This chapter contains sections titled: Cheerful Resignation Self‐Sufficiency Murphy was an Optimist: Negative Visualization Agency and Control Fate, Freedom, and Sailing.

While few soldiers may have read the works of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, it is undoubtedly true that the ancient philosophy known as Stoicism guides the actions of many in the military. Soldiers and seamen learn early in their training "to suck it up," to endure, to put aside their feelings and to get on with the mission. Stoic Warriors is the first book to delve deeply into the ancient legacy of this relationship, exploring what the Stoic philosophy (...) actually is, the role it plays in the character of the military (both ancient and modern), and its powerful value as a philosophy of life. Marshalling anecdotes from military history--ranging from ancient Greek wars to World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq--Nancy Sherman illuminates the military mind and uses it as a window on the virtues of the Stoic philosophy, which are far richer and more interesting than our popularized notions. Sherman--a respected philosopher who taught at the US Naval Academy--explores the deep, lasting value that Stoicism can yield, in issues of military leadership and character; in the Stoic conception of anger and its control (does a warrior need anger to go to battle?); and in Stoic thinking about fear and resilience, grief and mourning, and the value of camaraderie and brotherhood. Sherman concludes by recommending a moderate Stoicism, where the task for the individual, both civilian and military, youth and adult, is to temper control with forgiveness, and warrior drive and achievement with humility and humor. Here then is a perceptive investigation of what makes Stoicism so compelling not only as a guiding principle for the military, but as a philosophy for anyone facing the hardships of life. (shrink)

In this article I argue for the thesis that Alexander's main argument, in Ethical Problems I, is an attempt to block the implication drawn by the Stoics and other ancient philosophers from the double potential of use exhibited by human life, a life that can be either well or badly lived. Alexander wants to resist the thought that this double potential of use allows the Stoics to infer that human life, in itself, or by its own nature, is neither (...) good nor bad. Furthermore, I shall argue that Alexander's main argument establishes that human life, despite exhibiting a double potential of use, is by its own nature or intrinsically good. Finally, given that this is not a conclusion that the Stoics are likely to accept, I shall also contend that the argument should be regarded as conducted for the most part in foro interno, as a way of persuading the Peripatetics themselves of the falsity of the Indifference Implication, precisely because of the risk that such an implication be derived from their own theoretical framework. (shrink)

Is the Stoic sage a possible or desirable ideal for contemporary men and women, as we enter into difficult times? Is he, as Seneca presents him, the very best person for a crisis? In order to examine these questions, Part 1 begins from what Irene Liu calls the “standard” modern conceptions of the sage as either a kind of epistemically perfect, omniscient agent, or else someone in possession of a specific arsenal of theoretical knowledge, especially concerning the physical world. (...) We contest this contentious conception of the sage for being inconsistent with the Stoic conceptions of wisdom, the technai and knowledge which can be gleaned from the doxographic sources. In Part 2, we suggest that the wisdom of the Stoic sage reflects the Stoics’ “dispositional” conception of knowledge, their substantive conception of reason, and their sense of philosophy as above all an “exercise” or askêsis of a craft or technê for living. It is embodied in an ongoing exercise of examining one’s impressions for consistency with what one already knows, looking back to the natural prolêpseis with which all people are equipped. In Part 3, we show how only this account of the wisdom of the sage, at the epistemic level, enables us to understand how, in the non-doxographic texts led by Seneca’s De Constantia Sapientiae, the sage is celebrated above all for his ethical characteristics, and his ability to bear up in a crisis. Concluding reflections return to our framing concern, as to whether philosophy as a way of life, and the ancient ideal of the sage, can speak to us today not only as scholars, but as individuals called upon to live in difficult times. We suggest that they can and should remain sources of orientation, contestation, and inspiration. (shrink)

From the team that brought you The Obstacle Is the Way and Ego Is the Enemy, a beautiful daily devotional of Stoic meditations—an instant Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestseller. Why have history's greatest minds—from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson, along with today's top performers from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities—embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is (...) for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers 366 days of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the playwright Seneca, or slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, as well as lesser-known luminaries like Zeno, Cleanthes, and Musonius Rufus. Every day of the year you'll find one of their pithy, powerful quotations, as well as historical anecdotes, provocative commentary, and a helpful glossary of Greek terms. By following these teachings over the course of a year (and, indeed, for years to come) you'll find the serenity, self-knowledge, and resilience you need to live well. (shrink)

We are going to present a panorama of Byzantine Philosophy. As starting point should be considered the Patristic Thought, which preceded the Byzantine Philosophy and was established in the first centuries A.D. into the Greek-Roman world. It was based on the Old and New Testament, the apostolic teachings, as well as on Judaism and Greek Philosophy. Also, the Ancient Oriental Religions – especially those of the Greek-Roman period, i.e. the Gnosticism- exerted an influence on it. The Patristic Thought and (...) the Ancient Greek Philosophy were the two main pedestals of Byzantine Philosophy. But, we cannot separate completely Patristic thought from the Byzantine Philosophy, first because the Byzantine Philosophy used all the corpus of the preceded texts of the Church Fathers and second because the Patristic Thought was continued to the end of Byzantium in interaction with Byzantine Philosophy. When we use he term Byzantine Philosophy we refer to the ideological currents that flourished from the 9th century till the 15th in the geographical area of the Greek East. Its main task was the quest for truth from the metaphysical point of view. In this era we have not only commentaries and scholastic works, but also an assimilation of the previous philosophical and scientific developments in purpose of an interior evolution. The opposition to, and the use of, the Western scholasticism were also another two special characteristics of Byzantine Thought. The use of the logical works of Aristotle and the metaphysics of Plato made up its main theoretical body, always in relation to the Christian dogmas. The logical, metaphysical, cosmological, ethical, aesthetical and anthropological subjects were closely connected with the fixed Christian view of the World, God and Man. But despite the influence of the Christian religion and the Aristotelic, Platonic, Stoic, Neoplatonic etc. teachings, today we can arrive at the conclusion that from the ninth through the fifteen century a relative autonomy of Philosophy in Byzantium was emerged. Also, the Philosophical thought in Byzantium gave some new solutions to the old problems and dared sometimes to proceed in new rational, mystical or even empirical elaborations of original philosophical questions. (shrink)

For anyone who wishes to make philosophy relevant to our everyday life, the Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is a fascinating text. It is fascinating because it not only presents a deep conception about life, but also mentions practical ways of applying this conception to everyday life.The Meditations is a Stoic text which contains some central ideas already found in earlier Stoic writings and develops them in an engaging way. Several prominent historians of philosophy, notably Pierre Hadot2 and (...) A.A. Long3 , interpret it as a personal notebook of Stoic exercises, or what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.”4 The idea is that the emperor’s primary purpose in writing this text was not to describe or speculate, but rather to practice. His purpose was not to record his thoughts and actions but to influence them, and thus to direct himself towards the good life.The view that the Meditations is a book of Stoic exercises makes this text especially relevant for philosophical practice. Philosophical practice is a modern approach that seeks to use philosophical thought for dealing with our personal predicaments, enriching our self-understanding, and thus living more deeply, fully, and with greater wisdom.5 Philosophical practice can take different shapes: as philosophical counseling between a philosopher and a counselee; as a workshop of self-examination directed by a philosopher; as a companionship of fellow philosophical seekers; but it can also be practiced by an individual who seeks to live philosophically, just like Marcus Aurelius. Thus, the Meditations can be seen as one of the ancient precursors of modern philosophical practice. (shrink)

In his article Banicki proposes a universal model for all forms of philosophical therapy. He is guided by works of Martha Nussbaum, who in turn makes recourse to Aristotle. As compared to Nussbaum’s approach, Banicki’s model is more medical and less based on ethical argument. He mentions Foucault’s vision to apply the same theoretical analysis for the ailments of the body and the soul and to use the same kind of approach in treating and curing them. In his interpretation (...) of philosophical therapy, there are, however, some controversial issues, to which we would like to call attention: -/- Is restoring health by a philosophical method of treatment – health understood as a person’s ability to reach his/her vital goals – a convincing explication of philosophical therapy in general? In order to answer this question, it may be useful to look at Plato. It is not only Platonism (and especially Neo-platonism since Plotinus) that questions the idea that therapy is necessarily connected with „vital goals“. Buddhist and Gnostic philosophies are questioning „the vital“ in general. The immense effort in the history of philosophy to liberate the mind from the body casts doubt on the project to explain philosophical therapy solely in analogy to medical therapy. -/- According to Banicki a therapeutic philosophy has to identify the diseases it attempts at curing. There are, however, reasons for associating the term therapy with suffering/risk rather than disease. If a therapy aims at reducing the fear of death, as for example many classical philosophical therapies do, then there is no disease to be cured. A model based on chances and risks also has the advantage that the Buddhist and Stoic reinterpretation of desires/emotions as “diseases” can be dropped in contemporary philosophical therapy. -/- Banicki mentions the comparison of therapies as one of the primary goals of modelling. Methods should be verified by a statistical correlation between method and therapeutic success and/or by a theory which justifies the method. Some forms of therapies, however, avoid theory-specific terms and concepts in favor of an unprejudiced interpretation of the patient’s statements. Others share the (Nietzschean) aspiration to explore and change measures of value. If the therapeutic process is seen as a unique phenomenon, then there can be no theory and no statistics with co-occurrences. -/- According to Banicki philosophical therapy has to describe techniques which qualify as genuinely philosophical. Techniques like maieutics and hermeneutics, however, are antique philosophical “inventions”, which were later adopted by psychotherapy. If meditation is accepted as a therapeutic tool – as it was in ancient times – then there is not only a methodical but also an emotional relation to religion. If finally, the Socratic search for a good life is seen as one of the characteristics of philosophical therapy, then delimitation even turns into a criterion for non-philosophical therapies. The search for a good life requires an interdisciplinary approach. -/- For the concretization of the formal structure, we suggest a typology of therapies, which is based on chances and risks. Such a typology has the advantage, that it can model conflicting (and even opposing) forms of therapies. The variety of therapeutic goals and methods is a consequence of the historical development towards conceptual freedom. (shrink)

This provocative study presents philological, philosophical, and historical arguments that with the Greek term καθῆκον and its Latin equivalent officium the ancient Stoics invented a new concept that anticipated the modern notion of moral duty, for example, Pflicht in Kant. Scholars began to shift from translating kathēkon as "duty" to translating it as "appropriate or fitting action" in the late 1800s, according to Visnjic. The usage of the verb kathēkein in Greek literature prior to the Stoics suggests to him (...) that it described something prescribed by law, tradition, or decree. Visnjic argues that the Stoics did not conceive of kathekonta as rules of conduct but as prescriptions specific to situations. They held that there are some universal duties, like believing in the gods, believing that the gods are benevolent guardians of humanity, and being a good person, but that such duties offer no concrete, practical guidance for determining how to act. The most innovative contribution of this work is the collection and collation of pieces of practical advice scattered throughout extant sources to devise a four-stage process of deliberation. The two chapters on Kant seem comparatively cursory. On the whole, this book, at times daringly inventive, is occasionally unapologetically speculative. (shrink)

