Knowing and Being in Ancient Philosophy

294 Pages·2022·3.133 MB·English

by  Daniel Bloom, Laurence Bloom, Miriam Byrd

Knowing and
Being in Ancient
Philosophy
Edited by
daniel bloom
laurence bloom
miriam byrd
Knowing and Being in Ancient Philosophy
Daniel Bloom • Laurence Bloom
Miriam Byrd
Editors
Knowing and Being in
Ancient Philosophy
Editors
Daniel Bloom Laurence Bloom
Department of English, Philosophy Department of Philosophy
and Modern Languages Rhodes University
West Texas A&M University Grahamstown, South Africa
Canyon, TX, USA
Miriam Byrd
Department of Philosophy and
Humanities
The University of Texas at Arlington
Arlington, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-98903-3 ISBN 978-3-030-98904-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98904-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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A
cknowledgments
We wish to express our gratitude to Nicholas Marshall, Graham Schuster,
Jeffrey Doty and Anna Bloom-Christen for their editing work, to Slavka
Halper for getting the ball rolling on this project, and to Aaron Halper for
putting us in touch with our publisher at Palgrave Macmillan. We are also
grateful to the English, Philosophy, and Modern Languages Departments
at West Texas A&M University for their generous financial support
through the Urban Fund.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Daniel Bloom and Laurence Bloom
Section I Knowing and Being 9
2 In What Ways Are the Souls of Human Beings Immortal
According to Plato? 11
Luc Brisson
3 One and Many in Plato’s Metaphysics 19
William H. F. Altman
4 Sensibles as Me Onta: The Harmony of Sophist and Timaeus 43
Richard Patterson
5 Syllogisms: In Theory and Practice 49
Lenn E. Goodman
6 Monism, Metaphysics, and Paradox 73
Owen Goldin
7 Understanding the Image of the Sun: Aristotle, Descartes,
and Spinoza on Imagination 97
Nastassja Pugliese
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 Moving Naturally for Aristotle, Laozi, and Zhuangzi 123
May Sim
9 Parmenides 143d–144a and the Pebble-A rithmetical
Representation of Number 149
Mitchell Miller
Section II Goodness as Knowing How to Be 167
10 VIRTUE AND SELF-RESTRAINT: Maimonides’
Dialogue with Aristotle in Eight Chapters 169
Ronna Burger
11 Socrates’ Failures and their Implications for Moral
Psychology in the Early Dialogues 189
Miriam Byrd
12 Pleasure, Pain, Calm, and the Philosophical Life 205
Richard D. Parry
13 Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Socrates on Justice 221
Roslyn Weiss
14 A Reading of the First Book of the Republic: A Look to
the Whole 237
Chad Wiener
15 Popper’s Plato Revisited 251
John Rist
Publications of Edward Charles Halper 283
Index 289
n c
otes on ontributors
William H. F. Altman, a retired public high school teacher, overlapped
with Edward Halper at the University of Toronto in the late 1970s. He is
the author of a five-volume study of Plato’s dialogues (2012–2020) and
other studies in ancient and modern philosophy.
Daniel Bloom is Associate Professor of Philosophy at West Texas A&M
University. He began teaching at WTAMU in 2014 after completing his
graduate studies at the University of Georgia under the supervision of
Edward Halper. His research is primarily in Ancient Western Philosophy.
He is the author of The Unity of Oneness and Plurality in Plato’s
Theaetetus (2015).
Laurence Bloom is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Rhodes University
in Makhanda, South Africa. He completed a PhD under the supervision of
Professor Halper in 2010. Although he publishes primarily on Plato, his
philosophical interests extend throughout the history of philosophy. His
recent book The Principle of Non-contradiction in Plato’s Republic: An
Argument for Form (2017) argues for a reading of the Republic that
looks after an underlying noetic unity pointed to by the text’s diano-
etic argumentation—in particular, in Socrates’ division of the soul.
Luc Brisson, Director of Research [Emeritus] at the National Center for
Scientific Research (Paris [Villejuif], France; Centre Jean Pépin, UMR
8230 CNRS-ENS, PSL), is known for his works on both Plato and
Plotinus, including bibliographies, translations, and commentaries.
He has also published numerous works on the history of philosophy and
religions in Antiquity.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Ronna Burger is Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair, Professor of
Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University,
where she has been teaching since 1980, after receiving her PhD in
Philosophy from the New School for Social Research. Burger is the author
of Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics, as well as
