Notes on Contributors
Julia Annas is Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. She holds a B.A. (Hons) from Oxford, a Ph.D. from Harvard (1972), and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Uppsala. Her research interests have ranged over a wide field of ancient philosophy, but for some years have focused on ancient ethics, and she has also worked in the field of contemporary virtue ethics. Her publications in ancient philosophy include An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (1981), The Morality of Happiness (1993), Platonic Ethics Old and New (1999), and Virtue and Law in Plato and Beyond (2018). She has also published Intelligent Virtue (2011) and is working on a book on virtue ethics.
David O. Brink is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1985, where he studied with Gail Fine and was supervised by Terry Irwin. His research interests are in ethical theory, history of ethics, moral psychology, and jurisprudence. He is the author of Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Perfectionism and the Common Good: Themes in the Philosophy of T.H. Green (Clarendon Press, 2003), and Mill’s Progressive Principles (Clarendon Press, 2013).
Lesley Brown is Fellow in Philosophy emeritus at Somerville College, Oxford and a member of the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Oxford. She has published extensively on Plato, particularly on Plato’s Sophist, and on Aristotle, including ‘Why is Aristotle’s Virtue of Character a Mean?’ in the Cambridge Companion to the Nicomachean Ethics (2014).
David Charles is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (Duckworth, 1984) and Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Clarendon Press, 2000) and edited Definition in Greek Philosophy (Clarendon Press, 2010).
Roger Crisp is Uehiro Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is author of Mill on Utilitarianism (Routledge, 1997), Reasons and the Good (Clarendon Press, 2006), and The Cosmos of Duty: Henry Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics (Clarendon Press, 2015). He has translated Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for Cambridge University Press (2000) and edited the Oxford Handbook of the History of Ethics (2013).
John Martin Fischer received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1982. He was fortunate to study with both Gail Fine and Terry Irwin during his time at Cornell. His primary research interests are in free will and moral responsibility.
He is the author of The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control and (with Mark Ravizza) Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Oxford University Press has published four collections of his essays: My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility; Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will; Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value; and Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.
Paula Gottlieb is Professor of Philosophy and Affiliate Professor of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her B.Phil. at Oxford and studied for the Ph.D. with Terry Irwin and Gail Fine at Cornell. She specializes in Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics. She is the author of The Virtue of Aristotle’s Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and ‘Aristotle on NonContradiction’ for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. She is presently writing a book, tentatively titled Aristotle on Reason and Feeling, for Cambridge University Press.
Verity Harte is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1994. Her research interests are in ancient philosophy, especially the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, with a particular focus on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical and moral psychology. She is the author of Plato on Parts and Wholes: The Metaphysics of Structure (Oxford, 2002) and of numerous articles on Greek philosophy.
Richard Kraut is Charles and Emma Morrison Professor in the Humanities, in the Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University. His interests include contemporary moral and political philosophy and the ethics and political thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Among his publications are Against Absolute Goodness (Oxford, 2011), What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Harvard, 2007), Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2002), Aristotle, Politics Books VII and VIII: Translated with a Commentary (Clarendon Aristotle Series, 1997), Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton, 1989), and Socrates and the State (Princeton, 1984). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Susan Sauvé Meyer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. Trained at the University of Toronto (B.A. 1982) and Cornell University (Ph.D. 1987), she taught at Harvard University before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. A specialist in Classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy with special interest in the ethical tradition, her publications include Aristotle on Moral Responsibility (1993; reissued in 2011), Ancient Ethics (2008), and Plato: Laws 1 and 2 in the Clarendon Plato Series (2015). She is currently an editor of the journal Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie.
Karen Margrethe Nielsen is Tutorial Fellow at Somerville College and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. Her publications include ‘Spicy Food as Cause of Death: Coincidence and Necessity in Metaphysics E 3’, Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy (2017), ‘Vice in the Nicomachean Ethics’, Phronesis (2017), ‘The Will: Origins of the Notion in Aristotle’s Thought’, Antiquorum Philosophia (2013), and ‘Deliberation as Inquiry’, Philosophical Review (2011). She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2006, on a dissertation supervised by Terry Irwin and co-supervised by Gail Fine, on Aristotle’s theory of decision (prohairesis). The topic has held her attention ever since.
Dominic Scott is a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and taught in the Philosophy Department there from 1989 to 2007. He was professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia from 2007 to 2014. He is the author of Recollection and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Plato’s Meno (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and Levels of Argument: A Comparative Study of Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2015). He co-authored The Humanities World Report 2015 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and edited Maieusis: Studies in Honour of M. F. Burnyeat (Oxford University Press, 2007) as well as The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter: A Seminar by Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Christopher Shields is Shuster Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Previously he taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has held visiting posts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of St. Louis, the Humboldt University of Berlin, Cornell University, Stanford University, Yale University, and the University of Arizona. He is the author of Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in the Philosophy of Aristotle (Oxford University Press, 1999), Classical Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2003), Aristotle (Routledge, 2007), Ancient Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2011), with Robert Pasnau, The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Westview, 2003; 2nd rev. ed. Oxford University Press, 2015), and Aristotle’s De Anima, Translated with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is the editor of The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (Blackwell, 2002) and The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Ralph Wedgwood is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1994, where he studied with Gail Fine and was supervised by Terry Irwin. Later, he was their colleague at the University of Oxford, where until 2012 he was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy and a Fellow of Merton College. His principal research interests are in ethics, epistemology, and the theory of practical reason and rational choice, with a subsidiary interest in the history of those subjects. He is the author of The Nature of Normativity (Clarendon Press, 2007) and of The Normativity of Rationality (Clarendon Press, forthcoming).
