Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind is an elegant survey of Stoic and Epicurean ideas about the soul--an introduction to two ancient schools whose belief in the soul's physicality offer compelling parallels to modern approaches in the philosophy of mind. Annas incorporates recent thinking on Hellenistic philosophy of mind so lucidly and authoritatively that specialists and nonspecialists alike will find her book rewarding. In part, the Hellenistic epoch was a "scientific" period that broke with tradition in ways that have an affinity with the modern shift from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the present day. Hellenistic philosophy of the soul, Annas argues, is in fact a philosophy of mind, especially in the treatment of such topics as perception, thought, and action.

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Hellenistic philosophy of mind

Marsilio Ficino completed the third part of his De vita libri tres, titled De vita coelitus comparanda, in July of 1489; by the fall of that year he felt obliged to write an Apologia on behalf of his new book. Though it was destined to be the most popular of his original works, this analysis and defense of astrological magic and medicine caused Ficino worry from the moment of its composition. The Apology shows that he was particularly anxious about the religious orthodoxy of De vita III, among whose readers he expected to find many ignorant critics and some malignant:

Scholastic philosophy and Renaissance magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Determinism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that whatever happens in the world is brought about by causes other than itself. In this sense, all the major philosophers of the seventeenth century – with the possible exception of Male-branche – were determinists. But these same philosophers also believed in human freedom. It follows that each of them (again, perhaps excepting Malebranche) was a compatibilist with respect to freedom and determination: each held that being free is logically compatible with being causally determined. Yet their specific teachings on this subject are very different from one another. For they had very different views on the nature and scope of human freedom, and different conceptions of causation. This chapter concentrates on the teachings of these major figures: Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, and Leibniz. There were, of course, other seventeenth-century thinkers who concerned themselves with freedom and determinism – this was one of the most frequently debated issues of the age. And some of these others, in opposition to the philosophers, were incompatibilists. They held that an action logically cannot both be causally determined and be free, in any proper sense of ‘free’. An incompatibilist has two options: adhere to determination and deny that anything or anyone is free (this is hard determinism) or admit free actions and claim that these are undetermined, and thereby reject the doctrine of determinism (this is libertarianism). We know of no seventeenth-century thinker who took the hard determinist position, but quite a few were libertarians.

Determinism and human freedom

Ideas and objective being

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Nero's tutor and advisor, wrote philosophical essays, some of them in the form of letters, and dramas on Greek mythological topics, which since the early Renaissance have exercised a powerful influence on the European theater. Because in his essays Seneca, in his own eclectic way, subscribes to the philosophy of the Stoic school, scholars and critics have long been asking the question whether the plays, also, could be regarded as transmitters of Stoic thought. Various answers, ranging from a categorical no to an uneasy yes, have been given. With few exceptions, the students who have concerned themselves with this question have looked for their enlightenment in Stoic psychology and Stoic ethics. In this book, Thomas G. Rosenmeyer proposes instead to look at the Stoic science of nature, of the world and human beings in the world, as a more plausible grounding for the difference between Senecan drama and its Greek predecessors. In the process of looking at what the Stoics, especially the early Stoics, had to say about the forces determining natural phenomena, the author uncovers a deeply pessimistic strain in Stoic cosmology, and an interest in physicality and environmental tension, that he finds replicated in the theater, not only of Seneca, but also of the later European tradition indebted to him.

David E. Hahm

Papers

The origins of Stoic cosmology