This book discusses key philosophical concepts and ideologies, including ontology, epistemology, logic, semantics, moral and political philosophy, theology and aesthetics during classical antiquity. Karsten Friis Johansen charts the history of ancient philosophy from the mythological oral tradition, Homer and early tragedy, to the giants of Plato and Aristotle through to paganism and the genesis of Christianity. A History of Ancient Philosophy also presents detailed analysis of individual ancient philosophers and interpretations and commentary on key philosophical passages.

Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier, A History of Ancient Philosophy charts the origins and development of ancient philosophical thought. For easy reference, the book is divided chronologically into six main parts. The sections are further divided into philosophers and philosophical movements: *Pre-Socratic Philosophy, including mythology, the Pythagoreans and Parmenides *The Great Century of Athens, including the Sophists and Socrates *Plato, including The Republic, The Symposium and The Timaeus *Aristotle, including The Physics, The Metaphysics and The Poetics *Hellenistic Philosophy, including the Sceptics, (...) the Stoics, the Epicureans and Cicero *Late Antiquity, including Neoplatonism, Origen and St Augustine. This comprehensive and meticulously documented book is structured to make ancient philosophical thought and ancient thinkers accessible. It contains: *full references to primary sources *detailed interpretations of key philosophical passages, including surveys of previous philosophical readings *an overview of the development of ancient philosophical thought *discussions of the relationships between philosophers and their ideas *analyses of key philosophical concepts and ideologies including ontology, epistemology, logic, semantics, moral and political philosophy, theology and aesthetics *explanations of Greek philosophical terminology. (shrink)

Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier, _A History of Ancient Philosophy_ charts the origins and development of ancient philosophical thought. For easy reference, the book is divided chronologically into six main parts. The sections are further divided into philosophers and philosophical movements: *Pre-Socratic Philosophy, including mythology, the Pythagoreans and Parmenides *The Great Century of Athens, including the Sophists and Socrates *Plato, including The Republic, The Symposium and The Timaeus *Aristotle, including The Physics, The Metaphysics and The Poetics *Hellenistic Philosophy, including the Sceptics, (...) the Stoics, the Epicureans and Cicero *Late Antiquity, including Neoplatonism, Origen and St Augustine. This comprehensive and meticulously documented book is structured to make ancient philosophical thought and ancient thinkers accessible. It contains: *full references to primary sources *detailed interpretations of key philosophical passages, including surveys of previous philosophical readings *an overview of the development of ancient philosophical thought *discussions of the relationships between philosophers and their ideas *analyses of key philosophical concepts and ideologies including ontology, epistemology, logic, semantics, moral and political philosophy, theology and aesthetics *explanations of Greek philosophical terminology. (shrink)

Translated by Henrik Rosenmeier, _A History of Ancient Philosophy_ charts the origins and development of ancient philosophical thought. For easy reference, the book is divided chronologically into six main parts. The sections are further divided into philosophers and philosophical movements: *Pre-Socratic Philosophy, including mythology, the Pythagoreans and Parmenides *The Great Century of Athens, including the Sophists and Socrates *Plato, including The Republic, The Symposium and The Timaeus *Aristotle, including The Physics, The Metaphysics and The Poetics *Hellenistic Philosophy, including the Sceptics, (...) the Stoics, the Epicureans and Cicero *Late Antiquity, including Neoplatonism, Origen and St Augustine. This comprehensive and meticulously documented book is structured to make ancient philosophical thought and ancient thinkers accessible. It contains: *full references to primary sources *detailed interpretations of key philosophical passages, including surveys of previous philosophical readings *an overview of the development of ancient philosophical thought *discussions of the relationships between philosophers and their ideas *analyses of key philosophical concepts and ideologies including ontology, epistemology, logic, semantics, moral and political philosophy, theology and aesthetics *explanations of Greek philosophical terminology. (shrink)

This book offers an important study of Aristotle's theory of the sense-organs. It aims to answer two questions central to Aristotle's psychology and biology: why does Aristotle think we have sense-organs, and why does he describe the sense-organs in the way he does? The author looks at all the Aristotelian evidence for the five senses and shows how pervasively Aristotle's accounts of the sense-organs are motivated by his interest in form and function. The book also engages with the celebrated problem (...) of whether perception for Aristotle requires material changes in the perceiver. It argues that, surprisingly to the modern philosopher, nothing in Aristotle's description of the sense-organs requires us to believe in such changes. (shrink)

