Greek philosophy frede (ed), language and learning1 philosophy of language in the hellenisti

LANGUAGE AND LEARNING

The philosophers and scholars of the Hellenistic world laid the foundations upon which the Western tradition based analytical grammar,
linguistics, philosophy of language, and other disciplines probing the
nature and origin of human communication. Building on the pioneering work of Plato and Aristotle, these thinkers developed a wide range
of theories about the nature and origin of language which reflected
broader philosophical commitments. In this collection of ten essays a
team of distinguished scholars examines the philosophies of language
developed by, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, the Stoics and
Lucretius. They probe the early thinkers’ philosophical adequacy and
their impact on later theorists. With discussions ranging from the
Stoics on the origin of language to the theories of language in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the collection will be of interest to
students of philosophy and of language in the classical period and
beyond.
d o rot h e a f re d e is Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Hamburg. She has written numerous articles on Greek philosophy
and her previous publications include Philebos (1992) and (with Andr´e
Laks) Traditions of Theology, Studies in Hellenistic Theology (2002).
b r a d i n wo o d holds the Canada Research Chair in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His recent publications include
The Poem of Empedocles (Second edition, 2001) and The Cambridge
Companion to the Stoics (2003).



LANGUAGE AND LEARNING
Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age
Proceedings of the Ninth Symposium Hellenisticum

e d i t e d by

DOROTHEA FREDE AND BRAD INWOOD


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Contents

List of contributors
Preface
List of abbreviations

page vii
ix
xi

Introduction

1

1 The Stoics on the origin of language and the
foundations of etymology

14

James Allen

2 Stoic linguistics, Plato’s Cratylus, and Augustine’s De
dialectica

36

A. A. Long

3 Epicurus and his predecessors on the origin of language

56

Alexander Verlinsky

4 Lucretius on what language is not

101

Catherine Atherton

5 Communicating Cynicism: Diogenes’ gangsta rap

139

Ineke Sluiter

6 Common sense: concepts, definition and meaning in and
out of the Stoa

164

Charles Brittain

7 Varro’s anti-analogist

210

David Blank

8 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation
Susanne Bobzien

v

239


vi

Contents

9 What is a disjunction?

274

Jonathan Barnes

10 Theories of language in the Hellenistic age and in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries

299

Sten Ebbesen

References
Index nominum et rerum
Index locorum

320
336
341


Contributors

j a m e s a l l e n Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
c at h e r i n e at h e rto n Professor of Philosophy and Classics,
University of California, Los Angeles
j o n at h a n b a r n e s Professor of Philosophy, Sorbonne, Paris
d av i d b l a n k Professor of Classics, University of California, Los
Angeles
s u s a n n e b o b z i e n Professor of Philosophy, Yale University
c h a r l e s b r i t ta i n Associate Professor of Classics, Cornell University
s t e n e b b e s e n Professor at the Institute of Greek and Latin, University
of Copenhagen
a . a . lo n g Professor of Classics, University of California, Berkeley
i n e k e s lu i t e r Professor of Classics, University of Leiden
a l e x a n d e r ve r l i n s k y Professor of Classics, University of
St Petersburg and researcher at the Bibliotheca Classica Petropolitana

vii



Preface

The ninth Symposium Hellenisticum was held in Haus Rissen at Hamburg,
23–28 July 2001 under the sponsorship of Hamburg University. Nine of the

ten papers presented here are revised versions of drafts distributed to the
participants in advance and discussed at the meetings; Bobzien’s paper
could not be presented at the conference and the editors are pleased to
be able to include it. The final versions of all the papers bear the mark
of much discussion, reflection and revision over the months following the
conference.
The participants at the Symposium (and their affiliations at the time)
were: Keimpe Algra (University of Utrecht), James Allen (University
of Pittsburgh), Julia Annas (University of Arizona), Catherine Atherton (Oxford University), Jonathan Barnes (University of Geneva), G´abor
Betegh (Central European University, Budapest), David Blank (University of Reading), Susanne Bobzien (Oxford University), Tad Brennan (Yale
University), Charles Brittain (Cornell University), Myles Burnyeat (Oxford
University), Walter Cavini (University of Bologna), Sten Ebbesen (University of Copenhagen), Theodor Ebert (Erlangen University), Dorothea
Frede (Hamburg University), Nikolai Grintser (Moscow State University),
Christoph Horn (Bonn University), Fr´ed´erique Ildefonse (University of
Paris), Anna Maria Ippolo (University of Rome), Brad Inwood (University
of Toronto), Andr´e Laks (University of Lille), Anthony Long (University
of California), Gretchen Reydam-Schils (Notre Dame University), David
Sedley (Cambridge University), Ineke Sluiter (University of Leiden), Gisela
Striker (Harvard University), Alexander Verlinsky (University of St Petersburg), Hermann Weidemann (M¨unster University). Thanks are due to all
participants for their engagement in discussion and to the readers for their
helpful suggestions that are reflected in the revisions of the contributions.
We are especially grateful to our editor, Michael Sharp, and the production editor, Mary Leighton, for their support and patience, and to the two
anonymous readers for their careful and helpful criticism, in particular to
ix