Allen W. Wood is Ruth Norman Halls Professor at Indiana University and Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. He was born in Seattle, received his B.A. from Reed College in 1964 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968. His interests are in the history of philosophy, especially German philosophy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in ethics, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. He is the author of a dozen books and editor or translator of about a dozen others. His most recent books are Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford University Press, 2016), Formulas of the Moral Law (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and a second (revised) edition of his translation of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Yale University Press, 2018). Forthcoming in Spring, 2018 is a second (revised) edition of his translation of Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (Yale University Press).
Introduction
Through their writing, their teaching, their mentoring, and their broader scholarly output, Gail Fine and Terry Irwin have reshaped the character of ancient philosophy as an academic discipline. Their contributions to the discipline do not, however, end there. On the contrary, their wide-ranging achievements extend into all periods of the history of philosophy and indeed into several areas more systematic than historical. Or perhaps one should say, rather, that their work defies any ready classification as being either historical or systematic, because whatever its primary focus on a given occasion, what they write cannot be pigeonholed as either exclusively scholarly or thematic; for they practice an unremittingly philosophical form of history of philosophy, or, judged from another angle, a historically enriched form of systematic philosophy. That is, as they pursue it, philosophy engages the discipline’s history in a manner animated by its current and perennial concerns, but it does so while remaining fully sensitive to the original context of its production. Their work combines the highest level of scholarly rigor and rich philosophical insight. Animated by a purely philosophical spirit, it is never narrowly antiquarian in orientation. Although alert to matters of text and transmission reflecting painstaking philological care and exceptionally broad scholarly erudition, their work never loses sight of a simple question: should we too believe this?
Their students, their colleagues, and the broader philosophical public have been the beneficiaries of their sustained and remarkable activity. In an effort to express their admiration and gratitude to Terry and Gail, the contributors to this Festschrift have offered these essays to mark the occasion of their retirements from the University of Oxford and Cornell University, where both have held permanent posts in their long and distinguished careers. They have between them educated several generations of philosophers, many of whom have in their turn begun the process of passing along to their own students the legacy of excellence originating in the careers of Terry and Gail. Most of the essays in the present volume made their first appearance at a conference held at Cornell University in September of 2013, dedicated to Terry and Gail, who kindly presided over the proceedings. The speakers at the conference found themselves, in typical fashion, challenged, encouraged, and schooled by Terry and Gail, and indeed by the assembled audience of their past and current students, their colleagues, and those whose work they have influenced. Since then, the editors have
carried the spirit of the conference forward, commenting upon each of the chapters, engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges with their authors, and working to produce a volume worthy of its two honorees. We offer it to Gail and Terry with admiration and continuing gratitude.
Prefatory to the chapters which follow, we have undertaken to offer brief overviews of the careers and contributions of Gail and Terry. Although they share a common method and a dominant period of focus, their individual contributions head in distinctively different directions, often arriving at instructively divergent points of view, at times complementary and other times at variance with one another. Accordingly, we begin by recounting their philosophical careers individually, before returning briefly to their shared influence and legacy.
Gail Fine
Gail’s contributions to ancient philosophy center on Plato and Aristotle, but extend to Hellenistic philosophy as well, where she has done seminal work on Academic Scepticism. Her work is characterized by a lively, minute form of textual engagement motivated by broader philosophical considerations: she wants to know what the philosophers she studies maintain, to ascertain why they maintain what they do, and then to determine whether we ourselves should agree with them, and, if we do, whether we should do so on the basis they advance for holding the views they espouse. We find, then, careful exegesis and philosophical assessment in equal measure.
It should not be inferred, however, that these activities parcel into discrete components in her work, beginning with neutral exegesis where positions are discerned and dispassionately characterized, followed by argument reconstruction, and then rounded off by critical appraisal. On the contrary, it is a hallmark of Gail’s methodology that each of these activities informs the others in a symbiotic, mutually enhancing way. Generally speaking, on her approach it counts as a good reason to discount an interpretation of Plato, or Aristotle, or Sextus that it ascribes without compulsion a view that is transparently implausible or simply false. Accordingly, Gail’s approach to ancient texts is guided by the thought that we are better served by reading a supporting argument as enthymematic than by concluding that it is transparently invalid or unsound, unless, again, we are faced with an unanswerable reason for doing so. This is not because ancient authors never say false things or give bad arguments for their views, whether true or false. Rather, Gail’s approach commends the thought that if we read a text understanding our first hermeneutical impressions to be unassailable, then we do our authors a disservice: we are apt to miss their deeper meanings and motivations. By the same token, if on a first reading we find a philosophical position alien to the point of being unintelligible, that, Gail thinks, is as likely our fault as it is the fault of the author being studied. In consequence, we should in every instance strive to understand and assess the philosophers of antiquity in terms we ourselves can readily understand and articulate in our own vocabulary.
This last point has induced some of her readers to suspect Gail of courting anachronism: we should, such scholars advise, grapple with philosophers of earlier periods in their own terms, not in the terms we happen to find congenial, and we should avoid allowing our independent assessments of the plausibility of their positions to colour— or, or as they would have it, to discolour—our judgment as to the accuracy of an ascription. Gail, they may rightly point out, is happy to recruit both Chomsky and Damascius when elucidating a single Platonic text (2014, 154 n. 51, 165); yet Chomsky writes in a place and time far removed from Plato and in an idiom utterly alien to that of Damascius. Put in its most unsympathetic terms, this sort of reaction calls into question the unflinchingly logocentric method Gail characteristically employs. Does this charge have any traction? Each time she encounters an ancient text Gail’s method involves posing a pair of questions: (i) what are the possible meanings of this text? and (ii) which among them is most plausibly supported by the argument it offers? When we know the argument, we have a handle on the position, but not before. It is rarely if ever the case that we can simply light upon the correct interpretation of an ancient philosophical text as a matter beyond question or controversy from a reading which avoids assessing its author’s philosophical motivations and objectives, no matter how thorough our reading may otherwise be. Competing interpretations of varying degrees of plausibility will invariably present themselves; we are then asked to choose among them. Gail’s way of choosing begins by determining, with all due charity and intellectual humility, which of the alternatives is best supported by the argument the author of the text promulgates. Where no immediate argument is given, one may equally determine, as her approach suggests, which among the positions most readily comports with claims motivated by argument elsewhere. We may then, adapting a metaphor deployed in Plato’s Republic (434e), rub the passages together to see which interpretation emerges from the process, as fire emerges from the sparks of fire sticks when rubbed together. If we proceed in this way, our governing impulse will be primarily logocentric, in the sense that it will enjoin us to ferret out the argumentative underpinnings of a claim as our first and most secure—if not our sole—guide to its likely meaning.
