Thomas Blackson

This book is a collection of twenty-three of Professor Cooper’s essays on ancient moral philosophy and ethical theory. Two essays are published here for the first time. Three essays are “somewhat revised” versions of essays first prepared for other collections that were in press during the time in which Cooper wrote the preface. Three essays are “reworkings” of previously published review essays, and the remaining fifteen essays are reprints with editorial alterations of essays Cooper first published between 1973 and 1996. Cooper offers these twenty-three essays to “a wider readership” in the “hope [that] they present a unified way of reading and reflecting on some of the most significant texts and issues in ancient moral philosophy from Socrates to Epicurus and the Stoic philosophers Chrysippus and Posidonius, and beyond”.

In “Knowledge, Bets, and Interests,” Brian Weatherson makes a suggestion for how to frame a decision problem. He argues that “the states we can ‘leave off’ a decision table are the states that the agent knows not to obtain.” I present and defend an example that shows that Weatherson’s principle is false. Weatherson is correct to think that some intuitively rational decisions wouldn’t be rational if states the agent knows not to obtain were not omitted from the outcomes in the decision problem. This, however, is not true of every rational decision. Weatherson’s principle for how to frame a decision problem is open to counterexample.

Keith DeRose gives an invalid argument for contextualism in “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context.” In section 2.4, entitled “The Argument for Contextualism,” DeRose makes the following remarks. “The knowledge account of assertion provides a powerful argument for contextualism: If the standards for when one is in a position to warrantedly assert that P are the same as those that comprise a truth-condition for ‘I know P,’ then if the former vary with context, so do the latter. In short: The knowledge account of assertion together with the context-sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge”.