Revista electrónica de estudios sobre la civilización clásica y su recepción
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In the Oeconomicus the management of slaves presents some very interesting aspects: on the one hand widespread practices, like purchase, sale, leasing and manumission of slaves, are completely ignored; on the other we can find some probably innovative practices as the prevailing tendency to a rewarding system based on merit and especially the attribution of command functions to some slaves, the epitropoi. Even more innovative the fact that it is acknowledged that at least some slaves, who hold offices of responsibility (the epitropoi and the housekeeper), are endowed with enkrateia, which is the foundation of virtue according to Xenophon’s Socrates. This seems to some extent to anticipate a view destined to a decisive development in Hellenistic age, according to which virtue is accessible also to slaves.
Ambiguities of Oikonomia in Aristotle’s Practical Thought
In Aristotle’s Ethics, oikonomia appears either subordinate to politics (NE I 1), or on the same level as the latter (EE I 5, NE VI 8) as a form of practical wisdom. Is it possible to reconcile these two descriptions of its status? We shall attempt to answer this question by exploring the more elaborated treatment of oikonomia in book 1 of the Politics. There two conclusions emerge. The first one is that oikonomia is not only necessary for living, but also useful for living well. The second one is that, although Aristotle makes a distinction between a legitimate form of chrematistics and a bad one, and restricts the former as much as possible to the exploitation of natural resources, he remains rather evasive on the conditions and means of acquiring wealth, which are nonetheless indispensable to the exercise of virtues. What he tends to value in oikonomia is the dimension of use over that of acquisition.
While Xenophon in the Economics and Plato in the Laws unreservedly advocate the political integration of agriculture and farmers, my claim is that Aristotle’s case in the Politics is different. While he makes agriculture the main economic activity of any just city, for both empirical and metaphysical reasons, the question of who should carry it out remains problematic: if the ideal situation would be for slaves or foreign populations to take charge of it, so that free men could devote themselves exclusively to political affairs, the reality of the Greek world often leads free men to take part in agricultural tasks themselves, and to neglect political functions. In this sense, Aristotle’s Politics testifies to the limited and problematic political integration of farmers, between inclusion and exclusion, and invites us to question the distribution and relationships of political and economic functions in the city.
About Ancient Pre-Aristotelian Economic Thought in General and Plato’s in Particular
It is usually considered that pre-Aristotelian thought had little interest in economic problems. However, many authors of the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 4th century BC (Ps.-Xenophon, Plato, Xenophon, Phaleas of Chalcedon) pay particular attention to these questions in their political theories or criticisms. While their thoughts diverge in detail, they all share the same distrust of commercial activities and monetary economy. These thinkers introduce a strong and detailed critique of the economic transformations of their time, grounded on shared (aristocratic) political assumptions. In Plato’s works in particular, the importance of economic realities appears in his acerbic criticism of Athenian democracy, as well as in his political constructions of the Republic, of the Critias and the Timaeus, or of the Laws. By alternating general (of this movement of thought at the turn of the 5th century) and circumstantial (because the importance of economy in Plato’s cities unveils itself in apparently minor details) approach, the article hopes to show the fundamental character of the economic reflections in classical Greek thought, before the works of the Stagirite.
Preferences, Personality, and Rational Choice in Aristotle and Theophrastus
Aristotle outlines a clear theory of human rational choice in his discussions of prohairesis, which is tantalizingly similar to, and even includes, central aspects of economic rationality. His theory then veers off, however, when it gets to one of the major components of modern economically rational choice theory, which are the preferences that guide individuals’ decisions. Unbeholden to disciplinary boundaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he mentions economic rationality only to delve into the variety of personality types and mental programming of the people he observed around him. Desires, emotions, and cultural values influence rational choice of different stereotypes in the Virtues and Vices. Likewise, his student Theophrastus also found the diversity of ancient Greek preferences to be more interesting than the decision-making process itself, particularly how the rational and irrational parts of the brain interact. Aristotle and Theophrastus describe economic rationality but their account of rational choice focuses more on the different personality types, and how emotions and irrational desires intensify, warp, or bypass altogether the rational calculating processes of the brain for some individuals.