x

Preface

the reader who undertook the arduous task of reviewing the revised versions
of the articles at short notice.
Financial support came from a generous grant by the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft and from the home Universities of some of the
participants. The organisers of the Symposium wish to acknowledge the
generous assistance without which this conference could not have been
held.
One of our tasks was to impose, as best we could, some measure of
standardisation on the varieties of conventions used by the contributors in
the joint bibliography at the end of the volume. The titles of the works
of ancient authors have been given in accordance with the editions used
by the authors. Modern authors are listed by name and year. Quotations
in Latin are not italicised, apart from single words or words deserving
special emphasis. Quotations from Greek and Latin in the main text are
accompanied by translations. The indices do not aim at completeness but
pick out the major terms and the more sustained discussion of passages.
Most welcome help was given by the copy-editor, Linda Woodward, and
in the compilation of the indices by Euree Song MA.
Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood


Abbreviations

In addition to more familiar abbreviations, the following will be found in
this volume:
CAG
= Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca.
CIMAGL = Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen Age Grec et Latin. Copenhagen.
CPhD = Corpus Philosophorum Danicorum Medii Aevi. Copenhagen.
FDS

= H¨ulser, K.-H. (ed.) (1987–8) Die Fragmente zur Dialektik der
Stoiker. Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt.
LS
= Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley (eds.) (1987) The Hellenistic
Philosophers, with trans. and comm. (2 vols.). Cambridge.
PL
= Migne, J.-P. (ed.) (1844–65) Patrologia Latina. Paris.
SSR
= Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, vol. iv. coll. disp. apparatibus notisque instruxit Gabriele Giannantoni (1990). Naples.
SVF
= von Arnim, H. (1903–5, 19642 ) Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta,
vols. i–iii. Stuttgart.

xi



Introduction
Dorothea Frede and Brad Inwood

Despite the fact that Greek culture (and consequently Roman as well)
was intensely language conscious, the systematic investigation of language,
its origin, its structure, and its varieties was a relative late bloomer in the
ancient world. This is bound to surprise us. To be sure, there were reflections
on the relation between speech and its objects from early on among the
poets, the Presocratic philosophers, and especially among the sophists, the
first professional rhetoricians and teachers of ‘how to do things with words’.
That such concern did not immediately lead to the development of language
as a field of research seems to be due to several factors. Though the Greeks
were aware of the existence of different languages, the acquisition of a

foreign language was not part of even an elite education in the Greek world,
but was left, rather, to professional interpreters. Furthermore, despite a great
wealth of speculation on the origin of culture, language was not a major
topic in those considerations. Though there is a host of stories of divine gifts
of craftsmanship to human beings, including the civic virtues as a means of
survival and the Promethean clandestine handing down of fire, there is no
parallel depiction of a miraculous distribution of language to a miserable
horde of speechless primitive men. The lack of a mythological account of
the origin of language is certainly no accident in a religious culture that
presupposes that there is a language common to gods and men: such a
mythical background quite unreflectively presupposes that language has
‘always’ been around, even before the creation of humankind (if such a
creation was part of the common lore).
These conditions changed when the gods no longer stood in the limelight
of the interpretation of the world, its origin and its order. Once philosophy
had replaced the mythical explanation of the world, the existence and
nature of language was no longer taken for granted. It is therefore no
accident that Plato and Aristotle recognised the importance of the use of
language as the decisive distinguishing feature between man and beast,
and raised questions concerning the meaning and the proper use of words,
1


