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60Hellenistic CosmopolitanismIn Mary Louise Gill & Pierre Pellegrin (eds.), A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 549-558. 2006.This chapter surveys the origins and development in Greek philosophy of the thought that living well requires living as a citizen of the world.
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480Socrates and Coherent Desire (Gorgias 466a-468e)In J. Clerk Shaw (ed.), Plato's Gorgias: a critical guide, Cambridge University Press. pp. 68-86. 2024.Polus admires orators for the tyrannical power they have. However, Socrates argues that orators and tyrants lack power worth having: the ability to satisfy one's wishes or wants (boulēseis). He distinguishes wanting from thinking best, and grants that orators and tyrants do what they think best while denying that they do what they want. His account is often thought to involve two conflicting requirements: wants must be attributable to the wanter from their own perspective (to count as their desi…Read more
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39The Dangerous Game of PersuasionThe Common Reader 1 (49). 2024.A brief overview of Classical Athenian views of persuasion.
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957Socratic MethodsIn Russell E. Jones, Ravi Sharma & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Socrates, Bloomsbury Handbooks. pp. 45-62. 2024.This selective and opinionated overview of English-language scholarship on the philosophical method(s) of Plato's Socrates discusses whether this Socrates has any expertise or method, how he examines others and why, and how he exhorts others to care about wisdom and the state of their soul.
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33Knowing the Whole: Comments on Gill, “Plato’s Phaedrus and the Method of Hippocrates”Modern Schoolman 80 (4): 315-323. 2003.What does Socrates mean by suggesting that no one can understand the nature of the soul "without the nature of the whole" (Phaedrus 270c)? I raise epistemological and metaphysical questions for Mary Louise Gill's proposal that he means us to consider the whole environment, and I make a case for the old-fashioned interpretation that he means us to consider the whole cosmos.
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600Wishing for Fortune, Choosing Activity: Aristotle on External Goods and HappinessProceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 22 (1): 221-256. 2006.Aristotle's account of external goods in Nicomachean Ethics I 8-12 is often thought to amend his narrow claim that happiness is virtuous activity. I argue, to the contrary, that on Aristotle's account, external goods are necessary for happiness only because they are necessary for virtuous activity. My case innovates in three main respects: I offer a new map of EN I 8-12; I identify two mechanisms to explain why virtuous activity requires external goods, including a psychological need for exter…Read more
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45Knowing the Whole: Comments on Gill, “Plato’s Phaedrus and the Method of Hippocrates”Modern Schoolman 80 (4): 315-323. 2003.Socrates suggests that no one can know the nature of soul without knowing the nature of the whole. The whole what? Gill proposes "the whole environment" in which the soul is active. I criticize this and argue for the old-fashioned reading of "the whole world."
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731Plato on the Unity of the Political Arts (Statesman 258d-259d)Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 58 1-18. 2020.Plato argues that four political arts—politics, kingship, slaveholding, and household-management—are the same. His argument, which prompted Aristotle’s reply in Politics I, has been universally panned. The problem is that the argument clearly identifies household-management with slaveholding, and household-management with politics, but does not fully identify kingship with any of the others. I consider and reject three ways of saving the argument, and argue for a fourth. On my view, Plato assume…Read more
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1049Plato's Socrates and his Conception of PhilosophyIn David Ebrey & Richard Kraut (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press. pp. 117-145. 2022.This is a study of Plato's use of the character Socrates to model what philosophy is. The study focuses on the Apology, and finds that philosophy there is the love of wisdom, where wisdom is expertise about how to live, of the sort that only gods can fully have, and where Socrates loves wisdom in three ways, first by honoring wisdom as the gods' possession, testing human claims to it, second by pursuing wisdom, examining himself as he examines others, to achieve a more well justified set of beli…Read more
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274CosmopolitanismStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2013.The word ‘cosmopolitan’, which derives from the Greek word kosmopolitês (‘citizen of the world’), has been used to describe a wide variety of important views in moral and socio political philosophy. The nebulous core shared by all cosmopolitan views is the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to a single community, and that this community should be cultivated. Different versions of cosmopolitanism envision this community in different …Read more
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651Die Erfindung kosmopolitaner Politik durch die StoikerIn Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Andreas Niederberger & Philipp Schink (eds.), Kosmopolitanismus: zur Geschichte und Zukunft eines umstrittenen Ideals, Velbrück. pp. 9-24. 2010.This lecture explores the political import of Chrysippus' account of why and how one should live as a citizen of the cosmos, and it makes a case for seeing this account as the invention of political cosmopolitanism. (The preprint uploaded here is the final English draft on which the German translation was based.)
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2841The Unity of the Soul in Plato's RepublicIn Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan & Charles Brittain (eds.), Plato and the Divided Self, Cambridge University Press. pp. 53-73. 2012.This essay argues that Plato in the Republic needs an account of why and how the three distinct parts of the soul are parts of one soul, and it draws on the Phaedrus and Gorgias to develop an account of compositional unity that fits what is said in the Republic.
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2Epicurus on the Value of Friendship (Sententia Vaticana 23)Classical Philology 97 (1): 68-80. 2002.The orthodox reading of Sententia Vaticana (SV) 23 emends the sentence and attributes to Epicurus the view that every friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake. I argue that this reading should be rejected, because it singularly contradicts all our evidence about Epicurus' view, according to which only pleasure is choiceworthy for its own sake. I defend the manuscript reading, that every friendship is in itself a virtue, and I argue that anyone who rejects the manuscript reading should attribu…Read more
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628False Idles: The Politics of the "Quiet Life"In Ryan K. Balot (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 485-500. 2009.The dominant Greek and Roman ideology held that the best human life required engaging in politics, on the grounds that the human good is shared, not private, and that the activities central to this shared good are those of traditional politics. This chapter surveys three ways in which philosophers challenged this ideology, defended a withdrawal from or transformation of traditional politics, and thus rethought what politics could be. Plato and Aristotle accept the ideology's two central commitme…Read more
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389Socrates in the StoaIn Sara Ahbel-Rappe & Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), A Companion to Socrates, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 275-284. 2006.I show how the familiar Stoic paradoxes were developed by reflecting on Socrates.
