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Plotinus’ Treatise V.1 comes closer than any other to providing an outline of his entire spiritual and metaphysical system, and as such it may serve to some degree as an introduction to his philosophy. It addresses in condensed form a great many topics to which Plotinus elsewhere devotes extended discussion, including the problem of the multiple self; eternity and time; the unity-in-duality of intellect and the intelligible; and the derivation of intelligible being from the One. Above all, it shows that the so-called “three hypostases”—soul, intellect, and the One—are best understood not as a sequence of three things additional to one another, but as three levels of possession of the same content, so that each lower level—soul in relation to intellect and intellect in relation to the One—is an “image” and “expression” of its superior.Plotinus exhorts the human soul to overcome its alienation from its own true nature and its divine origin by first recognizing itself as superior to the body and the same in kind as the animating principle of the entire cosmos, and then discovering within itself the still higher levels of reality from which it derives: intellect and, ultimately, the One or Good, the supreme first principle of all things. To do so the soul must redirect its attention inward and upward to become aware of the divinity which is always within it but from which it is distracted by the clamor of the senses.

On Our Allotted Guardian Spirit is a lively and at times perplexing text combining general reflections on the nature of the soul with a discussion of the phenomenon of a personal guardian spirit. Plotinus wants to interpret Plato, and aims to integrate Plato's various statements about daimones into one comprehensive theory. This leads to some views that are, if not exotic, then at least strange on first encounter. However, a closer reading reveals that Plotinus is not interested in demonology per se. Instead, the central concern of the treatise are ideas about the soul, the self, and self-consciousness. Plotinus' explorations produce a theory of the mind as the agent and activity responsible for a person's ethical choices and conduct of life. The demon emerges as a philosophical tool passed down from Plato, but adapted and rationalized to try to explain motivation to action, the impulse toward the ethical life, and even the various differences in human ethical and psychological constitution. This innovative theory is a response to a strong and ongoing current of thought in the philosophical tradition.The introduction offers an overview of ancient demonologies, starting with Homer and the Presocratics, and is followed by an in-depth examination of Plato, the Stoics, Plotinus, and later Neoplatonic developments. As such the book presents Plotinus' specific rationalizing response to the idea of a guardian spirit in the context of ancient philosophical demonologies.

This early treatise is placed by Plotinus' editor at the very end of the Enneads, as the culmination of his thought, matching Plotinus' own last recorded instruction, 'to bring the god in you back to the god in the all.' It is a cosmological sketch, arguing that the being of anything depends on its being unified by its orientation to its own good, and so also the being of Everything, the All. The One, or the Good, is at once the goal of all things both individually and collectively, and also the transcendent source of all that we experience, mediated through an intelligible order. But it is also, and perhaps more importantly, intended as a guide to the proper education and discipline of our own motives and experience. We are encouraged to put aside immediate sensory data, egoistic prejudice and sensual impulse, first to grasp at least a little of the intelligible order within which we all live, and at last to purge even those last intellectual attachments and experience what cannot be adequately described: the unity of being.

In Ennead I.5 Plotinus attempts to navigate a well-trodden path of inquiry by directly responding to a wide spectrum of popular theories on human flourishing, and insisting emphatically that well-being belongs to the present moment. Indeed, Aristotle—with his insistence that well-being be measured by "a complete life" (Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16–20) or a life measured by virtue, a modus vivendi sustained via the development of appropriate habits (hexis) and the avoidance of misfortunes—is one of Plotinus' central targets. Nevertheless, it is also obvious that the Hellenistic schools, with their almost evangelical insistence that happiness is available to practitioners in the immediacy of the "now," take pride of place in Plotinus' short treatise on the subject. Layne analyzes in depth Plotinus' unique conception of the value of the present moment by highlighting his dialogue with Aristotle and Hellenistic conceptions of the soul, pleasure and pain, time and eternity, and so forth.