2

Introduction

as well as their combinations to form sentences. Plato, famously, in his
dialogue Cratylus for the first time addresses the problem of the status of
language as such, i.e. whether it exists by nature or by convention, and what

constitutes the ‘correctness of names’. Aristotle in his logical investigations
not only analyses the structure of propositions and the types of oppositions
between them, but also includes quantifiers and modal terms. But since in
the main the interest of the great philosophers of the classical age (and their
followers) focused on questions of proper definition, on the avoidance of
ambiguities, and on the structure of basic affirmations and negations, their
investigations of linguistic phenomena remained within narrow limits.
If the interest in language as a whole increased significantly in the schools
of the Hellenistic age this is due to several distinct factors. First of all, both
the Stoics and the Epicureans, albeit in a quite different sense, were not
only physicalists but also ‘creationists’, in a way that naturally led to the
question of the origin of humankind, its culture and its language. The Stoic
theory of the development of an eternally recurrent world order under the
guidance of divine reason included an account of the emergence of human
beings and their command of language in each emergence of the world
order. The Epicureans, by contrast, believed in the formation of an infinite
sequence of world orders on the basis of purely mechanical interactions
of the atoms and their conglomerates. This mechanical world view had to
provide a rather different account for the development of higher faculties
of humankind and for the status of language, quite generally. A second
important factor that contributed to the concern with language was the
increased antagonism and fierce competitiveness between the schools in
the Hellenistic age, especially once the Academic sceptics had made it their
mission to defeat any kind of ‘dogmatism’, i.e. the teaching of positive
doctrine, about the nature of the world. Their criticism not only focused on
the content of the dogmatists’ creed, but also on their epistemological and
methodological justifications. This challenge led to an increase in vigilance
and care on the dogmatists’ side concerning the linguistic precision and
formal accuracy of their arguments, as well as concerning the criteria of
truth which they proposed.

Though the concern with the origin of language and the defence against
attacks from outside provided something like a common background for
the concern with language, it would be misleading to speak of a ‘philosophy
of language’ tout court as an autonomous discipline within the schools of
the Hellenistic age. Questions of language were regarded as important
by the schools, but their motivations were often quite different, as was
the context within which they addressed linguistic problems. Each school


Introduction

3

not only dealt with these problems on the basis of its own philosophical
presuppositions, but also with different ends in view. Moreover, linguistic
phenomena were treated differently in connection with questions of logic,
epistemology, ethics, physics and/or theology. The closeness of the ties
between the study of language and the different parts of philosophy also
explains why the development of grammar as a systematic discipline was
taken up rather late by the philosophers. Its systematisation and maturation
owes a lot to the work of a quite different set of scholars: if the study of
language and grammar finally came of age this is largely due to the great
philologists and literary critics in the Alexandrian library whose results
gradually began to exert an influence on the philosophers. Only after the
study of the grammatical structure of the Greek and Latin languages and
their peculiarities had reached a certain level of sophistication did questions
of grammar and syntax become a matter of philosophical reflection and a
supplement to the analysis of the logical structure of propositions.
The different background of the philosophical treatment of language,
its direction and its growth is mirrored in the topics discussed at the ninth

Symposium Hellenisticum in Hamburg from July 23 to 28, 2001. Some of
the papers assembled in this volume are dedicated to the treatment of particular problems of language within one of the schools of the Hellenistic age,
while others address a problem that spans several centuries, and still others
range across several schools. Given the diversity of the interest in questions
of language (and, where applicable, grammar) during Hellenistic times,
the deplorable scarcity of sources makes it particularly hard to reconstruct
an overall picture. For we are not dealing with the remains of one ancient
road whose course might easily be discerned from a bird’s eye view. Instead,
we are confronted with a host of scattered pieces that belonged to quite
different roads, that lead in confusingly different directions, and whose
intersections are far from secure. Despite these discrepancies the different
contributions address a set of basic concerns among the major schools of
philosophy during the Hellenistic period, which not only supplement each
other but also point to interesting congruencies. It is these congruencies
that explain the emergence of a general interest in linguistic problems that
finally led to more or less standardised views on the structure of language
and grammar in late antiquity. This gradual consensus became the tradition that was revived in the Middle Ages. The collection of papers helps
explain the emergence of such a tradition and at the same time illuminate
the connections between the philosophical and the linguistico-grammatical
problems which are all too often treated in isolation from each other, to
the detriment of both disciplines.


