Method and Metaphysics

Jonathan Barnes was educated at the City of London School and at Balliol College. For 25 years he taught at Oxford, being a Fellow first of Oriel and then of Balliol. He then spent eight years at the University of Geneva, before becoming Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many publications include The Ontological Argument (Macmillan, 1972); Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (Clarendon Press, 2nd edition 1993); Aristotle (OUP, 1982); The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton UP, 1984); and Truth, etc. (Clarendon Press, 2007); with J. Annas, The Modes of Scepticism (CUP, 1985); Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin, 1987); The Toils of Scepticism (CUP, 1990); The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (CUP, 1995); and Porphyry: Introduction (Clarendon Press, 2003). He lives in France.

This volume collects several invaluable essays not only for the specialist or those interested in ancient philosophy or the history of philosophy. It is also a source of exegetical and conceptual riches in the form of rigorous discussions of crucial philosophical problems, theses, and arguments. Even the papers which are reviews of other theorists' works are characterized not only by astute critical spirit but also by a wealth of positive proposals ... Barnes's volume of collected papers on method and metaphysics is indispensable: it contains works of scholarly excellence, advances arguments of admirable clarity and cogency, and raises all the crucial questions growing out of the fields it examines. The volume itself is beautifully presented, includes new footnotes with helpful citations of most of the original Greek texts discussed, and retains (in brackets) the pagination of the papers in their original place of publication.

• Preface ; 1. Ancient philosophers ; 2. The history of philosophy ; 3. Philosophy within quotation marks? ; 4. Anglophone attitudes ; 5. Brentano's Aristotle ; 6. Heidegger in the cave ; 7. 'There was an old person from Tyre' ; 8. The Presocratics in context ; 9. Argument in ancient philosophy ; 10. Philosophy and dialectic ; 11. Aristotle and the methods of ethics ; 12. Metacommentary ; 13. An introduction to Aspasius ; 14. Parmenides and the Eleatic One ; 15. Reason and necessity in Leucippus ; 16. Plato's cyclical argument ; 17. Death and the philosopher ; 18. Aristotelian arithmetic ; 19. The principle of plenitude ; 20. 'Aristotle's opinion concerning destiny and what is up to us' ; 21. 'Belief is up to us' ; 22. The same again: the Stoics and eternal recurrence ; 23. Bits and pieces ; 24. Partial wholes ; 25. 'Drei Sonnen sahe ich': Syrianus and astronomy ; 26. Immaterial causes ; Bibliography ; Indexes