David Glidden

Once properly understood, how might Protagorean and Cyrenaic experiential empiricisms each comport with late twentieth century philosophical analysis of sense data, adverbial appears locutions, and reverentially opaque contexts? (In 2020 retrospect, had I listened more to Roderick Chisholm and less to my Princeton professors, a more apt philosophical perspective on Protagoras versus the Cyrenaics would have been in terms of early Husserl and the Göttingen phenomenologists on the differences between ‘objectivist’ and ‘subjectivist’ understandings of essential experience.)

The eristic paradox served as a starting point for Josiah Royce's metaphysical and moral outlook, beginning with "The Religious Aspect of Philosophy" (1885) and continuing to his final "Hope of the Great Community" (1916). In particular, Royce's early reflections on how error proves possible, as the puzzle was specifically presented in Plato's "Theaetetus", proved foundational for Royce's entire philosophical development. Royce's particular solution to the puzzles of the waxed table and the aviary is suggestive of similar moves in Frege, Wittgenstein, and the neopragmatism of Richard Rorty, not to mention Royce's own theory of community

Cicero, Lucullus 38: ‘…non potest animal ullum non adpetere id quod accommodatum ad naturam adpareat …’ From earliest childhood every man wants to possess something. One man collects horses. Another wants gold. Socrates has a passion for companions. He would rather have a good friend than a quail or a rooster. In this way, Socrates begins his interrogation of Menexenus. He then congratulates Menexenus and Lysis for each having what he himself still does not possess. How is it that one gets a friend, Socrates asks? Since the nineteenth century many who have read these lines have found them repulsive. Scholars have damned the Lysis for its selfish egoism, for regarding persons as personal belongings. At the turn of the century some sought to discredit the dialogue as a forgery and a calumny. Others debated the dating of the dialogue as Socratic or Platonic, seeking whom to blame rather than whom to credit. And those who have regarded the dialogue as Platonic have tried to redeem it by detecting hints of Plato's theory of Forms. A few have attempted to salvage reputations by understanding the argument of the Lysis as a reductio of egoism, or else by invoking the loyalty of Socrates' friends and the history of Plato's friendship for Dion of Syracuse to speak up for their defence. Guthrie has condemned the dialogue as a failure of method and presentation , and Vlastos has pronounced it a failure of love: ‘The lover Socrates has in view seems positively incapable of loving others for their own sake, else why must he feel no affection for anyone whose good-producing qualities he did not happen to need?’ The Lysis appears to make no positive contribution to the Greek tradition on friendship when compared to the Symposium or the Phaedrus. And in the subsequent tradition, whatever Aristotle might have borrowed from the dialogue he uses for his own purposes. Aristotle too is quite critical of specific points raised in the Lysis. Now it might seem that Aristotle made a place for the selfish love of the Lysis in his own theory, as an inferior grade of utility love. But even this cannot be so, if we are to agree with recent studies of Aristotle's ethics. According to Aristotle, if a client is friendly to his benefactor because of the latter's usefulness, this utilitarian motive must accompany a genuine concern for the benefactor's own interest in that relation, if they are to be friends. Inferior and genuine friendship may differ in purpose but not in regard for the well-being of the beloved. This respect for the object of one's love has no parallel in the Lysis, according to the standard reading of the dialogue

Within an interpretive community, conversation will not cease until voices are silenced by circumstance.1 Less than three months after lecturing at Lake Forest College in November of 1911, Royce suffered a stroke.2 Within a year, Royce had adequately recovered and recuperated, so as to redouble his preparations for a lecture series on Christianity, initially presented in part at the Lowell Institute and then in a more completed version at Oxford. These lectures would come to constitute The Problem of Christianity.3 Publication preceded Royce’s passing by a mere three years.In Royce’s day, both the United States and England were largely Christian nations. They are no longer so today....

