Julia Annas
Biographic Data
| ID | 313995 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julia Annas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julia |
| FAMILY NAME | Annas |
| SIGNATURE | ANNAS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Arizona |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4568-6427 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 97 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 84 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 13 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Cicero's Tusculan Disputations
Cicero composed the Tusculan Disputations in the summer of 45 BC at a time of great personal and political turmoil. He was grieving for the death of his daughter Tullia earlier that year, while Caesar's defeat of Pompey's forces at Munda and return to Rome as dictator was causing him great fears and concerns for himself, his friends and the Republic itself. This collection of new essays offers a holistic critical commentary on this important work…
Virtuous People and Moral Reasons
Ancient Philosophy
Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction explores the tradition of ancient philosophy. It elaborates on the key themes and debates of Graeco-Roman philosophy. Due to the long, rich, and variety of ancient philosophy, the field is in constant discussion and argument. The VSI showcases a sense of freshness and liveliness in the field of ancient philosophy in a wide variety of themes and styles in an attempt of branching itself away from the pr…
Ancient Philosophy
Virtue and Action
Reply to
Law and the Divine
In Book 10 Plato develops the hints that have been scattered through the dialogue of the idea that law is divine. The Athenian argues from the nature of motion and of soul to the ordered movements of the heavens and to a cosmic reason directing the soul which moves them in an unfailingly ordered way. This is said to be divine, and to be the ordering force which in individuals takes the form of reason and in societies takes the form of law, the pu…
Plato's Republic and Feminism
This chapter examines only with Plato and discusses what may surprise some: that it is quite wrong to think of Plato as 'the first feminist'. His arguments are unacceptable to a feminist, and the proposals made in Republic V are irrelevant to the contemporary debate. In fact Plato and Mill are the only great philosophers who can plausibly be called feminists. The idea that Plato is a forerunner of Women's Liberation has gained support from the fa…
Virtue and Law in Plato and Beyond
The Laws is Plato’s second attempt to outline an ideal society. It does not, as often thought, introduce the rule of law as a rejection of the rule of virtue in the Republic . In the Laws the place of law in the development of virtue is rethought, and Plato tempers the importance of obedience to law with the need for citizens to understand their laws as structuring a virtuous way of life in which they actively participate. Plato now develops a fr…
Developing the Virtues
Cicero's De Finibus
Cicero is increasingly recognised as a highly intelligent contributor to the ongoing ethical debates between Epicureans, Stoics and other schools. In this work on the fundamentals of ethics his learning as a scholar, his skill as a lawyer and his own passion for the truth result in a work which dazzles us in its presentation of the debates and at the same time exhibits the detachment of the ancient sceptic. Many kinds of reader will find themselv…
Virtue and Duty
Reply to Commentators
Plato'sLawsand Cicero'sde Legibus
Virtue And Happiness Essays In Honour Of Julia Annas
Intelligent Virtue
Julia Annas offers an account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. She argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of the kind we find in someone exercising an everyday practical skill. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent's happiness.
Virtue and law in Plato
In both the Republic and the Laws, Plato delineates societies whose aim is the happiness of the citizens; and in both works they are to achieve happiness by living a life of virtue. It is the chief aim of Magnesia, the city of the Laws – one it shares with the Doric societies of Sparta and Crete, though with an enlarged and improved view of it – to make the citizens happy by rendering them virtuous.