4

Introduction

There are three main centres of interest that received special attention
from all schools in the Hellenistic age and its aftermath. (1) There is the
question of the origin of language or languages. Though the notion of a ‘wise

inventor’ of language was generally treated with disfavour, the problem of
the etymology of linguistic expressions and their reference to reality posed
a challenge to all philosophical schools. (2) Special attention was also given
to the question of the interdependence between language and thought in
general, particularly in view of the importance attributed to rhetoric and
other forms of self-expression. (3) Last, but not least, is the concern with
the question in what sense ‘language’ can be treated as a technical subject
with rules of its own, so that grammar is not merely a matter of empirical
research and linguistic observation. This problematic also extends to the
question of the precision of language and the avoidance of fallacies as well
as to the relation between the grammatical and the logical functions of key
terms in a language. Needless to say, each of these three topics would have
deserved a conference of its own. The present volume does not pretend
that the contributions do more than address some of the most pertinent
aspects of each of these fields.
(1) The questions of the origin of language, the possibility of exploiting
etymology as a means of interpretation, and the justification of the ‘correctness of speech’ was a particular challenge to the Stoics and Epicureans
because both schools are concerned with a ‘naturalistic’ account of the rise
of human culture. The articles of James Allen and Anthony Long deal with
the Stoic theory of language and both take Plato’s Cratylus as their point of
departure. The Cratylus is not only the first known work that highlights the
alternative views that language is either based on nature or on convention
(in a stricter or wider sense), but also explores the claim that there is a
‘correctness’ of language. The Stoics seem to have known that work and
made it the reference point in their ‘naturalistic’ account of language.
Though very little is known about the Stoic views on the early stage of
culture in each cosmic cycle, it is clear that they did not hold an evolutionary view to the effect that human beings developed from a primitive
level akin to that of animals; instead they assumed that there was an early
natural stage in the history of humankind that was superior to their own
day, and used it as an incentive to recapture its insights.

James Allen (‘The Stoics on the origin of language and the foundations of
etymology’) shows that this assumption explains the Stoics’ preoccupation
with etymology as part of their concern with a time ‘when language was still
young’ and the product of a primordial wisdom. Since they held a naturalist
rather than a conventionalist view the Stoics assumed that there had been a


Introduction

5

primary stock of words that somehow ‘imitate’ the nature of the objects in
question and could therefore be used as a natural standard of correctness.
Since they assumed that there had been a high level of rationality among
humans at a primordial stage, the Stoics saw nothing unnatural in proposing the notion of an original ‘name-giver’ as a hypothetical construct. Such
a construct escapes the sceptic’s ridicule because it merely assumes that
the human need and the ability to converse rationally with each other,
which manifests itself in every individual at a certain age, must also have
been part of the nature of the (assumed) first generation of human beings.
The ‘naturalness’ of names consists, then, in their suitability for communication with others; though it presupposes a mimetic relation between
words and certain kinds of objects, it is not confined to onomatopoetics;
instead it makes use of other means to augment language by associations
and rational derivations of further expressions that are gradually added to
the original stock of words. This explanation, as Allen points out, may
make the etymologies less interesting and relevant in our eyes; but though
the Stoics did not assume mechanical laws of derivation that would allow
them to recover the ‘cradle of words’, attempts at rational reconstructions
of the relation between different expressions provided them with a means
to discover and to correct later corruptions of thought and so to play a crucial role in philosophical progress. Despite certain similarities of concern
with the naturalist position in the Cratylus, the Stoic position therefore

differs in more significant ways from the Platonic position than is usually
acknowledged.
Anthony Long (‘Stoic linguistics, Plato’s Cratylus, and Augustine’s De
dialectica’) also elaborates on the influence of Plato’s Cratylus on Stoic
theory. But he goes much further than Allen with his hypothesis that the
Stoics not only made use of Plato’s dialogue, but did so in a way that justifies
the presentation of many central features of their linguistic theory as being
the result of a revisionary reading of the Cratylus. It is a reading that makes
Socrates’ suggestions about the ‘natural’ relation of names to things much
more coherent than they are in the dialogue itself. This also applies to their
etymological explanation of the names of the gods that they suggested as a
revision of a corrupted tradition and a return to the original name-givers’
comprehension of the true nature of the universe. Given their ‘synaesthetic’
reconstruction of the relation between phonetics and semantics, the Stoics
could avoid the Cratylus’ more absurd features of onomatopoetics, as Long
shows by analysing different forms of ‘naturalism’, including ‘formal and
phonetic naturalism’, and their application by the Stoics that not only
includes names but also the famous lekta or ‘sayables’. Long contends that