Having been set free from sin,You have become slaves of righteousness.Beginning with The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Josiah Royce's views gradually evolved into a growing celebration of community affiliations. Philosophy of Loyalty eloquently articulated his distinctive social philosophy.1 Royce's vision of ideal community life soon became beatified in The Problem of Christianity in the form of "the Beloved Community," where Royce venerated the Pauline model of a gathered community consisting of those who share a common faith. Heartfelt community loyalty thereby acquired a spiritual dimension that transformed human nature. Against the background of this transfiguration, Royce downplayed the...

Book synopsis: Reissued in 1997 with corrections and a new Afterword, this book fully explores for the first time an idea common to Plato and Aristotle, which unites their treatments - otherwise very different - of love and friendship. The idea is that although persons are separate, their lives need not be. One person's life may overflow into another's, and as such, helping another person is a way of serving oneself. The author shows how their view of love and friendship, within not only personal relationships, but also the household and even the city-state, promises to resolve the old dichotomy between egoism and altruism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friendship in the Classical World by David KonstanDavid K. GliddenDavid Konstan. Friendship in the Classical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xiv + 206. Paper, $18.95.Despite its brevity, Konstan’s history of friendship in classical antiquity speaks volumes. With admirable precision and economy of expression, Konstan cites and surveys scores of ancient authors—poets, playwrights, politicians, novelists and historians, sophists, satirists, philosophers, and theologians—from Homer’s legendary portrait of Achilles and Patroclus to the Christian fusions of Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth century of the common era. An impressive array of anthropologists, philosophers, and classical scholars enter into the discussion at specific interstices connecting philology, textual interpretation, ancient history, and modern social psychology all together, so as to display an evolving array of ancient philosophies, faiths, and attitudes concerned with friendly relations of one sort or another. Konstan grounds this history in a richly informed context of exacting detail. Yet, he charitably leaves his reader with the feeling that so much more needs to be explored.At the same time, what largely motivates this work is Konstan’s demonstrable conviction that ancient friendship exhibits recognizable resemblances with its contemporary counterpart, notwithstanding all the varieties exhibited over the fifteen hundred years or so of ancient Greek and Roman practices. “Ideas of friendship were adapted to different practices, but the core sense of a private bond based on mutual affection, esteem, and liberality—within the capabilities of the respective partners—abided” (148). What is foreign in ancient human relations may be considerable, but it [End Page 359] does not efface what remains familiar and what continues to be prized about the company of friends. Regardless of the peculiarities of ancient political associations, protocols of reciprocity, the relations of clients to their patrons, strains between honesty and flattery, divided loyalties among families, friends, and countries, and the dramatic effects of early Christianity on human relations when faced with a relationship to God, there is, all the same, something comfortably familiar about the ways friends related to one another throughout the ancient world. This abides even in the face of ancient/modern barriers segregating friendships from, say, sexual relationships or restricting friendships across genders, or so it would seem.Konstan’s anthropological approach employs an approximating master concept of friendship with which to tie his story together, a conception which places great emphasis on “mutual affection, esteem, and liberality.” Aristotle’s understanding of friendship consequently plays a special role in this history, both as an influential model within antiquity and also as a vehicle for Konstan’s own narrative construction.Aristotle famously portrayed a prototype of human friendship in which persons are bound together first and foremost by a personal affinity due in large part to the content of their character, in contrast to those who are friends for lesser reasons, due to usefulness or pleasure. At the same time, Aristotle’s focus on virtue friendship as a primary vehicle for fathoming other varieties of human relations became something of a self-fulfilling methodology. Armed with such a normative model, a philosophical anthropologist would then rank other varieties of human relations accordingly, as lesser forms of friendship. Aristotle’s template serves Konstan’s purpose nicely, since he too sees character affinity as primary to the various ways we human beings relate with one another. Yet, normative ideals of what friendship ought to be when at its best inevitably affect, in turn, how we read the ways friends are and were historically.Following Aristotle, Konstan lays great emphasis on the originating Greek conception of the friend (philos as a noun), as opposed to the various instantiations of whatever objects may be loved or cherished generally (philos as an adjective). So too, the broader, underlying account of caring (philein the verb; philia the abstracted noun) is displaced as well, to maintain a steady focus on the living witness of friends, both real and ideal. While this tidy terminological division between philos (noun) and philos (adjective) might work well for Aristotle and for Konstan, Plato found it less appealing. And it was Plato’s Lysis, after all, that Aristotle’s originating model of friendship was responding to. Had a modern...