Abstract

In this special issue, our goal is to ... show that the distinguished history of philosophical reflection on attention, insofar as the Western tradition is concerned, has at least some of its roots in Classical Greek and Roman philosophy. This is offered as a partial corrective to historical overviews of the Western discourse, which rarely reach further back than René Descartes. Furthermore, we wish to emphasize that ancient treatments of attention are especially concerned with its role in the context of ethics and human agency. Even when they take their departure from an analysis of selective perceptual attention, their intention is not only to account for this phenomenon as part of a naturalistic science of the mind but also to motivate the view that the capacity to focus or to shift our attention is indispensable to human flourishing. Moral training is to a large extent conceived of as a matter of acquiring and sustaining the mental strength required for maintaining an attentive state of mind while resisting the interference of competing stimuli. TABLE OF CONTENTS Pauliina Remes: From Natural Tendencies to Perceptual Interests and Motivation in Plato’s Timaeus Voula Tsouna: The Epicurean Notion of epibolê Katerina Ierodiakonou: The Stoic Provenance of the Notion of Prosochê Charles Brittain: A Stoic Ethics for Attention (Seneca Letter 56) Lenka Karfíková: Attention in Augustine