This dissertation argues that a proper understanding of Aristotle's theory of the virtues and vices requires us to understand how practical science presupposes theoretical science, more particularly the science of the nature of the morally-developed person. It argues that by using the canons of the Posterior Analytics we can prove why the virtues are causally necessary for the morally-developed person. Further, by seeing the virtues and vices in the context of the Physics, we can see how the development of (...) these character traits might constitute the substrate principle which explains why different people respond to the world in the forms they do. ;Treating the virtues and vices as character traits and as the substrate principle underlying people's responses to the world points the way to treating them as the principle around which psychology, ethics and politics can all be integrated. The ethical virtues are rooted in the psychology of character while politics is a matter of organizing institutions so as to promote the development of determinate forms of character in given populations. Virtuous politics is taken to be that which organizes institutional structures and processes around the goal of human development. ;Throughout the dissertation I related Aristotelian insights to contemporary work in the realist philosophy of science, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology and Marx. ;This is a speculative work which, though inspired by Aristotle, is not presented as an exegesis of Greek texts. (shrink)

Philosophy, in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, and in various other cultures too, was typically thought of as, among other things, bearing on how to live. Questions of how to live may now be considered by some as merely one optional specialism among others, but Derek Parfit for one, we shall see, rightly treats implications for how to live as flowing naturally from metaphysical theories. In the hope of showing something about the ancient Graeco-Roman tradition as a whole, I (...) shall speak of things that I and others have said before,1 but I will highlight certain aspects of how the various groups or individuals related their philosophy to their lives. I shall start with the ancient Stoics as providing a clear case, then move on more briefly to their rivals, the Epicureans, and finally, more briefly again, to consider their predecessors and successors in other ancient schools and periods. This will not be a survey of the main central doctrines, although that is also something useful to attempt. But it will involve a selection of important ideas to illustrate their application to how to live. (shrink)

What is truly timeless? This book explores the language of eternity, and in particular two ancient Greek terms that may bear the sense of eternal : aiônios and aïdios. This fascinating linguistic chronicle is marked by several milestones that correspond to the emergence of new perspectives on the nature of eternity. These milestones include the advent of Pre-Socratic physical speculation and the notion of limitless time in ancient philosophy, the major shift in orientation marked by Plato s idea (...) of a timeless eternity, and the further development of Pre-Socratic insights by Epicurean and Stoic thinkers. From the biblical perspective, the intersection of Greek and Hebrew conceptions is reflected in Septuagint, as well as new inflections in popular terminology in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and in the role of eternity in the theology of the New Testament. The profound cross-fertilization of Christian and classical philosophical conceptions in the works of the Church fathers and their contemporaries is explored, bringing the topic into the Patristic period. Christian theology in the first five centuries of the Common Era and its choice of vocabulary prove to be most revealing of larger doctrinal commitments. Above all debate raged on the question of eternal damnation versus the idea (deemed heretical in the Christian church after the formal condemnation of Origenism) of apocastastis or universal salvation - that is, the belief that the wicked are not condemned to eternal punishment but will eventually be included among the saved. Terminology for eternity is often at the core of how these issues were debated, and helps to identify which writers inclined to one or the other view of the matter. (shrink)

Ancient philosophical theories of soul are in many respects sensitive to ways of speaking and thinking about the soul psuchê] that are not specifically philosophical or theoretical. We therefore begin with what the word ‘soul’ meant to speakers of Classical Greek, and what it would have been natural to think about and associate with the soul. We then turn to various Presocratic thinkers, and to the philosophical theories that are our primary concern, those of Plato (first in the (...) Phaedo, then in the Republic), Aristotle (in the De Anima or On the Soul ), Epicurus, and the Stoics. These are by far the most carefully worked out theories of soul in ancient philosophy. Later theoretical developments — for instance, in the writings of Plotinus and other Platonists, as well as the Church Fathers — are best studied against the background of the classical theories, from which, in large part, they derive. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

Notably since Thomas Hobbes, canonically with Benjamin Constant, and conventionally amid Nietzschean, Popperian, Straussian, Arendtian, liberal, republican, political, and sociological readings of ancient texts, contemporary scholarship on the ancients often has employed some version of the dichotomous ancient/modern or ancient/contemporary contrast as a template for explaining, understanding, and interpretively appropriating ancient texts and political practices – particularly those of ancient Greek philosophy and democracy. In particular, this has been done to argue for some conception of (...) political ethics and democracy. I argue that this rhetorical trope, often using Athens and Europe/America as synecdoches for antiquity and modernity, has generated narrow and distorted views of ancient texts and political practices, on the one hand, and their contemporary relevance, on the other – views that misinterpret the theoretical significance of historical phenomena and misread the potential lessons of ancient authorities. Instead, texts and practices should be read either with more qualifications or more fully against a historical dynamic of critical philosophy and political power – including its ethical, cultural, institutional, and governing elements – that is not framed by this dichotomy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In his 1981–82 lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault claims that a significant portion of the modern historiography of ancient philosophy tends to discredit the ethical framework of epimeleia heautou (“care of the self”). The thematic analysis of knowledge in the historiography of ancient philosophy overshadows the theme of care of the self. Taking Foucault’s claim as a point of departure, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, the paper provides a genealogy of the (...) early Hellenistic Academy, from Polemo to Arcesilaus. Second, the paper demonstrates that for Arcesilaus, the alleged pioneer of what modern historiography has designated the Academy’s epistemological scepticism, philosophy is not restricted to a continual search for knowledge at a theoretically rarefied level of challenging arguments or discursive statements. This paper situates Arcesilaus’ opposition to early Stoic epistemology within the framework of Academic epimeleia heautou, and defends the thesis that under Arcesilaus the Hellenistic Academy undergoes a shift in the practice of care of the self. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:It is difficult to do justice to a monumental study such as PJDS in a short review: only time will determine its real significance. We can only offer some preliminary comments, and in spite of anything we have to say, the mere fact that the book contains such a wealth of information justifies for it a permanent place on a bookshelf of a student of medieval thought.The title of (...) PJDS deserves special attention. While we have books on Scotus's theology or particular topics of his thought, there has been no comprehensive study of his "philosophy," seemingly for a good reason: Scotus is clearly a "fundamental" and systematic theologian who simply uses some classic tools of ancient philosophers and some of their texts and ideas as material for his own discussions. So first of all one needs to determine what constitutes "philosophy" in such a case. V. devotes considerable attention to this question, but unfortunately only at the very end of the study, in Part III, which constitutes almost a separate monograph on the historiography of the debate about "medieval philosophy" and Scotus's role in it. Dichotomizing medieval thought into "philosophy" and theology in recent debates comes from the post-Enlightenment habit of seeing "philosophy" , as opposed to "theology," as something positive in itself. In Chapter 14 V. makes a good observation that "philosophy" and "theology" in ancient and medieval thought are simply two systems that can be coherent in themselves but differ fundamentally as far as their premises are concerned. Using the terminology of contemporary hermeneutical-postcritical analysis, one could say that both disciplines are intratextual systems, with their own internal logic but with different "starting points," opened to a conversation ad extra to various degrees. The classification "intratextual system" based on a solid theoretical foundation in the hermeneutical-postcritical tradition would eliminate the unnecessary dichotomy in ancient and medieval thought. Indeed, it is difficult to see why some of Plato's, Aristotle's or Stoic texts should be classified as "philosophy," not to mention those of Plotinus and Proclus that are often clearly "theology." As a whole, V.'s verdict is that Scotus has his own coherent system of thought based on contingency, as opposed to the "necessitarianism" of ancient philosophers. As for the role of "philosophy," V.'s analysis of recent scholarship shows that "medieval philosophy" is often understood as the logical tools in the service of theology: the interpretation that explains the recent interest in the fourteenth-century thought where those tools were best developed.The book in general is quite readable, despite occasional infelicities in the English and some typos. V. employs a variety of styles, from purely scholarly, which includes a straightforward exposition of relevant texts, with some analysis of the diachronic development of issues, to more literary, ornate and emotional. Similarly varied is his presentation of issues: from dry exposition to creating prolonged "mystery plots" that lead to "discoveries." Unfortunately there is also some unevenness in the text flow: from very smooth to abrupt transitions from one statement to another .Although the book will definitely benefit a variety of readers, the exact readership is difficult to pinpoint. Some sections, such as the extended discussion of distinctions and relations in the section on logic, presuppose a very basic audience; often much of the material from previous sections is repeated . Yet other sections presuppose a rather sophisticated reader who is familiar with the context of the discussion and is able not only to follow but also anticipate the author's train of thought.PJDS provides an excellent coverage of Scotus's work, with one notable exception: the Reportatio tradition. Even though the Wolter/Bychkov edition-translation of Rep. I-A appeared perhaps.. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has (...) followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

