Shaul Tor | King's College London (original) (raw)
Books by Shaul Tor
Cambridge University Press, 2017
Papers by Shaul Tor
Expected in G. Cambiano and A. Lianeri (eds) The Edinburgh Critical History of Greek and Roman Philosophy
Forthcoming in R.T. Anderson and P. Chaudhuri (eds), Belief and its Alternatives in Greek and Roman Religion, 2025
Phronesis, 2024
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
Phronesis, 2023
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2023
As early as Plato and as recently as current scholarship, readers of Parmenides have diagnosed te... more As early as Plato and as recently as current scholarship, readers of Parmenides have diagnosed tensions of one sort or another between his ontological views and the language through which he expresses those views. In the first instance, this article examines earlier claims for such tensions and argues that they are predicated on problematic assumptions concerning Parmenides' ontological commitments or his strictures regarding the use of language. In the second instance, however, it argues that Parmenides' Way of Reality does indeed confront us with tensions between language and doctrine, that these tensions are more pointed and sustained than scholars generally recognize and that they can be identified independently of specific or determinate elaboration of Parmenides' precise ontological views. This analysis discloses a reflective preoccupation with, and a consistent attitude towards, the scope and limitations of human language. Parmenides persistently evinces his awareness that his description of what-is proceeds through expressive measures that are imported with difficulty from a different domain and, consequently, are limited, indirect and often figurative. The article closes by pointing to a meaningful (but partial) affinity between Parmenides and those Platonists who placed their own ultimate philosophical and ontological principle beyond the expressive reach of words.
In L. Iribarren Baralt and H. H. Koning (eds), Hesiod and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy. Leiden and Boston, 177-197, 2022
In S. Goetz and C. Taliaferro (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, 2021
In D. Wolfsdorf (ed.), Early Greek Ethics. Oxford, 19-36, 2020
In H. Bartos and C. King (eds), Heat, Pneuma and Soul in Ancient Philosophy and Science. Cambridge, 61-79, 2020
In V. Harte and R. Woolf (eds), Rereading Ancient Philosophy: Old Chestnuts and Sacred Cows. Cambridge, 8-31, 2017
This chapter offers a fresh look at one of Heraclitus’ most celebrated pronouncements: physis kry... more This chapter offers a fresh look at one of Heraclitus’ most celebrated pronouncements: physis kryptesthai philei (B123). I examine the fragment in the light both of uses elsewhere of the construction philein + infinitive and of Heraclitus’ other thoughts on god and nature. I defend the traditional construal ‘nature likes to hide’ and advance a new interpretation of the theological and philosophical significance of the vocabulary of philein in B123. For the reader who returns to the fragment again (and again) in the light of Heraclitus’ other reflections, B123 conveys a requirement to align the inquiry into nature with the distinctive intentionality and purposeful intelligence which determine nature’s organisation and appearance. The fragment, I conclude, affords a unique insight into the relation between (the study of) nature and (the study of) god in Heraclitus’ thought. More broadly, I argue that B123 offers us one powerful perspective from which to examine critically the deep-seated and still rife notion that, as they broke with the mythological tradition, the early philosophers precisely refused to see in the inquiry into nature a study of divine persons. Heraclitus frames the inquiry into nature as an inquiry into the inclinations and will of a divine person.
