Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

The purpose of this article is to present the influence of Plotinus' thought on the political philosophy of the Roman Emperor Julian, between the years 361 to 363. The methodology consists of selecting excerpts from the works of Juliano Misopogon and Cartas y Fragmentos that may indicate the influence of the ideas of Plotinus' Ennead in the speech given by the Emperor to legitimize his political power. Juliano argues that the laws of the empire were created by the gods for (...) the organization of human life, so that obedience to the gods necessarily requires an obedience to those laws. According to Juliano, knowledge or episteme about the laws of empire is conditioned to the escape from sensible reality in the name of spiritual reality, in which the wise ruler also needs to transcend the body to know and obey divine laws. Thus, after analyzing Juliano's arguments, we seek to reflect on the viability of the political system adopted by him, especially if the reception of his ideas by rulers from the 20th century onwards is considered. (shrink)

This article sheds light on the diversity of meanings and connotations that tend to be lost or hidden in translations between different conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia. It reviews the idea of “nature” in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano, Lumad, Indonesian, Burmese, Nepali, Khmer, and Mongolian. It shows that the conceptual subtleties in the conceptualization of nature often hide wider and deeper cosmological mismatches. It concludes by suggesting that these diverse voices need to be represented in (...) global reports on sustainability, which can be fostered by the direct involvement of experts from diverse traditions of thought who have access and interpretative knowledge of sources in languages other than English. To take into consideration the diversity of conceptualizations of nature can lead to better decisions about sustainability and improve the acceptability and efficiency of environmental policies in each local context, as well as internationally. Solutions and policies on the ground must be designed based on the local conceptual and cultural frames. (shrink)

This article provides a transcultural, “transversal” investigation. It starts from the philo- sophical problem of knowing non-knowing. In chapters 1 and 2, the first expressions of this problem by Confucius and Socrates are considered. Against this background, new transcultural working concepts are developed. A new key term to be established here is that of an “implicate logic”. It refers to the reflection of unity of unity and difference and therefore to the very condition of the possibility of (differentiating) thinking as (...) such. In chapters 3 and 4, this train of thought is further developed under the influence of Nico- laus Cusanus, by reflecting on the first chapter of the Daodejing, and in view of important remarks by Niklas Luhmann. In chapter 5, the outcome is related to the idea of transversal reason in the philosophy of Wolfgang Welsch. As the most basic principle of (self-referential) thinking, implicate logic is to be discerned from Aristotelian (or similar traditions of ) logic and Hegelian dialectics—albeit both are being tied to the former’s principle in one way or the other. In the end, an introductory outlook of a comprehensive work by the present author provides the starting point to validate the logical foundations of knowing non-knowing as a methodological foundation to further develop the fields of transcultural-comparative, trans-comparative, and global philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, particular key aspects of the philosophies of Plotinus and Wang Yangming have been analysed comparatively on the basis of important passages of their works. The method used for this investigation can be defined as that of transversal comparative induction, in which the focus is more on working out the details of affinities and similarities. As this means a first step in an encompassing systematic context, differences will be introduced more briefly. The present investigation aims to provide a (...) foundation for a more differentiating and therefore complementing second part, which will consider other contents and topics in both philosophies. The present analysis is performed in three systematic steps and with regard to three basic phil- osophical ideas: (1) the idea that human consciousness is a central medium in the universal process and interrelatedness of (biological) life as a whole; (2) the idea that the self-unfoldment of reality represents a meta-cognitive process beyond the limits of subjectivity and finite consciousness; and (3) the idea that it is our major task to perfect and know ourselves by means of a “return” to the highest underlying founda- tion of this universal process. In their own ways, Plotinus and Wang Yangming both show that by enfolding human reflexivity toward the ineffable source of all reality in thought, feeling, human activity, and natural processes, namely by actively pursuing the path of moral and intellective perfection, we become fulfilled mediators of a universal process and of that which all of it represents. (shrink)

