Ancient Ethics

Among Galen’s most deeply held philosophical tenets is his commitment to a particularly robust form of tripartite Platonic psychology. In particular, he argues across a number of works that the non-rational parts of the soul, appetite and spirit, play an ineliminable and valuable role in adult human motivation, over and beyond reason. At the same time, he is also quite emphatic that we ought to free ourselves as far as possible from the emotions.

In the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian’s success in forming the “good man skilled in speaking” (vir bonus dicendi peritus, 12.1.1) depends on his ability to bridge the gap between the idealistic education he outlines and the moral commitment of his readers. In the provocative 1993 essay “The ‘Q’ Question,” Richard Lanham hints that Quintilian’s insistence on the perfect orator’s goodness is naïve and question-begging, unable in itself to ensure the goodness of the orator through education (155).

Can philia stretch to include an entire polity? Commentators have wondered whether political friendship involves emotion. For example, EN IX.6 seems more cognitive than affective, equating “the civic sense” of friendship with likemindedness (homonoia; 1167b3). The latter is a “feature of friendship,” and another, related feature, goodwill, is “definitely not friendship” (1166b30). Might civic friendship, too, lack something essential to friendship?

The study of Antiochus of Ascalon by historians of philosophy has, in recent years (cf. Sedley 2012), progressed to the point that critics are beginning to take a closer look at the philosophy of Varro, a known supporter of Antiochus (cf. Blank 2012 and the panel, “Varro the Philosopher” organized by Grant Nelsestuen and Sidney Horky at the 2019 SCS Meeting). This paper seeks to advance our understanding of another Roman Antiochean, M.

The problem of compatibility or incompatibility between the possibility of meaningful deliberation and necessitarianism (the view that everything happens of necessity) has long been a topic of discussion, and it is well known that Aristotle is concerned with the problem in De Interpretatione 9. He thinks that if everything happens of necessity (18b30-31), then ‘there would be no need to deliberate or to take trouble, thinking that if we do this, this will happen, but if we do not, it will not’ (18b31-33).