In this special issue, our goal is to ... show that the distinguished history of philosophical reflection on attention, insofar as the Western tradition is concerned, has at least some of its roots in Classical Greek and Roman philosophy. This is offered as a partial corrective to historical overviews of the Western discourse, which rarely reach further back than René Descartes. Furthermore, we wish to emphasize that ancient treatments of attention are especially concerned with its role in the context of (...) ethics and human agency. Even when they take their departure from an analysis of selective perceptual attention, their intention is not only to account for this phenomenon as part of a naturalistic science of the mind but also to motivate the view that the capacity to focus or to shift our attention is indispensable to human flourishing. Moral training is to a large extent conceived of as a matter of acquiring and sustaining the mental strength required for maintaining an attentive state of mind while resisting the interference of competing stimuli. -/- TABLE OF CONTENTS Pauliina Remes: From Natural Tendencies to Perceptual Interests and Motivation in Plato’s Timaeus Voula Tsouna: The Epicurean Notion of epibolê Katerina Ierodiakonou: The Stoic Provenance of the Notion of Prosochê Charles Brittain: A Stoic Ethics for Attention (Seneca Letter 56) Lenka Karfíková: Attention in Augustine. (shrink)

Late Stoics and, in particular, Epictetus made ample use of the notion of attention, which they understood as the soul’s vigilant focus on sense impressions and on the Stoic principles. Attention, in their view, was meant to assist our self-examination and lead to ethical progress. It was thus regarded as a Stoic good and a constitutive part of eudaimonia. Early Stoics did not seem to have invoked such a notion, whereas the Neoplatonists appropriated it into their psychology by postulating the (...) soul’s attentive part, which they introduced to explain both perceptual and intellectual attention as well as self-awareness. (shrink)

In NE III.10, 1118b1–3, Aristotle says that the “most shared of the senses is that according to which intemperance [comes about], and it would seem justifiably to be shameful, because it inheres [in us] not insofar as we are human beings, but insofar as we are animals”. This statement appears to describe the sense of touch as shameful. This may seem like a strange position for Aristotle to hold, since elsewhere he describes human touch as the most accurate among animal (...) species, which corresponds to our superior intelligence, and as necessary for animal life. In this paper, I argue that Maimonides nevertheless succeeds in showing that Aristotle has a strong theoretical reason for maintaining that the sense of touch is shameful. Maimonides shows that, based on principles of Aristotelian psychology, human touch is indeed shameful because it obstructs intellectual activity. (shrink)