Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1474412092 ISBN 13: 9781474412094

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2017

Synopsis

18 essays breathe new life into the classic problems of ancient metaphysics using contemporary continental materialisms and realisms

In this volume, leading philosophers address the varied, volatile and novel encounters between contemporary and antique thought. They reconceive and redeploy the problems of ancient metaphysics: one and the many, the potential and the actual, the material and immaterial, the divine and the world itself. Alongside these essays are three original and previously unpublished translations of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Aubenque and Barbara Cassin.

Contents:

Introduction

1. A Thousand Antiquities - Abraham Jacob Greenstine & Ryan J. Johnson

I. Plato

2. The Muses and Philosophy: Elements for a History of the "Pseudos" [1991] - Barbara Cassin, trans. Sam Galson
3. Odysseus' Changed Soul: A contemporary reading of the Myth of Er - Catherine Malabou
4. Plato's Protagoras: The Authority of Beginning an Education - Daniel Price
5. Univocity, Duality, and Ideal Genesis: Deleuze and Plato - John Bova & Paul Livingston
6. "Adjust your dread": Badiou's Metaphysical Disposition - A.J. Bartlett

II. Aristotle

7. Science Regained [1962] - Pierre Aubenque, trans. Clayton Shoppa
8. Aristotle's Organism, and Ours - Emanuela Bianchi
9. Does it Matter? Material Nature and Vital Heat in Aristotle's Biology -Adriel M. Trott
10. The Modern Aristotle: Michael Polanyi's Search for Truth against Nihilism -David Hoinski & Ron Polansky 
11. Diverging Ways: The Trajectories of Ontology in Parmenides, Aristotle, and Deleuze - Abraham Jacob Greenstine
12. Object and Οὐσία: Harman and Aristotle on the Being of Things - Eric Salem

III. Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, and Neo-Platonists

13. Lucretius and Naturalism [1961] - Gilles Deleuze, trans. Jared Bly

14. On Causality and Law in Lucretius and Contemporary Cosmology - David Webb
15. On the Surface: The Deleuze-Stoicism Encounter - Ryan J. Johnson
16. Contingency and Skepticism in Agamben's Thought - Gert-Jan van der Heiden
17. Plotinus' "Reverse" Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation Imagery - Gina Zavota

IV. Postscript 
18. From Metaphysics to Ethics (with Bernard Stiegler, Heraclitus, andAristotle) - Kurt Lampe

About this title

About the Author

Abraham Jacob Greenstine is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University and the Institüt fur Philosophie at the Universität Kassel.

Ryan Johnson is Associate Professor of Philosophy Elon University and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. Ryan is author of two monographs — Deleuze, A Stoic (Edinburgh UP, 2020) and The Deleuze Lucretius Encounter (Edinburgh UP, 2016) and several edited volumes, including Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh UP, 2017) and Nietzsche & Epicurus (Bloomsbury 2020). He recently finished a co-written (with Biko Mandela Gray) monograph, Phenomenology of Black Spirit (forthcoming with Edinburgh UP), which stages a dialectical parallelism between Hegel's magnum opus and Black thinkers from Frederick Douglass to Angela Davis. In between, Ryan is writing a fourth book, Three American Hegels, which explores the reception of Hegelianism by three seminal yet neglected American philosophers: Henry C. Brokmeyer, the forgotten first English translator of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik; Horace Williams, the first philosophy professor at the first U.S. public university, UNC-Chapel Hill; and John William Miller, the influential teacher of the metaphysics of democratic acts. Ryan is also completing a co-editing another volume entitled Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice (Edinburgh University Press). Finally, Ryan is bringing to completion several articles on themes such as Hegel and lynching, Nietzsche and James Baldwin, and historical exclusion in philosophy and musicology, as well as translating a book of French philosophy by Émile Bréhier and serving as the co-editor of a journal issue of Studies in Pedagogy on the theme of "Teaching Philosophy as a Way of Life."

From the Back Cover

This volume is an ambitious experiment in doing the history of ancient philosophy as the practice of thought on the rich terrain of contemporary metaphysics. Bringing together an impressive international roster of rising stars and established scholars, it stakes out Greek philosophy as a vital resource for thinking beyond the parameters of the present. It should quickly become a classic.
- Brooke Holmes, Princeton University

No philosophy can stand the test of time without being measured against the ancient classics of our discipline. In Greenstine and Johnson's new collection, the giants of Greece take the stage with some of our most prominent contemporary thinkers, with key appearances from figures as early as Parmenides and as late as Agamben, Malabou, Stiegler, and Speculative Realism. I found myself quickly engrossed in these essays, and was sorry to reach the end of the volume.
- Graham Harman, Southern California Institute of Architecture (on leave from the American University in Cairo)

Edition details

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1474412092
• ISBN 13: 9781474412094
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Greenstine Abraham Jacob, Johnson Ryan J.