Ancient scepticism and ancient religion
This paper considers an Epicurean challenge to the possibility of Sceptical inquiry (reminiscent of a famous paradox in Plato’s Meno), and also explores Sextus’ reply to that challenge. It suggests that Sextus makes the good point that one need not know, nor even believe, that p, in order to inquire whether p is so. However, it is less clear whether one can inquire if one lacks all beliefs; yet the Sceptics are sometimes thought to disavow all be…
Feeling good and functioning well
This paper is an invited response to Kashdan, Biswas-Diener, & King (2008) and to Waterman's (2008) commentary. Kashdan et al. assert that the distinction between hedonic and eudaimonic well-being is unwarranted philosophically and scientifically. We disagree, because a correct understanding of Aristotle refutes Kashdan et al.'s claims, and we refute three specific claims made about the definition, measurements, and overlap of kinds of subjective…
Ethics in Stoic Philosophy
When examining the role of Stoic ethics within Stoic philosophy as a whole, it is useful for us to look at the Stoic view of the way in which philosophy is made up of parts. The aim is a synoptic and integrated understanding of the theoremata of all the parts, something which can be achieved in a variety of ways, either by subsequent integration of separate study of the three parts or by proceeding through 'mixed' presentations, which can be made…
The Virtuous Life in Greek Ethics
There is now a renewed concern for moral psychology among moral philosophers. Moreover, contemporary philosophers interested in virtue, moral responsibility and moral progress regularly refer to Plato and Aristotle, the two founding fathers of ancient ethics. The book contains eleven chapters by distinguished scholars which showcase current research in Greek ethics. Four deal with Plato, focusing on the Protagoras, Euthydemus, Symposium and Repub…
Virtue Ethics
Wickedness as Psychological Breakdown
Ancient Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century
It may sound peculiar to suggest that ancient philosophy can develop in a way appropriate to the twenty-first century. After all, it consists in the study of a body of texts which, apart from occasional new discoveries, remains fairly constant. Moreover, some among these texts have been studied for so long, and so intensively, that we might question whether there are any genuinely new developments to be made in their interpretation. Ancient philo…
Happiness as achievement
Daedalus Spring 2004 Ten years ago, shortly after publishing a book called The Morality of Happiness about the structure of ancient ethical theory, I received an email informing me that I had been added to a bibliography of “happiness researchers” on a website called the World Database of Happiness. I explored this site with interest, only to 1⁄2nd that this was not a research program that I felt myself to be part of. The website assumes, without…
Virtue as a skill
The article argues that a consideration of the idea, common in ancient ethical theory, that virtue is a skill or craft, reveals that some common construals of it are mistaken. The analogy between virtue and skill is not meant to suggest that virtue is an unreflective habit of practised action. Rather what interests ancient ethical theorists is the intellectual structure of a skill, one demanding grasp of the principles defining the field and an a…
Plato's Myths of Judgement
I The myths in dialogues have been in general neglected by philosophers; when he moves from argument or exposition into the myth form there is a sharp switching-off of philosophical interest. There have been studies of the myths,1 some of them from a philosophical perspective, but it is broadly true that philosophical analyses of the dialogues have made little or no attempt to relate the content of each myth to the argument of the dialogue in whi…
Happiness as achievement
Daedalus Spring 2004 Ten years ago, shortly after publishing a book called The Morality of Happiness about the structure of ancient ethical theory, I received an email informing me that I had been added to a bibliography of “happiness researchers” on a website called the World Database of Happiness. I explored this site with interest, only to 1⁄2nd that this was not a research program that I felt myself to be part of. The website assumes, without…
The Morality of Happiness
Aristotle on Inefficient Causes
Journal Article Aristotle on Inefficient Causes Get access Julia Annas Julia Annas St Hugh's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 32, Issue 129, October 1982, Pages 311–326, https://doi.org/10.2307/2218698 Published: 01 October 1982
The Modes of Scepticism
Mulheres e a qualidade de vida
