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Charles H. Kahn
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William David Ross
Theages, pupil of *Socrates(1). *Plato(1) refers in the Republic (496b) to ‘the bridle of Theages’, the bad health which kept him out of politics and saved him for philosophy. On the basis of this reference an imitator of Plato wrote a Theages dealing with the relation between philosophy and politics, and this is included in the corpus of Plato's works.
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Vicki Lynn Harper
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John Dillon
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Robert Sharples
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William David Ross and Simon Hornblower
Thrasymachus of Chalcedon (fl. c. 430–400
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Douglas Cairns
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William David Ross
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Compiled an extant brief lexicon of difficult words in *Plato(1).
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Christopher Rowe
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John Hedley Simon and Dirk Obbink
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M. T. Griffin
A philosopher who accompanied *Brutus in his campaign against the triumvirs (see
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Vicki Lynn Harper
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Myrto Hatzimichali
Xenarchus taught at Alexandria, Athens, and Rome, and his acquaintances included the geographer Strabo and the emperor Augustus. He is best known for his critique of Aristotle’s fifth element, which constitutes the material of the heavenly bodies according to the De caelo. Xenarchus targeted in particular Aristotle’s reliance on direct correspondences between simple bodies and simple motions and suggested that the ontologically privileged fire “in its natural place” could perform circular motion and was thus a plausible candidate for the material constituent of the heavens. He made further contributions in physics, psychology, and ethics, but he does not seem to have shown the same interest in the Categories as his Peripatetic contemporaries.
We are able to date Xenarchus’ activity to the 1st century
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Guy Cromwell Field and Simon Hornblower
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Malcolm Schofield
Zeno (1), of Elea is portrayed by *Plato(1) (Prm. 127b) as the pupil and friend of *Parmenides, and junior to him by 25 years. Their fictional meeting with a ‘very young’ *Socrates (ibid.) gives little basis for firm chronology. We may conclude only that Zeno was active in the early part of the 5th cent.
The most famous of Zeno's arguments are the four paradoxes about motion paraphrased by *Aristotle (Ph. 6. 9), which have intrigued thinkers down to Bertrand Russell in our era. The Achilles paradox proposes that a quicker can never overtake a slower runner who starts ahead of him, since he must always first reach the place the slower has already occupied. His task is in truth an infinite sequence of tasks, and can therefore never be completed. The Arrow paradox argues that in the present a body in motion occupies a place just its own size, and is therefore at rest. But since it is in the present throughout its movement, it is always at rest. The Dichotomy raises the same issues about infinite divisibility as the Achilles; the Arrow and the Stadium (an obscure puzzle about the relative motion of bodies) are perhaps directed against the implicit assumption of indivisible minima.