In Ennead II.4 Plotinus investigates the question of what underlies the forms that constitute the contents of our minds and senses. Aristotle had called this substrate "matter," and Stoic philosophers followed suit. With a critical review of their notions, and reference to Plato's so-called Receptacle, Plotinus develops an account of matter that makes it a supremely negative entity. How he describes the indescribable, and how he justifies incorporeal matter's indispensability to bodies, are highlights of this tenaciously argued essay.A. A. Long translates and interprets Plotinus' treatise on the matter that underlies all physical and intelligible beings. With a wide-ranging introduction and probing analysis of details, he explains the intricate structure of the text. The book will appeal to everyone interested in the history of Platonism and ancient Greek theories of the world's ultimate principles.

Providing a challenging new interpretation of the Second Alcibiades from the Platonic corpus, this treatment sees the dialogue not only as a work of philosophic ethics, but also as one steeped in ancient literature, particularly Euripidean tragedy. The dialogue's philosophy is underpinned by an epistemology paying special attention to one's personal viewpoint, as its language shows. Dramatically, it presents a Socrates who falls into a similar trap from the one he steers Alcibiades away from, facing the dangers of a tragic character thanks to their mutual attraction. Understood in this way the dialogue, here retranslated to bring out such features, is revealed as the work of an author with linguistic and literary gifts who is deeply conscious of the human condition. While reminiscent of the Academic Skeptic picture of Plato, it is the work of somebody still moving cautiously in that direction.

Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues introduces readers to some key problems in understanding Plato’s writings, and explores in-depth and critically the various ways of approaching Plato. The problem of how to interpret Plato’s dialogues dates back to Plato’s Academy, and Plato’s interpreters ought not to forego this important discussion. For how one approaches texts will inevitably influence how one interprets their contents. This is especially true of Plato’s writings, as they are, with few exceptions, dialogues. For the sake of historical accuracy, then, it is crucial that the most plausible interpretation of Plato’s works is articulated and well defended. And this is precisely what this book provides: an articulation and critical evaluation of the various ways to approach Plato’s dialogues, along with the articulation and defense of a plausible new way to interpret Plato.This new way of approaching Plato neither sees Plato’s words as doctrines according to which the dialogues are to be interpreted, nor does it reduce Plato’s dialogues to dramatic literature. Rather, it seeks to interpret the aim of Plato’s writings as being influenced primarily by Plato’s respect for his teacher, Socrates, and the manner in which Socrates engaged others in philosophical discourse. It places the focus of philosophical investigation of Plato’s dialogues on the content of the dialogues themselves, and on the Socratic way of doing philosophy.This book contains a comprehensive bibliography of philosophical sources on the interpretation of Plato’s corpus of writings, as well as some important works in the field of classical studies and philology. Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues provides both an analytical, scholarly, and thorough treatment of what is perhaps the most long-standing problem in Plato studies. The book serves quite well as a companion text to Plato’s dialogues and is of special interest to philosophers, classicists, and philologists.

The Sophist sets out to explain what the sophist does by defining his art. But the sophist has no art. Plato lays out a challenging puzzle in metaphysics, the nature of philosophy, and the limitation of philosophy that is unraveled in this new and unconventional interpretation.Here is a new translation of this important late Platonic dialogue, with a comprehensive commentary that reverses the dominant trends in the scholarship of the last fifty years. The Sophist is shown to be not a dry exposition of doctrine, but a rich exercise in dialectic, which reveals both the Eleatic roots of Platonic metaphysics and Plato’s criticism of unrevised Eleaticism as a theoretical underpinning for sophistry.The Sophist is presented now not as an artefact of the intellectual past or precursor of late 20th century philosophical theories, but as living philosophy. In a new translation and interpretation, this late dialogue is shown to be a defense of not a departure from Plato’s metaphysics.The book is intended to provide a complete interpretation of Plato's Sophist as a whole. Central to the methodology adopted is the assumption that all elements of the dialogue to be understood must be understood in the context of the dialogue as a whole and in its relation to other works in the Platonic corpus.Three main points are argued: 1) the dialogue does not present a definitive or positive doctrine of the late Plato, but has the structure of a reductio ad absurdum; 2) the figure of the sophist is employed to critically examining the metaphysics of Parmenides. While acknowledging a core of metaphysical insight in Parmenides, the argument implies that, by failing to account for resemblance, Eleaticism implies an inadequate theory of relations, which makes impossible an adequate understanding of essence. Consequently, Eleaticism unrevised can be taken as the philosophical underpinning for the antithesis of philosophy, lending legitimacy to sophistry; 3) the criticism constitutes an indirect argument for Platonic metaphysics, which has roots in Eleaticism, that is, for the Theory of Forms.

