This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides, the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible. With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental framework with which we conceptualise motion today.

This volume contains the text of Francis Cornford's 1931 inaugural lecture upon becoming Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the University of Cambridge.

Concepts of Space in Greek Thought studies ancient Greek theories of physical space and place, in particular those of the classical and Hellenistic period. These theories are explained primarily with reference to the general philosophical or methodological framework within which they took shape. Special attention is paid to the nature and status of the sources. Two introductory chapters deal with the interrelations between various concepts of space and with Greek spatial terminology (including case studies of the Eleatics, Democritus and Epicurus). The remaining chapters contain detailed studies on the theories of space of Plato, Aristotle, the early Peripatetics and the Stoics. The book is especially useful for historians of ancient physics, but may also be of interest to students of Aristotelian dialectic, ancient metaphysics, doxography, and medieval and early modern physics.

Provides a broad framework for engaging with ideas relevant to ancient Greek and Roman science, medicine and technology.

R. J. Hankinson traces the history of ancient Greek thinking about causation and explanation, from its earliest beginnings through more than a thousand years to the middle of the first millennium of the Christian era. He examines ways in which the Ancient Greeks dealt with questions about how and why things happen as and when they do, about the basic constitution and structure of things, about function and purpose, laws of nature, chance, coincidence, and responsibility.

An examination of ancient Greek philosophical conceptions of pleasure, which is the first book to compare them to contemporary conceptions.

On the Heavens (Greek: Περὶ οὐρανοῦ, Latin: De Caelo or De Caelo et Mundo) is Aristotle’s chief cosmological treatise: written in 350 BC it contains his astronomical theory and his ideas on the concrete workings of the terrestrial world. It should not be confused with the spurious work On the Universe (De mundo, also known as On the Cosmos).

This book 1942 examines Plato's later dialogues in terms of their dependence on pre-Socratic philosophy and other aspects of ancient thought and life.

In 1988 the philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked that, throughout his career, he had always been 'circling around' a concept of nature. Providing critical analysis of his highly original readings of Stoicism, Aristotle, and Epicurus, this book shows that it is Deleuze's interpretations of ancient Greek physics that provide the key to understanding his conception of nature. Using the works of Aristotle, Plato, Chrysippus, and Epicurus, Michael Bennett traces the development of Deleuze's key concepts of event, difference, and problem. Arguing that it is difficult, if not impossible, to fully understand these ideas without an appreciation of Deleuze's Hellenistic influences, Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics situates his commentaries in the context of contemporary scholarship on ancient Greek philosophy. Delving into the original Greek and Latin texts, this book shows that Deleuze's readings are more complex and controversial than they first appear, simultaneously advancing Deleuze as a new voice in interpretations of ancient Greek philosophy. Generating both new critical analyses of Deleuze and a new appreciation for his classical erudition, Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in ancient Greek philosophy, Deleuze's philosophical project or his unique methodology in the history of philosophy.

In this new series leading classical scholars interpret afresh the ancient world for the modern reader. They stress those questions and institutions that most concern us today: the interplay between economic factors and politics, the struggle to find a balance between the state and the individual, the role of the intellectual. Most of the books in this series centre on the great focal periods, those of great literature and art: the world of Herodotus and the tragedians, Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Caesar, Virgil, Horace and Tacitus. This study traces Greek science through the work of the Pythagoreans, the Presocratic natural philosophers, the Hippocratic writers, Plato, the fourth-century B.C. astronomers and Aristotle. G. E. R. Lloyd also investigates the relationships between science and philosophy and science and medicine; he discusses the social and economic setting of Greek science; he analyses the motives and incentives of the different groups of writers.