For further publications, please refer to the individual CPAS faculty members.

Plato’s Timaeus and the Latin Tradition

 By Christina Hoenig

This book focuses on the development of Platonic philosophy at the hands of Roman writers between the first century BCE and the early fifth century CE. It discusses the interpretation of Plato's Timaeus by Cicero, Apuleius, Calcidius, and Augustine, and examines how these authors created new contexts and settings for the intellectual heritage they received and thereby contributed to the construction of the complex and multifaceted genre of Roman Platonism. It takes advantage of the authors' treatment of Plato's Timaeus as a continuous point of reference to illustrate the individuality and originality of each writer in his engagement with this Greek philosophical text; each chooses a specific vocabulary, methodology, and literary setting for his appropriation of Timaean doctrine. The authors' contributions to the dialogue's history of transmission are shown to have enriched and prolonged the enduring significance of Plato's cosmology.

Self-Motion: From Aristotle to Newton.

By Mary Louise Gill (Editor), James G. Lennox (Editor)

The concept of self-motion is not only fundamental to Aristotle's argument for the Prime Mover and to ancient and medieval theories of nature, but it is also central to many theories of human agency and moral responsibility. Read more »

Politics and Society in Ancient Greece

By Nicholas F. Jones

Western democracies often trace their political roots back to Ancient Greece. While politics today may seem the dusty domain of lawmakers and pundits, in the classical era virtually no aspect of life was beyond its reach. Read more »

Translating the Heavens: Aratus, Germanicus, and the Poetics of Latin Translation

By D. Mark Possanza

Germanicus Caesar's translation of Aratus's celebrated astronomical poem, Phaenomena, is crucial for the study of the poetics of Latin translation. Building on the foundation of translation studies, Translating the Heavens investigates how Germanicus rewrote the Phaenomena as an Augustan aetiological poem that subverts the religious and philosophical themes of the original. Read more »

Cosmos and Cognition: Studies in Greek Philosophy

By Nicholas Rescher

The six studies comprising this volume deal with some fundamental issues in early Greek thought: cosmic evaluation in Anaximander, the theory of opposites from the Pre-Socratics to Plato and Aristotle, thought experimentation in Pre-Socratic thought, the origins of Greek Scepticism among the Sophisists, the prehistory of 'Buridan's Ass' speculation, and the role of esthesis in Aristotle's theory of science. Read more »

Dramatic Action in Greek Tragedy and Noh

By Mae J. Smethurst

This book explores the ramifications of understanding the similarities and differences between the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles and realistic Japanese noh. First, it looks at the relationship of Aristotle's definition of tragedy to the tragedies he favored. Next, his definition is applied to realistic noh, in order to show how they do and do not conform to his definition. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus moves to those junctures in the dramas that Aristotle considered crucial to a complex plot - recognitions and sudden reversals -, and shows how they are presented in performance. Chapter 3 examines the climactic moments of realistic noh and demonstrates that it is at precisely these moments that a third actor becomes involved in the dialogue or that an actor in various ways steps out of character. Chapter 4 explores how plays by Euripides and Sophocles deal with critical turns in the plot, as Aristotle defined it. It is not by an actor stepping out of character, but by the playwright's involvement of the third actor in the dialogue. The argument of this book reveals a similar symbiosis between plot and performance in both dramatic forms. By looking at noh through the lens of Aristotle and two Greek tragedies that he favored, the book uncovers first an Aristotelian plot structure in realistic noh and the relationship between the crucial points in the plot and its performance; and on the Greek side, looking at the tragedies through the lens of noh suggests a hitherto unnoticed relationship between the structure of the tragedies and their performance, that is, the involvement of the third actor at the climactic moments of the plot. This observation helps to account for Aristotle's view that tragedy be limited to three actors.