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Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft958009gj&chunk.id=0&doc.v... Preferred Citation: Annas, Julia E. Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft958009gj/ Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind Julia Annas UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1994 The Regents of the University of California Preferred Citation: Annas, Julia E. Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992 1991. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft958009gj/ Preface I began the project of writing this book in 1983, and it has been through a number of different versions. It was originally intended as part of a larger collaborative work on Hellenistic philosophy as a whole; but the larger work lagged while my chapter kept on growing and (I hope) improving, until finally it seemed more appropriate to let it expand to a more appropriate length as an independent publication. Since 1983 I have worked periodically on the book as well as on other research, and I have been able to work in more depth on some topics relevant to the book, such as Epicurean emotions, Stoic epistemology, and Epicurus' difficult views on agency. The book has improved from this, and also from the critical distance one can achieve when returning to familiar material after an interval. My aim has remained the same; I hope to provide a clear introduction to a fascinating subject, one that will help to make the subject accessible to readers with differing backgrounds, philosophical and classical. There is no area of ancient philosophy which is officially called "philosophy of mind"; but as practicing philosophers all know, the official demarcations of one's subject matter may not answer to the ways the subject develops, and I hope that readers will agree that when we look at the texts, what we find is in fact philosophy of mind. The contributions of the Stoics and Epicureans have long suffered neglect and sometimes contempt, partly from lack of sympathy with their fundamental principles and partly from misconceptions as to what the ― viii ― Stoics and Epicureans were trying to do. I have tried to be both sympathetic and critical, but my principal aim is to present a clear view of the Stoic and Epicurean theories, their major advantages and some problems they face. I spent the academic year 1983/84 at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D. C., as a junior fellow, doing research for this book. I am very grateful to Bernard Knox, then the director, and to everyone at the Center for making that such an enjoyable year. The Center is an ideal place for research, and like many junior fellows, I only wish I could return again. Several people read and commented on the first complete draft of the book. I am especially grateful to Myles Burnyeat, Jonathan Barnes, Tony Long, Martha Nussbaum, Brad Inwood, Christopher Gill, and Malcolm Schofield. Others who have helped me with portions 1 of 151 8/6/2006 1:30 PM Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft958009gj&chunk.id=0&doc.v... of the book are David Sedley, Simon Laursen, Gisela Striker, and Stephen Everson. I have benefited from discussion of papers relevant to parts of the book at the Duke University Conference on Tradition and Innovation in Epicureanism in the spring of 1989 and the Fifth International Symposium Hellenisticum in Syam, France, in August 1989. In the spring of 1989 I gave a seminar at the University of Arizona based on material from the book. I learned much from the graduates taking the seminar, especially from Stephen Laurence and from Victor Caston (visiting that semester from the University of Texas at Austin). Subsequently my colleague Rob Cummins read the whole manuscript and made valuable comments, many of which forced me to be more critical of crucial arguments or to make the progress of the argument clearer for readers who are not specialists in ancient philosophy. In my final rewriting I have been helped by detailed comments from Tony Long and from a referee for the University of California Press. With all this generous help I am especially sorry for mistakes and confusions that remain, for which I alone am of course responsible. I have been aided in two bouts of work on the book by having study leave from the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona, and I am very grateful for this, as well ― ix ― as for the stimulating atmosphere and beautiful surroundings I enjoyed at Tucson. I am also grateful to Jonathan Barnes for joint seminars on Hellenistic philosophy which we held in Oxford and for continuing to inspire and stimulate my interest in Hellenistic philosophy by his own work. I am very grateful to Michele Svatos for preparing the Index Locorum and for enormous assistance with the General Index. The book is dedicated to my husband, David, who has been supportive and helpful intellectually and in every other way through the various stages of the book's progress (including periods when there was no progress), and to our daughter, Laura, who has been a source of joy for all eight years of her life, and seven of the book's. ― 1 ― Introduction Modern philosophy of mind, like most areas of philosophy, harks back from time to time to predecessors in the ancient world. Usually the predecessor singled out is Aristotle, the great founder of the subject. Aristotle's De anima and Parva naturalia are the first works to study psychological phenomena seriously in a philosophical way. Rooting "study of the soul" firmly in biology, Aristotle's works are the ancestors not only of philosophy of mind, as that is studied in philosophy departments, but also of systematic psychology, the more purely scientific study of psychological and mental phenomena. And Aristotle's approach is still of interest to modern philosophers, as is witnessed by the huge amount of research devoted in the last two decades to understanding Aristotle's theory of the soul and classifying it as physicalist, dualist, or functionalist.[1] Aristotle's successors, the philosophers of the Hellenistic or post-Aristotelian period, have been comparatively neglected. This is a pity, because the theories are sophisticated and interesting. It is also somewhat surprising, since even from the perspective of modern interest the Hellenistic theories have a great deal more in common with modern concerns than Aristotle's does. Furthermore, Hellenistic accounts of partic- [1] For a selection of recent work and reference to the vast secondary literature, see Nussbaum and Rorty (1991). ― 2 ― ular phenomena, such as perceiving, are often of great interest in their own right. Thus, both on grounds of their intrinsic interest and from the viewpoint of modern concerns, it seems reasonable to expand our picture of ancient philosophy of mind to include Aristotle's great successors. Hellenistic philosophy of mind has been generally neglected in the history of recent scholarship because Hellenistic philosophy generally has been undervalued, an imbalance that is now being corrected. In the recent past, however, this period of philosophy of mind was thought especially worthy of neglect. It was dismissed as crude, as a mere throwback to earlier ideas,[2] and even as a type of theory which was patently inadequate, but whose faults were overlooked in the haste to get to what was really supposed to matter, namely, the ethical conclusions.[3] Why was Hellenistic philosophy of mind held to be crude? The main reason is that all the major theories 2 of 151 8/6/2006 1:30 PM Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft958009gj&chunk.id=0&doc.v... are physicalist; they hold that the mind is (with refinements we shall examine) something physical. And until surprisingly recently the philosophical background of scholars interpreting Hellenistic philosophy was one in which the dominant theory was dualism. Hence we frequently find scholars dismissing Hellenistic theories as inadequate in principle on the grounds that they merely study the material conditions for mental activity to be possible, [2] Hellenistic theories often criticize, and make use of, pre-Socratic ideas; but so does Aristotle, who is not usually dismissed as a mere throwback. The relative importance attached by Stoics and Epicureans to their intellectual forebears is still uncertain and controversial. [3] Cf. Jaeger (1913, 56): "In der krasser Materialität der Seele erblicken sie [die Stoiker] wie die Atomisten den festen Anker, mit dem das politisch wurzellose Individuum, der apolis des Hellenismus sein vereinzeltes Dasein im Gesetzesfrieden des ehrwürdigsten aller Staat gründete, dem kosmos der sich wandelnden und umformenden Urstoffe." This general claim, that Hellenistic philosophy is a rush to ethical certainty motivated by the unbearable anomie of the postclassical period, is now thoroughly discredited. Further, the more important ethics is to a philosopher, the more important it is to have a firm basis for it, rather than a faulty one. ― 3 ― and omit mental activity itself.[4] More recently interpreters havetended to have an intellectual background in which it is physicalism that is dominant and dualism that is not taken seriously. And this makes it easier for us to understand the Hellenistic theories, for in that period also physicalism was seen as the norm. The terms "physicalism" and "materialism" have been used for many different kinds of theory. The theories that we shall examine in detail, those of the Stoics and Epicureans, are theories of a kind which I shall call physicalist. "Physicalism" here covers theories which claim that everything that exists is physical. "Physical" here in turn means "falls under the laws of physics." Something is physical if and only if it can be described and explained using only the concepts and methods of physics.
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