Today I was doing a little bit of writing about a class that I'm going to be teaching for the second time, which is called Stoicism and the Cardinal Virtues. And one of the things that I was mentioning as I was writing about this class, trying to get people interested in signing up for it and taking it along with me, is the fact that when it comes to virtue, the four cardinal virtues, the subordinate virtues that each of those four cardinal virtues encompasses or includes, what we don't have is any one single Stoic text where you're going to get a comprehensive overview of that.
Instead, what we have is a set of different discussions spread throughout a whole bunch of different thinkers, a whole bunch of texts, many of which are actually by Stoics, some of which are by people like Cicero who are not themselves Stoics but know a lot about it, communicate a good bit about it, and find certain aspects of the Stoic point of view rather attractive.
What we have to do is take these many different discussions, which, by the way, are in two different languages, ancient Greek, Latin, right? And we have to do a lot of connecting the dots, correlating what one person says with what another person says, catching allusions that are being made, for example, in Epictetus, who talks about a number of these different subordinate virtues without mentioning the cardinal virtues by name. We have to piece together a fairly systematic doctrine.
And what we're doing there is what I for about 20 years or so have come to call “philosophical detective work”. That's my own phrase. Nobody else is required to use it. You're not going to be able to look it up in an online dictionary or a website and have people say, oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. It's just a useful term that I have been providing people with for a number of years, probably a little bit ambiguous, maybe misleading or inexact in what they make of it so that they can understand the kind of work that I and certain other philosophers do.
And I say certain other philosophers because there are other philosophers who I see doing this, particularly people working in the history of philosophy, but not restricted to that. But I also say certain other philosophers because we're probably in the minority when it comes to the contemporary philosophy world where other people are taking different approaches.
If you look at my academic writings and even some of my popular writings, you'll see me doing this in my own way with a lot of different thinkers. So, for example, when it comes to Aristotle, I’m somebody who delves into particular topics and reads across a number of different texts where Aristotle is discussing that.
On anger, for example, I will bring in the Rhetoric and the two Ethics, the Nicomachean and Eudamian, the Politics, and any other text that I think is particularly relevant for what it is that I'm discussing, which might be the Topics, might be the De Anima, might even be the Poetics for that matter.
When I'm working on Thomas Hobbes, okay, there I'm mostly using Leviathan, but I'm ranging throughout the first two books of the work and I'm connecting together discussions rather than saying, oh, I'm only going to look at this particular chapter. I am going to bring in all sorts of things to try to illuminate the topic that I'm interested in.
If I'm writing about Jeremy Bentham, well, I obviously will be engaging with his most important and most often excerpted work, which is the introduction to the principles of morality and legislation. But I'll also bring in things from other works by him as well, and I'll be ranging over the whole of that big, thick, and oftentimes boring, but also quite interesting book.
So when it comes to the Stoics on the virtues, I am looking at not just what Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, these three late Stoics, have to say, but also what we find in Cicero's works or in Musonius Rufus's lectures or in the summaries of Stoic doctrine that we have in Diogenes Laertes and in Arius Didymus and other texts as well, because what I'm going to be doing is putting together a comprehensive picture as best as I can of what it is that these people, these really deep and systematic thinkers, wanted to tell us about these interesting, complicated phenomena.
In this case, what we call the virtues, but I might also be looking at an emotion or something else, a philosophy of action, motivations that people have. And in order to do this kind of work, there is a important prerequisite that I think a lot of philosophers don't want to engage in and don't see the usefulness of — perhaps were never even introduced to as an important way of doing philosophy — and that is to read widely and attentively and note connections between things.
If, for example, you want to know what St. Anselm's ideas about something that he talks about are, you have to read not just the most famous book where there's a chapter on that. You actually have to read around history.in his works, and probably not just read particular treatises, but also look at his letters to other people if there's anything relevant in there, or at the life of St. Anselm, or even texts like the Dicta Anselmi, which hasn't even been translated into English,and you might find useful stuff even in his Prayers and Meditations.
It's when you do that, when you actually engage with a thinker and their body of work, not just in a very pragmatic way, saying I'm interested in Anselm's ontological argument, so I'm only going to read Proslogion 2,or maybe 2 to 4, and the response to Gaunillo. But you say I want to see what he makes of other arguments in his works. In particular, since the Prosologian is supposed to be kind of a condensation of the many arguments of the Monologion, maybe you got to read that. But you probably also have to read through his works looking for other instances of “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, which you will find as a catchphrase used in other works, if you actually go to them and you read them.
If you don't do that, then unless you are fortunate enough to read somebody else who is doing that kind of work and they put it down in their own books or articles, you won't even suspect what you're missing. And that is where I think the vast majority of people who study education and teach and talk about and produce resources on philosophy actually are.
By contrast, if you really want to know a thinker well, you need to read a lot of the stuff that they've written. So it's not enough to understand Rene Descartes. just to read his Discourse on Method and the Meditations. You probably also want to read the Objections and Replies to the Meditations, but you also want to read letters that the guy wrote and some of his other works, and then you get a much fuller sense of what his project is and what he's doing and what positions he actually develops and holds and defends on particular matters.
I don't actually know how I wound up doing this other than being interested in reading as much as I could of particular authors and then seeing the interconnections between ideas and arguments and distinctions and other elements of philosophy spread across their works. But early on in my development as, I would say, a graduate student and then as a young professor, that's what I was tending to do in my academic articles and book chapters. And I think I even did some of that with my students in my classes and with colleagues, for example, at conferences saying, you know if you check out this, this person is also saying this about the topic.
And that has become one of my main approaches to understanding philosophical thinkers and movements over time. I imagine that many of my peers find what I do differently, either confusing or frustrating. They don't understand why there's so many allusions to other works when it seems like we could make things a lot simpler. But I'm not interested in simplifying.
I'm interested in doing justice to the complexity and depth and richness of the thought that we're lucky enough to have access to under the names of these interesting thinkers. And so that's what I call philosophical detective work. I'm not saying that anybody else necessarily has to do it. or that it's even the best way to study philosophy or teach it or talk about it. But I think it's a viable way of working at it, and it's one that is rather respectful of the great thinkers who so generously contributed their works to us.
And so those are some reflections for today. I don't really know what you ought to make of them, but I thought I would share it with you and you can tell me what your own views or experiences are when it comes to this approach.
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