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44“If all things were to turn to smoke, it’d be the nostrils would tell them apart”In Enrique Hülsz Piccone (ed.), Nuevos Ensayos Sobre Heráclito: Actas Del Segundo Symposium Heracliteum, . 2009.I start by asking what Aristotle knew (or thought) about Heraclitus: what were the key features of Heraclitus's philosophy as far as Aristotle was concerned? In this section of the paper I suggest that there are some patterns to Aristotle's references to Heraclitus: besides the classic doctrines (flux, ekpyrosis and the unity of opposites) on the one hand, and the opening of Heraclitus's book on the other, Aristotle knows and reports a few slightly less obvious sayings, one of which is in my tit…Read more
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19Sources of Significance in Hippolytus's Account of Greek PhilosophyApeiron 27 (3). 1994.L'A. étudie l'oeuvre d'Hippolyte de Rome qui présente, moins qu'un véritable intérêt philosophique, l'avantage d'une certaine connaissance de l'histoire de la philosophie, sur laquelle il fonde sa défense de la doctrine chrétienne. Le débat s'articule autour de l'originalité de l'interprétation de la philosophie grecque, des Présocratiques en particulier, par Hippolyte. Il s'agit, par comparaison avec Plotin, de délimiter les sources philosophiques de son oeuvre empreinte d'un moyen platonisme t…Read more
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79Perceiving white and sweet (again) : Aristotle, De Anima 3.7, 431a20-b1Classical Quarterly 48 (2): 433-446. 1998.In chapter 7 of the third book of De anima Aristotle is concerned with the activity of the intellect, which, here as elsewhere in the work, he explores by developing parallels with his account of sense-perception. In this chapter his principal interest appears to be the notion of judgement, and in particular intellectual judgements about the value of some item on a scale of good and bad. In this paper I shall argue, firstly that there is in fact a coherent structure and focus to this chapter, wh…Read more
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2Plato, Wittgenstein and the definition of gamesIn Luigi Perissinotto & Begoña Ramón Cámara (eds.), Wittgenstein and Plato: connections, comparisons and contrasts, Palgrave. pp. 196-219. 2013.In this paper I argue, controversially, that Plato's Meno anticipates Wittgenstein's critique of essentialism. Plato is usually read as an essentialist of the very kind that Wittgenstein was challenging, and the Meno in particular is usually taken as evidence that Plato thought that to know something you must be able to define it, and that if you can't define it you can't investigate any other questions on the topic. I suggest instead that Plato shows Socrates proposing such a position (much as …Read more
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70Empedocles RecycledClassical Quarterly 37 (01): 24-. 1987.It is no longer generally believed that Empedocles was the divided character portrayed by nineteenth-century scholars, a man whose scientific and religious views were incompatible but untouched by each other. Yet it is still widely held that, however unitary his thought, nevertheless he still wrote more than one poem, and that his poems can be clearly divided between those which do, and those which do not, concern ‘religious matters’.1 Once this assumption can be shown to be shaky or actually fa…Read more
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30A Portable Presocratics Primer? (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (4): 791-797. 2013.No abstract
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Topography in the Timaeus: Plato and Augustine on Mankind's Place in the Natural WorldProceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 34 104-111. 1988.I consider the relation between the shape or structure of the world and the moral position occupied by human beings, and show that a cosmology that places earth at the centre does not give the centre of the universe pride of place but the lowest place, so any reluctance to move the earth from the centre of the universe was not due to thinking that humans must be in the most important position. From Plato on, the surface of the earth is at the bottom and the outer heaven is the highest place. Thi…Read more
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64Selves and Other Selves in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics vii 12Ancient Philosophy 29 (2): 349-371. 2009.Osborne argues against the idea that Aristotle thinks that friends are useful for assisting us towards self-knowledge, and defends instead the idea that friends provide an extension of the self which enables one to obtain a richer view of the shared world that we view together. She then examines similar questions about why the good person would gain from encountering fictional characters in literature, and what kinds of literature would be beneficial to the good life.
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56Plato's Natural Philosophy: A Study of the Timaeus-Critias (review)Philosophical Review 117 (4): 610-614. 2008.
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52G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Pp. xiii and 501. ISBN 0-521-25444-2 £30.00 (review)British Journal for the History of Science 18 (1): 93-94. 1985.This is a review of the book by Kirk, Raven and Schofield.
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39On Calling the Gods by the Right NamesRhizomata 1 (2): 168-193. 2013.Do you need to know the name of the god you're praying to? If you get the name wrong what happens to the prayer? What if the god has more than one name? Who gets to decide whether the name works (you or the god or neither)? What are names anyway? Are the names of the gods any different in how they work from any other names? Is there a way of fixing the reference without using the name so as to avoid the problems of optional names? There is a type of formula used in prayer in ancient Greece whic…Read more
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62Was verse the default form for Presocratic Philosophy?In Catherine Atherton (ed.), Form and Content in Didactic Poetry, . 1998.I argue that philosophy was naturally conceived and written in verse, not prose, in the early years of philosophy, and that prose writing would be the exception not the norm. I argue that philosophers developed their ideas in verse and did not repackage ideas and thoughts first formulated in non-poetic genres, so there is no adaptation or modification involved in "putting it into poetry". This also means that the content and the form are interdependent, and the poetic details are part of the mes…Read more
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University of East AngliaSchool of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication StudiesRetired faculty
Norwich, Norfolk, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Plato |
Areas of Interest
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