One of a pair of books selected from Stanley Rosen's career as a philosopher, scholar, and teacher over the last half of a century. They represent both the vast range of his learning in the most important philosophers of the tradition and the daring and penetration of his exploration of the fundamental philosophical questions. Yet the essays are written with an accessibility that is an expression of Rosen's thesis that our ordinary experience and speech provides the only stable ground for understanding and evaluating extraordinary thought and experiences.
Rosen proposes that only a qualified Platonism in which the preservation of the link between the good and the rational on the everyday level was preserved on the philosophical level, can do justice to our experience of ourselves. The notions of form and intuition play a central role in his proposal to preserve the spontaneity of the soul and the heterogeneity of its objects.
The essays were originally written for a variety of purposes: there are panoramic reviews of his philosophical intentions, intricate analyses of fundamental problems, challenging interpretations of classical texts, reviews of other authors, and informal commentaries on the state of philosophy in our time. Taken together these essays provide a key to the some of the most decisive questions in philosophy and a valuable explication of some the central themes of Rosen's work.
The essays were selected from articles, chapters, and unpublished lectures that were composed over the last five decades. They are distributed into two volumes by their focus upon ancient and modern themes, a convenient division that is not meant to imply a doctrinal chasm. On the contrary, it is one of Rosen's arguments that those who wish to preserve ancient wisdom are best served by the demonstration of the both parties address the same essential human nature, however much the practical and theoretical demands differ from epoch to epoch.

About the Author

Stanley Rosen, Prof. Emer. in Philosophy from Boston University, is a heralded author of numerous works in ancient and medieval philosophy. Other works of Stanley Rosen published by St. Augustine's Press: Plato's Symposium, Plato's Sophist, Plato's Statesman, The Ancients and the Moderns, Nihilism, G.W.F. Hegel, The Limits of Analysis, The Question of Being, and Metaphysics in Ordinary Language.

Martin Black completed his Ph.D. on Plato's depiction of the Socratic turn under the supervision of Stanley Rosen at Boston University in 2009. He has published articles on Plato's Symposium, the crisis of modernity, and self-knowledge, and is preparing a manuscript on the Socratic turn and a translation of several Platonic dialogues. He teaches ancient and medieval philosophy and the ancient Greek language and literature at Suffolk University.

Book Information
ISBN 9781587312274
Author Stanley Rosen
Format Hardback
Page Count 488
Imprint St Augustine's Press
Publisher St Augustine's Press
Weight(grams) 770g
Dimensions(mm) 105mm * 165mm * 37mm