Listening to poetry, wrote Plutarch, is like eating fish-heads: absolutely delicious, but it can give you bad dreams (How the young person should listen to poetry 15bc). Believe this, as all the major Stoic thinkers do, and what follows? A lover of fish-heads would prefer, clearly, to discover a way to go on eating them in good health, without suffering the disturbing consequences.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will in effect be an extended commentary on a single passage, Cicero, de Fato 7–9, which indirectly attributes to Chrysippus a strong thesis of psychophysical causality. I shall hope to show what that thesis amounts to, and how it fits into the teleological structure of the Stoic causal nexus. At the same time, I shall be offering reasons for seeing the Stoic theory in question as largely a development of Platonic psychology.

This last point needs some qualification. Chrysippus himself was openly opposed to at least one feature of Plato's psychology, namely the tripartition of the soul, as expounded in the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus. But equally, he was sympathetic to, and almost certainly deeply influenced by, the more ‘Socratic’ psychology to be found elsewhere in Plato's dialogues – the monistic theory presupposed in the Protagoras, developed in the Phaedo, and arguably still observed in the Theaetetus – according to which the soul is in itself a purely intellectual faculty. Given the further fact that Socrates, unlike Plato, was from the start revered as an absolute authority by the Stoics, it is probably most correct to locate the background to Stoic psychology not in Platonic but in Socratic psychology. At the same time, it would be misleading to imply that any ancient reader of Plato operated with an entirely clearcut distinction between historically Socratic texts on the one hand and Platonic texts on the other.

Le but de ce travail est d'esquisser une étude des variations dans la psychologie de la doxa depuis Zénon jusqu'à Philon d'Alexandrie. L'approche que nous avons choisie peut paraître surprenante à double titre: elle est diachronique, alors que les études actuelles ont quelque peu délaissé ce type de démarche; par ailleurs, elle se réfère à un personnage qui, non seulement n'appartient pas à la période hellénistique, mais dont la qualité de philosophe est fortement contestée, et le plus souvent même niée. Il convient donc de préciser ici notre propos et la méthode choisie.

Les études philoniennes ont toujours eu un statut spécial par rapport aux recherches sur l'histoire de la philosophic ancienne. Le ‘philonien’ est quelqu'un qui étudie un corpus où tout est exprimé en fonction de concepts philosophiques, mais auquel on a dénié, pour des raisons parfois contradictoires la qualité de texte philosophique. Or ces dernières années ont vu la remise en question de cette attitude, et une certaine réhabilitation de l'apport de Philon à la philosophic. Il n'est pas question d'entrer ici dans le problème de fond; nous souhaitons montrer à propos d'un problème particulier, celui de l'opinion, comment la réflexion de Philon ne peut se comprendre qu'à la lumière des débats antérieurs, et apporte à ceux-ci une contribution que l'on sera en droit de juger peu satisfaisante, mais dont nous pensons qu'elle a sa place dans une étude d'histoire de la philosophie.

Galen is remembered mainly as a doctor; and it is on his fame as a medical theorist and practitioner that his reputation principally rests. Yet he was no mere physician; he thought of himself as equally a philosopher, and if the tradition has been less kind to his strictly philosophical works than to his medical writings (here as elsewhere interest has to a large extent dictated survival), none the less enough of his philosophical temper shines through his medical oeuvre for us to be able to judge his claims to that title.

For Galen, fortunately (although at times infuriatingly), was not a dry and merely technical writer. On the contrary, his massive corpus abounds with digressions, asides, interludes; irrelevant hares are started, pointless chimerae chased. If Galen insists (as he does to the point of tedium) that his wordiness is the direct result of the idiocy of those whom he has to refute, he himself cannot be acquitted of the charge of prolixity and verbosity; even when hymning the philosophical and literary advantages of brevity, he does so at extravagant length. Galen loved the sound of his own voice.

And it is lucky for us that he did. For it is in those asides and irrelevances that we find a pot-pourri of scattered remarks and fragments of enormous philosophical importance. It is to Galen's exuberant largesse that we owe much of our knowledge of the schools of later Greek philosophy; and that debt has long been acknowledged.

The fifth meeting of the Symposium Hellenisticum took place between 17 and 25 August 1989 at the Château of Syam near Champagnole in the French Jura. Following a by-now well-established tradition, to which the four previously published volumes bear witness, the papers given at the fifth Symposium underwent long and searching discussion; the texts published here have been revised in the light of those and subsequent discussions which took place in one form or another after the end of the conference.

The participants in the Symposium were: Julia Annas, Jonathan Barnes, Suzanne Bobzien, Jacques Brunschwig, Pierluigi Donini, Eyjolfur Emilsson, Dorothea Frede, Michael Frede, David Furley, James Hankinson, Brad Inwood, Anna-Maria Ioppolo, David Konstan, Jean-Louis Labarrière, André Laks, Carlos Lévy, Geoffrey Lloyd, Anthony Long, Jaap Mansfeld, Mario Mignucci, Phillip Mitsis, Martha Nussbaum, Malcolm Schofield, David Sedley, Richard Sorabji, Gisela Striker, Voula Tsouna.

