In 419, or a little later, Julian attempted to pin a charge of Manichaeanism on Augustine, claiming, among other things, that Augustine's account of sexuality in marriage implied that the marriage act is vicious in itself. For Augustine had insisted from as early as The Desserts of Sinners (1.29.57) that the ‘disobedient members’ indicate original sin and the birth of children ‘in concupiscence’ (2.4.4).

The ensuing argument, still unfinished when Augustine's death prevented the completion of the last work Against Julian, was partly provoked by Augustine's use of the word concupiscentia itself. As we have seen, what he meant to represent by this term, at least in the phrase concupiscentia carnis, was a generalized weakness of the ‘flesh’, to which we can improperly assent. But ‘misunderstanding’ arose from the fact that, though concupiscentia is not limited to sexual desire, autonomous sexual arousal, being its most obvious visible effect, conveniently served as a symbolic representation of the phenomenon as a whole.

Augustine's assessment of the origin of this general weakness, which he saw as a defect, not a sin, and which in its sexual form makes males look like animals, is that it is acquired as a penal result of the fall. According to Julian, however, Augustine's ‘real’ view is that sexual desire is sinful in itself, not merely that it is vitiated by the sinfulness of Adam. Against this rendering of Augustine's position, Julian offered his own alternative, that libido as presently experienced is to be described as a morally neutral ‘natural appetite’ (Marriage and Concupiscence 2.7.17, apparently only in men (Against Julian 5.5.23)), or as ‘vigour of the members’ (2.35.59).

The world of Greco-Roman antiquity came to an end both gradually and dramatically. Many attempted to transform its thought, but among them Augustine was the most radical and the most influential, though the transformation he attempted was not always the transformation he produced. To transform is not necessarily to improve, and Augustine was handicapped by his lack of knowledge of much of the best classical philosophy. In the late twentieth century we know more about the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the Stoics than he did, though we do not always convert our knowledge into understanding. Augustine's more limited knowledge may even be thought to have left the originality of his own mind less constrained.

Unlike us, Augustine lived on the frontier between the ancient world and mediaeval Western Europe. For ill or for good, or it may be for both, the transformation he effected left an indelible mark on subsequent Western thought. Despite his lack of resources, he managed to sit in judgement on ancient philosophy and ancient culture.

BEING AND GOODNESS

In sorting through Augustine's descriptions of man's nature, knowledge, loves and hates, as well as of the harsh and morally disoriented society in which he lives, we have always tried not to lose sight of his insistence on the necessity of a radically theistic explanation of the facts that he has unearthed. In Augustine's view, only a theistic explanation makes sense of the gap between man's aspirations to the good life and the reality of the life he lives. Below the ‘problems’ of man lies the ‘problem’ of God.

Thus far, apart from treating the basic question of arguments for God's existence in chapter 3, and noting Augustine's insistence, against the ‘Greeks’, that creation is from nothing and that thus there is a huge and unique gap between the nature of God and those of his creatures, we have faced the problem of God only indirectly. In finally confronting parts of Augustine's ‘philosophical’ theology head-on, it is easy to begin with the obvious point that – Trinity and Incarnation aside – Augustine's account of God is much indebted to its Platonic or Neoplatonic roots; and Augustine saw something even of the Trinity in Neoplatonic theory. The unchangeable Platonic Forms, in an old tradition, exist in God's mind. Augustine's God too must be unchangeable; he can will change but not change his mind.

As with the God of all Platonists and Christians, there is a sense in which Augustine's God is unknowable (On Psalms 145 (144).6; Sermon 117.3.5).

I should perhaps apologize for devoting a longish paper to a very well-known document, which has been glossed again and again by every historian of Pyrrho and ancient Scepticism. My excuse for doing so is double: first, there is a general agreement, I think, on the crucial importance of this document for any attempt to reconstruct Pyrrho's thought; secondly, I would like to offer a new, and I hope reasonable, reading, of some of the most disputed points in it.

The text comes from Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, Bk.xiv, ch. 18, paragraphs 1–5 (= Aristocles fr. 6 Heiland = Pyrrho test. 53 Decleva Caizzi. See the Greek text in the Appendix to this chapter). Eusebius, as is well known, writes at the beginning of the fourth century AD, with the aim of exposing the absurdities and inconsistencies of most pagan philosophy. He makes abundant use of some good sources, in particular the Peripatetic philosopher Aristocles of Messina, whose date has been recently pushed back from the second half of the second century AD to the end of the first century BC. The work of Aristocles used by Eusebius was an important treatise in ten books, with the title π∈ρί ϕιλοσϕίaς. Most of Eusebius' chapters 17 to 21 comes from Book VIII of Aristocles' On Philosophy, dealing successively with Xenophanes and Parmenides, the Sceptics, the Cyrenaics, Metrodorus and Protagoras, and finally Epicurus. The extracts usually include a short doxographical section and a long critical section.

