Ancient Models of Mind: Studies in Human and Divine Rationality

How does god think? How, ideally, does a human mind function? Must a gap remain between these two paradigms of rationality? Such questions exercised the greatest ancient philosophers, including those featured in this book: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Plotinus. This volume encompasses a series of studies by leading scholars, revisiting key moments of ancient philosophy and highlighting the theme of human and divine rationality in both moral and cognitive psychology. The volume is a tribute to A.A. Long, and reflects multiple themes of his own work.

Andrea Wilson Nightingale is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is the author of Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (1995), Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context (2004), and 'Once out of Nature': Augustine on Time and the Body (forthcoming). She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, an ACLS Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center. She has been a Stanford Fellow (2004–6) and is presently serving as a Harvard Senior Fellow of the Hellenic Center (2009–13).

David Sedley is Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of Christ's College. He is the author of The Hellenistic Philosophers (1987, with A. A. Long), Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998), Plato's Cratylus (2003), The Midwife of Platonism. Text and Subtext in Plato's Theaetetus (2004), and Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity (2007), based on his 2004 Sather Lectures. He edited Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy from 1998 to 2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.