Philosophy

This paper reconsiders what the New Academy take themselves to be doing when they offer sceptical interpretations of Plato. The New Academy had several arguments that Plato was a sceptic (Cic. Luc. 74, Cic. Ac. 1.46; anon. ad Tht. 150c4-7; SE PH 1.222-23; anon. Proleg. 10-11), but we cannot judge from these arguments alone their interpretive ends. We may distinguish between interpretations about authors that have historical ends—which aim to discover what is true about the author (e.g. Why did the author write?

What little evidence remains about so-called indefinite propositions in Stoic semantics appears to be contradictory. The Stoics distinguished between three main kinds of affirmative propositions (axiōmata): definite, indefinite and middle (SE M VIII.96-7; DL VII.70).

1.

It is well known that teleological notions play important roles in Aristotle’s physics as well as in his ethics. In this paper, I consider how Aristotle employs ‘ἕνεκά του’ and ‘οὗ ἕνεκα’ in passages on chance from the Physics, and in passages on ignorance in action from the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics. In doing so, I seek to clarify that Aristotle’s uses of the two terms in the Physics and in the Ethics are in harmony with each other, but not in the way previously thought.

2.

In Book III of the Tusculanes (31.11-14), Cicero mentions an otherwise unknown Cyrenaic exercise. The Cyrenaic school of hedonism recommends to pre-rehearse future evils, i.e. to anticipate all the blows of fate in order to prevent the grief that an unexpected misfortune would cause. It is difficult, from the few fragments and testimonia that have come down to us, to understand how such a technique falls in line with Cyrenaic hedonism.