The works of the early Greek philosophers are not only a fundamental source for understanding archaic Greek culture and the whole of ancient philosophy, but also a perennially fresh resource that has stimulated Western thought until the present day. This nine-volume edition presents all the major fragments from the sixth to the fourth centuries BC.

This volume presents six lively conversations with Hans-Georg Gadamer (born 1900), one of the twentieth century's master philosophers. Looking back over his life and thought, Gadamer takes up key issues in his philosophy, addresses points of controversy, and replies to his critics, including those who accuse him of having been in complicity with the Nazis. A genial and direct conversationalist, Gadamer is here captured at his best and most accessible. The interviews took place between 1989 and 1996, and all but (...) one appear in English for the first time in this volume. The first three conversations, conducted by Heidelberg philosopher Carsten Dutt, deal with hermeneutics, aesthetics, and practical philosophy and the question of ethics. In a fourth conversation, with University of Heidelberg classics professor Glenn W. Most, Gadamer argues for the vital importance of the Greeks for our contemporary thinking. In the next, the philosopher reaffirms his connection with phenomenology and clarifies his relation to Husserl and Heidegger in a conversation with London philosopher Alfons Grieder. In the final interview, with German Nazi expert Dörte von Westernhagen, Gadamer describes his life as a struggling young professor in Germany in the 1930s and refutes accusations of his complicity with the Nazis. These conversations are a lucid introduction for readers new to the philosopher's thought, and for experts they present an invaluable commentary on Gadamer's most important themes. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent (...) for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so. (shrink)

Attempts to understand visual attention have produced models based on location, in which attention selects particular regions of space, and models based on other visual attributes . Previous studies of inattentional blindness have contributed to our understanding of attention by suggesting that the detection of an unexpected object depends on the distance of that object from the spatial focus of attention. When the distance of a briefly flashed object from both fixation and the focus of attention is systematically varied, detection (...) appears to have a location-based component. However, the likelihood that people will detect an unexpected event in sustained and dynamic displays may depend on more than just spatial location. We investigated the influence of spatial location on inattentional blindness under precisely controlled, sustained and dynamic conditions. We found that although location-based models cannot fully account for the detection of unexpected objects, spatial location does play a role even when displays are visible for an extended period. (shrink)

In a recent commentary, Memmert critiqued claims that attentional misdirection is directly analogous to inattentional blindness and cautioned against assuming too close a similarity between the two phenomena. One important difference highlighted in his analysis is that most lab-based inductions of IB rely on the taxing of attention through a demanding primary task, whereas attentional misdirection typically involves simply the orchestration of spatial attention. The present commentary argues that, rather than reflecting a complete dissociation between IB and attentional misdirection, this (...) difference highlights potential grounds for delineating mechanistically distinct forms of IB: spatial inattentional blindness, which stems from the covert misallocation of spatial attention, and central inattentional blindness, which stems from disruption or preoccupation of perceptual mechanisms that interface with higher-level processes such as working memory. Recognition of such distinctions can help situate theoretical understanding of IB more firmly within the context of the broader attention literature. (shrink)

The article sets out to reinterpret Heraclitus' views on religion and, by implication, his position in the context of the Presocratic philosophers' relationship to the Greek cultural tradition. It does so by examining the fragments in which Heraclitus' attitude to the popular religion of his time is reflected. The analysis of the fragments 69, 68, 15, 14, 5, 96, 93 and 92 DK reveals that the target of Heraclitus' criticism is not the religious practices themselves, but their popular interpretation. Heraclitus' (...) fragments are simultaneously shown to identify the underlying structure of the 'unity of opposites,' inherent in various religious practices. Heraclitus appears to reinterpret religious practices in terms of the conceptual structures of his own philosophy. On the other hand, religion provides him with the categories for the construction of his philosophical theology. Thus Heraclitus' treatment of religion is shown to be analogous to his treatment of ethics and politics, which he also tries to incorporate into his highly integrated vision of reality. In contrast to Xenophanes' radical critique of the traditional religion, Heraclitus emerges not as a reformer or an Aufklärer, but as an interpreter, who tries to discern the structures of meaning inherent in the existing practices, and to assume them into his own philosophical project. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotional distractors can impair perception of subsequently presented targets, a phenomenon called emotion-induced blindness. Do emotional distractors lose their power to disrupt perception when appearing with increased frequency, perhaps due to desensitisation or enhanced recruitment of proactive control? Non-emotional tasks, such as the Stroop, have revealed that high frequency distractors or conflict lead to reduced interference, and distractor frequency appears to modulate attentional capture by emotional distractors in spatial attention tasks. But emotion-induced blindness is thought to reflect perceptual competition between (...) targets and emotional distractors, and it is unclear whether high frequency emotional stimuli cause less disruption at this relatively early stage of processing. In four experiments, participants searched streams of images for a rotated target image. A negative or neutral distractor appeared before the target, and their relative frequency was manipulated. Across all exper... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe visual system has been found to prioritise emotional stimuli so robustly that their presence can temporarily “blind” people to non-emotional targets in their direct line of vision. This...