This article aims to show the close relationship between the economic phenomena described and analysed by Plato in the Republic and certain practices related to food. By relying on the Timaeus’ statements on the physiological processes related to food processing and on the considerations present in Letter VII on eating habits, we will show that, in addition to his awareness of the ethical and social role of food, the philosopher recognises in the diaita an economic and political operation in itself. In this sense, in addition to contributing new elements to the reflection of his contemporaries on food ethics, Plato is the first to develop a theory according to which the way in which man feeds himself defines to a large extent the economic behaviour of cities and, therefore, shapes their politics.
Ancient Theoretical Approaches to the Economy
While earlier research looked at the question of ancient economic theories primarily from the perspective of a modern understanding of economics, more recent research has focused on understanding ancient economic theory from the perspective of its time. This article argues for the justification of both perspectives, because the interpretation of ancient texts allows for both and both can complement each other. For this, a careful and detailed reading of the ancient texts is important. This is why this article, by focusing on the 4th century BC, first distinguishes between different literary forms which offer us oeconomic reflections. These include explicit forms such as Plato’s Laws, Aristotle’s Politics and Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, but also implicit forms such as Hesiod’s Works and Days and Plato’s Republic. A careful interpretation of the texts makes it possible to recognize that ideas of economic regulation are the result of economic analyses to which they react, but which sometimes we can recognize only implicitly. So, we can find more as well as more diverse and more complex ancient theoretical approaches to the economy than had long been assumed in modern times. It can also be shown that the ancient world also knew the concept of homo oeconomicus and that a dichotomy between homo oeconomicus and homo politicus cannot be maintained. In a second step, this article presents categories of ancient economic thought in the form of a general overview. These include an anthropological perspective that views need as a basic human situation, as well as the awareness that economics is an area of human activity that can be controlled by means of regulations and incentives. Other important categories are household, trade, market and property. Considerations on the role of the state in economic processes also play a role.
One of the core tenets of Xenophon’s economic thought is the doctrine of Proper Use: χρήματα (‘wealth’, ‘assets’ or literally ‘usables’) only really count as χρήματα if one knows how to make use (χρῆσθαι) of them (Oeconomicus I 8-10). In developing this idea Xenophon seems to come close to articulating a distinction between use value and exchange value. What tends to be overlooked in discussions of this doctrine is the underlying concept of ‘use’ itself. Present-day epistemological and ethical assumptions warp our understanding of Xenophon’s conception of ‘utility’ and ‘use’. This paper is an exercise in ‘unthinking’ these assumptions by way of the critical lens offered by ecological economics and ecocriticism. It will be argued that Xenophon’s doctrine of Proper Use is ‘ecological’ in the sense that it espouses a relationality between subject and object that is entangled, reciprocal and interdependent. The ideal oikonomos does not perceive his environment as exogenous to himself; rather, his mandate is to participate in the larger order of things.
