplishments, the present work explores and contextualizes his thought in both his paraphrases of the works of Aristotle and in his orations. Themistius' interpretation of Aristotelian thought, deeply influential in both the Arab and Latin worlds, and his strategy for teaching Aristotle, even outside the professional schools of philosophy, are major foci of this study. In particular, this work explicates Themistius' understanding of the nature and causality of the First Principle, of the cosmic order, and of the human soul and intellect. It argues that Themistius' approach reflects not only the systematization imparted by Alexander of Aphrodisias to the doctrines of Aristotle, but also the increasing, though oftentimes silent, influence of Plotinus. This is evident in the consideration of the three philosophical issues of God, cosmos, and soul analysed in Themistius, which reveal the preponderance of Plotinus' philosophy reflected in the Themistian orations. Concomitantly, it explores how Themistius' teachings proved decisive in the medieval understanding of Aristotle both among Arabic and Hebrew readers, as well as in the universities of Latin Europe. As such, this study challenges our understanding of philosophy in fourth-century Constantinople.