Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy
M. F. Burnyeat taught for 14 years in the Philosophy Department of University College London, then for 18 years in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, 12 of them as the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, before migrating to Oxford in 1996 to become a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College. The studies, articles and reviews collected in these two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy were all written, and all but two published, before that decisive change. Whether designed for a scholarly audience or for a wider public, they range from the Presocratics to Augustine, from Descartes and Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. Their subject-matter falls under four main headings: 'Logic and Dialectic' and 'Scepticism Ancient and Modern', which make up the first volume, with 'Knowledge' and 'Philosophy and the Good Life' contained in this, the second volume. The title 'Explorations' well expresses Burnyeat's ability to discover new aspects of familiar texts, new ways of solving old problems. In his hands the history of philosophy becomes itself a philosophical activity.
- A collection of essays by one of the world's greatest ancient philosophers alive today
- The only place where so much of his previously published work is collected
- Includes many seminal contributions to the subject
Product details
June 2012Hardback
9780521750738
368 pages
234 × 159 × 22 mm
0.72kg
Temporarily unavailable - available from TBC
Table of Contents
- Part I. Knowledge:
- 1. Examples in epistemology: Socrates, Theaetetus and G. E. Moore
- 2. Socratic midwifery, Platonic inspiration
- 3. The philosophical sense of Theaetetus' mathematics
- 4. Plato on the grammar of perceiving
- 5. Socrates and the jury: paradoxes in Plato's distinction between knowledge and true belief
- 6. Aristotle on understanding knowledge
- 7. Platonism and mathematics: a prelude to discussion
- 8. Wittgenstein and Augustine, De magistro
- Part II. Philosophy and the Good Life:
- 9. Message from Heraclitus
- 10. Virtues in action
- 11. The impiety of Socrates
- 12. The passion of reason in Plato's Phaedrus
- 13. Aristotle on learning to be good
- 14. Did the ancient Greeks have the concept of human rights?
- 15. Sphinx without a secret
- 16. First words
- Bibliography.