A fresh and original presentation that is easy and affordable for students, instructors, and general readers to use. This well-written, insightful history of philosophy is basic enough to be understood by those with no prior experience with philosophy but sophisticated enough to inform further those with some knowledge of philosophy. -/- Based on the author’s 20-plus years of teaching philosophy and learning what works for students, How We Are and How We Got Here is designed to connect with students to (...) help them understand philosophy and why it matters to them, regardless of their major. Its straightforward conversational presentation of philosophy includes readers in philosophy’s long conversation. Its chronological presentation places philosophers in their historical context, showing how philosophy is an ongoing interaction with society seeking practical knowledge useful to us in everyday life. -/- Key Features that fill multiple gaps in existing textbooks: -/- * Shows students how innovations in philosophy have interacted with and changed history, leading to how we are today. * Presents philosophy as a vital part of our lives, not as a set of isolated theoretical problems, avoiding the disconnected and fragmented silo approach of most textbooks. * Avoids the sink-or-swim approach of anthologies that plunges students into a hodgepodge of disjoint readings without adequate guidance. * Does not duplicate material covered in other introductory courses of ethics and logic but focuses on the rest of philosophy. * Focuses on explaining the ideas of the philosophers, allowing instructors to choose, at their option, primary texts from the plentifully available royalty-free sources. * Extensively covers vital areas of philosophy ignored by most textbooks, including pragmatism, phenomenology, social and political philosophy, postmodernism, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of race. * Always remains engaging and accessible to the reader. Neither dumbs down the material nor over complicates it. * Provides clear and direct text unencumbered by bells and whistles and other extraneous materials. -/- How We Are and How We Got Here provides students of all backgrounds with a clear and whole understanding of philosophy and its role in history and society, making the 2,400-year history of Western philosophy vital and relevant to today. It shows that philosophy is not a cold analytical academic procedure but exciting and alive, and reveals how we are all philosophers. (shrink)