6

Introduction

the Stoics not only found a better balance between the phonetic and the
formal constituents of meaningful discourse than emerges from Plato’s
dialogue itself, but restricted their use of etymology as a back-up to their
theology, i.e. the naturalistic reconstruction of the names of the gods. As an
additional witness to the sophistication of the Stoic linguistic theory Long
adds an appendix on the four-fold semantic distinction (between dicibile,

res, verbum, and dictio) in St Augustine’s De dialectica, which he takes to
be largely of Stoic origin.
The Epicureans also held that language is part of the natural emergence of
human culture. But here the similarity between the Stoic and the Epicurean
theory of language ends. For instead of an early stage of rationality and
inspired ‘name-givers’, the Epicureans proposed a quite different account
of the evolution of language as part of their mechanical reconstruction
of the order in nature, which includes an animal-like primitive stage of
human beings. Unfortunately the information on this early stage in the
development of humans as cultural beings in Epicurean theory is extremely
meagre; attempts to reconstruct it have to rely on a few lines in Epicurus’
Letter to Herodotus and in Lucretius’ poem.
Alexander Verlinsky (‘Epicurus and his predecessors on the origin of language’) valiantly attempts a reconstruction of the different stages of Epicurus’ evolutionary picture by a confrontation with some of his predecessors’
views that had been inspired by Democritus. The picture that emerges is
intriguing and suggestive. While some of the predecessors assumed that
human language was derived from animal sounds that were gradually articulated and assigned to objects, Democritus seems to have regarded gestures
as the initial way of signification; he therefore explained the development
of sounds from being merely expressive to their function as signifiers by
pointing out specific situations that first suggested to early human beings
the means of such communication. For Epicurus by contrast, two different
stages have to be distinguished. Though Epicurus agrees with his predecessors that the first utterances of human beings were emotional expressions
like those of the animals, they not only displayed a greater variety because
of a much richer natural endowment for such articulation, but the sounds
also received their functions as signifiers through a kind of social covenant.
Verlinsky derives the existence of a second stage in Epicurus’ theory of a
linguistic development from the evidence of a treatise by Ptolemy that indicates that language became greatly enriched not only by the composition
of new words derived from the first, natural ones, but also by a selection
among the variants that had arisen from the various spontaneous designations of the same things. The separation of these two stages allows Epicurus

Introduction

7

to give a more sophisticated explanation for the diversity of languages that
developed because of the different external conditions of life in different
societies.
While Verlinsky is concerned with a reconstruction of the evolution of
Epicurus’ theory of language against the background of earlier developments, Catherine Atherton takes a frankly evaluative approach. Her paper is
concerned with the limitations of the Epicurean account of the nature and
origin of language (‘Lucretius on what language is not’). She subjects the
Epicurean theory of the emergence of language to a sharp critical scrutiny
and challenges its justification and its success on a variety of crucial points.
She does so by drawing attention to some important differences between
Lucretius’ account and the Epicurean original that is known to us only
from his short summary in the Letter to Herodotus. As Atherton points out,
these differences show that Epicurus quite explicitly assumed that humans
are natural users of signs, an ability that is due on the one side to a rich
natural endowment to vocalisation that far outstrips that of other animals,
and on the other side to social pressure for cooperation that resulted in the
emergence of names. Despite the seeming attractiveness of this explanation of the emergence of language, Atherton points to grave philosophical
problems within the Epicurean theory. There seems to be an unbridgeable
gap between the natural vocalisations caused by the impact of the situation and properly intentional communication. For the latter presupposes
a system of communication that is based on a conscious and free use of
signs and the conceptualisation of sounds as names. As Atherton points out
with reference to contemporary theories of communication, the Epicurean
emergentist view of the development of human nature and the limits his
mechanistic laws of nature impose is incompatible with the inventiveness
that leaves room for the free play that is necessary for the intentionality presupposed by the use of names as signifiers. This difficulty is not restricted to
the Epicurean theory; it applies to all naturalistic and emergentist theories

