Search Results

Sign in Modify your search

Perform this search in

Narrow Your Choices

Availability

Subject

 1-10 of 10 Results

  • Keywords: Aristotle x
Clear all

Article

Xenarchus (3) of Seleucia, Peripatetic philosopher, c. 30 BCE  

Myrto Hatzimichali

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
25 February 2019
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

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 bce, probably towards the latter half, thanks to Strabo’s testimony that he (Strabo) was his pupil (14.5.4). From Strabo we also learn that Xenarchus quickly left his native Seleucia in Cilicia to teach at Alexandria and Athens, and finally at Rome. He was held in great honour thanks to his friendship with Arius of Alexandria, Augustus’ court philosopher and political adviser, as well as with Augustus himself.

Article

poetry, philosophers on  

S. Halliwell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

The engagement of philosophers with poetry was a recurrent and vital feature of the intellectual culture of Graeco-Roman antiquity. By around 380 bce, *Plato (1) could already refer to “a long-standing quarrel between philosophy and poetry” ( Resp. 10.607b). Early Greek philosophy, while closely related to poetry (*Xenophanes, *Parmenides, and *Empedocles wrote in verse), set itself to contest and rival the claims of “wisdom,” sophia, made by and on behalf of poets. Xenophanes, repudiating anthropomorphic religion, cast ethical and theological aspersions on the myths of *Homer and *Hesiod (DK 21 B 11–12); Heraclitus expressed caustic doubts about the idea of poets as possessors of deep understanding (DK 22 B 40, 42, 56–57); Democritus, by contrast, despite his materialist physics, seems to have believed in poetic inspiration (DK B 17–18, 21). Philosophy and poetry could be considered competing sources of knowledge and insight. The stage was set for lasting debates about their relationship.

Article

heart  

Julius Rocca

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 April 2019
Subjects:
  1. Science, Technology, and Medicine
The heart (καρδία, κῆρ) was one of the most discussed bodily parts in antiquity. This is due, not so much to any assertion that it was the centre of the vascular system, but that it was widely regarded it as the seat of cognition and governor of movement and sensation. From the Hellenistic era onwards, these supposed attributes were set against the counter claim that the brain mediated these functions. This debate remained unsettled, despite Galen’s efforts, and the heart’s association with emotional states persists to this day.Babylonian medicine possessed terms for the irregularity of the pulse, which served as labels for the heart. Egyptian medicine named the heart (ib, haty), and a vessel system (metu), which transported fluids of the body (including blood and air), as well as pathological and waste products. The connection between the heart beat and the peripheral pulse seems to have been recognised. The Iliad provides vivid examples of fatal wounds to the heart.

Article

thymos  

Douglas Cairns

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 March 2019
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Philosophy
Thymos (or thumos), cognate with Indo-European words meaning “smoke,” is one of a number of terms in Greek which associate psychological activity with air and breath. In the Homeric poems, thymos is one of a family of terms associated with internal psychological process of thought, emotion, volition, and motivation. Though the range of the term’s applications in Homer is wide, that in itself gives us a sense of the unity of cognitive, affective, and desiderative processes in Homeric psychology. No post-Homeric author can rival that range, but something of the richness of the Homeric conception of thymos as an interrelated set of motivations re-emerges in Plato’s conception of the tripartite soul in the Republic and the Phaedrus. Plato’s thymos represents a pared-down model of human agency typified by one central desire or aim in life but also exhibiting whatever further capacities of persons are necessary to enable it to pursue that aim in interaction with the other elements of the personality. As in Homer, the metaphorical agency of Plato’s thymos does not detract from the notion of the individual as the real centre of agency.

Article

poetic unity, Greek  

Richard Hunter

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
05 April 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Philosophy
Greek discussion of unified organic form, as both a biological principle and a literary virtue, has been very influential in Western criticism. What survives before late antiquity of that Greek tradition as applied to literature is, however, relatively sparse; crucial above all are the Homeric poems and ancient discussion of them, together with some passages of Plato and Aristotle. The fact that the bulk of later surviving criticism derives from rhetorical teaching, heavily indebted to the Isocratean tradition, means that much greater prominence is given to the closely related ideas of variety (poikilia) and the avoidance of monotony over the course of a long work, and to the arrangement and ordering (taxis) of narrative than to “unity”; there is no standard term for “unity” in Greek criticism.Homer announces the subject of the Iliad as the wrath of Achilles, which wrought terrible destruction upon the Greeks, but, however dominant the story of the wrath and its consequences, the scope of the poem is clearly not limited to that subject. Reflection upon the Iliad stands at the beginning and the heart of ancient discussion of unity, and it is the Iliad that shows why “unity” and “variety” are entirely compatible in ancient criticism.

