Authors and Authorities in Ancient Philosophy

Description

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is often characterised in terms of competitive individuals debating orally with one another in public arenas. But it also developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge some other particular philosopher or group of philosophers as an authority and offer to that authority explicit intellectual allegiance. This is most obvious in the development after the classical period of the philosophical 'schools' with agreed founders and, most importantly, canonical founding texts. There also developed a tradition of commentary, interpretation, and discussion of texts which itself became a mode of philosophical debate. As time went on, the weight of a growing tradition of reading and appealing to a certain corpus of foundational texts began to shape how later antiquity viewed its philosophical past and also how philosophical debate and inquiry was conducted. In this book leading scholars explore aspects of these important developments.

Jenny Bryan is Lecturer in Classical Philosophy in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Likeness and Likelihood in the Presocratics and Plato (Cambridge, 2011). Robert Wardy is a Reader in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of The Chain of Change: A Study of Aristotle's Physics VII (Cambridge, 1990), The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and their Successors (1998), Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation (Cambridge, 2000), and Doing Greek Philosophy (2005). James Warren is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Epicurus and Democritean Ethics: An Archaeology of Ataraxia (Cambridge, 2002), Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics (2004), Presocratics (2007) and The Pleasures of Reason in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Hedonists (Cambridge, 2014) alongside articles on a range of topics in ancient philosophy, including on various topics in Epicureanism and ancient scepticism. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism (Cambridge, 2009) and, with Frisbee Sheffield: The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy (2013).