The brief for this chapter is to consider kingship in the abstract, that is both how late medieval people theorised kingship but also their assumptions, prejudices and expectations about what a king could and should do. The difficulty with this task is that, although these two domains overlap, they are distinct. The hard, theoretical categories of professional thinkers are different from the unspoken assumptions that a time-travelling anthropologist might uncover. The English took their political theory from different ages and places, occasionally adapting it to fit local conditions. This might seem surprising, since the period was rocked by momentous developments in the powers of kings and what their subjects expected them to do. Established ideas can prove surprisingly resilient despite their inapplicability to changed circumstances.

This introduction outlines current understandings and paradoxes of the chorus. It discusses the single and formal role that various critical traditions have assigned to the tragic chorus over the centuries, and how a focus on the chorus’ fragmentations, augmentations, interruptions and interactions is better suited to capture the varied activities that the tragic chorus undertakes in fifth-century Athenian theatre. To justify why a new account of choral performance is necessary, the introduction also examines the relative neglect of the chorus in scholarly accounts of ancient performance, the history and transmission of dramatic texts, and studies exploring the politics of tragic and literary form. It also offers an overview of choral knowns and unknowns, including the chorus’ size and composition, their delivery and performance, and their arrangement on the ancient theatrical space.

The central component of Suárez’s account of time in DM 50.8-11 is the metaphysical notion of duration understood as permanence in existence and as belonging to every real being in its actual existence. Suárez associates different kinds of duration with the different modes of existence displayed by real beings. The mode of existence relevant to time is that of successive beings: time is the duration of successive things, that is, of change. Suárez’s ambitious project is to offer a “metaphysical deduction” of time from the notion of duration. In this paper I analyze two fundamental aspects of this project: the existence of time and its real identity with change. Suárez emphasizes that both the existence of time and its identity with change can be deduced from general properties of duration. However, he is also very much concerned to show that this deduction does not miss specific features of time.

In this introduction, we first describe the contents of the Summa Logicae in some detail, situating the work in the larger context of medieval logical texts of the thirteen and fourteenth centuries and explaining why it occupies pride of place in Ockham’s philosophical project. Second, we argue that the Summa Logicae was most likely composed in Avignon between 1324 and 1328 contrary to the accepted view that Ockham wrote it in London over the summer of 1323. Third, we trace the legacy of the Summa Logicae from its first reception in Oxford and Paris in the 1330s, into the Parisian controversies of the 1330s and 1340s, and its dissemination further into Europe over the course of the next century or so. We end this history by noting the 1974 publication of the modern critical edition of the Summa Logicae, which was an enormously significant landmark in Ockham studies.

Inspired by the later medieval development in logic, especially theories on the properties of terms, Ockham’s modal logic is an innovative expansion of Aristotelian modal logic. Ockham’s treatment of modal logic is evolved systematically on the ground of the medieval distinction between two readings of modal propositions, that is, the reading in the divided and in the composite sense, which can be compared to the de re and de dicto reading in modern modal logic. The result is a comprehensive theory of propositional modal logic and syllogistics. In addition to Aristotle’s modal term logic, Ockham works out syntactic rules for inferences of modal sentences in the composite sense and offers a framework for propositional modal logic. In this chapter, I outline Ockham’s modal logic by describing the related texts, semantics for modalities, the linguistic and logical structure of modal sentences, their truth conditions, propositional modal logic, and modal syllogistics in Ockham.

This chapter examines the sort of happiness Aquinas thinks we can have on earth without any special divine help, namely, natural imperfect happiness. After establishing the varieties of natural imperfect happiness Aquinas accepts, it argues that, according to Aquinas, happiness is constituted exclusively by engaging in and enjoying those genuinely good activities that are made possible through the purely natural development of one’s powers. This is the Enjoying Good Activities Reading as applied to ordinary earthly happiness. The chapter then explains the various roles that everyday goods play in happiness so understood. Because of the role those goods play, it turns out that this sort of happiness is somewhat fragile. After giving an account of just how fragile it is, the chapter ends by considering Aquinas’s understanding of degrees of natural imperfect happiness.

Leibniz is the genuine initiator of German Idealism, developing ideas of freedom as spontaneity or self-originating action, and linking freedom with justice and progress in ways that are decisive for Kant and later idealists. Rethinking spontaneity as negative freedom, Kant criticises the paternalistic perfectionism and Enlightened absolutism of Christian Wolff, a distinct development from Leibniz, but opens the way for a new perfectionism of freedom. The origins of perfectionism in Aristotle and the Stoics are surveyed, and the various formulations of post-Kantian perfectionism from Humboldt to Marx are outlined.

The question explored in this chapter is this: Is there a foothold, or even a toehold, in Stoic and Kantian texts that gives us purchase for developing an account of moral anger? I answer “yes,” although the positive argument in both Stoic and Kantian texts is not obvious. In the Stoic tradition, the overall normative demand is modeled on the character and conduct of a good and wise person, that is, the sage. Can the Stoic sage feel moral anger as part of how full virtue is expressed? The Stoic sage is typically modeled on concrete historical examples that display a fuller gamut of emotions than is often acknowledged. Moral anger and vicarious distress are, I argue, Stoic “good emotions” compatible with the rational desires and emotions characteristic of full virtue. Despite Kant’s Stoicizing tendencies at various junctures, he leaves room for moral anger as a way we express our duties of sympathy and become aware of the constraints of the moral law.

Chapter Five was devoted to the metaphysics that underpins the Stoic theories of everlasting recurrence. The present chapter focusses on three of these theories in some detail. At least two of them, as I explain in section 6, are early Stoic. As we shall see, one is stronger than the other two, and the two weaker theories are revisions of it. A central component of this chapter is the thesis of Identity, according to which there must be a full type-identity between the events of any two cosmic cycles. Why should this thesis be true? Why could not the events be slightly, or even completely, different? Thus, sections 1 and 2 describe the three theories and how exactly they differ from one another. In sections 3 and 4 are devoted to the argument for Identity. The argument is based on the nature of the Stoic god. It is his full rationality that requires that the token-events of each new cosmos be fully type identical to those of the previous one. I close the chapter in Sections 5-6 with a discussion of the two weaker theories. What are their philosophical motivations? And in what order did they emerge in the history of Stoicism?

By way of conclusion, this chapter deals with two issues that are deeply connected to the argument of the book but that I shall leave open. The first one is Chrysippus’ own answer to question of why the Stoic god would want the conflagration if the new cosmos is identical to the old one and no improvement is possible. The second issue is when the Stoic god designs the cosmos if the series of cosmic cycle is beginningless and changeless. This second issue is related to the larger topic of cosmic creation and the link between the Stoic and the Christian god. Thus, it is of more general interest and may help to put the argument of the book in a wider historical perspective.

The chapter studies this mechanism in detail and focusses on the following questions. First, what are these ‘exhalations’ (ἀναθυμιάσεις) and why do they rise up in the sky? Secondly, why does the desiccation of the sublunary region cause celestial fire to descend to this region? More particularly, why does not celestial fire consume the sublunary region before it totally dries out, as an ordinary wildfire would consume a forest that is still relatively green and full of life? Thirdly, how does celestial fire consume the exhalations and the substances that it finds in the sublunary region? And, more generally, how do the Stoics conceive of the physical process by which a mass of fire consumes another body? In other words, how do they envision the phenomenon of combustion? Fourthly, what is the place of the concept of combustion in their elemental theory? And, finally, how long does the conflagration last?

The early Stoic cosmos is sharply different from that of Plato and Aristotle. But it is also unique compared to that of the Presocratics. In this chapter, I seek to prove that this is so by concentrating upon the Stoic theory of conflagration we just examined. The issue requires an in-depth discussion because Stoic cosmology owes enormously to the Presocratics, and the theory of conflagration is clearly the part of Stoic cosmology that has deeper roots in these early thinkers, much more so than the theories of cosmogony and everlasting recurrence

The conflagration is followed by a cosmony that restores the cosmos. In fact, a permanent end would be impossible given the rationality of the early Stoic god. In this chapter, I limit myself to asking what is the structure of the cosmogony. How, exactly, is the large mass of fire left by the conflagration transformed in the cosmogony into the differentiated masses of air, fire, water and earth that constitute the present cosmos? I shall argue that the cosmogony, which sets off as soon as the conflagration is over, divides into at least three basic stages: (a) the formation of the four elements and of the sublunary and supralunary regions as two differentiated parts of the cosmos, (b) the formation of composite homogeneous substances (gold, flesh, wood, etc.) out of the four elements; and (c) the formation of composite heterogeneous substances (animals and plants) out of homogeneous ones.

This chapter and the next build upon the previous chapters by addressing a vital question that they leave open. What is the relation between the cosmos issued from the cosmogony and the cosmos previously destroyed at the conflagration? Is it the same cosmos? Or is it different? The issue of identity drove a great deal of dispute within the school. In fact, as I explain in Chapter Six, there were three clearly different Stoic theories of everlasting recurrence that opposed one another on this question. In the present chapter, I concentrate upon two broader and more basic metaphysical problems presupposed in the dispute over identity. The two problems, concisely put, are the following. (a) Why is the present cosmos present as opposed to past or future? In general, how is the present distinct from the past and the future? (b) Supposing that the present cosmos is type-identical to the previous one and the next how can they really occupy different places in time? And how can the times themselves be distinct if the events are type-identical?