Adam Smith & His Sources: The Evil of Independence

M.Lee (ed) Strategies of Argument: Essays in Ancient Ethics, Epistemology, and Logic, 2014

ABSTRACT: Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Organon are valuable sources for both Stoic and early Peripatetic logic, and have often been used as such – in particular for early Peripatetic hypothetical syllogistic and Stoic propositional logic. By contrast, this paper explores the role Alexander himself played in the development and transmission of those theories. There are three areas in particular where he seems to have made a difference: First, he drew a connection between certain passages from Aristotle’s Topics and Prior Analytics and the Stoic indemonstrable arguments, and, based on this connection, appropriated at least four kinds of Stoic indemonstrables as Aristotelian. Second, he developed and made use of a specifically Peripatetic terminology in which to describe and discuss those arguments – which facilitated the integration of the indemonstrables into Peripatetic logic. Third, he made some progress towards a solution to the problem of what place and interpretation the Stoic third indemonstrables should be given in a Peripatetic and Platonist setting. Overall, the picture emerges that Alexander persistently (if not always consistently) presented passages from Aristotle’s logical œuvre in a light that makes it appear as if Aristotle was in the possession of a Peripatetic correlate to the Stoic theory of indemonstrables.

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 2003

The latest entry in the long-running series of Companions will hopefully raise the profile of Stoicism in philosophical curricula-hope, however, being a sentiment condemned by the Stoics. i There is not a single area of philosophical reflection which could not be advanced by an intensive reexamination of Stoic positions and polemics. The school's long duration in diverse habitats, moulded by a succession of powerful intellects with differing facilities and preoccupations, represented by a panoply of sources none of which, however, constitutes an adequate presentation of the Stoic project, has the curious effect of bringing into the foreground the ideas which united the school. As a result it is the systematicity of Stoic thought that strikes one every time it is presented, despite the diversity of projects to which the appropriation of Stoic thought has lent itself, and despite the fact that it is, for us, a philosophy in fragments. It is due to this essential integrity of the Stoic project that the fragments have been sufficient to prompt time and again revivals of the project begun, according to Diogenes Laertius, by the fortuitous shipwreck near Athens in the late 4th century BCE of a wry-necked Cypriot, "lean, fairly tall, and swarthy," with "thick legs," who was "flabby and delicate" and "fond of eating green figs and of basking in the sun," (DL VII. 1). His name was Zeno, and the school that he founded was named for the painted colonnade or stoa of Pisianax, in which "he used to discourse, pacing up and down" (ibid, 5). Beginning in some sense as an outgrowth of Cynicism (Zeno's earliest teacher Crates was a Cynic), the school grew into one of the most ambitious and comprehensive philosophical programs in antiquity. Universality and systematicity were goals of the school right from the start, as can already be seen from Zeno's famous definition of the telos: "Living in agreement/consistently [homologoumenôs]," (Stobaeus II 75). This agreement or consistency had as its condition of possibility the absolute immanence of the ideal in the world, which in turn demanded of humans the recognition at every moment and in every field of endeavor of its absolute sovereignty. Thus, although it may seem to us hopelessly naïve that the Stoics should have sought to answer questions which plainly called for empirical inquiry by syllogisms instead, their total faith in the methods of formal reasoning was simply the obverse of their evacuation of the Platonic universal. Having brought the intelligible down to earth, there could no longer be any question of allowing the particular to slip out from under its determination. We see this reflected as much in their epistemology, where they affirm the identity of indiscernibles, making of each individual an infima species, as in their ethics, where the individual is expected, as the final stage in their natural development, to take up a cosmological, indeed, in some sense, a cosmogonic perspective on their own life. The Stoics reached out to incorporate as much of the legacy of their philosophical forebears as could be harmonized with the principal intuitions of the school, in accord, seemingly, with the no-doubt-initially-unpromising oracle received by Zeno advising him to "take on the colors of the dead," which he took to mean "study ancient authors" (DL VII 2). Particularly interesting-and receiving insufficient attention in the Companion, I would say-is the Stoic appropriation of Heraclitus, surely beginning with Zeno, but documented for, and becoming pervasive under, his successor Cleanthes. David Sedley's fine opening historical piece, "The School, from Zeno to Arius Didymus," provides inter alia an elegant account of the school's integration of Platonism i This condemnation has interesting consequences in Stoic thought. It seems as if the tendency in Marcus Aurelius (e.g. at Meditations X 6) to suspend his properly Stoic belief in the providential ordering of the universe (what Gill in the Companion calls the "providence or atoms" theme (p. 50)) may derive from such considerations. And Simplicius-for his own reasons, of course-takes Epictetus this way when he explains that Epictetus' speeches "render the people who believe them and put them into practice blessed and happy without the need to be promised the rewards of virtue after death-even if these rewards always do follow too" (H194, trans. C. Brittain and T. Brennan); a sort of inverted Pascal's wager. beginning in the mid second century BCE. We are accustomed to thinking of Stoicism as the minor element in any such synthesis, but Dio Chrysostum, the Stoicizing sophist of the Imperial era (c. 40-c. 110 CE), has the semi-Scythian Greek colonists he encounters in the Crimaea characterize Stoicism as "this more precise philosophy," compared to the Plato they know (DC 36. 26). And for the Romans of the late Republic and early Empire, of course, Stoicism represented Greek philosophy in the truest sense. Christopher Gill's chapter, "The School in the Roman Imperial Period," argues effectively for the continued creativity of the school in its transplanted home. In Cicero's Academica-in which we are privileged to witness the process of coining the Latin translations of Greek philosophical concepts which are so familiar to us today (e.g., qualitas for poiotês at I 6)-the views of the Platonic Academy itself are represented by the heavily Stoicizing Antiochus. There is a paradox to be noted here, perhaps, concerning the difference between a living tradition of philosophical argumentation as opposed to a scholastic interpretation of texts: the former may bear fewer evident characteristics of its filiation, while the very intensive textuality of the latter may indicate that it no longer possesses an unbroken connection to the circumstances in which its core texts were generated. The last heirs of Plato's Academy in antiquity would continue to draw productively upon the Stoic legacy, long after the Stoics had ceased to exist as a living school of thought: the 6th century CE Platonist Simplicius, who was among the philosophers emigrating temporarily to the court of the Persian King Khosroës, writes a long commentary on the Encheiridion of Epictetus. In addition to their attempt to incorporate the best from the other philosophical schools, the Stoics did not hesitate to intervene, to accumulate interests and stake claims, so to speak, within the most diverse sectors of intellectual life, expanding from their firm base of "prior commitments," as Michael J. White terms them in the Companion (p. 127), ii into new intellectual territories, albeit not always with felicitous ii Citations of page number alone will refer to pages of the Companion.

