Enquiries and further information:

The local organisers for this year's event is James Warren. He can be contacted on jiw1001@cam.ac.uk 

Abstracts

Session 1

Toomas Lott (Tartu) - ‘Wishful thinking and inquiry in the Phaedo’

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates is inquiring into the immortality of the soul in what might seem like a biased manner. Establishing the truth of the claim that the soul is immortal is highly desirable, both for Socrates personally and for his philosophically minded interlocutors. Plato also portrays Socrates as being acutely aware of the risks of wishful thinking. I will examine the strategies that Socrates proposes to counteract the dangers of wishful thinking and ask whether they can plausibly be seen as good strategies.

Session 2:

Emily Daly (Oxford) – ‘Plato on comedy in the Republic and the Laws’

While in the Republic, Socrates notoriously banishes both comic and tragic poets from Kallipolis, in the Laws, the Athenian asserts that comic performances are to serve as a form of moral education for the citizens of Magnesia. Working on the assumption that Plato doesn’t change his mind about poetry’s power to corrupt its audience between the Republic and the Laws, the aim of this paper is to show how he can safely reintroduce comedy in the Laws.

Riccardo Di Stefano (Cambridge) – ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias on What Is up to Us: Alternative Possibilities and Sourcehood’ 

According to Alexander of Aphrodisias, only actions resulting from deliberation are up to us, since we can do otherwise only when we deliberate. In this paper, I argue that Alexander grounds this ability to do otherwise in the satisfaction of a specific sourcehood condition (SC) for moral responsibility. By analyzing the respective contributions of desire, the object of desire, and the soul to the explanation of action, I show (i) how SC accounts for the difference between merely voluntary actions and actions that are up to us, and (ii) how Alexander’s account of SC fits into his broader project of defending the causal efficacy of forms.

Session 4

Pieter Sjoerd Hasper (Hamburg) — ‘Aristotle's Epistemology of Scientific and Dialectical Arguments’

For Aristotle, epistêmê is ametapeistos, whereas even true doxa is unstable in that one can be persuaded otherwise – and epistêmê is ametapeistos because it is based on demonstrations grounded in cognition of the essence, whereas merely true doxa is brought about by another type of arguments, subsumed under the heading of dialectical arguments. It thus seems excluded that a dialectical argument can ever persuade us of some piece of knowledge which is to be known as a matter of epistêmê. At the same time, Aristotle claims that dialectical, non-demonstrative, arguments are very useful for the acquisition of epistêmê. How is this possible?

Session 5

Kelli Rudolph (Kent) – Political Love in Zeno's Republic: Erōs, Reason and Civic Security

This paper examines the political function of erōs in a fragment of Zeno's Republic where Erōs is called a co-worker (synergos) toward the security of the city, and god of friendship and freedom and provider of concord, "and of nothing else." Scholarly debate has concentrated on the report's opening paraphrase; I take up the clause attributed to the Politeia and ask what Erōs is a co-worker with. I argue that it works with the citizens' own reason. Since the Stoics treat the fool's erōs and the sage's as sharing one structure but differing in its object and measure, Zeno's restriction identifies one form of attachment as the relation within which judgement about common goods can be exercised and corrected. Freedom, friendship and concord are accordingly not a causal sequence but a single condition described from three aspects. Read against Athenian practice after 307 BCE, when security was purchased through cultic attachment to Demetrius, the argument locates civic failure in misdirected attachment rather than indifference to strangers and shows the Republic to be political theory rather than ethics in civic idiom.

Session 6

Laura Castelli (Cambridge) – ‘Aristotle on Plato’s Forms and Principles’

In this paper I focus on Aristotle’s account of the origin and philosophical motivation for Plato’s introduction of the two Elements (the One and the Indefinite Dyad) as distinct from the Forms. I argue that, thinking of the Forms as the first and praiseworthy attempt at introducing immobile substances, Forms should indeed be separate. But the introduction of the Elements in the wake of Pythagorean and Parmenidean intuitions suggests that Forms and Elements are conceived of as too similar to natural substances and their elements – and this, for Aristotle, is the fundamental philosophical problem in Plato’s metaphysics.