“A unique and intriguing point of entry into the dialogues and a variety of concerns from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics, politics, and aesthetics.” —Eric Sanday, University of Kentucky Plato’s Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato’s dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato’s work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato’s understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English. “Plato’s Animals is a strong volume of beautifully written paeans to postmodern themes found in premodern thought.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews “Shows readers of Plato that he remains significant to issues currently pursued in Continental thought and especially in relation to Derrida and Heidegger.” —Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver “Will provide fertile ground for future work in this area.” —Jill Gordon, author of Plato’s Erotic World

Despite the central role that animals play in African writing and daily life, African literature and African thinkers remain conspicuously absent from the field of animal studies. The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics demonstrates the importance of African writing to animal studies by analyzing how postcolonial African writing—including folktales, religion, philosophy, and anticolonial movements—has been mobilized to call for humane treatment of nonhuman others. Mwangi illustrates how African authors grapple with the possibility of an alternative to eating meat, and how they present postcolonial animal-consuming cultures as shifting toward an embrace of cultural and political practices that avoid the use of animals and minimize animal suffering. The Postcolonial Animal analyzes texts that imagine a world where animals are not abused or used as a source of food, clothing, or labor, and that offer instruction in how we might act responsibly and how we should relate to others—both human and nonhuman—in order to ensure a world free of oppression. The result is an equitable world where even those who are utterly foreign to us are accorded respect and where we recognize the rights of all marginalized groups.

In this book a distinguished philosopher offers a comprehensive interpretation of Plato's most controversial dialogue. Treating the Republic as a unity and focusing on the dramatic form as the presentation of the argument, Stanley Rosen challenges earlier analyses of the Republic (including the ironic reading of Leo Strauss and his disciples) and argues that the key to understanding the dialogue is to grasp the author's intention in composing it, in particular whether Plato believed that the city constructed in the Republic is possible and desirable. Rosen demonstrates that the fundamental principles underlying the just city are theoretically attractive but that the attempt to enact them in practice leads to conceptual incoherence and political disaster. The Republic, says Rosen, is a vivid illustration of the irreconcilability of philosophy and political practice.

Hendrik Lorenz presents a comprehensive study of Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of non-rational desire. They see this as something that humans share with animals, and which aims primarily at the pleasures of food, drink, and sex. Lorenz explores the cognitive resources that both philosophers make available for the explanation of such desires, and what they take rationality to add to the motivational structure of human beings. In doing so, he exposes a remarkable degree of continuity between Plato's and Aristotle's thought in this area. He also sheds fresh light, not only on both philosophers' theories of motivation, but also on how they conceive of the mind, both in itself and in relation to the body.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1862.

In On the Parts of Animals, Aristotle develops his systematic principles for biological investigation and explanation, and applies those principles to explain why the different animals have the different parts that they do. This new translation and commentary reflects the subtlety and detail of Aristotle's reasoning.

Plato's dialogue the Timaeus-Critias presents two connected accounts, that of the story of Atlantis and its defeat by ancient Athens and that of the creation of the cosmos by a divine craftsman. This book offers a unified reading of the dialogue. It tackles a wide range of interpretative and philosophical issues. Topics discussed include the function of the famous Atlantis story, the notion of cosmology as 'myth' and as 'likely', and the role of God in Platonic cosmology. Other areas commented upon are Plato's concepts of 'necessity' and 'teleology', the nature of the 'receptacle', the relationship between the soul and the body, the use of perception in cosmology, and the work's peculiar monologue form. The unifying theme is teleology: Plato's attempt to show the cosmos to be organised for the good. A central lesson which emerges is that the Timaeus is closer to Aristotle's physics than previously thought.

Along with Plato and Socrates, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) is one of the triumvirate of philosophers responsible for the establishment of Western philosophy as it exists today. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were among the first to refine philosophical thought, and Socrates is credited with devising the Socratic Method as a way to argue and debate points rationally. The Ancient Greek philosophers further stressed the importance of virtue and stoicism, advocating the improvement of one's self through constant learning and knowledge. These teachings and practices formed the foundation for philosophy and psychology as fields of study. Still, Aristotle was very much his own philosopher. Though he studied at Plato's famous academy, he was not hesitant to counter or criticize Plato's philosophical stances on certain issues. Aristotle was the most renowned Ancient Greek philosopher for nearly 2,000 years. In The History of Animals, Aristotle wrote what can be considered an ancient form of zoology, discussing the natural history of other creatures. It's a massive tome that helped serve as a base of knowledge for animals in the West moving forward.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.