Ancient Philosophy

Engages in a wide-ranging exploration of what we can learn from the study of ancient civilizations, which is relevant to fundamental problems, both intellectual and moral, that we continue to face today.

How far is it possible to arrive at an understanding of alien systems of belief? Is it possible to talk meaningfully of 'science' and of its various constituent disciplines, 'astronomy', 'geography', 'anatomy', and so on, in the ancient world? Are logic and its laws universal? Is there one ontology—a single world—to which all attempts at understanding must be considered to be directed? When we encounter apparently very different views of reality, how far can that be put down to a difference in conceptions of what needs explaining, or of what counts as an explanation, or to different preferred modes of reasoning or styles of enquiry? Do the notions of truth and belief represent reliable cross-cultural universals? Are the discourses of human nature and of human rights universally applicable? What political institutions do we need to help secure equity and justice within nation states and between them?

Lloyd provides compelling evidence that the science and culture of ancient Greece and China have much to offer contemporary debates in many fields of study.

This book examines the views on friendship of the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, friendship is the ideal type of relationship that rational beings should cultivate. The book argues that Aquinas fundamentally revised some of the main features of Aristotle's paradigmatic account of friendship so as to accommodate the case of friendship between radically unequal beings: man and God. As a result, Aquinas presented a broader view of friendship than Aristotle's, allowing for a higher extent of disagreement, lack of mutual understanding, and inequality between friends.

Aristotle is the father of virtue ethics, and virtue ethics is hot. Yet Aristotle’s accounts of the individual virtues remain opaque, for most contemporary commentators of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics have focused upon other matters. By contrast, this book takes Aristotle’s detailed description of the individual virtues to be central to his ethical theory. Working through the Nicomachean Ethics virtue by virtue, explaining and generally defending Aristotle’s claims, the book brings each of Aristotle’s virtues alive. A new Aristotle emerges, an Aristotle fascinated by the details of the individual virtues. Justice and friendship hold special places in Aristotle’s virtue theory. Many contemporary discussions place justice and friendship at opposite, perhaps even conflicting poles of a spectrum. Justice seems to be very much a public, impartial, and dispassionate thing, while friendship is paradigmatically private, partial, and passionate. Yet in Aristotle’s view they are actually symbiotic. Justice is defined in terms of friendship, and good friendship is defined in terms of justice. Virtue ethics is not only about being good; it is also about becoming good. The book reconstructs Aristotle’s account of moral development. Certain character types serve as stages of moral development. Certain catalysts and mechanisms lead from one stage to the next. Explaining why some people cannot make moral progress specifies the preconditions of moral development. Finally, the book describes Aristotle’s quest to determine the ultimate goal of moral development: happiness.

Focuses on two themes in Aristotle's philosophy and their interconnection. The first is his account of the meaning (or signification) of terms such as ‘man’, ‘fish’, and ‘eclipse’, which refer to kinds of objects or processes. The second is his theory of the essences of these kinds, what we refer to in defining them, and what makes them what they are. For Aristotle, the meaning of such terms is determined by a distinctive type of efficient causal connection between the kind and thoughts with which the terms are associated. However, although these terms signify existing kinds with essences, one who has the relevant thoughts need not know either that the kind exists or that, if it exists, it has an essence of a given type. In consequence, Aristotle's account of the essence of kinds has to be grounded in his metaphysics and not in his theory of the mastery of natural kind terms. Aristotle's essences are specified in our definitions of kinds because they determine the kind's distinctive nature and necessary properties. They simultaneously ground the identity of the kind and explain its necessary, but non‐essential, features. In these respects, Aristotelian essentialism, which plays a central role in his scientific and metaphysical writings, is distinct both from twentieth‐century attempts to revive essentialism (such as are to be found in the writings of Kripke and Putnam) and from the views criticized by anti‐essentialists (such as Locke and Quine). This book aims to set out and critically evaluate Aristotle's distinctive form of essentialism.

This book presents an examination of Aristotle's accounts of voluntariness in the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics. It makes the case that these constitute a theory of moral responsibility — albeit one with important differences from modern theories. Highlights of the discussion include a reconstruction of the dialectical argument in the Eudemian Ethics II 6-9, and a demonstration that the definitions of ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ in Nicomachean Ethics III 1 are the culmination of that argument. By identifying the paradigms of voluntariness and involuntariness that Aristotle begins with and the opponents (most notably Plato) he addresses, the book explains notoriously puzzling features of the Nicomachean account — such as Aristotle's requirement that involuntary agents experience pain or regret. Other familiar features of Aristotle' account are cast in a new light. That we are responsible for the characters we develop turns out not to be a necessary condition of responsible agency. That voluntary action has its ‘origin’ in the agent and that our actions are ‘up to us to do and not to do’ — often interpreted as implying a libertarian conception of agency — turn out to be perfectly compatible with causal determinism, a point the book makes by locating these locutions in the context of Aristotle's general understanding of causality. While Aristotle does not himself face or address worries that determinism is incompatible with responsibility, his causal repertoire provides the resources for a powerful response to incompatibilist arguments. On this and other fronts Aristotle's is a view to be taken seriously by theorists of moral responsibility.

Aristotle is commonly considered the inventor of teleology, although the precise term originated in the eighteenth century. But if teleology means the use of ends or goals in natural science, then Aristotle was rather a critical innovator of teleological explanation. Teleological notions were widespread among Aristotle’s predecessors, but he rejected their conception of extrinsic causes such as intelligence or god as the primary cause for natural things. Instead, he considers nature itself as an internal principle of change and as an end, and his teleological explanations focus on what is intrinsically good for natural substances themselves. Aristotle’s philosophy was later conflated with the teleological proof for the existence of god, the anthropic cosmological principle, creationism, intelligent design, vitalism, animism, anthropocentrism, and opposition to materialism, evolution, and mechanism. But and examination of both his explicit methodology and the explanations actually offered in his scientific works (on physics, cosmology, theology, psychology, biology, and anthropology) shows that Aristotle’s aporetic approach to teleology drives a middle course through traditional oppositions between: causation and explanation, mechanism and materialism, naturalism and anthropocentrism, realism and instrumentalism.

Aristotle holds that we desire things because they appear good to us – a view still dominant in philosophy now. But what is it for something to appear good? This book argues that Aristotle understands appearances of goodness as literal quasi-perceptual appearances, operations of a psychological capacity responsible for phenomena like dreams and visualization: phantasia (‘imagination’). It then uses Aristotle’s detailed accounts of phantasia and its relation to perception and thought to gain new insight into some of the most debated areas of his philosophy: his accounts of emotions, akrasia, ethical habituation, character, deliberation, and desire. The result is a new – and controversial – interpretation of Aristotle’s moral psychology: one which greatly restricts the role of reason in ethical matters, and gives an absolutely central role to pleasure.