Introduction (1–24)

(1) The general character of the skeptical ability has been indicated with the appropriate treatment, sketched out in part directly and in part by means of a division of the philosophies close to it. What is left is to explain, next, how it is applied to the particulars, with a view to avoiding a reckless haste either when inquiring about things on our own or when rebutting the dogmatists. (2) But since philosophy is a many-faceted sort of thing, it will be necessary, for the sake of an orderly and systematic search, to draw a few distinctions concerning its parts.

The parts of philosophy (2–23)

For, to begin with, some people seem to have supposed that it has one part, some two parts, and some three parts; and of those who have posited one part some have posited the physical part, some the ethical part, and some the logical part, (3) and similarly of those who divide it into two some have divided it into the physical and the logical parts, some into the physical and the ethical, and some into the logical and the ethical; (4) whereas those who divide it into three have agreed in dividing it into the physical, the logical, and the ethical parts.

(5) The ones who maintained that it has just the physical part are Thales, Anaximenes and Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, and Heraclitus – Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander according to everyone and without dispute, but Empedocles and Parmenides and also Heraclitus not according to everyone.

Sextus' life and works

The two books Against the Logicians are part of a larger work by Sextus Empiricus, the best known ancient Greek skeptic and the only one from whom we possess complete texts, as opposed to fragments or second-hand summaries. About Sextus Empiricus himself we know virtually nothing. He identifies himself as a member of the Pyrrhonist skeptical tradition, on which more in the next section. He occasionally refers to himself in the first person as a medical practitioner (PH 2.238, M 1.260, cf. M 11.47). His title would suggest that he was a member of the Empiricist school of medicine. This is confirmed by Diogenes Laertius (9.116), who refers to him as “Sextus the Empiricist”; it would anyway not be surprising, given that we know the names of several other Pyrrhonists who were also Empiricists. Sextus at one point addresses the question whether medical Empiricism is the same as Pyrrhonist skepticism (PH 1.236–241), and unexpectedly replies that another school, the Methodist school, has closer affinities with skepticism. However, it is possible to read this passage as expressing suspicion towards a certain specific form of Empiricism, rather than towards the school as a whole.

Such indications as there are concerning where Sextus was born, or where he worked in his maturity, are too slender to bear any significant weight. The evidence suggests that he lived in the second century ce, but it is not clear that we can fix his dates with any more precision than that.

The true (1–140)

(1) In the treatise that we have now finished, we have gone over the impasses that are usually recounted by the skeptics with a view to doing away with the criterion of truth. Having also given the account that they trace from the original physicists up to more recent figures, we promised, on top of all this, to speak separately about the true itself. Hence, in fulfilling that promise now, let us first look into whether there is anything true.

Whether there is anything true

(2) It is apparent to everyone right away that, if there is no obvious criterion, the true is also necessarily made unclear at the same time. But still, it will be possible for good measure to explain that even if we say nothing directly against the criterion, the disagreement about the true itself is sufficient to bring us into suspension of judgment. (3) And in the same way as, if there is nothing straight or crooked in the nature of things, neither is there a standard capable of testing them; and if there is no heavy or light body, the setting up of scales is also done away with; so if there is nothing true, the criterion of truth is also gone. And that there is nothing true or false – if we go by the dogmatists' words – we can learn once we have laid out the disagreement on this subject that has developed among them.

In the previous chapter we focused on the metaphysics of the Philebus and its fourfold classification. In this one, I propose to show how those results can be brought to bear on the ethical discussion, which occupies the bulk of the dialogue, about what seem to be two competing lives: the life of intellect and the life of pleasure. In this regard, the roles of both pleasure and knowledge in a happy life deserve further scrutiny, and each will be treated in a separate section. First, if pleasure is one of the main subjects of the Philebus, should we think that it is only by way of compromise that Socrates ends up including it as a component of the happy life? This is a particularly pressing question, given that contemporary interpretations have tended to downplay the role of pleasure in the dialogue (so that Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, is at heart on the side of the intellectualist in the discussion) or even contended that god embodies the ideal of the pleasureless life. In opposition to these readings, I shall argue that in the Philebus Plato does mean to allot pleasure an indispensable role even in the best form of life. Accordingly, if god functions as a model for humans, it is not as an entity who experiences no pleasure but as the ideal of the happiest life understood as one that combines pleasure with knowledge.

