The cosmological revolution of the seventeenth century saw the establishment of physics and astronomy as autonomous spheres. The Ptolemaic universe was a hierarchy of dignity – sun and stars above, lowly earth at the bottom – supported by a hierarchy of disciplines that set theology and metaphysics at the apex of intellectual life. The advancing belief in heliocentrism that undid the first was paralleled by challenges to the second, starting with the humanist celebration of rhetoric and moral philosophy and carried further by Copernicus’s exaltation of astronomy, hitherto assigned the lowly place of a mere computational aid, as a source of truth. The authority of the Church was often restricted by political and cultural divisions, so that many heretical ideas could not be stamped out, and Galileo long found support from Jesuits and even the pope. As he lost it, he sought backing in a wider audience, publishing his writings in Italian rather than Latin, and in a popular style. Newton and his followers would similarly seek to substitute horizontal connections for the vertical ones around which intellectual life had long been organized, demonstrating elements of their theories to popular audiences and explicitly describing the kind of science they favored as “public.”

The Church’s victory in the “Investiture Controversy,” throwing off the domination achieved over it by secular powers following the death of Charlemagne, made it the first domain to successfully assert the right to manage its activities in accord with its own principles. But victory was only partial, leaving spiritual and secular powers facing each other across a field of constantly shifting relationships, giving heterodoxy more room to survive than elsewhere. An early example was the contrast between European universities, established as associations of teachers and students formed to assert autonomy from town authorities, and Islamic madrasas subject to direction by their elite patrons. When the corpus of Aristotelian texts became available, first in Arabic and later in Latin, it was first greeted with enthusiasm by readers of both, followed by suspicion because Greek materialism posed threats to religious doctrines. In Muslim lands, this led to a widespread rejection of philosophical inquiry as a path to truth; in Europe, attempts to impose similar restrictions failed, because university faculties resisted the claims of churchly conservatives to limit what could be taught. In this situation, scholastic speculation generated radical ideas about cosmology and physics, foreshadowing the break with traditional cosmology two centuries later.

Dietterlin and other Renaissance artists supported an empirical approach to architectural image-making, one that emerged in treatises like Dietterlin’s Architectura. Such treatises became sites of conflict between rationalist and empirical mathematical traditions, with Dietterlin’s mixed arithmetic and geometrical design procedures marking a pivotal turn toward empiricism. The development of prints in architectural texts – from geometrical illustrations in masonic incunables to Dürer’s 1525 Lesson on Measurement and archaeological renderings by Sebastiano Serlio, Philibert De L’Orme, and Hans Blum – shows how Dietterlin and his contemporaries increasingly rejected received knowledge in favor of the empirical epistemology also practiced by period artists and natural philosophers. As architectural treatises shifted from rationalist to empirical approaches to architectural design, they aligned architecture with the empirical culture of Renaissance image-making exemplified in Dietterlin’s Architectura.

In contrast to what several recent interpreters suggest, Hegel would reject the labels “naturalism,” “essentialist naturalism,” and “naturalist essentialism” for his philosophy. In light of the architecture of his system, the label “essentialist naturalism” would commit him to a variety of physicalism, which he rejects on the grounds of physics’ inability to establish the compatibility of material bodies and physical form. Second, as his critique of nature’s most concrete category “the death of the individual animal” and the sublation of nature into Geist illustrate, Hegel deems nature incapable of reconciling the individuals’ particularity with the genus’ universality, and therefore associates the realm of nature with death and proceeds to sublate nature into the concept of Geist. Finally, pointing out the inability of objectivist essentialist metaphysics to consistently unite the universal with the particular, Hegel also rejects the metaphysics of “naturalist essentialism” and proposes a concept-metaphysical account of the relationship between the logical idea, nature, and Geist. As all of these are variations of the idea, this proves him to be an idealist rather than a naturalist or a spiritualist.