The notion of a capacity in the sense of a power to bring about or undergo change plays a key role in Aristotle’s theories about the natural world. However, in Metaphysics Θ Aristotle also extends ‘ capacity ’, and the corresponding concept of ‘activity’, to cases where we want to say that something is in capacity, or in activity, such and such but not, or not directly, in virtue of being capable of initiating or undergoing change. This paper seeks to (...) clarify and confirm a certain view of how Aristotle wishes us to see the relationship between the two uses of ‘ capacity ’ and ‘activity’. To that end, I consider also Aristotle’s employment of the terms in the De Anima, which sheds light on the key examples which direct the discussion in Metaph. Θ. (shrink)

Two main uses of categories are classification and feature inference, and category labels have been widely shown to play a dominant role in feature inference. However, the nature of this influence remains unclear, and we evaluate two contrasting hypotheses formalized as mathematical models: the label special-mechanism hypothesis and the label super-salience hypothesis. The special-mechanism hypothesis is that category labels, unlike other features, trigger inference decision making in reference to the category prototypes. This results in a tendency for prototype-compatible inferences because (...) the labels trigger a special mechanism rather than because of any influences they have on similarity evaluation. The super-salience hypothesis assumes that the large label influence is due to their high salience and corresponding impact on similarity without any need for a special mechanism. Application of the two models to a feature inference task based on a family resemblance category structure yields strong support for the label super-salience hypothesis and in particular does not support the need for a special mechanism based on prototypes. (shrink)

Aristotle’s philosophy of mind is often understood as anticipating present-day functionalist approaches to the mental. In Aristotle on the Sense-Organs Johansen argues at length that such interpretations of what Aristotle has to say about the senses are untenable. First, Aristotle does not allow that the matter of a sense-organ can be identified without reference to the form or function of the organ, so sense-organs are not compositionally plastic. Second, Aristotle’s conception of sense-perception is radically different from anything a philosopher (...) today, functionalist or not, would find credible: acts of sense-perception on Aristotle’s view do not require material changes in the sense-organs. Developed carefully throughout all six chapters, Johansen’s defense of this latter claim is the most significant part of the book, and it will be my focus here. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

At Timaeus 48e2–52d4 Timaeus sets out to establish that there are three principles or kinds underlying the creation of the cosmos, not just the two he acknowledged earlier. The way he does so is not simply by adding an account of the third kind to the accounts of being and becoming that he has already given. Rather he does so by showing how each of the three differs from the others. It has not been noticed how this procedure structures the (...) receptacle passage. The passage divides up into three parts, each punctuated by a list of the three kinds in a significant order. If we take X, Y and Z to stand for ‘becoming’, ‘being’ and ‘receptacle’ ’ respectively, the structure is X≠Z, X≠Y, Y≠Z. By showing the distinctness of each pair, Timaeus demonstrates that all the kinds are distinct and that they are indeed three in number. (shrink)

Nowadays, it is common that newly built hospitals are designed with single‐room accommodation, unlike in the past, where shared accommodation was the favoured standard. Despite this change in hospital design, very little is known about how single‐room accommodation affects nurses' work environment and nursing care. This study evaluates how the single‐room design affects nurses and nursing care in the single‐room hospital design. Nurses working in the single‐room design predominantly work alone with little opportunity for peer training, interaction and reflection. In (...) addition, the single‐room design affects the nurses' work environment due to changes in sensory stimulation and increased walking distances. Furthermore, a change in the discourse, namely, regarding the single room as the patient's home, makes the nurses react to queries, demands and tasks in a new way. Overall, the new hospital design forces the nurses into a more reactive role and affect their way of providing nursing care. Despite this, the nurses find single‐room accommodation beneficial for the patients and their nursing care. (shrink)

Understanding of principles forms the basis of mastering Greek Philosophy. This article focuses on the idea of Principled Knowledge. Plato, too, seems to hold that grasping a body of knowledge requires a grasp of its principles. One example is the Republic where Socrates explains the image of the line. He has divided the line into two sections, the intelligible and the perceptible. The Timaeus, like the Republic, emphasizes the need for us to grasp the proper principle of our disciplines of (...) study. The major principles enlisted in the Timaeus are as follows: Being is that which is graspable by intelligence with an account ; becoming is that which is graspable by opinion with unreasoning perception. Everything that comes into being has a cause. When a craftsman uses an eternal model, his product is necessarily fine ; if he uses a generated one, the product is not fine. The article further elaborates upon the standards of the cosmological argument and the most proper principle of coming into being which Socrates argues is the prelude. (shrink)

A Critical Notice of Filip Karfík, Die Beseelung des Kosmos. Untersuchungen zur Kosmologie, Seelenlehre und Theologiein Platons Phaidon und Timaios, K. G. Saur Verlag, München/Leipzig 2004.

