While all of Hume's readers agree that he is a sceptic – he calls himself a “true” sceptic in the “Conclusion” to Book I of the Treatise and a “mitigated” sceptic in the final Section of the first Enquiry – there is almost no agreement on what this kind of scepticism amounts to. I will limit my contribution to this controversy here to an examination of Hume's first engagement with scepticism, his exploration in “Of scepticism with regard to reason” (T.I.iv. 1; hereafter SwR) of the argument that we should not accept the verdicts of our reasoning; I reconstruct this sceptical argument in Section 1. What Hume wants us to learn from this exploration has also been the focus of much debate amongst his recent readers. There are three main interpretive positions, none of which to me seems satisfactory, but each of which I will suggest contains a germ of truth.

First, some have suggested that Hume's argument against our believing the verdicts of our reasoning is meant to be entirely ad hominem. For, after he has presented it, he says:

The Reception of Epicureanism Amongst the Moderns

The Epicurean system of natural philosophy and ethics presented a major attraction for seventeenth century philosophers, for whom it offered a powerful alternative to Christian Aristotelianism and the theory of man's corrupted and sinful nature. On the natural philosophy side, it furnished the underlying system – corpuscularianism – of the moderns, or, in seventeenth century terms, the “innovators.” On the ethical side, the revival of the Epicurean doctrine of pleasure is evident in seventeenth century moral philosophy, in which references to happiness, joy, and pleasure begin to take on a more positive tone, though they are constrained by the doubt that a secular morality is possible and by worries over concupiscence. It would be a worthwhile project to trace the reaction to and reinterpretation of each of the major Epicurean doctrines, including the ideational nature of God and the evolution of the functional animal in early modern philosophy. Meanwhile, the efforts of an idealistic, and somewhat authoritarian philosopher, Leibniz, to come to terms with ambient Epicureanism will serve to illustrate this mixed, but, on the whole, highly positive reception.

Assimilating is always a more dangerous philosophical and intellectual strategy than distinguishing. Qualifications are needed, and the chapter will supply them in due course. But I suspect that the Epicureanism of the moderns has been underestimated for two reasons that do not amount to justifications.

In considering the ways in which early modern philosophers used Hellenistic philosophy, the concept of appropriation is particularly useful. Rather than being the disembodied transmission and reception of ideas, the metaphor of appropriation gives agency to individual thinkers, and enables us to understand them in their own particular historical and intellectual contexts. Ideas do not influence subsequent ideas, nor do they develop by their own intrinsic power. Rather, particular individuals in real historical contexts deploy and develop earlier ideas to solve problems of their own. Thinking in terms of appropriation leads us to think about the historical agents as well as the content of their ideas. We must consider why particular figures were attracted to one tradition or another; how the way they asked their questions affected the use of the ideas they borrowed; and what role their own presuppositions played in their use of the appropriated ideas and texts.

Early modern philosophers often appropriated ideas from ancient philosophy and used them to solve new problems in new contexts. Looking back to classical times, philosophers considered an array of texts that had been deemed canonical, in terms of which they could develop their own positions. In part, this approach was an outgrowth of Renaissance humanism, which was devoted – among other things – to the recovery of ancient sources.

Stoicism casts a long shadow over early modern moral philosophy. In the late sixteenth century, the efforts of Justus Lipsius and Guillaume Du Vair to formulate a coherent Christian Neostoicism sparked a succession of works aimed at assimilating, or rebutting, central claims of Stoic ethical theory. The impact of Stoicism on the major figures of seventeenth-century philosophy, particularly those of the second half of the century, takes a more subtle form. Among these thinkers, there is little interest in confronting Stoic views directly, either to refute them or defend them. Yet Stoicism makes a vital contribution to the ethical theories of a number of later early modern philosophers, including, most prominently, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The theories of these three philosophers differ significantly in their details and in their proximity to Stoic orthodoxy, yet each involves a creative appropriation of Stoic ideas.

A growing body of literature relates the ethical views of Descartes and Spinoza to those of the Stoics. Much less has been written about the Stoic background to Leibniz's ethics. In one sense, this is unsurprising, since it is difficult to extract a systematic ethical theory from Leibniz's fragmentary writings. At the same time, the case demands attention, for Leibniz confronts more directly, and more critically, than Descartes or Spinoza the ramifications of Stoicism for morality, and does so in part by identifying his rationalist predecessors as the modern inheritors of the mantle of Stoicism.

