We focus on the question of how expertise as conceived by the Stoics interacts with the content of impressions. In Section 1, we situate the evidence concerning expert perception within the Stoic account of cognitive development. In Section 2, we argue that the content of rational impressions, and notably of expert impressions, is not exhausted by the relevant propositions. In Section 3, we argue that expert impressions are a subtype of kataleptic impressions which achieve their level of clarity and distinctness (...) due to the contribution of expertise. In Section 4, we argue that the expertise in living well not only allows the wise person to assent correctly but also affects the content of her impressions. We suggest that these two models – one’s attitude toward an impression being informed by expertise, and one’s impressions being affected by expertise – might characterize distinct stages of cognitive development. Stoic wisdom is not only a matter of the way one assents to one’s impressions but also a matter of the condition of one’s soul and, consequently, of the kinds of impressions one even entertains. Expertise offers a model of how cognitive and discriminatory improvement through practice and effort can transform the non-wise into the wise. A reading on which the content of impressions is not exclusively propositional illuminates a further aspect of this transformation. If the same propositions are accessible through impressions with different non-propositional content, we can account for cases in which the novice and the expert entertain the same proposition. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the equivalent of Epicurus’ πρόληψις, the second criterion of the Epicurean Canonic (DL X 31 = fr. 35 Usener), in Lucretius’ De rerum natura (DRN). Taking stock of the several occurrences of the Latin terms notitia and notities in the six books of the poem, I show that Lucretius’ view about preconception remains faithful to Epicurus’ πρόληψις, and that the poet does not endorse a less empiricist position than his Master because of some influence of (...) the Stoic ἔννοια. To this end, I will also briefly address an important case in which πρόληψις, albeit not clearly mentioned, plays an essential role, namely the prolepsis of the deity (DRN V 1169–1182). Finally, I explain how Lucretius can be of some help in grasping the controversial relationship between the criterion of πρόληψις and that of ἐπιβολὴ τῆς διανοίας (animi inectus/iactus), showing in which way the poet seems to consider the latter as a criterion of truth in its own right. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the account of concept formation developed in the 4th Century A.D. by Themistius in the most ancient extant commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Themistius’ account can be contrasted with two widespread modern interpretations of Aristotle. Unlike psychological empiricists, Themistius ascribes an active role in concept formation to our innate capacity of understanding. Unlike intuitionists, he would not be satisfied by saying that νοῦς “intuits” or “spots” concepts. Rather, the question is what makes our νοῦς capable of “finding” (...) and “recognizing” concepts in experience, and this can only be an understanding prior to all experience. Themistius seems to be responding here to Platonist arguments against Aristotle’s epistemology: postulating a “potential νοῦς” is not enough, for one can apply Meno’s dilemma to it and ask how it can recognize that it has found what it was looking for. But, contrary to the judgment of some modern scholars, Themistius never embraced the theory of recollection either. He argued that both empiricism and Platonist innatism are wrong and developed a middle path marked by a strong interdependence between the perceptive and the rational capacity. This holds for all rational learning, and concept formation is its first stage: to form a concept means to learn something genuinely new, but also to recognize it as falling, e. g., under one of the ten categories. While being presented as a mere “paraphrasis” of Aristotle’s words, Themistius’ account is a well-advised and original response to the epistemological debates of his time. (shrink)

This volume - the joint effort of the research groups on practical philosophy and the history of political thought of the Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences - brings together scholarly essays that attempt to face the challenges of the contemporary situation. The authors come from rather divergent disciplinary backgrounds, including philosophy, law, history, literature and the social sciences, from different cultural and political contexts, including Central, Eastern and Western Europe, (...) and belong to different generations. But they all share an interest to bravely answer the large topical issues concerning universal morality, here and now. (shrink)

Se defiende una política de lo común a partir de las aportaciones ontológicas y epistemológicas de Espinosa y de Deleuze. Una política capaz de articular las diferentes reivindicaciones de las minorías buscando escapar de la caída en los esencialismos identitarios excluyentes que definen de forma rígida quien es un verdadero proletario o una verdadera mujer, etc. Una política de lo común que partiendo de las diferencias se orienta hacia una política “de todo el mundo” y “para todo el mundo”, a (...) través de devenires minoritarios que concluyen en un “devenir imperceptible”; es decir, es una política de las diferencias que desemboca en la indiferencia de cada cual, ya que se refiere a lo que tienen de común los individuos más que en aquello que los separa. Es una política basada en la razón, pero una razón que hace las cuentas con las pasiones, en la estela espinosiana, y con los factores inconscientes, en la estela deleuziana. Una razón, pues, situada y abierta a la sensibilidad, los afectos y los sentimientos, pero sin caer en retóricas irracionalistas o sensibleras. (shrink)