Ex interiore ipso exeas. Preface. This book reconstructs the history of a still open dialectics between several ethoi, that is, shared codes of unwritten rules, moral traditions, or self-aware attempts at reforming such codes, and ethical theories discussing the nature and justification of such codes and doctrines. Its main claim is that this history neither amounts to a triumphal march of reason dispelling the mist of myth and bigotry nor to some other one-way process heading to some pre-established goal, but (...) instead to a chain of controversies where the partners’ will to win unintentionally yields a wealth of insights on human existence that has still something to teach us. -/- 1. The Hellenic moral tradition. -/- Two different traditions of morality in vi-v century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. -/- 2. Plato and the Good. -/- Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates rejoinder to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 3. Aristotle and practical philosophy. -/- Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistency in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater families, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics, is illustrated. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexes, or ‘dispositions’. Prudence, or better, practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with boùleusis or deliberation is discussed, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 4. Cynics and Stoics: ethics as therapy. -/- The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place that was given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of the science of well-being aiming, more than pleasure understood as in the popular view, the reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Roman and Imperial Moralists. -/- The chapter is dedicated to the reconstruction of a particular kind of literature, whose specific features have long been under-stressed, namely the Roman and Imperial moral literature. Cicero is treated at some length, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is given pride of place, stressing the novelty of his approach to ethics as cognitive therapy, in this case just following an already existing new wave of interest after nineteenth-century oblivion justified by alleged lack of authentic ‘philosophical’ character. -/- 6. The Hebrew moral tradition. -/- A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torah (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Levitic is stressed as the turning point when the stress on mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, starts being combined with legal tradition yielding the change in the sensibility of the Second Temple time. -/- 7. Second Temple Judaism. -/- This chapter describes the Long March leading from the post-exile Zadokite restoration to the first-century aevi vulgaris. The first topic reconstructed is the Zadokite theology of the double retribution. The second is the alternative Enochic tradition consistently rejecting the central role of the Temple, the Priesthood and worship as atonement for sins and offering as an alternative God’s unlimited mercy and preaching mercy, not sacrifice as the way of behaving requested by God. Wisdom literature, the third subject discusses, is a kind of third way, on the one hand increasingly critical towards the double retribution and ruling theology’s optimism facing the world as it is and on the other mocking at the Enochic current as a band of dreamers and visionaries. The third way consists in disenchantment facing the word as it is combined with a refusal of vain and childish hope of prizes for the righteous, suggesting instead the leading idea of right deeds for righteousness’s sake. Rabbi Hillel, Rabbi Yeshua and Philo of Alexandria are described as the three leading figures at the culminating point of such process of emergence of a new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This starting point consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, whose meaning is, arguably, more consistent than a long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine made us believe. And Christian morality, vis-à-vis allegedly legalist ‘Ancient Testament’ teachings, is less of a novelty than most early Christian writers announced. -/- 8. Talmudic moral doctrines and proto-Christian paraenesis. -/- The first three sections examine the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirke Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deot, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexes and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was "the tool by which the world was built"; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous, but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The last two sections examine first the various Christian currents and then Gnostic para-Christian or non-Christian currents as well as Manicheism. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure, purest Judaism. The last section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manicheism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. -/- 9. Christianity as “philosophy”. -/- The chapter reconstructs the stormy story of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and several rhetorical topics from the Stoic and Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua himself had been influenced by cynical preachers, is a proof of the necessity to translate the original Christian message in a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 10. Ethics in the Arabic-Islamic Philosophy. -/- The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on the retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince, had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries, a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with the disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 11. Ethics in the Jewish philosophy. -/- The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place for the first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed too a few traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Tora and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirke Avot could be translated. -/- 12. The practical philosophy revival in Latin Europe. -/- A reconstruction is carried out of a fresh start of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium rescuing a Platonic and Augustinian legacy, with Anselm and Peter Abelard. In this phase remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions, gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of a full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. -/- 13. Scholastic practical philosophy: Thomas Aquinas. -/- Aquinas’s ethics is theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to the repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave pure nature incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too ambitious, and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Prima Secundae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas was able to solve the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from the knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethics, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of the death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not the Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is no way an ethical ‘absolutism’, as both the traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularists tend to believe, but rather an ethic of prudential judgment on the individual case. Exceptions to this approach – or better the result of logical fallacies – are provided by the thesis of the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of so-called intrinsically evil acts, a thesis that would simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences that Thomas did not live long enough to draw. -/- 14. Scholastic practical philosophy: John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. A reconstruction is carried out of the ethical doctrines by both most authoritative Franciscan doctors. Their continuity with Aquinas is vindicated against prejudice carried by centuries of polemics within the Catholic Church and tendentious disparaging of both as forerunners of execrable Reformation. Besides aspects of continuity, also the important novelties are illustrated, first John’s abandonment of Aquinas’s and Augustine’s eudemonism, asserting righteousness for righteousness’s sake, and then William’s explicit defence of the philosopher’s virtues, that is, natural morality, and his solution to the dilemma of God’s omnipotence and the universal validity of natural law extending to God himself. -/- 15. Aristotelianism interpreted by the Magistri Artium. -/- A reconstruction of the until recently forgotten ethical doctrines by the Parisian Magistri Artium, falsely depicted as ‘Averroists’ and either deprecated as heretics or mistaken for predecessors of modern secularism. In fact, they illustrate a view of ‘natural’ virtue as may be understood by human reason without the assistance by Revelation. -/- Etiamsi daremus Deum non esse. Intermediate considerations. Three considerations may be suggested by the story told in the book. The first one is that intellectual histories have been mounted in the past with the same state of mind as one may mount a war chariot. Such constructions are not very helpful as tools for understanding the past. Wars waged in the past have left the field obstructed by ruins not easy to remove even by those historians who have animated by an impartial academic motivation. They have been influenced too by consequences of past emphasis on some authors and damnatio capitis suffered by others, by stratifications left on sources by secondary literature and translations, by allotment of originally close sources to different literary genres, by the monopolization of religious texts by churches with full cooperation by secular scholars who still fear contamination. The second one is that aware or unaware ethnocentrism has carried various calamities to our comprehension of the past. Their last vestiges have surfaced again in the semi-scholarly discussion on the idea of Europe occasioned by the debate on a project of a European Constitution. Mention of Europe’s Christian roots has been the clumsiest move. Proclamations of such roots were so obvious in what they affirmed as they were totally off-path concerning what they omitted, namely that he modern European moral tradition included legacies from Middle-Eastern wisdom, Hellenic philosophy, Roman Imperial legal literature, and, besides, a Jewish legacy in turn incorporating other more ancient Middle-Eastern legacies and which has been partly conveyed by Christianity. And the Islamic-Arabic philosophy too, in so far it made the Nicomachean Ethics available to Latin Christian scholars, is one more of Europe’s roots. The third is that religious traditionalists and secularist fundamentalists have gone hand in hand for a couple of centuries in either extolling or deprecating the allegedly Modern idea of Ethics without God, first formulated by Hugo Grotius with the claim that natural law would still be valid ‘etiamsi daremus – quod sine summo scelere dari potest – Deum non esse’. The facts are, firstly, that this is not an irreligious claim and Grotius was just a pious and meek Christian and, secondly, that it is not a ‘modern’ claim but rather one more formulation of the claim that there is a natural morality, independent of divine revelation, a claim shared by Moshe ben Maimon, Aquinas and William of Ockham. -/- . (shrink)

Whenever we worry about what to eat, how to love, or simply how to be happy, we are worrying about how to lead a good life. No goal is more elusive. In How to Be a Stoic, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci offers Stoicism, the ancient philosophy that inspired the great emperor Marcus Aurelius, as the best way to attain it. Stoicism is a pragmatic philosophy that teaches us to act depending on what is within our control and separate things worth (...) getting upset about from those that are not. By understanding Stoicism, we can learn to answer crucial questions: Should we get married or divorced? How should we bank in a world nearly destroyed by a financial crisis? How can we survive great personal tragedy? Whoever you are, Stoicism has something for you—and How to Be a Stoic is your essential guide. (shrink)

Starting from Hans Jonas’ works, this essay researches the bases of human responsibility and its reasoning is made up of four points. 1. He was aware of how his experience had influenced his thought and he questioned what means reflecting starting from extreme situations: «The apocalyptic state of things, the threatening collapse of a world, the climatic crisis of civilization, the proximity of death, the stark nakedness to which all the issues of life were stripped, all these were ground enough (...) to take a new look at the very foundations of our being and to review the principles by which we guide our thinking on them». 2. Faced with these situations he rediscovered the richness of the Ancients’ thought. For example, the Stoics inherited and transformed the illuminating aspects of the theory that conceived of the ‘being’ as contemplation of the whole, which had permeated Greek natural philosophy and scientific speculation. They took it on as the capacity to identify one’s own most internal principle with the principle of the whole, in a more religious sense. The discovery in the whole of what is felt to be the highest and noblest in human beings – like reason, order, and form - makes our orientation towards a super-regulating end a liberating wisdom. 3. Jonas considers that starting from XVII century the two aspects, here distinct as external and internal, remain at the core of the issue so far as the problem of freedom is concerned. Moreover, theoretical efforts now move in the direction of rendering, of discovering a conception of freedom which is logically compatible with causal determinism, while in the history of philosophy, the problem of freedom was not born in the sphere of logic. So it is necessary to rethink Modernity and how it is possible to found human freedom and responsibility nowadays. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spinoza and the Theory of Organism HANS JONAS I CARTESIANDUALISMlanded speculation on the nature of life in an impasse: intelligible as, on principles of mechanics, the correlation of structure and function became within the res extensa, that of structure-plus-function with feeling or experience (modes of the res cogitans) was lost in the bifurcation, and thereby the fact of life itself became unintelligible at the same time that the explanation (...) of its bodily performance seemed to be assured. The impasse became manifest in Occasionalism : its tour de force of an extraneous, divine "synchronization" of the outer and the inner world (the latter denied to animals) not only suffered from its extreme artificiality, the common failing of such ad hoc constructions, but even at so high a cost failed to accomplish its theoretical purpose by its own terms. For the animal machine, like any machine, raises beyond the question of the "how" that of the "what for" of its functioning---of the purpose for which it had thus been constructed by its maker.1 Its performance, however devoid of immanent teleology, must serve an end, and that end must be someone's end. This end may (directly) be itself, as indeed Descartes had implied when declaring self-preservation to be the effect of the functioning of the organic automaton. In that case the existence as such of the machine would be its end--either terminally, or in turn to benefit something else. In the former case, the machine would have to be more than a machine, for a mere machine cannot enioy its existence. But since, by the rigorous conception of the res extensa, it cannot be more than a machine, its function and/or existence must serve something other than itself. Automata in Descartes ' time were mainly for entertainment (rather than work). But the raison d'etre of the living kingdom could not well be seen in God's indulging his mechanical abilities or in the amusement of celestial spectators--especially since mere complexity of arrangement does not create new quality and thus add something to the unrelieved sameness of the simple substratum that might enrich the spectrum of being. For quality, beyond the primitive determinations of the extended per se, is the subjective creature of sensation, the confused representation of quantity in a mind; and thus organisms cannot harbor it because as mere machines they lack mentality, and pure spirits cannot because they lack sensuality, or the privilege of confusion and thereby of illusion with its possible enjoyment. And as to their intellectual enjoyment, even that, deprived of the thrill of discovery by the same token, would pale in the contemplation of what to sufficiently large The concept of "machine," adopted for its strict confinementto efficientcause, is still a finalisticconcept,even thoughthe final cause is no longer internal to the entity, as a mode of its own operation,but external to it as antecedent design. [43] 44 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY intellects is nothing but the ever-repeated exemplification of the same few, elementary (and ultimately trivial) truths. There remained, then, the time-honored--Stoic as well as Christian--idea that plants and animals are for the benefit of Man. Indeed, since the existence of a living world is the necessary condition for the existence of any of its members, the self-justifying nature of at least one such member (= species) would justify the existence of the whole. In Stoicism, Man provided this end by his possession of reason, which makes him the culmination of a terrestrial scale of being that is also self-justifying throughout all its grades (the end as the best of many that are good in degrees) ; in Christianity, by his possession of an immortal soul, which makes him the sole imago Dei in creation (the end as the sole issue at stake) ; and Cartesian dualism radicalized this latter position by making man even the sole possessor of inwardness or "soul" of any kind, thus the only one of whom "end" can meaningfully be predicated as he alone can entertain ends. All other life then, the product of physical necessity, can be considered his means. However, this traditional idea, in its anthropocentric vanity never a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Montaigne and the Coherence of EclecticismPierre ForceSince the publication of Pierre Hadot's essays on ancient philosophy by Arnold Davidson in 1995,2 Michel Foucault's late work on "the care of the self"3 has appeared in a new light. We now know that Hadot's work was familiar to Foucault as early as the 1950s.4 It is also clear that Foucault's notion of "techniques of the self" is very close to (...) what Hadot calls "spiritual exercises." At the same time, there are important differences between the views of these two philosophers, and Hadot has often expressed his regret that Foucault's untimely death prevented them from exploring these differences.5 One important point of disagreement was the status of eclecticism. In Foucault's interpretation of ancient philosophy, the "constitution of the self" implied a personal choice among disparate philosophical references: "Writing as a personal exercise done by the self and for the self, is an art of disparate truth."6 In a 1989 article Hadot argued from a historical point of view that, so far as Stoicism and Epicureanism were concerned, [End Page 523] eclecticism had no place in a mature practice of philosophy. Foucault's favorite example, Seneca's Letters to Lucilius, in which Stoic arguments were invoked along with Epicurean arguments, was a work for beginners. In a mature practice of Stoicism, one would stick to the arguments of the Stoic school, choose them for their coherence, and instead of trying to forge a spiritual identity for oneself through writing, one would "liberate oneself from one's individuality in order to raise oneself up to universality."7 Hadot added that "it is only in the New Academy—in the person of Cicero, for instance—that a personal choice is made according to what reason considers as most likely at a given moment."8 This discussion of Foucault may give the impression that Hadot was somewhat dismissive of eclecticism. Yet in a 2001 interview Hadot claimed that he had always admired Cicero's intellectual independence, and he proposed a reappraisal "of an attitude that has always had a bad reputation: eclecticism."9Something very similar is a stake in the work of Alexander Nehamas, as Lanier Anderson and Joshua Landy showed in their study of his Art of Living. In the conception of philosophy as a "way of life" (Hadot) or "care of the self" (Foucault) or "self-fashioning" (Nehamas), a central issue is the relationship between theoretical coherence and the coherence of the person who theorizes. Elaborating on Nehamas's chapter on Montaigne, Anderson and Landy argue that there is a move in Montaigne away from doctrinal coherence and towards a coherence of the self. As they put it, "the harmonious whole Montaigne commends [... ] is not a coherent body of fact or theory; it is the unified self of the theorizer."10 Anderson and Landy show that this brings up all kinds of difficulties: can this unified self be other than a fiction? If that is the case, how can philosophy be a way of life? Nehamas's answer is very much in the spirit of the late Foucault: there is a coherence of the self in Montaigne, and this coherence is the product of writing as a philosophical activity. The self is fashioned through writing.Because Montaigne writes in the ancient tradition of philosophy as a way of life, one may recall Hadot's suggestion that Foucault's notion of [End Page 524] "writing the self" is an intriguing but historically inaccurate description of ancient philosophical practice. But perhaps Hadot agrees with Foucault after all, since in his most recent interviews, he speaks favorably of eclecticism, a notion that is central to Foucault's analysis of self-fashioning through writing. The case of Montaigne is particularly interesting for these purposes, not only because the Essays seem to be the prototypical example of "writing the self," but also because eclecticism is both discussed and practiced throughout the Essays. I propose to take a fresh look at this issue by investigating the status of eclecticism in Montaigne's Essays. This must start with an examination of the philosophical tradition most closely associated with... (shrink)

