Etudes sur les philosophies Hellenistiques: Epicurisme, stoicisme, Scepticisme.

Allen, James

BRUNSCHWIG, Jacques. Etudes sur les philosophies Hellenistiques: Epicurisme, stoicisme, Scepticisme. Evry-Cedex: Presses Universitaire de France, 1995. 364 pp. Cloth, FF 248.00--Jacques Brunschwig's collection of papers, Etudes sur les philosophies Hellenistiques: Epicurisme, stoicisme, Scepticisme follows close on the heels of his similar, though not identical, Papers in Hellenistic Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). It performs the same valuable service for Francophone readers that was performed for Anglophone readers by the English volume: it makes available for the first time in French articles that originally appeared in English along with a selection of pieces first published in French. The only serious complaint I can imagine against either volume concerns the decision to exclude certain pieces from each. Yet one should not be greedy; this is a splendid collection which gives ample cause for gratitude as it is.

Like its English counterpart, this collection contains twelve pieces. It may perhaps be worth singling out for special mention three pieces that made signal contributions to the issues they take up when they first appeared in English and are therefore likely to be especially welcome here. "Definir la demonstration" is a, or rather the, pathbreaking study of the accounts of proof transmitted by the Pyrrhonian skeptic, Sextus Empiricus. By dint of painstaking archeological work, Brunschwig is able to separate the different strata of this very confusing but potentially very illuminating discussion, in this way bringing to light a complex and philosophically exciting set of developments within Stoic thinking about this subject. "L'argument des berceaux chez les Epicuriens et chez les Stoiciens" is a comparative study of the uses to which the Stoics and Epicureans put the so-called cradle argument: the appeal to the behavior of infants in order to arrive at an understanding of human nature before it is hopelessly perverted by the corrupting influence of society. Brunschwig throws light not only on the ethical issues at stake, but on how the adherents of a philosophical position understand the considerations they offer in support of first principles which they regard as in some way too obvious to be established by argument in the usual way. "Le probleme de l'heritage conceptual dans le scepticisme: Sextus Empiricus et la notion de [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] investigates, with special attention to the criterion, the too seldom recognized questions raised by Sextus' use of a conceptual framework to classify and describe the competing dogmatic positions he subjects to skeptical examination. How, Brunschwig asks, can a skeptic, officially detached from dogmatic theory, employ a framework which is far from free from theoretical commitments and is the product of the contingencies of its own curious history?

One of the reviewer's privileges is to pursue a little further a question raised in the work under review. "La formule [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] chez Sextus Empiricus" defends a broadly deflationary interpretation of the phrase "insofar as it is a matter of logos" that has been assigned a more philosophically pregnant part in some recent interpretations of Pyrrhonism. This kind of view takes the phrase, at least sometimes, to characterize--globally--the way in which the skeptic raises questions and suspends judgment about the matters that come under his consideration. He does so, on this view, insofar as it is a matter of reason or philosophical reflection or something along these lines. This way of putting into question and suspending judgment can then be contrasted with a way in which the skeptic does not put into question or suspend judgment about a matter, that is, it is somehow compatible with the skeptic's claim that he goes along with or follows the phenomena. Brunschwig, on the other hand, takes the phrase, as a rule, to have a local significance, relative to a particular context and the logos at issue in it.

Brunschwig's case presents a stiff challenge, but all the same I think that there is something to be said for a view of the kind he opposes. His discussion is focused on the first occurrence of the phrase at PH 1.20, where Sextus is concerned to answer the charge that the skeptic abolishes the phenomena. "We inquire," Sextus says, "not about the phenomena, but about what is said about them ... for example, honey seems to us to be sweet, which we grant ... but we continue to inquire as to whether it is sweet so far as the logos is concerned." Brunschwig offers us a choice between anaphoric and nonanaphoric interpretations of logos. At first glance, it might seem that the kind of view I am defending is best served by a nonanaphoric interpretation of logos as something like philosophical theory, which has not been referred to in the immediate context. Yet it does not have to be abandoned if we adopt an anaphoric interpretation that takes logos to refer to "what is said about the phenomena," as Brunschwig persuasively argues that we should. For "what is said about the phenomena" could refer to the whole range of arguments and counter-arguments about whether appearances afford us an accurate grasp of the way things are.

I believe that this interpretive possibility does not emerge clearly because Brunschwig insists on too close a connection between grammatical and philosophical interpretations in the two anaphoric interpretations he offers--an adverbial reading in which "so far as it is a matter of logos" belongs to "we inquire," and an object-orientated reading in which it is attached to the object under investigation, namely, that honey is sweet. For he supposes that on the first, adverbial reading the logos is the argument whose strength furnishes the skeptic with his reason for doubting that honey is sweet, while on the second, objectal reading it refers to the nonskeptic's ground for supposing the opposite whose weakness is the basis of the skeptic's doubt. Yet it seems to be a mistake to suppose that a choice of this kind is at issue, because the skeptic's suspension of judgment is not the result of his being moved by the arguments on one side of a question and unimpressed by those on the other, but rather the result of his being as impressed (or unimpressed) by one argument as by the other. If the skeptic argues a little more insistently on one side of an issue than the other--the side we are accustomed to call the skeptical side--it is only because the other side has been well enough handled by others (see M 7.443).

I suggest that we need an interpretation of logos here broad enough to embrace both sides of the argument, for example, both Aristotelian and Stoic arguments that, in the right conditions, perceptual appearances afford us a grasp of reality and, say, Cyrenaic and Democritean arguments which, in very different ways, call this into question. Sextus goes on in the same chapter to say that even if he does bring logoi against the phenomena, it is only to exhibit the rashness of the dogmatists by showing how deceptive the logos can be. Logos clearly must mean something like reason here. However I should like to suggest that Sextus is not introducing a new logos, but proceeding to consider a further question about the logos already under discussion, namely whether the effects of reason applied to the appearances can be confined as he has just suggested they can.

Scholarly disagreement should not obscure the fact that this paper and its companions here represent contemporary writing about classical philosophy at its very best. All will repay close and careful attention and will be a source of pleasure and illumination to anyone interested in Hellenistic philosophy.

James Allen, University of Pittsburgh.