In the preceding chapter I traced the basis on which Xenocrates, Plato’s second successor as head of the Academy, created the original textual canon for building a Platonic system. It emerged that his authoritative Platonic texts were two myths – the creation myth of the Timaeus, and the Phaedrus’ mythical travelogue about the destiny of eternal souls. The latter passage, I argued, was so canonical as to determine, on occasion, how even the former should be interpreted.

As we shall see in the course of this chapter, a similar approach to Plato’s use of characters in his dialogues can be found in Proclus, Olympiodorus and elsewhere.4 Twenty-first century readers of Plato, conscious of the need to appreciate Plato’s dialogues as works of literature as well as philosophy, may well be struck by remarks like these,5 and may wonder how the Neoplatonists of late antiquity reconciled their awareness of Plato’s skill in characterization with treating Plato as a philosophical authority. That will be my topic in this chapter. I begin with a brief discussion of some modern interpreters who emphasize Plato’s use of dialogue form, from which we shall see that even in our postmodern age such an emphasis can still be combined with a belief that Plato is a dogmatic philosopher. I will then turn to fuller examination of the interpretation of Plato’s characters by Proclus and Olympiodorus, including how this relates to their acceptance of Plato’s authority.

Aristotle plays a highly authoritative role in Neoplatonic philosophy, second only to the almost undisputed authority of Plato. However, as any reader of Plato’s and Aristotle’s works knows, the views of the two philosophers often diverge and generate conflicts. These conflicts provide the Neoplatonic commentators with a serious interpretative challenge: although, as Platonists, their main goal is to defend Plato and the Platonist position, they are also hesitant to openly criticise Aristotle, who is regarded as a true adherent of Plato’s philosophy. The commentators most prominently face such a challenge in the case of the self-moving soul, a core Platonic doctrine severely criticised by Aristotle, implicitly in Physics 8.5 and explicitly in De anima 1.3.

Within the Pythagorean tradition the supreme source of authority is, needless to say, Pythagoras himself. The Pythagoreans are the only Pre-socratics named after the founder of their brotherhood. However, if one takes into account the amount of extant Pythagorean literature, which is for the most part apocryphal – as is well known, the amount of apocryphal Pythagorean literature by far exceeds the few fragments which can be considered authentic and safely attributed to ancient Pythagoreans – the predominant name is that of Archytas, who was undoubtedly a prominent figure, although not one as authoritative as Pythagoras. Moreover, a great number of pseudo-Pythagorean writings go under the name of largely unimportant, or otherwise unknown, authors. Nonetheless, this apocryphal literature considerably contributed to lending the necessary authority to a very influential tradition that extended over the centuries. In this contribution I will endeavour, among other things, to explain (a) how Archytas came to be regarded as a major source of authority; (b) why the authors of Pythagorean forgeries made recourse to names which apparently were anything but authoritative; (c) more broadly, what kind of criteria may have guided the authors in building the pseudo-Pythagorean corpus; (d) what relationship exists between these writings and the Platonist tradition.

In Adversus Colotem (1121F), Plutarch suggests that Colotes – in his polemical work against some of the eminent philosophers up to Epicurus – accused Arcesilaus of attributing his own sceptical views not only to Socrates and Plato but also to Parmenides and Heraclitus. Since Colotes’ list dated back to Arcesilaus’ time, it seems likely that Colotes derived the list from Arcesilaus himself. However, Heraclitus does not figure at all among Arcesilaus’ illustrious predecessors in Cicero’s Academica. This absence is puzzling not only because Heraclitus had a ‘pervasive impact’ upon Plato’s philosophy, and because Arcesilaus strongly appealed to Plato, but also because Heraclitus was a key figure for the Stoics exactly at the time of Arcesilaus and Arcesilaus’ quarrel with the Stoics over their philosophical predecessors. I will set out to detect if and to what extent Arcesilaus made use of Heraclitus in his own philosophy.

In his seminal article on philosophical authority published in 1997, David Sedley showed that, in antiquity, the founder of a philosophical school was taken as figure of ‘authority’ by subsequent members of the school, who would carefully avoid expressing disagreement with him. What is more, the reason for their deference was not purely formal, or political: the authority with which school-members invested the founder of their school was epistemic as well, in the sense that it involved some level of concern to know and be guided by their founder’s views. But this is far from the end of the story. As Jan Opsomer and Angela Ulacco have been careful to describe subsequently, ‘epistemic authority’ ranges widely in sense and strength: from uncritical assent to the truth of whatever can be gleaned from the authority-figure within a given domain, to the belief that their views might help to point one in the right direction.1 Where one stands on this question might make all the difference to the character of one’s philosophical project.

At Against the Mathematicians (M) 2.10 Sextus Empiricus defines technê along Stoic lines, as (a) an organized system of knowledge (b) directed towards an end useful for life. This raises a question. Does the sceptic’s own art satisfy conditions (a) and (b) and thereby qualify as a technê? This is not an idle question. For if it turns out that the sceptic’s art does qualify as a technê, then one might reasonably ask whether, on pain of inconsistency, Sextus ought not to train his guns on the sceptic’s art just as he trains his guns on the liberal arts of grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology and music in M 1–6. The chapter explore the different possible answers that can be given to the question and argues that, though scepticism satisfies condition (b) for a technê, it fails to satisfy condition (a). While skepticism has eudaimonistic use, in that establishes ‘unperturbedness’ (ataraxia), not fixed target or subject matter like technai proper, but one that changes according to dialectical context. Skeptic art has then an asystematic subject matter. Scepticism is, therefore, a non-technical art that differs fundamentally from the kinds of technai Sextus discusses, and attacks, in M 1–6.

