Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

The second of two volumes collecting the published work up to 2000 one of the greatest living scholars of ancient philosophy alive today.

M. F. Burnyeat (Author)

9780521750738, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 June 2012

368 pages
23.4 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.72 kg

M. F. Burnyeat taught for 14 years in the Philosophy Department of University College London, then for 18 years in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, 12 of them as the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, before migrating to Oxford in 1996 to become a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College. The studies, articles and reviews collected in these two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy were all written, and all but two published, before that decisive change. Whether designed for a scholarly audience or for a wider public, they range from the Presocratics to Augustine, from Descartes and Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. Their subject-matter falls under four main headings: 'Logic and Dialectic' and 'Scepticism Ancient and Modern', which make up the first volume, with 'Knowledge' and 'Philosophy and the Good Life' contained in this, the second volume. The title 'Explorations' well expresses Burnyeat's ability to discover new aspects of familiar texts, new ways of solving old problems. In his hands the history of philosophy becomes itself a philosophical activity.

Part I. Knowledge: 1. Examples in epistemology: Socrates, Theaetetus and G. E. Moore
2. Socratic midwifery, Platonic inspiration
3. The philosophical sense of Theaetetus' mathematics
4. Plato on the grammar of perceiving
5. Socrates and the jury: paradoxes in Plato's distinction between knowledge and true belief
6. Aristotle on understanding knowledge
7. Platonism and mathematics: a prelude to discussion
8. Wittgenstein and Augustine, De magistro
Part II. Philosophy and the Good Life: 9. Message from Heraclitus
10. Virtues in action
11. The impiety of Socrates
12. The passion of reason in Plato's Phaedrus
13. Aristotle on learning to be good
14. Did the ancient Greeks have the concept of human rights?
15. Sphinx without a secret
16. First words
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]