This chapter recovers Schopenhauer’s previously neglected account of prudent political action. It points out the connections between the skilled governance of society and the savvy self-control of the individual in Schopenhauer’s works and argues that a full analysis of his conception of politics must include a treatment of prudence in world affairs as well as in interpersonal encounters. In fact, Schopenhauer supplemented his account of the modern state as an instrument of society-wide pacification with an account of prudent self-governance as an obligation for the modern subject. He believed that the state must impose constraints on disruptive egoism from the top, but that individuals should also prudently mask their egoism and in this way soften antagonisms. In Schopenhauer’s view, Hobbes’ theory of statehood could be constructively linked to Baltasar Gracián’s account of prudence; implemented together, they could strengthen the prospects of peace.

Hume’s ‘four essays on happiness’ are distinctive in Hume’s oeuvre, and not merely in the 1741 volume of Essays, Moral and Political in which they appeared. They are written in the style of philosophical monologues, with Hume ‘personating’ a representative of each of the main, late Hellenistic philosophical sects in turn. Each such representative, however, engages critically with the philosophical positions staked out by his rivals and antagonists. The ultimate question each of the philosophical sects seeks to answer is: what is the true end (summum bonum) of human life, and where is true contentment to be found? Scholars have tended to be preoccupied with the question of which sect best articulates Hume’s own underlying philosophical commitments. This chapter argues that such an approach is mistaken, because Hume dismissed the quest for the summum bonum altogether. Hume presented all the late Hellenistic philosophical sects as capturing something important about human life, and about the purpose of philosophical activity. Yet ancient moral philosophers had ultimately failed to develop the ‘science of man’ that Hume took to be the greatest achievement of modern philosophy. The four essays, then, reveal Hume’s keen – and lifelong – interest in the history of moral philosophy, and his attentiveness to the distinctive (and superior) character of modern approaches to the discipline.

This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.

In ‘Doing Things with Concepts in Sextus Empiricus’, Richard Bett examines Sextus’ terminology in connection to his use of such strategies and highlights their inventiveness and sophistication. On the one hand, Sextus appears to agree with his dogmatic opponents insofar as he says that we need to get our concepts clear before investigating any topic. On the other hand, he often raises objections against dogmatic concepts, arguing, for instance, that they are inherently inconsistent and therefore there are no objects corresponding to such concepts or, alternatively, that even if we accept these concepts, there exists nothing real corresponding to them. It is not clear whether or how these two lines of approach can be coherently combined. Nonetheless, Sextus frequently runs the two together, and Bett enquires into his reasons for doing so. An important upshot of this study is that it leads us to consider what kinds of concepts and what sort of reflection about concepts are available to a sceptic of Sextus’ variety.

The third and final review authored by Pistorius in this volume is his review of the second Critique. The review completes a fascinating exchange between Pistorius and Kant that begins with the former’s early review of Schultz’s Elucidations and the Groundwork, among others, continues with Kant’s responses to these reviews in the second Critique, and ends here with Pistorius’ review of the second Critique. In the review, Pistorius returns to some of the same points made in his previous reviews, such as the ‘priority of the good’ objection, the charge of empty formalism, and Kant’s conception of freedom. A major theme of the review is Pistorius’ inability to accept Kant’s distinction between the empirical and intelligible character of human beings, and other topics include a discussion of the highest good and Kant’s relationship to Stoic moral philosophy.

Pistorius’ review of the Groundwork was without a doubt the most important early review, at least with respect to its influence on the second Critique. Pistorius raises several important objections in the review, many of which are now regarded as classic responses to Kant’s moral theory in the literature. These include: the empty formalism objection, the claim that Kant is a covert consequentialist, that only hypothetical imperatives can bind human beings, and that there is a distinction to be made between happiness through instinct and happiness through reason. Kant was aware of the review and responds to Pistorius explicitly in the second Critique, such as in the second chapter of the Analytic, where he replies to a “certain reviewer,” i.e., Pistorius, who claimed against the Groundwork that “the concept of the good was not established before the moral principle.” (5:8.27–9.2)

Often viewed as derivative, philosophy written in Latin has in recent years been enjoying a scholarly renaissance, as critics realise that philosophical thought does not develop in a vacuum but is intrinsically linked to the time, place and language in which it is expressed.This chapter brings a historicising approach to the phenomenon of Roman philosophy, combining a diachronic narrative with a focus on particular themes.After considering the Roman adoption of Greek philosophy in the second century BCE, I use Lucretius as a case study for the Latinisation of Greek thought and Cicero as an example of the political and cultural uses of philosophy in the late Republic.I explore some of the many appearances of philosophy in Latin poetry – evidence of the saturation of the Roman cultural imaginary with philosophical ideas and the fact that Latin philosophical writing was not restricted to genres viewed as philosophical.Moving into the Empire, I discuss Seneca as a proponent of philosophy as a way of life and consider the self-representation of philosophers, with a focus on Apuleius, before concluding with an exploration of the Christianisation of philosophy in late antiquity.

This chapter finds that Augustine self-consciously departed from Stoicism and Platonism (while remaining within eudaimonism) in finding that there were other natural objects of human beings’ eros-love besides the highest good. This finding leads to a new explanation of Augustine’s distinction between use and enjoyment and to a new explanation of his view that grief would be found not only in the lives of the vicious but in the lives of the virtuous as well.