O artigo trata da questão de como podemos avaliar as injustiças suscitadas pela existência de duas normas sociais distintas para a vida de homens e mulheres. Argumenta-se que essas injustiças tornam-se mais visíveis quando se confronta essa diferenciação tal como existe em sociedades de tipo 'liberal' comn o modo como se apresenta em sociedades 'tradicionais'. Essa comparação pode revelar o papel que o apelo a uma noção de natureza humana pode de…
Ethics in Stoic Philosophy
When examining the role of Stoic ethics within Stoic philosophy as a whole, it is useful for us to look at the Stoic view of the way in which philosophy is made up of parts. The aim is a synoptic and integrated understanding of the theoremata of all the parts, something which can be achieved in a variety of ways, either by subsequent integration of separate study of the three parts or by proceeding through 'mixed' presentations, which can be made…
The Heirs of Socrates
It seems as though in ancient philosophy there are no permanently lost causes. Until recently few scholars have taken seriously the defensibility of the sceptical Academy's claim to be philosophically in the tradition of Plato, or the tenability of the Stoic theory of knowledge. Now both are centres of philosophical debate: the issues are seen to be more complex, historically and philosophically, than has been assumed, and we have been woken from…
Plato and Common Morality
In the Republic , Socrates undertakes to defend justice as being in itself a benefit to its possessor. Does he do this, or does he change the subject? In a well-known article, David Sachs pointed out that there seems to be a shift in what Plato is defending. The challenge to Socrates is put by Thrasymachus, who admires the successful unjust man, and by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who do not, but are worried that justice has no adequate defence agains…
Against the Ethicists
Reply to Cooper
The matter will hinge on this point: what will be established is the ideal wise and virtuous person either of the Stoics or of the Old Academy [Platonists and Aristotelians]. You can't have both; the dispute between them is not about boundaries but about complete ownership, since all rationale for living is involved in one's definition of the final good, and dispute about that is dispute about all rationale for living. So it can't be both, since …
Forms and first principles
In this paper I shall present and discuss some arguments from the nerpl I e&v, and try to show that some commonly-held ideas about them are not well-based, and that they are more interesting than has been realised in revealing Aristotle's attitude to Plato. The arguments are those referred to by Aristotle at 990 b 17-22, which are given by Alexander in his commentary on the Metaphysics, 85. 21-88.2, and they concern problems for the holders of th…
"Individuals in Aristotle's "Categories
M vR r. Barrington Jones, in his recent article in Phronesis,I has suggested a new way of solving standing debate about nature of non-substance individuals in Categories. Mr. Jones' article suggests some exciting new approaches to Categories, but I would like to put forward two difficulties I find with way he proposes to cut through main problem. In Categories, but nowhere else, there seem to be individuals in non-substance categories, correspond…
Forms and first principles
In this paper I shall present and discuss some arguments from the nerpl I e&v, and try to show that some commonly-held ideas about them are not well-based, and that they are more interesting than has been realised in revealing Aristotle's attitude to Plato. The arguments are those referred to by Aristotle at 990 b 17-22, which are given by Alexander in his commentary on the Metaphysics, 85. 21-88.2, and they concern problems for the holders of th…
Aristotle, Number and Time
Journal Article Aristotle, Number and Time Get access Julia Annas Julia Annas St Hugh's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 25, Issue 99, April 1975, Pages 97–113, https://doi.org/10.2307/2217626 Published: 01 April 1975
Clarendon Aristotle Series: Metaphysics: Books Μ and Ν
Plato's Republic and Feminism
Not many philosophers have dealt seriously with the problems of women's rights and status, and those that have, have unfortunately often been on the wrong side. In fact Plato and Mill are the only great philosophers who can plausibly be called feminists. But there has been surprisingly little serious effort made to analyse their arguments; perhaps because it has seemed like going over ground already won.
Aristotle on Substance, Accident and Plato's Forms
At Metaphysics 990 b 27-991 a 8 (= 1079 a 19-b 3) there is a very puzzling argument of Aristotle's against Platonic Forms. Aristotle is trying to embarrass the Platonists with a contradiction in their theory. On the one hand they want to say that there are Forms not only of substances but also of accidents of substances (qualities, relations, etc.) On the other hand, they are committed to the belief that there are Forms only of substances. The co…
XII—How Basic are Basic Actions?
