Malcolm Schofield

This book, first published in 2000, is a general and comprehensive treatment of the political thought of ancient Greece and Rome. It begins with Homer and ends in late antiquity with Christian and pagan reflections on divine and human order. In between come studies of Plato, Aristotle and a host of other major and minor thinkers - poets, historians, philosophers - whose individuality is brought out by extensive quotation. The international team of distinguished scholars assembled by the editors includes historians of law, politics, culture and religion, and also philosophers. Some chapters focus mostly on the ancient context of the ideas they are examining, while others explore these ideas as systems of thought which resonate with modern or perennial concerns. This clearly written volume will long remain an accessible and authoritative guide to Greek and Roman thinking about government and community.

This chapter argues that Aristotle's very conception of the political sphere as political (and not the domain of a despot) is what dictates that citizens should have powers of deliberation and determination in the city's most important decisions, as members of the citizen body as a whole. The justification for their doing so is supplied by principled appeal to the wisdom of the collective body of citizens when assembled together — always provided that that body is not a corrupted _dêmos_ that has itself become despotic. Ruling the city by his decision-making is what a citizen's job is as a citizen. What qualifies him for it — it always is him for Aristotle, as for the political universe he inhabited — is the modicum of virtue and wisdom which he brings (if he has it) to the deliberations of the political bodies of which he is a member. To that extent, Aristotle is a democrat — the sort of democrat with whom John Stuart Mill might have felt some affinity.

Of this batch of books 1 the one I found most compelling reading was Sarah Waterlow's Nature, Change and Agency . This work is an intense meditative commentary on the most important portions of the Physics; it probes beneath the text of Aristotle's loosely organized treatise to exhibit its deep structure. Waterlow attempts to show how Aristotle's apparently independent and self-contained discussions in Books I, II, III-IV and VIII all rest on a single notion, viz. that the world consists of natural substances, understood as things engaged each in a unitary pattern of change whose source and determining plan is within themselves

A full account of the philosophy of the Greek and Roman worlds from the last days of Aristotle until 100 BC. Hellenistic philosophy, for long relatively neglected and unappreciated, has over the last decade been the object of a considerable amount of scholarly attention. Now available in paperback, this 1999 volume is a general reference work which pulls the subject together and presents an overview. The History is organised by subject, rather than chronologically or by philosophical school, with sections on logic, epistemology, physics and metaphysics, ethics and politics. It has been written by specialists but is intended to be a source of reference for any student of ancient philosophy, for students of classical antiquity and for students of the philosophy of later periods. Greek and Latin are used sparingly and always translated in the main text.

What role does Aristotle give to _phantasia_ in his theory of animal movement, particularly in his main treatment of the topic, _De Motu Animalium_? Whereas _De Anima_ 3.10-11 is mainly concerned with explaining why and how practical thinking (or ‘calculation’ _logismos_) causes movement only in the service of desire, and introduces _phantasia_ into the story principally in that connection, _De Motu_ is in the end more interested (despite the famous discussion of the practical syllogism in Chapter 7, 701a7-25) in the cognitive activity that triggers movement when the animal does not engage in calculation. Aristotle here works consistently with a co-ordinate triad in his explanations of the cognitive input into animal behaviour: sense-perception, _phantasia_, and intellect (or thinking). Contrary to some interpretations, _phantasia_ is not treated in this context as more general or fundamental than sense-perception. Sense-perception and _phantasia_ can each produce psychophysical reactions — but in ways that are simply different from each other.

This paper is a piece of detective work. Starting from an obvious excrescence in the transmitted text of Simplicius's treatment of the foundations of Presocratic atomism near the beginning of his "Physics" commentary, it excavates a Theophrastean correction to Aristotle's tendency to lump Leucippus and Democritus together: Theophrastus made application of the οὐ μ[unrepresentable symbol]λλον principle in the sphere of ontology an innovation by Democritus. Along the way it shows Simplicius reordering his Theophrastean source in his efforts to find material which will strengthen the contrast between Leucippus's atomism and Eleatic metaphysics. And it argues that in doing so he all but obliterates Theophrastus's attempt to point up the Democritean credentials of the οὐ μ[unrepresentable symbol]λλον principle