This volume brings together papers and monographs on Hellenistic philosophy I have written over a period of almost twenty years. Some of them have been hard to find; two were published in German and appear here in translation. I hope that the collection will make it easier to see some of the connections between the different topics taken up in individual essays. With the exception of Chapter 2, my first venture into Hellenistic philosophy, each of the issues discussed here arose from a question left open in an earlier paper. The introductory chapter, previously unpublished, deals with the Sophists of the fifth century B.C., and hence a much earlier period. It started out, however, from a question about the predecessors of the Greek Skeptics: How is it that most of the arguments used by the Pyrrhonists seem to be available at the end of the fifth century, yet Skepticism – at least according to the ancient accounts – begins only with Pyrrho, at the end of the fourth century? I think that a look at the similarities and differences between the Sophists and Skeptics can help one better to understand the role of the skeptical movement in the larger framework of Greek epistemology in general.

A collection of this kind would hardly make sense were it not for the remarkable revival of interest in Hellenistic philosophy inaugurated by the two conferences at Chantilly (1976) and Oxford (1978).