The second chapter examines literary and historical sources writing about theoria, including those by Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Euripides, as a means of providing the larger cultural background against which Plato's use of theoria must be considered. Two analogies to traditional theoria are here considered, that of pilgrimage and cultural sight-seeing, both of which contribute elements to the distinctive intellectual conception of theoria developed by Plato and Aristotle with which the chapter concludes.

The fifth chapter provides a synoptic chapter about the objects of theoria, both as they relate to traditional theoria and to philosophical theoria. The objects of the former kind of theoria, namely, festival- and sanctuary-attendance, are the images of the gods on temples or the gods themselves. In the case of philosophical theoria, or contemplation, the objects are more abstract entities, namely, forms, that Plato and Aristotle take to comprise the highest objects of philosophical study, or contemplation. The philiosophers consider that when we apprehend these objects, we are in possession of scientific knowledge that they compare to divine activity. In both kinds, the apprehension of the objects of theoria is reached through an activity that is directly perceptual or mediated by perceptual experience.

This chapter provides a critical account of Cicero’s discussion of the nature of the soul and the emotions in the Tusculan Disputations. The first two sections trace the key steps of Cicero’s argumentation as he critically evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of various competing views in the Greek philosophical tradition. Cicero ultimately purports to favor Plato’s position on the immortality of the soul and the Stoics’ cognitivist account of the emotions. The final section draws attention to the ways in which Cicero employs and evaluates these philosophical resources in the realm of therapeutic practice, as he reflects on his own experience of suffering and loss. Cicero showcases the practical utility of a flexible therapeutic model that focuses on the transformation of beliefs: while he clearly favors the Stoic explanation of the emotions, he does not feel compelled to recommend only the therapy in agreement with that explanation. This pragmatic approach can be seen as a distinctive aspect of Cicero’s own philosophical practice.

Cicero’s De natura deorum, De divinatione, De fato, and Timaeus offer a coherent development of some of the questions first raised in De republica and De legibus. In the specific context of the mid-first-century bce debate between Stoics and Epicureans, Cicero raises three far-reaching issues: can a rational discourse on religion be developed without a solid cosmological and theological foundation? What use can be made of historical and anthropological observations of cultual practices? Is it possible to reach a universal definition of the psychological process which accounts for human attitudes towards the gods? Cicero’s authorial strategies frame skeptical arguments so as to suggest constructive answers and preserve human freedom and moral responsibility. A mythopoetical discourse on the universe offers sufficient background as “provisional physics.” Historical enquiries help define precise limits for political thinking on religion. Philosophy explains psychologically how the admiration for the beauty of the world leads to ethical accomplishment.

Many of Cicero’s translations of Greek concepts (assent, comprehension, quality) have become common terms in philosophy but also in ordinary language in many European countries. Some of them, pertaining to epistemology, ethics, or physics, are studied in this chapter to show why and how Cicero set out to create a Latin philosophical vocabulary. He wanted to extend the supremacy of Rome to an area formerly reserved to the Greeks. He tried to avoid technical terms or neologisms and preferred open notions to closed concepts. He aimed at conveying the complexity of Greek philosophical doctrines in Latin and sometimes brought out certain nuances which did not exist in the Greek terms (as in the case of probabile). Cicero’s originality as a philosopher does not lie in creating a new system but in providing philosophy with a new language and in promoting the idea that philosophy was not the privilege of Greek culture but a field open to human ingenuity.

This chapter is focused on Aristotle’s account of sensibility in De Anima II 12. My thesis is that the account defines sensibility as the standard in relation to which perceptible qualities are the sorts of quality they are. To illustrate, Aristotle holds that some colors are dark, others light; this implies that the spectrum of dark and light is “divided” into two “sides,” one dark, the other light. In the previous chapter I suggested that what it is for a quality to lie on one side of a spectrum – e.g. to be one of the dark colors – is a matter of its relation to the “middle” of the associated spectrum. In this chapter I argue that the claim that sensibility just is “as it were a kind of mean of the contrariety in perceptible qualities” implies that these “middles” are defined by sensibility itself, the form or essence of the primary sense organ. The upshot is that the senses are “forms” or “standards” of perceptible qualities, in that the particular qualities known by their means are the sorts of quality they are (e.g. dark colors or light ones) thanks to their relationship to the form of the primary sense organ.

This chapter asks what it is about “intelligence” (nous) that, in Aristotle’s view, makes “understanding” or “insight” (noēsis) its proprietary work. It argues that the answer lies in the peculiar clarity and distinctness of that activity. This clarity and distinctness, it argues, make intelligence the very “form” or “measure” of its objects – what they all “have in common,” what “makes” them intelligible, what their intelligibility consists in.

The chapter traces statements on Cicero’s philosophical position from his earliest treatise (on rhetorical theory) to the philosophical works of the 40s bce, while attending to the literary form of Cicero’s oeuvre. It argues that Cicero’s stance is stable over time, that it exhibits a number of features that would warrant calling it mitigated skepticism, but that, given the way different Academic positions are conceptualized in Cicero’s texts, notably the Academica, his position is formally one of radical skepticism. The chapter tries to identify features of the evidence from Cicero which are distinctive compared to other texts (e.g. by Sextus Empiricus and Numenius), notably an unusual wealth of comments on the practice of Academic skepticism (i.e. on what being an Academic skeptic was like, at least on Cicero’s construal and to what extent it was compatible with being a fully functioning Roman of a certain social class and with a particular occupation).

This chapter discusses Cicero’s views on the relation between ethical theory and the good human life, focusing on his main work on ethical theory, De finibus. Cicero’s critique of Stoic and Epicurean ethics has a common element, all the more striking given the differences between the two doctrines, namely that neither theory is livable with integrity in social contexts. This critique is a reflection both of Cicero’s belief that ethics should engage with lived human experience and of the commitment, in varying degrees, of the Stoics and Epicureans to a conception of the good human life as inherently social. The pluralism of the Old Academy’s ethics discussed in the final part of De finibus escapes this critique but is in danger, through lack of a single supreme value, of failing to offer a basis on which we may structure our lives. Taken as a whole, De finibus can thus be seen to cast a skeptical eye on the viability of ethical theory itself.