There is no single ancient Greek word in the surviving fragments and testimonies of Hellenistic philosophy that is directly translatable by the term ‘intuition’. But if we are in search of intuitions in the context of Hellenistic epistemology, it could be said that both the Stoics and the sceptics made use of them in their philosophical debates; for intuitions seem to be closely connected with the formation of conceptions, which were abundantly used by all Hellenistic philosophers. It is important to (...) understand, though, that the Stoics’ and the sceptics’ attitude towards the epistemic status of intuitions would greatly differ: The Stoics would explain intuitions by invoking a rational capacity of human beings, which based on experience would put them in touch with the reality of things, so that their intuitions could be thought of as somehow rationally admissible. The sceptics, on the other hand, would suggest that intuitions guide our everyday life merely on the basis of our previous experiences, and thus their intuitions could be regarded as empirically justified, although they would not guarantee any access to how things actually are. (shrink)

Presumption is often discussed in law, less often in epistemology. Is it an attitude? If so where can we locate it within the taxonomy of epistemic attitudes? Is it a kind of belief, a judgment, an assumption or a supposition? Or is it a species of inference? There are two basic models of presumption: judgmental, as a kind of judgment, and legal, taken from the use of presumptions in law. The legal model suggests that presumption is a practical inference, whereas (...) the judgmental model suggests that presumption is an epistemic attitude. I argue that presumption is neither a practical inference nor a merely epistemic attitude: it involves both, within the category of what we may call the inquiring attitudes. (shrink)

In Ps.-Plutarch's epitome,Doctrines of the Philosophers,lemma4.11 bears the heading: Πῶς γίνεται ἡ αἴσθησις καὶ ἡ ἔννοια καὶ ὁ κατὰ ἐνδιάθεσιν λόγος. The text reads: Οἱ Στωϊκοί ϕασιν· ὅταν γεννηθῇ ὁ ἄνθρωπος, ἔχει τὸ ἡγεμονικὸν μέρος τῆς ψυχῆς ὥσπερ χάρτην εὔεργον εἰς ἀπογραϕήν· εἰς τοῦτο μίαν ἑκάστην τῶν ἐννοιῶν ἐναπογράϕεται. Πρῶτος δὲ [ὁ] τῆς ἀναγραϕῆς τρόπος ὁ διὰ τῶν αἰσθήσεων. αἰσθανόμενοι γάρ τινος οἷον λευκοῦ, ἀπελθόντος αὐτοῦ μνήμην ἔχουσιν· ὅταν δὲ ὁμοειδεῖς πολλαὶ μνῆμαι γένωνται, τότε ϕαμὲν ἔχειν ἐμπειρίαν· ἐμπειρία γάρ ἐστι (...) τὸ τῶν ὁμοειδῶν ϕαντασιῶν πλῆθος. Τῶν δὲ ἐννοιῶν αἱ μὲν ϕυσικῶς γίνονται κατὰ τοὺς εἰρημένους τρόπους καὶ ἀνεπιτεχνήτως, αἱ δὲ ἤδη δι’ ἡμετέρας διδασκαλίας καὶ ἐπιμελείας· αὗται μὲν οὖν ἔννοιαι καλοῦνται μόνον, ἐκεῖναι δὲ καὶ προλήψεις. Ὁ δὲ λόγος, καθ’ ὅν προσαγορευόμεθα λογικοὶ ἐκ τῶν προλήψεων συμπληροῦσθαι λέγεται κατὰ τὴν πρώτην ἑβδομάδα. The Stoics say: When a human being has been born, the commanding part of his soul is like a sheet of paper in good condition for writing upon; upon this each one of his conceptions is written. The first way of writing is through the senses. For when humans perceive something, e.g. something white, they have a memory of it when it goes away; and when many memories of the same kind have come to be, then we say that they have experience; for experience is a plurality of impressions of the same kind. Of conceptions, some come about naturally and non-technically through the aforementioned ways, but others come about through our own learning and efforts. The latter are called ‘conceptions’, but the former are called ‘prolepses’ as well. And reason, according to which we are called ‘rational’, is said to be completely filled out with prolepses at the age of seven years. (shrink)

