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What is the good life for a human being? Aristotle's exploration of this question in the Nicomachean Ethics has established it as a founding work of Western philosophy, though its teachings have long puzzled readers and provoked spirited discussion. Adopting a new point of view, this book deciphers some of the most perplexing conundrums of this influential treatise by approaching it as Aristotle's dialogue with the Platonic Socrates. Tracing the argument of the Ethics as it emerges through that approach, the book's reading shows how Aristotle represents ethical virtue from the perspective of those devoted to it, while standing back to examine its assumptions and implications.

“Man is a political animal,” Aristotle asserts near the beginning of the Politics. In this reading of one of the foundational texts of political philosophy, this book traces the surprising implications of Aristotle's claim and explores the treatise's relevance to ongoing political concerns. Often dismissed as overly grounded in Aristotle's specific moment in time, the Politics in fact challenges contemporary understandings of human action and allows us to better see ourselves today. Close examination of Aristotle's treatise, the book finds, reveals a significant, practical role for philosophy to play in politics. Philosophers present arguments about issues—such as the right and the good, justice and modes of governance, the relation between the good person and the good citizen, and the character of a good life—that politicians must then make appealing to their fellow citizens. This book yields new ways of thinking about ethics and politics, both ancient and modern.

What is the good life? Posing this question today would likely elicit very different answers. Some might say that the good life means doing good—improving one's community and the lives of others. Others might respond that it means doing well—cultivating one's own abilities in a meaningful way. But for Aristotle, these two distinct ideas—doing good and doing well—were one and the same, and could be realized in a single life. This book examines how we can draw this conclusion from Aristotle's works, while also studying how this conception of the good life relates to contemporary ideas of morality. The key to Aristotle's views on ethics, the author argues, lies in the Metaphysics or, more specifically, in his thoughts on activities, actions, and capacities. He shows that, for Aristotle, it is only possible to be truly active when acting for the common good, and it is only possible to be truly happy when active to the extent of one's own powers. But does this mean we should aspire to Aristotle's impossibly demanding vision of the good life? In a word, no. The author stresses the enormous gap between life in Aristotle's time and ours.

While Aristotle's writings on biology are considered to be among his best, the comments he makes about females in these works are widely regarded as the nadir of his philosophical oeuvre. Among many claims, Aristotle is said to have declared that females contribute nothing substantial to generation; that they have fewer teeth than males; that they are less spirited than males; and that woman are analogous to eunuchs. This book aims not to defend Aristotle's ideas about females but to defend Aristotle against the common charge that his writings on female species were motivated by ideological bias. The author points out that the tools of modern science and scientific experimentation were not available to the Greeks during Aristotle's time and that, consequently, Aristotle had relied not only on empirical observations when writing about living organisms but also on a fair amount of speculation. Further, he argues that Aristotle's remarks about females in his biological writings did not tend to promote the inferior status of ancient Greek women.

This second Plato book of mine treats the three dialogues, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium, in which Plato showed how a young Socrates became the mature philosopher of all the dialogues. Plato structured these three dialogues to contain events of recovery: each reaches back from a later time to an earlier time in order to recover a stage in Socrates’ becoming, all three stages occurring before what Plato made the chronologically first dialogue, the Protagoras, which he set in 434 when Socrates was 35. Of the three stages that Plato isolated, Socrates himself reports how he began with natural philosophy and then turned to a “second sailing” which led him to transcendent forms (Phaedo), and Socrates reports the final stage which peaks in a comprehensive ontology (Symposium). Understanding the first and third stages depends on the Parmenides, the pivotal dialogue which Socrates does not report. It recovers an event of unlearning that has profound implications for understanding the mature Socrates: old Parmenides showed nineteen year old Socrates that transcendent forms are rationally untenable. The Parmenides contains the implicit challenge to understand how Socrates can still use transcendent forms in his maturity as in the Phaedo and Republic. The Parmenides also contains a “gymnastic” of logical exercises through which alone Socrates can gain the true understanding of forms, the second and indispensable stage: understanding understanding itself. In this installment in the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche, I show how Socrates’ epistemology and ontology are akin to Nietzsche’s.

