PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE

FACULTAD DE FILOSOFIA

Santiago, Chile

2016 - At present

CONSEJO NACIONAL DE INVESTIGACIONES CIENTIFICAS Y TECNICAS

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina

1986 - 2003

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

WASHINGTON, DC, Estados Unidos

1999 - 2000

UNIVERSIDAD DE BUENOS AIRES

Buenos Aires, Argentina

1982 - 1994

PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE CHILE

Santiago, Chile

2016 - At present

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

NEW YORK, Estados Unidos

2008 - Not Available

UNIVERSIDAD ALBERTO HURTADO

SANTIAGO, Chile

2010 - 2016

UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES

SANTIAGO, Chile

2003 - 2010

JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION

Estados Unidos, 2008

A NEW STOIC SOURCEBOOK1 1. Introduction: The Ancient and Middle Stoics share with the Presocratics the regrettable fact that their works got lost. Although we know that the Older Stoics wrote a number of books, we just have fragments of their works. Fortunately, we have an enormous amount of fragmentary material coming from Antiquity: philosophers (such as Proclus, Plotinus, Galen, Sextus Empiricus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Seneca, Cicero or Plutarch), theologians (such as Clement of Alexandria, Philo of Alexandria, or Origen), or doxographers (such as Diogenes Laertius or Stobaeus) provide us with an impressive amount of material to our knowledge of Stoicism and now, after more than two centuries of intense scholarly work, we can say that our knowledge of Stoicism is reasonably good. However, many of the reports supplied by these authors are sometimes quotations, made out of context, of passages presumably included in an original work of a single Stoic philosopher. Although at present we have a much better understanding of the Latin and Greek texts containing Stoic philosophy than 100 years ago, we believe that reliable anthologies are still need to be done. In what follows we shall explain in detail why a new anthology, like ours, will contribute to fill the gap. 2. Brief narrative account of the textual situation regarding Stoicism At the beginning of the 20th century scholars devoted to Stoicism benefited from the appearance of the monumental work by H. von Arnim Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, the first collection of texts belonging to Ancient Stoicism as a whole. Some translations into different languages (much of them based on von Arnim’s collection) were conducted during the 20th century. Even though von Arnim’s work continues to be a mandatory sourcebook and work of reference for anyone working on Stoicism, this pioneering contribution contains many defects and limitations. First, some of the editions of the Greek and Latin texts printed by von Arnim have been already improved and replaced. Second, the “fragments” of the single Stoics, such as they are printed in von Arnim’s book, are sometimes quoted out of context, so that it is pretty hard both to reconstruct the argument and the grammar sometimes turns out to be a little awkward. On the other hand, the critical apparatus offered by von Arnim is very economical. In 1987 Anthony A. Long and David N. Sedley published The Hellenistic Philosophers, a significant advance for the Hellenistic philosophy in general and for the Stoic scholarship in particular. Not only did Long and Sedley widened the contexts significantly but they also used updated editions of the Greek and Latin texts printed (sometimes they suggest important emendations to the texts). They also supplied a wider critical apparatus, as well as an English translation and a philosophical commentary of the texts. In part, our book is inspired from The Hellenistic Philosophers. In particular we use their manner of presenting the Latin and Greek texts, in which these are followed by a brief apparatus and some brief philological and philosophical notes to the texts. However, Long and Sedley’s book is focused on the whole of Hellenistic philosophy, i.e. Epicurus (and Epicureanism), Stoicism, and Skepticism, so that the selection of the texts is more limited, insofar as they must cover three different schools and philosophers. This is not, of course, a defect of this important piece of scholarship, but rather an objective fact. In the same year that LS’ book appeared K. Hülser published his massive work on Stoicism;5 Hülser’s work was also a significant advancement insofar as he included a number of texts that had not been considered in the previous collections already mentioned. Hülser not only provided the Latin and Greek text (with critical apparatus), but also a German translation and a philological and philosophical commentary. Moreover, even though his book concentrates mainly on Stoic logic, it printed important Latin and Greek texts on Stoic physics and ethics. However, as noted above, the focus is logic (such as it was understood by the Stoics, i.e. formal logic, grammar, and epistemology). Hülser’s book represents an important addition to Stoic scholarship and, as a matter of fact, we have made extensive use of it. 3. Our Stoic Sourcebook: Our project started as a modest book, but now it has become a very ambitious one and, it does seem to us, it will be a work with proper and peculiar characteristics. Compared to other collections of Stoic texts, our book displays some peculiar features which distinguish it from the other anthologies already mentioned: (i) Unlike the other collections, our work is exclusively focused on the Stoics (mainly ancient and middle Stoicism, but it also includes some significant passages belonging to Roman Stoicism, e.g. Seneca, Epictetus, Musonius Rufus, and Marcus Aurelius). (ii) The book deals with the three “parts of philosophy” (following the typical Stoic distinction), i.e. logic, physics, and ethics. Thus the cited passages are not restricted (like Hülser’s book) to a specific domain; in this vein it should be said that our work will cover all the parts of philosophy as well as almost all the periods of Stoicism, as is the case with von Arnim. In contrast with von Arnim, however, the contexts have been meaningfully widened; so we provide a significantly wider context, a crucial point in same cases to assess the argument. (iii) We have no doubt that our book will fill an important gap in the Spanish speaking world, insofar as there are no translations into Spanish of the main texts of Stoic philosophy (not to mention the fact that there are no comprehensive philosophical commentaries on Stoic texts). It seems to us, though, that our Spanish translations and commentaries