RICERCA ITALIANA     

Research program

The birth of the European individual: the subject of infividuality as a philosophical problem

University Co-ordinator

Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza" - STUDI FILOSOFICI ED EPISTEMOLOGICI - ()

Research Unit Leader

Anna Maria Ioppolo

Description

The current research project aims to face the concept of individuality both from an epistemological prospective and from the ethical and political point of view. At the same time, it proposes to use, along with the traditional research methodologies, the support of the information techniques. Individuality arises as a problem in the cognitive approach because knowledge refers back to an external object as its obliged reference point. Since knowledge is possible only through the relationship to an external object and the consequent confrontation established by representation, scepticism ascertains that this relationship is impossible and that the confrontation cannot take place. The disproportion betwen human knowledge and its object entails the impossibility of expressing in one’s own language, for the sceptical philosopher has made of the enunciative, reflexive, and constructive dimension his polemical target. The language is the domain of assertion and of non-assertion, but the Sceptic who cannot make any assertion without being involved in it, for sake of coherence is either compelled to silence (aphasia) or to make only dialectical argumentations.
Hence, the problem of the research for a non-assertive language is an indispensable necessity not only for the Pyrrhonean scepticism, as Sextus Empiricus attests, but also for the Academic scepticism, as Plato already bears out in the Theaetetus. Sextus, a primary source of knowledge for the both Sceptical currents, situates the difference between the position of the Pyrrhonean scepticism and that of the akin philosophies, included the Academic scepticism, exactly in the use of language. Actually, he devotes the first part of PH I to illustrate the Sceptic phonai which aim to relieve of responsibilities the subject of enunciation by avoiding any sort of ontological involvement and letting solely the communicative, ostensive and pragmatic value of language to subsist. The first step of the research project will consist, thus, in a thorough analysis of Sextus Empriricus’ writings that will lead above all to a new and more accurate translation of the whole corpus. Besides, the philological, linguistic and conceptual analysis of Sextus’ usus scribendi will be accompanied by a constant comparison of the technical philosophical lexicon that emerges from the Sceptic tradition of the Academy, namely from Plutarch’s Adversus Colotem, from Numenius’ work On the Academics’ Separation from Plato, and above all from Cicero’s Academica. In fact, most important to establish what belongs to the Academic scepticism and what pertains to the Pyrrhonean tradition is the study of Cicero’s Academica, that represent the most ancient source on Academic scepticism and which exhibit the difficulty of translating the Greek philosophical terminology into Latin. And Cicero is not always able to understand all the conceptual nuances of it. The philological and critical analysis of Cicero’s philosophical writings aims to be a basis for a comparative study of the technical use of the ScepticAcademy’s philosophical lexicon, without overlooking the constant polemical interaction with the lexicon and the terminological choices of the rival dogmatic schools, in particular of stoicism. From an ethical and political point of view the concept of individuality understood in the sense of ‘person’ and arisen as an object of reflection in the II-I century Stoa, in particular with Panaetius and his pupil Hecaton, grows up in the Imperial age by the confluence of several elements originating from Middle Platonism and the Oriental religiousness. The most important results of this combination of factors are: the recovering of the theory of the individual duties, a characteristic of Middle stoicism existent, together to more ancient Stoic themes, in Epictetus; a re-elaboration of the theory of the so-called natural and social ‘appropriation’ put forward by the Stoa in the III century B. C. but represented by Hierocles of Alexandria in a modified version; the introduction of cosmological and eschatological elements of Platonic tenor originally extraneous to the anthropological views of the Ancient Stoa, an operation which becomes evident in the work of Seneca and, above all, of Marcus Aurelius. A further goal of the research is to focus these different developments taking into account: 1) the modifications of the technical terminology, especially in authors writing in Greek and which reveal analogies with Platonizing writers or with authors not related to the Stoic profession, such as for instance Plutarch of Chaeronea and Philo of Alexandria; 2) the adoption of stylistic or rhetorical adaptations (adoption of metaphors or frequency of the diatribal style) in authors writing both in Greek and in Latin with a particular reference to the Senecan language; 3) the different geographical and cultural region in which a particular personality or school operates with a special attention to the Roman and Alexandrian milieu. In the meantime a particular attention will be devoted to the history of moral protreptic in the Hellenistic age and to the interactions amongst moral exhortation, wherefrom the sage as a moral individual emerges, the diatribe and the epistolary style: a significant example is represented by Philodemus of Gadara’s work On Vices (PHerc. 1008). The goal will be that of establishing the precise philosophical collocation of the work comparing it with the parallel testimonies – Epicurean, Stoic, and Peripatetic – in the light of a philological, lexical, and terminological analysis. To the end of displaying and enucleating these testimonies so that they may contribute to establish a solid reference point for the investigation of the development and the conceptual interrelationships that characterised the Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic debate, an electronic edition of Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers and of the entire work of Sextus Empiricus is planned. For the realization of this special task CNR/ILIESI has already fixed a specific funding. The recourse to the electronic instrument, beyond representing an unquestionable surplus in the exchange and utilisation of the data, will propose itself also as a new field on which to build up a different and wider approach. That permits to fill in some of the limits of the traditional editions of the fragmentary material relative to the Hellenistic schools (such as, just to mention the most striking cases, the Stoa and the Sceptic Academy), supplying the scholars with the possibility of immediately having at their disposition the widest contexts of the quotations as well as the possible references to other akin sources.