Miriam Leonard | Granta

Miriam Leonard

Miriam Leonard is a lecturer in the Department of Greek and Latin at University College London. She is author of Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought and co-editor of a volume on classical myth and feminist thought. How to Read Ancient Philosophy was published by Granta Books in 2008.

Publications

How To Read Ancient Philosophy

Miriam Leonard

Thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato and Parmenides have shaped the way we see the world, and it is their original conception of philosophy which has placed topics such as logic, metaphysics, ethics and ontology at the heart of philosophical debates for centuries.

Miriam Leonard not only explores the central theories of their works, but also gives some sense of the process of abstraction, which sees written texts transformed into timeless ideals. She looks at how simple phrases such as ‘In what way?’ or ‘There is …’ are turned into the language of philosophy. Taking passages from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Lucretius and Cicero, as well as Plato and Aristotle, she investigates the breadth and diversity of Greek and Roman thought and provides an account of the influence of its texts on the later history of ideas.