In ‘The Place of Concepts in Socratic Inquiry’, Terence Irwin examines Socrates’ question ‘What is F?’, which is often taken to be a request for some sort of definition or account of what F is. When Socrates asks, ‘What is courage?’, ‘What is piety?’, ‘What is temperance?’, does his discovery that everyone, including himself, cannot answer such questions in a satisfactory manner imply that these answerers do not know what the words mean? If one cannot answer the ‘What is F?’ question, does it follow that one lacks the concept of F? Irwin argues that conceptual argument has an indispensable role in the arguments that lead to Socratic definitions, but it will not take us all the way to them. To understand Socratic definitions, Irwin compares them with Aristotelian real definitions, and with Epictetus’ views on the articulation of preconceptions.

This chapter examines the idea of the prophetically able holy man, or theios anêr, and argues that the attribution of sagehood to prophets in the Hellenistic Jewish tradition paved the way to the creation of the idealised prophet-sage of the Greek theios anêr tradition. This process radically altered the way in which Greeks – including pagans, Jews, and Christians – conceptualised the role of the prophet. The merging of the rational-dialectical epistemic claims of the sage with the revelatory epistemology of the prophet in authors like Philo established a potentially universal scope to the prophet-sage’s knowledge; while both the prophet and sage had defined epistemologies and limits in traditional Greek and Jewish thought, the new-prophet sage understood nothing less than the ‘structure of the cosmos and the activity of the elements’.

Heir to a shared Indo-European eudaimonist thoughtworld, Shakespeare’s Hamlet dramatizes the interplay of Buddhist, Skeptic, and Stoic philosophies at the affective-cognitive interface indispensable for virtue in action. Hamlet’s search for appropriate response — in the role of “scourge and minister” thrust upon him to redress regicide — requires equanimity, and equanimity, as the play suggests, ultimately requires other-focused compassion to counteract affective-cognitive affliction: the emptying of self-engrossed mental proliferation prepares the mind for virtuous action. Our ability in Greco-Buddhist wisdom traditions to stand firm by judgment and detachment from destructive emotions and mental disturbances is encapsulated in Hamlet’s famous line in banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “There’s nothing either good / or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.244-45). This key idea from Buddhist, Skeptic, and Stoic philosophies compresses therapy for emotional control through skepticism, or suspension of judgment. This equanimity in Buddhist-Stoic spiritual practices, moreover, interacts closely with two primary virtues: compassion and wisdom. Throughout most of the play, Hamlet’s quandary is exacerbated by his overactive ruminations until finally in Act 5, his feelings of compassion toward another, Laertes, relieves and releases Hamlet from his psychohumoral affliction and lends him the emotional equanimity and mental clarity to take virtuous action.

Representative selections from the Discourses, the Handbook and some fragments.

It is greatly tempting to speak of a specifically ‘Trajanic’ moment in Alexander reception, as this is the only moment in Greek literature in which an ‘idealised Greek’ Alexander appears. This chapter concentrates on his unusual figuration as a philosopher by Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch, which is both decisively Hellenocentric and at the same time motivated by Trajan’s own profile as a philhellene who admired Alexander as a military hero. The uniqueness of this image is suggested by contrast with other near-contemporary texts that are decidedly philosophical – those of Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Pseudo-Diogenes and Maximus of Tyre – but that either ignore Alexander or see him as a philosophical anti-type. Idealising Alexander required opportunity, which I suggest came quickly in the form of Trajan, was seized upon by a couple of experimentalists, and disappeared just as quickly, at least within secular literature.

The scholarly conclusions regarding Paul’s relationship with Hellenistic philosophy center around the parallels between Paul and contemporary philosophers (e.g., Seneca or Epictetus) or philosophies (e.g., Stoicism, Middle Platonism, Epicureanism, etc.), each with varying theses on Paul’s uncritical consumption of such philosophies or his savvy redeployment of Hellenism. Aside from encyclopedic convictions that often fund such comparisons, differences between Paul and Hellenism are discussed less often.What if his dispositions and diatribes could be related to his view of the prophetic office undergirding Hebraic philosophy as easily as they could to the rhetoric of the cynic or stoic? This chapter will suggest that Paul’s style of philosophy is largely Hebraic. However, because Paul’s epistles are audience-centric in their formation, so, too, the style is often garbed in Hellenistic philosophy. Nevertheless, the Hebraic style of philosophy is what drives his effort.

The fifth chapter lays out Arendt’s critical dismantling of classical political philosophy. Socrates understood the dialogical and aporetic nature of essential thought, she argued, and Socratic thought is compatible with the openness and endlessness of political persuasion.By contrast, Plato aimed to replace political persuasion with government by philosopher-kings, whose knowledge entitled them to rule over citizens, as the expertise of master craftsmen entitled them to give orders to subordinates.But this aim led Plato both to misunderstand the realities of political life and to misconceive the nature of political theory.Aristotle also derived some of his basic terms from the sphere of production, Arendt argued, so that his metaphysical concepts led him to conceive the political philosopher on the model of a craftsman, the polis on the model of a product, and political action on the model of making. The chapter then traces Arendt’s genealogies of the concepts of freedom, authority, law, and principle in classical philosophy. This account of classical political theory leads to the question of the next chapter: How did Arendt rethink the basic realities of politics?