Since the Greeks, our world has been understood in terms of one of two root metaphors – the world as an organism (“organicism”) and the world as a machine (“mechanism”). With the coming of evolutionary ideas in the eighteenth century, we see that there are interpretations in terms of both metaphors.

In this treatise Bartolus applies the Aristotelian schema of constitutions to the city republics of his own day and argues that for the smallest such cities, such as Perugia, where Bartolus lived and worked, the most appropriate form of government is ‘government by the people’ or regimen ad populum. He argues that aristocracy is preferable in larger cities such as Venice and Florence, and then corrects Giles of Rome’s universal endorsement of monarchy as the best constitution by limiting it to much larger political organizations which hold sway over other peoples. He argues that where monarchy is appropriate at all, elective monarchy is superior to hereditary, and established by law for the Roman empire and for the church. Bartolus uses Roman constitutional development as presented in the Roman law to exemplify the different systems of rule brought into being by the growth in numbers and influence of a people. He casts his treatise in part as a lawyer’s version of the Aristotelian constitutional analysis made popular by the theologian Giles of Rome. The concept of the common good is central to Bartolus’s treatment.

Bartolus analyses the problem of tyranny according to biblical, Aristotelian, and legal authority. Starting from Pope Gregory the Great’s definition of the tyrant as one who rules without right in the commonwealth, Bartolus distinguishes between a tryant for want of just title, and a tyrant who possesses such just title but is tyrannical in his exercise of power. He is particularly interested in the validity or otherwise of legal transactions conducted by tyrants, and by those living under tyranny, and in how to prove by convincing legal means that a tyranny is or was in existence. The concept of fear, which invalidates certain legal agreements if proved, plays a major role in his argument here. He is especially interested in ‘veiled’ or covert tyrants, who have satisfied the legal formalities for legitimate government but are nonetheless tyrants. This leads him to explore the mechanics of popular election. Bartolus complicates the matter by noting that even legitimate governments need to behave in ways defined as tyrannical by Aristotle, and uses the concept of the common good as the ultimate criterion between legitimate and tyrannical rule.

I stake out a contemporary context in which democracy seems to be under attack from the populist right, and neglected by parts of the progressive left caught up with a politics of the personal. In a polarised world, persuading others to change their sense of who they are has become more difficult. I draw on Jonathan Haidt to show how most decisions are made on the basis of emotion rather than reason. Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe argue for the importance of public argument and the theatricality of political life, prioritising social roles over personal authenticity. From a liberal perspective, Judith Shklar speaks to the inevitability of hypocrisy in democratic politics. Matthew Flinders, Alan Finlayson and David Runciman are contemporary theorists who identify the need for political science to take on the problem of rhetoric. From truth and hypocrisy, I turn to the question of representation. A democratic politician represents those who vote for her or him much as an actor in a play represents a character. Theatre offers a lens through which to contemplate problems of selfhood and identity, and the paradox of the sincere liar.

This chapter discusses Plutarch’s On the Oracles at Delphi, and in particular the account of the grammarian Theon as to how prose came to replace verse, not just in the delivery of the Delphic oracle, but in literary discourse as a whole. Theon’s account of the history of Greek literate culture is an important document of how learned Greeks in the Roman empire imagined how their world had changed, along with the literature in which it was represented. The first part of the chapter considers another Plutarchan account of cultural and intellectual change, namely the opening of On the Obsolescence of Oracles, which tells the foundation story of Delphi. Both texts lay weight upon the fact of change itself, rather than on any detailed plotting of that change, let alone a chronology for it; so too, both illustrate a tendency to see recurrent patterns of change, by which the outlines of Greek literary history are found already adumbrated in classical literature itself. Among the classical texts which are central to this appropriation of past models are the programmatic chapters of Thucydides and Aristotle’s account of the development of poetic language.

