The Person and the Human Mind : Issues in Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This item is unavailable.The Person and the Human Mind : Issues in Ancient and Modern Philosophy

This collection of essays aims to explore analogous issues in classical and modern philosophy relating to the concepts of person and human being. A key question for the collection is whether there are such analogous issues, and whether we can find in ancient philosophy a notion which is comparable to `person`, as this figures in modern philosophy. This question is approached, on the modern side, by essays which reappraise the validity of the notion of person, and which ask whether this notion can be distinguished from our conception of what is essential to our existence as human beings. The essays on Classical philosophy take up the related questions of what being `human` entails in ancient ethics and psychology, and whether we should regard ourselves as essentially human or rational beings.

This is the first publication to offer extended examination of these questions about the relationship between Classical and modern thinking; and it merits the attention of all those who are interested in the substantial implications of philosophy, ethics, and the history of ideas.

'the essays are uniformly of unusually high interest, all at least very good, some quite excellent ... Three not so far discussed in this review are of particular importance for students of Greek thought. M.R. Wright's first-rate discussion of "presocratic Minds" is peculiarly valuable for its account of a view of mind.' Arion, 1991

'we should welcome the individual papers in the conveniently accessible form which this book provides' J.D.G. Evans, Queen's University of Belfast, Philosophical Books, 33.1 (1992)

'interesting collection of papers ... a stimulating and useful collection the value of which lies not only in the merits of individual papers but also in the questions which it raises about the relations between the views discussed and defended by the different authors' David Cockurn, St David's University College, Lampeter, Philosophical Investigation

'The essays are of uniformly high quality; they are original and provocative. Most exciting, however, is the diversity of perspective which this collection brings to a single set of problems. The authors come from widely divergent areas of philosophical specialization and, hence, come to the questions treated in their essays by quite different paths. They converge, however, on the same set of issues, and so we see these issues treated from quite different perspectives, informed by vastly diverse background assumptions, which yield importantly different insights.' Ethics 102:1 October 1991

'It is not the least of the merits of this valuable collection to provoke the reader to reflect on the nature of the study to which it makes its own distinctive contribution.'C.C.W. Taylor, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Polis, Vol. 11, No. 1, (1992)