"This volume assembles nine of the author's essays on determinism, freedom and moral responsibility in Western antiquity, ranging from Aristotle via Epicureans and Stoics to the 3rd century. It is representative of the author's overall scholarship on the topic, much of which is devoted to showing that what commonly counts as 'the problem of free-will and determinism' is noticeably distinct from the issues the ancients discussed. It is true that one main component of the ancient discourse concerned the question how moral accountability can be consistently combined with certain causal factors that impact human behaviour. However, it is not true that the ancient problems involved the questions of the compatibility of causal determinism with our ability to do otherwise or with free will. Instead, we encounter questions about human rational and autonomous agency and their compatibility with preceding causes, external or internal; with external impediments; with divine predetermination and theological questions; with physical theories like atomism and continuum theory, and with sciences more generally; with elements that determine character development from childhood, such as nature and nurture; with epistemic features such as ignorance of circumstances; with necessity and modal theories generally; with folk theories of fatalism; and also with questions of how human autonomous agency is related to moral development, to virtue and wisdom, to blame and praise. These questions were all debated without reference to freedom to do otherwise or free-will-at least in Classical and Hellenistic philosophy. This volume considers all of these questions to some extent"--

Pendlebury alleges that abstraction and rationalization have had a strong and malign influence on normative moral philosophy in the 20th century. Criticizing writers such as Hare, Rawls and Scanlon for pursuing a conception of moral philosophy that bears little resemblance to the way in which human beings actually think and conduct themselves, Pendlebury, instead, suggests a ’Virtue Ethics’ inspired by Hegel’s and Aristotle’s accounts of action as a corrective to this trend, showing that moral activity is historically and socially based and must address the formed character of individual agents. This trend, which began with the responses by Locke, Hume and Kant to Descartes’ Meditations, rendered moral philosophy individualistic and psychologistic in contrast to Aristotle and Hegel’s claim that man is essentially a social creature. Pendlebury argues that this should be the starting point of any account and understanding of morality which roots the concept of will in the practical activity involved in being a member of an ethical community rather than an abstract metaphysical entity that is supposedly in the possession of individuals. In providing a critique of modern moral philosophy from this perspective, Pendlebury’s line of enquiry lends much support to ’Virtue Ethics’ as exemplified in the work of Hursthouse and Slote, while taking a more combative approach with those with whom he disputes. In doing so he shows that serious considerations of continental philosophy highlights the richness of moral activity absent from ’analytical’ tradition which for so long has been bent on marginalizing it.

An astounding project of analysis on more than one hundred translations of ancient philosophical texts, this index of words found in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series comprises some 114,000 entries. It forms in effect a unique dictionary of philosophical terms from the post-Hellenistic period through to late antiquity and will be an essential reference tool for any scholar working on the meaning of these ancient texts. As traditional dictionaries have usually neglected to include translation examples from philosophical texts of this period, scholars interested in how meanings of words vary across time and author have been ill served. This index fills a huge gap, therefore, in the lexical analysis of ancient Greek and has application well beyond the reading of ancient philosophical commentaries. Bringing together the full indexes from 110 of the volumes published in Bloomsbury's Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, McKirahan has combined each word entry and analysed how many times particular translations occur. He presents his findings numerically so that each meaning in turn has a note as to the number of times it is used. For meanings that are found between one and four times the volume details are also given so that readers may quickly and easily look up the texts themselves.