Phillip Mitsis

Allusion, authority, and truth : critical perspectives on Greek poetic and rhetorical praxis

The past few decades have seen the development of new critical methods with which the poetic and rhetorical dimensions of ancient Greek texts can be evaluated. In this volume, an international group of distinguished scholars comes together to examine how a wide range of ancient texts in different genres were able to assert their authority and claims to truth, often alluding to one another in subtle ways as they attempted to project their own superiority. A series of illuminating new readings is offered of both particular passages and whole works in the light of these new critical advances.

Chion of Heraclea: A Philosophical Novel in Letters

In the fourth century BC, the city of Heraclea in Pontus fell under the power of a local tyrant named Clearchus. Clearchus was slain twelve years later, in 353-52, by a young man named Chion, a citizen of Heraclea who, according to a collection of seventeen letters attributed to him, left his native city in order to study with Plato in the Academy, but returned home after five years in order to deal with the domestic emergency. A central motif in the letters, which are addressed for the most part to Chions father Matris (epp 1-8,10-15) but also include missives to a friend (9), to the tyrant Clearchus himself (16), and a final epistle to Plato, is the value of a philosophical education for the acquisition of civic virtue, which prepares the disciple to run ultimate risks in the service of his friends, family, and community. Chion again and

Happiness and death in Epicurean ethics

Epicureans often seem to be unduly obsessed by death and this makes itself felt throughout the various branches of their philosophy. A primary, perhaps the primary, goal of Epicurean inquiries into physics and metaphysics, for example, is to demonstrate that we are material compounds subject to the same deterioration and eventual dissolution that affect all other temporary atomic unions; at death, they argue, we too are permanently annihilated into more basic material constituents. Similarly, Epicureans make a concerted attempt in their theology to allay any worries that the gods are capable of or even interested in punishing the dead or making them suffer. After all, the gods can hardly punish us when our atoms are scattered and we no longer exist. The justification for such systematic concerns about death becomes more clear in the light of Epicurean ethical works. Epicureans share with most ancient moralists the eudaimonist assumption that happiness is our ultimate aim and the goal of all of our rational actions. They insist, moreover, that among the most important obstacles to a happy and virtuous life is a mistaken view of the condition of the dead and of the effects of death upon the living. Most of us, they argue, are driven into troubling and ultimately self-defeating competitions for power and material goods because we wrongly fear death as an evil and suppose that such things can be of help in eluding it. As a result, we find

Locke's Offices

There is a curious moment in Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) when he turns to the question of what discourses on ethics a young English gentleman in the making should be encouraged to read. This is a question of some importance, one would have thought, in a treatise whose stated goal is an education to virtue and service to ones country, especially given Lockes claim that education “is that which makes the great difference in mankind.” “... of all the men we meet with,” hesays, “nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education” (&1). But the brevity of his treatment here – earlier in the treatise he has spent at least ten times as long on proper methods of toilet training and five times as long on the question of whether children should beallowed to eat melons and plums or apples and pears – as well as the brevity of his actual reading list, occasion some surprise. Indeed, Locke explicitly recommends reading just two books in the sphere of morality:Theknowledge of virtue, all along from the beginning, in all the instances he is capable of, being taught him, moreby practice than rules; and the love of reputation, instead of satisfying his appetite, being madehabitual in him; I know not whether he should read any other discourses of morality, but what he finds in the Bible; or have any system of ethics put into his hand, till he can read Tullys Offices, not as a school-boy to learn Latin, but as one who would be informed in the principles and precepts of virtue, for the conduct of his life

How Modern Is Freedom of the Will

How modern is freedom of the will? For many, such a question might recall Jacques Derrida’s famous corresponding question about the age of psychoanalysis1 and suggest that I am going to attempt to find my way through the theoretical brambles of origins, pre-origins, copies, and their multifarious relations. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on one’s views about these questions, I make no attempt to directly address such large theoretical issues here. For me, when looking at the fitfully paratactic history of Epicureanism, it seems difficult enough to try to point to the process by which some stray bit of Lucretius’s poetry or argument comes to be noticed and then, for sometimes baffling reasons, gets put back into circulation—though, just as frequently as not, decked out in ways that would hardly have provoked divina voluptas in Lucretius himself. To make a corresponding attempt to do so for Lucretius’s text as a whole strikes me as an improbable task, since at no time has the De Rerum Natura (DRN), at least in any meaningful sense, popped back from the dead as a vital whole. At different times and in different guises, various parts of the poem have gone in and out of historical consciousness,2 some making multiple appearances, while others, in good Epicurean fashion, have lived utterly hidden. Accordingly, any holistic view of the text’s historical path may wrongly suggest some lively and coherent relations between parts and wholes in Lucretius’s poem that have never been fully operative, perhaps even from the very outset.

Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity

This book explores a fundamental tension in Aristotles metaphysics: how can an entity such as a living organisma composite generated through the imposition of form on preexisting matterhave the conceptual unity that Aristotle demands of primary substances? Mary Louise Gill bases her treatment of the problem of unity, and of Aristotles solution, on a fresh interpretation of the relation between matter and form. Challenging the traditional understanding of Aristotelian matter, she argues that material substances are subverted by matter and maintained by form that controls the matter to serve a positive end. The unity of material substances thus involves a dynamic relation between resistant materials and directive ends. Aristotle on Substance offers both a general account of matter, form, and substantial unity and a specific assessment of particular Aristotelian arguments. At every point, Gill engages Aristotle on his own philosophical ground through the detailed analysis of central, and often controversial, texts from the Metaphysics, Physics, On Generation and Corruption, De Anima, De Caelo, and the biological works. The result is a coherent, firmly grounded rethinking of Aristotles central metaphysical concepts and of his struggle toward a fully consistent theory of material substances.

Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition

When Philip Sidney defends poetry by defending the methods used by poets and lawyers alike, he relies on the traditional association between fiction and legal procedure--an association that begins with Aristotle. In this study Kathy Eden offers a new understanding of this tradition, from its origins in Aristotles Poetics and De Anima, through its development in the psychological and rhetorical theory of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to its culmination in the literary theory of the Renaissance.Originally published in 1986.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.