"The commentary by Aspasius that is translated here dates from the second century A.D., and is the earliest extant commentary on Aristotle. The second work is of unknown date and authorship. The third, a commentary by Michael of Ephesus, dates to the twelfth century.".

Mary P. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 229. ISBN 978-0-521-89973-4. Laurence D. Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 357. ISBN 978-0-271-03330-3.

Dans ce texte, je fais une distinction, chez Aristote, entre deux conceptions de l’acte consistant à accorder un bienfait à une autre personne. La première relève de la libéralité ou eleutheriotês, une des vertus examinées par Aristote dans l’ Éthique à Nicomaque ; la personne libérale aide une autre personne en vue de ce qui est « beau » ou « noble » ( to kalon ). L’autre conception correspond à la faveur ou kharis, qu’Aristote analyse quand il examine les (...) émotions, au deuxième livre de la Rhétorique. Les faveurs sont accordées sans motif ultérieur, mais seulement en vue du bien de l’autre personne ; il n’y a rien à attendre en retour, sous quelque forme que ce soit, pas même le surcroît d’honneur dû à l’accomplissement d’un acte vertueux. Je soutiens que seul le second type de bienfait, selon Aristote, appelle la gratitude (en Grec, kharin ekhein ), puisqu’il est accordé d’une manière pleinement gratuite. Je suggère ensuite que le motif qui anime ce type de faveur pleinement altruiste est probablement l’amour ou philia, le pathos qui, selon Aristote dans la Rhétorique, est qualifié comme « vouloir pour une personne ce que l’on tient pour des biens – pour elle et non pour soi – et de faire ce qu’on peut pour les lui procurer ». (shrink)

This work is a volume in the series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, edited by Richard Sorabji. The aim of the series is to make the Greek commentaries available in English. Konstan does an admirable job of this. The translation is extremely careful, clear, and readable. Konstan succeeds in staying close to the text without sacrificing intelligibility. Whenever necessary, he inserts words or phrases in brackets to complete the sense of an accurately translated passage. Konstan also makes use (...) of brackets to give precise citations to fill out Simplicius' references. The footnotes, too, are excellent. There the reader finds information about deviations from Diels's text, about alternative readings, and explanations of renderings into English that might be controversial. In the introduction, Sorabji gives a thumbnail sketch of the philosophical issues raised by Physics 6. Several useful documents are appended to the commentary, namely, a list of all departures from Diels's text, an appendix written by the editor providing a brief survey of the ancient Greek commentators, and a list of the philosophers cited by Simplicius with a onesentence description of each. (shrink)

Inquires into ancient Athenian philosopher Epicurus' analysis of irrational fears and desires, arguing that such emotions played a more central and controlling role in his system than has often been supposed, in a book that also looks at how ancient Roman poet Lucretius interpreted Epicurus' ideas. Reissue.

Aspasius' commentary on the "Nicomachean Ethics", of which six books have come down to us, is the oldest surviving Greek commentary on any of Aristotle's works, dating to the middle of the second century AD. It offers precious insight into the thinking and pedagogical methods of the Peripatetic school in the early Roman Empire, and provides illuminating discussions of numerous technical points in Aristotle's treatise, along with valuable excursuses on such topics as the nature of the emotions. This is the (...) first complete translation of Aspasius' work in any modern language. (shrink)

Aristotle’s conception of vice is notoriously problematic. On the one hand, it appears as the antithesis of virtue; as such, it may seem, like virtue, to rest on principles, except that in the case of vice the principles are bad ones. On the other hand, vice may be something more like the privation or absence of virtue: not the negative pole or opposite of virtue but the condition of not being at all guided by rational principles or logos. As a (...) way of approaching Aristotle’s notion of vice, I propose to examine two disapproved qualities that Aristotle mentions briefly in his Rhetoric, and which are adduced as the opposites of emotions. The two qualities are ingratitude, which is represented as the opposite of feeling grateful, and shamelessness, the opposite of the emotion shame. Both ingratitude and shamelessness have the appearance of vices, even though they are contrasted here not with virtues but with passions or pathê. Examining the logic of these pairings will, I hope, shed light not only on ingratitude and shamelessness but also on the complex and unstable nature of vice itself. (shrink)

