Does the universe support our moral endeavours? Does the world, as we know it, give us reason to think that we will be better off, happier, more thriving, if we pursue a course of moral probity than if we do not? Does the universe make us feel at home as moral agents? Does goodness or beauty figure in the world independently of us? Can we learn something about how to live our lives from observing the universe? Many today would agree with Jacques Monod in answering ‘no’ to all of these questions. We live in an ‘unfeeling’ universe. The world is insensitive to our moral concerns. Values are mere human ‘constructs’, which the universe at best is indifferent to and at worst undermines.

Reading Plato we are brought back to a world in which the ‘ancient covenant’, the moral agreement between man and the universe, still holds. It is a tenet of Plato's thought that man is not alone in the universe with his moral concerns. Goodness is represented in the universe. We can therefore learn something about goodness by studying the cosmos. Cosmology teaches us how to lead our lives.

It is common to distinguish between two kinds of teleological account. One kind explains an outcome as the result of intentional agency. In this sense I might explain why I went to the circus by saying that I wanted to have fun. Another kind of teleological explanation does without intentions and posits goals without reference to thoughts or other intentional states. Aristotle's natural teleology is normally taken as an example of the latter, unintentional sort. In contrast, Plato's cosmology in the Timaeus is, with good reason, taken as an example of the intentional sort of teleology, or ‘unnatural’ teleology as James Lennox has called it.So at the beginning of his account Timaeus tells us that the cosmos was created by a craftsman, a ‘demiurge’ (Greek, dēmiourgos), who wanted to make the world as good and beautiful as possible (30a2–3). Throughout his account Timaeus reminds us that the demiurge made this or that feature of the cosmos as well as he could or that he made it in order that such-and-such an end should come about. The aim of this chapter is to examine the role of the demiurge in the creation of the cosmos in the light of this contrast between natural and unnatural teleology. I shall first consider Timaeus' reasons for introducing the demiurge. I then look at and reject some ways in which one might try to dispense with the demiurge when interpreting the Timaeus.

The Timaeus-Critias, like Plato's other works, is commonly referred to as a dialogue. Yet from 29d6 to the end, that is to say for about five-sixths of the text, the Timaeus takes the form of a monologue, and roughly the same holds for the Critias. There are other Platonic dialogues which contain long, uninterrupted speeches, for example, the Apology and the Laws. Yet there is, with the possible exception of the Menexenus, no other work that to such an extent is dominated by monologue. What has happened to the dialogue form in the Timaeus-Critias? In what sense, if any, can we call this work a ‘dialogue’? And if Plato has given up on the dialogue form in the Timaeus-Critias, how does this reflect on the sorts of inquiry that Timaeus and Critias are engaged in? We tend to think of Plato's method of philosophy as dialectical, at least in the minimal sense of involving questions and answers. Has Plato then changed his conception of philosophy in this work, and if so, why in this work?

DIALOGUE

One can talk about at least four kinds of dialogue in Plato, and no doubt there are more. There is the dialogue between the characters within the works. So, for example, Socrates discusses the immortality of the soul with Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo. There is also the dialogue between the narrator of such conversations and his audience.

In chapter 1 I considered the aim of the dialogue as a whole and the connections between the Atlantis story and Timaeus' account of the cosmos. In this chapter I try to answer the question about the status of the Atlantis story as ‘history’ or ‘fiction’. In the next chapter I go on to investigate the status of Timaeus' account.

From antiquity on, the status of Critias' account has been the subject of intense debate. Are we as readers supposed to take the Atlantis story as ‘real history’? The dialogue invites us to raise this question but also to reflect on its terms. In this chapter I argue that the story should be seen as ‘history’ only in a special Platonic sense: it is a story which is fabricated about the past in order to reflect a general truth about how ideal citizens would fare in war. The story thereby provides a practical example of how virtue, understood along the lines of the Republic, would prevail in this world even in the most adverse of conditions.

As we have seen, the Timaeus-Critias tells two stories. One is an account of the war between ancient Athens and Atlantis; the other is an account of the creation of the kosmos and everything in it. Critias and Timaeus tell their stories in response to Socrates' request to be entertained in return for the entertainment he provided yesterday, which was an account of an ideal city very similar to that of the Republic.

Stoicism remains one of the most significant minority reports in the history of Western philosophy. Unfortunately, however, the precise nature of its impact on later thinkers is far from clear. The essays in this volume are intended to bring this picture into sharper focus by exploring how Stoicism actually influenced philosophers from antiquity through the modern period in fields ranging from logic and ethics to politics and theology. The contributing authors have expertise in different periods in the history of philosophy, but all have sought to demonstrate the continuity of Stoic themes over time, looking at the ways in which Stoic ideas were appropriated (often unconsciously) and transformed by later philosophers for their own purposes and under widely varying circumstances. The story they tell shows that Stoicism had many faces beyond antiquity, and that its doctrines have continued to appeal to philosophers of many different backgrounds and temperaments.

In tracing the influence of Stoicism on Western thought, one can take either the high road or the low road. The high road would insist on determining the ancient provenance of Stoic and apparently Stoic ideas in the work of medieval and modern thinkers, using the writings of the ancient Stoics to grade their proximity to the genuine article; this would require paying close attention to the particular questions that exercised thinkers such as Zeno and Chrysippus, in order to determine the extent to which later figures contributed to their solutions.