The organization of the conference was made possible by generous support from several institutions: le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; le Ministère de l'Education Nationale (Direction des affaires générates, internationales et de la coopération); l'Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne); l'Université de Paris x (Nanterre). We acknowledge with gratitude not only these institutions, but also those who have individually shown their interest in our project and have actively furthered its realization.

Quiconque s'en va séjourner quelque temps du côté des Stoïciens apprend bien vite que, selon eux, les hommes, dans leur quête du bien, se sont tout d'abord, comme les animaux, laissés conduire par leur inclination (hormē) à rechercher le premier approprié (to prōton oikeion), à savoir ce qui est susceptible de préserver la constitution (sustasis) à laquelle ils sont naturellement attachés par un lien tout autant affectif que providentiel. Bien vite également il apprendra qu'à la différence des animaux privés de logos, les hommes, dont ‘la raison est comme un artisan qui s'ajoute à l'inclination’ (Diog. Laer. vii. 86), n'en restèrent pas là, ce qu'expliquent aussi bien la célèbre métaphore de la recommandation que l'acquisition de la notion de bien chez Cicéron (de Fin.iii. 20–3, 33–4).

Or, si l'on s'est souvent intéressé au rôle que pouvaient jouer les animaux, voire les enfants, dans la théorie de l'oikeiōsis – leur fonction est de montrer que le premier approprié n'est pas le plaisir, mais aussi qu'il existe un sentiment naturel d'attachement à sa progéniture – on s'est en général moins intéressé pour elles-mêmes aux fonctions ou facultés cognitives mises en oeuvre par les animaux dans cette recherche de l'approprié.

Ce fut pourtant l'objet d'une belle polémique entre Stoïciens et Académiciens.

Diogenes Laertius reports that Zeno was the first to introduce the word ‘kathēkon’ and to write a treatise on the topic. He also suggests that, in connection with these reflections on kathēkonta, Zeno reversed Hesiod's well-known tag about the value of following good advice relative to that of knowing things for ourselves. According to Zeno,

Although few things are so characteristic of the Stoics as their penchant for dispensing advice, Zeno's remark is initially rather puzzling. Surely, we might object, Hesiod is the one who has it right: merely following another's advice, whether in the form of specific individual instructions or more general rules, should hardly take precedence over knowing things for ourselves.

Zeno, however, apparently defended his own ranking by postulating a critical link between an ability to accept advice and action. A crucial prerequisite for praxis, he explained, is being capable of accepting and following the sound advice of others; by itself, knowing things on one's own holds no special guarantees with respect to one's actions. Yet, this added bit of explanation seems hardly less puzzling, especially given Zeno's overall endorsement of the Socratic claim that knowledge is sufficient for virtuous action.

In Plato's dialogue the Sophist, the main interlocutors, the Eleatic Stranger and Theaetetus, are trying to determine the nature of the sophist. Given that the phenomenon of the sophistic movement is so many-faceted and somewhat amorphous, it is not surprising that the first attempts in the dialogue to get a grip on the elusive reality underlying this phenomenon turn out to be not particularly successful, since they at best capture some superficial feature of the sophist. These features are recapitulated at 231c8-e7. Then, in 232a1ff a renewed attempt is made to capture the sophist; this attempt seems to go more to the heart of the matter, but runs into difficulties whose resolution occupies the remainder of the dialogue. The suggestion is that the sophist has a remarkable ability to represent things in a way that makes this representation, the sophist's statement about things, appear and seem to be true, though, in fact, it is not. This raises a series of difficulties, first alluded to in 235d2, then again in 236c9ff, and spelled out in considerable detail in 236d9ff.

PLATO'S ACADEMY AND THE SCIENCES

At some time between the early 380s and the middle 360s Plato founded what came to be known as the Academy. Our information about the early Academy is very scant. We know that Plato was the leader (scholarch) of the Academy until his death and that his nephew Speusippus succeeded him in this position. We know that young people came from around the Greek world to be at the Academy and that the most famous of such people, Aristotle, stayed there for approximately twenty years. However, it appears that, at least in Plato's time, there were no fees attached to being at the Academy. Thus it does not seem likely that it had any official “professorial staff” or that “students” took a set of courses to qualify them to fill certain positions in life. The Academy was more likely a community of self-supporting intellectuals gathered around Plato and pursuing a variety of interests ranging from the abstractions of metaphysics to more concrete issues of politics and ethics.

In Book VII of the Republic Socrates describes a plan of higher education designed to turn the most promising young people of a Utopian city-state into ideal rulers. It is frequently assumed (and quite naturally) that this curriculum bears a significant relation to Plato's plans for the Academy; sometimes it has even been described as essentially the plans themselves. It is important to see that this assumption is subject to major qualifications. For, first of all, fourth-century Athens is not even an approximation to Plato's Utopia; Plato could not expect entrants in the Academy to have been honed in the way the Utopian citizens are supposed to be.

