Late Antique Epistemology: Other Ways to Truth [Hardcover]

Late Antique Epistemology explores the techniques used by late antique philosophers to discuss truth. Non-rational ways to discover truth, or to reform the soul, have usually been thought inferior to the philosophically approved techniques of rational argument, suitable for the less philosophically inclined, for children, savages or the uneducated. Religious rituals, oracles, erotic passion, madness may all have served to waken courage or remind us of realities obscured by everyday concerns. What is unusual in the late antique classical philosophers is that these techniques were reckoned as reliable as reasoned argument, or better still. Late twentieth century commentators have offered psychological explanations of this turn, but only recently had it been accepted that there might also have been philosophical explanations, and that the later antique philosophers were not necessarily deluded.

A collection of scholarly papers on the techniques used by late antique philosophers to discover truth

PANAYIOTA VASSILOPOULOU is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK and holds a Research Fellowship with the Academy in Finland. She has published articles on Plotinus's psychology, aesthetics and feminism.

STEPHEN R. L. CLARK is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is author of Biology and Christian Ethics (2000), G. K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking Forward (2006) and Understanding Faith: Religious Belief and its Place in Society (forthcoming).