Philosophy in its Beginnings: On the Conceptualisation, Criticism, and Justification of Philosophy in Antiquity
21-23 July 2017, Humboldt-University Berlin, Hannoversche Str. 6
FRIDAY, 21st July 2017
10 - 10:10 Introduction
10:10 - 11:25 Robert Bolton (Rutgers University): Dialectic and Analytics: Aristotle’s Two Standards for Inquiry
11:30 - 12:45 Ian Campbell (Princeton University): The Eristic Background to the Platonic and Aristotelian Principle of Noncontradiction
Lunch
13:45 - 15:00 Laura Viidebaum (NYU): Isocrates on philosophy
15:05 - 16:20 Marina McCoy (Boston College): Philosophia in the Platonic dialogues and competitors’ false practices of wisdom
Break
16:50 - 18:05 Christopher Roser (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Philosophy as expertise in logoi in Plato. Or what is the difference between rhetoric and dialectic?
18:15 - 19:30 John Sellars (King’s College London): What was Hellenistic philosophy?
20:00 Conference dinner
SATURDAY 22nd July 2017
10:00 - 11:15 Christopher Moore (Penn State University): Calling philosophoi names: on the origins of a discipline
11:20 - 12:35 Ronja Hildebrandt (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): What’s Philosophy for Aristotle?
Lunch
13:30 - 14:45 Monte Ransome Johnson (University of California, San Diego): Apotreptic: arguments against philosophy (and their refutation in Aristotle’s lost dialogue the Protrepticus)
14:50 - 16:05 Matthew Walker (Yale-NUS): Isocrates, Aristotle, and the Possibility of Philosophical Progress
Break
16:35 - 17:50 David Gallop (Trent University): The Origin of Philosophy in ‘Wonder’
17:55 - 19:10 Matthias Perkams (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena): Methodik und Mystik. Der Übergang vom spätantiken Platonismus zum mittelalterlichen Aristotelismus im Spiegel zweier Grundanliegen von "Philosophie" (Method and Mystic. The transition from late ancient Platonism to medieval Aristotelianism in the light of two fundamental concerns of philosophy)
20:00 Dinner
SUNDAY, 23rd July 2017
10:00 - 11:15 Raul Heimann (Freie Universität Berlin): Plato’s defense and conception of philosophy in Republic VII
11:20 - 12:35 Rasmus Sevelsted (University of Cambridge): Plato on being perfectly mousikos. Poetry as the beginning of philosophy in Plato’s Republic
Break
12:45 - 14:00 Will Desmond (Maynooth University): Plato’s Mythology of Reason
This conference is organised by Christopher Roser and Ronja Hildebrandt, and it is generously supported by the DFG Research Training Group “Philosophy, Science, and the Sciences.”
(https://ancient-philosophy.hu-berlin.de/en/ancient-philosophy/)
Marina McCoy
I argue that Plato develops a concept of philosophia as a normative term to set apart his own practice from other competitors who also wish to claim wisdom or its pursuit for themselves. In particular, Plato uses rhetoric, sophistry, poetry, and the performative approaches of tragedy and comedy as contrasts against which to develop a notion of philosophia. Plato does not merely criticize rhetoricians, sophists, and poets for not being sufficiently philosophical. Rather, his dialogues shape a normative concept of philosophia through deliberately developing tensions between his own philosophical practice and these other practices—with which Plato often shares much in common. Through the push and pull of exploring the similarities and differences between true philosophia and its similar counterparts in rhetoric, sophistry, and poetry, Plato shows philosophia to be the pursuit of a “human kind of wisdom” that longs for wisdom’s objects and can progress in their understanding, but in which such wisdom is never complete.
Laura Viidebaum, New York University (lv40@nyu.edu) - Isocrates on philosophy
Isocrates is a notoriously thorny figure in ancient Greek thought and his relationship to philosophy is a topic that has created and keeps creating controversy around the borders of philosophy and rhetoric: how exactly should we understand Isocrates’ role in the conception and practice of philosophy? And why is this such a complicated matter to settle?
In this paper, I want to take a closer look at Isocrates’ views of philosophy (broadly construed) and how he conceptualizes the role and importance of both those who came before (the ‘pre-Socratics’ and sophists) and of his contemporaries (especially Plato and Aristotle) in relation to his own work. It is not simply of secondary interest what he thought of the surrounding intellectual community. As we will see, Isocrates often (if not always) works towards defining his own practice through references to, and critiques of, previous and contemporary intellectuals, creating thus a sense of his work as a positive development over the preceding intellectual tradition. But how exactly does he delineate this previous tradition and how does his portrayal compare to our contemporary view of this particular intellectual/philosophical climate?
An important part of this investigation revolves around the emergence of a new technology – writing and that of prose in particular. It is well known that Isocrates has special interest in the written word and, in several places, he gives us a list of what he perceives to be categories of different genres of writing (XII 1, XV 45). These are all types of writing that appear to be current at his time, but that – according to Isocrates – eventually fall short of his own proposed way of writing. As has been noticed before, these lists say nothing about philosophy. I aim to show in this paper that Isocrates conceives of philosophical activity (or philosophizing) as confined primarily to the oral medium and to teaching in particular. This is not to say that we cannot find philosophically relevant questions and ideas in his work (I am confident that we can). Such a search would, however, be inevitably influenced and guided by the concept of philosophy that we have inherited from the Platonic tradition. But Isocrates himself, I argue, does not ask us to consider his writings philosophy and this might be the reason why in these works he never calls himself a philosopher.
John Sellars - What was Hellenistic Philosophy?
In this paper I examine the claims that philosophy in the Hellenistic period was primarily a therapeutic enterprise or a way of life. In the first part I consider each of the main Hellenistic schools of thought, looking at their reflections of the nature of philosophy. In the second part I turn to the development of other disciplines during the period - especially at Alexandria - and how this may have impacted on how philosophy was conceived.
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In Antiquity, the meaning and value of philosophy was debated with great vigor. This debate among opponents and proponents of philosophy has formed the foundation of our understanding of philosophy until today. The aim of this conference is to bring papers on different aspects of this debate together, in order to better illuminate it and its ramifications. Core questions of the conference will be: What is philosophy and how did the understanding of “philosophy“ develop in Antiquity? What does the criticism of philosophy and similar rational endeavours in Antiquity consist in? What kind of justification of philosophy and similar rational endeavours do we find in Antiquity?
We gather papers on these core questions and related issues such as, but not exclusively: philosophy as a way of life; philosophy as the highest scientific endeavour; the art of living; the relation and delineation of philosophy from other endeavours as politics, rhetoric, sophistic, or the sciences; the historical and social impact on the origins of philosophy.
We are interested both in authors that are traditionally considered to be „philosophers“ such as pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle and in authors whose status is more controversial, such as Aristophanes, Thucydides, Gorgias, Antiphon, Isocrates, Xenophon. Papers on different periods of Antiquity are welcome.