André Laks

Jacob Burckhardt, the famous historian of Renaissance and Greek culture that Nietzsche highly appreciated, famously said that ‘What is of interest to [him] is not so much to see how far the Greeks took philosophy as to see how far philosophy took them.’ The phrase encapsulates the fascinating tension that pervades Burckhardt’s attitude towards Greek philosophy: whereas he was fundamentally hostile to philosophical doctrines, in particular because philosophers were themselves doctrinally hostiles to art, he also highly praised philosophy in as much as the embodiment of one of the great achievements of Greek culture, the development of the ‘free personality’. This explains why the Cynics, with little doctrine and much life, were his preferred philosophers.

This article shows how two basic meanings of _psuchē_—namely, ‘breath’ and ‘life’—may have helped Platonizing, or for that matter Stoicizing, doxographers in endowing various Preplatonic philosophers with the view that the world is ‘ensouled'. Although I do not attempt a systematic reconstruction of how these cosmo-philosophers conceived the relationship between the world and what was to become ‘the soul’, I suggest that framing the problem in terms of ‘breath’ and ‘life’ helps us to arrive at a more adequate understanding both of the authentic evidence and of the history of its reception. Indeed, to the extent that it is possible I try to reconstruct the interpretative steps that led, with various degrees of legitimacy, from the original wording to its Platonizing or Stoicizing deformations, which remain all too often the framework of analysis in modern interpretations. Five case studies are considered: Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, some Pythagoreans, and Alcmaeon.

The reading of Parmenides’ poem advocated in this chapter is synthetic, verging on cultural eclecticism. The author takes what he thinks is fruitful in Jonathan Barnes’ and Patricia Curd’s analysis of the Parmenidean ‘one’, especially what they say about B8.6a, with what the author thinks is right in Jean Bollack’s analysis of B8.53–54a, in the transitional section, or ‘hinge’ (B8.50–61), leading to the cosmological and physiological explanations that present the best possible version of ‘mortal opinions’ (B8.51, cf. B1.30). The substantial point is that there is a sense in which non-being is evacuated from the second part of the goddess’ exposition, and multiplicity given a legitimate ontological status. Read in this way, the second part of the goddess’ exposition is not the deployment of an error, but turns out to be the continuation, at another level (that of the world of mortal entities that mortals inhabit), of the ontological criterion advocated in the first part of her exposition. The picture of Parmenides that emerges from this interpretation is that of an ‘archaic’ thinker, compared here to Plato’s _Timaeus_, which at crucial junctures implicitly but clearly refers to Parmenides’ hinge.

Does Anaxagoras admit that the world is destructible? Aëtius’ doxographical handbook says as much, and so does a doxographical scholion derived from Alexander of Aphrodisias’ lost commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (Frag. 539 Rashed) according to the transmitted text. However, because of other difficulties occurring in the same scholion, Rashed was led to correct not only this text, thus making it contradict Aëtius’ testimony, but also the entry dedicated to Plato. My article suggests that while Rashed’s corrections are superfluous, the problems that triggered them are of great interest for the history of the doxographical tradition, for the way in which this tradition was used by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Simplicius in their commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and, last but not least, for the understanding of the difficulties that ancient interpreters had to confront when they had to make sense of the lines now known as Anaxagoras B12 DK – difficulties that modern interpreters have still to confront.

Hegel's often-echoed verdict on the apolitical character of philosophy in the Hellenistic age is challenged in this collection of essays, originally presented at the sixth meeting of the Symposium Hellenisticum. An international team of leading scholars reveals a vigorous intellectual scene of great diversity: analyses of political leadership and the Roman constitution in Aristotelian terms; Cynic repudiation of the polis - but accommodation with its rulers; Stoic and Epicurean theories of justice as the foundation of society; Cicero's moral critique of the traditional political pursuit of glory. The volume as a whole offers a comprehensive guide to the main currents of social and political philosophy in a period of increasing interest to classicists, philosophers and cultural and intellectual historians.

L’importance de Platon dans l’œuvre de Schleiermacher est connue, mais a été souvent trop exclusivement liée à la traduction des dialogues et à la célèbre Introduction qui la précède. Or cette Introduction ne porte que sur la forme des dialogues platoniciens. S’agissant du contenu, il convient de lire, en parallèle avec l’ Introduction (publiée en 1804), les Principes d’une critique de la doctrine des mœurs antérieures, qui datent de 1803. Platon y joue en effet un rôle central, à côté de Spinoza, auquel il est régulièrement associé. Une des questions qui se pose alors est comment construire la relation entre l’éloge constant que Schleiermacher fait de l’éthique platonicienne dans ce traité, et les critiques qu’il adressera aussi par la suite à Platon, notamment dans son Introduction à la République de 1828.

Nine leading scholars of ancient philosophy from Europe, the UK, and North America offer a systematic study of Book Beta of Aristotle's Metaphysics. The work takes the form of a series of aporiai or 'difficulties' which Aristotle presents as necessary points of engagement for those who wish to attain wisdom. The topics include causation, substance, constitution, properties, predicates, and generally the ontology of both the perishable and the imperishable world. Each contributor discusses one or two of these aporiai in sequence: the result is a discursive commentary on this seminal text of Western philosophy.