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”.

This book may well become the definitive work on Philo of Larissa. It is comprehensive, and the knowledge of the texts and their historical contexts is impressive. My only concern is with the philosophical exposition. Philo is an important figure in the history of epistemology, and it seems to me that his contribution should have been specified more clearly. This of course is a tall order. Ancient epistemology is a difficult subject, and my desire for a clearer exposition is more of a wish than a criticism. Philo of Larissa is a very good book.

In the Phaedo, to explain why the philosopher lives in the unusually ascetic way he does, Socrates explains what someone realizes when philosophy takes possession of his soul and how he changes his behavior on the basis of this information. This paper considers the conception of belief the character uses in this explanation and whether it is the same as the conception Michael Frede thinks the historical Socrates is likely to have held and that the Stoics much later incorporated into their doctrine of practice.

Ancient Greek Philosophy: From the Presocratics to the Hellenistic Philosophers presents a comprehensive introduction to the philosophers and philosophical traditions that developed in ancient Greece from 585 BC to 529 AD. Provides coverage of the Presocratics through the Hellenistic philosophers Moves beyond traditional textbooks that conclude with Aristotle A uniquely balanced organization of exposition, choice excerpts and commentary, informed by classroom feedback Contextual commentary traces the development of lines of thought through the period, ideal for students new to the discipline Can be used in conjunction with the online resources found at http://tomblackson.com/Ancient/toc.html

According to the Stoics, human beings enslave themselves. When they change from nonrational children into rational adults, human beings form false beliefs about what is good and what is bad. These beliefs enslave them to things that are neither good nor bad. The author argues for an interpretation of how the Stoics understood the reasoning in terms of which human beings form these false beliefs. This interpretation helps makes sense of the argument against Chrysippus’s explanation of the origin of vice that Galen attributes to Posidonius. It also helps explain how the Stoics could think that nature is provident and that nature constructs human beings so that they enslave themselves when they change from nonrational children into rational adults.

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”.

The aim of this dissertation is to take a fresh look at Plato's thought on cause and definition and the connection of these topics to explanation. I trace and examine the development of his thought from certain early definitional dialogues through parts of the Hippias Major to Socrates' autobiography in the Phaedo and beyond to the Timaeus. ;The result of my investigation is a very different interpretation of Plato's views from the one currently accepted by scholars. Commentators on Plato have made a mistake by trying to see him as anticipating Aristotle's Doctrine of the Four Causes. Plato does not suppose, as Aristole is often claimed to suppose, that the Greek noun 'aitia' has several senses. Furthermore, Plato does not distinguish kinds of "causes" and kinds of "explanations" in the way that many suppose Aristole does. Plato's views on cause and definition, and the connection of these topics to explanation, are different from those of his famous pupil, Aristotle. ;Perhaps the most striking difference between their views concerns cause and definition. In the Hippias Major, Plato supposes that the search for definitions is a search for definitional ways to specify causes. He firmly renounces this view in the Phaedo, and he never again thinks of definition in this way in his post-Phaedo searches for definitions. Thus, far from proposing, in the style of Aristotle, that definitions specify a kind of cause and that definitional explanations are acceptable, Plato concludes in his post-Phaedo dialogues that definitions, as such, do not specify causes at all and that definitional explanations are not one of many possible kinds of explanation

In Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy, Professor Bobzien accomplishes what she describes as her “primary goal”; namely, “to establish-as far as that is possible—what the Stoic positions were, and to make them comprehensible to modern readers”. To this end, she demonstrates a scholarly command of the ancient texts and the contemporary secondary literature that places her as one of the most knowledgeable philosophers working in the history of ancient philosophy today. Moreover, as Myles Burnyeat says in his remarks on the jacket, not only is the book “a model of scholarly method,” it is “an outstanding example of lucid philosophical thinking in an area where clear thought is extremely difficult.” Bobzien herself says that the “book is written with those in mind who have an interest in philosophy” and that “[t]his means that historical and philological questions are treated strictly as subordinate to the question of what the respective philosophical position was, whether it was consistent, etc.” This strict subordination is not always so clear, and the philosophical problems are certainly interesting enough that a deeper and more extensive discussion would have been welcome, but Bobzien does provide a philosophically lucid treatment of the Stoic position on determinism, freedom, and related subjects. Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy is likely to be a dominate work in the field for quite some time.