Several decades of scholarship have demonstrated that Roman thinkers developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer many perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy explores a range of such Roman philosophical perspectives through thirty-four newly commissioned essays. Where Roman philosophy has long been considered a mere extension of Hellenistic systems of thought, this volume moves beyond the search (...) for sources and parallels and situates Roman philosophy in its distinctive cultural context. The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy emphasizes four features of Roman philosophy: aspects of translation, social context, philosophical import, and literary style. The authors adopt an inclusive approach, treating not just systematic thinkers such as Cicero and Augustine, but also poets and historians. Topics covered include ethnicity, cultural identity, literary originality, the environment, Roman philosophical figures, epistemology, and ethics. (shrink)

This volume presents papers of a conference held in 2002 at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After a superficial introduction, eight chapters trace the legacy of Epicureanism from Philodemus, the philosopher who took up residence in the Roman town of Herculaneum in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, to C.S. Peirce and, rather cursorily, eighteenth-century Russian theology. Three further chapters deal with Epicurus' ideas of friendship and death, and the last provides a brief description of the wall-sized Epicurean inscription in the (...) ancient city of Oenoanda (in modern Turkey), dating to the second century AD. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

In this book, eminent scholars of classical antiquity and ancient and medieval Judaism and Christianity explore the nature and place of forgiveness in the pre-modern Western world. They discuss whether the concept of forgiveness, as it is often understood today, was absent, or at all events more restricted in scope than has been commonly supposed, and what related ideas may have taken the place of forgiveness. An introductory chapter reviews the conceptual territory of forgiveness and illuminates the potential breadth of (...) the idea, enumerating the important questions a theory of the subject should explore. The following chapters examine forgiveness in the contexts of classical Greece and Rome; the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and Moses Maimonides; and the New Testament, the Church Fathers, and Thomas Aquinas. (shrink)

This collection of original essays examines innovations in both the theory and practice of classical philology. The chapters address interdisciplinary methods in a variety of ways. Some apply theoretical insights derived from other disciplines, such as folklore studies, performance theory, feminist criticism, and the like, to classical texts. Others examine the relationships between classics and cultural studies, popular literature, film, art history, and other related disciplines. Others, again, look to the evolution of theoretical methods within the discipline of classics. Taken (...) together, the essays offer a spectrum of new approaches in the classics and their place within the profession. (shrink)

What is truly timeless? This book explores the language of eternity, and in particular two ancient Greek terms that may bear the sense of eternal : aiônios and aïdios. This fascinating linguistic chronicle is marked by several milestones that correspond to the emergence of new perspectives on the nature of eternity. These milestones include the advent of Pre-Socratic physical speculation and the notion of limitless time in ancient philosophy, the major shift in orientation marked by Plato s idea of a (...) timeless eternity, and the further development of Pre-Socratic insights by Epicurean and Stoic thinkers. From the biblical perspective, the intersection of Greek and Hebrew conceptions is reflected in Septuagint, as well as new inflections in popular terminology in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and in the role of eternity in the theology of the New Testament. The profound cross-fertilization of Christian and classical philosophical conceptions in the works of the Church fathers and their contemporaries is explored, bringing the topic into the Patristic period. Christian theology in the first five centuries of the Common Era and its choice of vocabulary prove to be most revealing of larger doctrinal commitments. Above all debate raged on the question of eternal damnation versus the idea (deemed heretical in the Christian church after the formal condemnation of Origenism) of apocastastis or universal salvation - that is, the belief that the wicked are not condemned to eternal punishment but will eventually be included among the saved. Terminology for eternity is often at the core of how these issues were debated, and helps to identify which writers inclined to one or the other view of the matter. (shrink)

In this book, David Konstan argues that the modern concept of interpersonal forgiveness, in the full sense of the term, did not exist in ancient Greece and Rome. Even more startlingly, it is not fully present in the Hebrew Bible, nor in the New Testament or in the early Jewish and Christian commentaries on the Holy Scriptures. It would still be centuries - many centuries - before the idea of interpersonal forgiveness, with its accompanying ideas of apology, remorse, and (...) a change of heart on the part of the wrongdoer, would emerge. For all its vast importance today in religion, law, politics and psychotherapy, interpersonal forgiveness is a creation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Christian concept of divine forgiveness was fully secularized. Forgiveness was God's province and it took a revolution in thought to bring it to earth and make it a human trait. (shrink)

What makes something beautiful? In this engaging, elegant study, David Konstan turns to ancient Greece to address the nature of beauty.

This work presents the concepts of translation and conservative translation between logics. By using algebraic semantics we introduce several conservative translations involving the classical propositional calculus and the many-valued calculi of Post and Lukasiewicz.