According to Aristotle, a technê is both a productive power and a kind of epistêmê. In so far as it is a kind of epistêmê, it deals with universals, involves grasping explanations and does not concern itself with the accidental. But a puzzle arises about how something can both be an epistêmê in this sense and at the same time be a power for producing things. Successful production requires the ability to make adjustments to take account of indefinitely variable circumstances. In this chapter, Coope argues that this essential flexibility of technê marks an important difference between it and theoretical epistêmê. Whereas a theoretical epistêmê is potentially complete (in the sense that it is possible in principle to possess all the explanations of the epistêmê), a technê is indefinitely improvable (however many explanations one grasps, there will always be further explanations to be worked out). Because of this, even an expert in a technê needs to have the capacity for working out new explanations. It is possible for Aristotle to think of technê in this way just because he (unlike, for instance, later Christian authors) does not think there is such a thing as a divine technê.

Production is an essential category of Proclus’ thought. To understand human production, as the late ancient Platonists conceive of it, we need first to look at divine production and natural generation, which is ultimately due to divine causes. Divine production is the by-product of the gods’ unchanging act of thinking. Demiurgic production is a subclass of divine production producing things that become as such. Interestingly, demiurgic production resembles human production more than higher forms of divine production. Gods have only the higher forms of technai, not the human technai based on conjecture. In the logical sequence of planning, the whole precedes the part, while in actual production parts come first. This is made possible by the plurality of demiurgic causes, ordered in a hierarchical sequence. Human craftsmanship is structurally analogous to natural and divine production. It involves paradigmatic causes which are not eternal intelligible objects, but the fruit of genuine invention. Artefacts and the rational formulae (logoi) describing their function and form must be adapted to changing circumstances. While propositional and discursive, their elements are provided by reflections of Forms. New logoi presuppose creative imagination, representing non-actual situations. Knowledge of how to make artefacts involves their conditions of realisation.

Virtue is agreed to be a technê – or at least very like one – by Socrates, Plato, the Stoics and Aristotle (who is deeply ambivalent about the technê model). But in what ways is technê a useful model for virtue? Barney argues that technê has two important dimensions. First, technê provides a small-scale, well-understood model for the general, unspecialized practical rationality that would constitute virtue. Relevant features of a technê so understood include perceptual, rational and deliberative capacities, and a disinterested orientation to an end. Second, a technê is a practical identity: a social role the adoption of which provides a deliberative standpoint. Adopting a practical identity involves accepting its normative authority: we undertake to be a good doctor, mother, etc. Understanding technê´s normative authority as a practical identity (rather than as knowledge) solves several standard puzzles about virtue as technê. Moreover, the model can be defended against some common objections if virtue is taken as a kind of ‘super-technê’, with the human good as its end and, accordingly, some special features: it directs all the other technai, its adoption as a practical identity is non-optional for a rational human being, and its reasons for action are non-defeasible.

This chapter offers a fresh account of Aristotle's contribution to the long debate in antiquity among philosophers, rhetoricians and medical writers concerning the relative merits, or demerits, of accumulated experience (empeiria) and of theoretical know-how (technê) as powers for successful practical action. In pursuing this topic, Bolton offers an extensive investigation of the relation between the account of these powers offered by Aristotle in Metaphysics I.1 and that found in the Nicomachean Ethics. He carefully distinguishes the different notion of universal that are available to Aristotle in characterizing the object of technê, arguing that the notion of universal underlying Aristotle’s account of technê in Metaphysics I.1 is the one we find in the Posterior Analytics, thereby giving us a theoretically flavoured notion of technê. However, this notion is not generally presupposed by the accounts we find elsewhere in the Aristotelian corpus. Particularly, in the Topics a different conception of technê emerges as empeiria or experience, an account which coincides with those defended by the later medical empiricists.

These two chapters form a conceptual unity. Their aim is, first, to present and, then, to compare the concepts of technê (art, craft, discipline, expertise) used, respectively, by the Stoics and the Epicureans in different philosophical domains – notably, in cosmology, epistemology and ethics. The main issues to be discussed include the definition of a technê; the criteria determining a technê, the importance of rules and method, the role of experience and practice, the structure of every technê in so far as it is directed towards a goal, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the transmissibility of different sorts of technai and the common assumption that the technai are beneficial for life. Moreover, Tsouna argues that the notions of technê occurring in Stoic and Epicurean texts differ, and she explains how they differ. She suggests that one reason for that fact is that these two schools react in different ways to Plato’s rationalism about technê. On the one hand, the Stoics’ creative appropriation of Plato leads them to formulate a principally rationalistic notion of technê, which is manifest, for example, in their cosmological creationism (cf. the notion of technikon pur), the epistemological distinction between first-order technai and the epistêmê of the wise man, and their ethical conception of the art of living. On the other hand, the Epicureans react to the Platonic heritage in a more negative way and appear to modify their views about technê accordingly. Vis-à-vis the Stoics, they exhibit greater flexibility regarding the criteria of ‘technicity’ and attribute more value to common experience than many Stoics do. Their physical theory precludes any idea of divine craftsmanship. As for Epicurean epistemology and ethics, both involve uses of technê consistent with Epicurean empiricism and the ethical view that pleasure or the absence of pain is the supreme good.