Search results for ""Author Geert Roskam""

Plutarch of Chaeronea is one of the most influential and fascinating authors of antiquity. His Parallel Lives and Moralia are storehouses of challenging questions, valuable insights and interesting observations. Moreover, they contain a wealth of quotations from and references to earlier writers and traditions, and thus provide one of the richest gateways to the ancient world. This book introduces the reader to Plutarch's life and to the different facets of his variegated thinking and writing, such as his tremendous erudition, his Platonism and (moral) philosophy, his interpretation of history and his view of God. Above all, Plutarch stands out as a particularly clever and subtle thinker, driven by a spirit of painstaking enquiry (zetesis) that shows authentic and impressive intellectual honesty and sincere love of the truth. In this respect, as in many others, he remains an inspiring model even for us today.

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The question of the political relevance of philosophy, and of the role which the philosopher should play in the government of his state, was often discussed in Antiquity. Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king is well-known, but was precisely his failure to realise his political ideal in Syracuse not the best argument against the philosopher’s political engagement? Nevertheless, Plato’s ideal remained attractive for later Greek thinkers. This is illustrated, for instance, by one of Plutarch’s short political works, in which he tries to demonstrate that the philosopher should especially associate with powerful rulers, because he can in this way exert the greatest positive influence on his society and at the same time maximise his personal pleasure. This study provides a thorough analysis of Plutarch’s Maxime cum principibus philosopho esse disserendum. A lengthy general introduction deals with the author and the text and discusses each step in Plutarch’s argumentation in detail. A systematic lemmatic commentary then provides a systematic complement to the previous analysis of the work, dealing with many problems of textual criticism, explaining all kinds of realia, and discussing a great number of passages through parallels from Plutarch’s own oeuvre and from other authors.

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The present volume contains the proceedings of an international colloquium held in February 2015 at the Arts Faculty of the KU Leuven that brought together specialists in (late) ancient philosophy and early Christian studies. Contributors were asked to reflect on the reception of two foundational texts dealing with the origin of the world - the third book of Plato's Timaeus and the Genesis account of the creation. The organizers had a double aim: They wished to offer a forum for furthering the dialogue between colleagues working in these respective fields and to do this by studying in a comparative perspective both a crucial topic shared by these traditions and the literary genres through which this topic was developed and transmitted. The two reference texts have been studied in antiquity in a selective way, through citations and essays dealing with specific issues, and in a more systematic way through commentaries.The book is divided into three parts. The first one deals with the so-called Middle- and Neoplatonic tradition. The second part is dedicated to the Christian tradition and contains papers on several of the more important Christian authors who dealt with the Hexaemeron. The third part is entitled "Some Other Voices" and deals with authors and movements that combine elements from various traditions. Special attention is given to the nature and dynamics of the often close relationship between the various traditions as envisaged by Jewish-Christian authors and to the remarkable lack of interest from the Neoplatonists for "the other side".

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This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference held in Leuven in June 2017 as a follow-up to a previous meeting that dealt with views on the origin of the cosmos in Greek philosophical and early Christian tradition (published in STAC 104, 2017). The second conference focused on how both traditions have reflected on the end or the goal towards which the cosmos is moving. The Judeo-Christian concept of a creation with temporal development and the philosophical notion of the eternity of the world evidently represent two very different positions. Yet there are also clear signs of convergence and of the latter influencing the former. The essays show there is common interest in reflecting not only on the principles that govern cosmology and on how the cosmos is reverting on its principles, but also on the answers provided in each tradition.

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