At any rate, Gail’s governing practice seems to reflect some such approach; she does not spend a great deal of time overtly defending or even describing her philosophical method. Still, the same method structures her work in virtually every period of her long and productive career. She deals primarily with non-value areas of philosophy, concentrating especially on issues in metaphysics and epistemology, and their intersection, as they crop up in the philosophers of special concern to her, taken both individually and in concert.
This last point bears emphasis because one core area of Gail’s research has concerned the philosophical interaction of Plato and Aristotle. In the early twentieth century, the pioneering German scholar Werner Jaeger advanced a striking set of views about Aristotle’s development, focussed centrally upon his evolving attitudes towards Plato. Jaeger thus kicked off a long and fruitful scholarly dialectic to which Gail has made lasting contributions.
In general terms, Jaeger (1923) took the view that Aristotle began life as a dutiful Platonist who gradually grew critical of his teacher, developing into his own master as he matured and forged a system of philosophy markedly incompatible with Plato’s, rejecting most conspicuously the cornerstone of Plato’s thought, his theory of Forms. Jaeger’s view won many adherents but also some partial detractors as well; it was not, however, frontally assaulted with any success until 1965 with the publication by G. E. L. Owen (Gail’s doctoral advisor) of a British Academy lecture entitled ‘The Platonism of Aristotle’. In this work, Owen attempted to turn the tables completely by arguing that only as he matured did Aristotle come to appreciate the profounder dimensions of Plato’s thought, with the result that, far from beginning as a dutiful Platonist who emerged incrementally as an autonomous thinker and harsh critic, Aristotle actually began life as an impetuous critic who came to adjust his own thinking with an increasingly appreciative eye on delicate problems acknowledged by Plato himself in some admirably self-critical moments. One such moment, a crux of sorts, is the so-called Third Man Argument directed against Plato’s theory of Forms, introduced by Plato in his Parmenides, according to some scholars merely maieutically and heuristically, in an effort to clarify and defend his conception of Forms, but according to others as a candid negative assessment of his own system intended to present an unanswerable criticism of his signal contribution.
This Third Man Argument came to play a significant role in Gail’s intellectual development. She investigates the argument in several articles, and then returns to it along with various other Aristotelian assaults on the theory of Forms in her magisterial On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticisms of Plato’s Theory of Forms (1995). This work is a study of an uncommonly rich text of Aristotle’s, the Peri Ideôn (On Ideas), sections of which were preserved by Alexander of Aphrodisias. In the fragment recorded by Alexander, Aristotle assails Plato’s theory of Forms by means of a series of complex arguments, including a version of the Third Man Argument. Gail’s treatment of these arguments represents the pinnacle of an argument-focused assessment of Aristotle’s relationship to Plato and his theory of Forms. The picture that emerges is—as a philosophical as opposed to a doxagraphical matter—far more detailed and philosophically nuanced than anything produced by either Jaeger or Owen. It is, and will remain for many years to come, an indispensable resource for philosophical scholars investigating Aristotle’s relationship to Plato in metaphysical matters.
This work is, however, but one of Gail’s signal achievements in ancient philosophy. Judged by their impact and the amount of discussion they have generated, Gail’s contributions in four areas merit special note. First is the issue already introduced, Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato, including, but not limited to, those pertaining to the theory of Forms; second is her widely influential, early account of knowledge and belief in the middle books of Plato’s Republic; third is her career-spanning interest in the paradox of inquiry, as it was formulated originally in Plato, but then also as it appears subsequently in various guises in post-Platonic ancient philosophers; and fourth is her engagement with Plato’s epistemology more broadly, which already occupied her
in her Harvard doctoral thesis, ‘Plato and Acquaintance’ (1975). Her concern with Plato’s epistemology surfaces over and over again throughout her more than 50 scholarly articles, critical discussions, and scholarly monographs.
Her great body of work comprises many publications not mentioned in this short discussion, including several important contributions on the nature of substances and universals, most but not all of which take Plato and Aristotle as their focus, as well as assays into scepticism, subjectivity, perception, causation, and determinism. (A full bibliography of Gail’s scholarly publications can be found at the end of the volume.) Without any attempt at being comprehensive, then, we may characterize some of Gail’s most prominent publications, in an effort to provide an indication of her lasting contributions to the field and to reflect at least briefly on her distinctive philosophical methodology.
Beginning with the last recurrent theme mentioned, we may focus first on Gail’s approach to Plato’s epistemology. In an earlier, much discussed work, ‘Knowledge and Belief in Republic V’ (1978), later reprised, refined, and expanded as ‘Knowledge and Belief in Republic V–VII’ (1989b), Gail articulates a deep problem in Plato’s epistemology and proceeds to offer a startling solution to it—startling, at any rate, to a certain sensibility, one characteristic of an older generation of scholars who had understood Plato’s metaphysical epistemology in such a way that the problem Gail articulates with such clarity and force barely comes into focus. The problem is this. In the middle books of the Republic, Plato offers an account of knowledge which seems first to bifurcate the world into the knowable and the unknowable and then to suggest that knowledge (epistēmē) is, reasonably enough, restricted to those sorts of objects which are knowable, namely Forms. Forms are, on this picture, suitable objects of knowledge because they are stable, precise, context-invariant, and incapable of slipping away, as Plato puts it in the Meno, in the manner of the statues of Daedalus. These seem at first to be fixed in place, like other statues, but then prove so lifelike that when left unshackled, they scamper away, leaving those who possessed them empty-handed. What value they have to those whose they are, then, lasts only so long as they are secured. Evidently, beliefs are like that: they are fine as far as they go, but unless tied down, they slip away when unobserved, and so prove of no lasting value. To be secured, however, beliefs must be bound with the chains of reason, tethered by an account (logos) or reasoned explanation (aitios logismos); then, and only then, do beliefs give way to knowledge. In this way, an item of genuine knowledge is superior to any given belief, because in addition to being true, as a belief may (or may not) be, it is supported in the right way by an anchoring account.
