No one who has read the classics with any attention can fail to have been struck by certain oddities in both the Greek and Latin usage of epithets denoting colour. How really strange their application often is may have escaped general notice for three reasons: partly, it may be, because custom has staled their surprising character—phrases such as ‘the wine-dark sea’ having become, so to say, ‘household words’; partly because a natural and on the whole commendable diffidence prevents our attributing, (...) at least to the Greeks, anything that seems in the least derogatory from an artistic point of view; and partly because these instances of curious usage are scattered and so have no cumulative effect on our judgement. (shrink)

Absolutely no one still believes that every physical interactionconsists of material bodies bumping into each other. Those who have tried to work out a completely mechanistic physics have been unable to explain common phenomena like liquidity, gravitation and magnetism. In fact, there is great reason to doubt that such a physics could ever account for attractive forces in general.

Relativism, the position that things are for each as they seem to each, was first formulated in Western philosophy by Protagoras, the 5th century BC Greek orator and teacher. This book focuses on the challenge to the possibility of expert knowledge posed by Protagoras, together with responses by the three most important philosophers of the next generation, Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus. In his book Truth, Protagoras made vivid use of two provocative but imperfectly spelled out ideas. First, that everyone is (...) a ‘measure’ of the truth, and that everyone is already capable of determining how things are, since the senses are the best and most credible guides to the truth. Second, given that things appear differently to different people, there is no basis on which to decide that one appearance is true rather than the other. Plato developed these ideas into a more fully worked-out theory, which he then subjected to refutation in the Theaetetus. Aristotle argued that Protagoras’ ideas lead to skepticism in Metaphysics Book G, a chapter which reflects awareness of Plato’s reaction in the Theaetetus. Finally, Democritus incorporated modified Protagorean ideas and arguments into his theory of knowledge and perception. There have been many important recent studies of these thinkers in isolation. However, there has been no attempt to tell a single, coherent story about how Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle responded to Protagoras’ striking claim, and to its perceived implications about knowledge, perception, and truth. This book offers a new account of this important chapter in the development of Greek epistemology. (shrink)

In discussing the atomists' theory of vision modern accounts have quite neglected to take into account two sections of Alexander of Aphrodisias on this topic. Nearly identical in length and content, they contain objections to the atomist theory of vision by means of the . In form they consist of a series of questions purporting to contain atomist doctrine. Each question is followed by objections to its subject-matter. Most of the questions contain doctrine known to us already from other sources.

This study offers a new and stimulating interpretation of Theophrastus' "De sensibus, a treatise unique in content and method, as it reports and criticizes the ...

_The Sceptics_ is the first comprehensive, up-to-date treatment of Greek scepticism, from the beginnings of epistemology with Xenophanes, to the final full development of Pyrrhonism as presented in the work of Sextus Empiricus. Tracing the evolution of scepticism from 500 B.C to A.D 200, this clear and rigorous analysis presents the arguments of the Greek sceptics in their historical context and provides an in-depth study of the various strands of the sceptical tradition.

This two-part volume collects the complete fragments and most important testimonies for the leading presocratic philosophers. The Greek and Latin texts are translated on facing pages and accompanied by a brief commentary for each philosopher.

The study of colour has become familiar territory in anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form. By drawing together evidence from contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, Mark Bradley reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. He also demonstrates that the questions of what colour was and how it functioned - as well as how it could be misused and (...) misunderstood - were topics of intellectual debate in early imperial Rome. Suggesting strategies for interpreting Roman expressions of colour in Latin texts, Dr Bradley offers alternative approaches to understanding the relationship between perception and knowledge in Roman elite thought. In doing so, he highlights the fundamental role that colour performed in the realms of communication and information, and its intellectual contribution to contemporary discussions of society, politics and morality. (shrink)