The intersection between virtue and care ethics is underexplored in contemporary moral philosophy. This thesis approaches care ethics from a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethical perspective, comparing the two frameworks and drawing on recent work on care to develop a theory thereof. It is split into seven substantive chapters serving three major argumentative purposes, namely the establishment of significant intertheoretical agreement, the compilation and analysis of extant and new distinctions between the two theories, and the synthesis of care ethical insights with neo-Aristotelianism (...) to generate a virtue ethical theory of care. In the first two chapters, I outline virtue ethics and care ethics, and argue for considerable agreement over central premises. Chapter 2 summarises the foundational commitments of care ethics, focusing particularly on their relational ontology and its links to the other ethical claims care ethicists universally ascribe to, namely particularism, partialism, the moral salience of emotions, and the rejection of hard public/private distinctions. Chapter 3 lays out the central concepts in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, including eudaimonism, virtue, and character traits, and drawing a number of comparisons between virtue and care ethics specifically with regard to relational ontology and the meta-ethical commitments it underpins. In addition to doing the necessary expository work for the remainder of the thesis, Chapters 2 and 3 also argue that care ethics and virtue ethics have much more in common than is typically acknowledged – the first major contribution of this thesis to the literature. Chapters 2 and 3 to provide at least a prima facie justification for pursuit of the questions I confront in the remainder of the thesis. In Chapter 4, I ask what differentiates these two ethical theories. I survey some of the differences which philosophers in either camp have identified and offer some of my own. I suggest that several of those differences either rest on misunderstandings of one ethic or the other, or that in erecting a divide between virtue and care ethics they also disunify ethics of care. I do, however, identify two differences which seem defensible. Specifically, they are that virtue ethics seems to lack an account of care, which I define minimally as a response or responsiveness to need, and that virtue and care ethics organise their meta-ethical and normative concepts differently. This chapter thus presents a second contribution to the literature: a study of the differences between virtue ethics and care ethics. It also serves to set the trajectory for the remaining chapters, where I respond to the claim that virtue ethics lack an account of care. I spend the remainder of the thesis constructing what I take to be a satisfying foundation for a virtue ethical theory of care. In Chapter 5, I offer three initially viable means of incorporating care into virtue ethics, all of which treat care as a virtue. These are the analogical approach, according to which care is analogous to an existing virtue; the additive approach, according to which care is a novel virtue; and the bundling approach, according to which care is a bundle of virtues. I also offer and evaluate reasons to reject the claim that care is a virtue, concluding that the claim is indeed a viable one so long as the concept of care is sufficiently thick, and I contend that analogical approaches, and particularly analogies with charity, outperform the others. Chapter 5 therefore serves two ends. First, it proffers a novel meta-analysis of concepts of care as a virtue, and thus makes a third contribution to the literature. In doing so, it makes an inroad into the second: the development of a neo-Aristotelian theory of care. Chapter 6 continues this project. I attempt to show how care can be construed as an act-type and a practice. I argue in this chapter that practices are a subcategory of actions, and that care qualifies as an Anscombean act-type which aims at the meeting of needs relating to the care-recipient’s flourishing. I go on to consider the implications of this account for ethics which deploy care as a moral concept, maintaining that it not only offers a better account of consequences than theories of care which include success criteria, but also that it affords us interesting insights into the distinction between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ which allow us to make sense of certain tenets of neo-Aristotelianism. This represents a contribution to both discourses, since neither care nor virtue ethicists working at the intersection of their respective normative theories have delved very deeply into the philosophy of action. Chapter 7 discusses caring relations, suggesting that a virtue ethical theory of caring relations can lean on the work care ethicists have done, and adding some necessary refinements, such as a distinction between ideal and non-ideal caring relations, and a theory of caring relations as reasons for action. This final chapter also draws these three concepts of care together by arguing that virtuous caregivers who are invested in the flourishing of those for whom they care are also sensitive to the relations those care-recipients bear to their institutional environment. I argue that because they are caring participants in caring relations, virtuous agents are characteristically motivated by states of need and dependency to engage in certain sorts of conventionally political practices. In other words, the virtue or virtues of caring characteristically manifest in certain sorts of political or social practices, relating specifically to those areas of moral life. This allows us to build upon recent work in feminist virtue ethics of the sort offered by Tessman and Friedman. I also offer a novel analysis of migration, suggesting that the account of care presenting here is analytically useful both when it comes to historical cases of migration such as the underground railroads and escapes from Nazi-occupied Europe, but also for contemporary issues such as the migrations occurring in the Southern United States and in much of Europe. I thus conclude not only that virtue ethicists ought to incorporate care into their normative framework, and that the theory of care presented here is a coherent one, but that this leads us naturally into applied topics such as virtue politics. I conclude the thesis by considering some its implications and by identifying some further avenues for research. (shrink)

In the mid-first century BC Geminus of Rhodes, a scientist and philosopher close to Posidonius, composed a comprehensive Theory of Mathematical Sciences, in the surviving fragments of which the numerous characters are referred to plainly by name, with some of them being namesakes of other, more well-known mathematicians and philosophers. This paper tries to set apart the namesakes of Geminus, of which there are four in his fragments: Theodorus, Hippias, Oenopides, and Menaechmus.

It is argued in this note that the word quattuor in line 15 of the “Ciris” should be emended to quatenus. A possible cause of error is also suggested.

It is argued that (1) the alleged violation of the auspices by both the Consuls of 249 B. C. did in fact occur and (2) resulted in separate prosecutions directed at each of them; (3) the name ‘Pullius’, reported for one of the plebeian Tribunes that prosecuted P. Claudius Pulcher, is probably authentic; (4) the cognomen of L. Iunius Pullus is not spun out the violation of the auspices attributed to him and his colleague; and (5) the cognomen ‘Pulcher’, first (...) born by the Consul of 249, may actually derive from his drowning of the Chickens. (shrink)

In the Armenian tradition of Ailios Theon’s Progymnasmata two otherwise unknown historians occur. By examining the context of the passage and comparing it with authors like Philostephanos, it is made plausible that the ‘unknown’ historians are Phileas of Athens and Skymnos of Chios, whose names are misspelled in the Armenian text.

