Online research in philosophy

Neoplatonism is a term used to designate the form of Platonic philosophy that developed in the Roman Empire from the third to the fifth century AD and that based itself on the corpus of Plato's dialogues. Sara Rappe's challenging and innovative study is the first book to analyse Neoplatonic texts themselves using contemporary philosophy of language. It covers the whole tradition of Neoplatonic writing from Plotinus through Proclus to Damascius. Addressing the strain of mysticism in these works from a fresh perspective the author shows how these texts reflect actual meditational practices, methods of concentrating the mind, and other mental disciplines that informed the tradition as a whole. In providing the broadest available survey of Neoplatonic writing the book will appeal to classical philosophers, classicists, as well as students of religious studies.

I LOGIC IN PHILOSOPHY— PHILOSOPHY OF LOGIC i. On the relation of logic to philosophy I n this book, the consequences of certain logical insights for ...

This book uncovers and examines the confusion in antiquity between Aristotle's hypothetical syllogistic and Stoic logic, and offers a fresh perspective on the ...

These two texts are fundamental for the understanding not only of Neoplatonism but also of the conventions of biography in late antiquity. Neither has received such extensive annotation before in English, and this new commentary makes full use of recent scholarship. The long introduction is intended both as a beginner’s guide to Neoplatonism and as a survey of ancient biographical writing.

Clashes between bits of non-homogeneous theories inherited from antiquity were an important factor in the formation of medieval theories in logic and grammar, but the traditional categories of Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism are not quite adequate to describe the situation. Neoplatonism is almost irrelevant in logic and grammar, while there might be reasons to introduce a new category, LAS = Late Ancient Standard, with two branches: (1) logical LAS = Aristotle + Boethius, and (2) grammatical LAS = Stoics &c. → Apollonius → Priscian.

Truth, etc. is a wide-ranging study of ancient logic based upon the John Locke lectures given by the eminent philosopher Jonathan Barnes in Oxford. The book presupposes no knowledge of logic and no skill in ancient languages: all ancient texts are cited in English translation; and logical symbols and logical jargon are avoided so far as possible. Anyone interested in ancient philosophy, or in logic and its history, will find much to learn and enjoy here.

This article investigates the nature of Aristotelian syllogistics and shows that the categorical syllogism is fundamentally about showing the connection, in the premises of the syllogism, between the major and minor terms as stated in the conclusion. It discusses how this is important for the use of the syllogism in scientific demonstration. The article then examines modern deductive logic with an eye to they way in which it contrasts with Aristotelian syllogistics. It shows howmodern logic is about making necessary connections between each proposition by means of external or second order rules. In the syllogism, on the other hand, the necessity between the premises as a whole unit and the conclusion is based on the internal middle term. The article concludes with a discussion of Günther Patzig’s claim that Aristotelian syllogisms are best thought of as tautological propositions. If this were the case, then the differences asserted to exist between syllogistic and modern logic would not hold. However, it is shown that Patzig’s assimilation of syllogistics to modern deductive logic is illegitimate.

The paper is a study of the logic of existence, negation, and order in the Neoplatonic tradition. The central idea is that Neoplatonists assume a logic in which the existence predicate is a comparative adjective and in which monadic predicates function as scalar adjectives that nest the background order. Various scalar predicate negations are then identifiable with various Neoplatonic negations, including a privative negation appropriate for the lower orders of reality and a hyper-negation appropriate for the higher. Reversion to the One can then be explained as the logical inference of hyper-negations from mundane knowledge. Part I develops the relevant linguistic and logical theory, and Part II defends Wolfson and the scalar interpretation against the more traditional Aristotelian understanding of Whittaker and others of reversion as intensional abstraction.