Aristotle describes the history of poetry (in Poetics 4–5) in terms of a gradual progress, starting from primitive beginnings and concluding with the perfect forms of Attic (classical) drama. Characteristic of this Aristotelian approach to literary history are the notion of gradual progress, the notion of a τέλος, and the suggestion that different historical ideas, authors or genres belong to one coherent process of development. This chapter examines to what extent Aristotle’s approach has informed ancient literary criticism. It is demonstrated that the Aristotelian framework is in different aways adopted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his history of early historiograpy (On Thucydides 5–6), and by Demetrius in his history of prose styles (On Style 12–15). Modern histories of (ancient) literature likewise adopt the Aristotelian narrative of progress. The author of On the Sublime, however, contradicts the Aristotelian model: Longinus’ enthusiasm for early authors like Homer, Archilochus and Hecataeus shows that, according to this critic, the history of the sublime is not one of gradual progress from a primitive beginning towards a perfect form in the classical age. Longinus suggests that the sublime was there from the very beginning. The special position of On the Sublime is explained as resulting from a deliberate rejection of Aristotelian principles.

Both Socratic Greek philosophy and biblical religion endorse the human aspiration to become as much like a god or God as is humanly possible. This fact testifies to the important role that ideals of perfection play in human life. Against this fundamental similarity, however, important differences arise. First, in Socratic philosophy, deification rests on human not divine initiative. Socratic deification is primarily the product of rational self-discipline. The Bible, however, rejects as prideful this Greek ideal of self-deification. Biblical deification rests on divine not human initiative. Second, the gods of the Socratic philosophers are personifications of reason rather than divine persons. The gods of the philosophers are paradigms to be imitated rather than persons with whom we are in relationship. Third, the gods of the Socratic philosophers are cosmic gods whom we approach through the study of the orderly motion of the celestial bodies. By contrast, the biblical God is a divine person whom we approach through loving union with other persons, divine and human. Greek salvation takes us from here to there, from earth to heaven; biblical salvation takes us from now to then, from the present to the future.

Aristotle’s theology is best understood in relation to Plato’s. Like Plato, Aristotle offers no science of god, but he does offer philosophers a way to immortalize themselves through the study and contemplation of the cosmos. First, Aristotle arrays all classes of substances, from the elements to the gods, in a single progressive hierarchy. Every substance in the cosmos, he says, strives to become as much like god as its own nature permits: each class of substance perfects itself by imitating the class above it. A person’s life, says Aristotle, develops through the classes of plants, animals, and humans—before striving to imitate the divine by contemplating the stars. We become like the god by climbing the ladder of classes of substances. Second, Aristotle’s god governs the cosmos not by managing it but purely by being an example of perfection—an example that magnetically draws all things toward him. The perfect happiness enjoyed by god inspires all other classes of substances to love and to imitate him. Similarly, a philosopher governs his household and his city not by managing them, but merely by the attractive power of the example he sets of godlike happiness.

According to Aristotle, character or ethos in tragedy is ’that which reveals what the moral choice is like’. This kind of ethos is what this book explores in Sophocles, by examining five tragedies in which moral choice is central to the course of the drama. These choices are made within the context of traditional Greek morality, which, amongst other things, expected one to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. Closely allied to these principles is the conception of justice as retaliation. This nexus of principles provides a pervasive ethical background to most of Greek literature and is of special significance for tragedy.

Greek popular thought is pervaded by the assumption that one should help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. These fundamental principles surface continually from Homer onwards and survive well into the Roman period, and indeed to the present day, especially in international relations. They are firmly based on observation of human nature, which yields the conclusion that most human beings do in fact desire to help their friends and harm their enemies, and derive satisfaction from such behaviour. Thus Xenophon’s Socrates can count benefiting friends and defeating enemies as one of the things which bring the ’greatest pleasures’.

This chapter contains an outline of the book and of its main argument. It concentrates on the deep structure of the Peripatetic science of perishable living beings, which consists in separate but coordinated studies of animals and plants. It provides the reader with an initial idea of the contents of the book with an emphasis on the epistemic requirements that shape the Peripatetic study of perishable life.