In this volume of 18 essays, leading philosophers address the varied, volatile and novel encounters between contemporary and antique thought. They reconceive and redeploy the problems of ancient metaphysics: one and the many, the potential and the actual, the material and immaterial, the divine and the world itself. Alongside these essays are three original and previously unpublished translations of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Aubenque and Barbara Cassin.

Like the ancient inquiries into the nature of things, contemporary continental realism and materialism, from Deleuze to the Speculative Realists, embraces a commitment to investigate beings, without subordinating it to analyses of language, consciousness, texts or the social. This pensée brute, traditionally known as metaphysics, dares to question the one and the many, the potential and the actual, the material and immaterial and the world itself. This apparent kinship is not merely thematic, since contemporary thinkers explicitly and repeatedly return to the texts and figures of the Greco-Roman world. In this volume, leading philosophers address these varied, volatile, and novel interactions and themselves contribute to reconceiving and redeploying the problems of ancient metaphysics. Alongside this are 2 original and previously unpublished translations of essays by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Aubenque.

This volume explores Nietzsche's decisive encounter with the ancient philosopher, Epicurus. The collected essays examine many previously unexplored and underappreciated convergences, and investigate how essential Epicurus was to Nietzsche's philosophical project through two interrelated overarching themes: nature and ethics. Uncovering the nature of Nietzsche's reception of, relation to, and movement beyond Epicurus, contributors provide insights into the relationship between suffering, health and philosophy in both thinkers; Nietzsche's stylistic analysis of Epicurus; the ethics of self-cultivation in Nietzsche's Epicureanism; practices of eating and thinking in Nietzsche and Epicurus; the temporality of Epicurean pleasure; the practice of the gay science, and Epicureanism and politics. The essays also provide creative comparisons with the Stoics, Hobbes, Mill, Guyau, Buddhism, and more. Nietzsche and Epicurus offers original and illuminating perspectives on Nietzsche's relation to the Hellenistic thinker, in whom Nietzsche saw the embodiment of the practice of philosophy as an art of existing.

Ryan Johnson reveals that Deleuze's provocative reading of ancient Stoicism produced many of his most singular and powerful ideas. Including previously untranslated French Stoic scholarship, Johnson unearths new possibilities for bridging contemporary and ancient philosophy.

More than any other 20th-century philosopher, Deleuze considers himself an apprentice to the history of philosophy. But scholarship has ignored one of the more formative influences on Deleuze: Lucretian atomism. Deleuze's encounter with Lucretius sparked a way of thinking that resonates throughout all his writings: from immanent ontology to affirmative ethics, from dynamic materialism to the generation of thought itself. Filling a significant gap in Deleuze Studies, Ryan J. Johnson tells the story of the Deleuze-Lucretius encounter that begins and ends with a powerful claim: Lucretian atomism produced Deleuzianism.

“The major American philosopher . . . makes us want to re-read the Platonic text with fascination. And that is but its grandest gift.” —Daniel Guerriere, professor emeritus of philosophy at California State University, Long Beach In Chorology, John Sallis takes up one of the most enigmatic discourses in the history of philosophy. Plato’s discourse on the chora—the chorology—forms the pivotal moment in the Timaeus. The implications of the chorology are momentous and communicate with many of the most decisive issues in contemporary philosophical discussions. “This excellent work . . . deserves the serious consideration of all who are interested in contemporary philosophy as well as those who concern themselves with ancient philosophy, especially Plato.” —Review of Metaphysics

This collection of essays engages with several topics in Aristotle’s philosophy of mind, some well-known and hotly debated, some new and yet to be explored. The contributors analyze Aristotle’s arguments and present their cases in ways that invite contemporary philosophers of mind to consider the potentials—and pitfalls—of an Aristotelian philosophy of mind. The volume brings together an international group of renowned Aristotelian scholars as well as rising stars to cover five main themes: method in the philosophy of mind, sense perception, mental representation, intellect, and the metaphysics of mind. The papers collected in this volume, with their choice of topics and quality of exposition, show why Aristotle is a philosopher of mind to be studied and reckoned with in contemporary discussions. Encounters with Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of ancient philosophy and philosophy of mind.

Continental philosophers and contemporary artists transform the classics into living practices.

​This book, itself a study of two books on the Baroque, proposes a pair of related theses: one interpretive, the other argumentative. The first, enveloped in the second, holds that the significance of allegory Gilles Deleuze recognized in Walter Benjamin’s 1928 monograph on seventeenth century drama is itself attested in key aspects of Kantian, Leibnizian, and Platonic philosophy (to wit, in the respective forms by which thought is phrased, predicated, and proposed).The second, enveloping the first, is a literalist claim about predication itself – namely, that the aesthetics of agitation and hallucination so emblematic of the Baroque sensibility (as attested in its emblem-books) adduces an avowedly metaphysical ‘naturalism’ in which thought is replete with predicates. Oriented by Barbara Cassin’s development of the concerted sense in which homonyms are critically distinct from synonyms, the philosophical claim here is that ‘the Baroque’ names the intervallic [διαστηματική] relation that thought establishes between things. On this account, any subject finds its unity in a concerted state of disquiet – a state-rempli in which, phenomenologically speaking, experience comprises as much seeing as reading (as St Jerome encountering Origen’s Hexapla).

Helen Palmer examines the Russian formalist concept of defamiliarisation from a contemporary critical perspective, bringing together new materialist feminisms, experimental linguistic formalism and queer theory.She explores how we might radically restructure this gesture of 'making-strange' to create a dialogue with the affirmations of 'deviant', 'errant', 'alternative' and 'multiple' modes of being which have become synonymous with queer theory. Queer theory harnesses the creative potential of indeterminacy in order to celebrate and affirm infinite dimensions of sexuality and gender, creating space for all human beings to express themselves without the classification or judgement of prescriptive terminologies. Linguistic at its source, but going beyond this limit just like defamiliarisation, the liberating force of queer theory is derived from the removal of terminological boundaries. Palmer asks what a 21st-century queer defamiliarisation might look like and examines the extent to which these affirmative or emancipatory discourses escape the paradoxes of normativity or historicisation.