will be also useful for Italian, French and even German scholars, who usually read Spanish. On the other hand, our philosophical commentary in each chapter offers a reconstruction of the arguments and sometimes provides some new interpretations (on which see below section 4: “Concluding remarks”), and discusses, to some extent, the most recent bibliography on some particular issues. (iv) Our book will include two kinds of texts: (a) fragments and testimonies, and (b) brief passages of whole treatises. The texts will be thematically ordered, and they will be accompanied by a Spanish translation, philological and philosophical commentary. Our selection of the texts is different from von Arnim’s insofar as we intend to avoid some methodological problems included in his work as well as the problems involved in the already mentioned translations into Spanish of von Arnim’s book. Although we have adopted some criteria taken from LS’ work, our selections are wider since we include several texts that they did not take into account. In addition, our book also differs from Hülser’s insofar as texts focused on semantics, logic, and dialectic are more limited; however, our book encompasses areas of Stoicism that Hülser, due to the nature of his project, leaves aside. Of course, our project does not intend to replace the mentioned anthologies, but contribute to fill some gaps in the Stoic scholarship. (v) To sum up, in what follows we describe the general structure of the book as well as the thematic division we shall use to order the different texts: 1. The book will be divided into two volumes: Volume A includes the Spanish translation of texts plus a philosophical commentary; the texts will be thematically ordered by chapters. The size of the texts will be about twenty lines each one, and each chapter will contain about twelve texts. If each chapter will have about 6,500 words, each volume will have about 200,000 words. This first volume will contain, in addition to the texts themselves and the commentary, (i) a general introduction (where the nature of the book and its structure is explained), (ii) a list of used abbreviations, (iii) a Greek-Latin-Spanish glossary of technical terms, and (iv) an index of key subjects and concepts. Due to its nature, this volume is addressed to a wide audience. 2. Volume B includes, in original language (Greek and Latin), the ancient texts that are translated in volume A. In volume B the texts are accompanied by philological and historical notes, where we also discuss the specialized secondary literature. Besides, this volume also comprises: (i) a Greek-Latin-Spanish glossary of the technical terms, (ii) an index of cited sources, (iii) a concordance between our numeration of the texts and that of von Arnim’s, LS’, and Hülser’s; and finally (iv) a list of the works (secondary literature) discussed in notes. Due to its nature, volume B is a supplement of volume A, but it is mainly addressed to experts in ancient philosophy. Due to the reasons already given, our selection of the texts is different from von Arnim’s, LS’, and Hülser’s. 3. With regard to the thematic order of the texts, the criteria we have employed have been mainly philosophical, and fit with the way in which the Stoics themselves divided knowledge thematically. In accordance with this, texts are grouped into five areas, which, in turn, are divided into chapters containing, in average, twelve texts each one. The following is the thematic division we propose: First Part: The parts of the philosophical discourse Chapter 1: The parts of philosophy Second Part: The fundamental ontological principles Chapter 2: The supreme genus and its first division: bodies and incorporeals Chapter 3: The subdivisions of the genus of body or of being Chapter 4: The entities external to the supreme genus Third Part: Logic, Epistemology and semantics Chapter 5: Logic, dialectic, and rhetoric Chapter 6: Impression, assent, and formation of concepts Chapter 7: The criterion of truth Chapter 8: Theory of meaning: lekta Chapter 9: Theory of inference Chapter 10: Fallacies, ambiguity, paradoxes Fourth Part: Physics Chapter 11: The division of physics Chapter 12: Nature and world. Movement and continuum Chapter 13: Soul 5 Chapter 14: Principles and causality Chapter 15: Elements and cosmogony Chapter 16: Mixture Chapter 17: Theology and teleology Chapter 18: Conflagration Chapter 19: Determinism, fatalism, and everlasting recurrence Chapter 20: Place, void, and time Fifth Part: Theory of action, ethics, and politics Chapter 21: Division of ethics Chapter 22: Primary impulse and self-preservation Chapter 23: Psychology of action Chapter 24: Passions and the problem of the parts of the soul Chapter 25: Theory of value and of virtue Chapter 26: Due, correct, and incorrect acts Chapter 27: Motivation Chapter 28: Moral responsibility Chapter 29: Wisdom Chapter 30: Politics 4. Concluding remarks As indicated at the outset of this presentation, our Stoic sourcebook does not expect to replace any of the existing collections of Stoic texts, but to contribute to fill some gaps in all the existing collections. Besides, it appears to us that we have posited some novel interpretations in points of detail; for instance, our assertion that the two basic ontological principles (“the active” and “the passive”) should be regarded as “correlatives terms” (i.e. the active presupposes the passive as well as the passive presupposes the active; cf. chapter 14). This remark also extends towards another Stoic basic distinction: bodies, on the one hand, and incorporeals, on the other. At this point we intend to show that some views on Stoicism (held by authors like Proclus, Plutarch or Alexander) are misleading, mostly because either they take incorporeals to be secondary realities (bodies being the primary ones) or because they raise their objections to Stoic claims starting from quite a different conceptual scheme. Although the view that incorporeals are inferior realities would seem to be plausible (and in fact this view has been accepted by conspicuous contemporary scholars), we try to demonstrate that this sort of interpretation is not consistent with Stoic philosophy as a whole and that, accordingly, incorporeals can plausibly be thought to be of such a kind that they turn out to be essential to account for bodily things as well. Following this line of thought, we suggest that bodies and incorporeals are (like the active and the passive) complementary terms. Thus, between bodies and incorporealsthere seems to be a reciprocal dependence (see chapters 2-3).

UNIVERSIDAD DE BUENOS AIRES

Argentina, 1993

Premio a la producción cintífica como investigador joven.