Luca Castagnoli

Augustine’s discussion of our memoria of the liberal arts in Confessions X poses a series of challenging questions which are best tackled in the broader context of his ideas on teaching, learning, understanding and the acquisition of knowledge. The contents of the liberal arts are stored in our memory (a non-physical and non-spatial receptacle often meta­phorically depicted through spatial imagery) by themselves, and not through images (like the objects of sense-perception) or ‘notions’ (like the affections of the soul). When we learn the disciplinae liberales, actually we do not absorb new information from our teachers, but we are triggered by their words to retrieve from the most remote ‘caves’ of our memory contents already present in a latent form since birth (I address the question of what exactly these con­tents might be). In the Confessions, unlike in earlier writings, Augustine cautiously eschews expressions which might suggest full-blown Platonic recollection of things known in previous lives and subsequently forgotten, and thus presuppose the pre-existence and reincarnation of the soul (not even the claim that cogitare is, literally, ‘re-collecting’ involves recalling forgotten knowledge). I argue that for Augustine divine illumination (as presented, e.g., in the De magistro and the De Trinitate) and recollection are not two rival and incompatible theo­ries, but two different and yet consistent sets of metaphors meant to illustrate the same family of ideas and intuitions (sometimes underdetermined in their details); I also explain why the illumination metaphor ultimately appears more appropriate.

This Companion provides a comprehensive guide to ancient logic. The first part charts its chronological development, focussing especially on the Greek tradition, and discusses its two main systems: Aristotle's logic of terms and the Stoic logic of propositions. The second part explores the key concepts at the heart of the ancient logical systems: truth, definition, terms, propositions, syllogisms, demonstrations, modality and fallacy. The systematic discussion of these concepts allows the reader to engage with some specific logical and exegetical issues and to appreciate their transformations across different philosophical traditions. The intersections between logic, mathematics and rhetoric are also explored. The third part of the volume discusses the reception and influence of ancient logic in the history of philosophy and its significance for philosophy in our own times. Comprehensive coverage, chapters by leading international scholars and a critical overview of the recent literature in the field will make this volume essential for students and scholars of ancient logic.

Through a close reading of Plutarch’s Against Colotes 3-9, the paper reconstructs and interprets the original Epicurean criticism against Democritean epistemology and ontology, and in particular against Democritus’ theory of sensible qualities, and Plutarch’s twofold criticism of Epicurean epistemology, on similar grounds, and of the questionable exegetical and argumentative manoeuvres used by the Epicurean Colotes. In the process of interpreting Plutarch’s text, the paper reflects on the nature, motivation and plausibility of Plutarch’s own exegetical and argumentative strategies. Finally, the paper suggests that a careful reading of Against Colotes will help us to put into focus the important question of whether, independently of their apparently opposite claims about the “reality” of secondary qualities, Democritus and Epicurus shared either a form of radical relativism or a form of commonsense “intersubjectivism” in their evaluations of ascriptions of such qualities to macroscopic objects.

Greek Memories aims to identify and examine the central concepts underlying the theories and practices of memory in the Greek world, from the archaic period to Late Antiquity, across all the main literary genres, and to trace some fundamental changes in these theories and practices. It explores the interaction and development of different 'disciplinary' approaches to memory in Ancient Greece, which will enable a fuller and deeper understanding of the whole phenomenon, and of its specific manifestations. This collection of papers contributes to enriching the current scholarly discussion by refocusing it on the question of how various theories and practices of memory, recollection, and forgetting play themselves out in specific texts and authors from Ancient Greece, within a wide chronological span, and across a broad range of genres and disciplines.

This article aims at reconstructing the logic and assessing the force of Socrates' argument against Protagoras' 'Measure Doctrine' at Theaetetus 171a–c. I examine and criticise some influential interpretations of the passage, according to which, e.g., Socrates is guilty of ignoratio elenchi by dropping the essential Protagorean qualifiers or successfully proves that md is self-refuting provided the missing qualifiers are restored by the attentive reader. Having clarified the meaning of MD, I analyse in detail the broader section 170a–171d and argue, against an extensive scholarly consensus, that it contains two slightly different formulations of the same argument, and not two distinct arguments, that Socrates does not highlight his own strategy at 171a–c as especially clever, and that his argument successfully shows that md turns out to be untenable for Protagoras himself when submitted to scrutiny in dialectical contexts, without aiming at proving its absolute falsehood. Finally, I clarify the philosophical import of the final image of Protagoras' momentary return from the underworld.

A 'self-refutation argument' is any argument which aims at showing that a certain thesis is self-refuting. This study was the first book-length treatment of ancient self-refutation and provides a unified account of what is distinctive in the ancient approach to the self-refutation argument, on the basis of close philological, logical and historical analysis of a variety of sources. It examines the logic, force and prospects of this original style of argumentation within the context of ancient philosophical debates, dispelling various misconceptions concerning its nature and purpose and elucidating some important differences which exist both within the ancient approach to self-refutation and between that approach, as a whole, and some modern counterparts of it. In providing a comprehensive account of ancient self-refutation, the book advances our understanding of influential and debated texts and arguments from philosophers like Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, the Academic sceptics, the Pyrrhonists and Augustine.

When in classical formal logic the notions of deduction, valid inference and logical consequence are defined, causal language plays no role. The founder of western logic, Aristotle, identified ‘non-cause’, or ‘positing as cause what is not a cause’, as a logical fallacy. I argue that a systematic re-examination of Aristotle's analysis of NCF, and the related language of logical causality, in the Sophistical Refutations, Topics, Analytics and Rhetoric, helps us to understand his conception of. It reveals that Aristotle's syllogismhood is non-monotonic, and thus narrower than classical validity as consisting in, or coextensive with, necessary truth-preservation. It also supports the conclusion that a syllogism is a form of relevant consequence: the premisses must be causes of the conclusion in the sense that they are not only sufficient but also necessary for the conclusion to follow. Close analysis of NCF also suggests that syllogistic relevance is not a semantic matter, but a syntactic..