Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought

This work traces the history of ancient Greek thinking about causation and explanation, from its earliest beginnings through more than a thousand years to the middle of the first millennium of the Christian era. The ancient Greeks were the first Western civilization to subject the ideas of cause and explanation to rigorous and detailed analysis, and to attempt to construct theories about them on the basis of logic and experience The author examines the ways in which they dealt with questions about how and why things happen as and when they do, about the basic constitution and structure of things, about function and purpose, laws of nature, chance, coincidence, and responsibility. Such diverse questions are unified by the fact that they are all demands for an account of the world that will render it amenable to prediction and control; they are therefore at the root of both philosophical and scientific enquiry. The book draws on a wide range of sources, in philosophy, natural sciences, medicine, history, and the law, in order to create a synoptic picture of the growth and development of these central concepts in the Graeco-Roman world This book is intended for scholars and graduate

A fascinating book. It contains a sweeping survey of approaches to causation and explanation from the Presocratic philosophers (sixth century BC) to the Neo-platonist philosophers (third century AD). Hankinson pays a visit to every major figure and movement in between: the sophists, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans and a variety of medical writers, early and late ... impressive ... Hankinson's observations are regularly intriguing, at times refreshingly trenchant, and in some cases straightforwardly arresting ... the history itself is excellent: clear, intelligently conceived and executed, and broadly accessible. Those in search of a philosophically astute history of clasical philosophy given in terms of one of its own central unifying obsessions will delight in reading R. J. Hankinson's work.

R. J. Hankinson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin.