André Laks

This essay aims at establishing that the word “free” (eleutheros) and related terms are used by Plato in the Laws in two main senses. There is, first, the constitutional meaning of “freedom” which is put to work in book 3 in order to analyze moderately good and degenerate forms of historical constitutions. Strikingly enough, this meaning does not play any subsequent role in the shaping of the Platonic constitution itself—a fact which requires some kind of explanation. There is, then, scattered throughout the work, the behavioral meaning of “freedom” according to which the citizens of Magnesia, who are free in the sense that they are free men, are supposed to behave as such and to be educated accordingly, that is as “gentlemen.” One important aspect here is that a free education will appeal to rationality. The philosophically interesting fact, however, is that there appears to be no intrinsic link for Plato between freedom and rationality, as we might expect on the basis of modern philosophical assumptions whereby freedom is grounded on rationality. Rather, freedom is the condition for exercising rationality, because this exercise takes time. True, there is in the Laws a unique occurrence of yet another conception of “freedom” according to which one is free when one's reason masters one's desires. One might speculate why Plato did not develop this specific conception of freedom, which is in some sense closer to some modern views about liberty, as is shown, for example, from I. Berlin's concept of “positive liberty.” Footnotesa I would like to thank the editors for revising the English of this paper, as well as for a further series of useful suggestions.

This article takes up Diogenes again, investigating some of the reasons Diogenes has been unappreciated, and making a case for Diogenes' mind-based teleology as a significant philosophical contribution. The sophists, too, have suffered from the charge, which goes back to Plato, of not being “real” philosophers. Diogenes did not bother himself with, or was not interested in, showing in what sense the world is organized in the best possible manner; this looked to him as something that happened as a matter of course. What did interest him, on the other hand, was to show what the thing that exercised intelligence is. From this point of view, the emphasis is definitely not on teleology, but rather on noetics. Here, primary textual evidence is available, for the fragments, as well as Simplicius's presentation of them, definitely support the view that the point of Diogenes' argumentation was to show that intelligence is air's.

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.

In the _Poetics_, Aristotle, defines metaphor as the transfer of a term from a given, foreign domain to another one. If, as does the classical doctrine of tropes, we consider that it substitutes the ‘proper’ term, the metaphor has a purely ornamental value and we can do without it. Modern theories insist, on the contrary, on the cognitive value of the metaphor: because it offers a re-description of the world, the metaphor is “alive”. The question is to what extent this cognitive conception of metaphor, in spite of its classical reception, is already at work in Aristotle’s differentiated analysis of the phenomenon, as Ricœur claims. The answer is ‘yes but rather no’. This is because the cognition Aristotle talks about in relation to metaphor is of a special type, a “quasi-cognition”.

Bien que Nietzsche n'ait cessé de se réclamer de la phlologie, il cessa un jour de pratiquer ce qu'on appelle cemmunément ainsi. Quel fut, pour Nietzsche, le statut de cette philologie-là? le présent article cherche à répondre à cette question, en étudiant un text qui n'a guèrre été commenté, les Diadokhai des Philosophes préplatoniciens, rédigé en 1873/4. A la différence de autres études laetiennes de Nietzsche, où la Quellenforschung semble ètre pratiquée pour elle-même, la «recherche des sources», dans les Diadokhai, est directement, quoique implicitement, mise au service de la réévaluation des philosphes préplaniciens, à laquelle Nietzsche travaille par ailleurs dans les Leçons sur les préplatoniciens qu'il professe à Bàle entre les années 1969/70 et 1876. Ainsi se manifeste pour un temps, chez Nietzsche même, la solidarité entre l' «histoire des sommets» et la travail du tácheron, fugitivement thématisé dans la Seconde inactuelle.Obwohl Nietzsche niemals aufhörte, sich auf die Philologie zu verufen, hat er doch eines Tages aufgehört zu praktizieren, was man gewöhnlich so nennt. Was war für Nietzsche der Status dieser Philologie? der Aufsatz will eine Antwort auf diese Frage geben, indem er einen Text untersucht, der bisher kaum kommentiert wurde, die Διαδοχαί der vorplatonischen Philosophen von 1873/74. Im Unterschied zu zanderen Studien Nietzsches zu Laertius, in denen er Quellenforschung um ihrer selbst willen zu prakizien scheint, setzt er sie hier direkt, wenn auch implizit, zur Umwertung der vorplatonischen Philosphen ein, an der Nietzsche außerdem in seinen Vorlesungen über die vorplatonischen Philosophen arbeitet, die er in Basel von 1869/70 bis 1876 hält. So zeigt sich auf Zeit bei Nietzsche selbst die Nähe der 'Gipfel-Geschichte' und der mühsamen Arbeit, wie in der Zweiten Unzeitgemässen Betrashtung flüchtig thematisiert wird