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” by Benson MatesDavid K. GliddenBenson Mates. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s “Outlines of Pyrrhonism.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. x + 335. Cloth, $55.00, Paper, $22.95.Benson Mates’s translation and commentary of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism appears nearly half a century after Mates first began his pioneering work on Sextus and Hellenistic philosophy. This publication coincides with another new translation of the Outlines by Annas and Barnes, who provide only an abbreviated commentary (Cambridge University Press, 1994). After decades when the only available English translation was by Bury from the Loeb, there are now choices available which allow Sextus to be taught to different sorts of English readers.In comparing the two translations, this reader found the Annas and Barnes version more mellifluous. Mates is not as sweet. His style is plain-spoken, but this approach has merits when the arguments get going. The Annas and Barnes version uses footnotes for commentary, along with a brief introduction. Their notes cite parallel passages in other works by Sextus, provide brief guidance for interpretation when it is most needed, and connect the reader with a focused list of bibliographical references, inviting readers themselves to turn toward scholarly debates over certain controversial passages. Consequently, Annas and Barnes opens out to a wide audience of classicists, historians, students of literature, general readers interested in scepticism, as well as philosophers of whatever ideology. [End Page 460]The Mates edition is directed toward philosophers alone. It is much less oriented toward historical scholarship, preferring to read Sextus as a contemporary professional philosopher might. In this way, Mates will approach a passage from the Outlines in terms of a passage in Hume or Berkeley, even though, of course, these latter-day philosophers derived their views from reading Sextus. Mates employs philosophese with ease, constructing a version of Sextus from the professional philosopher’s interpretive stance, in the language of propositions and Fregean intensions. The audience Mates is writing for and the viewpoint he is writing from more or less correspond to the “analytical” faction of the American Philosophical Association. Postmodern Foucaultians, contextualist historians, and Hellenistic scholars might find this approach unhelpful, even irritating. But busy, mainstream American philosophers could find Mates’s approach sufficiently sympathetic to actually read some Sextus, in the way Chisholm once had done, finding a passage on the Cyrenaics in Sextus which led to the reinvention of “adverbial appears locutions” and which, in turn, played for decades in the epistemological arcades.Mates begins his edition with a systematic introduction to the Outlines and follows his translation with another hundred pages of narrative, reflecting primarily what Mates finds interesting about certain selected passages. Although, like Annas and Barnes, he provides parallel passages, ancient references, and highly abbreviated accounts of scholarly disputes, his own narrative line dominates both his introductory essay and his commentary. Mates writes in a somewhat chatty style prone to the blunt Cephalean confidence that comes with considerable experience and success as a professional philosopher. His narrative line is clear, connected, often compelling, as for instance when he argues that for Sextus “dogmatizing and believing turn out to be one and the same” (61).Fashion has returned to favor Pyrrhonism in the late twentieth century, just as the cycle had come around before, toward the end of the sixteenth century, sparking a philosophical renaissance. This time around the import may be different. Both Annas and Barnes as well as Mates find Sextus worth reading as serious philosophy. This is a considerable improvement in the fortuna of the Outlines. For decades Sextus was banned in American philosophy departments, as no philosopher at all. He was not taught, he was not read. One highly prominent American philosopher was expressly forbidden to write a dissertation on him, around the time Mates and Chisholm had the courage to publish on him. Sextus is now welcome in the Canon.If Sextus now is one of us, a serious philosopher, then the dogmatists (Stoics, Epicureans, Peripatetics, etc.) he ridiculed were merely failures. The game continues. So, Mates, Annas and Barnes can embrace Sextus as ours. His readers won’t...