Speusippus
Speusippus | |
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Theory of Forms |
Speusippus ( of any thing without knowing all the differences by which it is separated from everything else.
The standard edition of the surviving fragments and testimonies is Leonardo Tarán's Speusippus of Athens: A Critical Study with a Collection of the Related Texts and Commentary (1982).
Life
Speusippus was a native of
The report about his sudden fits of anger, his greed, and his debauchery, are probably derived from a very impure source:
Philosophy
Epistemology
Speusippus was interested in bringing together those things which were similar in their philosophical treatment,
Like Plato, Speusippus distinguished between that which is the object of thought, and that which is the object of sensuous perception, between the cognition of the reason and sensuous perception. He tried, however, to show how perception can be taken up and transformed into knowledge, by the assumption of a perception, which, by participation in rational truth, raises itself to the rank of knowledge. By this he seems to have understood an immediate (in the first instance aesthetic) mode of conception; since he appealed, in support of this view, to the consideration that artistic skill has its foundation, not in sensuous activity, but in an unerring power of distinguishing between its objects, that is, in a rational perception of them.[15]
Metaphysics
Speusippus rejected Plato's
Speusippus made still more kinds of substance, beginning with the One, and assuming principles for each kind of substance, one for numbers, another for spatial magnitudes, and then another for the soul; and by going on in this way he multiplies the kinds of substance.[18]
Nevertheless, Speusippus also must have recognised something common in those different kinds of substances, inasmuch as, firstly, he set out from the absolute One, and regarded it as a formal principle which they had in common,[19] and, secondly, he appears to have assumed that multitude and multiformity was a common primary element in their composition. But it is only the difficulties which led him to make this and similar deviations from the Platonist doctrine, of which we can get any clear idea, not the way in which he thought he had avoided those difficulties by distinguishing different kinds of principles. The criticism of Aristotle, directed apparently against Speusippus, shows how little satisfied he was with the modification of the original Platonist doctrine.
With this deviation from Plato's doctrine is connected another which takes a wider range. As the ultimate principle, Speusippus would not, with Plato, recognise the Good, but, with others (who doubtless were also Platonists), going back to the older Theologi, maintained that the principles of the universe were to be set down as causes of the good and perfect, but were not the good and perfect itself, which must rather be regarded as the result of generated existence, or development, just as the seeds of plants and animals are not the fully formed plants or animals themselves.[20]
Speusippus [supposes] that supreme beauty and goodness are not present in the beginning, because the beginnings both of plants and of animals are causes, but beauty and completeness are in the effects of these.[21]
The ultimate principle he designated, like Plato, as the absolute One, but it was not to be regarded as an existing entity, since all entities can only be the result of development.
Ethics
Diogenes Laertius' list of Speusippus' works includes titles on justice, friendship, pleasure, and wealth.
Modern scholars have detected a polemic between Speusippus and Eudoxus of Cnidus concerning the good. Eudoxus also accepts that the Good will be that at which all people aim, but identifies this as pleasure, as opposed to Speusippus' exclusive focus on moral goods. Texts of Aristotle and Aulus Gellius suggest that Speusippus insisted that pleasure was not a good, but that the Good was "in between the opposites of pleasure and pain." It is possible that the dispute between Speusippus and Eudoxus influenced Plato's Philebus (esp. 53c–55a).[28]
Speusippus also seems to have developed further Plato's ideas of
List of works
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See also
- Plato's unwritten doctrines, for debates in the Early Academy over Plato's esotericism
Notes
- ^ Name "Speusippus" is pronounced /spu-Sip'-əs/. In James Knowles, A Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language, 1835, p. 771.
- ^ Dorandi 1999, p. 48.
- ^ Laërtius 1925, § 1; Suda, Speusippos
- ^ Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 4.1
- ^ Debra Nails (2002), The people of Plato: a prosopography of Plato and other Socratics, page 272. Hackett
- ^ Plutarch, Dion, c. 22. 17
- ^ Plutarch, Dion, p. 17
- ^ Athenaeus, vii. 279, xii. 546
- ^ Laërtius 1925, § 1-2; comp. Suda, Speusippos; Tertullian, Apolog. c. 46.