In E. Eidinow, J. Kindt and R. Osborne (eds), Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion. Cambridge, 89-116, 2016
This chapter examines what sort of theology and theologising are at work in Heraclitus’ famous pr... more This chapter examines what sort of theology and theologising are at work in Heraclitus’ famous pronouncement that ‘the lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi neither says nor conceals but gives a sign’ (B93). Previous discussions share the mostly implicit assumption that what Heraclitus says about Apollo is in itself pretty much clear and unproblematic, and that interpretive difficulties arise once we ask what, if anything, the comment implies about Heraclitus himself or about anything else. I argue that Heraclitus’ comment about Apollo is pointedly difficult and paradoxical, not only in its implicit ramifications, but already on the most rudimentary and literal level of its interpretation. Consequently, Heraclitus’ encapsulation of Apollo’s modus operandi is not an unchallenging assertion of a point which was already easily familiar, but a case of creative, involved and unobvious theological abstraction. Arguing further that Apollo does indeed serve in B93 as a paradigm of emulation for Heraclitus, I ask how the paradoxical nature of Heraclitus’ theological remark bears on his understanding of his own use of language (and on other, related aspects of his thought) and examine the motivations, scope and limits of the implicit analogy in B93 between god (Apollo) and mortal (Heraclitus).
Phronesis, 2015
This paper pursues a new approach to the problem of the relation between Alētheia and Doxa. It in... more This paper pursues a new approach to the problem of the relation between Alētheia and Doxa. It investigates as interrelated matters Parmenides’ impetus for developing and including Doxa, his conception of the mortal epistemic agent in relation both to Doxa’s investigations and to those in Alētheia, and the relation between mortal and divine in his poem. Parmenides, it is argued, maintained that Doxastic cognition is an ineluctable and even appropriate aspect of mortal life. The mortal agent, however, is nonetheless capable of sustaining the cognition of Alētheia by momentarily coming to think with – or as – his divine (fiery, aethereal) soul.
International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2014
Following the lead of Duncan Pritchard’s “Wittgensteinian Pyrrhonism,” this paper takes a further... more Following the lead of Duncan Pritchard’s “Wittgensteinian Pyrrhonism,” this paper takes a further, comparative and contrastive look at the problem of justification in Sextus Empiricus and in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I argue both that Pritchard’s stimulating account is problematic in certain important respects and that his insights contain much interpretive potential still to be pursued. Diverging from Pritchard, I argue that it is a significant and self-conscious aspect of Sextus’ sceptical strategies to call into question large segments of our belief system en masse by exposing as apparently unjustifiable fundamental propositions which are closely related in their linchpin role to Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions. In the first instance, the result is a more complex account of both a deeper affinity between Wittgenstein’s approach to hinge propositions and Sextus' approach to what I term archai propositions and a divergence between the two. In the second instance, I suggest how the comparison with On Certainty can be illuminating for the interpreter of Sextus. In particular, it can help us to see how the Pyrrhonist’s everyday conduct—common assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding—involves rational procedures of justification, in line with a naturalism reminiscent of Wittgenstein. Furthermore, it can help us to reflect on the Pyrrhonist’s attitude to what Wittgenstein would have called her ‘worldview’. Throughout, I suggest that the comparison with Wittgenstein is interesting, although it must be cashed out differently, not only on the interpretation—or, perhaps, strand— of ancient Pyrrhonism which has the sceptic exempt ordinary beliefs from her suspension of judgement, but also on the interpretation (or strand) which has her disavow all beliefs categorically.
Rhizomata, 2013
In the first instance, this paper offers a new interpretation of the logic of Xenophanes B18.1. C... more In the first instance, this paper offers a new interpretation of the logic of Xenophanes B18.1. Contrary to the two ways in which previous commentators have construed this line, Xenophanes neither categorically rejects the notion of divine disclosure nor acquiesces in traditional understandings of it. Rather, Xenophanes rejects traditional conceptions of divine disclosure as theologically faulty and supplants them with his own, alternative notion of disclosure. Having argued that Xenophanes developed a conception of divine disclosure, I advance further suggestions concerning its function and characteristics. I follow and develop Lesher’s (1983) argument that Xenophanes arrives at his understanding of the limitations of human knowledge by rejecting traditional divinatory assumptions. But Lesher, I suggest, tells only half the story. On Xenophanes’ conception of disclosure, the divine purposively facilitates mortal belief-formation and mortal inquiry. That is, Xenophanes’ own understanding of disclosure underlies his positive views regarding what does lie within the scope of mortal epistemology. More speculatively, I develop two alternative interpretations of the precise notion of purposiveness which underlies Xenophanean disclosure. Most probably, Xenophanes reconceptualises the notion of divine disclosure radically as the view that the divine purposively facilitates all mortal experience and belief-formation as part of its intelligent direction of the cosmos and its inhabitants. Another, somewhat less likely possibility is that Xenophanes maintains less idiosyncratically that the divine guides particular mortals in particular circumstances. Finally, I ask how the proposed interpretation of Xenophanes’ epistemology may lend nuance to our understanding of the complexity of his critical engagement with the traditional mantic model of divine disclosure.