One of the most characteristic and, to the contemporary mind at least, bizarre theses of orthodox Chrysippean Stoicism is its insistence on the wholly rational character of the human mind or soul. The whole of the soul, or at least the whole of the hēgemonikon or “leading part” of the soul, is said to be reason (logos): there are no irrational parts or powers within the soul, no independent sources or faculties of emotion or nonrational desire, and all cases of apparent irrationality are supposed to be referred to the operations of thought itself (dianoia, another name for the mind). This seems to fly in the face of much of what we assume or feel sure we know about human psychology: not only do modern psychological theories tend to stress the role of irrational or subrational factors in human motivation, but we seem to be clearly aware in ourselves of major nonrational or irrational aspects of our own behavior and thought processes. Thus when confronted with Stoic claims such as that all emotions and desires are really just judgments or beliefs, or that passions or emotions are unnatural conditions that ought to be extirpated, we find these not only hard to swallow but difficult and nearly impossible even to grasp. However, there is nothing about this sort of difficulty with Stoicism that is specifically modern.

As Sten Ebbesen has emphasized in his contribution to this volume, the influence of Stoicism in the Middle Ages is to be found everywhere and is yet felt subtly enough that one is often unsure whether it is Stoicism itself that is being encountered. Part of the reason for this is fairly simple: Stoicism was so very influential in the Roman Empire that it left its mark on most of the church fathers and on most of the philosophical schools of late antiquity. Because so little work by card-carrying Stoics has survived, Stoic ideas were transmitted into the Middle Ages largely through thinkers who, while influenced by Stoicism, were not themselves Stoics and who often made free with Stoic ideas. Not surprisingly, it is often hard to tell when a later thinker is in some important way a Stoic.

In this chapter I want to make one piece of what would have to be a much more complex argument to be complete. My larger thesis is that Peter Abelard is as close to Stoicism as a Christian could be and that in his case this is not some independent rediscovery of Stoic ideas but a self-conscious taking up of them with profound consequences for later medieval philosophy. I stake this claim as a claim about Abelard's positions in a variety of areas, including logic – hence my ambiguous title.

We are all familiar with the notion of a moral judgment. In the vocabulary of ethical debate, this term is so common as to be a cliché. While we have different theories about how we make such judgments, it would seem distinctly odd to observe that “judgment” is a term transferred from another semantic domain and to attempt to sort out its meaning by scrutinizing its source or to impugn the clarity or usefulness of the term on the grounds that it began its conceptual career as a mere metaphor. Whatever origins the term may have had, they now seem irrelevant.

But is this really so? I want to argue that moral judgment has not always been taken as a bland general synonym for moral decisions and that it need not be; to see that, we can consider uses of the terminology of moral judgment in which the original semantic sphere for such language (the judicial sphere) is still relevant to understanding how it is used. One such use comes from the Stoic Seneca, and I argue that he did take the notion of moral judgment as a live metaphor, one that he used to develop his own distinctive Stoic views on moral thinking.

That the particular language we use in talking about moral decision and moral assessment should matter is not surprising. Even for us, this is not the only way to talk about such matters; we also invoke the notions of deduction, calculation, and analysis, for example.

In the French language, to call someone a Stoic is to recognize the virtue of standing firm in adversity, of enduring misfortune with courage and tenacity, without being driven from the path one has chosen. The characteristic Stoic attitude thus appears to be constancy. The image of the sage as a rock, immovable in a storm, was a standard trope in French moral literature during the seventeenth century. On the mark of the publisher Plantin we read the motto, labore et constantia (by labor and constancy). This illustrates the extent to which this virtue seems characteristic of the rebirth of the Stoic movement at the end of the Renaissance. The restoration began with the philological work of the humanists, but it is also tied to a definite political context, marked by the renewed outbreak of religious troubles and civil war. Treatises on the subject of constancy flourished at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries and had impressive publishing histories. But treating constancy as a cardinal virtue was not merely a compromise choice: Charron had preferred prudence, Descartes generosity, Pascal charity. Constancy is the virtue of someone who relies first and foremost on his own strengths and not on God or others. As Lipsius says, a man writes a treatise on constancy primarily for himself and his own benefit, and not because he seeks fame.

Expressing the inimitable tranquillity of the Stoic sage, Seneca declares that

Perhaps one of Stoicism's greatest points of appeal, prominent in its resurgence in the early modern period, is its assertion that happiness is attainable by any rational individual. Moreover, this happiness is, as Seneca depicts it, a this-worldly salvation: the rational individual can aspire to a perfect happiness, a tranquillity impervious to any and all assaults of Fortune. Such is the virtue of Stoic ethics famously celebrated in the sixteenth century by Justus Lipsius, who, exasperated by the conflicts raging within the Christian tradition and the horrific wars accompanying them, looked to Stoicism for an alternate source of moral sustenance and the prospect of genuine respite from public tumult – to be sure, nothing less than an enduring peace of mind. According to the Stoic model, such eminent tranquillity, which entails perfecting one's intellect, is founded on a specific collection of doctrines: an immanentist theology whereby God and the universe are rational in nature and can be perfectly apprehended by the human mind; virtue that is readily indicated in natural impulse; a diagnosis of the passions, the primary obstacle to virtue, in terms that immediately invoke their susceptibility to remedy; and, finally, psychotherapy as the means to happiness, a means that is subject to individual agency and responsibility.

The great study on first movements in Christianity by O. Lottin ascribes the invention of the idea to the eleventh century. But in fact the idea of first movements in emotion has its first extant record a thousand years earlier in Seneca's On Anger, book 2, chapters 2–4, and has a long history in Christianity after that.