Knowledge and virtue in early Stoicism

143 Pages·2015·3.59 MB·English

by  Håvard Løkke (auth.)

Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind 10
Håvard Løkke
Knowledge and
virtue in early
Stoicism
Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind
Volume 10
Series Editors
Henrik Lagerlund, The University of Western Ontario, Canada
Mikko Yrjönsuuri, Academy of Finland and University of Jyväskylä, Finland
Board of Consulting Editors
Lilli Alanen, Uppsala University, Sweden
Joël Biard, University of Tours, France
Michael Della Rocca, Yale University, U.S.A.
Eyjólfur Emilsson, University of Oslo, Norway
André Gombay, University of Toronto, Canada
Patricia Kitcher, Columbia University, U.S.A.
Simo Knuuttila, University of Helsinki, Finland
Béatrice M. Longuenesse, New York University, U.S.A.
Calvin Normore, University of California, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
More information about this series at h ttp://www.springer.com/series/6539
Håvard Løkke
Knowledge and virtue
in early Stoicism
Håvard Løkke
University of Agder
Kristiansand , Norway
Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind
ISBN 978-94-007-2152-4 ISBN 978-94-007-2153-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2153-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952638
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Pref ace
I have tried to write a book for scholars and advanced students in ancient philosophy
who already know something about Stoic epistemology but would like to know
more. Experts in Stoic philosophy will fi nd that important issues are treated too
superfi cially, while readers with no knowledge of Stoic epistemology will fi nd that
too much time is spent on preliminaries. Both are right in a sense, but then the book
is not intended for either of them. I have not written for fellow Stoic experts simply
because there are still too few of them around. On the other hand, if I had gone
straight to the gist of Stoic epistemology, the book would have had little new to
offer, since there are already some excellent brief introductions available. There is
plenty of room between the novice and the specialist, however, and it is this inter-
mediate level I have aimed at. I could have delved much deeper into most of the
issues I raise but only at the cost of making the book much longer and therefore less
useful for my intended reader.
Some of the material in the book is more than 10 years old, but most of it is much
newer. Chapters 2 , 3 and 4 still contain some traces of my D. Phil. thesis, submitted
in 2004, but all this material has been rewritten. Shortly after submitting the thesis I
also realized that I should have been more careful about which views are of early
Stoic origin and which are not, and so I started working on the early and later devel-
opments of Stoic epistemology, material that ended up in Chaps. 1 and 6 , respec-
tively. Three or four years later, when I decided to write a book, I realized that it
would be a good thing if I could say something about what we now call moral
knowledge. So I started working on the material that now makes up Chap. 5 , where
I address that issue, albeit in very rough outline. The book is therefore a collection
of materials that I have worked on at different periods over a decade or more, but
everything in it has been written or rewritten over the last 2–3 years.
S ome of the material in Chaps. 2 and 4 has been published elsewhere: Sect. 1 of
Chap. 2 builds on ‘The Active Principle in Stoic Philosophy’ in J. Pietarinen and
V. Viljanen (eds.), T he World as Active Power (Brill, 2009); Sect. 2 of the same
chapter builds on ‘The Stoics on Sense Perception’ in S. Knuuttila and P. Kärkkäinen
v
vi Preface
(eds.), T heories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Springer,
2008); and Sects. 3 and 4 of Chap. 4 are based on ‘Mistakes in early Stoicism’ in
Ancient Philosophy 27 (2007). I have also been fortunate enough to be allowed to
present many sections of the different parts of this book at reading groups and con-
ferences, and I am very grateful to many people who have listened patiently and
come up with useful suggestions in Oxford and Oslo, Uppsala and Helsinki,
Sorbonne and Sicily, Athens and Rome.
My work has been funded mainly by scholarships from the University of Oslo,
fi rst by a doctorate from Antikkprogrammet, then by a postdoctorate from
Etikkprogrammet. I am grateful to both institutions, and especially to Øivind
Andersen and Grethe Netland. I am also grateful to the History of Mind group at
Helsingfors Universitet and to the Leslie Center at Dartmouth College for grants
that enabled me to start turning my thesis manuscript into a book. I have worked
alone but received much support from many people. My main academic debts are to
my Oslo tutor Eyjólfur Kjalar Emilsson and my Oxford tutors Susanne Bobzien and
Michael Frede. It will be obvious to many readers how much I owe to Frede and his
work on Stoic philosophy. More recently, Margaret Graver and her work on Stoicism
has become an important source of inspiration. I also thank David Sedley for his
written comments on the original thesis and Jean-Baptiste Gourinat for two sets of
comments on the book manuscript. Thanks also to my new colleagues at the
University of Agder, especially Henny Fiskå Hägg and Ralph Henk Vaags, for their
generosity and interest. I am also very grateful for many enjoyable discussions over
the years with David Bloch, Panos Dimas, Sten Ebbesen, Hallvard Fossheim, Tomas
Ekenberg, Christel Fricke, Gösta Grönroos, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Simo Knuuttila,
Mika Pärälä, Øyvind Rabbås, Svavar Hrafn Svavarsson and Miira Tuominen.
T hanks to Arild, Michael and Morten for being my friends, to Ollie for improv-
