Mozart's skull -- The case of the purloined partitur -- A tale of two authenticities -- Ancient authenticities -- Operatic authenticity -- Messiah's message -- Is nothing sacred? -- Sound in sound -- Music, science, and semantics -- Authorial intention and the pure musical parameters -- Leonard Meyer's sonata.

A fascinating portrait of the Pythagorean tradition, including a substantial account of the Neo-Pythagorean revival, and ending with Johannes Kepler on the threshold of modernism.

David Blank presents a new translation into clear modern English of a key treatise by one of the greatest of ancient philosophers, together with the first ever commentary on this work. Sextus Empiricus' Against the Grammarians is a polemical attack on ancient Greek ideas about grammar, and provides one of the best examples of sustained Sceptical reasoning.

A la fin du IVe siecle av. J.C. s'opere un evenement musical et philosophique sans precedent en Grece : un disciple d'Aristote, Aristoxene de Tarente, refute pour la premiere fois les theses musicales, jusqu'alors hegemoniques, des Pythagoriciens, dans son Traite d'Harmonique. Comme s'effectue cette revolution, qui donne naissance a une science musicale autonome, delivree du joug des mathematiques, dotee de principes et d'une methode a elle propres? Quelle etait la structure originelle de l'ouvrage, que la tradition manuscrite a denaturee? En (...) quoi Aristoxene s'appuie-t-il sur l'acquis aristotelicien, - qu'il depasse ici, lui qui ajoute au corpus des sciences aristoteliciennes une discipline que le Lycee n'avait fait qu'effleurer? La musique sera aristotelicienne ou ne sera pas : telle est la lecon d'Aristoxene ; elle sera une science de la nature et du mouvement, autant dire une Physique. C'est ce que montre cette etude, a la croisee de la philosophie et de la musique, a la recherche d'un texte lacunaire ou altere, encore peu connu des hellenistes. (shrink)

The Cyrenaic school was a fourth-century BC philosophical movement, related both to the Socratic tradition and to Greek Scepticism. In ethics, Cyrenaic hedonism can be seen as one of many attempts made by the associates of Socrates and their followers to endorse his ethical outlook and to explore the implications of his method. In epistemology, there are close philosophical links between the Cyrenaics and the Sceptics, both Pyrrhonists and Academics. There are further links with modern philosophy as well, for the (...) Cyrenaics introduced a form of subjectivism which in some ways preannounces Cartesian views, endorsed by Malebranche and Hume and developed by Kant. This 1998 book reconstructs Cyrenaic epistemology, explains how it depends on Cyrenaic hedonism, locates it in the context of ancient debates, and discusses its connections with modern and contemporary epistemological positions. (shrink)

This book is the recent addition to the Clarendon Later Ancient Philosophers series, and its greatest significance lies in its being the sole commentary on Against the Grammarians. It also provides the only English alternative to Bury’s 1949 translation in the Loeb edition. As such, it is a clear and readable translation, although, of course, there is no Greek text provided.

In this paper, we examine Sextus Empiricus' treatise Against the geometers . We first set this treatise in the overall context of the sceptic's polemics against the liberal arts. After a discussion of Sextus' attitude to the quadrivium , we discuss the structure, the sources and the target of the Against the geometers . It appears that Euclid is not Sextus' source, and neither he, nor the professional geometers, seem to be Sextus' main targets. Of course, Sextus never really makes (...) clear his precise target, but his attacks are rather directed against geometry as a means of modelling the physical world, thus ruining the support geometry was intended to bring to the physical part of dogmatic philosophy. (shrink)