Jaap Mansfeld – författare

Jaap Mansfeld and Frans de Haas bring together in this volume a distinguished international team of ancient philosophers, presenting a systematic, chapter-by-chapter study of one of the key texts in Aristotle's science and metaphysics: the first book of On Generation and Corruption.In GC I Aristotle provides a general outline of physical processes such as generation and corruption, alteration, and growth, and inquires into their differences. He also discusses physical notions such as contact, action and passion, and mixture. These notions are fundamental to Aristotle's physics and cosmology, and more specifically to his theory of the four elements and their transformations. Moreover, references to GC elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus show that in GC I Aristotle is doing heavy conceptual groundwork for more refined applications of these notions in, for example, the psychology of perception and thought, and the study of animal generation and corruption. Ultimately, biology is the goal of the series of enquiries in which GC I demands a position of its own immediately after the Physics.The contributors deal with questions of structure and text constitution and provide thought-provoking discussions of each chapter of GC I. New approaches to the issues of how to understand first matter, and how to evaluate Aristotle's notion of mixture are given ample space. Throughout, Aristotle's views of the theories of the Presocratics and Plato are shown to be crucial in understanding his argument.

A full account of the philosophy of the Greek and Roman worlds from the last days of Aristotle (c.320 BC) 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.

An ancient compendium of ancient philosophy.Placita (Tenets), generally attributed to an author named Aëtius and dating from the late first or early second century AD, was a compendium setting out in summary fashion the principal doctrines and opinions of philosophers and philosophical schools in response to questions and topics in the domain of natural philosophy. Now lost, Placita can be largely reconstructed from the work of three authors working in the period from the second to the fifth century (Pseudo-Plutarch, Stobaeus, and Theodoret) who quote from it extensively.Placita is organized into five books: First Principles; Cosmology; Meteorology and the Earth; Psychology; and Physiology. Each chapter contains a list of short opinions or tenets, which are ascribed to an individual philosopher and/or school and usually arranged in sections that stress the variety and contrast of the teachings concerned.Designed as a multi-purpose resource, Placita long served as a manual of neatly packaged doxographic material on a wide variety of topics, to be used for study, as an aide-mémoire, for displays of erudition, for persuasion in rhetorical or apologetic contexts, and for personal enlightenment, and it remains a valuable source for our knowledge of Presocratic and Hellenistic philosophy.This edition of Aëtius’ Placita offers a fresh translation, ample annotation, and a text fully informed by the latest scholarship.

It is a curious fact that many of the sources for the Presocratic and Stoic philosophers are early Christian authors; similarly, one can even find an echo of Parmenides in a Gnostic treatise from Nag Hammadi. Such writers were often dependent for their knowledge on a whole chain of previous interpretations and traditions, and it is these with which Professor Mansfeld is here largely concerned. He has tried to discover what in an earlier writer - Plato, and Aristotle, of course, as well as the Early Greeks - was of interest to a later one, notably the Middle Platonists. These articles demonstrate the value of such an approach, showing how a familiarity with the later history of an idea, say in a Gnostic text, can contribute to the understanding of the idea itself; or how the study of the selection of ideas used by Philo, for instance, not only sheds light on his own projects, but also helps explain why some motifs survived and not others, and why philosophical thought took the directions it did.

The study of the Elenchos (c. 225 CE) involves the whole range of ancient interpretative traditions concerned with Greek Philosophy, from Aristotle to the Late Neoplatonists. The present inquiry places Hippolytus' important reports about the Greek philosophers in the context of these traditions and so is able to illuminate not only what he has to offer but also to increase our knowledge of the traditions he depends on. For him the Pythagoreanizing current in Pre-Neoplatonism is of paramount importance. Accordingly, he constructs a succession (diadoche) starting with Pythagoras and including Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and argues that the diadoche of the Gnostic heresiarchs is parasitical on its Pythagorean predecessor.A new assessment of the sources used — the first serious attempt since that of Diels in 1879 — hinges on an analysis of Hippolytus' method of presentation, which is a blend of cento and exegesis geared to his anti-Gnostic purpose.

Prolegomena deals with the introductory and hermeneutic sections of a wide range of commentaries and studies on philosophical, scientific, biblical and other ancient authors.Special attention is given to unclearness as a stimulus for interpretation. New light is shed on the Life of an author (e.g. Plotinus') as a preliminary to the study of his works, and on the part played by the idea that life and doctrine should agree with each other.The results obtained by the study of the practices as well as the avowed principles of ancient scholars and commentators among other things further the understanding of the interrelated philosophical, literary, medical and patristic exegetical traditions, of the book of Diogenes Laërtius, of Galen's autobibliographies and of Thrasyllus' Before the Reading of the Dialogues of Plato.

In 1879 the young German scholar Hermann Diels published his celebrated Doxographi Graeci, (in which the major doxographical works of antiquity are collected and analysed). Diels' results have been foundational for the study of ancient philosophy ever since.In their ground-breaking study the authors focus on the doxographer Aëtius, whose work Diels reconstructed from various later sources. First they examine the antecedents of Diels' Aëtian hypothesis. Then Diels' theory and especially the philological techniques used in its formulation are subjected to detailed analysis. The remainder of the volume offers a fresh examination of the sources for our knowledge for Aëtius. Diels' theory is revised and improved at significant points.Subsequent volumes will examine the contents and methods of the doxographer and his antecedents in earlier Greek philosophy.No scholar concerned with the history of ancient philosophy can afford to ignore this study.

Cicero's philosophical works are a rich source for the understanding of Hellenistic philosophy, and his Academic Books are of critical importance for the study of ancient epistemology, especially the central debate between the Academic sceptics and the Stoics. This volume makes Cicero's challenging work accessible to philosophers and historians of philosophy and represents the best current work in both fields.The ten papers published here are the work of leading authorities from North America, England and Europe; they were presented and discussed at the seventh Symposium Hellenisticum at Utrecht, August 1995, and deal with every aspect of the Academic Books, historical, literary and philosophical.Several papers make major contributions to the understanding of ancient scepticism and sceptical arguments, to the role of Socrates in later Greek thought, to the history of the Academy as an institution, and to the philosophical stance of Cicero himself.

This is the first study to deal with the history of Greek mathematics - starting with Appollonius and including astronomy - as part of the history of literary culture. It attempts to find out how mathematical works were presented by original authors (e.g. Ptolemy), and introduced and explained by commentators (e.g. Pappus who is at the centre of this enquiry, Eutocius, and prolegomena by late Anonymi). The manner in which mathematical treatises were presented and studied is entirely comparable to that practised in e.g. philosophy, medicine, biblical and literary studies (see the author's Prolegomena, (Brill, 1994)). Discussion of introductory issues is a standard feature, and in mathematics the development from the implicitly expressed to the explicitly expressed and from there to scholastic routine is the same as in these other fields.