The contemporary canon of what constitutes ancient political thought was fixed in the course of the nineteenth century by the then newly reigning discipline of the philosophy of history. It made little difference whether this discipline was positivistically or dialectically inclined. Whatever the methodological commitment there was general agreement that the sources of ancient wisdom on the nature and ends of social and political life were to be found in the political and ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle (...) and, to a lesser extent, Cicero. Here Cicero was read, in part, as a repository of a Stoic political wisdom that had not survived in the original texts. According to this tradition, genuine, if not final, political wisdom is to be found in the reflections of these ancient thinkers -- not a totally unexpected conclusion to come from philosophers. For these nineteenth-century practitioners of Geistesgeschichte the essence of ancient experience is distilled in its inner life, its art, literature, religion, and above all in its philosophical speculation, but not, for instance, in its political experience as recorded in its history. (shrink)

Diana Lobel takes readers on a journey across Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions to discover a beauty and purpose at the heart of reality that makes life worth living. Guided by the ideas of ancient thinkers and the insight of the philosophical historian Pierre Hadot, _The Quest for God and the Good_ treats philosophy not as an abstract, theoretical discipline, but as a living experience. For centuries, human beings have struggled to know why we are here, (...) whether a higher being or dimension exists, and whether our existence is fundamentally good. Above all, we want to know whether the search for God and the good will bring happiness. Following in the path of the ancient philosophers, Lobel directly connects conceptions of God or an Absolute with notions of the good, illuminating diverse classical texts and thinkers. She explores the Bible and the work of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides, al-Farabi, and al-Ghazali. She reads the _Tao Te Ching_, _I Ching_, _Bhagavad Gita_, and _Upanishads_, as well as the texts of Theravada, Mahayana, and Zen Buddhism, and traces the repercussions of these works in the modern thought of Alfred North Whitehead, Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. While each of these texts and thinkers sets forth a distinct and unique vision, all maintain that human beings find fulfillment in their contact with beauty and purpose. Rather than arriving at one universal definition of God or the good, Lobel demonstrates the aesthetic value of multiple visions presented by many thinkers across cultures. _The Quest for God and the Good_ sets forth a path of investigation and discovery culminating in intellectual and spiritual communion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science by Lucas SiorvanesP.A. MeijerLucas Siorvanes. Proclus: Neo-Platonic Philosophy and Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+ 340. Cloth, $35.00.This book will be welcomed by scholars of Proclus and by readers unfamiliar with Proclus alike. There are not many introductory books on Proclus. And Siorvanes presents in an interesting way the latest developments in scholarship. [End Page 160]Siorvanes gives an account of (...) Proclus’s life and times, his position in the Athenian Neoplatonic school, and his influence and offers a panoramic view of Proclus’s philosophy in the chapters: “General Metaphysics,” “Knowledge and the levels of Being,” “Physics and Metaphysics,” and “Stars and Planets.” He presents not only Proclus’s views on physics and astronomy, but also his poetics (189).Siorvanes deals competently with Proclus’s metaphysics, analyzing it in its own right and as the indispensable background of his scientific views. His summaries are on the whole adequate and instructive. But a scheme or outline of levels of the multi-layered Proclean system of Gods (Henads), such as that offered by H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink in Proclus, Théologie Platonicienne (Paris 1968) for example, would have facilitated understanding.In an impressive description of Proclus’s historical influence, Siorvanes establishes connections between Proclus’s ideas and modern views in metaphysics, mathematics, physics, logic and astronomy. Yet a warning would be appropriate in this context. There is, for instance, the strikingly modern Proclean theory that planets have satellites. Perhaps Siorvanes is too much enamoured with these modern Proclean theories. Though he recognizes that the theory about the satellites is really a consequence of Proclus’s metaphysics (268–271), he fails to emphasize that Proclus’s modern-seeming theories are no less speculative than other ancient theories. Neither Proclus’s metaphysics nor his mathematics can replace evidence as used in modern science. Thus, the rather triumphal tones Sioravanes sounds in this regard are somewhat out of place. The incidental similarities in theoretical structures and patterns that emerge in the course of history are interesting to note, but we should beware of becoming too enthusiastic about their significance. The so-called indirect influence may be due precisely to the structure of problems and the (limited) range of possible solutions.I would raise some objections to Siorvanes’s manner of translating and interpreting the Greek word for “to be” (einai) or “Being” (on). As is often done, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, Siorvanes alternatively uses “being,” “existence” and “reality,” without being aware of the fact that in ancient philosophy the Greek words “on/ousia” (“Being”) generally do not admit of the translation “existence.” Such translations are anachronistic and wrong. “Reality” is entirely inappropriate as a translation. As an essentially medieval expression, the word “reality” (realitas) as such is nowhere to be found in antiquity. When Proclus presents his multilevel system of Being, there are no degrees of reality in the sense that one transcendent level is more real than another. There are only degrees of Being. The problematic nature of the issue stands out even more when one speaks about not being. “Being” interpreted as “reality” suggests that what is not being, has no reality. But that is not what Proclus meant to say. The translation “existence” is bound to bring about similar misunderstandings. The notion “existence” is seldom in the focus of the interest when an ancient philosopher uses “einai.” Thus, an innocent reader of Siorvanes’s book may despair when he encounters “real existence” as a translation for “ousia” (124). Do the levels of being other than the one called “ousia” exist or do they not exist? If they do not, Proclus’s entire philosophy would be incoherent, and our world would not even exist or possess “reality.” But this is not what Proclus or Siorvanes mean. To avoid misunderstandings, we should use only “Being” (and “to be”) as translations. [End Page 161]There are also problems with some aspects of Siorvanes’s description of participation. In picturing the connection of the entity that is participated (methekton), what is given to the participant (metechomenon) and the participant (metechon), the terms “predication” and... (shrink)

This work reconstructs the original theory of natural law as developed by the early Stoic scholarchs, explains its fundamental differences from our traditional conception of natural law, and considers the philosophical motivation for this transformation of the original theory. For the nearly Stoics, natural law corresponds not to a determinate code of laws or precepts, as in Aquinas, but to a certain mental disposition, namely the perfectly rational and consistent conduct of the wise man. The content of the moral conduct (...) enjoined by natural law is specified by "virtuous actions" rather than "appropriate actions" . ;In the Introduction I discuss the central differences between ancient and modern theories of natural law, outline the plan of my project, and explain how the early Stoic theory of natural law differs quite radically from the Thomistic conception of the subject. Next I reconstruct the original form and motivation of the theory from the fragments of the early Stoic scholarchs, explain its relation to their ethics and political philosophy, and show that its original motivation was to offer a better answer than Plato had succeeded in giving to the problems he raised in the Republic. In the third chapter I reconstruct and examine critically Carneades' attack on the Stoic theory. Finally, I argue that Antiochus of Ascalon introduced a simple but fundamental modification of the early Stoic theory, which radically changed its orientation and laid the basis for the Thomistic theory. To support his view about the unity of doctrine of the "ancients", Antiochus revised natural law so as to enjoin kathekonta rather than katorthomata, thus making the content of natural law correspond to a determinate class of precepts. I conclude with some general remarks on why Cicero chose Antiochus' version of natural law as the basis for his De Legibus. In an Appendix I argue that the Stoics' theory had little if any substantive influence on Roman Jurisprudence. (shrink)

