The Megaric School: Stilpon's position on the problem of predication

We also know Stilpon’s position on a related problem, the problem of predication, which had occupied Plato in the sophist and on which all the efforts of his adversaries were concentrated. Moreover, Stilpon’s thesis on this subject is only a new aspect of the one we have just examined. If one wishes to think, like Aristotle and Plato, by definite and stable concepts, each having their own essence, it is forbidden to state any proposition whatsoever, under penalty of affirming the identity of two distinct essences. To affirm that the horse runs or that man is good is to affirm that the horse or the man are something other than themselves; or, if one responds that the good is indeed the same thing as the man, it is to deny oneself the right to affirm the goodness of the remedy or of food. It is doubtless not necessary to say, as Colotes the Epicurean, who reports this doctrine of Stilpon in his treatise Against the Philosophers, that this thesis “suppresses life,” but it does suppress the interpretation of judgments as relations of concepts, that is to say, all of Athenian idealism[1].

It will be recalled that, in fact, Aristotle could only resolve such difficulties by introducing, alongside fixed and determined essences, notions of indeterminate realities, such as that of potentiality, and Plato jokingly accused himself of parricide by asserting against his father Parmenides that the life of thought required that existence be granted to non-being. It is therefore not surprising that the Megarians were compared to Parmenides and are considered as renovators of his thought. Perhaps, however, the thought of Parmenides was not of great importance to them in itself; What they want to show above all is that a philosopher of the concept, admitting only fixed essences, has no right to introduce these indeterminate realities, which Aristotle wanted: this seems to be the meaning of the argument to which the name of Diodorus Cronus, disciple of Eubulides and contemporary of King Ptolemy Soter (306-285), is attached: this argument, which is called the triumphant, in fact reaches the very roots of Aristotle’s philosophy, by showing that, in this philosophy, the notion of the possible, and consequently of indeterminate power, can have no meaning.

Aristotle gives (without attributing it to Diodorus or even to the Megarians) a completely simple form of the argument[2]: as soon as you admit in a general way that every proposition is true or false, the principle applies as much to future events as to the present or the past; every assertion about the future will be either true or false; it follows that there is no indeterminacy (or possibility of being or not being) for the future event. The affirmation of the possible is incompatible with the principle of contradiction. Did the author of this argument want (as Aristotle affects himself to believe, who refutes it by the practical consequences of his thesis) to demonstrate necessity? Is it not more in accordance with what we know of the Megarians to believe that he wanted to show the absurdity of the consequences of a logic founded on the principle of contradiction, which led to making all will and all deliberation about the future impossible? Epietetus gives us a more complicated, but unfortunately very obscure, form of the argument[3]. The reasoning takes for granted that any true assertion about the past cannot become false, and that, on the other hand, the impossible can never be an attribute of the possible. Then, no doubt showing (in a development analogous to that preserved for us by Aristotle) that the principle of contradiction must have, according to the opponent, a universal scope, that is to say, it must also apply to assertions relating to the future, he deduces that in an alternative (such an event will happen or will not happen), the assertion which expresses the event which will not happen does not relate to anything possible, since the possible is that which can be and not be, while the event in question not only is not but will never be. To say that it is possible would therefore be to say that the impossible is possible. The philosophy of the concept could therefore only admit a rigorously and completely determined reality.

Among all the Megarians, we see only attacks, but no positive doctrine: they want to show the incoherence of the philosophy of the concept; but these “eristics” never appear to have had the intention, which has sometimes been attributed to them, of substituting an idealism specific to that of Plato and Aristotle. Has reasoning ever served the thinkers of Greece, even Plato, to establish a truth? Is it not always dialectical, that is to say, intended to deduce the consequences of an assertion made by the adversary? By a brilliant transposition, Plato had made this dialectic a principle of spiritual life; with the Megarians, it falls heavily back to the ground and resumes his eristic employment.

But is this not precisely to make way for a new spiritual life, directed quite differently than in Plato? There are other means of education than dialectics. The rhetorician, for his part, knows how to speak of useful things and speaks of them in a persuasive manner; and it is this method of rhetorical education that Alexinus of Elea, a Megarian of the generation of the Stoic Zeno, praises, from whose treatise On Education Hermarchus the Epicurean quoted a passage[4]. We see Alexinus, known, moreover, like his master Eubulides, for having written a slanderous book filled with personal polemics against Aristotle[5], proposing an ideal that departs greatly from philosophy; In the debate that has always existed, in Greece and even in the Greek soul, between rhetoric and philosophy, between formal education which teaches themes and scientific education which reaches things, he takes sides without hesitation for the former; and if he reproaches the professors of literature for their overly meticulous research in matters of textual criticism, he praises them for treating useful things in discourses on philosophical themes, using plausibility to decide the questions. We have here the place of which the polemic was only the reverse. We will find a similar rhythm in the other Socratic schools.

Notes

[1] Putarque, Contre Colotès, chap. XXII et XXIII

[2] De l’interprétation, chap. ix.

[3] Dissertations, II, 19, 1-5.

[4] Preserved by Philodemus of Gadara, in book B of his Rhetoric (Volumina rhetorica, ed. Sudhaus; supplementum, Leipzig, Teubner, 1895, column 40, 2-18).

[5] According to Eusebius, Préparation évangélique, XI, 2, 4-5.