Elian McCarron

This essay attends to an underlying problem in ethics: how do we apply general ethical principles to particular situations? Seneca proposes his own model of moral reasoning using two epistemological tools to assist the moral agent in applying the general to particular: decreta and praecepta. I aim to show that the Senecan model is designed to improve upon early Stoic ethics by (i) allowing for the morally appropriate conduct of non-Sages, thus (ii) relaxing the restriction of Stoic ethics to the Sage alone, and also (iii) provides the means by which Sagehood may be attained using praecepta. Later, I identify the particular dispositional quality that makes equitable consideration of both the general and particular as aequitas. This identification allows for Seneca’s distinctive and valuable contribution to Stoic ethics to be better appreciated and also sheds clarificatory light upon his puzzling treatise De Clementia – a text often considered to be incompatible with the Stoic philosophy.

Identifying the unifying theme of the Phaedrus has puzzled scholars since at least the 5th century CE. Whilst multiple proposals remain in contention, psychagōgia ‘soul-leading’ seems the most promising. There is, however, two respects in which this proposal may be improved. First, psychagōgia seems too general and could function as a unifying theme for almost any Platonic dialogue where Socrates is leading an interlocutor. Instead, a unifying theme should be descriptive of this particular dialogue and match with its subject matter. Second, psychagōgia focuses heavily on rhetoric and is accordingly ill-equipped to deal with manía ‘madness’ and the erotic language, images and symbols presented throughout the dialogue – all of which provide a puzzle to a rational and rhetorical account. I shall take a different approach to the scholarship by utilising semiotic analysis of the Phaedrus’ symbology in both sections of this paper. I claim seduction specifies the means of psychagōgia; thus as a related but narrower concept that specifies this particular dialogue, it may provide a better candidate for the unifying theme of the Phaedrus. Section I conducts a close reading of the dialogue. Section II examines seduction’s connection with eros and rhetoric, relating seduction with madness and knowledge. By uncovering an epistemological value for erōs from philosophical madness, overlooked by psychagōgia, we may observe that the Phaedrus is designed to lead us – to rhetorically seduce us – towards a phenomenological view of knowledge which differs from the conventional rationalist account of Plato’s works we are accustomed to. Whilst at first it may seem surprising to present seduction as the unifying theme, my proposal is part of a broader picture familiar to scholars of Plato, namely his working of erotic imagery into much of his philosophy.