Journal of the History of Philosophy

Philosophic Method in Cicero MICHAEL J. BUCKLEY, S.J. AT THZTUrN OF THE C~NTUR'Z,Wilhelm Windelband's Geschichte der Philosophie laid a judgment upon Cicero which would perdure, almost without challenge, through the decades that followed: his works exhibit an ability for compilation and a talent for expression, but they lack any power of philosophizing---a lack demonstrated in their eclectic selection among philosophic systems,x Earlier Friedrich 0berweg had indicated the derivative nature of Ciccro's thoughts but praised his rhetorical enhancement of ethical values; later German historians would commend his eclecticism as a major source of Hellenistic philosophy, though agreeing with Windelband that Cicero was neither original as a thinker nor significant as a philosopher. 2 Emile Brdhier and Joseph Owens treat him accordingly , citing his works for the doctrines and arguments of others, while omitting any serious analysis of them as philosophic in their own right,a Contemporary historians of philosophy may recognize within his dialogues articulate proponents of divergent philosophies and their systematic ~nity through exposition and refutation , but they relate these works to literary or rhetorical exercises. It is an unexamined assumption of our times that rhetoric and philosophy are univocally separate and exclusive provinces, connected neither by common topics, identifiable subject-matters, nor universal methods. Cicero's view of philosophic method questions the dogmatism of so rigid a disjunction and compels us to consider another possibility within the plurality of philosophic methods. In Cicero's philosophic dialogues as in his textbooks on rhetoric, every careful method of discourse (omnis ratio diligens disserendO was a composite of two moments: invention (discovery) and judgment. 4 The Stoic dialectic failed seriously in its omission of the former, while the preeminence of Aristotle lay in the mastery Wilhelm Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophie, zweite durchgesehene und erweiterte Auflage (Tlibingen: Verlag yon J. (2. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1900), p. 132. s Frieddch ~)berweg, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophic, 13. Auflage (Basel: Benno Schwabe and Co., 1953), erster Teil, pp. 471-475. Johannes Hirschberger, The History of Philosophy, trans. Anthony N. Fuerst (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1958), p. 261. * Emile Br~hier, Histoire de la Philosophic (Paris: Librairie Fdlix Alcan, 1962), tome premier . Joseph Owens, A History of Ancient Western Philosophy (Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1959). Cp. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Westminister, Maryland: The Newman Bookshop, 1946), Vol. I, "Greece and Rome," 418-420. 9 Topica, II, 6. For the importance of invention and judgment in the Roman rhetorical tradition, cf. Richard P. McKeon, "The Methods of Rhetoric and Philosophy: Invention and Judgment," The Classical Tradition: Literary and Historical Studies in Honor of Harry Caplan, ed. Luitpold Wallach (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 365-373. [143] 144 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY which he had exercised over both.5 Each was an art, and both were necessary if the philosophical enterprise was to bring its union of ratio and oratio to term.6 Invention, or the topical art, was an ability to discover things or arguments or what might pass for either. It was a heuristic proficiency, and its function was the construction of argumentation and the uncovering of evidence by which a position might be proved, a case defended, or a cause advanced: "Invention is the excogitation of things which axe true or which seem to be true and which will give probability to a case." Its product, then, was the res or the argumentum, data or a particular line of reasoning by which confidence (tides) might be elicited in dubious matters or likelihood obtained in conclusions.7 The art of judgment, or dialectics, was geared to the testing or criticism of the discovered, to the verification of the "bright idea." Judgment questioned whether things existed, whether arguments were true, or whether verbal composition was accurate and telling. As such, it was a necessary second moment in any method. Invention discovered evidence, argumentation, and discourse; judgment weighed the evidence, tested the argumentation, and criticized the discourse. Out of this adjudication issued the correct ordering of the invented or the accurate appraisal of the proffered. Invention and judgment comprised the double periods of creativity and criticism, of originality and experimentation. As such, invention took...