The problem of the one and the many is central to ancient Greek philosophy, but surprisingly little attention has been paid to Aristotle’s treatment of it in the Metaphysics. This omission is all the more surprising because the Metaphysics is one of our principal sources for thinking that the problem is central and for the views of other ancient philosophers on it.The Central Books of the Metaphysics are widely recognized as the most difficult portion of a most difficult work. Halper uses the problem of the one and the many as a lens through which to examine the Central Books. What he sees is an extraordinary degree of doctrinal cogency and argumentative coherence in a work that almost everyone else supposes to be some sort of patchwork. Rather than trying to elucidate Aristotle’s doctrines—most of which have little explicitly to do with the problem, Halper holds that the problem of the one and the many, in various formulations, is the key problematic from which Aristotle begins and with which he constructs his arguments.Thus, exploring the problem of the one and the many turns out to be a way to reconstruct Aristotle’s arguments in the Metaphysics. Armed with the arguments, Halper is able to see Aristotle’s characteristic doctrines as conclusions. These latter are, for the most part, supported by showing that they resolve otherwise insoluble problems. Moreover, having Aristotle’s arguments enables Halper to delimit those doctrines and to resolve the apparent contradiction in Aristotle’s account of primary ousia, the classic problem of the Central Books. Although there is no way to make the Metaphysics easy, this very thorough treatment of the text succeeds in making it surprisingly intelligible.Halper's One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics: The Central Books was originally published in 1989 by Ohio State University Press. The reprint of this work includes a new Introduction by the author.Further, The Central Books is part of a Trilogy whose two other as of yet unpublished works Alpha—Delta and Iota—Nu will be released by Parmenides Publishing in 2008 and in 2014 respectively.

In this careful study of the fragments of Parmenides' hexameter poem, ""On Nature,"" Alexander P. D. Mourelatos combines traditional philological reconstruction with the approaches of literary criticism and philosophical analysis to reveal the thought structure and expressive unity of the best preserved, most important and coherent text of Greek philosophy before Plato.The author shows how Parmenides' deduction of the ""signposts"" and ""bounds"" of ""what-is"" critically defines the concept of reality implicit in Greek-cognitive vocabulary and in early speculative cosmologies. He interprets the second part of the poem, the ""Doxa,"" as a cosmology designed to bring out both similarities and contrasts with Parmenides' own doctrine of ""what-is."" The ""Doxa"" thus serves as a semantic commentary on the first part, the ""Truth."" Mourelatos' discussions of the concepts of ""persuasion,"" ""fidelity,"" ""opinion,"" ""belief,"" and ""appearance"" elucidate terms strategically important for interpreting Parmenides and contribute in the history of Greek philosophical vocabulary.This first-time in paperback edition includes a new Introduction by the author. Also included are three essays by him, as well as one previously unpublished paper by Gregory Vlastos. (The Route of Parmenides was first published in hardcover in 1970 by Yale University Press.)