of language and therefore presents a challenge to contemporary naturalist
explanations of language as well.
(2) While the origin of language remained a topic that fascinated philosophers to the end of antiquity, continued attention was also given to questions of the appropriate use and function of language as a means of social
intercourse. Not all ancient philosophers made language a matter of explicit
reflection. But all of them used it in a more or less conscious manner. Most
eccentric was no doubt the way of communication chosen by the Cynics, in
particular by their founder and model, Diogenes of Sinope, also called ‘the
Dog’. As a critic once remarked, when the violinist Nigel Kennedy stands


8

Introduction

in front of a symphony orchestra he appears like a parrot surrounded by a
herd of penguins. Ineke Sluiter’s contribution (‘Communicating Cynicism:
Diogenes’ gangsta rap’) promises a similarly colourful contrast to the more
conventional investigations in this volume. But the addition of colour is
not the main intention of this paper. Like Atherton’s paper, it shines a
philosophical spotlight on the question of what would count as ‘communication’ and agrees that some kind of intention is required along with a
form of behaviour that serves to indicate something. Sluiter aims to show
that the Cynics, while not concerned with a theory of language in the
conventional sense (unremarkably, since their concern with theory was
minimal) were quite conscious of the importance of the modes of communication, both verbal and non-verbal, that anticipate modern notions of
self-representation as a philosophical message. Thus Diogenes intentionally used shocking transgressive forms of non-verbal communication that
puts the body and its processes to philosophical use. Though this nonverbal communication was meant to shock in a new way, it had certain
precedents in features of ancient comedy and satire. These forms of art
display the same kind of precarious balance between momentary outrage
and a lasting message. It is important to remember that this exploitation
of audience reaction is a feature of all aspects of Cynic ‘philosophy’ – here

as with the other schools philosophy of language reveals its intimate links
to the rest of their message. If it is fair to say that the Cynics lived their
philosophy quite generally, then in Sluiter’s essay we see how it is that they
performed their philosophy of language.
Yet if the Cynic’s communication is to achieve an effect beyond the
momentary outrage it must be transformed into anecdote and accepted in
the literary tradition, a transformation that robs it of its bite and ultimately
makes it harmless. That there is a form of communication that lives on the
ambiguity between the outrageous and the traditional not only represents
Cynicism’s self-undermining message, but also establishes a tie to modern
forms of self-expression like gangsta rap – a fact that accounts for the essay’s
provocative title.
Sluiter is not alone in focusing on the practical effect of the philosophical
interest in language. Charles Brittain (‘Common sense: concepts, definition
and meaning in and out of the Stoa’) also focuses on an important aspect
of the philosophical analysis of language: its relation to reality and to the
conceptual apparatus in the human mind, which on most theories connects reality to language. To the na¨ıve mind, a concept like ‘common sense’
would not seem to be in need of development since it must have been in
place since the dawn of human reasoning. Nor is that the issue of Brittain’s


Introduction

9

paper. Instead, he focuses on the development of a theory of common sense
that is based on the connection between a stock of rational conceptions
that is the common possession of all humans and the words which map
naturally onto those conceptions and so give expression to them. The Stoics
themselves did not maintain that everyone can acquire conceptions that