Now, if all knowledge qualifies as knowledge only if it is accompanied by an account, then—on the assumption that an account is also something that has to be known by the knower whose belief it anchors—knowledge will require prior knowledge if it is to qualify as knowledge at all. If that is so, however, knowledge will be impossible. For each attempt at a knowledge claim will require a prior, more fundamental justifying knowledge claim. One may counter, as many scholars take Plato to counter, that some
kinds of knowledge escape this regress: some knowledge is privileged, qualifying as a first principle, as something known simply and immediately, without any need for further justification. An older generation of scholars accepted this second outcome, taking a cue from Plato himself, who introduces the Form of the Good as the ‘unhypothethical first principle of all’ (Rep. 510b7, 511b6). The suggestion thus lies near that knowledge of this Form, the Form of the Good, is foundational for all other knowledge, and that Plato’s solution to the regress problem is thus a version of epistemic foundationalism.
This near-lying suggestion is also, however, as Gail presses, deeply problematic. Indeed, its manner of being problematic nicely illustrates Gail’s general approach to interpreting Plato. To begin, the notion of a first epistemic principle, an ungrounded ground accessed directly by an unnamed faculty of mind via some manner of immediate apprehension, strikes many as inherently, intractably mysterious. Still, one may aver, this is Plato’s view and we are left to make such sense of it as we can.
Is it, though, Plato’s view? To many it seems so. Is this not, after all, the immediate purport of Plato’s commitment to the Form of the Good as an unhypothetical first principle? Indeed, the entire analogy of the sun in Republic VI supports this view. After all, as the Form of the Good is to the intelligible realm, so the Sun is to the visible realm. As the Sun illuminates other things but is visible itself by its own nature, so the Form of the Good renders other things intelligible but is itself intelligible in virtue of itself, by its own nature, and so needs nothing beyond itself to vouchsafe its grounding role in Plato’s foundationalist epistemology. This seems very close to a straightforward statement of epistemic foundationalism on Plato’s part.
As Gail is quick to point out, however, and as we have already seen, Plato maintains precisely the opposite regarding objects of knowledge as a class: he distinguishes knowledge (epistēmē) from mere belief (doxa) by demanding that knowledge be accompanied by an account or reasoned explanation; the foundationalist model mooted precisely abjures that requirement. When a cognizer becomes acquainted with a Form, or at least the Form of the Good, there is no further justification needed or wanted; indeed, the very possibility of providing a justifying account seems ruled out by the unhypothetical character of the experience. How, if this is so, is knowledge (epistēmē) to be distinguished from mere belief (doxa)? There seems to be little wriggle room here, since Plato’s contention that knowledge (epistēmē) requires something more than mere belief (doxa) is not a singular or even rare in his writings. On the contrary, he asserts it repeatedly (e.g. Rep. 510c, 531e, 533b–c; Phaedo 76b; Symp. 202a; Tht. 202c; Laws 966b, 967e). More to the point, it figures centrally in his brief in Republic V for the claim that only philosophers can rule: they, and they alone, can differentiate Forms from one another by reason and by giving an account of what each is (by providing a logos), including, as Plato acknowledges, the Form of the Good (Rep. 534b–c). Are we, then, left with a simple contradiction?
Gail thinks not. All knowledge, including knowledge of the Form of the Good, requires, just as Plato says, some accompanying justification or account (logos) to
secure it. It does not follow, however, that the justificatory chains of our claims to knowledge must be linearly ordered, with each justification appealing to a justifying principle prior to it in a justificatory order. Indeed, it does not even follow that the ‘chains’ of justification be chains. Individual justifications might rather fit into a web, deriving justification one from the other and all in concert from the totality which comprises them, conferring justification holistically rather than atomistically. Plato might, after all, be an epistemic coherentist rather than a foundationalist. Such, at any rate, is Gail’s contention.
Gail’s contribution to this debate has occasioned a great deal of discussion, including a good deal of dissent. This is, however, only because it is novel, provocative, philosophically alert, and uncommonly creative. It also turns out to be motivated not by some anachronism, but by a looming contradiction internal to Plato’s writings which others have failed to acknowledge. Philosophically minded readers of Plato have rightly taken note.
The same again holds of her career-spanning interest in the paradox of inquiry (1992b, 2004a, 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2013, 2014). Like her work on the middle books of the Republic, Gail’s engagement with the paradox of inquiry reflects her deep and abiding interest in both epistemology and metaphysics—in this case beginning already in her undergraduate days, when, as she reports, she read the Meno and was ‘immediately enchanted’ (2014, vii). It is easy to see why she should find this dialogue so captivating. Its core paradox raises deep questions about Plato’s aims and objectives, and thereby also about the aims and objectives of a broader sort of philosophical mission.
