Myles Burnyeat

Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed

Refutation de lassertion de Berkeley posant les philosophes grecs antiques comme les precurseurs de son idealisme: en fait ni Platon, ni Aristote, ni les Neo-Platoniciens, ni les Sceptiques ne remettent en cause la realite du monde exterieur. Le premier a le faire est Descartes| cette nouveaute est liee chez lui a celle dautres positions: lacces a la verite dans le seul domaine de lexperience subjective| la prise en consideration de la connaissance par le sujet de ses etats subjectifs| la pensee du corps comme appartenant au monde exterieur| lanalyse des limites de la tradition sceptique.

Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology

A recent revival of interest has taken place in the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics, their theories and problems, and the lively debates that went on between them in ancient Greece. This study provides a philosophical introduction to the epistemological and metaphysical debates in which these Hellenistic thinkers marked out for philosophy some of its central concerns. In the first chapter David Sedley introduces the major thinkers of the period in a brief sketch of Hellenistic philosophy. The papers which follow were originally delivered and discussed at an international conference held in 1978 at Oriel College, Oxford, which was the first of a series of Symposia Hellenistica.

Plato on the Grammar of Perceiving

The question contrasts two ways of expressing the role of the sense organ in perception. In one the expression referring to the sense organ is put into the dative case (let us call this the ‘with’ idiom); the other is a construction with the preposition δia (‘through’) governing the genitive case of the word for the sense organ (let us call this the ‘through’ idiom).

The Philosophical Sense of Theaetetus' Mathematics

T HERE IS A WELL-KNOWN PASSAGE in Platos Theaetetus (147d-148b) where the young Theaetetus recounts a story which has figured in histories of mathematics ever since. The story concerns a geometry lesson in which Theodorus of Cyrene gave separate case-by-case proofs that the side of a square with area 3 square feet, 5 square feet, and so on up to 17 square feet, is incommensurable with the side of a 1-foot (unit) square; whereupon Theodorus pupils Theaetetus and a companion of his called Socrates the Younger formulated a general definition of the important mathematical notion of linear incommensurability. The question is, what kind of evidence, if any, does the story provide for actual historical developments in Greek mathematics? It has been traditional among historians of mathematics to suppose that Platos scene celebrates Theaetetus part in a historical reality, a decisive advance in the theory of irrationals made, no doubt, in Theaetetus adulthood but projected back into his student days in order to fit the dramatic circumstances of the dialogue. Dramatically, the dialogue is set in 399 B.C.: Socrates is in the last year of his life, with the prospect of his trial and condemnation already looming (142c, 210d); Theaetetus is depicted as a mere youth of sixteen or even less (142c, 143e, 168d, et al.), unbearded (168e), and with some growing still to do (155b), while Theodorus is a distinguished old man (143de, 146b) of around sixty or seventy years. If, then, as historians suppose, Theaetetus took the theory of irrationals forward from the stage to which Theodorus had brought it, on grounds of their respective ages neither Theodorus contribution nor Theaetetus is likely to have been made very near the time of the lesson. The story is a fiction, devised by Plato for his own purposes in the dialogue.

The Material and Sources of Plato's Dream

In attempting to show that this claim is ill-founded I shall for the most part be concerned with matters peripheral to the interpretation of the Dream itself, but the discussion may be useful as a prolegomenon to an interpretation which locates the Dream section firmly within Platos own philosophic concerns instead of seeking to account for it wholly or partly in terms of alien sources.

Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed *

It is a standing temptation for philosophers to find anticipations of their own views in the great thinkers of the past, but few have been so bold in the search for precursors, and so utterly mistaken, as Berkeley when he claimed Plato and Aristotle as allies to his immaterialist idealism. In Siris: A Chain of Philosophical Reflexions and Inquiries Concerning the Virtues of Tar-Water , which Berkeley published in his old age in 1744, he reviews the leading philosophies of antiquity and finds them on the whole a good deal more sympathetic to his own ideas than the ‘modern atheism’, as he calls it, of Hobbes and Spinoza (§354) or the objectionable principles of ‘the mechanic and geometrical philosophers’ such as Newton (§§250, 271). But his strongest and, I think, his most interesting claim is that neither Plato nor Aristotle admitted ‘an absolute actual existence of sensible or corporeal things’ (§311).

Examples in Epistemology: Socrates, Theaetetus and G. E. Moore

Theaetetus, asked what knowledge is, replies that geometry and the other mathematical disciplines are knowledge, and so are crafts like cobbling. Socrates points out that it does not help him to be told how many kinds of knowledge there are when his problem is to know what knowledge itself is, what it means to call geometry or a craft knowledge in the first place—he insists on the generality of his question in the way he often does when his interlocutor, asked for a definition, cites instead cases of the concept to be defined (Plato, Theaetetus 146ce).

Explorations in ancient and modern philosophy

M. F. Burnyeat taught for fourteen years in the Philosophy Department of University College London, and then for eighteen years in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge, twelve of them as the Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy, before migrating to Oxford in 1996 to become a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at All Souls College. The studies, articles and reviews collected in these two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy were all written, and all but two published, before that decisive change. Whether designed for a scholarly audience or for a wider public, they range from the Presocratics to Augustine, from Descartes and Bishop Berkeley to Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore. Their subjectmatter falls under four main headings: ‘Logic and Dialectic’ and ‘Scepticism Ancient and Modern’, which make up the first volume with ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Philosophy and the Good Life’ contained in this, the second volume. The title ‘Explorations’ well expresses Burnyeat’s ability to discover new aspects of familiar texts, new ways of solving old problems. In his hands the history of philosophy becomes itself a philosophical activity.

Virtues in Action

It is a familiar feature of the tradition of moral philosophy which began with Socrates that its primary concern is with virtues and vices, with what it is to be a good man and why one should aspire to perfection of the soul. By contrast, the focus of much modern ethics is on actions rather than on character, the primary concern being with principles of right conduct.

THE UPSIDE-DOWN BACK-TO-FRONT SCEPTIC OF LUCRETIUS IV 472

Here are four lines of argument, culminating in an image which has long been a puzzle to editors. The image is integral to the argument: if you do not understand the image, you will not take the full meaning of the argument. I propose to show that the image has a definite, precise sense which gives a clear and forceful contour to the argument. The line is in fact a nice illustration of (one aspect of) the way Lucretius set about making poetry out of Epicurus philosophy.