Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy: Rhetoric

-/- In Plato's work the "Sophist", Socrates, who typically occupies a central position in Plato's dialogues, is assigned a supporting role. This has led some scholars to argue for a shift in Plato's oeuvre, where he distances himself from Socrates and introduces a new main protagonist. However, this new protagonist remains unnamed and is only identified by his social position as Xenos, indicating that he is an outsider and a stranger whose identity is ambiguous. In this article, I argue that (...) Plato's decision to leave the character unnamed serves to raise a first problem: the question of whether this stranger is a friend or an adversary of philosophy. At the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates employs a series of references to Homer to bring into play a second problem: the problem of disguise. The third problem, “What is a sophist?”, is attributed to the Xenos. This is the only problem that is explicitly developed and is, therefore, the most prominent in the dialogue. If we relate these three problems to each other, it becomes clear that they represent contradictory intuitions without providing us with a strict criterion for deciding which of these intuitions is correct. By presenting these problems in their entanglement without providing a way out, Plato invites his readers to think without making explicit what the outcome of this thinking should be. -/- [In Dutch: In de "Sofist" speelt Sokrates, vaak het meest prominente personage in Plato’s dialogen, alleen maar een bijrol. Dit heeft veel interpreten ertoe verleid om een breuk in het oeuvre van Plato te postuleren, waarbij Plato afstand zou nemen van Sokrates ten behoeve van een nieuw personage. Ik zal echter laten zien dat Plato er bewust voor kiest om dit nieuwe personage naamloos te laten en hem alleen aan te duiden via zijn sociale positie als xenos (vreemdeling). Hiermee roept Plato, zo zal ik betogen, impliciet een eerste probleem op: is deze naamlo- ze Xenos een vriend of een vijand van de filosofie? Aan het begin van de dialoog wordt er door Sokrates een tweede probleem in spel gebracht: het probleem van de vermomming. Het derde probleem — ‘wat is een sofist?’ — wordt toegeschreven aan de Xenos. Dit is het enige probleem dat expliciet wordt uitgewerkt en is dan ook het meest prominent aanwezig in de dialoog. Als we deze drie problemen op elkaar betrekken dan wordt duidelijk dat ze tegenstrijdige intuïties vertolken, zonder dat we een strikt criterium krijgen aangereikt om te beslissen welke van deze intuïties de juiste is. Door deze problemen in een nog niet ontwarde kluwen te presenteren, nodigt Plato zijn lezers uit tot denken, zonder expliciet te maken wat de uitkomst van dit denken zou moeten zijn.]. (shrink)

Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in (...) a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending. (shrink)

La doctrina sugerida por el filósofo de Samos, al menos en lo que respecta al placer como fin de la vida dichosa, informa de ciertos rasgos teóricos los cuales convergen en una finalidad: la defensa de la vida feliz que, en sentido omnímodo, recoge variados aspectos de la existencia (material y anímica), siendo preeminente el propósito de un filosofar que busca de la salud del cuerpo y la imperturbabilidad del alma. Para ello, un conocimiento de la realidad de lo provechoso (...) y perjudicial, un bien que se limita a la experiencia del no sufrir en el cuerpo ni en el alma, tiene en la autosuficiencia del ser humano su criterio de adquisición; autosuficiencia que se logra en el reproche a la viciada participación en ciertas actividades de la πόλις y de sus instituciones, el desarraigo de aquellas riquezas y honores excesivos, además de las falsas creencias en los dioses. Todo esto integra lo que puede llamarse los tópicos éticos esenciales de una filosofía epicúrea. (shrink)

Democritus of Abdera, best known as a cosmologist and the founder of atomism, wrote more on ethics than anyone before Plato. His work Peri euthumiês (On Contentment) was extremely influential on the later development of teleological and intellectualist ethics, eudaimonism, hedonism, therapeutic ethics, and positive psychology. The loss of his works, however, and the transmission of his fragments in collections of maxims (gnomai), has obscured the extent his contribution to the history of systematic ethics and influence on later philosophy, especially (...) in the Hellenistic age. In this essay I review the evidence basis for Democritus’ ethics, discuss the rhetorical and logical aspects of his maxims, attempt to synthesize the fragments into an overall interpretation, and offer a summary some of the more influential aspects of his ethics. (shrink)

Augustine, in the Confessions, calls God the True Love who lifts him up when he is too low to see. Augustine pants in the Soliloquies that God is the Wisdom whom he wishes to hold naked under the bed sheets. Augustine's understanding of love is tied to his understanding of God who loves him, whom he loves, and in whom he loves others. Thus, students of Augustine can learn about love by looking at Augustine's language about God. Who is this (...) God whom Augsutine loves and who loves Augustine? This paper discusses how best to translate Augustine's gendered descriptions of God. Written in 2005, this paper was one of the first to argue for literal translation of Augustine's gendered pronouns for God in order to best understand his philosophy of love and theology. (shrink)

Students of Stoic philosophy, especially of Stoic ethics, have a lot to swallow. Virtues and emotions are bodies; virtue is the only good, and constitutes happiness, while vice is the only evil; emotions are judgements ; all sins are equal; and everyone bar the sage is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Non-Stoics in antiquity seem for the most part to find these doctrines as bizarre as we do. Their own philosophical or ideological perspectives, and the criticisms of the Stoa (...) to which these gave rise, are no less open to criticism than are the paradoxes and puzzles under attack – but they may be, often are, better documented, less provocatively attention-begging, or simply more familiar. Even disputes within the Stoa can be obscured or distorted by modern prejudices. Posidonius rejected Chrysippus' theory of a unitary soul, one rational through and through, on the grounds that such a theory could not satisfactorily account for the genesis of bad – excessive and irrational – emotions, the πάθη. Posidonius' own Platonising, tripartite soul feels more familiar to us because the Republic tends to be a set text rather more often than do the fragments of Chrysippus' de anima; and the balance in Plato's favour is unlikely to change. When Posidonius wrote, on the other hand, the Chrysippean soul was school orthodoxy, and Platonism the latest thing in radical chic. (shrink)