The Philebus is known as a dialogue on pleasure. Its central issue is “the good”, or happiness, for humans, and where it is to be found. Is it in pleasure, knowledge, or a mixture of both? At the outset of the dialogue, Philebus and Protarchus are presented as two supporters of hedonism, advocating the first view. Socrates appears, at least initially, defending the second one, even though they agree that if a life is found that is superior to both, that candidate wins (11d–12a). The question will then concern the status of a mixed life of pleasure and knowledge with respect to happiness, and what the role of those components is within it.

Now, if this is so, and if the purpose of the dialogue is fundamentally ethical, it might seem prima facie surprising that so much of it is spent on taxonomy, or dialectical classifications of kinds of pleasure and knowledge. In particular, it might seem disturbing that the interlocutors should devote a whole section (14–31) to dealing with a pair of notions that stand out as especially obscure in Plato's writing. These are those of limit (to peras) and the unlimited or indefinite (to apeiron), whose interpretation has raised unending controversy. As we shall see, they are introduced not as mere technicalities, but with the hope of shedding light on difficult logical (or dialectical) and metaphysical issues. But why should dialectic and metaphysics matter to a hedonist?

In this book I have argued that Plato's cosmology is an indispensable framework for understanding his concerns about the happy life in the late dialogues. While the Timaeus and the Philebus emphasise the role of the universe as a model for human behaviour, the Politicus and the Laws, without dismissing the latter dimension, seem to open a new one: the universe as the stage of human actions, whose description can be tinged by anthropological concerns. This can reach the point of depicting on a cosmic scale an ethical drama that seems inherently human, as in the Politicus, or portraying the cosmos as the battlefield of human good and evil in the Laws, with a consequent warning, we might infer, about the cosmic dimension of human behaviour, since whatever we do is reflected in the cosmos and contributes to its being good or not.

The late dialogues, in addition, present the universe as a “common origin” for all souls (Laws X 903d2–3; cf. Tim. 41d, Phil. 30a), which therefore have a kinship not only among themselves but with their source. Hand in hand with this, we see Plato's tendency to extend more widely the possibility of an autonomous kind of happiness, a tendency that seems to rescue him, as it were, from the limitations of his elitist approach in the Republic.

WHY COSMOLOGY AND ETHICS?

This book is a study of Plato's late cosmology and its relation to Plato's ethics. The combination might strike one as odd. Indeed, it might seem far from obvious, first, that Plato has any coherent cosmological story to tell; second, that even if he does, it would deserve any special attention beyond historical curiosity, still less as a necessary background for understanding his ethical thinking. In the modern literature, it has in fact been quite common to investigate Plato's ethics, but much less common to delve into his cosmology. At any rate, these two undertakings have usually been carried out in isolation from each other. Thus, for example, Terence Irwin's extensive treatment in Plato's Ethics contains no section on the Timaeus, and virtually no allusion to Plato's cosmology and theology. Even more striking in this regard is Christopher Bobonich's recent book on Plato's later ethics and politics, Plato's Utopia Recast, which, despite occupying more than 600 pages of exegetical treatment, does not for the most part consider it necessary, for its purposes, to take a stand on cosmological issues.

Certainly, some fresh air has been brought to these topics in a few recent contributions, though an extensive treatment of Plato's late cosmology in relation to his ethics is lacking to this day. Julia Annas, for example, devotes a chapter of her Platonic Ethics, Old and New to the issue of assimilation with god, but does not do much in terms of integrating this aspect of Plato with other aspects of his ethical thinking, and is at any rate quite comfortable with the thought that Plato's ethics can be understood independently of his metaphysical commitments.