Readers of the Meno will recall that a problem about the goals of Socratic inquiry is first interjected into the dialogue by a frustrated Meno on the occasion of his having been refuted by Socrates. Meno’s frustration results in part from his failure to answer a general sort of question posed by Socrates, a so-called ‘What is F-ness?’, where ‘F’ stands in for some virtue term: ‘What is courage?’, ‘What is piety?’ and so forth. Meno grows indignant, asserting that the Socratic ‘What is F-ness?’ question is unanswerable, insinuating that in posing it Socrates is setting up his interlocutors for failure. Socrates rejoins with what he purports to be a precisification of Meno’s complaint. In so doing, Socrates presents what has come to be known as ‘Meno’s Paradox’: for all x, inquiry into x is impossible, since either one knows x, in which case there can be no occasion for coming to know it by inquiry, or one does not know x, in which case one will fail to recognize it even if one stumbles upon it in the course of inquiring after it, rendering any attempt to inquire into what one does not know futile. Socrates’ response to the paradox as he himself formulates it is perplexing: he first dismisses it as a debater’s trick (Meno 80e), yet then proceeds to counter it by means of an elaborate, even extravagant response involving his remarkable doctrine of recollection, according to which all learning is actually recollection, coupled with a commitment to the prenatal existence of the human soul. As Socrates shows by cross-questioning a slave about a simple geometrical problem, the slave already has the answer he professes not to know somehow, so to speak, lurking unrecognized in his soul. If this is correct, the process of
‘learning’ is shown to be not the acquisition of something from without, but really rather a dredging up of what one already knows. This in turn implies, Socrates contends, that the soul is immortal, since it shows itself able upon examination to recollect things never learned in this lifetime. Looked at from one angle, then, Socrates’ response may appear concessive to a fault, implicitly allowing that the debater’s argument, no matter how slippery, actually has a true conclusion: inquiry into what one does not already know is impossible.
This appearance is, however, misleading at best. The situation proves far more complicated, in ways Gail, more than any other scholar, has painstakingly made clear. Indeed, all of the ingredients for the sort of philosophical problem which excites Gail’s interest are present in this exchange. There is an epistemic dimension: what can be known and how? What standards are appropriately employed in determining that someone has and can demonstrate having genuine knowledge, as opposed to conviction or earnest, even true belief? There is a metaphysical component as well: what kinds of things can be known? Propositions? Abstract entities? Only what is assertoric and truth-evaluable? Sensible individuals, in addition to the abstract objects of knowledge? These questions play out against the backdrop of the worry Meno rightly presses in his initial outburst: what does Socrates want to achieve in posing his ‘What is F-ness?’ question? What form will a successful response take? Are there perhaps different kinds of knowledge for different kinds of objects? That is, does knowledge (or virtue, or piety, and so on for any of the various values of ‘F’ in the ‘What is F-ness?’ question) admit of a univocal analysis, as Socrates so often seems to assume? Finally, there is a multi-tiered set of textual questions about Plato’s presentation of these issues. Is he speaking in propria persona using Socrates as a dramatic character or representing the historical Socrates he knew? Are we to take Socrates’ presentation of the doctrine of recollection at face value, or as going proxy for some milder doctrine, about the possibility of innate or perhaps a priori knowledge? In sum, in Meno’s Paradox we have a complex and multitiered nexus of textual, exegetical, epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological questions, each of which impacts the other in appreciable ways: plainly grist for Gail’s mill.
Scholars have responded in all manner of ways to this situation, some even maintaining that Socrates cannot be in earnest in offering his doctrine of recollection in response to Meno’s Paradox, that he is sparring, sporting, or otherwise spoofing. Gail, by contrast, sees a genuine problem met with an earnestly proposed solution. According to Gail, Plato responds by showing that though perfectly valid, Meno’s paradox is unsound. Its premise is false: the claim that if one does not know x, then one cannot inquire into x. On the contrary, one can, just as Socrates’ exchange with the slave illustrates, begin in belief, even false belief, and steer one’s way to knowledge. Since we can in fact move from belief (doxa) to knowledge (epistēmē), not least through the instrument of a shrewdly deployed Socratic elenchus, it is simply false that inquiry is impossible for those lacking knowledge.
When we confront Plato’s Meno, we are asked to determine how deep the paradox of inquiry runs. The discussions inaugurated by Gail provide ample reason to believe that
no simple quick fix suffices. We see this same result in another way as well, a way made clear in Gail’s latest work on this topic, a book-length study of the paradox of inquiry as it appears not only in Plato but also in the philosophers influenced by him. For, as she shows, the paradox of inquiry has a long afterlife in antiquity, captivating a full spectrum of top-tier philosophical minds, including Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics, and the Sceptics. Their nuanced attention to aspects of the problems it poses gives us further reason to conclude that Meno’s paradox cannot be dissolved simply by disarming it as a debater’s equivocation. Gail’s career-long interest in this topic thus eventuates in another lasting contribution to the field, The Possibility of Inquiry: Meno’s Paradox from Socrates to Sextus (2014).
Yet another agenda-setting thesis emerges in a different early work of Gail’s (1978), one offering an especially clear illustration of her hermeneutical methodology. It also shows how Gail’s work on Plato crosses readily over from epistemology into metaphysics. On one natural reading of the middle books of Plato’s Republic, we find him committed to an epistemically driven bifurcation of reality. Given their invariability and context-insensitivity, Plato suggests, Forms are uniquely suited to serve as objects of knowledge (epistēmē); by contrast, sense particulars, given their ceaseless variability and context-dependence, are suitable objects of belief (doxa) but never of knowledge. Can we know, for instance, that an elephant is large? Well, fairly plainly, in the class of mammals, elephants are indeed large. Still, in comparison with Mt. Everest or the Milky Way, an elephant is puny. So, is an elephant large? Well, suggests Plato: yes and no. By contrast, largeness itself, taken by itself, is never anything but large: it does not rely on a context of appraisal for being what it is. One Platonic way of thinking, then, differentiates Largeness, the Form, a transcendent, abstract entity, from sensible large things, which can never escape their context sensitivity. As a result, the Form Largeness itself is not reducible to large sensibles, taken either individually or corporately. The requisites of knowledge thus imply that the objects of knowledge are supra-sensible, demarcated by their very natures from anything we might perceive by the senses.
