Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy: Volume 4

Myles Burnyeat (1939-2019) was a major figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of this. After teaching positions in London and Cambridge, where he became Laurence Professor, in 1996 he took up a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, from which he retired in 2006. In 2012 he published two volumes collecting essays dating from before the move to Oxford. Two new posthumously published volumes bring together essays from his years at All Souls and his retirement. The essays in Volume 4 are addressed principally to scholars engaging first with fundamental issues in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics and epistemology and in Aristotle's philosophical psychology. Then follow studies tackling problems in interpreting the approaches to physics and cosmology taken by Plato and Aristotle, and in assessing the evidence for early Greek exercises in optics.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Part I. Ontology and Epistemology: 1a. Apology 30b2-4: Socrates, money, and the grammar of γίγνεσθαι; 1b. On the source of Burnet's construal of Apology 30b2-4: a correction; 2. Plato on how not to speak of what is not: Euthydemus 283a-288a; 3. Platonism in the Bible: Numenius of Apamea on Exodus and eternity; 4. Kinêsis vs. energeia: a much-read passage in (but not of) Aristotle's Metaphysics; 5. De Anima II.5; 6. Aquinas on 'spiritual change' in perception; 7. Epistêmê; Part II. Physics and Optics: 8. ΕΙΚΩΣ ΜΥΘΟΣ; 9. Aristotle on the foundations of sublunary physics; 10. Archytas and optics; 11. 'All the world's a stage-painting'.

About the Author :
Myles Burnyeat was formerly Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Carol Atack is a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (2020) and an associate editor of Polis. She previously worked with Myles Burnyeat in the preparation of The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter (2015). Malcolm Schofield is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College. He was co-editor with Myles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes of Doubt and Dogmatism (1980), the first volume of the published proceedings of a series of triennial conferences on Hellenistic philosophy that continues to the present. His most recent book is a survey of Cicero's political thought (2021). David Sedley is Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College. He was an editor of Classical Quarterly and Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. His books include (with A.A. Long) The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1987) and Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (2007).