This paper proposes a slight emendation at Aesch. Choeph. 68, which allows to rescue the transmitted adjective διαλγής by referring it to the sufferer instead that to Ate, and to recover at the same time a connective particle which many editors missed in the passage.

This paper compares the preface of Columella’s Res rustica with that of the earliest fully extant Chinese agricultural treatise, the Qimin yaoshu (‘Essential Techniques for the Common People’) of Jia Sixie. I argue that both prefaces have a similar function: to present to the reader the social world in which the author wishes his agricultural work to be understood. By drawing on authoritative literary and historical traditions, each author projects an idealized vision of farming in which the discipline acquires a (...) deep moral significance. Granting these striking similarities, the authors’ views also diverge in certain illuminating respects: these include the moral agency of agriculture, the social location of expertise, and the historical development of agriculture in relation to society. (shrink)

The epistolary corpus of M. Cornelius Fronto, the rhetoric teacher of the ‘princes’ M. Aurelius and L. Verus, offers valuable insights into the functioning of the monarchical order of the Principate, despite the seemingly trivial subject matter of many of his letters, due to the unique level of communication. Especially the communication with the domus Augusta provides important additions to the comparable letters of Pliny the Younger. While scholars have so far concentrated on Fronto’s relationship with his pupil Marcus, this (...) contribution focuses on the communication with and about the adoptive father of his pupils, Antoninus Pius, because it makes tangible the ‘rules of the game’ of the interaction between the senatorial elite and the princeps who came from their ranks. (shrink)

The abrupt beginning of the Philebus refers to the abrupt interruption of the dialogue with Callicles in the Gorgias. The reuse of the phrase αὐτὸς γνώσῃ (Phlb. 12a9 = Gorg. 505c9), unique in Plato, is an evident sign of the will to connect the two texts and contexts. Both of them deal with the problem of the interruption of the philosophical dialogue. The absolute lack of contextualization and the ‘open’ conclusion in the Philebus are consistent with this framework. The continuity (...) with the Gorgias is also a fundamental reason why Socrates returns as protagonist in a late dialogue. It also allows us to put forward a hypothesis on the identity of Philebus, an emblematic character like Callicles. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for Sophocles’ dramatic use of γνώμη-language at the end of his Philoctetes. Through a thorough analysis of the phrase γνώμη … φίλων at l. 1467, I demonstrate how Sophocles drew on the contemporary resonances of γνώμη in Athenian legal contexts to make the play’s final scene rich and complex. In addition, the tension between the mortal and divine worlds, which is a recurrent theme in the play, is mirrored in the expression γνώμη … φίλων, which (...) is sandwiched between Μοῖρα and πανδαμάτωρ δαίμων at ll. 1466-1468. Both points add to our understanding of how the sense of closure is achieved at the end of the play. (shrink)

Our Odyssey is shaped by oral poetics but also by storytelling techniques developed to attract and hold audiences’ attention. From Odysseus’s first appearance, episodes consistently bring to mind his revenge plot against the suitors and test the qualities and skills he will need to carry it out. These episodes offer reassuring evidence that Odysseus will defeat the suitors balanced by doubt-inducing signs that he will fail. Taken together, these episodes elicit hope and fear, the constituent elements of suspense, regarding Odysseus’s (...) chances of succeeding. The consistency with which these episodes appear and the balance they strike between reassurance and doubt suggest that the generation of suspense played a significant role in the composition of the Odyssey as we have it. (shrink)

This article proposes two emendations to the text of Apollonius Citiensis and Galen of Pergamum’s De Praecognitione. The problematic transmissions are isolated and a conjectural emendation suggested.