I am very happy and proud to have been given the opportunity of presenting the following papers, for the most part translated from French, to an English-speaking readership. At a time when voices are heard in my country, sometimes with distinctly chauvinistic overtones, standing out against the socalled tyranny of the ‘Publish in English or perish’ injunction, I do not feel any urge whatsoever to apologize, especially since a similar, if not exactly identical, collection is about to be published by the Presses Universitaires de France. But I must confess that I am by no means displeased that the present volume will slightly anticipate it. This is because its publication is something of a tit-for-tat: for my taste for Hellenistic philosophers and my attempts to work on them have been, if not wholly aroused, at least enormously stimulated and fostered by the powerful revival of interests which they have enjoyed in Englishspeaking countries (not to mention others, Italy in particular) for the last twenty years or so. Not that French scholarship and academic teaching have neglected them: witness the works of Victor Brochard on the Sceptics, of Emile Brehier on the Stoics, of Victor Goldschmidt on the Stoics and Epicurus: pioneering works indeed, as everyone would agree, I believe, and not in the least dated.

The so-called ‘Ontological Argument’ (hereafter: OA), which claims to establish the existence of God on the basis of his essence alone, is probably, together with the Liar Paradox, the Third-Man Argument and some other jewels of the same water, one of the most fascinating legacies of the whole Western philosophical tradition. Its official inventor, as is well known, is Anselm of Canterbury (eleventh century); new versions of it were devised by Descartes and some of his most prominent followers; a radical criticism was offered by Kant; and some modern philosophers have tried to revive it under new guises (Plantinga 1965, Hick and McGill 1967, among others, offer comprehensive reviews of this long story). As usual, some historians invoked the nil novi sub sole philosophico, and claimed that the OA had been already adumbrated, or even actually elaborated, by some ancient philosophers. Plato's name was mentioned in this context, by virtue either of some ‘ontological’ moves in the final argument for the immortality of soul in the Phaedo (e.g. Gallop 1975, p. 217; Schofield 1982, p. 2; Dumont 1982, p. 389 n. 6), or of the unique ontological properties of the Good in the Republic (Johnson 1963); some statements of Aristotle's about necessary and eternal being have also been invoked circumstantially (Hartshorne 1965, pp. 139–49); passages from Philo, Boethius and Augustine are standardly quoted as well.

There is not much chance of being wrong when one declares the theory of the proper noun to be positioned at a strategic crossroads in Stoic thought. It is fair to say (with the modulated reservations that such a declaration demands) that it was the Stoics who invented the grammatical category of the proper noun and it was by no mere chance that they did so. Their logic, unlike Aristotle's, allots to the singular proposition a place of fundamental importance. Their ontology attributes to every existent an individuality which makes it, in principle, discernible from every other; their theory of knowledge extends to representations the discernibility of the objects that they represent. That is to say, by tugging on the metaphorical string of the proper noun, one could easily unravel the entire skein of Stoicism, thereby vindicating the constant claims of systematicity that partisans of the doctrine were in the habit of advancing. In the limited space available here, I shall do no more than sketch in just such a claim on my own behalf.

The framework for the invention of the proper noun is the theory of the parts of discourse which the Stoics did not themselves invent but to which they attached great importance and also made decisive contributions.

There are many Stoic ways of not being, or – to be more precise – of not being a ‘being’ (őν). The only one with which I shall be concerned here is that which consists in being the intentional object of an impulse (ὁρμή), or of some kind or other or a sub-kind of impulse (őρ∈ξις, tendency; ἐπιθμία, desire; βού λησις, will; aρ∈σις, choice, etc.). The technical formulation of this aspect of Stoic ‘meontology’ can be summed up in three statements: (i) impulses are directed towards (ἐπί) predicates (κatηγορήμaVa); (ii) predicates are incorporeals (as, in general, are the λ∈κτά, of which they are a species); (iii) incorporeals are not beings, for only bodies are beings. Statement (i) is to be found in particular in the Ti text (see Appendix to this chapter). I shall henceforth refer to it as the POI thesis (it is a Predicate that is the Object of an Impulse). Statements (ii) and (iii) crop up all over the place.