- ^ Leonardo Tarán (1981), Speusippus of Athens: a critical study with a collection of the Related Texts and Commentary, page 6. BRILL
- ^ Laërtius 1925, § 3–4.
- ^ Laërtius 1925, § 5.
- ^ Diodorus, ap. Laërtius 1925, § 2
- ^ Themistius, in Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora
- ^ Sextus Empiricus, adv. Math. vii. 145 ff.
- ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, vii. 2, i. 6, xiii. 8-9
- ^ Aristotle Metaphysica, vi. 2, 11, xii. 10, de Anima, i. 2; Iamblichus, ap. Stobaeus, Eclog. i.
- ^ Aristotle, Metaphysics, vii. 2
- ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, vi. 2, xiv. 3, xiii. 9
- ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, 5, xiii. 7, xii. 10, Ethica Nicomachea, i. 4; Cicero, de Natura Deorum, i. 13 ; Stobaeus, Ecl. i.; Theophrastus, Metaphysica, 9
- ^ Aristotle, Metaphysics, xii. 7
- ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, xii. 7, ix. 8, xiv. 5
- ^ Aristotle Ethica Nicomachea, i. 4
- ^ comp. Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, xii. 10
- ^ Cicero, de Natura Deorum, i. 13
- ^ Stobaeus, Ecl. Phys. i. 1; comp. Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, Ethica Nicomachea, vii. 14
- ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, 5, comp. 2, 1, xiii. 9
- ^ Russell Dancy, "Speusippus," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003
- Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, iv. 4, 5.
References
- Dorandi, Tiziano (1999). "Chapter 2: Chronology". In Algra, Keimpe; et al. (eds.). The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 48. ISBN 9780521250283.
- Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. Vol. 1:4. Translated by Hicks, Robert Drew(Two volume ed.). Loeb Classical Library.
Attribution:
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Smith, William, ed. (1870). Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology.
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Further reading
Editions
- Paul Lang, De Speusippi academici scriptis. Accedunt fragmenta, diss. Bonn, 1911 (repr. Frankfurt 1964, Hildesheim 1965)
- Elias Bickermann and Johannes Sykutris, Speusipps Brief an König Philipp: Text, Übersetzung, Untersuchungen, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig: Philologisch-historische Klasse 80:3 (1928)
- Margherita Isnardi Parente, Speusippo: Frammenti. Edizione, traduzione e commento, Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1980
- Leonardo Tarán, Speusippus of Athens: A Critical Study with a Collection of the Related Texts and Commentary, Leiden: Brill, 1982
- Anthony Francis Natoli, The Letter of Speusippus to Philip II: Introduction, Test, Translation, and Commentary (Historia Einzeschriften 176), Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004
Studies
- John Dillon: The Heirs of Plato. A Study of the Old Academy (347–274 BC). Clarendon Press, Oxford 2003, ISBN 0-19-927946-2
- Hans Krämer: Speusipp. In: Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, Die Philosophie der Antike, Bd. 3: Ältere Akademie – Aristoteles – Peripatos, hrsg. ISBN 3-7965-1998-9, S. 13–31
- Debra Nails: The People of Plato. A prosopography of Plato and other Socratics, Indianapolis 2002, ISBN 0-87220-564-9, S. 271f. (und Stammtafel S. 244)
- Ravaisson, Félix (1838). Speusippi de primis rerum principiis placita qualia fuisse videantur ex Aristotele (in Latin). Excudebant Firmin Didot Fratres.
- Fabian Wilhelmi: Isokrates' Philippos und Speusippos' Brief an König Philipp II. als Bitte um königliches Patronat, Düsseldorf 2010, ISBN 3-640-89613-0.
External links
- Dancy, Russell. "Speusippus". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
- Jackson, Henry (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.).