As Rembrandt is creating his famous painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer, Aristotle is soon able to see and hear. As the masterpiece makes its way through history, Aristotle's complicated mind finds unanswerable dilemmas

Historian Carlo Ginzburg uses the occasion of his Menachem Stern Lectureship to present a provocative and characteristically brilliant examination of the relation between rhetoric and historiography. In four lectures, based on a wide range of texts -- Aristotle's Poetics; humanist Lorenzo Valla's tract exposing the Donation of Constantine as a forgery; an early 18th-century Jesuit historical account purporting to record the diatribe of a Mariana Island native against Spanish rule; and Proust's commentary on Flaubert's style -- he demonstrates that rhetoric, if properly understood, is related not only to ornament but to historical understanding and truth. Ginzburg discovers a middle ground between the empiricist or positivist view of history, and the current postmodern tendency to regard any historical account as just one among an infinity of possible narratives, distinguished or measured not by the standard of truth, but by rhetorical skill. As a whole, these lectures stake out a position that both mediates and transcends warring factions in the current historiographical debate.

This book considers the concepts that lay at the heart of natural philosophy and physics from the time of Aristotle until the fourteenth century. The first part presents Aristotelian ideas and the second part presents the interpretation of these ideas by Philoponus, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, and Duns Scotus. Across the eight chapters, the problems and texts from Aristotle that set the stage for European natural philosophy as it was practiced from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries are considered first as they appear in Aristotle and then as they are reconsidered in the context of later interests. The study concludes with an anticipation of Newton and the sense in which Aristotle's physics had been transformed.

"Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers' encounter with Aristotle.Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna's and Aquinas's interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna's reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna's world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch's own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory."-- Publisher's website.

The political thought of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle defended and justified the values and way of life of the declining and decaying landed aristocracy in opposition to Athenian democracy and the craftsmen, traders and labourers upon which it increasingly rested. Although the Socratics recognized and condemned aristocratic regeneration, they hoped that the outlook and conduct of the nobility could be revitalized so as once more to become the foundation of civic life in order to stem the levelling tide of democracy, the tyranny of the mob, and the vulgarity that they felt were endangering Greece and especially Athens. To be understood and appreciated fully, the classics of political theory must be viewed as basically ideological and much more closely and rigorously related to their social contexts than has usually been the case. The point of departure for this critique of the Socratics is a particular conception of the Greek polis and its significance for Western social organization, an interpretation differing from most standard treatments. Besides casting new light upon the political thought of the Socratics, this study should help to illuminate the aristocratic myth about the character of the demos which, immortalized by the Socratics, has been a cornerstone of anti-democratic ideology and social theory in the West ever since the ancient philosophers first recorded their fears of the 'mob'.

Product Description The mutual interaction of philosophy and Roman political and cultural life has aroused more and more interest in recent years among students of classical literature, Roman history, and ancient philosophy. In this volume, which gathers together some of the papers originally delivered at aseries of seminars in the University of Oxford, scholars from all three disciplines explore the role of Platonism and Aristotelianism in Roman intellectual, cultural, and political life from the second century BC to the third century AD. Review Praise for Philosophia Togata I: "An invaluable contribution to the long-overdue exploration of an important but neglected area".--Greece & Rome About the Author Miriam Griffin, Tutorial Fellow in Ancient History, Somerville College, Oxford.

Based on Aristotle's 'The Politics', these lectures discuss a wide spectrum of history & theory in order to examine the realm of politics. This is the only published collection of seminars from Morgenthau, revealing him as both a teacher & a thinker.