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Full-Text Articles in Ancient Philosophy

Greek Bronze: Holding A Mirror To Life, Expanded Reprint From The Irish Philosophical Yearbook 2006: In Memoriam John J. Cleary 1949-2009, Babette Babich Jun 2009

Greek Bronze: Holding A Mirror To Life, Expanded Reprint From The Irish Philosophical Yearbook 2006: In Memoriam John J. Cleary 1949-2009, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

To explore the ethical and political role of life-sized bronzes in ancient Greece, as Pliny and others report between 3,000 and 73,000 such statues in a city like Rhodes, this article asks what these bronzes looked like. Using the resources of hermeneutic phenomenological reflection, as well as a review of the nature of bronze and casting techniques, it is argued that the ancient Greeks encountered such statues as images of themselves in agonistic tension in dynamic and political fashion. The Greek saw, and at the same time felt himself regarded by, the statue not as he believed the statue divine …


Mousike Techne: The Philosophical Practice Of Music In Plato, Nietzsche, And Heidegger, Babette Babich Jan 2005

Mousike Techne: The Philosophical Practice Of Music In Plato, Nietzsche, And Heidegger, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

After retracing the breadth of the definition of music in antiquity to the end of justifying the sense in which one may speak of 'the music of philosophy' as Plato's Socrates does, this essay re-reads the Platonic distinction between philosophy as the highest kind of music and performative, as heard or played sung music as a lower form. It then turns to an exploration of Nietzsche's writing style conceived on a muscial model precisely qua aphoristic and concludes with a review of Heidegger's thought as musically composed or adumbrated.


Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary Apr 2001

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

Research Resources

In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …