Review Article — Time, Persons, and Cognition: Some Recent Work in Ancient Philosophy

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Review Article — Time, Persons, and Cognition: Some Recent Work in Ancient Philosophy REVIEW ARTICLE — TIME, PERSONS, AND COGNITION: SOME RECENT WORK IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Lloyd P. Gerson1 Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought. Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji, ed. Ricardo Salles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. ix + 592, £60.00, ISBN 019 926130 X (cloth). This sumptuous Festschrift for Richard Sorabji contains 19 essays by leading scholars of ancient philosophy on various themes treated in Sorabji’s volumi- nous writings. The essays are preceded by a substantial intellectual autobiog- raphy by Sorabji and followed by a bibliography of his writings. The essays cover an extremely broad range of topics and are grouped under three head- ings: (1) metaphysics; (2) the senses and the nature of the soul; and (3) ethics. Surprisingly, only one of the essays deals with any of the material with which Sorabji has been so intensely and successfully involved in recent years, namely, the 80 volumes of translations of the Neoplatonic Aristotelian commentators. Under (1) are: ‘Intrinsic and Relational Properties of Atoms in the Democritean Ontology’, by Alexander D.P. Mourelatos; ‘Necessitation and Explanation in Philoponus’ Aristotelian Physics’, by Sylvia Berryman; ‘A Contemporary Look at Aristotle’s Changing Now’, by Sarah Broadie; ‘On the Individuation of Times and Events in Orthodox Stoicism’, by Ricardo Salles; ‘Stoic Metaphysics at Rome’, by David Sedley; and ‘Platonism in the Bible: Numenius of Apamea on Exodus and Eternity’, by Myles Burnyeat. Under (2) are: ‘Platonic Souls as Persons’, by A.A. Long; ‘Aristotle Versus Descartes on the Concept of the Mental’, by Charles H. Kahn; ‘Perception Naturalized in Aristotle’s De anima’, by Robert Bolton; ‘The Spirit and the Letter: Aristotle on Perception’, by Victor Caston; ‘The Discriminating Capacity of the Soul in Aristotle’s Theory of Learning’, by Frans A.J. de Haas; and ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Nature and Location of Vision’, by Robert W. Sharples. Under (3) are: ‘Plato’s Stoic View of Motivation’, by Gabriela Roxana Carone; ‘The Presence of Socrates and Aristotle in the Stoic Account of Akrasia’, by Marcelo D. Boeri; ‘Extend or Identify: Two Stoic Accounts of Altruism’, by Mary Margaret McCabe; ‘Competing Readings of Stoic Emo- tions’, by Christopher Gill; ‘Were Zeno and Chrysippus at Odds in Analyzing Emotion?’, by A.W. Price; ‘Seneca on Freedom and Autonomy’, by Brad Inwood; and ‘Moral Philosophy and the Conditions of Certainty: Descartes’ Morale in Context’, by M.W. Stone. 1 Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto, 81 St. Mary St., Toronto, Ontario, M5S1J4, Canada. Email: [email protected] POLIS. Vol. 23. No. 1, 2006 REVIEW ARTICLE 163 It is not possible in one review even to state fairly the most complex argu- ments of each and every one of these essays. What I propose to do is to discuss three groups of essays each of whose members make an especially thought-provoking or significant contribution to a single topic in ancient phi- losophy. The first is time, and the essays I shall consider are those by Broadie, Salles, and Burnyeat. The second is the nature of persons, and the essays I shall discuss are those by Long, Carone, Boeri, and McCabe. Finally, I shall discuss the essays by Bolton, Caston, and de Haas on perception and cogni- tion generally, especially in Aristotle. I The most famous extended discussions of time in antiquity are those of Aris- totle, Plotinus, and Augustine, though virtually all ancient arguments about cosmology, change, generation, and even human destiny rest upon assump- tions about the nature of time. Beginning perhaps with Parmenides, the ques- tion of the relation of time to being itself came to the fore. How can that which is ‘in’ time ever truly be said to be since a non-existent past is seemingly con- nected directly to a non-existent future? But how can that which truly is stand outside of time? Broadie’s paper is a subtle and fascinating study of the prob- lem that brings together contemporary discussions (especially that of McTaggart) and Aristotle’s own solution. Specifically, Broadie examines jointly Aristotle’s account of the ‘now’ as always ‘different and different’ and the contemporary distinction between time as order and time as passage. The latter distinction is between, on the one hand, events in time as ordered rela- tive to each other ‘timelessly’, so to speak, for these each event was once future, then present, then past; these events are, relative to each other, eter- nally ordered in their priority and posteriority; and, on the other hand, events as ‘passing’ from being future to being present, to being past. It is such pas- sage that McTaggart famously argued was unreal. Since passage is an integral part of the concept of time, time is unreal. Broadie argues that Aristotle does in fact provide a solution to this profound puzzle by showing how before and after are applied to events in time. He shows that the now is the reference point for judging before and after, and that, accordingly, it is ‘different and differ- ent’. So, to say that event A precedes event B is to say that if both events are future, then A is closer to now; if both events are past, A is further from now. Thus, there is no single temporal series that expresses passage. It is the now that serves as the ever differing pivot to establish the past and present as two mutually exclusive series. Before and after depend on the now, not the other way around. Salles takes up a criticism made by Jonathan Barnes of the Stoic conception of time and their contention that there are everlasting recurrences of bodies in the universe with identical properties. But if time is, as the Stoics held, an ‘in- corporeal’ and thereby has no properties of its own, then times are.
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