ElenchosPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1515/elen-2020-0016
Maeve Lentricchia
{"title":"Our Atoms, Ourselves: Lucretius on the Psychology of Personal Identity (DRN 3.843–864)","authors":"Maeve Lentricchia","doi":"10.1515/elen-2020-0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/elen-2020-0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In Epicurean cosmology, material reconstitution, or palingenesis (παλιγγενεσία) is the necessary consequence of the infinity of time and the eternity of atoms. I examine Lucretius’ treatment of this phenomenon (DRN 3.843–864) and consider the extent to which his view enables us to develop an Epicurean response to the question: what makes a person at two different times one and the same person? I offer a reading of this passage in the light of modern accounts of persistence and identity, and what Lucretius states in Books 3 and 4 about memory and the soul’s motions. Guided by the metaphysical implications of this analysis, I determine the type of relation which, according to Lucretius, holds between the mental and the physical.","PeriodicalId":38726,"journal":{"name":"Elenchos","volume":"41 1","pages":"297 - 328"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/elen-2020-0016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49555001","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ElenchosPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1515/elen-2020-0020
L. Perilli
{"title":"Interconnectedness. The Living World of the Early Greek Philosophers","authors":"L. Perilli","doi":"10.1515/elen-2020-0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/elen-2020-0020","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38726,"journal":{"name":"Elenchos","volume":"41 1","pages":"385 - 391"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/elen-2020-0020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45897981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ElenchosPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1515/elen-2020-0015
Jordi Pià-Comella
{"title":"Un tournant majeur de l'acculturation du cynisme à Rome : le De philosophia de Varron","authors":"Jordi Pià-Comella","doi":"10.1515/elen-2020-0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/elen-2020-0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In his De philosophia, Varro lists 288 philosophical schools on the highest good before presenting Antiochus’s doctrine as the only true one. One of the particularities of his moral doxography consists in including cynicism which has never been mentioned in the previous moral sources. This paper therefore aims to show that the De philosophia represents a major turning point for the Roman reflection on cynicism. First, Varro defines cynicism as a simple way of life (habitus) and not a doctrine (ratio) so that it could be adopted by all other philosophies. In fact, by ‘reducing’ cynicism to a way of life Varro makes it compatible with his conception of the highest good based on social duties. In that respect, his position on cynicism is opposite to Cicero’s who, in his De officiis, considers cynicism as a dangerous philosophy for Roman values. Finally, Varro uses cynicism as a conceptual tool for thinking, in philosophical terms, one of the most important issues that run through all his work: the relationship between happiness and Ancient Roman simplicity, especially in the context of Roman decadency. For instance, in Varro’s Menippean Satires, Cynics’s destitution partly reminds of the Ancient Romans’ austerity. Therefore, by mentioning cynicism in his moral doxography, Varro gives an original and Roman treatment of the Antiochian inquiry into the concept highest good.","PeriodicalId":38726,"journal":{"name":"Elenchos","volume":"41 1","pages":"269 - 296"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/elen-2020-0015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43460714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ElenchosPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1515/elen-2020-0017
R. Eichorn
{"title":"The Elusive Third Way: The Pyrrhonian Illumination in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty","authors":"R. Eichorn","doi":"10.1515/elen-2020-0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/elen-2020-0017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract I argue in this paper that, like the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, Wittgenstein’s response to negative–dogmatic skepticism in On Certainty turns on the attempt to free us from the demands of traditional philosophy and is therefore not a philosophical position, strictly speaking. Rather, it is a therapeutic metaphilosophy designed to bring into view (i.e., to illumine) the relationship between our everyday epistemic practices and those of philosophy such that we simultaneously come to recognize (a) what I call the pragmatic–transcendental self–standingness of the everyday and (b) its philosophical–rational groundlessness. The Pyrrhonian illumination of the everyday is therapeutic in that it aims to purify our metadoxastic attitudes of dogmatism.","PeriodicalId":38726,"journal":{"name":"Elenchos","volume":"41 1","pages":"329 - 362"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/elen-2020-0017","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47722996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ElenchosPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1515/elen-2020-0013
Dora Suárez
{"title":"Rhetoric beyond Arguments: Thinking about the Role of Fictional Audiences in Plato’s Gorgias","authors":"Dora Suárez","doi":"10.1515/elen-2020-0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/elen-2020-0013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this piece, I propose a reading of Plato’s Gorgias that pays special attention to the role that the fictional audience plays in the unfolding of the dialogue. To this end, I use some of the insights that Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts–Tyteca conveyed in their seminal work, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation in order to argue that thinking about the way in which Socrates’ arguments are shaped by the different audiences that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles aim to address and represent provides us with a new hermeneutical understanding of what is at stake in each of the different interactions Socrates engages in throughout the dialogue. In unpacking the way in which Socrates appropriates Gorgias’ particular audience, transforms Polus’ universal audience, and challenges Callicles’ elite audience, I provide an outline of the difficulties that Plato’s Socrates has to overcome in order to achieve the ‘community of minds’ that Perelman and Olbrechts–Tyteca identify as the bedrock of fruitful argumentation. Having done this, in the last section I turn to Plato’s Phaedrus, for the purpose of making evident that thinking about Plato’s deployment of rhetorical audiences is a crucial step in the effort to expose the implicit continuity that links the discussion of rhetoric delivered by the Gorgias to that of the Phaedrus.","PeriodicalId":38726,"journal":{"name":"Elenchos","volume":"41 1","pages":"217 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/elen-2020-0013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43597531","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ElenchosPub Date : 2020-12-01DOI: 10.1515/elen-2020-0021
J. Wildberger
{"title":"Von Pflanzen und Pflichten: Zum naturalistischen Ursprung des stoischen kathēkon","authors":"J. Wildberger","doi":"10.1515/elen-2020-0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/elen-2020-0021","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38726,"journal":{"name":"Elenchos","volume":"41 1","pages":"393 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/elen-2020-0021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45295455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ElenchosPub Date : 2020-11-25DOI: 10.1515/ELEN-2020-0010
Stefano Maso
{"title":"S. Maso, rec. Hermann Weidemann. 2019. M. Tullius Cicero. Über das Schicksal/De fato, Lateinisch–deutsch, herausgegeben, übersetzt und erläutert von H. W., Sammlung Tusculum, Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter. Pp. 379. ISBN: 9783110471182.","authors":"Stefano Maso","doi":"10.1515/ELEN-2020-0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/ELEN-2020-0010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38726,"journal":{"name":"Elenchos","volume":"41 1","pages":"195-200"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1515/ELEN-2020-0010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67253959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}