The concept of a philosophical legacy is figurative. A literal legacy involves the transfer of tangible goods (and perhaps intangible ones, such as peerages) from one generation to another. Like literal legacies, philosophical legacies also involve the transfer of goods between generations. But unlike literal legacies, the goods being transferred in philosophical legacies are ideas, arguments, systems, or other such philosophical entities. This difference in a philosophical versus literal legacy is important, and complicates considerably the correct use of the notion of philosophical legacy itself. Because philosophical legacies consist in ideas, arguments, and so forth, those “inheriting” them must necessarily engage in acts of interpretation. Because philosophical legacies necessarily involve interpretation, they are not fixed: what the legacy or bequest actually means or amounts to depends, to a greater or lesser extent, on the person receiving it. This is not necessarily the case with literal legacies, in which the inheritors can receive their inheritance without any effort (intellectual or otherwise) on their part.

I begin with these comments because the Stoics' theory of the natural law has long been regarded as one of their most lasting and influential legacies. This is arguably true, but depending on how the notion of the legacy itself is understood, there is a real risk of simplifying and distorting the interactions that occurred between the Stoics and their successors.

The Discourse and Its Genre

When Descartes' mathematics, and what was true in his physics, were surpassed, and what was false in his physics was refuted and ridiculed, the two main works that survived the wreck, and continue to shape our picture of the man, were the Discourse on the Method and the Meditations. Of these, the Meditations is less personal. The Meditator of the Meditations is not specifically René Descartes. Rather he, or she, is a role that any of us can fill if we choose to pursue this path of thinking. By contrast, the Discourse presents to us the life and aims and undertakings, not precisely of René Descartes – for the original 1637 publication was anonymous – but at any rate of the person who is the author of the Essays that the Discourse introduces (the Geometry, the Dioptrics, and the Meteors), who has made many new discoveries through a special method of “searching for truth in the sciences” and who is also the author of some more mysterious treatises that he has chosen not to publish. The Discourse presents this impressive but anonymous person as having made an almost-complete break with the traditional disciplines in which he was educated; he begins his own intellectual work, when he does begin it, not from the lessons of his teachers or from books or from what he learned by travelling in “the book of the world,” but from his own private reflections that lead him to the method described in Part Two.

The great covered cisterns of Istanbul were built during the sixth century of the common era. Their roofs are held up by row upon row of stone pillars. Many of these pillars were made specially for the cisterns, but others seem to have been pieced together from whatever broken bits of column were available to the builders: a pediment of one style or period, a capital of another, a shaft from yet a third. The provenance of the parts did not matter. It sufficed that this material from the past served the present purpose.

Architects have other ways of using the past. Consider New York City's old Pennsylvania Station: it was meant to look like a Roman bath, perhaps in order to transfer the grandeur of the ancient empire to the modern railroad company that was displaying its wealth and glory. Or consider some of the post-modern buildings now on display in our cities: Gothic arches atop glass-fronted skyscrapers after Corbusier or Mies, with additional odd bits and pieces of whatever style it amused the architect to incorporate. The elements are meant to recall the past, if only to dismiss it, even while they are intended to function in a striking new structure.

This volume shows that philosophers have as many ways of using the past as architects have. The chapters here assembled were written for a conference on the role of Hellenistic philosophy in the early modern period.

There is a curious moment in Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) when he turns to the question of what discourses on ethics a young English gentleman in the making should be encouraged to read. This is a question of some importance, one would have thought, in a treatise whose stated goal is an education to virtue and service to one's country, especially given Locke's claim that education “is that which makes the great difference in mankind.” “… of all the men we meet with,” he says, “nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education” (&1). But the brevity of his treatment here – earlier in the treatise he has spent at least ten times as long on proper methods of toilet training and five times as long on the question of whether children should be allowed to eat melons and plums or apples and pears – as well as the brevity of his actual reading list, occasion some surprise. Indeed, Locke explicitly recommends reading just two books in the sphere of morality:

Let me begin this chapter with a simple categorical statement: There is no mysticism in Spinoza's philosophy. To most careful readers of the Ethics, such an assertion should seem unsurprising, if not obvious; Spinoza's place in the pantheon of arch-rationalist philosophers would seem to be as secure as that of his seventeenth-century mentor, Descartes. Thus, I do not claim that the thesis of this chapter is particularly bold or even novel. And yet it seems still to stand in need of demonstration. For from the earliest commentators on his work down to the most recent scholarship – and especially including the representation of Spinoza in the popular imagination – there has persisted a significant trend in which Spinoza is seen not as the inheritor of the Cartesian devotion to clear and distinct reasoning, nor of the Jewish intellectualist tradition of Maimonides and Gersonides, but as the descendent of the mysticism of Philo of Alexandria and of the later kabbalists.

At the end of the seventeenth-century, for example, it was not uncommon to see Spinoza's philosophy as deeply imbued with kabbalistic and occult themes. In the eighteenth-century, Jacques Basnage, in his grand Histoire des Juifs, depuis Jesus Christ jusqu'à prèsent (1705), included Spinoza in his discussion of kabbalah, which he sees as the source of his “obscure and mystical” ideas. Later that century, Solomon Maimon asserted that “kabbalah is nothing but extended Spinozism,” an opinion that the great twentieth-century scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Sholem, would later second.

