Author: D. H. Fowler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198502586
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 490
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Book Description
This is an updated edition of a groundbreaking examination of early Greek mathematics. The author has revised parts of the text, updated the bibliography, and added a new Appendix where he takes a strong position in the continuing debate about the nature and range of classical mathematics. The first part presents several new interpretations of the idea of ratio in early Greek mathematics and illustrates these in detailed discussions of several texts. Part Two then focuses on the sources themselves and provides a critical look at our knowledge of Plato's Academy during his lifetime, at the source of our text of Euclid's Elements, and at our understanding of early Greek mathematics. The final part contrasts some of the evidence from early and late antiquity and then gives a historical account, beginning in the seventeenth century, of the modern theory of continued fractions, which underlies our reconstruction of early Greek mathematics.
Author: D. H. Fowler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442
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Book Description
This book presents a reinterpretation of early Greek mathematics, one of the most tantalizing intellectual subjects of the last 2,000 years. The first part offers several new interpretations of the idea of ratio in early Greek mathematics and illustrates them in detailed discussion of several texts. Part Two discusses the historical context of the subject--what we know of Plato's academy during his lifetime, the origin of our text of Euclid's Elements, and what we know of early Greek numerical practice. The book finishes with an account of the theory of continued fractions and its history since the 17th century.
Author: Paul Kalligas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426441
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
A comprehensive, interdisciplinary history of Plato's Academy, the most prominent philosophical school in antiquity, which lasted for about 300 years. Also includes the first complete annotated translation in English of Philodemus' History of the Academy, preserved on a papyrus from Herculaneum.
Author: John Dillon
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 9780191519253
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
The Heirs of Plato is the first book exclusively devoted to an in-depth study of the various directions in philosophy taken by Plato's followers in the first seventy years or so following his death in 347 BC. - the period generally known as 'The Old Academy'. Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Polemon, the three successive heads of the Academy in this period, though personally devoted to the memory of Plato, were independent philosophers in their own right, and felt free to develop his heritage in individual directions. This is also true of other personalities attached to the school, such as Philippus of Opus, Heraclides of Pontus, and Crantor of Soli. After an introductory chapter on the school itself, and a summary of Plato's philosophical heritage, John Dillon devotes a chapter to each of the school heads, and another to the other chief characters, exploring both what holds them together and what sets them apart. There is a final short chapter devoted to the turn away from dogmatism to scepticism under Arcesilaus in the 270s, and some reflections on the intellectual debt of Stoicism to the thought of Polemon, in particular. Dillon's clear and accessible book fills a significant gap in our understanding of Plato's immediate philosophical influence, and will be of great value to scholars and historians of ancient philosophy.
Author: Iamblichus
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 9780933999725
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 140
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Book Description
Attributed to Iamblichus (4th cent. AD), The Theology of Arithmetic is about the mystical, mathmatical and cosmological symbolism of the first ten numbers. Its is the longest work on number symbolism to survive from the ancient world, and Robin Waterfield's careful translation contains helpful footnotes, an extensive glossary, bibliography, and foreword by Keith Critchlow. Never before translated from ancient Greek, this important sourcework is indispensable for anyone intereted in Pythagorean though, Neoplatonism, or the symbolism of Numbers.
Author: M. F. Burnyeat
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521750725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393
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Book Description
The first of two volumes collecting the published work of one of the greatest living ancient philosophers, M.F. Burnyeat.
Author: Phillip Sidney Horky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190465700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Was Plato a Pythagorean? Plato's students and earliest critics thought so, but scholars since the nineteenth century have been more skeptical. With this probing study, Phillip Sidney Horky argues that a specific type of Pythagorean philosophy, called mathematical Pythagoreanism, exercised a decisive influence on fundamental aspects of Plato's philosophy. The progenitor of mathematical Pythagoreanism was the infamous Pythagorean heretic and political revolutionary Hippasus of Metapontum, a student of Pythagoras who is credited with experiments in harmonics that led to innovations in mathematics. The innovations of Hippasus and other mathematical Pythagoreans, including Empedocles of Agrigentum, Epicharmus of Syracuse, Philolaus of Croton, and Archytas of Tarentum, presented philosophers like Plato with novel ways to reconcile empirical knowledge with abstract mathematical theories. Plato and Pythagoreanism demonstrates how mathematical Pythagoreanism established many of the fundamental philosophical questions Plato dealt with in his central dialogues, including Cratylus, Phaedo, Republic, Timaeus, and Philebus. In the process, it also illuminates the historical significance of the mathematical Pythagoreans, a group whose influence on the development of philosophical and scientific methods has been obscured since late antiquity. The picture that results is one in which Plato inherits mathematical Pythagorean method only to transform it into a powerful philosophical argument about the essential relationships between the cosmos and the human being.
Author: Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
ISBN: 1609253949
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 374
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Book Description
This anthology, the largest collection of Pythagorean writings ever to appear in English, contains the four ancient biographies of Pythagoras and over 25 Pythagorean and Neopythagorean writings from the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The material of this book is indispensable for anyone who wishes to understand the real spiritual roots of Western civilization.
Author: Arthur M. Field
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140085976X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Founded by Cosimo de' Medici in the early 1460s, the Platonic Academy shaped the literary and artistic culture of Florence in the later Renaissance and influenced science, religion, art, and literature throughout Europe in the early modern period. This major study of the Academy's beginnings presents a fresh view of the intellectual and cultural life of Florence from the Peace of Lodi of 1454 to the death of Cosimo a decade later. Challenging commonly held assumptions about the period, Arthur Field insists that the Academy was not a hothouse plant, grown and kept alive by the Medici in the splendid isolation of their villas and courts. Rather, Florentine intellectuals seized on the Platonic truths and propagated them in the heart of Florence, creating for the Medici and other Florentines a new ideology. Based largely on new or neglected manuscript sources, this book includes discussions of the earliest works by the head of the Academy, Marsilio Ficino, and the first public, Platonizing lectures of the humanist and poet Cristoforo Landino. The author also examines the contributions both of religious orders and of the Byzantines to the Neoplatonic revival. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Mary Gow
Publisher: Enslow Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 9780766031197
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132
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Book Description
Follows the life and teachings of the philosopher Plato, one of the world's greatest thinkers, who in his writings taught us to question what we think we know.
