Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind

Julia Annas

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Julia Annas (Ph.D., Harvard), Regents Professor of Philosophy, was at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, for fifteen years before coming to Arizona. She specializes in almost every facet of ancient Greek philosophy, including ethics, psychology and epistemology. Her current research interests are in Platonic ethics. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the founder and former editor of the annual journal, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy.

Introduction
Modern philosophy of mind, like most areas of philosophy, harks back from time to time to predecessors in the ancient world. Usually the predecessor singled out is Aristotle, the great founder of the subject.
Aristotle’s De anima and Parva naturalia are the first works to study psychological phenomena seriously in a philosophical way. Rooting “study of the soul” firmly in biology, Aristotle’s works are the ancestors not only of philosophy of mind, as that is studied in philosophy departments, but also of systematic psychology, the more purely scientific study of psychological and mental phenomena. And Aristotle’s approach is still of interest to modern philosophers, as is witnessed by the huge amount of research devoted in the last twodecades to understanding Aristotle’s theory of the soul and classifying it as physicalist, dualist, or
functionalist.[1] Aristotle’s successors, the philosophers of the Hellenistic or post-Aristotelian period, have been comparatively neglected. This is a pity, because the theories are sophisticated and interesting. It is also somewhat surprising, since even from the perspective of modern interest the Hellenistic theories have a great deal more in common with modern concerns than Aristotle’s does. Furthermore, Hellenistic accounts of particular phenomena, such as perceiving, are often of great interest in their own right. Thus, both on grounds of their intrinsic interest and from the viewpoint of modern concerns, it seems reasonable to expand our picture of ancient philosophy of mind to include Aristotle’s great successors.
Hellenistic philosophy of mind has been generally neglected in the history of recent scholarship because Hellenistic philosophy generally has been undervalued, an imbalance that is now being corrected. In the recent past, however, this period of philosophy of mind was thought especially worthy of neglect. It was dismissed as crude, as a mere throwback to earlier ideas,[2] and even as a type of theory which was patently inadequate, but whose faults were overlooked in the haste to get to what was really supposed to
matter, namely, the ethical conclusions.[3] Why was Hellenistic philosophy of mind held to be crude? The main reason is that all the major theories

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