Sunday, October 04, 2020

Armstrong & Mcosker, Philodemus, On Anger

NEW BOOK FROM SBL PRESS:
Philodemus, On Anger
David Armstrong, Michael Mcosker

ISBN 9781628372694
Status Available
Price: $44.00
Binding Paperback
Publication Date September 2020
Pages 320

The first English translation of On Anger

This latest volume in the Writings from the Greco-Roman World series provides a translation of a newly edited Greek text of Philodemus’s On Anger, now supplemented with the help of multispectral imaging. As our sole evidence for the Epicurean view of what constitutes natural and praiseworthy anger as distinguished from unnatural pleasure in vengeance and cruelty for their own sake, this text is crucial to the study of ancient thought about the emotions. Its critique of contemporary Stoic and Peripatetic theories of anger offers crucial new information for the history of philosophy in the last two centuries BCE. The introduction and commentary also make use of newly revised texts and readings from several other ancient treatises on anger.

Features
  • An apparatus representing work on the text since the papyrus was opened in 1805
  • A full explication of the Epicurean theory of natural anger as an emotion without pleasure
  • One of the Herculaneum papyri that survived the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE
The work of Philodemus is not of direct interest to PaleoJudaica. But I note it because it was recovered from the carbonized Herculaneum library, which was incinerated during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. The text was recovered with the help of multispectral-imaging.

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