Read audit in artes for the transmitted audet in artes in Gratt. 498. The correction has the effect that the phrase audere (ardere Gronovius) in proelia in Verg. Aen. 2,347 no longer has linguistic support.

Contrary to the prevailing opinion the servum in Calpurnius Flaccus’ fourth declamation (ed. Håkanson 4,12) is to be kept very well, whereas the emendations sacrum and tectum are unnecessary and not very convincing.

Curio’s six lictors with laureled fasces (Cic. Att. 10.4.9) are best explained by his holding command in 49 BC not as Caesar’s legatus, but pro praetore with imperium nominally in his own right, granted (‘extra-constitutionally’) by Caesar directly, without vote of Senate and People.

We hold a rather recent commentary on Prudentius, Peristephanon, which Pierre-Yves Fux provided in two volumes (2003 and 2013). The commentary proves that the text by Prudentius contains undissolved problems as to its criticism and exegesis. The following remarks refer to the poem on the martyr Romanus (perist. 10). It becomes clear that a part of the damage of the text that has been handed down to us is caused by conscious interference, which goes back to Late Antiquity.

The gratiarum actio of the acting consuls can be seen as a key political ritual of the High Empire and as an important aspect of the communication between senatorial aristocracy and princeps. The only surviving speech of this type from this period, Pliny’s Panegyricus, has, however, been judged very differently due to a lack of comparison. In this context, it is often overlooked that although the gratiarum actio of M. Cornelius Fronto has not survived, the Corpus Frontonianum contains both illuminating (...) references to this speech delivered in 142 AD in the absence of the princeps and Antoninus Pius’ reaction to its published version. This article asks about the possible insights into the panegyric ritual that emerge from these fragments of information. (shrink)

In the De Pythiae oraculis (397e) Plutarch mentions, according to the manuscript tradition, a bronze column of Hiero I of Syracuse, which stood in the sanctuary of Delphi and fell down on the day of his death. After retracing the interpretations of this passage both in the philological and archaeological studies and pointing out their problematic aspects, the author proposes a new reading of the text, suggesting that the monument involved was a statue of Hiero I instead of a column.

In order to demonstrate the existence of the god, Plato introduces an investigation into the kinds of movement in the Laws X. This research begins obviously with the circular movement and the local movement of the Platonic Polyhedrons, follows with their combination, separation, growth and decay that result in the generation and destruction of the four elements and all perceptible things, and ends with the corporeal movement that encompasses the preceding eight elemental motion-types, and the motion of the soul, which (...) is proclaimed to be the self-motion. Given that the self-motion is caused by the intellect and functions as the principle and reason of all physical movements in the χώρα, the soul is deemed to be divine, in this sense the existence of the god is demonstrated. (shrink)

Dealing with and collecting fragments has always been one of the core tasks of scholars of classical antiquity, especially classical philologists. As an examination of the relevant editions and treatises reveals, there is no agreement on what a ‘fragment’ should be. This also has to do with the polysemy of this term, which has gained a new and wider understanding, especially since the Romantic period. In the present contribution it is therefore suggested that the term ‘testimony text’ (‘Zeugnistext’) should be (...) used instead of ‘fragment’. In this way, it is also possible to avoid an editorial pre-determination regarding the authenticity of the testimonies in question. Furthermore, the question of the contextualization of the respective testimony texts will be discussed and suggestions for the practice of their presentation will be made. (shrink)

The principles governing elemental composition, variation, and change in Plato’s Timaeus appear to be incompatible, which has led commentators to prioritize some of the principles to the exclusion of others. Call this seeming incompatibility the problem of isomorphic variants. In this paper, I develop the theory of proportionate atomism as a solution to this problem. Proportionate atomism retains the advantages of rival interpretations but allows the principles of material composition, variation, and change to combine into an internally coherent and explanatorily (...) powerful atomic physics. (shrink)