Mantissa: Essays in Ancient Philosophy IV [Hardcover]

Mantissais the fourth (and last) volume of Jonathan Barnes' collected essays on ancient philosophy. It contains twenty-three papers on a diverse range of subjects, from the size of the sun to Plato and Aristotle in Victorian Oxford. One of the essays is new, and the others are all retouched or revised; six are newly translated into English.This is the fourth (and last) volume of Jonathan Barnes' collected essays on ancient philosophy. As its title suggests, the twenty-three papers which it contains cover a wide range of topics. The first paper discusses the size of the sun, and the last looks at Plato and Aristotle in Victorian Oxford. In between come pieces on--inter alia--the theory of just war and the definition of comedy, the nature of the soul according to Plato and Aristotle and Zeno and Tertullian, atheism of Protagoras, Timaeus the Sophist (and hisPlatonic Lexicon) and the early history of Aristotle's writings, Nietzsche on Diogenes Laertius, the first Christian novel ...One of the pieces is new. The others have all been retouched, and some of them revised. Half a dozen were written in French and have been translated into English. The volume is kitted out with a bibliography and with two rather good indexes.The papers are, in parts at least, well written, and some of them are mildly diverting: no-one with a nose for ancient philosophy will sniff at them.Preface1. The size of the sun in antiquity2. Teaching virtue3. Aristotle and political liberty4. Cicero and the just war5. Is rhetoric an art?6. An Aristotelian definition of comedy?7. Plato's three-part soul8. Aristotle's concept of mind9. 'Zeno says that the soul is a body ...'10. Anima Christiana11. Sensibility and the Stoics12. Protagoras the atheist?13. Ancient Plato14. The Platonic lexicon of Timaeus the Sophist15. Antiochus of Ascalon16. Roman Aristotle17. The catalogue of Chrysippus' logical works18. Cicero's de fato and a Greek source19. Diogenes Laertius on Pyrrhonism20. NlX