Thomas Alexander Szlezák, Aufsätze zur griechischen Literatur und Philosophie
Thomas Alexander Szlezák, Platon. Meisterdenker der Antike
Elisabetta Berardi, Maria Paola Castiglioni, Marie-Laurence Desclos, Paola Dolcetti (eds.), Aristotele citatore o la riappropriazione da parte della filosofia dei discorsi di sapere anteriori
Fausto Pagnotta, Cicerone e la societas hominum. Contesto e funzioni di un concetto politico
Lorenzo Gagliardi, “Romam commigrare”. I romani, i latini e l’immigrazione
Rafael Fernández Muñoz, Israel Muñoz Gallarte, Julián Solana Pujalte (eds.), De Bizancio a Córdoba. Los libros griegos del s. XVI en las bibliotecas cordobesas
When it comes to the discussions of ancient economic thought, the Stoics rarely come to the forefront. By and large, the lack of focus on this Hellenistic philosophical school is understandable: there is no evidence of the Stoics writing treatises entitled ‘oikonomikos’ or similar or, in fact, showing any substantial interest in the matters pertaining to wealth management or money acquisition. There is an extant fragment, however, depicting a debate between Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus in which the latter advocates for the moral permissibility of the behaviour that comes very close to exhibiting economic rationality. In this paper, I analyse this passage and, noting its complex transmission history, I argue that it reveals an engagement with various ideas pertaining to the oikonomia genre. Although some of them resemble the contemporary notion of economic rationality, ultimately, the Stoic argument is embedded in ethical debates with the Peripatetics and it concerns moral value rather than the homo economicus style of reasoning about maximizing gains
This article deals with the interpretation of Hipparchus and the question to which extent its advocacy of φιλοκέρδεια or the love of gain should be read ironically. It argues that this pseudo-Platonic dialogue can be best understood in the context of a broader fourth-century philosophical debate on the pursuit of (economic) self-interest. First, I show how the Hipparchus comments on and develops thoughts from Plato’s Republic. Then, I demonstrate how the re-evaluation of the love of gain compares to Xenophon’s treatment of φιλοκέρδεια, κέρδος, and πλεονεξία in the Oeconomicus and Cyropaedia, which also respond to the Republic, and show how both authors provocatively re-evaluate these negative notions of gain or self-interest into neutral ones. These comparisons inform a layered reading, in which the apparent irony helps readers to reflect on the proposed re-evaluation of commerce.
Aristotle and the Just Proportion in Communities of Exchange
This paper analyses the Aristotelian notion of τὸ ἀντιπεπονθός, traditionally understood as reciprocity, and presents a strictly mathematical interpretation of the kind of justice established for commercial exchanges in Nicomachean Ethics V 5. Justice understood as equality and, in turn, as a mean, allows Aristotle to present an alternative mathematical conception to the Pythagorean one. The few occurrences of the term ἀντιπεπονθός and derivatives appear in Euclid’s Elements and they are relevant to understanding this notion. Some definitions in Book six and several propositions allow to establish with some certainty the correspondence between the Aristotelian scheme and the straight line divided in extreme and mean ratio, also known as the golden ratio.
Manuel Knoll, Antike Griechische Philosophie (“De Gruyter Studium”), De Gruyter, Berlin-Boston 2017, pp. 398, ISBN 978-30-500-4626-6
Dione di Prusa, Boristenitico (Or. XXXVI), Introduzione, traduzione e commento di Michele Di Febo, con un saggio introduttivo di Giulio A. Lucchetta, Carabba (“Biblioteca del Leonardo. Testi e contesti” 1), Lanciano 2017, pp. 194, ISBN 978-88-634-4506-0
Aristotle’s notion of particular justice has been the object of a long controversy focused on the difference between particular injustice and other vices, and the difficulty of distinguishing the emotional content of just actions from the unjust actions of the covetous. This paper reconstructs Aristotle’s arguments and presents the most relevant objections to the representation of the vice of greed by J.O. Urmson and B. Williams. It concludes with some observations to mitigate these objections.
Courage in the Government of Passions: Notes on Plato and the Ancient Cynics
The following paper compares Plato’s proposal with the approach of cynicism concerning the virtue of courage. The first section studies role of musical education in the Republic, which contributes to foster real courage among the guardians and avoids brutality. The second section exposes the differences between Platonism and Cynicism. The latter presented a new way of understanding courage, as a way of life, which does not require a musical pedagogy, but training in overcoming shame. Courage, according to the Cynics, is not the specific virtue of a class but is a way of life that any individual can adopt.
From Fear to Injustice through Forgetfulness. Why the Just Ruler Must Have a Good Memory
In the Republic’s first conversation, Cephalus admits that he fears the death’s proximity of death due to the myths told about the Hades by the poets. Fear makes men forget what is just. For guardians and future rulers, this danger is more severe than for any other citizen. Plato criticizes poetry, imposes education children and guardians and establishes three tests for the candidates for philosopher-kings, in order to fix in the soul what is fearsome, so that fear of death does not let them forget what is right. The following paper analyses the relationship between courage, shame, memory, and justice.