successfully capture the essence of things; such success presupposes the
uncorrupted mind of the wise; so these normative concepts do not seem
to be an obvious source for a theory of common conceptions that are open
to all. As Brittain contends, it would nevertheless be wrong to attribute
such a theory to the later Platonists despite the fact that they advocated the
existence of universally acceptable word-meanings that are open to every
human being’s grasp. For Platonists regarded these meanings as mere accidental features of the thing in question. What was needed to establish a
theory of common sense was a combination of the two theories: the ‘preliminary definition’ of a term with universal acceptance that lays claim to at
least a partial grasp of the thing’s essence. En route to this solution Brittain
offers, inter alia, a reconstruction of the mechanism at work in the formation of common concepts with abstract and general contents and seeks
to solve the conundrum of how definitions of the words corresponding to
the concepts are formed. He does so by carefully sifting through different
sources that employ Stoic vocabulary (such as ‘preconceptions’ or ‘common conceptions’) but that differ significantly from the Stoic view that all
humans have at least a partial grasp of a thing’s essential properties, rather
than mere accidental properties. This assumption paves the way towards a
theory of ‘common sense’ that establishes a direct connection between the
concepts and the objects of the world and explains how ordinary languagespeakers have at least an outline understanding of the world. Such a theory,
so Brittain argues, is the upshot of Cicero’s treatment of preconceptions
as the basis of definitions. The rendering of ‘preconception’ (prolepsis) as
shared by all – by communis mens and finally by communis sensus – justifies
the attribution to Cicero of at least ‘a fragment of a theory of common
sense’ in civic and political matters that everyone in principle can understand. This was a theory that deeply influenced the later rhetorical tradition
and thereby became a lasting asset in cultural history.
(3) The more technical issues concerning the function of language, its
structure, properties and anomalies, and its relation to the world are taken
up from three quite distinct perspectives in this volume. David Blank
(‘Varro’s anti-analogist’) investigates the concern with grammar as a philosophical discipline by a reconstruction of the controversy between analogist
and anomalist theories of language as witnessed in Varro’s De lingua Latina,

10

Introduction

a major ancient source on ancient linguistic theory, even though it has survived only in part. The ‘accepted view’ on this issue so far has been that the
protagonists in the controversy were Crates of Mallos who argued for the
anomalist faction and contended that there are no rules of grammar and
that de facto usage alone was the criterion of correctness, and Aristarchus
of Samothrace, the proponent of the view that grammatical phenomena
follow analogical patterns. Blank purports to show that no such debate
between these alleged two schools of grammar can have existed; for Crates
was an exponent of technical grammar who put great emphasis on philological methods. If there was disagreement between him and Aristarchus
it must have concerned the explanation of particular grammatical phenomena, in which Crates proposed the use of analogically correct forms of
speech, which Aristarchus rejected in favour of the customary forms. The
real debate between analogists and anti-analogists, so Blank contends, was
between philosophical as opposed to grammatical empiricists (or sceptics)
and rationalist grammarians who advocated the adherence to rules, while
the empiricists held that observation of common usage is all that is necessary
to assure the correctness of speech.
Grammatical correctness was not the only issue that occupied the
Hellenistic philosopher’s concern with language. The question of ‘semantical correctness’ has a much older pedigree because the sophists as well as
the paradox-mongers in the Megarian tradition had made the treatment of
fallacies and the exploitation of ambiguities part of their stock-in-trade. The
avoidance of such pitfalls was therefore a major issue among the philosophers, as witnessed by the attention paid to such problems by Plato and
Aristotle. That the Stoics still regarded them as a major challenge may at first
blush seem strange, since one would expect that the shop-worn exploitation
of blatant ambiguities must have appeared both ludicrous and tiresome.
As Susanne Bobzien (‘The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation’) shows, the
Stoics had philosophical reasons for the development of strategies to handle
‘lexical’ ambiguities, because they regarded fallacies of ambiguity as complexes of propositions and sentences that straddle the realm of linguistic

expression (the domain of language) and the realm of meaning (the domain
of logic); moreover, there is also a pragmatic component because being
deceived is a psychological disposition that can be reduced neither to
language nor to meaning. Not all arguments are, after all, as transparently
fallacious as is the example that exploits the ambiguity of ‘for men/manly’
and concludes that a ‘garment for men’ must be courageous because manliness is courage. Bobzien provides a detailed analysis of the relevant passages,
lays bare textual and interpretative difficulties, and explores what the Stoic