This article challenges John M. Cooper's reading of ancient Stoicism as a way of life, one which sets its back against Pierre Hadot's notion that Stoicism (or the other ancient schools, excepting Epicureanism) could have philosophically advocated regimens of non-cognitive practices of the kind documented by Hadot. Part I examines Arrian's Discourses, following A.A. Long in seeing in this text Arian's portrait of Epictetus as a philosophical persona: one bringing together the different virtues of Socrates, Diogenes, and Zeno. Part II then examines Epictetus's Handbook (Encheiridion), seeing in this text-in contrast to Hadot and Sellars-a distinct set of prescriptions for the kinds of existential practices the Roman Stoics advocated, not in place of philosophical argumentation, but as a means to habituate aspirants' conduct to ways of thinking, desiring and acting harmonious with their philosophical conclusions.

2012

The Stoic philosopher Chrysippus wrote extensively on the liar paradox, but unfortunately the extant testimony on his response to the paradox is meager and mainly hostile. Modern scholars, beginning with Alexander Rüstow in the first decade of the twentieth century, have attempted to reconstruct Chrysippus’ solution. Rüstow argued that Chrysippus advanced a cassationist solution, that is, one in which sentences such as ‘I am speaking falsely’ do not express propositions. Two more recent scholars, Walter Cavini and Mario Mignucci, have rejected Rüstow's thesis that Chrysippus used a cassationist approach. Each has proposed his own thesis about Chrysippus’ solution. I argue that Rüstow's view is fundamentally correct, and that the cassationist thesis gains greater plausibility when viewed in light of a passage in Sextus Empiricus’ Adversus mathematicos that the previous commentators have ignored, and when understood within the broader context of Stoic logical theory and philosophy of language. I close with a brief remark on the significance of Chrysippus’ work for the modern debate on the semantic paradoxes.

