A. A. Long

The Cambridge companion to early Greek philosophy

1. The scope of early Greek philosophy A. A. Long 2. Sources Jaap Mansfeld 3. The beginnings of cosmology Keimpe Algra 4. The Pythagorean tradition Carl A. Huffman 5. Heraclitus Edward Hussey 6. Parmenides and Melissus David Sedley 7. Zeno Richard D. McKirahan Jr 8. Empedocles and Anaxagoras: responses to Parmenides Daniel W. Graham 9. The atomists C. C. W. Taylor 10. Rational theology Sarah Broadie 11. Early interest in knowledge J. H. Lesher 12. Soul, sensation, and thought Andre Laks 13. Culpability, responsibility, cause: philosophy, historiography and medicine in the fifth century Mario Vegetti 14. Rhetoric and relativism: Protagoras and Gorgias Paul Woodruff 15. Protagoras and Antiphon: Sophistic debates on justice Fernanda DeCleva Caizzi 16. The poetics of early Greek philosophy Glenn W. Most.

Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy

In what sense did the Hellenistic philosophers see themselves as the heirs or critics of Socrates? Was Socrates, in their view, a philosopher on whom Plato was the decisive authority? What doctrines or strategies of Socrates were thoroughly alive in this period? These are the principal questions I shall be asking in this paper, particularly the third. To introduce them, and to set the scene, I begin with some general points, starting from two passages which present an image of Socrates at the beginning and at the end of the Hellenistic era. Here first are three lines from the Silloi of the Pyrrhonean Timon of Phlius: From these matters (i.e. the inquiry into nature) he turned aside, the people-chiselling moralising ‘chatterer, the wizard of Greece, whose assertions were sharply pointed, master of the well-turned sneer, a pretty good ironist.

Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World

This volume captures the individuality, the national and personal identity, the cultural exchange, and the self-consciousness that have long been sensed as peculiarly potent in the Hellenistic world. The fields of history, literature, art, philosophy, and religion are each presented using the format of two essays followed by a response. Conveying the direction and focus of Hellenistic learning, eighteen leading scholars discuss issues of liberty versus domination, appropriation versus accommodation, the increasing diversity of citizen roles and the dress and gesture appropriate to them, and the accompanying religious and philosophical ferment. The result is an arresting view of the incredible and unprecedented diversity of the Hellenistic world.

The scope of early Greek philosophy

Unlike other books in this series, the present volume is not a “companion” to a single philosopher but to the set of thinkers who collectively formed the beginnings of the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece. Most of them wrote little, and the survival of what they wrote or thought is fragmentary, often mediated not by their own words but only by the testimony of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other much later authors. These remains are exceptionally precious not only because of their intrinsic quality but also for what they reveal concerning the earliest history of western philosophy and science. The fascination of the material, notwithstanding or even because of its density and lacunar transmission, grips everyone who encounters it. Two of our centurys most influential philosophers, Heidegger and Popper, have “gone back” to the earliest Greek philosophers in buttressing their own radically different methodologies and preoccupations. Many of these thinkers are so challenging that the small quantity of their surviving work is no impediment to treating each of them at book length. Even so, there are reasons beyond our fragmentary sources and conventional practice for presenting these and other early Greek philosophers in a collective volume.

The beginnings of cosmology

INTRODUCTION: MYTH AND COSMOLOGY Greek philosophical cosmology did not originate completely out of the blue. The first philosophical cosmologists - usually referred to as Ionian or Milesian cosmologists because they worked in Miletus, in Ionia - could react against, or sometimes build upon, popular conceptions that had existed in the Greek world for a long time. Some of these popular conceptions can be gleaned from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod (eighth century B.C.). In Homer the cosmos is conceived as a flat earth, surrounded by the Ocean (Okeanos), and overlooked by a hemispherical sky, with sun, moon, and stars. In the eighth century the annual course of the sun and the rising and setting of some constellations were integrated into a primitive seasonal calendar. Lunations were used for small-scale calendrical purposes (“the twenty-seventh of the month is best for opening a wine-jar” Hesiod Works and Days 814) and at some point - although there are no traces of this in Homer of Hesiod - some form of lunisolar calendar was established.

Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonist and satirist

The twentieth century has been so begrudging to Timon of Phlius that he could be forgiven for identifying himself with his misanthropic namesake. About a hundred and fifty of his ‘glanzenden Sillen’ (the phrase is Wilamowitzs) survive, but in Albin Leskys Geschichte der griechischen Literatur Timon gets only a third of the space devoted to Anaximander from whom we possess one possible sentence. Serious work on Timon largely came to a stop with Hermann Diels who edited the fragments and testimonia in Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta (Berlin, 1901), a book which is as difficult to come by as the older and much fuller study of Timon by C. Wachsmuth in Sillographorum Graecorum reliquiae (Leipzig, 1885). In spite of his skilful parody of Homer and his Aristophanic versatility in language (some sixty neologisms, many of them comic formations, occur in the fragments), Timon has been ignored by those who give such generous attention to Hellenistic poetry. Many fragments raise at least one major textual difficulty. A new edition and literary study of the material is badly needed.

The concept of the cosmopolitan in Greek & Roman thought

Nouns and Poetic Technique” (1968), “Stoic Studies” (1996), and “Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life” (2002). He has edited “Problems in Stoicism” (1996), “The Question of ‘Eclecticism’: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy” (with J. M. Dillon, 1988), and “The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy” (1999). He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Brit-

Socrates in Later Greek Philosophy

introduction Socrates is a philosopher whose world historical importance and renown are largely due to three remarkable facts. First, his life and especially his trial and death, though cardinal to his posthumous influence and standing, were relatively minor events for the majority of his contemporary Athenians and their immediate descendants. During the first years after his death, he was still the controversial figure he had been throughout his later life. He had written nothing, and it was just a few of his companions, Plato, Antisthenes, Xenophon, and the other Socratic authors, whose writings in his defense and teachings began, though only gradually, to turn this eccentric and disturbing Athenian into an intellectual and moral icon. He had hardly achieved that status even fifty years after his execution; for he is mentioned in only one context by Isocrates ( Busiris 4.3; 5.9), but once by the orator Aeschines ( Against Timarchus 173), and never by Demosthenes. Socrates, then – and this is the second salient fact – owes his philosophical significance to the diverse ways he was interpreted, lauded, and sometimes even criticized by authors who, thanks to their own intellectual and educational creativity, made Greek philosophy the major cultural presence it had not yet become during his own lifetime. With the founding of official schools of philosophy – the Academy, the Lyceum, the Garden of Epicurus, the Zenonian Stoa – and with less formally organized philosophical movements, especially the Cynics, contexts emerged for Socrates to return to live a life far more wide-reaching and various than anything he could have imagined for himself. Because each school or movement had its own quite distinct identity, their interpretations of Socrates followed suit.

What is the Matter with Matter, According to Plotinus?

Modern science is not linguistically original in hypothesizing the existence of dark matter. For Plotinus, the matter that underlies all perceptible objects, is essentially obscure and describable only in the negative terms of what it lacks by way of inherent properties. In formulating this theory of absolute matter, Plotinus took himself to be interpreting both Plato and Aristotle, with the result that his own position emerges as a highly original and equivocal synthesis of this tradition. Plotinus did not claim that matter is nothing, but the puzzling status he attributes to it can be aptly compared to Berkeleys doctrine that material substance is a self-contradictory notion.

Friendship and Friends in the Stoic Theory of the Good Life

This chapter is about how the Stoic philosophers of Greco-Roman antiquity investigated the notion of friendship and about what they understood by a truly good friend. To introduce the inquiry, I ask readers to set aside the modern use of stoicism as a name for uncomplaining endurance of life’s sorrows and disappointments. We moderns do not associate stoicism with friendship, but that is because stoicism, in its modern usage, has largely lost touch with the original ideas of the philosophical school called Stoicism. Friendship actually was a central component of the ancient school’s ethical theory, which, in turn, was the most influential component of a once mighty philosophical system. The ancient Stoics were the major intellectual force in the Greco-Roman world from about 300 BC to AD 200. The numerous books that they wrote have largely perished, but we are well informed about their doctrinal content, especially in the field of ethics.