This chapter examines several individuals and groups associated with the court of the Sasanian king Khusrō I (r. 531–79), detailing their respective religious and philosophical orientations, and the historical connections among them. The people in focus include, among others, Burzōy, author of the Vorlage for Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīla and Dimna, the Neoplatonists who supposedly left the Academy at Athens for the Sasanian court, and Khusrō I himself. While it is unlikely that the commonalities among these thinkers’ views are rooted in a shared debt or adherence to a specific tradition or school, they do attest to a broader philosophical and more specifically epistemological ferment in the later Sasanian empire, which continued into the time of Muslim rule.

This chapter asks what it was that marked the young Pater’s philosophy out as so radical and potentially dangerous in the 1870s. It addresses how his singular attitude to referencing, originality, and artistry in philosophy put him at odds with his contemporaries at Oxford. In its sections, it addresses (1) Pater’s reading of philosophy, and the importance of this reading to his intellectual development; (2) the ways in which Pater’s treatment of philosophy is part of his wider commitment to interdisciplinarity, and how his engagements with philosophers and their ideas shape diverse and perhaps unexpected aspects of his writings; and (3) the philosophical significance of Pater’s own aestheticism.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of Pascal’s legacy, his renown and neglect throughout the centuries, and his profound influence on philosophy, science, religion, and much else. The metholodgy of this book is then addressed: the aim is not primarily exegesis, though there will be plenty of that too. Rather, the aim of the book is to argue that there is much in Pascal’s work that is philosophically relevant to us today. Our cultural, social, political, and technological moment requires a deep look at our natures and aims, and this is what Pascal’s philosophy can offer, if we can get past the sometimes obscure theological disputes he was engaged in and the fragmentary nature of his writings. An overview of the book’s chapters is then provided.

This chapter sets the conceptual and methodological stage for the book by challenging conventional disciplinary boundaries in the history of philosophy. It argues for a broad understanding of philosophical inquiry that includes religion, literature, and lived practice. The chapter critiques the dominance of argument-based historiography, stemming from Descartes, Brucker, and the nineteenth-century research university model, which privileged metaphysics and epistemology over ethics and the art of living. It outlines a corrective vision that foregrounds genre, orality, and the performative dimensions of philosophy. Christianity is shown to be not only compatible with philosophy but also a key medium through which ancient philosophical ideas were preserved, transformed, and popularized. The chapter highlights neglected periods, especially late antiquity, and insists on the importance of reading ancient thinkers – Plato, Augustine, Paul – on their own terms and in their own genres. It advocates for a generous, contextually informed reading practice that sees philosophical ideas as part of a long conversation across centuries. Ultimately, this chapter positions the book as a work of retrieval that seeks to restore the breadth and spiritual seriousness of ancient and late ancient philosophical traditions.

This chapter focuses on the figures of Antonio Genovesi, Immanuel Kant, and Adam Smith. It begins by exploring the similarities and differences in their biographies and historical-intellectual contexts. Next, it examines the influence of Genovesi’s and Smith’s philosophies on Kant. Lastly, it provides a critical and selective review of the secondary literature regarding these authors’ perspectives on the morality of commercial life.

This Introduction situates Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law, and Adolf Reinach, in contemporary currents in private law theory and philosophy.

This Introduction situates Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law, and Adolf Reinach, in contemporary currents in private law theory and philosophy.

There is a difference between being a philosopher and mastering the technical aspects of philosophy. The technician is at home with axioms and abstract problems. Although the philosopher can weave his way through apparently pathless conundra, the conundra are not the philosopher’s home; his home is reality: the τὸ τί ἐστι (being of things) that tend toward ὁ ἀγαθός (the good) and ἡ ἀλήθεια (the truth). When Boethius was unjustly condemned to death, he was a blind man when it came to reality: despite his technical prowess, he was stumped by the problem of evil. The Consolatio is an account of the ascent of the mind of a technician imprisoned by the painful experience of injustice to the mind of the philosopher who can see Providence at work in creation.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical dialogue in the “prosimetric” or mixed form (prose and poetry), has attracted broad literary and philosophical readerships in both the Latin West and Greek East from the ninth century on. The two readerships, however, have not regularly overlapped or engaged with one another in their respective efforts to interpret the work. The purposes of this study are to enable a more informed appreciation of the philosophical implications of its more “literary” books (I–II) and the literary significance of its more transparently philosophical ones (III–V), and to bring its overall architecture into clearer focus. To these ends, a case is made at the outset for the complete state of the transmitted text of the work.

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most influential texts in medieval Europe. Yet it does not receive enough attention in contemporary scholarship on medieval philosophy. This is in part explained by the content and literary form of the Consolation. The direct influence of Plato and late antique Neoplatonism, the dialogue form, the alternating prose and poetry sections, and the wealth of references to classical literature and mythology contrast sharply with the sort of texts most contemporary scholars of medieval philosophy focus on. The essays in this volume tackle these interpretive challenges and reveal some of the rich philosophical insights the Consolation offers. Chapters 1–3 directly address its literary features and their philosophical significance. Chapters 4 and 5 consider the relationship between the Consolation and Boethius’ Christianity. Chapters 6–8 offer three different takes on the philosophy of selfhood, or philosophical anthropology, so central to the Consolation. Chapters 9–13 deal with the more standard metaphysical and theological issues, such as Boethius’ accounts of goodness, being, God, time, eternity, and human freedom.

Nietzsche’s late text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has an important formal aim: to release images from the demands of reason. It also has a moral aim – to release the human will from its enslavement to preordained images, including from the image of itself. What would an image be for which its viewer still had to be invented? for which its viewer was being invented – in the image itself? This is the adventure of Nietzsche’s major work, which, like some literary works, is drunk with images, but they take a certain path of development, from knowing images to willing images. Instead of an image that presents knowledge for a knower, Nietzsche, through trial and error, develops a “willing image,” which first has a negative task, to liberate the will from its tie to established knowledge. But across the momentous book he also gradually sets aside images that stimulate an already existing will. The aim of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is thus like the aim of some literature, to give desire, wishing, wanting, hoping, and loving a new landscape in which it can change its genre and its objects, where it can learn to self-determine.

This chapter places Carnap in the history of twentieth-century philosophy by pointing out different tensions in canon formation of philosophy. It also introduces key concepts and notions of the volume, along with chapter summaries.