To explain my choice, let me take as my starting point two extracts from Long and Sedley's splendid work (1987). On the one hand, they note in their bibliography (vol. II, p. 498) that ‘there has been much interest in the thesis that the object of a practical impulse is a predicate’.

‘The first and chief difference among propositions (ἀξιώματα), the dialecticians say, is that between simple (ἁπλᾶ) and non-simple (οχὐ ἁπλᾶ)'. These are the words of Sextus Empiricus (M VIII.93) and nobody would challenge the importance of that distinction. The declaration introduces a long passage (93 – 129) which sets out the subdivisions within this fundamental division. It is a passage which historians of logic tend to use as one of the sources that provide us with information on the Stoic classification of propositions, despite the fact that the Stoics are not specifically named, for it is generally accepted that Sextus does refer to them as ‘the dialecticians’. The task that faces us, then, is to compare his text with the classification transmitted to us by Diogenes Laertius (VII.68–76), who possibly bases his remarks on Diocles of Magnesia, – a classification which, for its part, is explicitly ascribed to Chrysippus and a number of his successors.

These texts, which have often been studied, present a number of similarities and also a number of differences. They pose many problems involving an inextricable mixture of historical questions, conceptual complications and textual difficulties (Diogenes' text is not in a good state).

Scepticism, as is well known, is a therapy for philosophical illnesses. But it does not spend much time in classifying those illnesses: the disease to fight against, in spite of its manifold forms, is always dogmatism. To the Sceptic, all non-Sceptical schools are dogmatic, whether ‘properly speaking’ (ἰδίως, PH 1.3) or in a particular way: the Academy itself professes a kind of upside-down dogmatism (PH 1.226). Eclecticism is never mentioned by Sextus, although the thing is not unknown to ancient philosophy, nor is the word unemployed. The reason for this silence is perhaps that eclecticism is less a philosophical illness than an alternative medicine, aiming at curing the same ills as Scepticism does (namely, conflicts among the dogmatists), but in an opposite way and on the basis of a different diagnosis. To the eclectic, doctrinal conflicts are superficial conflicts; philosophical doctrines are compatible at bottom, at least piecemeal, and perhaps even globally they converge. When looking at the philosophical stage, the Sceptic sees quite a different play: to him, the disagreement between systems is irreducible. An eclectic philosopher might actually accuse the Sceptic of being himself a kind of metaphilosophical dogmatist, in the sense that he admits not only that philosophers seem to contradict each other, but also that they actually do so; one might remind him of his zētētic disposition and invite him to be more careful before asserting the objective reality of those conflicts.

Timon of Phlius (about 325 to about 235), known as the Sillograph, was ‘spokesman’ (προϕήτης, Sextus Empiricus calls him, M 1.53) for his master Pyrrho of Elis. As his nickname indicates, he is known chiefly for his Silloi, a kind of Homer in disguise into which he had poured all his satirical verve, in the service of Pyrrho. In the fragments by him that have come down to us, the Silloi predominate, thanks to their dashing style and the many explicitly personal attacks directed against a large number of well-known and respected philosophers that they contain. Quite a few fragments of this work are thus preserved, and their spiciness still comes through, despite the sophistication of the vocabulary and the obscurity of the allusions. We also possess an equally valuable and quite detailed general description of the structure of the work and its author's intentions.

However, the Silloi by no means constitute the entire output of the Sillograph. The fragments that remain from Timon's writings testify fully to his many-sided ability. He was an enormously prolific author, who had written in the most varied of genres. Diogenes Laertius (ix.iio–ii) provides the following information on him:

As we know, the conjunctive proposition, called συμπ∈πλ∈γμένον by the Stoic logicians, is a ‘non-simple proposition’, obtained by linking two or more propositions by the conjunction ‘and’. I should like to show that this conjunctive proposition constituted a sort of model in Stoic thought, by reason of the particular features of its truth-conditions. We shall find that the presence of this model may be detected in several different sectors of the Stoic system, – its physics, ethics, psychology and epistemology. I shall be trying to prove that the notion of the conjunctive model may illuminate a number of difficulties and obscurities in the dogmas of the school. If my proposed enquiry proves fruitful, we shall thus possess concrete means to verify the organic unity of Stoic philosophy in one specific instance. It is a unity that is frequently asserted by the Stoics themselves, as well as by their commentators, and is solemnly illustrated by the famous images of the orchard, the egg and the animal, but all too often it remains by and large elusive as an effective reality and so far as details are concerned.

First, it is worth pointing out that what I propose to call the ‘conjunctive model’ in point of fact already appears in certain expressions that the Stoics used to vaunt the systematic coherence of their doctrine.