This doctrine, again congenial to an older generation of scholars, is sometimes dubbed the ‘Two-Worlds Theory’. According to the Two-Worlds Theory, Plato divides reality into two mutually exclusive domains, a domain of sense perceptibles which serve as objects of belief and a domain of abstract entities which serve as objects of knowledge. No object of belief can be known; no object of knowledge can serve as an object of belief. To revert to the earlier illustration of the Meno, if we think that we know what largeness is because we know that Jumbo the elephant is large, then we have truncated vision: we will find the predicate ‘. . . is large’ scurrying away as we shift Jumbo from one context of appraisal to another. When we know something, we know it stably and securely; so, our attitudes towards largeness vis-à-vis Jumbo do not amount to knowledge of largeness. Large things are perceived and not known; known things are grasped by the mind and not perceived.
It must be said that Plato does much to encourage the Two-Worlds Theory. In Republic V, for instance, he individuates our mental capacities by what they are ‘over’ or
‘set over’ (epi), thus: (i) knowledge (gnōsis, epistēmē) is set over (epi) what is; (ii) belief (doxa) is set over (epi) what is and is not; and (iii) ignorance (agnōsia) is set over (epi) what is not (Rep. 477a–b). One natural way of taking this passage would be that knowledge ranges over Forms (over what is, what exists fixedly and permanently), belief ranges over sensibles (which are ever shifting, and never completely or permanently what they are, because of the point about context sensitivity already mentioned), while ignorance ranges over what is not (because it takes no object at all). Bracketing the point about ignorance, which raises special difficulties for all approaches, the TwoWorlds approach takes Plato here to be more or less stating a straightforward commitment to the mutually exclusive and exhaustive bifurcation of reality, into the knowable and the sensible, the realm of Forms and the material realm.
Gail begins with a simple, deflating pair of observations. First, if we think that knowledge is the same as justified true belief (or that it at least requires justified true belief), then knowledge must involve belief, rather than exclude it. Since we do in fact think this, we cannot easily understand Plato as overlooking it so blithely.
This is another occasion, however, where some may suspect Gail’s method of courting anachronism. What matters, after all, is not what we think about knowledge and belief, but what Plato thinks; and has he not just effectively asserted that they are disjoint? Not exactly, it turns out. Gail too has textual evidence on her side. As we have already seen, it is not us, but rather Plato himself who urges, in the Meno and then also in the Theaetetus, that knowledge (epistēmē) precisely is true belief together with an account (logos) or reasoned explanation (aitios logismos). So, on his approach, far from being belief-excluding, knowledge (epistēmē) is belief-entailing. Hence, not only can Forms be objects of belief, they evidently must be. Moreover, Plato repeatedly speaks of his beliefs about Forms, including even the Form of the Good, about which he expressly claims to have no knowledge. So, the Two-Worlds Theory, however recommended by Plato’s manner of speaking, seems incompatible with his practice; it also seems at variance with some deeply intuitive convictions, such that one can know one’s neighbour, though she is not a Form, and one can believe, but not know for sure, that Plato’s Forms are meant to be paradigms after which the sensibles which participate in them are named.
Gail’s first observation recommends, then, a second. As she rightly maintains, when he asserts that knowledge and belief are set over (epi) specifiable objects, Plato may be taken in a variety of non-equivalent ways, depending on how one understands the word ‘is’. The English word ‘is’, like the Greek word it translates (esti), can be used in at least three different ways: (a) existentially (‘There is a God’ = ‘God exists’); (b) predicatively (‘Miss Stanbury is prim’, an instance of the general predicative schema ‘x is F’); and, if somewhat less frequently in English than in Greek, (c) veridically (‘Tell it like it is’ = ‘Tell the truth’) In principle, then, to take just his first sentence as an illustration, when Plato says that knowledge is set over (epi) what is, he might mean that knowledge takes as its objects: (a) what exists; (b) what is F, for some predicate or other; or (c) what is true. As Gail rightly observes, proponents of the Two-Worlds Theory move too
readily and without argument to (a), the existential use of ‘is’. Beyond the problems already noted, this interpretation has some immediately perplexing consequences even taken in its own terms: it is not at all clear what it means to assert that knowledge concerns what exists, whereas belief concerns what both exists and does not exist. What can both exist and not exist? Taken distributively, that one has beliefs both about what exists and about what does not exist, the suggestion seems more promising. Yet then we have a different worry. Surely if we can have beliefs about what does not exist, so too can we know things about what does not exist. One can, after all, know that Santa Claus does not exist; and one can believe falsely of the tree in the front garden that it is a poplar, when it is in fact a cyprus. In the first case we have knowledge pertaining to a non-existent and in the second false belief pertaining to an existent.
Perhaps, then, Plato has some one of the other, non-existential senses of ‘is’ in mind? Gail argues for (c), the veridical sense, such that Plato’s meaning is rather something less extravagant, that knowledge is in every instance of something which is true, namely a true proposition, whereas belief can be set over true or false propositions indifferently. Put another way, knowledge is truth-entailing, while belief is not. That much seems neither alien nor even problematic.
How, though, are we to adjudicate these differing interpretations? One can generate them, just as Gail does, only to find that there is no way forward. Even in that case, however, one will already have shown that Plato’s text does not demand the existential reading, and so does not simply state or even imply the Two-Worlds Theory. Still, with no further argumentation from one side or the other, the debate will stalemate. Fortunately, there is a way forward. For, happily, the second phase of Gail’s logocentric method is still to be deployed. One can proceed just as Gail is disposed to proceed, by looking to the text of the Republic to see which, if any, of these alternatives its arguments require, or, failing that, which they recommend. Gail argues that upon close inspection, the arguments of Republic V–VII in fact recommend (c), the veridical reading, which in turn carries with it various exegetical and philosophical advantages.
