Abstract

This volume contains substantially revised versions of eleven papers delivered at the Fifth Symposium Hellenisticum in France in 1989. Approaches vary from the philosophical to the historical-philological, and the scholarship is consistently excellent. The three French contributors offer exhaustive historical studies. Best of this lot is André Laks's brilliant effort to disentangle threads of the Cyrenaic tradition in Diogenes Laertius 2.8696. He argues that the later Cyrenaic Anniceris is not an innovator as has been argued recently, but that, despite his emphasis on psychic pleasures, Anniceris upholds the traditional line on the primacy of somatic pleasure. The point at issue, really, is whether considering altruistic feelings like friendship and gratitude as pleasures amounts to innovating. J. -L. Labarrière traces the debates between Stoics and Academics concerning animal faculties, especially phantasia. Carlos Levy looks at how the term doxa was wielded as a polemical weapon by early Stoics, the New Academy, and Middle Platonists. Next come three fine papers on Epicurus. Gisela Striker relieves our perplexity at Epicurus's conception of complete pleasure as the absence of pain, illuminating the Epicurean distinction between "kinetic" and "static" pleasures in Cicero's De Finibus. Epicurus identifies happiness with the greatest pleasure, or complete pleasure, which is complete absence of pain--not the accumulation of particular pleasures. Epicurus's views on free agency, surviving in the fragments of book 3 of On Nature, lead Julia Annas to conclude that rationality is associated with flexibility of response and ability to learn, and that rational capacity may very well develop in ways that are not fixed by our atomic constitutions. One might quarrel with her observation that this simple commonsense view is attractive. Finally, David Furley points out that Democritus doubted the senses' ability to reveal truth, while Epicurus claimed that "all perceptions are true." Yet both atomists deny that sensible qualities exist at the level of primary elements. The explanation? Epicureans accept perceptible qualities as properties of external objects, not merely "affections" of the senses; for Democritus aisthem;ta have no reality independent of us.