The Birth of Critical Thinking in Republican Rome

This book analyses the developments in critical reasoning that transformed the conception of tradition, authority, knowledge and power in the late Republic.

Claudia Moatti (Author), Janet Lloyd (Translated by), Malcolm Schofield (Foreword by)

9780521895781, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 September 2015

410 pages
23.6 x 16.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.73 kg

In this classic work, now appearing in English for the first time, Claudia Moatti analyses the intellectual transformation that occurred at the end of the Roman Republic in response both to the political crisis and to the city's expansion across the Mediterranean. This was a period of great cultural dynamism and creativity when Roman intellectuals, most notably Cicero and Varro, began to explore all areas of life and knowledge and to apply critical thinking to the reassessment of tradition and the development of a systematic new understanding of the Roman past and present. This movement, linked to the development of writing, challenged old forms of authority and adhesion, belief and behaviour, without destroying tradition; and for this reason this rational trend can be described not as a cultural but as an epistemological revolution whose greatest achievement, Professor Moatti argues, was the development of the system of Roman law.

Foreword Malcolm Schofield
Preface
Introduction to the English edition
Roman culture in movement
1. Crises and questionings
2. Opening up the world: the birth of curiosity
3. From disarray to erudition
4. The experience of thought
5. A discourse on the method, or the spirit of forms
6. The construction of Roman universality
7. Conclusion: the territories of reason.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], History: theory & methods [HBA], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB]