This chapter outlines Plato’s metaphysics of artefacts on the basis of his explicit references to Ideas of artefacts in the Cratylus and Republic X, his discussion of the eidetic cosmos presented in the Parmenides and the description of the material world as a product of the divine artisan in the Timaeus. The second section presents the shortcomings of Plato’s account detected by Aristotle and addressed through artefacts: these are Plato’s failure to recognise final causes and the concept of imitation. The third section outlines the metaphysical intuitions upon which Aristotle builds by taking artefacts into account. The roots of certain metaphysical problems are not explicitly identified as Platonic, but they are arguably to be found in the Platonic corpus. These problems concern the range of things that have a form, the separation between axiology and metaphysics, the concept of real kinds and the relation between parts and whole.

In this opening chapter, I attempt to situate Plato’s philosophizing and literary production in its historical context. The evidence external to the dialogues that such an enterprise can rely on is either scrappy or suspect, or both. So what I offer here is a series of snapshots. They follow a chronological sequence, from Plato’s relationship with Socrates and the Athens that executed him; through his momentous first visit to Italy and Sicily and its impact on his thinking about politics and philosophy; to the founding of the Academy, Plato’s rivalry with Isocrates, and the birth of the theory of Forms; and ending with the worlds of the late dialogues.

Plutarch the philosopher is present in all his texts. His allegiance is not in doubt: he is a follower of Plato, who is open-minded to other schools, as far as their views are reconcilable with Plato’s. He is above all committed to the dialogical spirit pervading Plato’s works. In several more technical treatises, he develops the core of his philosophical views. These have to do with the composition of the world-soul and its image, the human soul. From there, Plutarch develops his views on moral psychology: it is the task of reason, the divine presence in us, to control the irrational passions. This idea forms the basis of various texts in which the therapy of the soul and the development of character are the central goals. Plutarch’s concept of philosophy and his doctrinal stance are quite different from what we find in later Platonism. Later doxographical reports on Plutarch are not always reliable.

In a striking passage from the last book of his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero claims to live from day to day (nos in diem vivimus; 5.33). He always opts for what he deems probable, and this, he argues, also constitutes his freedom. This remarkable statement, which is obviously rooted in Cicero’s Academic philosophy, is far from unproblematic. This contribution aims at a better understanding of Cicero’s claim, through an analysis of his argumentative strategies in Tusculan Disputations. More precisely, attention is given to Cicero’s use of (1) the argument from common sense, (2) the argument from dignitas and decorum, (3) illustrative examples, and (4) to his approach in introducing the philosophical topics of the conversation. Finally, I deal with the complicated question as to whether Cicero’s sophisticated attitude of in diem vivere can be reconciled with the therapeutic goal of Tusculan Disputations.

This chapter examines the relationship between poetry and academic institutions in the twenty-first century, an era in which creative writing MFA and PhD programs are an established and durable part of the landscape. The real solidification of poetry’s academic situatedness has given rise to poetry that chooses to interrogate the notions of creative freedom and personal expression. Folding an explicitly hermeneutic practice or process into the poetry itself creates a reflexivity that imagines the speaking subject as an actively, discursively analytical subject – one that sees in these analytical methodologies not a way to stifle creative possibility, but to expand it. The work of Myung Mi Kim, particularly Commons, seeks to reconfigure the personal in service of the more broadly intellectual: the lyric speaker as an active analyst both of “lyric” and of “speaker.” Alongside the work of poets like Claudia Rankine and Nathaniel Mackey, the result is what we might call an academic avant-garde at the crossroads of programs in creative writing and those in literature, history, philosophy, and the other humanities.

Throughout the many centuries of their existence, the Academy, the Peripatos, the Garden, and the Stoa complemented and competed with each other in promoting distinctive ways of being in the world. The development of their philosophical thought amid the historical and topographical realities of ancient Athens turned their adherents into enduring models of how people should think, act, live, and die.

This chapter explains the evolution of ‘hard-word’ dictionaries in English lexicography during the seventeenth century. Through a discussion of how lexicography and natural philosophy were emerging and how scientific methods were being applied to language, it traces the development of dictionaries and what kinds of information went into them. We see that the first monolingual dictionaries were lists of words; subsequently, those lists included short definitions of terms borrowed from other languages. Soon, dictionaries provided definitions of technical terms and jargon – the ‘hard words’ – and finally, dictionaries developed into encyclopedic reference works that added information on the history and development of the language and practical uses of a dictionary for words in general use. Last, the chapter details a famous case of lexicographical plagiarism to present how the concept of authorship has changed over time.