While few soldiers may have read the works of Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, it is undoubtedly true that the ancient philosophy known as Stoicism guides the actions of many in the military. Soldiers and seamen learn early in their training “to suck it up,” to endure, to put aside their feelings and to get on with the mission. This book explores what the Stoic philosophy actually is, the role it plays in the character of the military (both ancient (...) and modern), and its powerful value as a philosophy of life. Marshalling anecdotes from military history—ranging from ancient Greek wars to World War II, Vietnam, and Iraq—the book illuminates the military mind and uses it as a window on the virtues of the Stoic philosophy, which are far richer and more interesting than our popularized notions. The book explores the deep, lasting value that Stoicism can yield, in issues of military leadership and character; in the Stoic conception of anger and its control (does a warrior need anger to go to battle?); and in Stoic thinking about fear and resilience, grief and mourning, and the value of camaraderie and brotherhood. The book concludes by recommending a moderate Stoicism, where the task for the individual, both civilian and military, youth and adult, is to temper control with forgiveness, and warrior drive and achievement with humility and humor. (shrink)

An interest in causation and explanation, as these concepts pertain to action, production and agency, is a characteristic of Hellenistic philosophy, and the Stoics are typical in this respect; a cause, or aition, for the Stoics, is something that actually does something. In this chapter, Hankinson discusses Stoic materialism with its distinction between Active and Passive principles, and discusses in detail the Stoic analysis of causation, which is conceived as corporeal and transmitted by contact. Hankinson shows that, while the Stoics (...) embrace determinism to a greater degree than any of their predecessors, they nevertheless retain a genuine possibility of human freedom of action, with emphasis upon the notion of Fate and responsibility. The Stoics’ thoroughly materialistic view of the world does not rule out the presence of intelligence; intelligence, or pneuma, is itself also a material substance, which is identical with God. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scepticism in the Sixth Century? Damascius’ Doubts and Solutions Concerning First PrinciplesSara RappeThe Doubts and Solutions Concerning First Principles, an aporetic work of the sixth century Neoplatonist Damascius, is distinguished above all by its dialectical subtlety. Although the Doubts and Solutions belongs to the commentary tradition on Plato’s Parmenides, its structure and method make it in many ways unique among such exegetical works. The treatise positions itself, at least (...) in part, as a response to Proclus’ metaphysical system. Thus the first principles alluded to in its title refer to a metaphysical structure consisting of five central elements, the Ineffable, the One, and the Noetic Triad, which Damascius both adumbrates in opposition to Proclus1 as well as subjects to his own, internal critique. In this article, I will be asking whether or not Damascius’ critique of Neoplatonic metaphysics is informed or inspired by ancient Scepticism. No doubt this question catches the reader off guard: if the last exponent of ancient Scepticism is Sextus Empiricus, how could this sixth-century Neoplatonist Scholarch, the last officially appointed Platonic Successor, revert to a tradition that seemingly disappears for well over three centuries?2 In what [End Page 337] follows, I suggest that a plausible historical context for such a reversion can be found in contemporaneous Neoplatonic allusions to Sceptical readings of Plato. I then analyze the Sceptical techniques deployed by Damascius in his critique of Neoplatonist metaphysics, focusing especially on his attacks on Neoplatonic theories of intellect and causation. I conclude by speculating on some ideological factors that shaped Damascius’ Sceptical affiliations, suggesting that here it is possible to see an initial volley in what was to become a centuries-long skirmish between reason and revelation.1. the neoplatonists read the sceptics?R. T. Wallis has suggested that Plotinus borrows from the Sceptics’ arsenal in voicing his own objections against Stoic or Stoicizing epistemology and theology. The seemingly radical stance that Plotinus takes against Stoic notions of divine rationality, virtue, and providence is anticipated by the Sceptics’ refusal to grant that an omniscient mind could stand in need of rational deliberation or exercise virtues that imply the presence of corresponding vices, etc. Not only is it the case that Plotinus makes a detailed use of specific Sceptical arguments in his own polemics against the Stoics, he seems to have been the first philosopher to have grasped the implications of Sceptical challenges to Stoic theology, and to have circumvented Sceptical dilemmas by means of his highly original formulations of nondiscursive thinking and negative theology.That this Platonist might side with Sceptics against dogmatic philosophy would hardly be surprising to the modern student of Plato, but it is also true that historically, this has been an uneasy alliance. In fact, it is just this question, the alliance between Platonists and the Sceptics, that gets rehearsed in the sixth century. Olympiodorus devotes Chapter 10 of his Prolegomena to the Study of Platonic Philosophy to the refutation of an ephectic, or nondogmatic Plato3: “Plato also superseded the philosophy of the New Academy since that school gave precedence to akatalepsia (nonapprehension), while Plato demonstrated that there do exist cognitions grounded in genuine knowledge. Nevertheless, some assert, assimilating Plato to the ephectics and to the Academicians, that he too maintained the doctrine of akatalepsia.” These remarks are curious, for we have no indication that a Sceptical reading of Plato was current or even conceivable at this time. In fact, as the context makes clear, the Sceptics are represented in this passage as a prior philosophical school; chapters 7 through 10 present a concise history of philosophy that is remarkably free from any notions of philosophical currency attributable to any of the views that fall [End Page 338] under its purvue: “there has been no shortage of philosophical haireseis [schools] both before and after Plato, yet he surpassed all of them by his teaching, his thought, and in every possible way”4 (Prolegomena, 7.1).Olympiodorus performs the exegete’s role throughout his refutation of a non-dogmatic Plato, turning first to the grammatical item, Plato’s use of what Olympiodorus terms the “hestitating” adverbs, such as “probably,” “perhaps,” and “as I imagine.” Nevertheless Olympiodorus manages... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theologian's Doubts:Natural Philosophy and the Skeptical Games of GhazālīLeor HaleviIn the history of skeptical thought, which normally leaps from the Pyrrhonists to the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) figures as a medieval curiosity. Skeptical enough to merit passing acknowledgment, he has proven too baffling to be treated fully alongside pagan, atheist, or materialist philosophers. As a theologian defending certain Muslim (...) dogmas, Ghazālī has not met what historians consider the mark of the true skeptic, a mind doubting the possibility of all systems of knowledge. But what is fascinating about him is that he brought into practical operation the tools of what I call "functional skepticism."1He denied the claims to truth of Aristotelian physics—whose basis he showed to rest on groundless belief—then turned and argued for the possibility of the Resurrection tooth and nail. The scholarly debate on The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) has concentrated on the extent to which Ghazālī qua Ashcarite theologian was seduced into Aristotelian philosophy despite himself.2 In my view this debate has been misguided in the attempt to distill the [End Page 19] essence of Ghazālī from the book's eclectic theology; I will argue for a different view of Ghazālī on the basis of a close reading of key passages. In the unusual sections where Ghazālī applies Aristotelian language to a world not following the ordinary laws of physics, some have found Ghazālī slipping, unconsciously perhaps, into an Aristotelian frame of mind. I will show that, as a skeptical theologian with a dialogic imagination, he was rather deconstructing Aristotelian discourse while playing a Wittgensteinian sort of language game.Natural Philosopher or Speculative Theologian?The disagreement about the extent to which philosophy infected Ghazālī is ancient. Ghazālī might have studied philosophy only in order to refute it. He himself defended his philosophizing with the claim that one cannot deconstruct a system of thought until one has understood it so deeply as to elaborate upon its fundamental principles.3 His Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was in fact received, especially in trans-Pyrenean Europe, as a philosopher's genuine summary of the object of philosophy.4 The book strikes me as suspiciously creative in its representation of philosophical discourse, but it appears in any case as an expert and surprisingly unbiased treatment.5 Arabic readers knew that Ghazālī had also written a polemical treatise against philosophy, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, but they still wondered about his engagement with the ideas he challenged. Abū Bakr Ibn al-cArabī, for example, commented that Ghazālī had been unable to extricate himself from philosophy.6 Other philosophers pondered whether or not he had been a closeted member of their charmed circle and sought in his writings traces of esoteric philosophy.7Averroës's own sober sense of distance between philosophy and theology was partially a reaction to what he perceived as Ghazālī's dangerous and carefree mixture of the two sciences.8 He attacked Ghazālī's book in The Incoherence [End Page 20] of the Incoherence to restore philosophy's sense of purity, an aim he sought to accomplish by separating religious concerns from the philosopher's field of inquiry.9 Ironically, such a separation is precisely what Ghazālī might have wished to provoke by crisscrossing and blurring the line between religion and philosophy.The modern debate on chapter 17 of Tahāfut al-falāsifa has concentrated on defining Ghazālī as either a natural philosopher or an occasionalist theologian. In his defense of the possibility of miracles Ghazālī presented two theories of causation, one denying the logical basis of Aristotelian notions of natural causality, and the other more or less adopting these notions. Jointly, the two theories have seemed incompatible, and for this reason scholars have attempted to sort Ghazālī out of the apparent confusion. In 1978 L. E. Goodman argued persuasively that Ghazālī exploited rather than denied the philosophers' ideas of causality. In two articles Michael Marmura challenged Goodman, contending... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540–1602)Dane T. DanielJole Shackelford. A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus (1540–1602). Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004. Pp. 519. Cloth, $83.00.The Paracelsian and Danish royal physician Petrus Severinus complained, "If we can make more potent [drugs], extracted from metals and minerals,... I ask, what age (...) except this one will oppose our efforts?" (115). Indeed, early modern attempts to prepare and prescribe drugs forged in the alchemical laboratory often faced vehement opposition by the university-trained physicians who were weaned on the humoral theory and herbal materia medica of Galen. The orthodox Galenists disdained not only the "chemical poisons" of the Paracelsians, but also their theoretical speculations. After all, the Paracelsians dismissed the belief that disease was the result of humoral imbalances, and promoted both the analogy of microcosm (the human) and macrocosm (the natural world, including the stars), and the idea that diseases were essences or actual beings.Severinus was prescient in his prediction that chemical medicine would become popular, but—as Jole Shackelford notes in the introduction to his A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine—the concepts of Paracelsus and his followers continue to remain peripheral to the grand narratives of early modern intellectual history. This remains the case despite the illuminating studies of such scholars as the late-Enlightenment medical historian Kurt Polycarp Sprengel, Walter Pagel, and Allen Debus. Thus, Shackelford sheds much needed light on this significant strand of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century science and medicine. Via text-oriented study, particularly of Severinus's Idea medicinæ philosophicæ (Ideal of Philosophical Medicine), Shackelford provides a long-awaited and meticulous biographical account of Severinus and explains with refreshing clarity the sources and speculative theory behind his brand of chemical medicine. Like such recent scholars as Michael Walton and Charles Gunnoe, Shackelford presents Paracelsianism as an ideology, duly noting that the ideas of Severinus, reflecting the reception of Paracelsus in general, were frequently accepted or rejected on religious grounds.To begin, Shackelford establishes Severinus's importance, noting that the medical author and Wittenberg professor Daniel Sennert wrote in 1619 that most iatrochemists followed in the steps of Severinus, who had molded Paracelsus's ideas into a coherent philosophy. Shackelford then traces the story of how Severinus—after studying at such universities as Padua and Paris—joined his friend Pratensis (a recognized Paracelsian) and Tycho [End Page 488] Brahe in bringing an increasingly eclectic Denmark up to continental cultural and intellectual standards. Unfortunately, Severinus's appointment as physician to the king distracted him from completing most of his research projects, but he had already left for posterity his Idea medicinæ, published in 1571.As Shackelford writes, the Idea medicinæ promoted Severinus's belief that Paracelsian medicine was not only an alternative to humoral medicine, but also promised to cope better with "new" fevers. Also, Severinus invested Paracelsianism with authority by emphasizing its ancient forebears and by arguing that Paracelsus was the latest in the line of prisca theologia—one of the few to "ascend to the inner chambers of the Mosaic mysteries" (57). In his amalgamation of Neoplatonism, the Hippocratic tradition, and Paracelsus, Severinus's featured doctrine was efficient causation, or "semina theory." Unlike Robert Boyle's inertial, material corpuscles and their active principles, Severinus's semina were "intrinsically formal and immaterial, and were logically and ontologically prior to matter" (17). The characteristics of these "loci," which accounted for all change in the subvisible world, could be observed through chemical analysis, and they were uniquely attractive to Christians, who were drawn to Severinus's Paracelsian interpretation of Genesis and his idea that when the predestinations contained in the semina are completed, the world will reach its end.Shackelford engages the reader with such fascinating topics as why Tycho—who was not just an astronomer, but also a student of alchemy—departed Denmark, and how Paracelsians were involved in the effort to improve the Danish Bible by "cleansing" it of non-Lutheran elements. Very welcome too is Shackelford's discussion of the neglected topic of Paracelsian therapeutics, especially his evaluation of... (shrink)