This volume contains eight articles on various topics in Stoic philosophy, an introduction devoted primarily to the history of the scholarly study of Stoic philosophy, and a select bibliography devoted to recent work on Stoic philosophy not found in either Spindel Conference 1984: Recovering the Stoics, R. H. Epp or The Hellenistic Philosophers, A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley. The first six articles appeared previously in translation in the Greek philosophical journal Deukalion. Professor Ierodiakonou commissioned these articles as “an attempt to present to the Greek public current work on Stoic philosophy, an area that has been unduly neglected in contemporary Greek scholarship,” but subsequently she came to think that these articles “should also, with the addition of two further articles, be made available in their original version” because they “were highly original and important” and because “modern Greek—unfortunately—is not a lingua franca”.

Professor Beversluis says that this book is a re-reading of Platos early dialogues from the point of view of the characters with whom Socrates engages in debate. He says that unlike existing studies, which are thoroughly dismissive of the interlocutors and reduce them to the status of mere mouthpieces, this book takes them seriously and treats them as genuine intellectual opponents whose views are often more defensible than commentators have standardly thought. Beversluis says his purpose is not to summarize their positions or the arguments of the dialogues in which they appear, much less to produce a series of biographical sketches, but to investigate the phenomenology of philosophical disputation as it manifests itself in the early dialogues. He thinks that this investigation demonstrates the truth of his thesis that Socrates frequent use of faulty arguments and unscrupulous dialectical tactics calls in question his announced seriousness and concern for the souls of his fellows.

This work is a Festschrift to celebrate the philosophical and scholarly achievements of John Dillon on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday on 15 September 1999. Such celebrations too often have little or no academic interest, but the editor is aware of this problem and has taken steps to prevent it from plaguing Traditions of Platonism. In order to avoid academic provincialism and to create a truly cosmopolitan collection of papers, contributed by some of the leading international experts within the field of Platonic and Neoplatonic studies, Professor Cleary says that he has carefully selected the contributors for their expertise on the ancient traditions of Platonism and for their diversity of perspectives, languages and traditions of scholarship.

Professor Kahn says that Plato and the Socratic Dialogue “presents a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato’s early and middle dialogues as a unified literary project, displaying an artistic plan for the expression of a unified world view”. To this end, Kahn argues that “[w]hat we can trace in these dialogues is not the development of Plato’s thought,” as Aristotle and others seem to have thought, “but the gradual unfolding of a literary plan for presenting his philosophical views to the general public”. This “unfolding” begins shortly after the Gorgias. Kahn argues that Plato then “created an essentially new form, the aporetic dialogue with a pseudo-historical setting” in order to bridge the psychological distance between the ordinary conception of the world and the radically new world view he would present in the middle dialogues. Kahn calls his interpretation “the hypothesis of ingressive exposition” and says that this hypothesis is “the claim that the seven threshold dialogues [Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis, and Euthydemus] are designed to prepare the reader for the views expounded in the Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, and that they can be adequately understood only from the perspective of these middle dialogues”.

This book offers a sympathetic explanation of the origin of the Theory of Forms that is true both to the dialogues and to Plato's place in history. The author's explanation makes the development of Plato's thought part of an intellectual and philosophical history that begins in the pre-Socratic period, extends through Socrates and the Sophists, and continues into the twentieth century. The explanation provides a unified reading of three passages that scholars have long recognized as keys to Plato's thought about the Forms, but which have proved stubbornly resistant to interpretation, both individually and as a group: (i) the intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo; (ii) the discussion of the philosopher and the lover of spectacles in the Republic; and (iii) the discussion of starting points, the Receptacle, and the four kinds of stuff in the Timaeus. The book will be of special interest to scholars of ancient philosophy, it will also be of interest to philosophers in general, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students.