Priscilla Sakezles

In Aristotle and the Stoics Sandbach argued that there is no evidence to prove that the Stoics were influenced by Aristotle. This work challenges that conclusion by arguing that the Stoics both knew of and were responding to Aristotle's theory of human action. I establish this by a comparison of their views on action and responsibility. ;The relationship between Aristotle and the Stoics on this issue is complex. Their conclusions are diametrically opposed: Aristotle believes all voluntary actions are "in our power" $$ to perform or refrain from performing; the Stoics maintain that we cannot do anything other than what we in fact do. Yet there are many structural similarities between their theories. Their physiological explanations of action are nearly identical. They have the same criteria for counting us responsible for an action. Both Aristotle and the Stoics insist that we are responsible for our actions because they are "in our power." This is the point at which the theories diverge. The Stoics define the notion "in our power" so as to avoid Aristotelian freedom, holding that an action is "in our power" as long as it comes about through our own impulse and assent. ;I conclude that the structural similarities between the Aristotelian and Stoic views are more than coincidental: the Stoics adopted significant portions of Aristotle's theory of action, and their determinism is at least partly the consequence of Aristotelian views. More specifically, the Stoics' determinism makes explicit what was implicit but unnoticed by Aristotle in his own philosophy

It is frequently, but incorrectly, claimed that Socrates said “All I know is that I know nothing.” The source of this misquote is Plato’s dialogue the Apology, where there are five Socratic claims that may appear to justify it. I review these five claims in their context to prove that they are not equivalent to, nor do they imply, the infamous quote. What Socrates does say is that he does not think that he knows anything that he does not in fact really know. He is skeptical in a certain sense; but he is not the dogmatic and self-contradicting skeptic that he is often made out to be.

This paper describes a strategy for getting students interested in ancient, especially Hellenistic, philosophy. While the works of Aristotle, the Stoics, the Skeptics, and the Epicureans may strike students as impossibly distant in time and thus far removed from their own personal concerns, students are always interested in the topics of free will and moral responsibility. Teaching the transition from Hellenic to Hellenistic philosophy through an emphasis on treatments of these topics engages students and makes feasible the teaching of an understudied, extremely important period in Western philosophy. The author advocates focusing specifically on the debate between Aristotle and the Stoics on whether “being able to do otherwise” is a necessary condition for freedom. After presenting a detailed overview of the arguments that comprise this debate, the author offers suggestions on how this strategy might be augmented and on how to apply this strategy to courses which do not focus exclusively on ancient philosophy.

This Article doDespite obvious differences in the Aristotelian and Stoic theories of responsibility, there is surprisingly a deeper structural similarity between the two. The most obvious difference is that Aristotle is (apparently) a libertarian and the Stoics are determinists. Aristotle holds adults responsible for all our "voluntary" actions, which are defined by two criteria: the "origin" or cause of the action must be "in us" and we must be aware of what we are doing. An "involuntary" action, for which we are not responsible, is one that fails to meet either one of these two criteria. Aristotle is a libertarian insofar as he insists that all voluntary actions are "in our power" to perform or not. As determinists the Stoics cannot admit this sort of freedom, but they still consider the agent to be a vital link in the chain of events, so they redefine what is "in our power" as what comes about "through us." The terminology is different, but I argue that these actions, for which the Stoics hold us responsible, are in fact coextensive with Aristotle's voluntary actions. An "impression" is the first necessary condition for action, and is a sort of visual image of the object stimulating one to act. The right sort of impression activates the agent's "impulse," an internal movement of soul or mind, which is the direct cause of action. But impulse is always accompanied by "assent," which is the mind's affirming the truth of the proposition that we ought to go after the object stimulating our impulse. Thus, since assent is a necessary condition for action, we always act knowing what we are doing. This means that all actions caused by our own impulse and assent are by Aristotle's criteria voluntary, where impulse provides the internal origin of the action and assent provides the awareness of what is being done. I conclude that the Stoic and Aristotelian classes of what one is responsible for are coextensive, their criteria defining responsible actions are nearly identical, and the only substantial difference is that Aristotle claims such actions are in our power to do or not do while the Stoics say that such actions are necessitated (by our internal nature as well as external factors). es not have an abstract