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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ HOW THE STOICS SOLVE PLATO’S GREATEST DIFFICULTY Causality and Responsibility in Plato and the Stoics Vazquez Hernandez, Sergio Daniel Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 03. Oct. 2021 HOW THE STOICS SOLVE PLATO’S GREATEST DIFFICULTY Causality and Responsibility in Plato and the Stoics Sergio Daniel Vázquez Hernández Faculty of Philosophy King’s College London Thesis dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy 1 Abstract This thesis offers a reconstruction and analysis of a debate about responsibility, and causation initiated by Plato, and continued by the Stoics. The pivotal moment of the discussion is a problem I call ‘the greatest difficulty,’ found in Plato’s Parmenides. The debate, however, involves a complex network of arguments including subordinated or parallel discussions about ontology, method, ethics, and epistemology. Instead of isolating the main topic, I highlight the structure of the debate, and the interconnection between its parts, to show the complexity and sophistication of the argumentation in both Plato and the Stoics, and the depth of the Stoics’ engagement with Plato’s works. The motivation for doing this is to better understand many of the otherwise unexplained and odd starting points of the early Stoic philosophy. But since this requires a reconstruction of the dialectical background the Stoic texts assume, this means that the bulk of the thesis is devoted to discussing Plato. The hope is that by showing the structure of the debate in Plato’s dialogues, the connections in the Stoic fragments will show with more clarity. The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first two are dedicated to Plato’s discussion of causality and responsibility in Phaedo 95e8-105c7, and Republic 6, 506d7- 509c4. The third chapter discusses ‘the greatest difficulty’ in Parmenides 133a11-135c4 as an objection to the main arguments of the previous dialogues. In chapter four, I analyse how Plato revisits the greatest difficulty in Sophist 245e6-249d5. Finally, in chapter five, I examine surviving evidence from the early Stoics, to argue that they engaged with Plato’s ongoing debate via the Sophist, and that their views on these topics are a careful continuation of this debate. 2 Acknowledgements During my PhD I benefited from participating in KCL’s Greek seminar, Yale-KCL’s Republic workshops, the Keeling masterclasses at UCL, and the writing groups in Cambridge organised by Dr Moira Faul. I am grateful to everybody who attended these events. I also wish to thank audiences in Fordham University, King's College London, UNAM, and Oxford for their invaluable feedback on different papers which later became part of the thesis. I am especially grateful to my supervisor MM McCabe. I also want to thank my examiners David Sedley and Christopher Gill, and Raphael Woolf, Peter Adamson, Ricardo Salles, Fiona Leigh, and Tania Gergel, for all their support, insightful feedback, and discussion. Informal chats with Lesley Brown, Huge Benson, Tamsin de Waal, Brad Inwood, Charles Brittain, and Marcelo Boeri also informed some of my decisions and views. Constant discussion and feedback from other fellow students also played an important part in my research process, and I am particularly thankful to Paloma Hernández, Sarah Acton, Clayton Beaman, Dimitrios Vasilakis, Katharine O’Reilly, and Saloni de Sousa. The writing of this thesis would have not been possible without the constant support of my family and closest friends. The preparation of the final draft was possible thanks to the help of my dear in-laws, José Ángel Martínez, Rocío Muñoz, and Mariana Martínez, as well as the research facilities offered by Churchill College, Cambridge, and Oriel College, Oxford. I am especially grateful to my wife Gabriela Martínez Sainz for her friendship, moral support, intellectual acuity, and constant encouragement. To her I dedicate this thesis. *** The research for this thesis has benefited from the financial support from the National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) in the form of a doctoral studentship that partially funded my degree. 3 Word Template by Friedman & Morgan 2014 Morgan & Friedman by Template Word Table of contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 2 Table of contents ............................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1. Responsibility and causation in Phaedo 95e8-105c7 .............................. 12 1. Socrates’ last conversation ...................................................................................... 12 2. A complex storyline ............................................................................................... 14 3. Puzzlements that make you unlearn your previous views ..................................... 16 4. Nous is responsible and orders each thing in whatever way is best ....................... 21 5. Accounts that do not hold together ......................................................................... 28 5.1 Real αἰτία, and real αἴτιον ................................................................................. 28 5.2 The Titanomachia ............................................................................................. 33 5.3 The Second Voyage .......................................................................................... 34 6. The solar eclipse and why previous methods are unsafe and careless ................... 37 7. A new hope ............................................................................................................ 41 7.1 The method of hypothesis. ................................................................................ 41 7.2 Safest answers and the method of hypothesis ................................................... 43 8. Opposites, and the safe and subtle answers ............................................................ 53 8.1 Echecrates’ interruption .................................................................................... 53 8.2 Opposites ........................................................................................................... 54 8.3 A doubt about opposites, and the law of opposites ........................................... 55 8.4 Opposite bearers ................................................................................................ 56 8.5 A safe and subtle answer ................................................................................... 57 9. Progress and remaining puzzles .............................................................................. 58 CHAPTER 2. Causality, and responsibility in the Sun analogy (Republic 6.506d7- 509c4) .............................................................................................................................. 61 1. Context, and relation with Phaedo .......................................................................... 61 2. Argumentation, analogies, and puzzles ................................................................... 63 3. You shall know the father through his son .............................................................. 67 4. The child of the good in relation to sight ............................................................. 72 5. The set up of the analogy ..................................................................................... 78 6. Extending the analogy .......................................................................................... 85 7. All this is either inconceivable or ridiculous ........................................................ 88 8. Continuity and innovation in the Sun analogy ..................................................... 90 CHAPTER 3. The greatest difficulty in Parmenides 133a11-135c4 .............................. 92 1. The last of many difficulties ................................................................................... 92 2. A multi-layered challenge ......................................................................................