Modern Economics and the Ancient World: Were the Ancients Rational Actors? Selected Papers from the Online Conference, 29–31 July 2021 Edited by Sven Günther, 2023

Abstract: This paper argues that Plato and Adam Smith represent two different modes of economic and social rationality and that Smith’s mode finds no match in ancient Stoics. This difference is part of his contribution to the constitution of modern economics. His mode of social rationality widely presupposes that people are able to behave as rational actors in both economy and ethics whereas Plato’s model requires intensive education and institutional initiation before people are qualified to act according to his particular pattern of rationality. Whereas Plato yields a hierarchic top-down organization in society, economy, politics, and psychology, Smith in both The Wealth of Nations (1776) and his ethical treatise The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), favours a horizontal and bottom-up model in economy, ethics, and psychology that is based on the individuals’ (peer-to-peer inter)action. Stoic theories such as proficients, cosmopolitanism, oikeiôsis and providence worked as ingredients and ferments to this new model that enhanced the confidence in the individuals’ fruitful cooperation. Transferring them from ethics and the cosmos to the economic system and complementing them by a model of self-regulatory interaction was Smith’s achievement.

2023

The Stoic grammatical-rhetorical system of education was interrupted about 50 BCE by the intrusion of a rational logic (logica rationalis) which challenged the place of grammar. Marshall McLuhan and Albert Einstein are called as witnesses against the

Brad Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Stoic Philosophy, pp. 85-123, 2003

ABSTRACT: An introduction to Stoic logic. Stoic logic can in many respects be regarded as a fore-runner of modern propositional logic. I discuss: 1. the Stoic notion of sayables or meanings (lekta); the Stoic assertibles (axiomata) and their similarities and differences to modern propositions; the time-dependency of their truth; 2.-3. assertibles with demonstratives and quantified assertibles and their truth-conditions; truth-functionality of negations and conjunctions; non-truth-functionality of disjunctions and conditionals; language regimentation and ‘bracketing’ devices; Stoic basic principles of propositional logic; 4. Stoic modal logic; 5. Stoic theory of arguments: two premisses requirement; validity and soundness; 6. Stoic syllogistic or theory of formally valid arguments: a reconstruction of the Stoic deductive system, which consisted of accounts of five types of indemonstrable syllogisms, which function as nullary argumental rules that identify indemonstrables or axioms of the system, and four deductive rules (themata) by which certain complex arguments can be reduced to indemonstrables and thus shown to be formally valid themselves; 7. arguments that were considered as non-syllogistically valid (subsyllogistic and unmethodically concluding arguments). Their validity was explained by recourse to formally valid arguments.

Choice Reviews Online, 2002

Bibliothèque nationale du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographie Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. rue Wellington ûttawaON K1A ON4 OnawaON K1A ON9 Canada Canada The author has granted a nonexclusive licence allowing the National Library of Canada to reproduce, loan, distribute or seU copies of this thesis in microfom, paper or electronic formats. L'auteur a accordé une licence non exclusive permettant à la Bibliothèque nationale du Canada de reproduire, prêter, distribuer ou vendre des copies de cette thèse sous la forme de microfiche/nlm, de reproduction s u. papier ou sur format électronique. The author retaim ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriété du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protège cette thèse. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la thèse ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent être imprimés reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son Thc Airiotekun Background what would nox-be considered scientific and not smïctly philosophical pursuits, and lacer even ceased to produce rnuch in writîng. The Peripatos faded; while there were Peripatetics afrer Aristotle and Theophrastus, they appear to have been relatively unimportant even in their own tirne." Pre-erninence in the fieid of logic in particular passed to the most successfid and popular of the newer schools, the Scoa. The Stoics, however, deveioped their own, distinct formal logic, inspiration for which came not so much Crom the Achenian Penpatos as from a rninor Socratic school at Megara, whose renowned logician Diodoms Cronus was a teacher of Zeno, the schooI's founder. Canonicai Stoic logic owes its essencial shape to Chrysippus, the third scholarch of the Stoa and, alongside ~s t o d e , probably the most gifted logician of antiquity. Tities of his logical treauses, as Diogenes recorded hem, number over one hundted, and range extensively over the field." Contemporary enthusiasts given to hyperbole prodaimed that the gods themselves have Chqsippus's logic if the? have logic at ail. " Anstode's work, by conuast, became obscure. Xesnnder and odier early neo-Pcripateac commentators thus began to revive Peripatetic logic in an intellectuai environment in which 'logic' generaliy meant Stoic logic. This environmenc demanded that they explicate Peripateac logic in relation to, or even in opposition to, Stoic logic, and frequent discussion and criticism of Stoic logic show that the commentators recognized and responded to such demands. Indeed, their revival of Penpateac logic in this environment touched off a contempocary debate about the relative mena of the nvo rival systems, the nature of whose precise points of contention has itself recently become a subject for debate. l 3 Because the commentators were such suong champions of Peripatetic logic, then, it is a surpnsing and difiicult source of doubt that, beginning at least with Alexander, they aiso drew on Stoic logic as a source for their presumably Peripateac hypotheticd syiiogistic. For the very circumstances that demanded that the neo-Peripacetics d e Stoic logic into account made it easy for them to take Stoic logic on board as weileither duough ignorance, mistake, or wilifd appropriationand thus to conflare MO distinct logical traditions. This conflation is whac scholars have thus far not duly considered, so that some have even unwittingiy Eollowed in it. 1 contend, in fact, that it influenced the reports of the neo-Peripateucs 10 For an extended discussion of the dedine of the Peripatos, sec Lynch, Alrirotk'r Scbool, pp. 135-62. " Diogenes, 7.189-198. " Ibid, 7.180. Diogenes a c d y wrote chat the gods would have Chrysippus's '&zh~tICi)', which indudes as an elemcnt logic in thc modern sense. " hluder, "Stoic and Peripatetic Logic"; Frede, "Stoic M. , i r i s t o t k SyIiogistic".