This is the first book-length analysis of the techniques and procedures of ancient mathematical commentaries. It focuses on examples in Chinese, Sanskrit, Akkadian and Sumerian, and Ancient Greek, presenting the general issues by constant detailed reference to these commentaries, of which substantial extracts are included in the original languages and in translation, sometimes for the first time. This makes the issues accessible to readers without specialized training in mathematics or in the languages involved. The result is a much richer understanding (...) than was hitherto possible of the crucial role of commentaries in the history of mathematics in four different linguistic areas, of the nature of mathematical commentaries in general, of the contribution that the study of mathematical commentaries can make to the history of science and to the study of commentaries in general, and of the ways in which mathematical commentaries are like and unlike other kinds of commentaries. (shrink)

In this collection of richly documented case studies, experts in many textual traditions examine the ways in which important texts were preserved, explicated, corrected, and used for a variety of purposes. The authors describe the multiple ways in which scholars in different cultures have addressed some of the same tasks, revealing both radical differences and striking similarities in textual practices across space, time and linguistic borders. This volume shows how much is learned when historians of scholarship, like contemporary historians of (...) science, focus on earlier scholars' practices, and when Western scholarly traditions are treated as part of a much larger, cross-cultural inquiry. (shrink)

Shows how the classical tradition has shaped human endeavors, from art and government to mathematics and medicine.

Block's target article makes a significant contribution toward sorting the neural bases of phenomenal consciousness from the neural systems that underlie cognitive access to it. However, data from developmental science suggest that cognitive access may be only one of several ways to access phenomenology. These data may also have implications for the visual-cognitive phenomena that Block uses to support his case.

Diese Schrift gehört zu den wichtigen Dokumenten der Naturphilosophie von Leibniz und seiner Zeit und stellt das einschlägige Dokument für die Synthese der Lehre von den einfachen Substanzen und derjenigen von den lebendigen Kräften dar.

L’auteur situe l’intérêt intense suscité par les Présocratiques en Allemagne dans les années 1920 dans le contexte de la philologie classique tout en le reconduisant au mouvement de fascination pour l’« archaïque » apparu au cours du dernier quart du xixe siècle. L’auteur montre que ce phénomène trouve sa source dans l’« invention » des Présocratiques par Nietzsche, au point que la réception des Présocratiques, notamment d’Héraclite, peut être considérée comme une réception déguisée de Nietzsche, ce qui éclaire d’un jour (...) nouveau l’invocation du « premier commencement » grec dans le Discours de rectorat de Heidegger.The author situates the interest in Pre-Socratic philosophy in Germany in the 1920s in regard to classical philology, linking this renewal to a fascination with the « archaic » that arose at the end of the 19th century. Critical here is the way this phenomena is rooted in a modern « invention » of Pre-Platonic thinkers through Nietzsche, one that culminates with figures such as Heraclitus functioning as a mask for Nietzsche reception, a philological and hermeneutical situation which illuminates the topic of the « first Greek beginning » in Heidegger’s Rectorial Address. (shrink)

In 1957, Edgar Lobel published an Oxyrhynchus papyrus containing anonymous commentaries to poems of Alcman which has not ceased to fascinate philologists and historians of ancient philosophy.

1. Considérations préliminaires : pourquoi des fragments? Éditer les plus anciens philosophes grecs – plus précisément, les philosophes antérieurs à Platon – signifie dans presque tous les cas éditer non pas des textes complets qui nous seraient intégralement parvenus plus ou moins sous la forme dans laquelle leurs auteurs les ont composés, mais bien plutôt une combinaison de citations indirectes, de longueur variable, que des auteurs postérieurs ont faites de leurs œuvres, des paraphrases,...