ing my English and to my parents, Eivind and Rønnaug, for helping me out on many
occasions. I am deeply grateful to my ex-wife, Hæge. Without her support, the book
would never have been written. In October 2013, when the book was fi nished, I met
Maria. In our life together I fi nd the courage and self-confi dence to publish it. I dedi-
cate the book to my three children – Olav, Agnes and Elias.
Contents
1 From Zeno to Chrysippus ........................................................................ 1
1.1 Two Forerunners: Socrates and Aristotle ........................................... 2
1.2 Two Contemporaries: Epicurus and Arcesilaus ................................. 8
1.3 The Sources of Normativity: φύσις and λόγος .................................. 13
2 Nurtured by Nature .................................................................................. 19
2.1 World and Mind ................................................................................. 20
2.2 Sense-Perceptions as Physical Events ................................................ 26
2.3 Memory and Experience .................................................................... 31
2.4 Reason: Its Constitution and Purpose ................................................ 36
3 Our Thoughts and Their Objects ............................................................ 43
3.1 Sayables: Their Nature and Kinds ...................................................... 43
3.2 Sense-Perceptions as Thoughts .......................................................... 48
3.3 Conceptions: Their Origins and Kinds ............................................... 51
3.4 Mere Concepts and Defi nitions .......................................................... 57
3.5 Arguments and the Unclear ................................................................ 61
4 Knowledge and Mistakes .......................................................................... 67
4.1 The Cognitive Impression as the Criterion of Truth .......................... 68
4.2 Sense-Perceptions, Preconceptions and Arguments ........................... 71
4.3 Mistakes: Their Nature and Kinds ..................................................... 79
4.4 The Main Worry: Emotions ................................................................ 83
5 Our Progress Towards Virtue .................................................................. 89
5.1 The Three Main Properties of Our Minds .......................................... 89
5.2 The Need for Philosophy ................................................................... 94
5.3 The Importance of Commitments ...................................................... 102
5.4 The Art of Living................................................................................ 105
vii
viii Contents
6 From Carneades to Cicero ....................................................................... 113
6.1 Carneades’ Critique and Two Stoic Responses .................................. 114
6.2 ‘The Younger Stoics’ in Sextus and ‘Lucullus’ in Cicero................... 119
6.3 Conservative Stoics, Among Them Antipater? .................................. 124
Bibliography .................................................................................................... 129
Introduc tion
This book is about an epistemological theory that was developed in the Stoic school
during the third century BC. The gist of this theory is the contention that we can
come to know all that we need to know in order to live good lives because we can
rely on the way things normally appear to us. We can characterize this theory as
commonsense realism or even naïve realism, as long as we bear in mind that the
early Stoics defended their contention with a precise defi nition of the kind of
impressions we are entitled to rely on. They also expanded on this defi nition with a
number of sophisticated arguments and examples. Moreover, epistemology is very
much a crossover subject in early Stoicism: on the one hand, it is backed up by
metaphysical and logical theories; on the other hand, it has bearings on several ethi-
cal issues, including the Stoic theory of emotions, which was famous already in
antiquity. It is therefore not so surprising that the epistemological theory of the early
Stoics proved to be very infl uential, both at the time and at later stages in the history
of European philosophy, especially in the early modern period. I am not going to
say anything here about these later stages, however.
I n this introduction I shall just very briefl y try to convey a sense of how the book
is organized and what I am hoping to achieve in it. As I see it, the book consists of
three layers, catering to three scholarly interests: an interest in epistemology, an
interest in Stoicism and an interest in the history of philosophy. The fi rst-mentioned
interest is mainly catered for in Chap. 4 , where I discuss the early Stoics’ views and
arguments on how we must think about things in order to acquire knowledge and
avoid mistakes. My interpretations in this chapter are mainly conservative. Thus,
Chap. 4 can serve as an introduction to Stoic epistemology for readers coming from
modern epistemology, preferably with Chap. 1 as a preface.
However, it is only fair to warn the reader that you will not be able to fully under-
stand Stoic epistemology without understanding Stoicism. In particular, you need to
understand that, as the Stoics saw it, human beings are at home in a rationally gov-
erned world and have a unique role to play in it, as rational animals. Many ancient
philosophers saw things differently: for instance, Platonists denied that we are at
home in this world, and Epicureans denied that we have a unique role to play in it.
However, I believe that in order to understand Stoic epistemology, we must try to
ix