This chapter asks whether Augustine criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that there was something fundamentally flawed about the eudaimonist approach to ethics, or whether he criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that these philosophies had insufficiently understood eudaimonism itself. It finds that the latter explanation is correct: in reaching this conclusion, this chapter establishes that Augustine defined virtue and vice, or sin, from within the eudaimonist tradition, making use of the ideas of love as eros and philia, and of the highest good, or summum bonum.

Three Indian religions are considered, in the likely order of their origin. In each case a history and analysis are first offered before a specific issue is addressed in more detail. For Jainism it is the question of reincarnation. Here it is suggested that similar concerns for justice underly both Jainism’s almost physical embedding of karma in the universe and western theism’s postulation of a doctrine of resurrection. If so, it is what is scientifically and metaphysically possible which is in dispute (the status of soul and body) rather than different moral values. With Buddhism its moral approach is considered, partly through using Gavin Flood’s comparative study on asceticism and partly through drawing parallels with the influence of Stoicism on early Christian ethics. Finally, the impersonal character of the divine advocated in Sikhism is given sympathetic treatment through considering some issues raised by Neo-Platonism. Each of these questions will be considered further in subsequent chapters.

“This chapter focuses on the two main philosophical questions raised by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. First is the problem of perspectivism, the idea that objectivity is impossible because knowledge is circumscribed by human subject positions. Differences between the four parts of Gulliver’s Travels suggest that Swift recognized no stable relationship between truth ‘in itself’ and what individuals believe about the world, but only comparisons in quality or scope between different perspectives. Second is a question about the relative validity of two different positions in Christian ethics: the optimistic neo-Stoicism espoused by Swift’s friend Alexander Pope, and the pessimistic Augustinianism preferred by Swift himself. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift gave eloquent expression both to his scepticism about the beneficence of God and nature and to his narrow estimation of the limits of human reason.”

In his obituary of Silius Italicus (Ep. 3.7), Pliny uses a series of apposite intertextual allusions drawn from a variety of sources (especially from Seneca’s Dialogi and Epistles, Cicero’s Epistulae ad Familiares and Hesiod) which help him denigrate Silius’ posthumous reputation. Pliny evokes several titles of Senecan works and thus virtually creates an epistolary library with a section containing Stoic best sellers. In this letter, Pliny absorbs Seneca’s Stoicism, prompts his readers to evaluate Silius’ character through the lens of Stoic discourses and to notice an inconsistency between Silius’ Stoic death and his un-Stoic way of life, while all the while associating the epic poet with Epicureanism. He has good reasons to undermine Silius’ reputation, since the latter was Pliny’s rival for the title of Cicero’s heir. However, at the same time Pliny differentiates himself from Seneca by rejecting some of his central ideas, as e.g. his idea that human life is not short. The negative insinuations against Silius are further accentuated by intratextual links with other letters addressed to Caninius Rufus.

The Stoics argued for women’s moral equality, companionate marriage, education, and participation in philosophy. And yet we have no writings from Stoic women, even from the Roman imperial period, when we know of several who could be considered Stoics. This silence of the written record coheres with the centrality within Stoicism of manliness (virtus), exemplified by heroes like Hercules. We must therefore examine indirect evidence, including writings by Stoic men on marriage and society, in order to glean anything about Stoic women. But this chapter suggests that writing tragedy provided the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the opportunity to stage the voice of a Stoic woman facing the most crucial choice – between life and death – and responding as her own moral agent. Acting as a Stoic exemplar, Megara, Hercules’ wife, chooses death over a life inconsistent with her ethically determined role.

In De Officiis, Cicero undertakes sustained engagement with Roman exemplary ethics. He uses dozens of different exempla to serve a variety of functions including as inspirational paradigms as means of illustrating abstract concepts and to communicate the important principle of situational variation. In addition he reflects upon some of the challenges of exemplary ethics when viewed within the Stoic context and also develops new techniques for utilising exempla and exemplary modes within a Stoic framework. He achieves this partly by incorporating into his philosophical discussion some key features of Roman exemplary ethics including a sense of particularity and historical specificity emotional charge and injunction and indeterminacy. De Officiis anticipates to some extent ideas later developed more explicitly by Seneca; identifying these enables us to better appreciate the unfolding dialogue between Stoicism and exemplary ethics.

Cicero’s De Officiis is the only surviving extended Stoic-style treatment of practical deliberation, offering guidance on what counts as well-judged decision-making. This chapter explores two questions raised by this feature of the work: (1) what is the general form of Stoic thinking on valid practical deliberation? (2) how far does Cicero’s De Officiis reflect the Stoic view of deliberation? On the first question, after considering recent scholarly discussions which stress the importance for Stoic deliberation of gaining advantages (‘preferable indifferents’), the chapter highlights the relevance for Stoic thought of a modern virtue ethical treatment of deliberation, which stresses the criterial role of virtue. On the second question, the chapter brings out how the structure and argumentation of De Officiis reflect the Stoic conception of deliberation, as presented here (that is, as centred on virtue).

In this Introduction, I first discuss the title, form and method of De Officiis, with a focus on Cicero’s prefaces to the three books that comprise the work, in order both to complement the essays that follow and because the prefaces give important information about Cicero’s compositional methods and motives. Having thus put the work into context, I go on to explain and discuss the structure of the volume itself, and offer a brief outline of the individual chapters.