A distinguished Platonic scholar discusses the impact of the Greek discovery of the ""cosmos"" on man's perception of his place in the universe, describes the problems this posed, and interprets Plato's response to this discovery.Starting with the Presocratics, Vlastos describes the intellectual revolution that began with the cosmogonies of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes in the sixth century B.C. and culminated a century later in the atomist system of Leucippus and Democritus. What united these men was that for all of them nature remained the inviolate, all-inclusive principle of explanation, precluding any appeal to a supernatural cause or ordering agency.In a detailed analysis of the astronomical and physical theories of the Timaeus, Vlastos demonstrates Plato's role in the reception and transmission of the discovery of the new conception of the universe. Plato gives us the chance to see that movement from a unique perspective: that of a fierce opponent of the revolution who was determined to wrest from its brilliant discovery, annex its cosmos, and redesign it on the pattern of his own idealistic and theistic metaphysics.This book is a reprint of the edition published in 1975 by the University of Washington Press. It includes a new Introduction by Luc Brisson.

In the Statesman, Plato brings together—only to challenge and displace—his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reissued here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean.The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical order of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed that question in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides, the Philebus, and the ""unwritten teachings.""This study demonstrates how the Statesman is the culminating expression of Plato's lifelong effort, both in Athens and in the Academy, to bring metaphysical insight to the unending political crisis of his times.

This translation is the result of a collaboration between Arnold Hermann and Dr. Sylvana Chrysakopoulou. Heeding the challenge of balancing intelligibility with faithfulness—while maintaining sufficient consistency to allow the discernment of technical terms—great pains have been taken to secure both accuracy and accessibility. In his Foreword, Douglas Hedley gives an insightful account of the way the Parmenides was received by different cultures and philosophical schools throughout the centuries to the present day.Hermann’s Introduction, aimed at first time readers and professional interpreters alike, offers an overview of the most noted philosophical problems addressed in the dialogue, and of its historical background. In view of the fact that certain individual issues have been exhaustively explored by generations of scholars, Hermann chooses to focus also on subjects that have at times been passed over, or trivialized: the debt the dialogue may owe to the works of earlier thinkers, or whether it constitutes a response to certain critics of the Theory of Forms; as for the Theory itself, whether it is bolstered or superseded by the dialogue’s conclusions, or whether there is such a thing as a “simple,” unparticipated Form, and if there is, why it cannot be the subject of an account; also, the issue of the “interweaving of Forms,” (the Sophist) is discussed, in light of its possible relevance to the Second Part of the Parmenides. Finally, Hermann provides an overview with a listing and summaries of the individual conclusions to each of the eight central arguments of the dialgoue’s Second Part (plus Coda).

Edward Halper’s three volume One and Many in Aristotle’s 'Metaphysics' contends that Aristotle argues for his central metaphysical doctrines by showing that they alone resolve various versions of what is known as “the problem of the one and the many.” The present volume, Alpha–Delta, argues that these books constitute the first stage of Aristotle’s inquiry, his case for the existence of metaphysics. Halper shows that the possibility of metaphysics turns on its having a subject matter with a sufficient degree of unity to be known by one science. Although books Alpha–Delta address the problem that occupied Aristotle’s predecessors, they also prepare the way for—and are consistent with—the second stage, the inquiry into principles in the central books. Along the way Halper argues for unique interpretations of “being qua being,” the source of the aporiai, the method of “saving the phenomena,” “said in many ways,” the principle of non-contradiction, and the significance of book Delta.

