Spencer’s Reviews > Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds > Status Update

Evils are thus the holes in the Swiss cheese of the universe. They are not things in their own right that the divine causes have brought into being. Rather, they are precisely cases where the divine causes have not brought something into being, or rather, have brought less into being than we might have hoped.

Evils are thus the holes in the Swiss cheese of the universe. They are not things in their own right that the divine causes have brought into being. Rather, they are precisely cases where the divine causes have not brought something into being, or rather, have brought less into being than we might have hoped.

Western philosophy began about two-and-a-half thousand years ago, with the Pre-Socratics. And for about half that time, from the third to the fifteenth centuries ad, philosophy was to a significant extent dominated by Neoplatonism.

You might think that the result of the skeptical process would be further frustration. But the Pyrrhonists claim that, to the contrary, the suspension of judgment yields freedom from disturbance—the very goal we began with, achieved through means we did not expect.

the Skeptics of the Academy often seem to have had little more on their minds than undermining the Stoics. This is perhaps just what we’d expect, since the Skeptics professed no doctrines of their own. What they brought to the table was not a rival theory, like that of the Epicureans, but an arsenal of dialectical weaponry designed to undercut and cast doubt upon the Stoic position.

The Stoics described most of the things people value and esteem as being in fact indifferent. Such things as pleasure, reputation, wealth, and even health lack any intrinsic value. Only virtue, which guides the correct use of such things, is genuinely good and worth pursuing in itself. Epictetus adapts the theory by arguing that our virtue really consists in the right use of prohairesis—that is, choosing rightly

Indeed, we can sum up the difference between the two schools by saying that the Stoics thought we should suspend judgment when we are not certain. The Skeptics agreed, but added that as far as we can tell certainty is never available, so we should always suspend judgment.

Epicurus teaches that the most pleasant life is a life of moderation, discipline, and careful planning. In this, Epicureanism makes a contrast with the Cyrenaic teaching of Aristippus the Younger. The Epicureans and Cyrenaics shared a commitment to hedonism, so of course they were bitter rivals. There’s nothing worse than an opponent who is uncomfortably close to agreeing with you.

As these Hellenistic schools competed to be the true heirs of Socrates, they adopted a broadly Socratic stance on the fundamental purpose of philosophy. We do find these thinkers speculating about logic, the universe, and the divine. But for all of them, philosophy centrally concerned the question of how to live.