Speranza
Presenting an unusually broadly based study of Imperial period philosophical
thought, Michael Trapp examines the central issues of personal morality,
political theory, and social organization: philosophy as the pursuit of
self-improvement and happiness; the conceptualization and management of emotion;
attitudes and obligations to others; ideas of the self and personhood;
constitutional theory and the ruler; the constituents and working of the good
community.
Texts and thinkers discussed range from Alexander of Aphrodisias,
Aspasius and Alcinous, via Hierocles, Seneca, Musonius, Epictetus, Plutarch and
Diogenes of Oenoanda, to Dio Chrysostom, Apuleius, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre,
Pythagorean pseudepigrapha, and the Tablet of Cebes. The distinctive doctrines
of the individual philosophical schools are outlined, but also the range of
choice that collectively they presented to the potential philosophical
'convert', and the contexts in which that choice was encountered.
Finally, Trapp
turns his attention to the status of philosophy itself as an element of the
elite culture of the period, and to the ways in which philosophical values may
have posed a threat to other prevalent schemes of value; Trapp argues that the
idea of 'philosophical opposition', though useful, needs to be substantially
modified and extended.
Michael Trapp is Professor of Greek Literature
and Thought at King's College London, UK. He has previously published an edition
and a translation of the Discourses of Maximus of Tyre, and a wide range of
papers on the philosophy and philosophical literature of the Imperial period.
His most recent works are Greek and Latin Letters. An Anthology (CUP, 2003), and
two volumes of edited papers Socrates from Antiquity to the Enlightenment and
Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (both Ashgate, 2007).
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