Feb 24, 2013

Classic Arguments About God's Existence in Cicero

My Introduction to Philosophy class is currently one-third of the way into Cicero's dialogue The Nature of the Gods -- a work that, like many others of Cicero, I unhesitatingly endorse as a philosophical analogue to undervalued stock.  It's a text that rarely gets taught in Ancient Philosophy classes, let alone Philosophy of Religion (where I taught it years back), or as a text by which to induct freshmen non-majors into the canons and practices of the philosophical profession.  I suspect that one reason for this lack of attention and use is that relatively few practicing philosophers have encountered it themselves -- whether in their own educational formation or in the course of their further studies.

That's a shame -- not only for On the Nature of the Gods, but also for other Ciceronian great works like the Academics, Republic, Laws, On Obligations . . .  one could go on and on.  A quite understandable tendency to underrate Cicero's role in philosophy -- construing him as merely an unoriginal eclectic who brought the philosophy he had learned in the Greek world into Roman culture -- tends to conceal the high level of philosophical discussion and debate contained in his dialogues.  If his is borrowed  brilliance, the words and arguments he places in the mouths of his characters become no less valuable or valid for replicating saying and speeches he learned from leaders of major philosophical schools in Athens or Rhodes -- particularly since it is his own artful arrangements we have to thank for passing them on to us, and down the ages.  Cicero is more than a mere digest-creator or textbook-scribbler, though -- he creates, he replicates, he articulates clashes and conflicts of modes of thought of the highest order available in his own time and place -- and like every playwright, every novelist, every poet of genius, he understands all that his characters do, and more.