Here too Gail’s solution has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention, once again a fair bit dissenting. All this discussion, including the dissent, is welcome: Gail’s work has inaugurated a healthy, productive scholarly debate, and has thus advanced our understanding of Plato and the issues he brings to our attention. That she should have this effect is altogether unsurprising. In assessing the so-called Two-Worlds Theory, Gail advances a textually informed, philosophically nuanced, bold and attractive thesis, one which has proven agenda-setting for all the best reasons.
We have focussed mainly on Gail’s influential discussions of Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology. Although our doing so provides at least a faint portrait of her approach to the study of ancient philosophy, we would be remiss not at least to mention her many other accomplishments. She has additionally done pioneering work on Aristotle’s metaphysics, on issues in ancient Scepticism, and on an intricate set of questions regarding the relationship between Plato and Aristotle. In particular, and not only in the monumental work already mentioned, On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticisms of
Plato’s Theory of Forms (1993), Gail has done more than any other living scholar to investigate Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s theory of Forms.
Gail’s work in all these areas proceeds with an unsurpassed level of attention to argumentative detail and displays an unremitting commitment to philosophical precision, all delivered with her trademark clarity and candour. The beneficiaries—her students, her colleagues, her readers—come away with renewed respect for the ancient authors whose philosophy it has been her life’s work to make vivid. When we encounter her engagements with Plato, or Aristotle, or Sextus, we are treated to philosophical dialectic at its highest level, and we are reminded that the ancient philosophers are, well, philosophers, as we ourselves wish to be. Gail shows that by treating the ancients as the philosophers they claim to be we ourselves stand to become, as she is, philosophers worthy of the tradition they inspire.
Terence Irwin
Through his research and graduate student supervision, Terry has had a profound influence on ancient philosophy and the history of ethics. In over four decades in the professorate, Terry had published five monographs, five translations, and well over 100 scholarly articles and helped shape the philosophical communities at Cornell and Oxford universities. He has trained many students who have gone on to successful academic careers, including several who are represented in this Festschrift. The depth and breadth of his work in Greek philosophy and the history of ethics have reshaped the agenda in those fields, for which we are all in his debt.
Terry made a dramatic entry into scholarship about Greek philosophy with the publication of Plato’s Moral Theory (1977a). It is common to read Plato’s earlier dialogues as representing the philosophical thought of the historical figure Socrates and later dialogues as representing the thought of Plato himself. Terry defends a striking version of this developmental thesis by contending that there is significant change in philosophical commitments from Socrates to Plato. Focusing primarily on ethical issues in Plato’s early and middle dialogues, he argued that, despite agreement on some claims about the nature and importance of the virtues, Socrates and Plato disagreed on several important methodological and substantive issues. On Terry’s reading, whereas Socrates seeks reductive real definitions of the virtues that eliminate disputed terms in the definiens, Plato defends real definitions of the virtues that are non-reductive. Further, Socrates accepts the unity of the virtues, believes that the virtues are forms of ethical knowledge, and denies the possibility of akrasia or weakness of will. By contrast, Plato conceives of virtue as an affective and conative state that is regulated by ethical knowledge; though his position about the unity of the virtues is not certain, he emphatically embraces the reality of akrasia. Moreover, though Socrates believes that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness, he nonetheless thinks that virtue has only instrumental value. Like Socrates, Plato thinks that the demands of virtue are always
dispositive. However, Plato rejects the Socratic assumption about the instrumental value of virtue, claiming that virtue is valuable for its own sake as a proper and controlling part of happiness. Despite claiming that virtue dominates happiness, Plato does not think that it exhausts happiness. For Plato, unlike Socrates, virtue can have a price, but it is one that is always worth paying.
Terry’s book was arresting, not just for its provocative interpretive claims but also for the resourcefulness of its arguments, both exegetical and philosophical. In addition to a densely argued text, covering Plato’s early and middle dialogues, the book contained an even denser and extremely rewarding set of notes, situating his claims in a rich secondary literature and offering reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with various received interpretations of Plato. The book, especially Terry’s reading of Socrates as an instrumentalist about virtue, proved extremely controversial, but critics recognized its value. The great classical scholar and philosopher Gregory Vlastos, Terry’s supervisor at Princeton, reviewed the book for the Times Literary Supplement, expressing reservations about Terry’s dense analytic prose and his instrumentalist reading of Socrates but also unequivocal praise for it as being ‘rich in philosophical erudition, arresting in its claims, and powerful in its reasoning.’ While taking issue with various aspects of Terry’s reading of Socrates, Vlastos also took care to record his admiration for Terry’s book.
Those who might think I am doing so [depreciating the value of Plato’s Moral Theory] would only reveal how sadly they misunderstand the standards by which a work of pure scholarship is appraised in its own domain. If an interpretation is as clear, bold, imaginative, yet painstakingly attentive to its texts and philosophically as rigorous as is Irwin’s, it has more than proved its worth. Its effect on those who work with it, testing it out, text by text and argument by argument, will be bracing, compelling them to bring into sharper focus things which had been heretofore fuzzy in their perception of what is being said in the dialogues and to explore connexions they had never troubled to track down before . . . . For this I am greatly in his debt, which is all the heavier because of the many pages of level-headed and level-tempered criticism his notes have devoted to my own work. I have never had more valuable help from a critic. (231)
This judicious assessment of Terry’s first book might equally serve as an assessment of his scholarly oeuvre.
