WIP in Ancient Philosophy: Peter Osorio (Harvard), “Plato's Authority and Plato the Author in Cicero's Tusculans Disputations”

The WIP in Ancient Philosophy Workshop organized by Cinzia Arruzza and Marc Gasser-Wingate. This week's speaker is Peter Osorio (Harvard). Abstract: In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero the character (‘M’) endorses a group of stoicizing views more strongly than in any other late dialogue. But Cicero the author writes the Tusculans as a response to another Latin philosophical book, Marcus Junius Brutus’ De virtute. In this paper, I focus on a series of textual-historical arguments in the first Tusculans in which ‘M’ fashions a Platonic tradition for his views on the basis of the Phaedo. Cicero's method is not only to oppose Brutus’ Antiochean ethics but to challenge Antiochus’ historiographical method of recovering Plato’s ethics from his successors and from Peripatetics. Cicero’s prefaces show that he does not accept M’s or Brutus’ commitments to Platonic authority, and that the textual arguments polemicize Antiochus’ arguments from authority and constitute a historical method of philosophical inquiry.