Plotinus's images are not merely 'ornamental' but constitute spiritual exercises. We need to understand Plotinus's myths and metaphors in the cultural and philosophical context of his time if we are to understand what those exercises amount to, and so to understand, as it were from within, where his philosophy leads. What is it, for example, ‘to think away the spatiality’ (or the bulk) of material things? What state of consciousness is being recommended when Plotinus speaks of love, or drunkenness, or nakedness? What sort of stars or star-like consciousness is intended when he declares that we once were stars, or are eternally? What does it mean to say that the soul goes round God, like the stars, or that we should expect transformed ‘spherical’ bodies? In what sense can Plotinus hope to ask the Muses – or Time itself – how Time came to be? If we are to ‘bring the god in us back to the god in the all’ (as Plotinus’s deathbed instruction reads) how do we even get started without knowing what those gods may be? This is itself an exercise in what has recently become a theme even within mainstream philosophy - that Philosophy was always considered 'a way of life'. My aim is both scholarly - in checking his writings against other contemporary writings, so far as that is possible - and open to psychotherapeutic discussions from within other philosophical and psychiatric traditions.

The common view of language in the West is that it represents the world. Although it is widely recognized that this concept of language originates with Plato, until now, it has not been established how Plato invented this now ubiquitous understanding. Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory illuminates how, over the course of several dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Euthydemus, Republic, and Sophist), Plato creates the concept of language-as-statement in order to overpower the political influence of the sophists. This was the original determination that language could be either false or true, where the distinction between false and true rests on a deeper distinction between seeming and being, or appearance and reality—crucial determinations for Plato’s defeat of the sophists’ false speech. This innovation was made possible through common methods of rhetorical theory; namely, the analysis of written texts and the development of theoretical, meta-discursive vocabulary about discourse, or language about language. Through the linguistic analyses offered in the Republic, the Cratylus, and the Sophist, Plato develops his rhetorical taxonomy of mimêsis, onoma, rhêma, and logos—the terminological foundation for his rhetorical theory of the statement, and of statements being either true or false. In demonstrating how Plato invented what Michel Foucault famously called the “sovereignty of the signifier” this book overturns the common assumption that Plato was rhetoric’s most hostile critic. On the contrary, his rhetorical theory makes it possible for him to establish the sovereignty of the signifier over and against the sovereignty of the sophists.

On the surface, stoicism and emotion seem like contradictory terms. Yet the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were deeply interested in the emotions, which they understood as complex judgments about what we regard as valuable in our surroundings. This book shows that they did not simply advocate an across-the-board suppression of feeling, as stoicism implies in today's English, but instead conducted a searching examination of these powerful psychological responses, seeking to understand what attitude toward them expresses the deepest respect for human potential. This work gives a new interpretation of the Stoic position. Drawing on a range of ancient sources, the author argues that the chief demand of Stoic ethics is not that we should suppress or deny our feelings, but that we should perfect the rational mind at the core of every human being. Like all our judgments, the Stoics believed, our affective responses can be either true or false and right or wrong, and we must assume responsibility for them. Without glossing over the difficulties, the author also shows how the Stoics dealt with those questions that seem to present problems for their theory: the physiological basis of affective responses, the phenomenon of being carried away by one's emotions, the occurrence of involuntary feelings and the disordered behaviors of mental illness. Ultimately revealing the deeper motivations of Stoic philosophy, the book uncovers the sources of its broad appeal in the ancient world and illuminates its relevance to our own.

This book explores the famous Socratic paradox, or claim that virtue is knowledge, in five dialogues in which that claim is most fully elaborated, the Apology, Gorgias, Meno, Protagoras, and Laws. The equation of virtue and knowledge points to the core of the Socratic view of human excellence at the same time as it represents a central puzzle of the dialogues. What is the character of the knowledge or wisdom that is said to be virtue? Can Socrates be serious in his claims that human excellence is constituted simply by one virtue, that vice is merely the result of ignorance, and that the correct response to crime is education and not punishment? Despite the strangeness of Socrates’ claims, the book contends that there is a serious truth at the core of each of them, and especially at the core of his claim for wisdom, that has not been adequately appreciated. By tracing the arguments for the goodness of virtue and the power of knowledge through the dialogues, this book uncovers the radically unconventional nerve of Socrates’ thought: virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, yet true virtue is nothing other than wisdom. The book concludes by exploring the moral and political implications of the Socratic insights: its significance with regard to questions of justice and moral responsibility, as well as its promise for shaping a political understanding that is clear regarding the limits of moral culpability and thereby humane in its recommendations for law and punitive justice.