International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2013
Sextus’ interpretation of Xenophanes’ scepticism in M 7.49–52 is often cited but has never been s... more Sextus’ interpretation of Xenophanes’ scepticism in M 7.49–52 is often cited but has never been subject to detailed analysis. Such analysis reveals that Sextus’ interpretation raises far more complex problems than has been recognised. Scholars invariably assume one of two ways of construing his account of Xenophanes B34, without observing that the choice between these two alternatives poses an interpretive dilemma. Some scholars take it that Sextus ascribes to Xenophanes (i) the view that one may have knowledge without knowing that one has knowledge. Others take it that he ascribes to Xenophanes (ii) the view that one may have true belief without knowing that one has true belief. A close examination of Sextus’ paraphrase exposes a crucial but overlooked complication. Sextus elides Xenophanes’ pivotal distinction between knowing “the clear and certain” (to saphes) and believing “what has been fulfilled” (tetelesmenon). He eliminates altogether tetelesmenon from his analysis of B34, and expands the role of to saphes. I demonstrate that, as a result, Xenophanes B34, as interpreted by Sextus, does not consistently and straightforwardly express either view (i) or view (ii). Sextus, I argue, in fact develops a fundamentally incoherent interpretation of Xenophanes B34. On Sextus’ interpretation, Xenophanes justifies the proposition “No human knows” by arguing that, even if a human does, in fact, know, he does not know that he knows. Finally, I argue that Sextus’ incoherent account reflects not unthinking negligence, but a sophisticated if ultimately doomed attempt to interpret the logical structure of Xenophanes B34 in line with later models of second-order scepticism.
Book Reviews by Shaul Tor
Expected in G. Cambiano and A. Lianeri (eds) The Edinburgh Critical History of Greek and Roman Philosophy
Forthcoming in R.T. Anderson and P. Chaudhuri (eds), Belief and its Alternatives in Greek and Roman Religion, 2025
Phronesis, 2024
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
Phronesis, 2023
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.
The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2023
As early as Plato and as recently as current scholarship, readers of Parmenides have diagnosed te... more As early as Plato and as recently as current scholarship, readers of Parmenides have diagnosed tensions of one sort or another between his ontological views and the language through which he expresses those views. In the first instance, this article examines earlier claims for such tensions and argues that they are predicated on problematic assumptions concerning Parmenides' ontological commitments or his strictures regarding the use of language. In the second instance, however, it argues that Parmenides' Way of Reality does indeed confront us with tensions between language and doctrine, that these tensions are more pointed and sustained than scholars generally recognize and that they can be identified independently of specific or determinate elaboration of Parmenides' precise ontological views. This analysis discloses a reflective preoccupation with, and a consistent attitude towards, the scope and limitations of human language. Parmenides persistently evinces his awareness that his description of what-is proceeds through expressive measures that are imported with difficulty from a different domain and, consequently, are limited, indirect and often figurative. The article closes by pointing to a meaningful (but partial) affinity between Parmenides and those Platonists who placed their own ultimate philosophical and ontological principle beyond the expressive reach of words.