When we talk about Presocratic philosophy, we are speaking about the origins of Greek philosophy and Western rationality itself. But what exactly does it mean to talk about “Presocratic philosophy” in the first place? How did early Greek thinkers come to be considered collectively as Presocratic philosophers? In this brief book, André Laks provides a history of the influential idea of Presocratic philosophy, tracing its historical and philosophical significance and consequences, from its ancient antecedents to its full crystallization in the modern period and its continuing effects today. Laks examines ancient Greek and Roman views about the birth of philosophy before turning to the eighteenth-century emergence of the term “Presocratics” and the debates about it that spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He analyzes the intellectual circumstances that led to the idea of Presocratic philosophy—and what was and is at stake in the construction of the notion. The book closes by comparing two models of the history of philosophy—the phenomenological, represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the rationalist, represented by Ernst Cassirer—and their implications for Presocratic philosophy, as well as other categories of philosophical history. Other figures discussed include Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, and J.-P. Vernant. Challenging standard histories of Presocratic philosophy, the book calls for a reconsideration of the conventional story of early Greek philosophy and Western rationality.

Le terme de « rationalisation », qui renvoie à un processus menant de l’« irrationnel » au « rationnel », prend deux valeurs opposées, selon que le processus en question est considéré comme objectif ou subjectif, légitime ou non. Le développement d’une nouvelle forme de rationalité en Grèce ancienne (la philosophie) et son historiographie postérieure présentent souvent des tensions intéressantes entre les deux options. Avons-nous affaire au « phénomèn » originel, dont la raison, malgré qu’elle en ait, doit s’accommoder, ou déjà à des utilisations et transpositions, qui font « référence » à des prétentions ou des types de pensée traditionnels ? L’article étudie sous ce rapport deux cas célèbres : la description fantastique que donne Parménide de son voyage chez la Déesse dans le proème de son poème et l’autoportrait d’Empédocle en « magicien » dans un de ses fragments, pour suggérer, contre certaines tendances récentes de l’interprétation, qu’ils répondent tous deux à la seconde hypothèse

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.

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.

Le développement conjoint, au cours du XVIIIe siècle, de la méthode historico-critique et du perspectivisme est à l'origine d'une tension nouvelle dans le traitement de l'histoire de la philosophie. L'article analyse brièvement quelques réactions, plus ou moins radicales, à cette configuration féconde. Zeller, Dilthey, Yorck, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Rorty, sont les principaux témoins. Il est aussi suggéré que la « doxographie », en dépit de la réputation détestable dont elle jouit, aussi bien chez les historiens que chez les philosophes, demeure une composante importante de toute réflexion sur la relation de la philosophie à son passé. The joint development, in the course of the XVIIIth century, of the historico-critical method on the one hand and of a self-conscious perspectivism on the other hand, created a new tension in the handling of the history of philosophy. In the following, I sketch some characteristic ways, hard or more compromising, of dealing with this lasting and, I suggest, productive tension. Zeller, Dilthey, Yorck, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Rorty are my main witnesses. In the wake of an analysis made by M. Frede, I also suggest, in the light of this tension, that « doxography », despite the detestable reputation the genre has among philosophers and historians of philosophy alike, remains an important component of any reflexion about the relationship between philosophy and its past