Charles Brittain

Speaking with the same voice as reason

 readers of Greek ethics tend to favour those accounts of the virtuous ideal according to which virtue involves the development of our non-rational—appetitive and emotional— motivations aswell as of our rationalmotivations. So our contemporaries find much of interest and sympathy in Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a condition inwhich reasondoes not simply override our appetites and emotions, but these non-rational motivations themselves ‘speak with the same voice as reason’.2 By contrast, the Stoic readers of Greek ethics tend to favour those accounts of the virtuous ideal according to which virtue involves the development of our non-rational—appetitive and emotional— motivations aswell as of our rationalmotivations. So our contemporaries find much of interest and sympathy in Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a condition inwhich reasondoes not simply override our appetites and emotions, but these non-rational motivations themselves ‘speak with the same voice as reason’.2 By contrast, the Stoic

Rationality, rules and rights

Topics in Stoic Philosophy is a stimulating collection of eight new papers on early Stoicism by well-known scholars, with an introduction charting the curious history of Stoic studies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The collection comes at a good moment for recent Stoic scholarship in English — the moment before any general interpretation of Stoic logic, physics or ethics (or their interrelation) has achieved an enervating ascendancy. As its modest title suggests, the work does not attempt to offer a complete review of Stoic themes; nor is every modem view of the selected issues represented; but the topics treated in it are important, and the papers on them refreshingly controversial. The collection is divided into four parts: the introduction, two papers on logic, five on ethics, and one on physics. For reasons of economy, my discussion is restricted to the five central chapters on ethics.