Article

matriarchy  

Simon Geoffrey Pembroke

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Gender Studies
The term “matriarchy” has, since J. J. Bachofen (Das Mutterrecht, 1861), been used to denote a quite hypothetical and now long discredited phase in the history of human societies when property was transmitted and descent traced through females, not males. There has from the outset been a persistent tendency to confuse the specific phenomenon of matrilineal descent, on the one hand—a system widely attested among contemporary peoples worldwide—with female supremacy in a more general and altogether less clearly defined sense, on the other. The system of descent is stated by Herodotus (1.173) to have been operative as a going concern among the non-Greek people of *Lycia in his own time, but this assertion is flatly contradicted by the conventional family structure reflected in their funeral inscriptions, including well over 150 in the *Lycian language itself, many of which go back to the 4th century bce.The statement of *Aristotle (fr.

Article

earthquakes  

Georgia L. Irby

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Science, Technology, and Medicine
The Mediterranean Basin is prone to earthquakes, and ancient thinkers sought to explain their causes either through myth (Poseidon’s wrath) or natural philosophy (dry and wet exhalations, trapped subterranean winds). Notable theorists include Thales, Anaxagoras, Aristotle, Epicurus, Posidonius, Lucretius, and Seneca the Younger. Historians and geographers (including Thucydides, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Pausanias) described severe earthquakes and their effects on geology (diverting bodies of water or causing bodies of water and/or land masses to appear or disappear, such as Atlantis), populations, and infrastructure (e.g., the complete annihilation of Helice and Boura). Among particularly noteworthy seismic events are those that occurred in Laconia in 464 bce, along the Malian Gulf in 426 bce, at Rhodes in 227/6 bce (toppling the famous Colossus of Helios), one extending from the Levant to Euboea (of unknown date), the quake affecting Campania (especially Pompeii and Herculaneum) in 63/63 ce, and at Smyrna in 178 ce.

Article

paradoxography  

Kenneth W. Yu

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Greek Myth and Religion
Over the course of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, descriptions of wonders and marvels developed into a discrete branch of literature known as paradoxography. Fragments of paradoxographical collections in both Greek and Latin reveal an abiding interest in natural wonders, but marvellous phenomena related to physiology, botany, zoology, and culture also frequently appear. Paradoxography shares thematic concerns with several historiographical, philosophical, and scientific genres, leading classicists of previous generations to spurn these texts as derivative of more serious, especially Aristotelian, scholarship. More recently, however, scholars have begun to appreciate the stylistic and expository features of paradoxography according to its own logic and principles. Nevertheless, how paradoxographical compendia were read and used in antiquity and in what scholarly or popular contexts they circulated remain difficult issues.Paradoxography refers to the stand-alone compilations (denoted by συναγωγή or ἐκλογή in titles), produced from the early Hellenistic period onward, of descriptions of natural, biological, ethnographic, and cultural wonders. .

Article

physiognomy  

Maria Michela Sassi

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Science, Technology, and Medicine
Physiognomy, the art of observing and making inferences from physical features of the body, was practised from c. 1500 bce (when it is mentioned in Mesopotamian handbooks on divination). A focus on personal character (and a reflection on the relation between physical and psychical facts) seems to be a Greek innovation. Aristotle attempted to give an inductive basis to assertions of the interdependence of body and soul (in An. pr. 2.27); the Historia animalium provided empirical evidence that corroborated early ideas about moral types among animals. The first extant treatise on the subject, the Physiognomonica (a Peripatetic work of c. 300 bce long attributed to Aristotle), established a few criteria of comparison with animal, racial, and gender types, as well as with the expressions of emotions. This treatise is the forerunner of a tradition embracing Polemon of Laodicea in the 2nd century ce, an anonymous Latin treatise (Anonymus Latinus) in the 4th, as well as medieval, Renaissance, and modern writers.

Article

Anonymus Londiniensis  

Daniela Manetti

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 March 2019
Subjects:
  1. Science, Technology, and Medicine
An anonymous work, preserved in a manuscript of the 1st century ce from Egypt, about several medical issues (definition of basic concepts, medical historiography on the causes of disease, physiology of digestion), Anonymus Londiniensis represents a rare example of an autograph from antiquity. An important source for peripatetic doxography and the reception of Hellenistic medicine.The papyrus P. Lit. Lond. 165, now held in the British Library as inv. 137 (P. Brit. Libr. inv. 137), was published first in 1893 by Hermann Diels, who learned of it through Fridericus G. Kenyon’s first notice.1 Diels set immediately to work, with the help of Kenyon, and produced the edition after a very short time. The papyrus, as reconstructed by Kenyon (with some later additions in 1901), is a roll around 3.5 metres long. Thirty-nine columns, almost complete, are preserved: one or two columns are missing at the beginning, as is at least one between columns IX and X. The text breaks off abruptly halfway down col. XXXIX. The handwriting suggests a date around the later part of the 1st century .