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In the treatise On the Change of Names (part of his magnum opus, the Allegorical Commentary), Philo of Alexandria brings his figurative exegesis of the Abraham cycle to its fruition. Taking a cue from Platonist interpreters of Homer’s Odyssey, Philo reads Moses’s story of Abraham as an account of the soul’s progress and perfection. Responding to contemporary critics, who mocked Genesis 17 as uninspired, Philo finds instead a hidden philosophical reflection on the ineffability of the transcendent God, the transformation of souls which recognize their mortal nothingness, the possibility of human faith enabled by peerless faithfulness of God, and the fruit of moral perfection: joy divine, prefigured in the birth of Isaac.
Volume Editor:
This long running and established book series publishes scholarly discussions of literary, historical and cultural issues from European classical antiquity and studies of classical ideas in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

The series published an average of one volume per year over the last 5 years.
Une étude sur l’expérience de pensée du Timée
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Ce livre propose une nouvelle interprétation du Timée de Platon dans laquelle le mythe cosmologique est identifié à une expérience de pensée. Le discours de Timée nous demande ce que nous ferions si nous étions un artisan divin chargé de façonner l'univers en conférant de l'ordre à un milieu chaotique. Après avoir adopté trois critères à satisfaire pour appartenir à la catégorie de l’expérience de pensée (1 : contrefactualité ; 2 : nécessité de la production d’images ; 3 : progrès cognitif), il est défendu que le discours de Timée contient à la fois une séquence d'arguments déductifs et la possibilité de combiner ces arguments en différents modèles mentaux de l'univers.

This book offers a new interpretation of Plato’s Timaeus in which the cosmological myth is identified with a thought experiment. Timaeus’ discourse asks us what we would do if we were a divine craftsman in charge of fashioning the universe by bestowing order upon a chaotic milieu. After having adopted three criteria to be satisfied to belong to the category of thought experiment (1: counterfactuality; 2: necessity of image productions; 3: cognitive progress), it is defended that Timaeus’ speech contains both a sequence of deductive arguments and the possibility to combine these arguments into different mental models of the universe.
This volume sheds new light on Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On Mixture and Growth as an intelligent and carefully crafted rebuttal of Stoic blending, which Alexander regarded as the closest rival of his own brand of hylomorphism. The authors explore Alexander’s dialectical method and determine the precise character of the Stoic theory he attacks. The problematic notions of mutual co-extension and infinite division appear in their proper context, while the successive stages of the process of blending are carefully distinguished from the resulting state of the blend. In this perspective the discussion of growth that closes Alexander’s work finds its natural place.
This monograph represents a rare, classical-philosophical approach to culture. It is grounded in philosophical realism and emphasizes personalism as a true achievement of philosophical anthropology. Employing the apparatus of the history of philosophy, science and religion, the author demonstrates the immense scope of the drama unfolding within human culture. In a classical approach, evaluation is inevitable—with regard to various theories of culture, human culture as such, and all its main actors. Jaroszyński’s work shows that realistic study of what it means to be a human person leads to the most comprehensive understanding of culture as it is and should be.
Author:
The papyrological writings of Philodemus of Gadara continue to yield crucial new insights on key aspects of ancient Epicureanism. In fact, they even shed light on the Epicurean paragon of human wisdom and happiness itself: the sage.
From the many references to the wise person’s characteristics that can be found scattered throughout Philodemus’ ethics, a uniquely detailed and multifaceted portrait of the Epicurean sage emerges. This is the first book-length study of the Epicurean sage. It explores the different aspects of the sage’s way of life and offers a reconstruction of this Epicurean role model, as envisaged by Philodemus.
D’une Herméneutique de la Nature à une Sémiotique de la Culture
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Salah Natij's book, Al-Jahiz's Theory of Bayân: From a Hermeneutics of Nature to a Semiotics of Culture is the first comprehensive study entirely devoted to the Bayān theory (communication, hermeneutics, semiology) elaborated in the middle of the ninth century by the Arab encyclopedist and polygrapher al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255 H./ 869). It is a work that restores to the Jāḥiẓian theory of bayān its originality by showing that it does not constitute a simple linguistic rhetoric (Balāgha), having the verbal statement (Lafẓ) as its sole object, but a hermeneutic-semiological perspective that studies not only speech (lafẓ), but also all types of signs that living beings, human and non-human, produce, emit and use to communicate or adapt to their living environment.