Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, and Sceptics

Description

Ideas about relativity underlie much ancient Greek philosophy, from Protagorean relativism, to Plato's theory of Forms, Aristotle's category scheme, and relational logic. In Ancient Relativity Matthew Duncombe explores how ancient philosophers, particularly Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Sextus Empiricus, understood the phenomenon and how their theories of relativity affected, and were affected by, their broader philosophical outlooks. He argues that ancient philosophers shared a close-knit family of views referred to as 'constitutive relativity', whereby a relative is not simply linked by a relation but is constituted by it. Plato exploits this view in some key arguments concerning the Forms and the partition of the soul. Aristotle adopts the constitutive view in his discussions of relativity in Categories 7 and the Topics and retains it in Metaphysics Delta 15. Duncombe goes on to examine the role relativity plays in Stoic philosophy, especially Stoic physics and metaphysics, and the way Sextus Empiricus thinks about relativity, which does not appeal to the nature of relatives but rather to how we conceive of things as correlative. Title_Pages Dedication Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Constitutive_relativity_in_Plato Relativity_and_separation_in_the_theory_of_Forms Relativity_and_partition_in_Republic Relativity_in_Categories_7_Topics_and_Sophistical_Refutations Aristotle_on_the_distinction_between_substances_and_relatives Relativity_in_Aristotles_Metaphysics_515 Relativity_and_independence_in_Aristotles_On_Ideas Stoic_relativity Relativity_in_Stoic_physics_metaphysics_and_ethics Relativity_against_dogmatism_in_Sextus_Empiricus Conclusion Bibliography Index_of_Sources Subject_Index