For a correct understanding of Plato, account needs to be taken of the fact that his philosophical activity spanned some fifty years, during which time certain doctrines underwent considerable changes. To trace this development and so be able to identify the final expression of his thought, it is essential to know in what order the dialogues were written, but there is little help in this quest either from external sources or from the dialogues themselves. Regarding the former, the only information likely to be reliable is Aristotle's statement that the Laws was written after the Republic. This is repeated by Diogenes Laertius (III 37) and Olympiodorus [Prol. VI 24), who add that the Laws was still in an unrevised state on wax tablets when Plato died and was published posthumously by one of his students, Philip of Opus. As for internal evidence, cross references in the Sophist (217a) and Politicus (257a, 258b) indicate the prior composition of the former, while the Timaeus (27a) mentions the Critias as its sequel. Rather less definite is the apparent reference in the Timaeus (17b- 19b) to the Republic, in the Sophist to the Parmenides (217c) and Theaetetus (216a), and in the Theaetetus to the Parmenides (183e).

Plato (427-347 B.C.) stands at the head of our philosophical tradition, being the first Western thinker to produce a body of writing that touches upon the wide range of topics that are still discussed by philosophers today under such headings as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, language, art, love, mathematics, science, and religion. He may in this sense be said to have invented philosophy as a distinct subject, for although all of these topics were, of course, discussed by his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, he was the first to bring them together by giving them a unitary treatment. He conceives of philosophy as a discipline with a distinctive intellectual method, and he makes radical claims for its position in human life and the political community. Because philosophy scrutinizes assumptions that other studies merely take for granted, it alone can give us genuine understanding; since it discovers a realm of objects inaccessible to the senses and yields an organized system of truths that go far beyond and in some cases undermine common sense, it should lead to a transformation in the way we live our lives and arrange our political affairs. It is an autonomous subject and not the instrument of any other discipline, power, or creed; on the contrary, because it alone can grasp what is most important in human life, all other human endeavors should be subordinate to it.

In this essay I will try to identify and explain the fundamental argument of Plato's Republic for the astonishing thesis that justice is so great a good that anyone who fully possesses it is better off, even in the midst of severe misfortune, than a consummately unjust person who enjoys the social rewards usually received by the just. Plato's attempt to defend this remarkable claim is of course the unifying thread of the dialogue, but his argument ranges so widely over diverse topics that it is difficult to see how it all fits together, and anyone who attempts to state his argument must take a stand on interpretive issues about which there is considerable scholarly controversy. The dialogue's difficulty is increased by Plato's failure to give any explicit justification for the complex moral equation he boldly announces: Justice discounted by pain and dishonor is more advantageous than injustice supplemented by the rewards of justice. Even if he manages to show that justice is the greatest single good, we are still left wondering whether its value is high enough to make this equation come out right.

For some time philosophers have thought of epistemology and metaphysics as different branches of philosophy, investigating, respectively, what can be known and the basic properties and nature of what there is. It is hard, though, to see any genuine boundary here. The issues irresistibly overlap. Certainly in Plato there is no such divide. His views about what there is are largely controlled by ideas about how knowledge can be accounted for, and his thinking about what knowledge is takes its character from convictions about what there is that is knowable. As a result his doctrines have a different shape from characteristically modern ones.

Some earlier Platonic writings do have a somewhat modern look. Socrates was notorious for having questioned whether he knew much of anything, and for making people hesitant about their opinions (Meno 80c, 86b-c). c). Plato exploits this side of Socratic thought. The namesake of the Euthyphro judges that an action of his is pious. Socrates wonders whether Euthyphro ought to be confident about that judgment, and tries to make him less so. Elsewhere Socrates raises questions concerning his own judgments about which things are beautiful (H. Ma. 286c). Such questions seem to suggest a general policy of doubting, reminiscent to us of Descartes or of the various programs of ancient skepticism. In Socrates' efforts to overcome ignorance (Meno 86b-c) we might see a project of justifying beliefs like that of typical contemporary epistemologists.

In most of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates professes to inquire into some virtue. At the same time, he professes not to know what the virtue in question is. How, then, can he inquire into it? Doesn't he need some knowledge to guide his inquiry? Socrates' disclaimer of knowledge seems to preclude Socratic inquiry. This difficulty must confront any reader of the Socratic dialogues; but one searches them in vain for any explicit statement of the problem or for any explicit solution to it. TheMeno, by contrast, both raises it explicitly and proposes a solution.

THE PRIORITY OF KNOWLEDGE WHAT (PKW)

Meno begins the dialogue by asking whether virtue is teachable (70a1-2). Socrates replies that he doesn't know the answer to Meno's question; nor does he at all(to parapan, 71a7) know what virtue is. The latter failure of knowledge explains the former; for “if I do not know what a thing is, how could I know what it is like?” (ho de mē oida ti estin,pōs an hopoion ge ti eideiēn; 71b3-4). Nonetheless, he proposes to inquire with Meno into what virtue is. Here, as in the Socratic dialogues, Socrates both disclaims knowledge and proposes to inquire.