Grotiana, 2001

It is a risky enterprise to speak in general terms about 'Stoicism' or of something being 'Stoic'. Old, middle, late and neo-Stoics (Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, Poseidonius, Marcus Antonius, Seneca and then elements in Christian and early modern authors going up to the seventeenth century) somehow seem to merge into one indistinct stream of thought. The fragmentary nature of what we know about the ancient Stoics contributes to this. However, it is somehow unavoidable to speak in shorthand, particularly when we discuss an author from within a humanist tradition like Grotius. In this paper I focus on an issue which is considered to be typically 'Stoic'. It is the distinction in Stoic ethics between the good and the evil, and of the things which in the perspective of absolute good and evil are indifferent, such as health or sickness and wealth or poverty. This characteristic distinction is in its full details and consequences itself the object of a considerable amount of uncertainty. This is mainly due to the distinction within the category of indifferent things between certain things which are 'preferred' and other things which are to be 'rejected' (and some truly indifferent things), according to the value they have. The precise relation between 'preferred' things and 'good' things has been an object of some controversy. I To mention one source contributing to confusion, according to Diogenes Laertius (7, 103), Posidonius is supposed to have held that health and wealth are among the goods and not merely among the things which are of value. This is a most important issue, for it highlights the crucial relation between the moral good and the preferred things within the category of indifferent things. For an analysis see a.o. M. Reesor, 'The indifferents in the Old and Middel Staa', Transactions and Proceedings o/the Philological Society, 82 (1951) I02-IIO; JM. Rist, Stoir philosophy (Cambridge 1969) 1-21; LG. Kidd, 'Stoic intermediates and the end for man', in: A.A. Long, Stoic problems (London 1971) 150-172. GROTIANA (New Series) vol. zZ/z3 (Z001/zOOZ) 177-196 VAN GORCUM-p.o. box 43-4900 AA ASSEN, THE NETHERLANDS 2 On the distortion of Stoic ethics which may result from conceiving of the adiaphora as intermediate between good and evil, particularly in Cicero, see Rist, Stoic Philosophy, 97-III. Ibidem: 'Ut huic obiectoni respondeatur, sciendum est non sequi iniustum ex quavis negatione iusti etiam positis iisdem circumstantiis; quemadmodum enim non sequitur, si liberalis rex dicendus est qui alicui mille talenta dederit, ideo si non dederit, illiberal em fore, ita non est perpetuum ut id quod iuste fiat, non nisi iniuste omittatur.' 8 !d., I, II, vi, 2: 'Illud lib ens agnosco, nihil nobis in Euangelio praecipi quod non naturalem habeat honestatem: sed non ulterius nos obligari legibus Christi quam ad ea ad quae ius naturae per se obligat, cur concedam non video. Et qui aliter sentiunt mirum quam sudent ut probent quae Euangelio vetantur ipso iure naturae esse illicita, ut concubinatum, divortium, matrimonium cum pluribus feminis.'