The ancient Stoics notoriously argued, with thoroughness and force, that all ordinary “emotions” (passions, mental affections: in Greek, pãyh) are thoroughly bad states of mind, not to be indulged in by anyone, under any circumstances: anger, resentment, gloating; pity, sympathy, grief; delight, glee, pleasure; impassioned love (i.e. ¶rvw), agitated desires of any kind, fear; disappointment, regret, all sorts of sorrow; hatred, contempt, schadenfreude. Early on in the history of Stoicism, however, apparently in order to avoid the objection that human (...) nature itself demands and indeed justifies—under certain circumstances at any rate—emotional attachments to or aversions from, and reactions to, some persons, things, and happenings, they introduced a theory of what came to be called eÈpãyeiai, good and acceptable ways of feeling or being affected. For short I will render these in English by “good feelings.”1 They divided these into three generic kinds, which they dubbed “joy” (xarã), “wish” (boÊlhsiw) and “caution” (eÈlãbeia). They ranged these alongside, and set them in sharp contrast to, three of the four highest genera into which they divided the normal human emotions: “pleasure” (≤donÆ), i.e., being pleased about something,2 “appetitive desire” (§piyuµ€a), and “fear” (fÒbow), respectively. The Stoics maintained that, though ordinary, familiar human emotions such as these last-named ones were always bad, the three sorts of “good feeling,” and their more specific variations (since these three are only the basic genera into which lots of other good ways of feeling will fall), were not merely free from the grounds of criticism on which ordinary emotions were rejected, and so were perfectly acceptable. The fully perfected human being (the “wise person”) would indeed regularly be subject to them.3 Their theory of the perfect human life did not, then, they could claim, require any outrageously unnatural demand, presumably unrealizable in any case, for a life completely without all feelings of involvement in the sweep and flow of life.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:522 BOOK REVIEWS Essays in Ancient Philosophy. By MICHAEL FREDE. Minneapolis: Uni· versiy of Minnesota Press, 1987. Pp. xxvii + 382. $32.50. For this impressive volume, Michael Frede has woven together a series of seventeen essays on themes from Plato's analysis of percep· tion to the principles of Stoic grammar. There are six sections of the hook, dealing with Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Skeptics, Ancient Medicine, and (...) class='Hi'>Ancient Grammar, respectively. Though most of the essays have appeared in print before, not all of them were readily accessible. Three essays are new to this volume (Chapters 1, 6, and 13) and three appear in English translation for the first time (Chapters 2, 4, and 10). In addition, Frede has prefaced the book with a splendid introduction, ex· plaining with great care his conception of the study of ancient philosophy. Throughout the book the argumentation is thorough and persuasive, the style clear, the conclusions subtle and profound. The experience that Frede brings to bear on various problems discussed in the hook is remarkable. The book may he read as a series of independent essays. There is no need to begin with the section on Plato, or to read the essays in any of the sections in sequence: no special knowledge of previous essays is presupposed by subsequent ones. Nevertheless, to suppose that the sug· gestions made and conclusions drawn in the course of the book are in· sulated from one another would be a serious mistake. To discern any precise connection between the essay on perception in Plato's Theae· tetus and the essay on the principles of Stoic Grammar is admittedly quite difficult. But the essays in the sections on Hellenistic Philosophy work together to flesh out the interrelations of the often complex and diverse views of that period, as well as to demonstrate the influence of earlier philosophers on these views. In this respect the essays in earlier sections provide a context for later essays. Within each section the essays generally exhibit a high degree of unity. This is especially true of the section on Aristotle. According to Frede, logic provides a unify· ing theme for all the essays in the hook. This is generally, but not al· ways, the case. Instead, it is Frede's consistent approach to the study of ancient philosophy that focuses and unifies the essays. His position is that we can understand a philosophical view only if we see how it fits into a [philosophical] history as a whole (p. xx, Introduction). There are, moreover, other histories that are relevant, or even crucial, to understanding certain views in ancient philosophy. Frede presents a clear formulation of his own approach to the study of ancient philos· ophy in the introduction, on which I comment below. The remainder of the comments in this review are intended to reflect, primarily, the interests of readers of this journal. Thus, most of the detailed remarks BOOK REVIEWS 5~3 to follow concern Frede's introduction and the sections on Plato and Aristotle. The other sections, however, are no less significant, and the arguments contained therein are as persuasive as any in the book. Anyone doing research in ancient philosophy must consider how much emphasis to place on its historical and philosophical elements: the methods, arguments, evidences, and contexts that one employs are a logical outcome of the relation one establishes between philosophy and history. Frede attempts to work out this relation in some detail, a task which is rarely undertaken in print; his introduction contains more than a few insights as a result. Many important distinctions are clarified or introduced, among them are distinctions between ancient philosophy and the history of ancient philosophy, between philosophical and historical explanation, between the history of philosophy and histories important to philosophy, and between a historically important philosophical fact and facts important to the history of philosophy. The conclusion yielded by these distinctions is that it is an extraordinarily complex fact that a philosopher held a certain view-a fact which can be legitimately studied in many ways, but not in just any way one chooses. In Frede's view, the study of ancient philosophy requires historical as well as philosophical approaches. For when... (shrink)

The term “Presocratics” refers to a group of Greek thinkers who lived not later than Socrates and who were not decisively influenced by him. They are often referred to as the first philosophers as they represent the dawn of human speculation in the West. The essay examines the fragments of major Presocratics - Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empidocles and Anaxagoras, which contain their views and arguments as reported by subsequent authors. Although these fragments are incomplete and are based (...) on secondary quotations, it is possible to sift through them and develop coherent and logical interpretations that approximate the original idea and intentions of these philosophers. The aim of this essay is to shed light on the philosophical meaning and significance of the concept of Arche (ἀρχή) – an untranslatable Greek word that connotes origin, principle, first in the series, or source, which constitutes the central thread of speculation among the Presocratics and their most influential contribution to the history of Western thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Historiography of Philosophy by Michael FredeClaude PanaccioMichael Frede. The Historiography of Philosophy. Edited by Katerina Ierodiakonou, with a postface by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 256. Hardback, $80.00.From the 1970s until his tragic death in 2007, Michael Frede was one of the most prominent scholars in ancient Greek philosophy, with landmark contributions to the study of Aristotle and of Hellenistic thought in particular. (...) This volume contains his theoretical reflections on the work of historians of philosophy. The main part of the book reproduces with minor corrections the previously unpublished text of the Nellie Wallace Lectures that Frede gave in 1989–90 in Oxford (1–135). Then come three papers that he published on pretty much the same topic between 1987 and 1992 (137–88). Jonathan Barnes's postface, finally, launches an exciting discussion of Frede's proposals by raising a number of questions and critical remarks about them (189–230).Frede's main claim throughout the book is that there is, and should be, a distinctively historical approach to the history of philosophy that has not yet been sufficiently recognized as such in the academic world. This is not to say that he considers more philosophical approaches to be illegitimate. His point is that we have to be clear about the distinction and what it involves in terms of requirements and methods. What Frede calls the "historical history of philosophy" is thus contrasted by him with two varieties of philosophical approaches. One of them he identifies as the "philosophical history of philosophy." It consists in retrospectively studying the past of philosophy as a kind of maturation toward some more recent doctrinal stage, as Aristotle or Hegel saliently did with their respective predecessors. Frede takes this to be "a perfectly intelligible and legitimate, though perhaps not particularly interesting or fruitful, enterprise" (41). Most of the time, he thinks, it would be led by its own philosophical presuppositions to be too selective and to provide a badly distorted picture of past philosophy.Frede is much more sympathetic to the other philosophical approach to the history of philosophy he acknowledges, the one he calls "doxography." This is the study of past philosophers with the aim of finding something of interest in them for ongoing philosophical discussions—a familiar practice, indeed, in the philosophical discipline as we know it. There is an inevitable amount of anachronism in such endeavors, according to Frede, insofar as the commentators will have to reformulate the old views in contemporary terms to a certain extent and to look at them in connection with the questions that are currently debated in the field. But Frede deems this kind of anachronism acceptable as long as sufficient care is taken to correctly identify the views of the past we are interested in and to report them in the best available way. He strongly insists, however, that there are inherent risks of distortion in this approach. This might not be a problem if we are prepared to deal, as philosophers, with views that were not exactly those of the past; but we then run the risk of leaving out something of great philosophical interest, even to us, since "as a rule the philosopher subjected to doxographical treatment was a much better philosopher than the doxographer" (34). If we turn to the past for philosophical inspiration, we should also do it seriously, and this presupposes a historical study of past authors that is pursued for its own sake. [End Page 317]The latter is what Frede is really interested in, and he wants this historical approach to be "as independent as possible from philosophy and not just an ancilla to philosophy" (60). Its practitioners must have a strong philosophical training, of course, in order to understand the views they study and the arguments that were adduced in support of them, but Frede insists that they nevertheless are historians first and foremost: they strive to provide a correct account of "the actual, historical evolution of these views and positions" (14) and of how new doctrines actually grew out of previous ones given the historical context. Insofar as this is what they are doing, historians of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 305-326 [Access article in PDF] Logos and Kratos: Gramsci and the Ancients on Hegemony Benedetto Fontana * The purpose of this paper is to locate Gramsci's concept of hegemony, and its related ideas of civil society, the national-popular and the people-nation, within the political thought of classical antiquity. 1 In so doing, the paper seeks to identify strands or elements within (...) aspects of ancient political thought which may usefully be seen as conceptual prefigurations or as political anticipations of Gramsci's hegemony. It will show that Gramsci shares with the ancients specific theoretical, linguistic, and intellectual topoi. Hegemony has hitherto been located within the context, both theoretical and historical, of debates and controversies arising out of the Marxist and later Leninist revolutionary tradition. It is rightly seen as a notion developed by Gramsci to explain revolutionary failure in Italy and in the West generally, and consequently its antecedents are traced to the problems attendant upon the collapse of the Second International and the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. 2 While such an approach has been useful in revealing the immediate (both political and tactical) constraints acting upon Gramsci's thinking, it has overlooked passages in his writings which reveal an interest in, and [End Page 305] familiarity with, philosophical and theoretical themes originally formulated and elaborated by classical political thought.I. In a note entitled "Passage from Knowing to Understanding and to Feeling and vice versa from Feeling to Understanding and to Knowing" Gramsci establishes a distinction between intellectuals who "know" and the "people-nation" that "feels." The former may know but do not always understand or feel, while the latter may feel but does not always know. The intellectual, in order to know something politically and socially, not merely abstractly or philosophically, must understand it with feeling and passion. As Gramsci writes: The intellectual's error consists in believing that one can know without understanding and even more without feeling and being impassioned (not only for knowledge in itself but also for the object of knowledge); in other words that the intellectual can be an intellectual (and not a pure pedant) if distinct and separate from the people-nation, that is, without feeling the elementary passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently elaborated--i.e. knowledge. One cannot make politics-history without this passion, without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation. 3The merely abstract knowledge of the intellectual becomes life and politics when linked to the experiential and passionate feelings of the people. At the same time, the feeling-passion of the people acquires the character of knowledge. Of course such a formulation is reminiscent of Marx's comments in the Theses on Feuerbach. 4 The dyadic relation between intellectual and people-nation, and between knowledge and feeling-passion, both parallels and informs the relation between common sense and good sense. Common sense is opinion which is incoherent and ambiguous 5 but which may nevertheless contain elements of truth to the extent that they are proliferated throughout a people. Good sense, on the other hand, is the common sense of the people as their passion and experience are imbued with knowledge and reason--that is, as the people begin to "think" coherently by producing their own intellectuals, the organic intellectual, or the democratic philosopher. 6 [End Page 306]Gramsci recalls the problem originally posed by Plato and Aristotle and running through the entire history of Western political thought up to thinkers as diverse as Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, and Croce: namely, the relation between knowledge and politics, philosophy and rhetoric, ruler and people, reason and desire/appetite. 7 This relation poses the question regarding the role and status of reason. It is the way reason (the logos as transcendent reason or as speech and language) is perceived that moves the theory in either an ossified (absolutist... (shrink)