Cet article vise à comprendre la théorie stoïcienne de la deixis afin d’expliquer l’importance accordée par les stoïciens aux pronoms démonstratifs et aux énoncés qu’ils composent, c’est-à-dire les propositions dites définitives. Nous montrons que ces propositions sont privilégiées pour des raisons à la fois ontologiques et épistémologiques en raison des propriétés sémantiques de leur sujet. Elles sont privilégiées d’un point de vue ontologique parce que la deixis grâce à laquelle leur sujet fait référence au réel crée une relation privilégiée à (...) la matière, la catégorie ontologique stoïcienne fondamentale. De plus, ces sujets requièrent que leur référent existe et soit présent et saisissable. Ces énoncés sont d’autre part privilégiés d’un point de vue épistémologique parce qu’ils sont fondamentaux dans l’acquisition de la connaissance. Nous suggérons enfin que tous les énoncés apparemment définis ne le sont pas en effet, et considérons quand et sous quelles conditions une référence déictique est réussie. (shrink)

In the Timaeus, Plato famously acknowledges the receptacle as extremely difficult to comprehend. It is neither intelligible (which is reserved exclusively for the Forms) nor sense-perceptible (as it is a principle far too basic). Instead, as Plato proposes, the receptacle can only be apprehended through a “bastard” sort of “reasoning” (νόθος λογισμός, Tim. 52b1-2.). This paper explores an exegesis of Plato’s claim as offered by Calcidius, the 4th century translator of and commentator on the Timaeus. I identify two distinctive methods (...) Calcidius advances when grappling with the knowability of the material substratum that underpins our world. The first method – analysis (resolutio) – traces its intellectual lineage to earlier philosophical tradition, and Calcidius primarily uses it to uncover the proper nature and ontological characteristics of matter. Conversely, the second method corresponds to the only cognitive grasp of matter Calcidius believes humans are capable of. In his view, we can neither sense-perceive nor rationally understand matter. Instead, matter yields itself only to the cognitive mode of suspicion (suspicio). The paper provides a detailed analysis of Calcidius’ suspicio, delving into its intricacies and exploring the interrelationships between suspicio and resolutio. As such it offers a pioneering and comprehensive exploration of Calcidius’ account of the knowability of matter. (shrink)

This chapter considers the encounter of skepticism with the Kantian and post-Kantian philosophical enterprise and focuses on the intriguing feature whereby it is assimilated into this enterprise. In this period, skepticism becomes interchangeable with its other, which helps understand the proliferation of many kinds of views under its name and which forms the background for transforming skepticism into an anonymous, routine practice of raising objections and counter-objections to one’s own view. German philosophers of this era counterpose skepticism to dogmatism and (...) criticism, ancient to modern skepticism, and, importantly, conceptualize the transitions from one form to another, which forms the conceptual matrix in which new disciplinary forms, such as psychology, anthropology, and historicism contend for cultural-intellectual standing beside philosophy. I present this assimilationist trajectory by reviewing three well-known moments of this encounter of skepticism and idealism: (1) Kant’s idealization of skepticism as a floating position amidst various philosophical positions through the dialectic, polemics, systematics, and history of pure reason; (2) Fichte’s schematic conception of skepticism as a dispute of systems in the early Wissenschaftslehre following his review of the skeptic G. E. Schulze’s attacks on Critical philosophy; (3) Hegel’s historicizing conception of skepticism in the context of differences between subjective idealism and speculative thought and his early Jena review of another work by the same skeptic Schulze. (shrink)

Resumen El propósito del presente ensayo es explorar la comprensión de technê que Epícteto asocia con la expresión technê peri bion ("arte/técnica de la vida"), utilizada por él para determinar tanto la "materia" de la que se debe ocupar la filosofía como el tipo de actividad que ha de aplicarse a dicha materia. Con base en dicha exploración, el ensayo defiende la tesis de que la filosofía de Epícteto acusa un cierto talante individualista que la acerca a conocidas variantes modernas (...) de la filosofía como arte de vivir.It is the purpose of this essay to inquire into the understanding of technê which Epictetus links with the expression technê peri bion ("art of living") used by him to determine both the (subject-) "matter" with which philosophy deals and the kind of activity to be duly applied to such matter. Based upon this inquiry, the essay upholds the thesis that Epictetus' philosophy bares an individualist spirit close to well-known modern versions of philosophy as an art of living. (shrink)