Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy: Volume 4

Collects important papers on various key issues in Plato and Aristotle and on the early history of Greek optics.

Myles Burnyeat (Author), Carol Atack (Prepared for publication by), Malcolm Schofield (Prepared for publication by), David Sedley (Prepared for publication by)

9781316517949, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2022

410 pages
23.6 x 15.7 x 2.7 cm, 0.73 kg

'Burnyeat's articles are, each in their own way, unique achievements. Most of them start with simple-looking questions concerning a particular piece of text that then turn out to be of great importance … They are models of philosophical analysis and philological accuracy. Even where one may disagree with Burnyeat's results, he certainly makes the alternatives very clear and thereby does a great service to his readers … Burnyeat's admirable thoroughness and patience have made him a hard task-master but also a model one, both from a philosophical and from a philological point of view.' Dorothea Frede, GNOMON

Myles Burnyeat (1939-2019) was a major figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of this. After teaching positions in London and Cambridge, where he became Laurence Professor, in 1996 he took up a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, from which he retired in 2006. In 2012 he published two volumes collecting essays dating from before the move to Oxford. Two new posthumously published volumes bring together essays from his years at All Souls and his retirement. The essays in Volume 4 are addressed principally to scholars engaging first with fundamental issues in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology and in Aristotle's philosophical psychology. Then follow studies tackling problems in interpreting the approaches to physics and cosmology taken by Plato and Aristotle, and in assessing the evidence for early Greek exercises in optics.

Introduction
Part I. Ontology and Epistemology: 1a. Apology 30b2-4: Socrates, money, and the grammar of γίγνεσθαι
1b. On the source of Burnet's construal of Apology 30b2-4: a correction
2. Plato on how not to speak of what is not: Euthydemus 283a-288a
3. Platonism in the Bible: Numenius of Apamea on Exodus and eternity
4. Kinêsis vs. energeia: a much-read passage in (but not of) Aristotle's Metaphysics
5. De Anima II.5
6. Aquinas on 'spiritual change' in perception
7. Epistêmê
Part II. Physics and Optics: 8. ΕΙΚΩΣ ΜΥΘΟΣ
9. Aristotle on the foundations of sublunary physics
10. Archytas and optics
11. 'All the world's a stage-painting'.

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