Contemporary Encounters With Ancient Metaphysics

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 Alongside these essays are three original and previously unpublished translations of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Aubenque and Barbara Cassin.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 Alongside this are 2 original and previously unpublished translations of essays by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Aubenque.

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 Alongside these essays are three original and previously unpublished translations of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Aubenque and Barbara Cassin.

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.

Deleuze dramatises the story of ancient philosophy as a rivalry of four types of thinkers: the subverting pre-Socratics, the ascending Plato, the interiorising Aristotle and the perverting Stoics. Deleuze assigns the Stoics a privileged place because they introduced a new orientation for thinking and living that turns the whole story of philosophy inside out. Ryan Johnson reveals Deleuze's provocative reading of ancient Stoicism produced many of his most singular and powerful ideas. For Deleuze, the Stoics were innovators of an entire system of philosophy which they structured like an egg. Johnson structures his book in this way: Part I looks at physics (the yolk), Part II is logic (the shell) and Part III covers ethics (the albumen). 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.

This is the first English translation of a compelling and highly original reading of Epicurus by Jean-Marie Guyau. This book has long been recognized as one of the best and most concerted attempts to explore one of the most important, yet controversial ancient philosophers whose thought, Guyau claims, remains vital to modern and contemporary culture. Throughout the text we are introduced to the origins of the philosophy of pleasure in Ancient Greece, with Guyau clearly demonstrating how this idea persists through the history of philosophy and how it is an essential trait in the Western tradition. With an introduction by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Federico Testa, which contextualizes the work of Guyau within the canon of French thought, and notes on both further reading and on Epicurean scholarship more generally, this translation also acts as a critical introduction to the philosophy of Guyau and Epicurus.

Adriel M. Trott challenges the wholesale acceptance of the view that nature operates in Aristotle's work on a craft model, which implies that matter has no power of its own. Instead, she argues for a robust sense of matter in Aristotle in response to feminist critiques. She finds resources for thinking the female's contribution - and the female - on its own terms and not as the contrary to form, or the male.