Philosophy

Extract

I start this review, which focuses for the most part on publications on Hellenistic philosophy, with a survey of some recent studies on Stoicism. René Brouwer's The Stoic Sage introduces itself as ‘an attempt to bring the early Stoic notions of the sage and wisdom to the fore again’ (1). ‘Again’ alludes to the fact that those notions, which attracted considerable philosophical and scholarly interest at various stages since antiquity, have not received sufficient attention in recent times (specialists in the area will judge the merits of this assessment). The book is divided into four chapters, dealing respectively with the Stoic definitions of wisdom; the ancient puzzles surrounding the nature and very possibility of the change from ‘folly’ to ‘wisdom’; the controversial question of whether the Stoics themselves believed they had achieved the ideal of perfect wisdom; and the intellectual, Socratic background against which the Stoics developed their notion of wisdom. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 contain, in expanded and revised form, material published by Brouwer in self-contained essays between 2002 and 2008. Chapter 1, with its analysis of the Stoic definitions of wisdom as ‘knowledge of human and divine matters’ and ‘fitting expertise’, is fundamental to set the stage for the more focused inquiries of the rest of the book. From this point of view, it succeeds only partially. It helpfully covers a reasonable amount of ground, but because of Brouwer's choice to focus exclusively on the Stoic definitions of wisdom (sophia) at this stage, and not, say, on the descriptions of the Stoic wise man (sophos: Brouwer's preferred translation ‘sage’ hides the etymological connection), it also problematically leaves some fundamental aspects untouched. I was especially surprised not to see the key notion of infallibility discussed at all in this context, despite the fact that Brouwer correctly clarifies that Stoic wisdom is not to be interpreted as a form of omniscience (33–4). This ultimately springs from an insufficiently detailed analysis of the Stoics’ notions of katalēpsis (which Brouwer translates as ‘cognition’, without ever explaining its distinctive status), and then, in turn, of epistēmē and technē, and their Stoic definitions (see also the puzzling reference to ‘weak cognitions’ on p. 62). (I only note here that Paolo Togni's 2010 monograph Conoscenza e virtù nella dialettica stoica examines much more extensively and systematically the psychological and epistemological ground which needs to be covered by a discussion of Stoic sophia.) The attempt to map exhaustively the three key terms of the first definition – knowledge, human and divine – into the three parts of Stoic philosophy, respectively logic, ethics, and physics, is ingenious but too crude and ultimately unconvincing, since logic had for the Stoics its own separate subject matter (not to be identified with ‘human and divine matters’, and not even with knowledge itself, pace Brouwer), and ethics and physics can themselves be described as forms of knowledge. The interconnected nature of Stoic philosophy, which is helpfully emphasized throughout the book, need not be mirrored in the very definition of wisdom. From a broader methodological point of view, the attempt to reconstruct an early Stoic theory of wisdom constantly clashes with the nature of our evidence, and although in several cases Brouwer does carefully justify why a certain late source can be taken to bear witness to such an early theory, in other cases the reader is left to wonder whether such a justification could be given (for example, in the case of some passages from Seneca). There is still much worth pondering in Brouwer's insightful analyses in Chapters 2–4, although one is left to wonder how much added value has been generated by integrating this previously published material into a single monograph.