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3724Aristotle on the choice of lives: Two concepts of self-sufficiencyIn Pierre Destrée & Marco Antônio Zingano (eds.), Theoria: Studies on the Status and Meaning of Contemplation in Aristotle's Ethics, Peeters Press. pp. 111-133. 2014.Aristotle's treatment of the choice between the political and contemplative lives (in EN I 5 and X 7-8) can seem awkward. To offer one explanation of this, I argue that when he invokes self-sufficience (autarkeia) as a criterion for this choice, he appeals to two different and incompatible specifications of "lacking nothing." On one specification, suitable to a human being living as a political animal and thus seeking to realize his end as an engaged citizen of a polis, a person lacks nothing by…Read more
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494CynicsIn Frisbee Sheffield & James Warren (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 399-408. 2013.This overview attempts to explain how we can come to an account of Cynicism and what that account should look like. My account suggests that Cynics are identified by living like Diogenes of Sinope, and that Diogenes' way of life is characterized by distinctive twists on three Socratic commitments. The three Socratic commitments are that success in life depends on excellence of the soul; that this excellence and success are a special achievement, requiring hard work; and that this work requires d…Read more
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375Plato on Well-BeingIn Guy Fletcher (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Well-Being, Routledge. pp. 9-19. 2015.Plato's dialogues use several terms for the concept of well-being, which concept plays a central ethical role as the ultimate goal for action and a central political role as the proper aim for states. But the dialogues also reveal sharp debate about what human well-being is. I argue that they endorse a Socratic conception of well-being as virtuous activity, by considering and rejecting several alternatives, including an ordinary conception that lists a variety of goods, a Protagorean conception …Read more
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2Stoic Cosmopolitanism and the Political LifeDissertation, The University of Chicago. 1997.Resurgent nationalisms and disputes over educational curricula have brought to the fore an old debate between cosmopolitans and patriots. The cosmopolitans emphasize our moral obligations to all human beings, while the patriots argue that our greatest moral obligations lie closer to hand, within our political community. My dissertation concerns the roots of this debate by focusing on the first philosophers in the West to devise an ethical theory which is fully committed to the strictly cosmopoli…Read more
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373The emergence of natural law and the cosmopolisIn Stephen Salkever (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought, Cambridge University Press. pp. 331-363. 2009.Two prominent metaphors in Greek and Roman political philosophy are surveyed here, with a view to determining their possible meanings and the plausibility of the claims advanced by those possible meanings.
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190Justice and Compulsion for Plato’s Philosopher–RulersAncient Philosophy 20 (1): 1-17. 2000.By considering carefully Socrates' invocations of 'compulsion' in Plato's Republic, I seek to explain how both justice and compulsion are crucial to the philosophers' decision to rule in Kallipolis, so that this decision does not contradict Socrates' central thesis that it is always in one's interests to act justly. On my account, the compulsion is provided by a law, made by the city's lawgivers, that requires people raised to be philosophers take turns ruling. Justice by itself does not require…Read more
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10A New Stoicism (review) (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 37 (1): 162-164. 1999.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A New Stoicism by Lawrence C. BeckerEric BrownLawrence C. Becker. A New Stoicism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. vii + 216. Cloth, $ 29.95.As the title suggests, A New Stoicism is not primarily a work in the history of philosophy but an appropriation for current purposes. Becker boldly identifies himself as a stoic (sic) and seeks to “outline a contemporary version of stoic ethics” (6). While disdaining …Read more
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26Topics in Stoic Philosophy, and: Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (review) (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 38 (3): 432-434. 2000.Review of Ierodiakonou (ed.), Topics in Stoic Philosophy, and Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy
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271Plato's ethics and politics in the republicStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Plato's Republic centers on a simple question: is it always better to be just than unjust? The puzzles in Book One prepare for this question, and Glaucon and Adeimantus make it explicit at the beginning of Book Two. To answer the question, Socrates takes a long way around, sketching an account of a good city on the grounds that a good city would be just and that defining justice as a virtue of a city would help to define justice as a virtue of a human being. Socrates is finally close to answerin…Read more
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185A Defense of Plato's Argument for the Immortality of the Soul at Republic X 608c-611aApeiron 30 (3). 1997.Despite the bad press, Plato has a valid argument for immortality from three premises: (1) if the natural evil of a thing cannot destroy it, then it is indestructible; (2) the natural evil of the soul is vice; and (3) vice cannot destroy the soul. These premises are contestable, of course, but Plato has some good reasons for advancing them.
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98I defend the Stoicizing view that Socrates in the Euthydemus really means what he says when he says that wisdom is the only good for a human being. By taking the deniers' case seriously and extending my Stoicizing interpretation to the Euthydemus as a whole, I aim to show how the dialogue calls into question three prominent assumptions that the deniers make, assumptions that reach far beyond the Euthydemus and that are made by more than just the deniers. First, the deniers misread Socrates' argu…Read more
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101The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection (review) (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (3): 490-491. 2007.Review of Gretchen Reydams-Schils, The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
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64Plato on the Rule of WisdomSouthern Journal of Philosophy 43 (S1): 84-96. 2005.How does Plato account for political legitimacy in the Republic? In the first half of these brief comments, I consider Fred Miller's proposal that Plato endorses "the rule of reason." In the second, I offer an alternative, according to which it is wisdom that earns rulers legitimacy.
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Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |