Thomas Blackson

Michael Frede has argued that there is a minimum belief for a Stoic to have a notion of a will and that Epictetus and the late Stoics were the first to have this belief. Against Frede’s interpretation, I argue for a new understanding of what the Stoics believed. Epictetus did not believe, as Frede argues, that adult human beings choose to assent to impulsive impressions. This gets the object of choice wrong in the minimum belief. He believed that the choice adult human beings make is to exercise their ability to use their impressions, and I argue that the early Stoics probably believed this too.

Michael Frede has argued that there is a minimum belief for a Stoic to have a notion of a will and that Epictetus and the late Stoics were the first to have this belief. Against Frede’s interpretation, I argue for a new understanding of what the Stoics believed. Epictetus did not believe, as Frede argues, that adult human beings choose to assent to impulsive impressions. This gets the object of choice wrong in the minimum belief. He believed that the choice adult human beings make is to exercise their ability to use their impressions, and I argue that the early Stoics probably believed this too.

The Stoics thought that once human beings become rational, they immediately form false beliefs about what is good and what is bad. There are no exceptions. Even the sage once had false beliefs about the value of things. The dispute among the Stoics was not about whether this happens, but was about how to explain the reasoning that results in these beliefs. The primary evidence for this dispute is Galen’s discussion in On the Doctrines of Plato and Hippocrates. On the basis of this discussion and certain assumptions about how the Stoics understood impulses in the psychology of children and adults, I set out an interpretation of (i) Chrysippus’ explanation of what happens at the onset of reason when human beings form false beliefs about what is good and what is bad, (ii) Posidonius’ criticism of this explanation of the origin of vice, and (iii) the explanation that Posidonius himself thought was correct.

I argue for an alternative interpretation of some of the examples Fred Feldman uses to establish his theory of happiness. According to Feldman, the examples show that certain utterances of the form S is pleased/glad that P and S is displeased/sad that P should be interpreted as expressions of extrinsic attitudinal pleasure and displeasure and hence must be excluded from the aggregative sum of attitudinal pleasure and displeasure that constitutes happiness. I develop a new interpretation of Feldman’s examples. My interpretation is plausible in its own right. Moreover, it is significant within the context of the debate. It allows the attitudinal hedonist to preserve the initial understanding of happiness that Feldman believes is open to counterexample: that happiness is the sum of attitudinal pleasure minus attitudinal displeasure and that all attitudinal pleasure and displeasure counts equally in the aggregation that constitutes happiness.

In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates argues that ‘the many’ are confused about the experience they describe as ‘being overcome by pleasure’. They think the cause is ‘something other than ignorance’. He argues it follows from what they believe that the cause is ‘ignorance’ and ‘false belief’. I show that his argument depends on a premise he does not introduce but they should deny: that when someone is overcome by pleasure, the desire stems from a belief. To explain why Plato does not make Socrates introduce this premise, the account I construct is speculative. It starts from the assumption that Plato is thinking through an understanding of human beings and what they must do to live good lives that he takes the historical Socrates to set out.

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.

There is a set of texts in the history of ancient skepticism that have not been widely understood. Michael Frede has done much to set these texts in their proper context, but his work has not gotten the appreciation it deserves. Historians have tended to think that ancient skepticism in the Clitomachian-Pyrrhonian tradition is the suspension of belief on all matters and that Frede’s attempt to show otherwise is confused. This may turn out to be correct, but Frede’s interpretation, as I think it should be understood, is more plausible and interesting than is usually thought. Frede has made it possible to see the skeptics in the Clitomachian-Pyrrhonian tradition as taking some of the first steps in working out the philosophical view that epistemic justification is a matter of whether a belief is the sustained outcome of a correct cognitive process and that correctness here need not and perhaps should not be understood in terms of modal reliability.

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 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.

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.

Abstract:There are two main interpretations of how the Stoics understood impulsive impressions in adults: the “form” interpretation and the “no-form” interpretation. I assess these interpretations against the well-known passages in Stobaeus’ account of Stoic ethics that provide the primary evidence for how the Stoics understood impulsive impressions. It is in terms of these passages that Inwood and other historians argue for the form interpretation. I argue that these arguments for the form interpretation are not sound and that these passages in Stobaeus provide no reason to believe that the form interpretation is more plausible than the no-form interpretation.

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.

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.