Cicero's Practical Philosophy
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0268036659
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Cicero’s Practical Philosophy marks a revival over the last two generations of serious scholarly interest in Cicero’s political thought. Its nine original essays by a multidisciplinary group of distinguished international scholars manifest close study of Cicero’s philosophical writings and great appreciation for him as a creative thinker, one from whom we can continue to learn. This collection focuses initially on Cicero’s major work of political theory, his De Re Publica, and the key moral virtues that shape his ethics, but the contributors attend to all of Cicero’s primary writings on political community, law, the ultimate good, and moral duties. Room is also made for Cicero’s extensive writings on the art of rhetoric, which he explicitly draws into the orbit of his philosophical writings. Cicero’s concern with the divine, with epistemological issues, and with competing analyses of the human soul are among the matters necessarily encountered in pursuing, with Cicero, the large questions of moral and political philosophy, namely, what is the good and genuinely happy life and how are our communities to be rightly ordered.
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persona theory at Orator, 74. 10. For some pertinent discussion, see Gill, “Personhood and Personality,” 177–94. 11. Dyck (A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis, 246) suggests that despite Cicero’s explicit assertion that the relationship is subordination of species to genus, he is wrong about that. But provided we take “what accords with nature” in the definition of specific decorum as shorthand for the formula defining generic decorum (“what accords with the excellence of a human being just
science unrelated to the citizen’s and statesman’s horizons of political engagement, of necessary decisions about the good. Rather, active political life and leadership may appear simply as forms of data to be explained in a science of politics, if not the science of psychology, both in the service of a comprehensive 6 Cicero’s Practical Philosophy philosophy or science of humankind. Strauss’s wonder then may allow us to understand better why Cicero’s distinctively practical philosophy has
I accept them, and sometimes even assent to them (although I don’t apprehend them, since I think that nothing is apprehensible). I’m not wise, so I yield to these impressions and can’t resist them” (Acad. 2.66). Cicero’s intellectual roaming refers to his cherished Academic freedom. So it is not simply a synonym for error, and he is not simply critical of his fallibility. The interpretative crux is the distinction between the “more easily accessible principles” and those “refined almost to the
acquiescence in the way things appear; it does not commit him to any view about the way the world really is. When he feels heated or chilled, hungry or thirsty, he goes along with these impressions in seeking the appropriate remedy (PH 1.13). Sextus differentiates this Pyrrhonian view of acquiescing in appearances with Clitomachus’s and Carneades’ view of going along with things that are plausible (pithanon). The fundamental difference is found in the two senses of peithesthai: “It means not
reality, both normatively and empirically.5 The result of this synthesis is a model of political community that bears strong structural similarities to the model of community current today, namely the national state, and indeed is a direct ancestor of it via Augustine and later the “republican” tradition of political thought.6 Moreover, Cicero’s model of political community, and in particular his understanding of the community as a patria, provides Cicero with a certain “picture” of the adequate