Description:
In this volume of 18 essays, leading philosophers address the varied, volatile and novel encounters between contemporary and antique thought. They reconceive and redeploy the problems of ancient metaphysics: one and the many, the potential and the actual, the material and immaterial, the divine and the world itself. Alongside these essays are three original and previously unpublished translations of texts by Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Aubenque and Barbara Cassin.
Brief description: Ryan J. Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elon University, in North Carolina. Ryan's early books include The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (Edinburgh UP 2016) and Deleuze, A Stoic (Edinburgh UP 2020), as well as the co-edited collections Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh UP 2018) and Nietzsche and Epicurus (Bloomsbury 2020). His recent work includes the co-written Phenomenology of Black Spirit (Edinburgh UP 2023) and the monograph Three American Hegels (Rowman & Littlefield 2024). His future work is on the radical abolitionist John Brown, Spinoza, and John Coltrane.
Review Quotes: This volume is an ambitious experiment in doing the history of ancient philosophy as the practice of thought on the rich terrain of contemporary metaphysics. Bringing together an impressive international roster of rising stars and established scholars, it stakes out Greek philosophy as a vital resource for thinking beyond the parameters of the present. It should quickly become a classic.--Brooke Holmes, Princeton University