The Epistemology Of The Cyrenaic School

The Cyrenaic school was a fourth-century BC philosophical movement, related both to the Socratic tradition and to Greek Scepticism. In ethics, Cyrenaic hedonism can be seen as one of many attempts made by the associates of Socrates and their followers to endorse his ethical outlook and to explore the implications of his method. In epistemology, there are close philosophical links between the Cyrenaics and the Sceptics, both Pyrrhonists and Academics. There are further links with modern philosophy as well, for the Cyrenaics introduced a form of subjectivism which in some ways preannounces Cartesian views, endorsed by Malebranche and Hume and developed by Kant. This 1998 book reconstructs Cyrenaic epistemology, explains how it depends on Cyrenaic hedonism, locates it in the context of ancient debates, and discusses its connections with modern and contemporary epistemological positions.

The Cyrenaic school was a fourth-century BC philosophical movement, related both to the Socratic tradition and to Greek Scepticism. In ethics, Cyrenaic hedonism can be seen as one of many attempts made by the associates of Socrates and their followers to endorse his ethical outlook and to explore the implications of his method. In epistemology, there are close philosophical links between the Cyrenaics and the Sceptics, both Pyrrhonists and Academics. There are further links with modern philosophy as well, for the Cyrenaics introduced a form of subjectivism which in some ways preannounces Cartesian views, endorsed by Malebranche and Hume and developed by Kant. This 1998 book reconstructs Cyrenaic epistemology, explains how it depends on Cyrenaic hedonism, locates it in the context of ancient debates, and discusses its connections with modern and contemporary epistemological positions.

The Cyrenaic school of philosophy (named after its founder Aristippus' native city of Cyrene in North Africa) flourished in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and whose importance was much recognized in ancient times. Ugo Zilioli's book provides the first book-length introduction to the school in English. This book begins by introducing the main figures of the Cyrenaic school beginning with Aristippus and by setting them into their historical context. Once the reader is familiar with those figures and with the genealogy of the school, the book offers an overview of ancient and modern interpretations of the Cyrenaics, to provide readers with alternative accounts of the doctrines they endorsed and of the role they played in the context of ancient thought. Finally, this book offers a reconstruction of Cyrenaic philosophy and shows how the ethical side of their speculation connected with the epistemology and ontology they endorsed and that, as a result, the Cyrenaics were able to offer a quite sophisticated philosophy. Indeed, Zilioli demonstrates that they represented, in ancient philosophy, an important and original metaphysical position and alternative to the kind of realism endorsed by Plato and Aristotle.

According to Xenophon, Socrates tried to persuade his associate Aristippus to moderate his excessive indulgence in wine, women, and food, arguing that only hard work can bring happiness. Aristippus wasn't convinced. Instead, he and his followers espoused the most radical form of hedonism in ancient Western philosophy. Before the rise of the better known but comparatively ascetic Epicureans, the Cyrenaics pursued a way of life in which moments of pleasure, particularly bodily pleasure, held the highest value. In The Birth of Hedonism, Kurt Lampe provides the most comprehensive account in any language of Cyrenaic ideas and behavior, revolutionizing the understanding of this neglected but important school of philosophy. The Birth of Hedonism thoroughly and sympathetically reconstructs the doctrines and practices of the Cyrenaics, who were active between the fourth and third centuries BCE. The book examines not only Aristippus and the mainstream Cyrenaics, but also Hegesias, Anniceris, and Theodorus. Contrary to recent scholarship, the book shows that the Cyrenaics, despite giving primary value to discrete pleasurable experiences, accepted the dominant Greek philosophical belief that life-long happiness and the virtues that sustain it are the principal concerns of ethics. The book also offers the first in-depth effort to understand Theodorus's atheism and Hegesias's pessimism, both of which are extremely unusual in ancient Greek philosophy and which raise the interesting question of hedonism's relationship to pessimism and atheism. Finally, the book explores the "new Cyrenaicism" of the nineteenth-century writer and classicist Walter Pater, who drew out the enduring philosophical interest of Cyrenaic hedonism more than any other modern thinker.

In the two golden centuries that followed the death of Socrates, ancient philosophy underwent a tremendous transformation that culminated in the philosophical systematizations of Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools. Fundamental figures other than Plato were active after the death of Socrates; his immediate pupils, the Socratics, took over his legacy and developed it in a variety of ways. This rich philosophical territory has however been left largely underexplored in the scholarship. This collection of eleven previously unpublished essays by leading scholars fills a gap in the literature, providing new insight into the ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology as developed by key figures of the Socratic schools. Analyzing the important contributions that the Socratics and their heirs have offered ancient philosophical thought, as well as the impact these contributions had on philosophy as a discipline, this book will appeal to researchers and scholars of Classical Studies, as well as Philosophy and Ancient History.

This book demonstrates that we need not choose between seeing so-called Presocratic thinkers as rational philosophers or as religious sages. In particular, it rethinks fundamentally the emergence of systematic epistemology and reflection on speculative inquiry in Hesiod, Xenophanes and Parmenides. Shaul Tor argues that different forms of reasoning, and different models of divine disclosure, play equally integral, harmonious and mutually illuminating roles in early Greek epistemology. Throughout, the book relates these thinkers to their religious, literary and historical surroundings. It is thus also, and inseparably, a study of poetic inspiration, divination, mystery initiation, metempsychosis and other early Greek attitudes to the relations and interactions between mortal and divine. The engagements of early philosophers with such religious attitudes present us with complex combinations of criticisms and creative appropriations. Indeed, the early milestones of philosophical epistemology studied here themselves reflect an essentially theological enterprise and, as such, one aspect of Greek religion.

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. Villa sets out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century. Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss. Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Focusing primarily on Plato, Aristotle, and the Pyrrhonian skeptics, Fine discusses the following questions, among others: does Socrates, in the Apology, claim to know that he knows nothing? How do Plato and Aristotle conceive of doxa and epistêmê? Are doxa and epistêmê belief and knowledge as we conceive of them nowadays? Do Plato and Aristotle allow us to have doxa of everything about which we can have epistêmê? How does Plato conceive of perception in the Phaedo and in Theaetetus 184-6? How should we understand his theory of recollection in the Phaedo? Do the Pyrrhonian skeptics disavow all beliefs? Do they have a conception of purely subjective experience? Do they take anything to be subjective? Are they external world skeptics? How do their views of subjectivity and skepticism compare with Descartes'? Taken as a whole, the essays explain why ancient epistemology is instructive and illuminating for us today.