Journal Article XII—How Basic are Basic Actions? Get access Julia Annas Julia Annas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 195–214, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/78.1.195 Published: 08 September 2015
Aristotle's Metaphysics, Books M and N
Aristotle's Concept of Dialectic
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Aristotle’s Concept of Dialectic. By J . D. G. Evans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. x+150. Prico £5.90) Julia Annas Julia Annas University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 110, January 1978, Pages 74–75, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219046 Published: 01 January 1978
Plato and Common Morality
In the Republic , Socrates undertakes to defend justice as being in itself a benefit to its possessor. Does he do this, or does he change the subject? In a well-known article, David Sachs pointed out that there seems to be a shift in what Plato is defending. The challenge to Socrates is put by Thrasymachus, who admires the successful unjust man, and by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who do not, but are worried that justice has no adequate defence agains…
Aristotle's Metaphysics, Books M and N
M and N, the last two books of the Metaphysics, are Aristotle's only sustained venture into the philosophy of mathematics. In them, he criticizes Plato's theories and suggests alternatives of his own. This commentary concentrates on the continuing philosophical interest of these books rather than on scholarly controversies, and will provide a clear introduction for students, including those without Greek, to an unjustly neglected part of Aristotl…
Aristotle's De motu animalium. Martha Craven Nussbaum
Aristotle on Pleasure and Goodness
Russian Thinkers
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Russian Thinkers. By Isaiah Beblin. Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly. With an Introduction by Aileen Kelly. ( Penguin Books. Pp. xxiv+312. Price £1.95) Julia Annas Julia Annas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 30, Issue 121, October 1980, Pages 357–359, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219530 Published: 01 October 1980
Practical Ethics
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Practical Ethics. By Peter Singer. (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1979. Pp. viii + 247. Price £10, pa. £2.95) Julia Annas Julia Annas Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 123, April 1981, Pages 180–182, https://doi.org/10.2307/2218731 Published: 01 April 1981
Form and Universal in Aristotle
Knowledge and language
In this chapter I suggest that some passages in the Cratylus may give us insight into certain of the difficulties in the notorious ‘dream’ passage in the Theaetetus. This is a modest point, but it has, I hope, less modest implications for our understanding of what Plato is after when he looks for a definition of knowledge. Whatever the merits of this paper, it has a certain appropriateness as my contribution to a volume honouring Gwil Owen; my in…
An encounter with Aristotle
Soon after completing this sixth volume of his History of Greek Philosophyl Guthrie died. It is clear from the Preface that, after a stroke, he perceived the approach of death before finishing the book; with dignity he records that he has not been able to treat the Rhetoric and Poetics as fully as he wished; and that the History will go no further. In the Preface he also says (p.ix) that, 'on re-reading what I have written I find it intensely per…
Plato's Myths of Judgement
I The myths in dialogues have been in general neglected by philosophers; when he moves from argument or exposition into the myth form there is a sharp switching-off of philosophical interest. There have been studies of the myths,1 some of them from a philosophical perspective, but it is broadly true that philosophical analyses of the dialogues have made little or no attempt to relate the content of each myth to the argument of the dialogue in whi…
Aristotle on Inefficient Causes
Journal Article Aristotle on Inefficient Causes Get access Julia Annas Julia Annas St Hugh's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 32, Issue 129, October 1982, Pages 311–326, https://doi.org/10.2307/2218698 Published: 01 October 1982
The Modes of Scepticism
The Modes of Scepticism is one of the most important and influential of all ancient philosophical texts. The texts made an enormous impact on Western thought when they were rediscovered in the 16th century and they have shaped the whole future course of Western philosophy. Despite their importance, the Modes have been little discussed in recent times. This book translates the texts and supplies them with a discursive commentary, concentrating on …
Image and Reality in Plato’s Metaphysics
Plato, Republic V–VII
The long section on knowledge and the philosopher in books V–VII of the Republic is undoubtedly the most famous passage in Plato's work. So it is perhaps a good idea to begin by stressing how very peculiar, and in many ways elusive, it is. It is exciting, and stimulating, but extremely hard to understand
Plato
Plato ( c. 427-347 BC) was born into a wealthy and aristocratic Athenian family. He cherished the ambition of entering politics when he came of age, but was disillusioned first by the injustices of the oligarchic government in which his relatives Charmides and Critias were involved, and later by the action of the democracy which succeeded it, particularly the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BC. In his best-known dialogue, The Republic , he…
Epicurus on Pleasure and Happiness
I concentrate on Epicurus' attempt to show that pleasure is complete, not just one aim we have for its own sake but ultimately the only non-instrumental aim we have. Epicurus tells us that we will be happy, have the best overall life, by having pleasure as our final aim, and that we shall achieve this by living according to the virtues, by becoming a certain kind of person.
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