Ancient Philosophy Commons^™

Aristotle's Quarrel With Socrates: Friendship In Political Thought, John Boersma

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Friendship played an outsized role in ancient political thought in comparison to medieval and modern political philosophies. Most modern scholarship has paid relatively little attention to the role of friendship in ancient political philosophy. Recently, however, scholars are increasingly beginning to investigate classical conceptions of friendship. My dissertation joins this growing interest by examining the importance of friendship in the political thought of Socrates and Aristotle. Specifically, I analyze the divergent approaches that Socrates and Aristotle take to politics and trace these distinct approaches to their differing conceptions of friendship. Through an examination of two Platonic dialogues—the Lysis and the …

Epicurus, Sententia Vaticana Xxiii, Eric A. Brown

Eric A. Brown

Sententia Vaticana 23, as usually emended, says that every friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake. I argue that this sentence should not be attributed to Epicurus. No other evidence supports the attribution of this view to Epicurus, and much other evidence counts strongly against it. It would be better to reject the emendation, so that the sentence says, in somewhat awkward but not entirely unprecedented Greek, that every friendship is by itself a virtue, or to attribute the emended sentence not to Epicurus but to the later, more timid Epicureans who, according to Cicero, conceded more value to friendship …

The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics And The Discourse Of Friendship In The Faerie Queene, Steven Swarbrick

Publications and Research

From Michel de Montainge’s essay “Of Friendship” to Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of the former in The Politics of Friendship, scholars both early modern and modern have sought ways to address the fluid co-mixture of bodies from which the discourse of friendship can and does emerge. More recently still, new materialist thinkers of ontology have begun to shift our attention to the ways both human and nonhuman bodies inter-animate in the making of political, interpersonal, and artistic life worlds. Together with these investigations, I argue that an aquacentric account of relation is necessary to think the subject of friendship …

Justice As Self-Transmitting Power And Just Acts In Republic 4, Andrew Payne

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

In his influential paper “A Fallacy in Plato’s Republic,” David Sachs charged Plato with committing a fallacy of irrelevancy. Plato’s Socrates is asked to show that justice understood as acting in conformity with conventional morality, so-called vulgar justice, is beneficial to the just person. Socrates actually demonstrates something else, namely that psychic justice, a state of internal harmony between parts of the soul, is beneficial to its possessor. A generation of Plato scholarship has reacted to Sachs’ reading of the Republic by using discussions of moral psychology and education elsewhere in the dialogue to bridge the gap between psychic justice …

What Aristotle Should Have Said About Megalopsychia, May Sim

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Megalopsychia (the greatness of soul) also translated as pride, or magnanimity, is a virtue Aristotle attributes to the good person regarding his claim to be worthy of great things, namely, honor. Despite this definition, commentators like C. Rowe, H. Curzer, R. Polansky and J. Stover, all chose to de-emphasize the centrality of honor in Aristotle’s definition of megalopsychia. Aristotle’s assertion that honor is the greatest external good also seems to be in tension with megalopsychia as a virtue that is to be pursued for its own sake, not to mention its tension with his remark that friendship is the greatest …

Aristotle And Theophrastus On The Emotions, William W. Fortenbaugh

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Fortenbaugh here revisits his 1975 study, Aristotle on Emotion, incorporating the contributions of Theophrastus to the Peripatetic synthesis of analyses of the emotions. He modifies earlier views, adding new analyses and illustrative material, replying to criticisms of his positions.

A.P.

Epicurus, Sententia Vaticana Xxiii, Eric A. Brown

The Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter

Sententia Vaticana 23, as usually emended, says that every friendship is choiceworthy for its own sake. I argue that this sentence should not be attributed to Epicurus. No other evidence supports the attribution of this view to Epicurus, and much other evidence counts strongly against it. It would be better to reject the emendation, so that the sentence says, in somewhat awkward but not entirely unprecedented Greek, that every friendship is by itself a virtue, or to attribute the emended sentence not to Epicurus but to the later, more timid Epicureans who, according to Cicero, conceded more value to friendship …