Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy: Volume 3

Collects important papers, some previously unpublished, written by one of the greatest modern scholars of ancient philosophy. Volume 3 introduces Plato and the Republic, explains his importance to John Stuart Mill, and shows how ancient philosophical thinking can be applied to contemporary questions about key philosophical and psychological topics.

Myles Burnyeat (1939–2019) was a major figure in the study of ancient Greek philosophy during the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of this. After teaching positions in London and Cambridge, where he became Laurence Professor, in 1996 he took up a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, from which he retired in 2006. In 2012 he published two volumes collecting essays dating from before the move to Oxford. Two new posthumously published volumes bring together essays from his years at All Souls and his retirement. The main body of Volume 3 presents studies written for a wide readership, first on Plato''s Republic and then on the reading and interpretation of Plato in subsequent periods, particularly in nineteenth-century Britain. The volume also includes hitherto unpublished lectures, ''The Archaeology of Feeling'', on the ancient origins of some key modern philosophical and psychological concepts.