The volume presents essays on the philosophical explanation of the relationship between body and soul in antiquity from the Presocratics to Galen. The title of the volume alludes to a phrase found in Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, referring to aspects of living behaviour involving both body and soul, and is a commonplace in ancient philosophy, dealt with in very different ways by different authors.

Review of T. K. Johansen's book Aristotle on the sense organs. Aristotle seeks to explain the characteristics of the different sense organs by reference to the goal that they serve, that of enabling animals to perceive. A material basis is necessary for sense perception but it is an open question whether the material in question undergoes a physiological change.

This article is a critique of Friis Johansen's thesis that twelve Greek vases painted between 570 and 550 B.C. depict a first arming in Phthia. Details that Friis Johansen considered representative of domestic settings are shown to appear in other contexts too. Friis Johansen, who based much of his argument on a plate by Lydos depicting Achilleus, Thetis, Peleus, and Neoptolemos, problematically assumed that all the other early vases portraying Achilleus's arming must represent the (...) same scene in Phthia. The appearance of Neoptolemos on Lydos's plate, however, shows that it is a "heroized genre-picture" and depicts no particular moment in myth. It is also questionable for Friis Johansen to contend that the first presentation of armor is depicted if all the details of a picture do not correspond with Homer's description of the second arming. Friis Johansen's final argument, that two Euripidean choruses describing Achilleus's first armor offer no "reasonable grounds for free mythological invention," runs counter to recent Euripidean scholarship. The conclusion of this critique is that it is very unlikely that any of the early vases showing the presentation of armor to Achilleus depict a first arming in Phthia. Instead, an episode loosely connected with Achilleus's arming in Troy is pictured. The examination of these arming scenes and others in which the material of the Homeric poems and vase-paintings overlaps is helpful in reassessing the question of how closely related the epic stories shown on Archaic Greek vases are to those related in the Iliad and Odyssey. (shrink)

Westphal wished to transpose lines 88–90 and 93–5 of the Supplices. This transposition has been supported recently by R. D. Dawe , by Holger Friis Johansen in C. & M. xxvii , 43–4 , and by Sir Denys Page . However, the transposition gains little support from a careful examination of the language and context of the passage, as I shall now proceed to demonstrate. I discussed the whole passage previously in my article ‘Aeschylus Supplices 86–95’, Classical Philology, (...) 1 , 21–5, and much of my argument can be found in that earlier article. (shrink)

Westphal wished to transpose lines 88–90 and 93–5 of the Supplices. This transposition has been supported recently by R. D. Dawe, by Holger Friis Johansen in C. & M. xxvii, 43–4, and by Sir Denys Page. However, the transposition gains little support from a careful examination of the language and context of the passage, as I shall now proceed to demonstrate. I discussed the whole passage previously in my article ‘Aeschylus Supplices 86–95’, Classical Philology, 1, 21–5, and much (...) of my argument can be found in that earlier article. (shrink)

Harold Tarrant - Plato's Natural Philosophy - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 150-151 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Harold Tarrant University of Newcastle, Australia Thomas K. Johansen. Plato's Natural Philosophy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. vi + 218. Cloth, $75.00. This major study of the philosophy of the Timaeus—provided with excellent argumentation, a fine bibliography, and useful indices—is of wider significance to the interpretation of Plato (...) than might initially be expected. Most obviously, it takes the dialogical unit as the Timaeus-Critias, as the majority do today. It does not interpret Critias's Atlantis story as such, for this "natural philosophy" is that expounded in Timaeus's monologue, but the Critias is important to chapters 1, 2, and 9, and the groundwork is laid for a better understanding.. (shrink)

Neoplatonic allegorical interpretation expounds how literary texts present philosophical ideas in an enigmatic and coded form, offering an alternative path to the divine truths. The Neoplatonist Porphyry’s _On the Cave of the Nymphs_ is one of the most significant allegorical interpretation handed down to us from Antiquity. This monograph, exclusively dedicated to the analysis of _On the Cave of Nymphs_, demonstrates that Porphyry interprets Homer’s verse from Odyssey 13.102-112 to convey his philosophical thoughts, particularly on the material world, relationship between (...) soul and body and the salvation of the soul through the doctrines of Plato and Plotinus. The Homeric cave of the nymphs with two gates is a station where the souls descend into genesis and ascend to the intelligible realm. Porphyry associates Odysseus’ long wanderings with the journey of the soul and its salvation from the irrational to rational through escape from all toils of the material world. (shrink)