Antiochus and Peripatetic Ethics

Description

This book offers a fresh analysis of the account of Peripatetic ethics in Cicero's On Ends 5, which goes back to the first-century BCE philosopher Antiochus of Ascalon. Georgia Tsouni challenges previous characterisations of Antiochus' philosophical project as 'eclectic' and shows how his reconstruction of the ethics of the 'Old Academy' demonstrates a careful attempt to update the ancient heritage, and predominantly the views of Aristotle and the Peripatos, in the light of contemporary Stoic-led debates. This results in both a hermeneutically complex and a philosophically exciting reading of the old tradition. A case in point is the way Antiochus grounds the 'Old Academic' conception of the happy life in natural appropriation (oikeiosis), thus offering a naturalistic version of Aristotelian ethics.

Georgia Tsouni is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer (Assistentin) to the Chair of History of Philosophy at the Universitat Bern, Switzerland. She has published extensively on Aristotelian/Peripatetic and Stoic ethical and political philosophy, including a new edition and translation of Didymus' Summary of Peripatetic Ethics, which survives in the Byzantine anthology of Stobaeus.

'All in all, this book is a fine piece of scholarship, providing as it does an accurate analysis of Antiochus' distinctive position in ethics, and specifically his reclaiming oikeiosis-theory for Aristotle and the Peripatetic tradition.' John Dillon, Bryn Mawr Classical Review