In L. Iribarren Baralt and H. H. Koning (eds), Hesiod and the Beginnings of Greek Philosophy. Leiden and Boston, 177-197, 2022
In S. Goetz and C. Taliaferro (eds), The Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion, 2021
In D. Wolfsdorf (ed.), Early Greek Ethics. Oxford, 19-36, 2020
In H. Bartos and C. King (eds), Heat, Pneuma and Soul in Ancient Philosophy and Science. Cambridge, 61-79, 2020
In V. Harte and R. Woolf (eds), Rereading Ancient Philosophy: Old Chestnuts and Sacred Cows. Cambridge, 8-31, 2017
This chapter offers a fresh look at one of Heraclitus’ most celebrated pronouncements: physis kry... more This chapter offers a fresh look at one of Heraclitus’ most celebrated pronouncements: physis kryptesthai philei (B123). I examine the fragment in the light both of uses elsewhere of the construction philein + infinitive and of Heraclitus’ other thoughts on god and nature. I defend the traditional construal ‘nature likes to hide’ and advance a new interpretation of the theological and philosophical significance of the vocabulary of philein in B123. For the reader who returns to the fragment again (and again) in the light of Heraclitus’ other reflections, B123 conveys a requirement to align the inquiry into nature with the distinctive intentionality and purposeful intelligence which determine nature’s organisation and appearance. The fragment, I conclude, affords a unique insight into the relation between (the study of) nature and (the study of) god in Heraclitus’ thought. More broadly, I argue that B123 offers us one powerful perspective from which to examine critically the deep-seated and still rife notion that, as they broke with the mythological tradition, the early philosophers precisely refused to see in the inquiry into nature a study of divine persons. Heraclitus frames the inquiry into nature as an inquiry into the inclinations and will of a divine person.
In E. Eidinow, J. Kindt and R. Osborne (eds), Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion. Cambridge, 89-116, 2016
This chapter examines what sort of theology and theologising are at work in Heraclitus’ famous pr... more This chapter examines what sort of theology and theologising are at work in Heraclitus’ famous pronouncement that ‘the lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi neither says nor conceals but gives a sign’ (B93). Previous discussions share the mostly implicit assumption that what Heraclitus says about Apollo is in itself pretty much clear and unproblematic, and that interpretive difficulties arise once we ask what, if anything, the comment implies about Heraclitus himself or about anything else. I argue that Heraclitus’ comment about Apollo is pointedly difficult and paradoxical, not only in its implicit ramifications, but already on the most rudimentary and literal level of its interpretation. Consequently, Heraclitus’ encapsulation of Apollo’s modus operandi is not an unchallenging assertion of a point which was already easily familiar, but a case of creative, involved and unobvious theological abstraction. Arguing further that Apollo does indeed serve in B93 as a paradigm of emulation for Heraclitus, I ask how the paradoxical nature of Heraclitus’ theological remark bears on his understanding of his own use of language (and on other, related aspects of his thought) and examine the motivations, scope and limits of the implicit analogy in B93 between god (Apollo) and mortal (Heraclitus).
Phronesis, 2015
This paper pursues a new approach to the problem of the relation between Alētheia and Doxa. It in... more This paper pursues a new approach to the problem of the relation between Alētheia and Doxa. It investigates as interrelated matters Parmenides’ impetus for developing and including Doxa, his conception of the mortal epistemic agent in relation both to Doxa’s investigations and to those in Alētheia, and the relation between mortal and divine in his poem. Parmenides, it is argued, maintained that Doxastic cognition is an ineluctable and even appropriate aspect of mortal life. The mortal agent, however, is nonetheless capable of sustaining the cognition of Alētheia by momentarily coming to think with – or as – his divine (fiery, aethereal) soul.