books on Plato’s Phaedo, Phaedrus, and a monograph On the Euthyphro.
Along with numerous articles on Greek philosophy, she has written on
Maimonides Guide of the Perplexed I.2 (in Political Philosophy Cross-
Examined, 2013), the Book of Esther (in Writing The Poetic Soul of
Philosophy, 2020) and “the female drama” in the Book of Genesis (in
Athens, Arden, Jerusalem, 2017). In addition to seminars and public
lectures on Plato and Aristotle, she teaches a series of courses on
“Bible and Philosophy” and has spoken at various campuses and con-
ferences on biblical themes and figures.
Miriam Byrd is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Texas at Arlington. She completed her dissertation under Edward Halper’s
supervision in 2001 and specializes in ancient philosophy. Her publica-
tions include journal articles and book chapters, mainly on Plato, and her
current research interests are Plato’s method of hypothesis, mathematical
intermediates, and moral psychology in the early dialogues.
Owen Goldin is Professor of Philosophy at Marquette University. He
has written mostly on ancient philosophy. He is the author of Explaining
an Eclipse: Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics 2 8–10 (University of Michigan
Press, 1996) and a number of articles on the Pesocratics, Plato,
Aristotle, and Hellenistic philosophers. He is the translator of
Philoponus (?): On Aristotle, Posterior Analytics 2 (London, Duckworth
Press, 2009), and, with Marije Martijn, of Philoponus: On Aristotle,
Posterior Analytics I. 19–31 (Bristol, Bristol Classical Press), 2012. He
has also published in the areas of Jewish philosophy, social philoso-
phy, and metaphysics.
Lenn E. Goodman is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon
Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He publishes widely
in Jewish, Islamic, and general philosophy. His writings on Aristotle
include the chapters on Aristotle in Aristotle’s Politics Today and in
Consciousness in the Great Philosophers and on the challenge of the
Diodorean modalities. He has also written extensively on Aristotelian vir-
tue ethics. His recent books include The Holy One of Israel, Religious
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere, Coming to Mind: The Soul and
its Body, and his Gifford Lectures: Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself.
Mitchell Miller is Dexter Ferry Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at
Vassar College. He works in the history of philosophy, ranging from the
Presocratics and Plato and Aristotle to late medieval philosophy, Descartes
and Leibniz, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philoso-
phy. He has published two books on Plato, Plato’s Parmenides: The
Conversion of the Soul (Princeton 1986, Penn State ppk 1991) and The
Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman (Martinus Nijhoff 1980, reissued with
“Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato’s Statesman,”
Parmenides Publishing 2004), a number of essays on Plato, and
studies of Hesiod, Parmenides, and Hegel. His most recent work
concentrates on the Philebus, the “so-called unwritten teachings” of
Plato, and, as the larger context for these studies, the notion of “the
longer way” to the dialectical study of the Good and a “more precise
grasp” of the city, the soul, and (he argues) the cosmos that Plato has
Socrates project at Republic 435c-d and 504b-e.
Richard  D.  Parry is the Fuller E.  Callaway Professor Emeritus of
Philosophy, having taught at Agnes Scott College for thirty-nine years. In
the Atlanta area, he also conducted graduate seminars on Aristotle and
Plato at Emory University and Georgia State University. In 1987–88, he
worked at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington,
DC, as a humanities administrator. Since retiring in 2006, he has
been involved in the work of the International Plato Society, where
he now serves as vice president. His publications include Plato’s Craft
of Justice (1996) and many articles, mostly on Plato’s moral psychology.
Richard Patterson is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Ancient
Mediterranean Studies at Emory University. He is the author of Image
and Reality in Plato’s Metaphysics, Aristotle’s Modal Logic, and a (to be
published someday) commentary on Plato’s Parmenides, along with
assorted articles in ancient philosophy and (with coauthors), in cognitive
science.
Nastassja Pugliese is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of
Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Professor of the
Graduate Program in Logic and Metaphysics and of the Graduate Program
in Education at the same university. Pugliese holds a PhD from the
University of Georgia where she was advised by Dr. Halper on a the-