Shortly after the publication of Plato’s Moral Theory, Terry contributed a translation, with extended notes, of Plato’s Gorgias for the Clarendon Plato series (1979a). The translation quickly became the best English translation of the dialogue, and the notes raise important scholarly questions about the text, not just concerning individual passages but also the role of the Gorgias—especially on topics about happiness, pleasure, virtue, and akrasia—in relation to the Protagoras and the Republic
In Plato’s Ethics (1995a), Terry returned to the themes of Plato’s Moral Theory. Though it endorses the main developmental picture of the relation between Socrates and Plato in the earlier book, it is not a second edition of the first book. Instead, it broadens the scope of the first book by including examination of ethical doctrines in
Plato’s later dialogues, especially the Philebus, and it aims to provide a more balanced and accessible discussion of Plato’s ethics and rival ways in which it has been interpreted. Terry’s examination of methodological and ethical themes and commitments in various dialogues yields important insights about individual dialogues and a striking developmental narrative. The extended engagement with the ethical argument of the Republic (eight chapters) is masterful. This alone would make Plato’s Ethics the best monograph on Plato’s ethical theory, though its scope, depth, and systematicity make an even greater scholarly contribution.
Building on several important articles on Aristotle’s metaphysics and ethics and a translation with notes and glossary of the Nicomachean Ethics (1985a, 1999), Terry’s monograph Aristotle’s First Principles (1988a) was a tour de force. It provides a systematic treatment of Aristotle’s methodological and substantive commitments, ranging from his dialectical methods to his conception of explanation and science, the metaphysics of matter, form, substance, and essence, the soul and action, eudaimonia, the virtues, and political science. Terry begins with an apparent tension between Aristotle’s dialectical methods and his naturalistic realism. How can dialectical methods, in which inquiry is driven by common and respected beliefs, be a guide to objective facts and truths? He argues that the resolution of this tension consists in the pursuit of dialectical methods involving privileged beliefs (which he terms ‘strong dialectic’). Strong dialectic appeals to first philosophy, which involves a particular kind of dialectical study of substances with an essence. Terry reconstructs Aristotle’s application of this conception of first philosophy to substance itself and then to the human soul, the human good, and the ethical virtues, and finally to political community. Though the book is chock-full of resourceful interpretive proposals and philosophical assessments of individual topics in Aristotle, which move the state of scholarship on those topics forward, perhaps its greatest contribution is to provide a sustained and systematic assessment of how Aristotle’s various philosophical commitments hang together in a system that is informed by his commitments to dialectical method and philosophical naturalism. Its combination of interpretive and philosophical scope and detail is unrivaled, and it remains the most impressive single monograph on Aristotle’s philosophy as a whole.
Though much of Terry’s scholarship concerns various figures and issues in Greek and Roman philosophy, he has always had diverse interests in the history of philosophy, especially the history of ethics. He taught the British idealists at the beginning of his career at Harvard, he regularly taught seminars on Kant at Cornell, and in the early 1980s he began teaching a two-semester sequence in the history of ethics. At Oxford, he has continued this engagement with medieval and modern, as well as ancient, figures and traditions. Terry’s interest in the history of ethics culminated in the publication of his monumental three-volume work The Development of Ethics (2007–9), a masterful reconstruction and assessment of figures, traditions, and ideas in the history of ethics in the Western tradition from Socrates through John Rawls. The three volumes weigh in at over 11 pounds and span 96 substantial chapters and over 2700 densely
formatted pages. The Development of Ethics covers not only familiar figures, such as Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Hutcheson, Butler, Hume, Smith, Reid, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Green, and Sidgwick, but also a rich variety of ancient sources (including the Cynics, Cyrenaics, Sceptics, and Church Fathers, such as Augustine), medieval, renaissance, and reformation sources (including Scotus, Ockham, and Machiavelli), sources for natural law (including Hooker, Vasquez, Suárez, Grotius, Pufendorf, and Barbeyrac), continental rationalists (including Spinoza and Leibniz), British moralists (including Cumberland, Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Clarke, Balguy, and Price), post-Kantians (including Marx, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger), and twentieth-century Anglo-American sources (including Moore, Ross, Stevenson, Ayer, Lewis, and Hare). This is just a sampling of the more familiar historical sources that Terry discusses. He also discusses a wealth of less familiar philosophical and theological figures. Most chapters are devoted to individual figures, and several figures get multiple chapters (Aristotle gets four, Aquinas nine, Scotus two, Suárez two, Hobbes three, Hutcheson two, Balguy two, Butler four, Hume five, Reid two, Kant seven, Hegel two, Mill two, Sidgwick three, and Rawls two). A few chapters discuss traditions and themes.
The combination of scope and depth in The Development of Ethics is without precedent. The broad scope of Terry’s inquiry pays various dividends, not the least of which is that he is able to show that some ideas and themes often taken to be distinctive of modern ethics have their origins and antecedents in antiquity. It is hard to think of anyone else as well qualified historically, philologically, and philosophically to undertake such an ambitious interpretive and philosophical task and carry it out with such authority. Any reader of his three volumes should find the process immensely illuminating though also humbling.
Though Terry has a keen sense of the context of the figures and ideas he discusses, he is relentless about understanding and assessing the philosophical content and implications of the texts. Though he provides self-contained reconstructions and assessments of various figures and traditions that make good sense of those figures and traditions on their own terms, two general principles emerge from and guide his discussion.
The first principle is a methodological commitment to Socratic dialectic, as refined and practised by Aristotle. This makes Terry’s approach to the history of ethics essentially comparative. In understanding and assessing the philosophical claims of a particular figure or tradition, he finds it fruitful to compare the philosophical commitments and resources of that figure or tradition with the commitments and resources of other figures and traditions. This is valuable, Terry believes, whether those different figures and traditions were in actual and conscious conversation or not.
The second principle is a substantive set of commitments that are perhaps clearest in Aristotle and Aquinas but that Terry thinks influence, in various ways, much of the history of ethics. This principle Terry calls ‘Aristotelian naturalism’, which takes the central ethical concept to be a teleological conception of a final good, which should be identified with the agent’s happiness or eudaimonia, where conceptions of eudaimonia