SummaryDogmatic debates in early Christianity shaped philosophical discourse just as Greek philosophy offered the conceptual tools to engage and, accordingly to crystalize early Christian practice, into a formal system of belief. Thus, in the recently-published The Rise of Christian Theology and the End of Ancient Metaphysics, Johannes Zachhuber notes that “Patristic thought as a whole can be identified as a Christian philosophy.” Following suit – though not without nuance – this paper suggests treating Patristic scriptural exegesis as an exercise (...) of speculative philosophy, as evidenced in Augustine’s interpretation of the figure of the cross at Eph 3.18, where the cross progressively becomes a simple yet compelling paradigm of divine manifestation. This paradigm can be framed according to Augustine’s mature articulation of the ‘ontological principle’ of manifestation in s. 165: “From the depth which you cannot see rises everything that you can see.” By engaging in scriptural exegesis, within a gestalt where Wisdom, sacred and profane alike, merge in the incarnate God manifest in Christ, Augustine articulates unprecedented philosophical principles. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to the StoicsJohn SellarsBrad Inwood, editor. The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 438. Cloth, $70.00. Paper, $26.00.No doubt everyone will be familiar with the format and rationale of the Cambridge Companion series, each volume being designed to function as a "reference work for students and nonspecialists." Brad Inwood's Cambridge Companion to The Stoics follows the usual (...) plan, offering fifteen essays by an impressive line up of well-known Stoic scholars. The essays fall into four distinct groups. The first group (Sedley, Gill) offers a sketch of the history of the Stoa, and both essays are excellent. Of particular interest is Sedley's challenge to the traditional distinction between the orthodox "early" and eclectic "middle" Stoa (esp. 23-24). The second group (Hankinson, Bobzien, White, Algra, Frede, Brunschwig, Schofield, Brennan) forms the heart of the volume, each essay examining a central topic in Stoic philosophy. While all of these contributions are very good, those by Bobzien, Brunschwig, and Schofield stand out in particular. Hankinson offers a helpful discussion of Stoic epistemology but lapses into anachronistic descriptions at times; the Stoic position is "Lockean," the Stoics are good empiricists in the Humean fashion, they have "Leibnizian metaphysics" (63, 69). Brennan gives a very interesting discussion of Stoic moral psychology, but perhaps pitches it a little too high for a nonspecialist audience. The third group (Hankinson again, Blank and Atherton, Jones) explores the ancient Stoic tradition's relationship with medicine, grammar, and the astronomical sciences. Jones' discussion of the neglected Cleomedes is especially welcome (333-37). The final group (Irwin, Long) considers the reception of Stoic ideas in the Western intellectual tradition. Of these I found Long the more accessible and useful of the two (compare, for instance, their respective discussions of Butler, 357-62 and 382-89), although Irwin will no doubt prove stimulating to those already familiar with the issues he addresses.What is lacking from the collection as a whole, however, is any sense of the systematic unity of Stoic philosophy. While it has inevitably been divided up under various headings for the sake of exposition, there has not been much attempt to put it back together again (like Humpty Dumpty, Stoic philosophy is like an egg; Diogenes Laertius 7.40). Although many individual contributors signal the systematicity of Stoicism, there is no extended discussion of the way in which the various parts of Stoic philosophy fit together, nor how that system relates to the way in which the Stoics conceived philosophy, or their ideal of the Sage. [End Page 337]My principal concerns with the volume as a whole relate to the lack of any supporting material that might prove useful to the student or nonspecialist approaching the subject for the first time. There is no list or chronology of the principal Stoics, nor a guide to the ancient sources for Stoicism. There is a list of primary sources, but this contains all of the primary material cited by the contributors, including works by Aquinas, Butler, Duns Scotus, Hume, Leibniz, and Spinoza. There is no readily accessible table of abbreviations, and what nonspecialist will know that in order to find a text cited as 'S. E. M' they may end up opening a book entitled Against the Logicians (as 'M' 7 and 8 are called in the Loeb Classical Library series)? Some abbreviations are explained within the list of primary sources, but this is not immediately obvious. The bibliography is indeed substantial but it also simply lists the various items cited by the contributors. What might have been more useful in this companion is a structured guide to further reading, such as the one in A. S. McGrade's excellent Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy, for instance. Even better would have been a bibliography along the lines of the one in Jonathan Barnes' Cambridge Companion to Aristotle. One other omission that is striking is the absence of a discussion of methodological problems that arise from relying on often hostile doxographical sources. Although a number of the contributors do touch on such issues en route, a more sustained treatment might have... (shrink)

A superb new edition of Epictetus’s famed handbook on Stoicism—translated by one of the world’s leading authorities on Stoic philosophy Born a slave, the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that mental freedom is supreme, since it can liberate one anywhere, even in a prison. In How to Be Free, A. A. Long—one of the world’s leading authorities on Stoicism and a pioneer in its remarkable contemporary revival—provides a superb new edition of Epictetus’s celebrated guide to the Stoic philosophy of life (...) along with a selection of related reflections in his Discourses. Freedom, for Epictetus, is not a human right or a political prerogative but a psychological and ethical achievement, a gift that we alone can bestow on ourselves. We can all be free, but only if we learn to assign paramount value to what we can control, treat what we cannot control with equanimity, and view our circumstances as opportunities to do well and be well, no matter what happens to us through misfortune or the actions of other people. How to Be Free features splendid new translations and the original Greek on facing pages, a compelling introduction that sets Epictetus in context and describes the importance of Stoic freedom today, and an invaluable glossary of key words and concepts. The result is an unmatched introduction to this powerful method of managing emotions and handling life’s situations, from the most ordinary to the most demanding. (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: (...) A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today’s art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of “noise” are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President François Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It’s not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal’s third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal’s project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal’s book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal’s title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal’s writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of “art-noise.” The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an “immersive noise vision theory.” This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author’s personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art’s potential to “place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory.” (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and “scopic all-over tension” as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda’s minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schöffler (whom Nechvatal names the true “the Father of Cybernetic Art”) and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and “all-over fullness and fervor.” Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: “wildly visionary,” Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent “noise consciousness.” Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal’s revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of “information overload” to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)