Naturalism and the Ancient Moralists

Joseph Butler (1692–1752) was not a prolific writer. His major work in moral philosophy, the Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, is always terse and often cryptic. He has been described as “the most sagacious, if not the most consistent or systematic, of the British Moralists.” But one systematic element in his moral outlook is his appeal to nature, and this element reasonably invites a comparison with Stoicism.

Butler's sermons are intended “to explain what is meant by the nature of man, when it is said that virtue consists in following, and vice in deviating from it, and by explaining to show that the assertion is true” (P 13). He says that this claim about nature is the view of the ancient moralists, but not the unanimous view of modern moralists. Some people simply reject it, while others regard it as trivial and useless, even if it is true (P 13).

He attributes the naturalist formula to “the ancient moralists” indiscriminately.

In the comparative expression “more contrary to this nature,” Butler suggests that torture and death are to some degree contrary to nature.

INTRODUCTION: THE SCOPE OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY, ANCIENT AND MODERN

Moral psychology addresses itself to the interface between ethics and psychology. One of the basic principles of moral psychology is the apparently trivial one, that all ethically correct actions are, to begin with, actions: inasmuch as they are the deliberate or at least intentional actions of human beings, ethical actions will share features with the class to which they belong, and fall under whatever constraints belong to the larger kind.

This of course raises an immediate question about the coherence of the topic so described. Psychology is clearly a descriptive field, and ethics is the normative field par excellence; the one tells us how the human mind does function, the other tells us how human agents ought to act. Given this fundamental difference, we may not assume, without further argument, that the first discussion can place any constraints whatsoever on the second. The mere fact that psychology places limits on what is humanly possible does not show, without further argument, that ethics must keep its demands within those limits.

The further argument tends to come, nowadays, in terms of a sort of mixing axiom of morality and modality, that the agent cannot be obligated to do anything it is not possible for the agent to do. This is usually abbreviated to the slogan that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, though its teeth are more often bared in the contrapositive formulation, that ‘not possible’ implies ‘not obligatory’.

INTRODUCTION

Is there a Stoic metaphysics? The answer obviously depends on what we mean by 'metaphysics', a word which no classical philosopher would have understood, despite its two Greek components and its familiarity as the title of the most famous of Aristotle's works. No matter what we might mean by 'meta-', in more than one sense the Stoics have no metaphysics: for them, no science comes 'after' physics (again, in whatever sense of 'after' you like); neither is there any science studying entities which, in some sense, are 'over and above' physics or 'beyond' physics - that is, 'metaphysical' (literally, 'super-natural') entities. For them, 'nature' (phusis) encompasses everything, including things, phenomena, and events which in other worldviews might seem to be 'super-natural' in some way. They had a firm conception of how philosophy (more exactly, its discursive exposition or logos) is and should be divided; and their primary division (into logic, ethics, physics) did not provide any place for anything like 'metaphysics'.

In another sense, however, one might suggest that the Stoics had not only one but two ‘metaphysics’. One is merely a part of physics; the other is a study over and above their standard tripartition of philosophy.

Stoicism has its roots in the philosophical activity of Socrates. But its historical journey began in the enrichment of that tradition with other influences by Zeno of Citium almost a century after Socrates' death, and it continued in the rise and decline of the school he founded. An apparently long pause followed during the Middle Ages, although it seems clear that its philosophical influence continued to be felt through a variety of channels, many of which are difficult to chart. In the early modern period, Stoicism again became a significant part of the philosophical scene and has remained an influential intellectual force ever since.

In the middle of the last century, Max Pohlenz, in a book whose value was always limited by the cultural forces of its time and place (Pohlenz 1948), described the school as an ‘intellectual movement.’ ‘Intellectual movement’ captured something of the longevity and protean variability of Stoicism. The dynamic connotations of that metaphor are apt, but I prefer the metaphor of a special kind of journey. An intellectual engagement with Stoicism is an odyssey in three ways. First, the historical trajectory of the school itself and its influence is replete with digressions, narrative ornament, and improbable connections, yet moving ultimately toward an intelligible conclusion. Second, the task of recovering the history of Stoic thought is an adventure in the history of philosophy. It can be a perilous journey for the novice, one requiring guides as varied in their skills and temperaments as was Odysseus, whose epithet polutropos (‘man of many talents’) indicates what is called for. And third, for those readers who find the central ideas of Stoicism appealing either in a purely intellectual way or in the moral imagination, the ongoing confrontation with Stoicism is one which refines philosophical intuitions, challenges both imagination and analytical talents, and leads ultimately to hard philosophical choices which, if taken seriously, define the kind of life one chooses to lead.