Set in an era witness to some of the most avant-garde and scintillating scientific discoveries and artistic creations of the last century, this novel takes readers behind the scenes and into the lives of many of history’s most fascinating and revolutionary minds, all while posing the question—could a mathematical discovery be so controversial and threatening as to drive one to kill?After the murder of his best friend lands Michael Igerinos in the center of the investigation as the prime suspect, he is transported back to the turn of the 20th Century, into the heart of Bohemian Paris and the sensual, hedonistic pursuits of the artists who haunted its infamous Moulin Rouge. There they are privy to the tormented genius of Toulouse-Lautrec, the twisted, visceral perspective of a young Picasso, and the wild exploits of les artistes de Montmartre.Michael and Stefanos meet at the groundbreaking Second International Congress of Mathematics in 1900, at which the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th Century—Hilbert, Poincaré, Bertrand Russell, Gödel—probed the depths of mathematical mystery and challenged the very foundations on which all of mathematical theory is based.Their mutual passion for uncovering the deepest, most elusive secrets of the universe unites them and their search for mathematical discovery draws them down a dark path whose tragic end neither man could possibly foresee.

Set in an era witness to some of the most avant-garde and scintillating scientific discoveries and artistic creations of the last century, this novel takes readers behind the scenes and into the lives of many of history’s most fascinating and revolutionary minds, all while posing the question—could a mathematical discovery be so controversial and threatening as to drive one to kill?After the murder of his best friend lands Michael Igerinos in the center of the investigation as the prime suspect, he is transported back to the turn of the 20th Century, into the heart of Bohemian Paris and the sensual, hedonistic pursuits of the artists who haunted its infamous Moulin Rouge. There they are privy to the tormented genius of Toulouse-Lautrec, the twisted, visceral perspective of a young Picasso, and the wild exploits of les artistes de Montmartre.Michael and Stefanos meet at the groundbreaking Second International Congress of Mathematics in 1900, at which the greatest mathematical minds of the 20th Century—Hilbert, Poincaré, Bertrand Russell, Gödel—probed the depths of mathematical mystery and challenged the very foundations on which all of mathematical theory is based.Their mutual passion for uncovering the deepest, most elusive secrets of the universe unites them and their search for mathematical discovery draws them down a dark path whose tragic end neither man could possibly foresee.

Epicurus, and his Roman disciple Lucretius, held that the primary cause of human unhappiness was an irrational fear of death. What is more, they believed that a clear understanding of the nature of the world would help to eliminate this fear; for if we recognize that the universe and everything in it is made up of atoms and empty space, we will see that the soul cannot possibly survive the extinction of the body—and no harm to us can occur after we die. This liberating insight is at the core of Epicurean therapy. In this book, Konstan seeks to show how such fears arose, according to the Epicureans, and why they persist even in modern societies. It offers a close examination of the basic principles of Epicurean psychology: showing how a system based on a materialistic world view could provide a coherent account of irrational anxieties and desires, and provide a therapy that would allow human beings to enjoy life to the fullest degree.

The much-anticipated anthology on Plato’s Timaeus—Plato’s singular dialogue on the creation of the universe, the nature of the physical world, and the place of persons in the cosmos—examining all dimensions of one of the most important books in Western Civilization: its philosophy, cosmology, science, and ethics, its literary aspects and reception. Contributions come from leading scholars in their respective fields, including Sir Anthony Leggett, 2003 Nobel Laureate for Physics. Parts of or earlier versions of these papers were first presented at the Timaeus Conference, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in September of 2007.To this day, Plato’s Timaeus grounds the form of ethical and political thinking called Natural Law—the view that there are norms in nature that provide the patterns for our actions and ground the objectivity of human values. Beyond the intellectual content of the dialogue’s core, its literary frame is also the source of the myth of Atlantis, giving the West the concept of the “lost world.”From Platonic space to Presocratic vortices, from Philosopher-Kings to Craftsman-Gods and from modern physics to the myth of Atlantis, One Book, The Whole Universe presents in one volume the most up-to-date and penetrating scholarship on Plato’s Timaeus by some of the greatest minds alive today.