This paper examines the Stoic account of apprehension (κατάληψις) (a cognitive achievement similar to how we typically view knowledge). Following a seminal article by Michael Frede (1983), it is widely thought that the Stoics maintained a purely externalist causal account of apprehension wherein one may apprehend only if one stands in an appropriate causal relation to the object apprehended. An important but unanswered challenge to this view has been offered by David Sedley (2002) who offers reasons to suppose that the (...) Stoics (or at least Zeno, the founder of the Stoa) did not make such a causal stipulation. I offer a defence of the traditional, causal reading against the challenges raised by Sedley but also argue, against the traditional view, that the Stoic account incorporated an internalist element. On the hybrid account defended here, in order to apprehend not only must the agent stand in an appropriate causal relation to the object apprehended but the agent’s appearance of the object must also be clear (a feature which is accessible to the epistemic agent). The traditional scholarly view rejects internalist interpretations because it is thought that such interpretations cannot make sense of the Stoics’ discussion of the ‘automatic assent’ produced by kataleptic appearances and a purely externalist view is taken to be charitable insofar as it saves the Stoics from a vicious regress which they would otherwise face (were they internalists). I spell out how the regress might be taken to function and defend an internalist interpretation against both these charges. The internalist element embraced by the Stoics does not lead to the problems it is often thought to and the account defended here not only does justice to the textual evidence but also sheds light on the Stoic debates with their sceptical opponents and grants the Stoics an epistemic account fit for purpose. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:388 BOOK REVIEWS Nielsen's essays. The development of such notions need not be a defense of religion. It may weU be that passions elicited and developed in some religious beliefs are not to be encouraged. (This is part of Hume's argument in The Natural History of ReUgion.) The chief shortcoming of Nielsen in this area is his apparent inability to recognize any form of religious interest other than a (...) speculative, intellectual interest in an explanation of the world's existence. Again, in view of his profes!!ed intimate knowledge of Kierkegaard, this is a puzzling shortcoming. In the volume's closing peroration, Nielsen pronounces the demise of the philosophy of religion. Its issues-the truth, justifiability, and coherence of religious beliefs (his list)-have been.settled: negative on one or more counts. What needs to happen next is, he says, an examination of religions as human phenomena and of the needs expressed through them. This he regards as a new agenda. But, if our focus on the issues is broader than Nielsen's, we can recognize that these studies (he mentions Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Durkheim, and Fromm} are a part of the philosophy of religion. From a perspective broadened in this and other dimensions, it appears that the issues in philosophy of religiontruth, justifiability, and coherence-are not settled. Nor are they boring. H endriw Oollege, Oonway, Arkansas JOHN CHURCHILL The Architecture of Religion: A Theoretical Essay. By PAUL WIEBE. San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1984. Pp. 153; index. The Architecture of Religion is a brave book. Not only does the author outline the essential structure (the "architecture") of religion, he also defines the essential task of the modern age, traces the general contours of true religion, and suggests a corresponding design for the study of religion, properly conceived. In fact, he could easily be criticized for trying to do too much, especially in a first book. But, in this reviewer's opinion, he should not be criticized on these grounds. There should be a place in academic life for addressing life's most serious concerns in bold new ways, even if the results are only provisional, and the publisher is to be commended for bringing Paul Wiebe's attempt to construct a theory of religion to a general audience. None of this means, of course, that the theory itself should not be criticized. That is what every theorist expects, and Wiebe is no exception. He begins by telling us that religion is "that basic human reality in BOOK REVIEWS 889 which humans master what they judge to be the one profound ill by confronting this ill with a good just as profound" (p. 29). Presumably, everyone has an interest in profound matters in which goods and ills are conceptualized and drawn into focus, and to this extent everyone is basically religious, no matter what he regards as life's greatest good. This idea has a Tillichian ring, which is not surprising given the author's background. Yet Wiebe criticizes Tillich for using the descriptive concept of ultimate concern in a normative way, judging alien religions as idolatrous faiths and claims that his own central concept of profound interest is purely formal and perfectly neutral, being altogether free of the " hermeneutical imperialism " which mars Tillich's account. In view of the fact that Wiebe uses his theory to discount traditional authorities in religion and to outline the shapes of true religion, this promise of neutrality seems overblown. Maybe the critical edge of his theory comes from other aspects of the theory, not from the concept of a profound interest-but then why couldn't the same be said of Tillich7 In any cruse, Wiebe follows Tillich in supposing that all people are religious. "No human life,'' he says, "is ever without religion" (p. 28). But common sense deserves a word here. Surely there is a difference between people whose interests are scattered and ever changing and people whose lives are ruled by dominant religious concerns. And surely there is a difference between one who believes that life's ills have a (religious) remedy and one who believes that there are no remedies at all. Such differences... (shrink)

This essay considers how ancient Stoic cosmopolitanism – roughly, the claim all human beings are members of the same “cosmopolis”, or universal city, and so are entitled to moral concern in virtue of possessing reason – informs Stoic thinking about how we ought to treat non-human entities in the environment. First, I will present the Stoic justification for the thesis that there are only rational members of the cosmopolis – and so that moral concern does not extend to any (...) non-human part of the natural world – and explore the foundations of these views in Stoic physics. Next, I will show that, like other anthropocentric theories, Stoic cosmopolitanism allows for environmental preservation and protection of non-human entities, so long as these activities ultimately benefit human beings. However, because the Stoics include the appreciation of natural beauty as a component of the happy life, this justification is not as feeble as it might seem. Humans are naturally set up to contemplate the order and complexity of the universe, and so environmental degradation and species loss, in marring this harmonious system, frustrates the achievement of the human goal. After exploring these facets of Stoic philosophy, and assessing to what extent they might justify environmental conservation, I close with a critical appraisal of Stoic theory – specifically, of the claims that (i) only humans possess reason and (ii) only rational creatures are deserving of moral concern. (shrink)

In this extended essay, I argue that Frege plagiarized the Stoics --and I mean exactly that-- on a large scale in his work on the philosophy of logic and language as written mainly between 1890 and his death in 1925 (much of which published posthumously) and possibly earlier. I use ‘plagiarize' (or 'plagiarise’) merely as a descriptive term. The essay is not concerned with finger pointing or casting moral judgement. The point is rather to demonstrate carefully by means of detailed (...) evidence that there are numerous (over a hundred) and extensive parallels both in formulation and --more importantly-- in content between the Stoics and Frege, parallels so plentiful that one would be hard pressed to brush them off as coincidence. These parallels include several that appear to occur in no other modern works that were published before Frege’s own and were accessible to him. Additionally, a cluster of corroborating historical data is adduced to support the suggestion, showing how easy it would have to been for Frege to plagiarize the Stoics. This (first) part of the essay is easy to read and vaguely entertaining, or so I hope. -/- (Corrigendum: At school, Frege likely had seven, not ten, years of intensive Latin and four years of intensive ancient Greek courses.). (shrink)

We explore whether a Rawlsian approach might provide a guiding philosophy for the development of a healthcare system, in particular with regard to resolving tensions between different groups within it. We argue that an approach developed from some of Rawls’ principles – using his ‘veil of ignorance’ and both the ‘difference’ and ‘just savings’ principles which it generates – provides a compelling basis for policy making around certain areas of conflict. We ask what policies might be made if those making (...) them did not know if one was patient, doctor, nurse or manager – in this generation or the next. We first offer a brief summary of Rawls’ approach and how we intend to extrapolate from it. We examine how this adapted Rawlsian framework could be applied to specific examples of conflict within healthcare; we demonstrate how this framework can be used to develop a healthcare service which is both sustainable (in its training and treatment of staff, and in encouraging research and innovation) and open (to protect the powers and opportunities of those using the health service). We conclude that while Rawls’ approach has previously been rejected as a means to address specific healthcare decisions, an adapted veil of ignorance can be a useful tool for the consideration of how a just health service should be constructed and sustained. Turning the theoretical into the practical (and combining Rawls’ thought experiment with Scanlonian contractarianism), managers, doctors, patients, carers and nurses could come together and debate conflicting issues behind a hypothetical veil. (shrink)

The twentieth-century logical mainstream, derived from works by Łukasiewicz and Scholz, pictures the history of logic for the most part as the prehistory of Boolean–Fregean mathematical logic. Particularly, with respect to classical propositional calculus, the Stoic logic has been pictured as an early stage of it and Aristotle's or the Peripatetics' logic as a theory that assumes it. Although it was not emphasised, it follows that the ancient logics contain the principle of explosion. In the endmost quarter of the (...) twentieth century, a competitive view began to spread to the effect that the ancient systems of logic were paraconsistent or relevantistic. In the twenty-first century, the latter view prevails and has every chance of becoming a new orthodoxy. It is claimed that although in Łukasiewicz's argument for the classicality of ancient logics, there are gaps, it may be demonstrated that the ancient logics contain the principle of explosion. (shrink)

What I propose to do in this short paper is to outline two different approaches to needs in Greek philosophy. The first is the reasonably familiar approach used by Aristotle, and, in some moods, by Plato; the second is a rather less well-known approach which can with some justice be associated with Socrates, and/or Plato when he is not in an Aristotelian mood (if I may so put it)—and also the Stoics, who seem to have picked up some distinctly Socratic (...) ways of thinking. The Aristotelian line, if not necessarily familiar as Aristotle’s, will be familiar just insofar as it gives some degree of that recognition to needs that most moderns would suppose the idea should be given. What I am calling the Socratic line, by contrast, appears to leave no room for the idea of needs at all (or at least, that will be my way of putting it for now; I shall need a rather different formulation later on). It is this second, ‘Socratic’, approach that primarily interests me, not least because it is non-standard. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Chrysippus is a reconstruction of the philosophy of an eminent Stoic philosopher, based upon the fragmentary remains of his voluminous writings. Chrysippus of Cilicia, who lived in a period that covers roughly the last three-quarters of the third century B.C., studied philosophy in Athens and upon Cleanthes’ death became the third head of the Stoa, one of the four great schools of philosophy of the Hellenistic period. Chrysippus wrote a number of treatises in each of the major (...) departments of philosophy, logic, physics, and ethics. Much of his fame derived from his acuteness as a logician, but his importance for Stoic philosophy generally was acknowledged in antiquity in the saying, “Had there been no Chrysippus, there would be no Stoa.” Previous accounts of Chrysippus’ philosophy, including Émile Bréhier’s study, the only work in this century which had sought to deal with Chrysippus’ philosophy alone, blurred the distinctive contributions of Chrysippus to Stoic philosophy and failed to bring to light the peculiar features in his thought. The vagueness in these accounts resulted in large measure from the assumption that if an ancient author ascribed a doctrine to “the Stoics” or “Stoicism”, one could infer that the doctrine belonged to Chrysippus. Professor Gould works from the more circumspect methodological principle that unless an ancient author explicitly ascribes a doctrine to Chrysippus, his testimony cannot be used in reconstructing Chrysippus’ philosophy. Working with those of the fragments in Hans von Arnim’s collection, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, which are explicitly Chrysippean in the sense suggested, Mr. Gould has worked out an account of Chrysippus’ views in the fields of logic, natural philosophy, and ethics. In order that Chrysippus’ thought might be viewed in context Mr. Gould provides a background picture by describing the third century milieu in which the Stoic philosopher worked. This follows an account of Chrysippus’ life and reputation in antiquity and a description of modern assessments of Chrysippus’ position in the Stoa. In his account of Chrysippus’ philosophy Mr. Gould frequently introduces comparisons and contrasts with Plato and Aristotle to help emphasize the continuity between Hellenic and early Hellenistic philosophy. Finally, in a concluding chapter, the author shows that the dominant themes in Chrysippus’ philosophy, while not exhibiting a thoroughly well-knit system, nevertheless are woven together into a remarkably comprehensive whole, which must have been extraordinarily impressive in antiquity. (shrink)

The concept of kosmos did not play the leading role in Aristotle’s physics that it did in Pythagorean, Atomistic, Platonic, or Stoic physics. Although Aristotle greatly influenced the history of cosmology, he does not himself recognize a science of cosmology, a science taking the kosmos itself as the object of study with its own phenomena to be explained and its own principles that explain them. The term kosmos played an important role in two aspects of his predecessor’s accounts that Aristotle (...) rejected: first, cosmogeny and kosmopoiia, generation or creation of the kosmos; second, diakosmêsis, arranging of a plurality of kosmoi. Aristotle was extremely critical of accounts involving kosmopoiia and diakosmêsis and he developed general dialectical strategies against them. In emphatically distinguishing his view from all his predecessors (including Plato), he uses the terms ho ouranos (the heaven), to holon (the whole), and to pan (the totality) in preference to ho kosmos (the kosmos or world). There is usually no harm in speaking loosely of ‘Aristotle’s cosmology’ when referring to his concept of the order of nature and the ouranos. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy offers something very different from those of his predecessors for whom kosmos was a keyword. (shrink)