Mimesophobia and rhetorics of the contagion: fear of the poem as a political instrument in Plato’s Republic
This paper focuses on fear of artistic contagion and its political dimension in Plato’s Republic . For Plato fear is a rhetorical and pedagogical device for a new rational configuration of individuals and community. An instrument that feeds on the political passion par excellence: fear, and, more precisely, fear of contagion, fear of disease and loss of self-control.
The following paper considers some aspects of the relation between language and politics in Plato’s. After a brief interpretation of some of the theses of Plato’s philosophy of language, the paper analyses the political and moral power that Plato identifies in language, and ponders specific uses of language proposed by Plato in education, and his critique of tragedy.
Politics as care of the passions in Plato: on the treatment of benevolence in the Gorgias
In the Gorgias (521d), Socrates claims to be the only Athenian who practices the real art of politics in his time. The present paper interprets this assertion based on an analysis of the Greek verb θεραπεύω, which in the context of the dialogue means “serving”, “caring”, or “tending” (513e, 521a). It alludes primarily to the therapeutic character of politics by analogy with medicine, but it also can refer to the training of horses (516e). Socrates understands the practice of politics as a way of taking care of the passions, and of their relation to goodwill, which is considered to be a necessary affective disposition that is inherently political. Socratic political n practice depends on the performative possibilities of language. An irreducible tension between the political and the apolitical determines it.
Plato, passions and criticism of the populism
The main thesis of this paper is that the political transcendence of passions determines Plato’s ethical and political points of view. The first time that he deals systematically with passions, as occurs in the Gorgias, they are directly implicated in the critic of imperialism and the rhetorical procedures of Athenian democracy. They are also an essential part of politics conceived as an art. In the Republic , the ideal city emerges as the necessity of practicing a purge of passions in the luxuriant or feverish city that has to be purged. The importance of this issue derives from the fact that the theory of justice in the individual and the city consists of a normative ideal on the relations that have to be established between passions and reason. As a consequence, the sequence of the degenerated forms of the ideal state can be interpreted as an increasing model of the illegitimate irruption of passions in the ill society opposed to it.
Fear and its Movements: Comic Politics of Phóbos in Aristophanes’s Frogs
This paper aims to explore the comic allusions to fear as a passion that can shed light on the underlying dramatic coherence. In the first half of the comedy, Dionysus’s declared courage opposes his real fear, but the choral verses of the second part endorse a military harangue that intends to impose order and administer emotions to overcome fear. Against the private and apolitical fear which produces laughter at the beginning by immobilizing and depriving Dionysus of his citizenship, the play finally enshrines political phobos to mobilize and instruct the polis.
Are We Able to Understand the Political Emotions of the Athenian Democracy? Some Reflexions in Order to Overcome the Confrontation Paradigm between Mass and Elites
This paper analyzes, based on previous papers of J.L. Moreno Pestaña and L. Sancho Rocher, the paradox concealed in the descriptions of democracy, philosophy, and historiography of Vth and IVth Centuries BC yield, which do not entirely meet the institutional dynamics that shaped this classical form of government. The first section will focus on some appraisals of democracy contained in Euripides’ tragedies - especially in the Suppliants - and in Aristotle’s Politics, as both perspectives decidedly show a certain demophobia , yet a moderate one. Euripides and Aristotle view democracy as the “normal” form of government they want to improve through measures inspired by an aristocratic approach to episteme. The second part of this paper will concentrate on the opposed accounts of Athenian democracy represented by Hansen and Ober, suggesting a third way for casting light over this political form. This paper claim that democratic procedures as draw and the reception of a salary for taking part in politics entails a radical transformation of the aristocratic notion of government and knowledge, which also modifies the public emotions that this political form arises. So, it becomes possible to overcome the approach to classical democracy that moves from a dialectic of elites and mass and recognizes the emergence of a “social field” (Bourdieu) that allocates to the community epistemic competences and the capacity for ruling the public sphere.