In October of 2007, the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (Argentina) hosted an International Symposium on the philosophy of Parmenides to celebrate the creation of the University’s new Center for the Study of Ancient Philosophy. The event—co-organized by the HYELE Institute for Comparative Studies (Switzerland) and Parmenides Publishing—brought together scholars from around the world to present their latest work and participate in discussion. These Proceedings present the collected papers that were given—all fully translated into English—and edited by Néstor-Luis Cordero.During the two years leading up to the International Symposium, no fewer than seven books on Parmenides were published. This revival and resurgence of interest in Parmenides and the critical reviews of traditional interpretations of his poem made this the perfect time for a global conference dedicated to the renowned figure known as the true father of philosophy.The Symposium on Parmenides united the world's foremost Parmenidean scholars, with many participants having written one, if not several books on Parmenides. The proceedings volume therefore represents the most cutting-edge and in-depth scholarship on Parmenides available today, and will be a great and timely enrichment to the field of Presocratic Philosophy.

Ennead VI.4–5, originally written as a single treatise, contains Plotinus’ most general and sustained exposition of the relationship between the intelligible and sensible realms, addressing and coalescing two central issues in Platonism: the nature of the soul–body relationship and the nature of participation. Its main question is, How can soul animate bodies without sharing in their extension? The treatise seems to have had considerable impact: it is much reflected in Porphyry’s important work, Sententiae, and the doctrine of reception according to the capacity of the recipient, for which this treatise is the main source, resonated in medieval thinkers.

How was the universe created, and what is our place within it? These are the questions at the heart of Plotinus’ Against the Gnostics. For the Gnostics, the universe came into being as a result of the soul’s fall from intelligible reality—it is the evil outcome of a botched creation. Plotinus challenges this, and insists that the soul’s creation of the world is the necessary consequence of its contemplation of the ideal forms. While the Gnostics claim to despise the visible universe, Plotinus argues that such contempt displays their ignorance of the higher realities of which the cosmos is a beautiful image.Against the Gnostics is a polemical text. It aims to show the superiority of Plotinus’ philosophy over that of his Gnostic rivals, and poses unique challenges: Plotinus nowhere identifies his opponents by name, he does not set out their doctrines in any great detail, and his arguments are frequently elliptical. The detailed commentary provides a guide through these difficulties, making Plotinus’ meandering train of thought in this important treatise accessible to the reader.

Ennead VI.8 gives us access to the living mind of a long dead sage as he tries to answer some of the most fundamental questions we in the modern world continue to ask: are we really free when most of the time we are overwhelmed by compulsions, addictions, and necessities, and how can we know that we are free? Can we trace this freedom through our own agency to the gods, to the Soul, Intellect, and the Good? How do we know that the world is meaningful and not simply the result of chance or randomness?Plotinus' On the Voluntary and on the Free Will of the One is a groundbreaking work that provides a new understanding of the importance and nature of free human agency. It articulates a creative idea of agency and radical freedom by showing how such terms as desire, will, self-dependence, and freedom in the human ethical sphere can be genuinely applied to Intellect and the One while preserving the radical inability of all metaphysical language to express anything about God or gods.

The term dunamis (potentiality) entered into the philosophical vocabulary with Plato, but it was with Aristotle that it acquired, together with energeia (actuality), the strong technical meaning that the two terms have maintained, with variations, throughout subsequent philosophical tradition.The significance of the notions of actuality and potentiality in Plotinus’ thought can hardly be overstated. Throughout the Enneads, they are crucial to understanding the specific causality of intelligible realities and the relation of participation between intelligible and sensible realms.In Ennead II.5, Plotinus for the first time provides a systematic clarification of his peculiar use of these terms, through a sustained revision of Aristotle’s own elaboration of the topic and of his terminology. The treatise discusses the different meanings of potentiality and actuality as well as the way each of them applies or does not apply to the sensible realm, to the intelligible realm, and to matter.While the structure of the text unfolds in a coherent and cohesive manner, Plotinus’ writing in this treatise is dense and at times dry in its technicality. The detailed commentary guides the reader step by step, making an otherwise particularly difficult text accessible.