Introduction

11

view on the matter implies for their theory of language. She points up that
the Stoics believe that the premisses of the fallacies, when uttered, have only
one meaning and are true, and thus should be conceded; hence no mental
process of disambiguation is needed, while Aristotle, by contrast, assumes
that the premisses contain several meanings, and recommends that the listeners explicitly disambiguate them. Bobzien proffers two readings of the
Stoic advice that we ‘be silent’ when confronted with fallacies of ambiguity,
and explicates how each leads to an overall consistent interpretation of the
textual evidence. Finally, she demonstrates that the method advocated by
the Stoics works for all fallacies of lexical ambiguity.
That the Stoics were the instigators of the emphasis put on linguistic
observations in ancient philosophy is uncontested. To what degree they
are rightly accused of paying more attention to expressions rather than
to things is quite another matter, despite the fact that this reproach was
voiced repeatedly in antiquity by authorities such as Galen and Alexander
of Aphrodisias and has lasted through the nineteenth century ad. If the
Stoics have enjoyed a better press since the twentieth century it is because
they were taken to be logicians for logic’s sake, committed formalists who

stopped just short of inventing the appropriate type of artificial language.
That this picture needs revision is argued by Jonathan Barnes (‘What is a
disjunction?’) in a painstaking investigation of the treatment of connectives
in Apollonius Dyscolus’ essay with that title and Galen’s Institutio logica.
Barnes shows that Apollonius’ text is coherent and thereby undermines a
long-standing prejudice about the Stoic impact on the development of traditional grammar: contrary to what has been assumed (via an unwarranted
textual emendation in a crucial passage of Apollonius Dyscolus) Apollonius does not criticise the Stoics’ meddling with grammar, but rather their
insufficient interest in some of its finer points. Far from adopting a purely
formalistic stance, the Stoics distinguished between natural and non-natural
disjunctions and colligations. They used these considerations not only to
distinguish between natural and occasional disjunctions, but also between
grammatical and semantical nonsense. Since no other text besides Apollonius’ attributes the conception of ‘natural disjunctions’ to the Stoics it is a
question whether it actually is of Stoic origin rather than derived from the
Peripatetics or an invention by certain grammarians. As Barnes shows, the
interconnections and boundaries between natural language and formal logic
did not only play a crucial role in the treatment of disjunctions by Apollonius Dyscolus. They are also the basis of Galen’s criticism of Stoic logic on
the differentiation between complete and incomplete conflict and implication, whose intent was to show what is and what is not a legitimate use of


12

Introduction

conjunctions. If that distinction is at stake, then Galen’s view on disjunctions and conjunctions turns out to be coherent, despite initial appearances
to the contrary. The differing parties accused each other of not having paid
sufficient attention to the pragmata; however, their complaint is not that
the facts in the world have been ignored, but rather that the meaning of
the terms has not received sufficient attention.
It is a generally accepted view that ‘philosophy of language’ as well as
‘grammar’ as a philosophical discipline were invented in antiquity by the

Stoics or by grammarians inspired by them. It is also the accepted view
that these achievements were passed on to the Latin West in the Middle
Ages through authors like Priscian and Boethius, to be augmented and
refined by the schoolmen from the beginning of the twelfth century on.
But though the general route of the tradition that indirectly relates to the
beginning of linguistic philosophy in Hellenistic times is uncontested, there
is little knowledge about any direct influence of the Hellenistic philosophers
on that period. Sten Ebbesen (‘Theories of language in the Hellenistic age
and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’) takes his readers into the
relatively uncharted waters of the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on the
Middle Ages by tracing Stoic influence on certain issues. Ebbesen focuses
on three points. First he points out how the question of ‘imposition’, i.e.
the assignment of phonemes to natural things was taken up by the members
of the Porretan school in order to show how moral and rational vocabulary
arose through a transformation of the natural vocabulary, so as to allow
discussion of non-natural phenomena in the sphere of culture, reason, and
even theology. Second he shows that Boethius of Dacia and other members
of the ‘modist school’ in the late thirteenth century developed a theory
of formal grammar and logic, a theory that showed how the ‘modes’ of
signifying, supplemented by a theory of representing logical relationships,
is based on modes of understanding and ultimately related to the modes of
being. Though among the modists the conviction prevailed that language
is based on convention they did not hold that expressions are introduced
at random; hence etymology, as first adumbrated in Plato’s Cratylus, has
its role to play in linguistic theory. Finally Ebbesen shows that the static
conception of the modists that assumed invariable rules of language was
changed into a dynamic theory of language by Roger Bacon, whose theory
allowed for changing rules of language without loss of intelligibility.
Thus we find in the Middle Ages ghost-like replicas of the controversies among the ancient philosophers of language, whether it concerns the
‘imposition of words’ inspired by Plato’s Cratylus, the quest to account for

the relation between language and the objects in the world that was a main