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Ursula Coope presents a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of the Neoplatonists (3rd-5th century CE). She explores their understanding of freedom and responsibility: an entity is free to the extent that it is wholly in control of itself, self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing - which only a non-bodily thing can be.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part I: The Puzzles
- 1: Freedom and enslavement
- 2: Responsibility, voluntariness, and what depends on us
- 3: Freedom and responsibility: Two discourses combined
- 4: Obstacles to freedom? Obstacles to responsibility?
- Part II: Freedom
- 5: Freedom and the One
- 6: Under the One but in control of oneself
- 7: Self-making and nonbodiliness
- 8: Freedom, dependence and being a part
- Part III: Responsibility
- 9: Responsibility and the myth of Er
- 10: Plotinus on responsibility and having a free principle
- 11: Proclus on self-movement and the logoi within
- 12: Rational assent and self-determination to the better or the worse
- Conclusion
About the author
Ursula Coope is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Keble College, and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College. Before coming to Oxford, she was a lecturer at Birkbeck. She has held visiting positions at Princeton and at New York University. She has been the recipient of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship and of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She is the author of Time for Aristotle (Oxford 2005) and has also written several articles on Aristotle's accounts of change, agency, and the infinite.
Summary
Ursula Coope presents a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of the Neoplatonists (3rd-5th century CE). She explores their understanding of freedom and responsibility: an entity is free to the extent that it is wholly in control of itself, self-determining, self-constituting, and self-knowing - which only a non-bodily thing can be.
Additional text
In this carefully argued study, Coope traces the relationship between notions of freedom and self-determination and the concept of responsibility in Neoplatonic thought...Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