Plotinus’ Ennead V.8, originally part of a single work (with III.8, V.5, and II.9), provides the foundation for a positive view of the universe as an image of divine beauty against the Gnostic rejection of the world. Although it emphasizes the cosmic dimension of beauty, it is, as are most treatises of Plotinus, concerned with the individual soul. The notion that the artist has within him an idea of beauty that derives directly from the intelligible world in fact coincides with his theory that each one of us has access to Intellect through his or her own intellect. It is the exploitation of this theme that forms the central dynamic of the treatise, with its stress on our ability to ""see"" and be one with the intelligible world and its beauty.

This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered ""one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times."" (Karl Popper) Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth.This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta (1901). The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides.

Ennead IV.4.30–45 and IV.5 retrieves the unity in this last section of Plotinus’ treatise on Problems concerning the Soul. Combining translation with commentary, Gurtler enhances both the accuracy of the translation and the recovery of Plotinus’ often unsuspected originality. This is especially true for IV.5, where previous translations fail to convey the concise nature of his argument against both the Aristotelian and Platonic theories of vision.Plato and Aristotle each claim that vision depends on the light between the eye and the object, but Plotinus presents evidence that this is not the case and develops a novel theory of light as a second activity that moves from source to object directly, even arguing that color is in the light itself rather than merely a quality of the object. This theory of vision, in turn, depends on the nature of sympathy developed especially in IV.4.30–45, where Plotinus shows how action at a distance is both possible and necessary for the proper unity in diversity of the sensible cosmos.

This celebratory Festschrift dedicated to Charles Kahn comprises some 23 articles by friends, former students and colleagues, many of whom first presented their papers at the international "Presocratics and Plato" Symposium in his honor (European Cultural Center of Delphi, Greece, 3–7 June, 2009). The conference was organized and sponsored by the HYELE Institute for Comparative Studies, Parmenides Publishing, and Starcom AG, with endorsements from the International Plato Society, and the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania. While Kahn's work reaches far beyond the Presocratics and Plato, it is in these subject areas that the distinction of his scholarship has come to be regarded as virtually unrivaled. The articles contributed to this volume are by some of the most renowned scholars working on these topics today, their breadth and depth bearing witness to his profound impact and influence on the discipline of Ancient Greek Philosophy.

Plotinus was much exercised by Plato's doctrines of the soul. In this treatise, at chapter 1 line 27, he talks of "the divine Plato, who has said in many places in his works many noble things about the soul and its arrival here, so that we can hope for some clarity from him. So what does the philosopher say? It is clear that he does not always speak with sufficient consistency for us to make out his intentions with any ease." The issue in this treatise is one that has puzzled students of Plato from ancient to modern times—and is indeed a popular topic for undergraduate essays even today: Why should the philosopher, who has ascended through a long and painful process of dialectic to "assimilation to the divine," ever descend back into the body? Plotinus himself is said by Porphyry to have attained such a state of other-worldly transcendence on at least four occasions during his lifetime, so this was a very real and personal issue for him. In this treatise we see him grappling with it.

The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In A Stranger's Knowledge Marquez argues that Plato abandons here the classic idea, prominent in the Republic, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, is qualified to rule. Instead, the dialogue presents the statesman as different from the philosopher, the possessor of a specialist expertise that cannot be reduced to philosophy. The expertise is of how to make a city resilient against internal and external conflict in light of the imperfect sociality of human beings and the poverty of their reason. This expertise, however, cannot be produced on demand: one cannot train statesmen like one might train carpenters. Worse, it cannot be made acceptable to the citizens, or operate in ways that are not deeply destructive to the city’s stability. Even as the political community requires his knowledge for its preservation, the genuine statesman must remain a stranger to the city.Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the ambiguous reevaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking feature of the political philosophy of the Statesman. The law appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and especially leaders, retain a “philosophical” attitude towards them. It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the laws what is just or good (and yet want to know what is just and good) that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of genuine political knowledge.