International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2014
Following the lead of Duncan Pritchard’s “Wittgensteinian Pyrrhonism,” this paper takes a further... more Following the lead of Duncan Pritchard’s “Wittgensteinian Pyrrhonism,” this paper takes a further, comparative and contrastive look at the problem of justification in Sextus Empiricus and in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I argue both that Pritchard’s stimulating account is problematic in certain important respects and that his insights contain much interpretive potential still to be pursued. Diverging from Pritchard, I argue that it is a significant and self-conscious aspect of Sextus’ sceptical strategies to call into question large segments of our belief system en masse by exposing as apparently unjustifiable fundamental propositions which are closely related in their linchpin role to Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions. In the first instance, the result is a more complex account of both a deeper affinity between Wittgenstein’s approach to hinge propositions and Sextus' approach to what I term archai propositions and a divergence between the two. In the second instance, I suggest how the comparison with On Certainty can be illuminating for the interpreter of Sextus. In particular, it can help us to see how the Pyrrhonist’s everyday conduct—common assumptions to the contrary notwithstanding—involves rational procedures of justification, in line with a naturalism reminiscent of Wittgenstein. Furthermore, it can help us to reflect on the Pyrrhonist’s attitude to what Wittgenstein would have called her ‘worldview’. Throughout, I suggest that the comparison with Wittgenstein is interesting, although it must be cashed out differently, not only on the interpretation—or, perhaps, strand— of ancient Pyrrhonism which has the sceptic exempt ordinary beliefs from her suspension of judgement, but also on the interpretation (or strand) which has her disavow all beliefs categorically.
Rhizomata, 2013
In the first instance, this paper offers a new interpretation of the logic of Xenophanes B18.1. C... more In the first instance, this paper offers a new interpretation of the logic of Xenophanes B18.1. Contrary to the two ways in which previous commentators have construed this line, Xenophanes neither categorically rejects the notion of divine disclosure nor acquiesces in traditional understandings of it. Rather, Xenophanes rejects traditional conceptions of divine disclosure as theologically faulty and supplants them with his own, alternative notion of disclosure. Having argued that Xenophanes developed a conception of divine disclosure, I advance further suggestions concerning its function and characteristics. I follow and develop Lesher’s (1983) argument that Xenophanes arrives at his understanding of the limitations of human knowledge by rejecting traditional divinatory assumptions. But Lesher, I suggest, tells only half the story. On Xenophanes’ conception of disclosure, the divine purposively facilitates mortal belief-formation and mortal inquiry. That is, Xenophanes’ own understanding of disclosure underlies his positive views regarding what does lie within the scope of mortal epistemology. More speculatively, I develop two alternative interpretations of the precise notion of purposiveness which underlies Xenophanean disclosure. Most probably, Xenophanes reconceptualises the notion of divine disclosure radically as the view that the divine purposively facilitates all mortal experience and belief-formation as part of its intelligent direction of the cosmos and its inhabitants. Another, somewhat less likely possibility is that Xenophanes maintains less idiosyncratically that the divine guides particular mortals in particular circumstances. Finally, I ask how the proposed interpretation of Xenophanes’ epistemology may lend nuance to our understanding of the complexity of his critical engagement with the traditional mantic model of divine disclosure.
International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 2013
Sextus’ interpretation of Xenophanes’ scepticism in M 7.49–52 is often cited but has never been s... more Sextus’ interpretation of Xenophanes’ scepticism in M 7.49–52 is often cited but has never been subject to detailed analysis. Such analysis reveals that Sextus’ interpretation raises far more complex problems than has been recognised. Scholars invariably assume one of two ways of construing his account of Xenophanes B34, without observing that the choice between these two alternatives poses an interpretive dilemma. Some scholars take it that Sextus ascribes to Xenophanes (i) the view that one may have knowledge without knowing that one has knowledge. Others take it that he ascribes to Xenophanes (ii) the view that one may have true belief without knowing that one has true belief. A close examination of Sextus’ paraphrase exposes a crucial but overlooked complication. Sextus elides Xenophanes’ pivotal distinction between knowing “the clear and certain” (to saphes) and believing “what has been fulfilled” (tetelesmenon). He eliminates altogether tetelesmenon from his analysis of B34, and expands the role of to saphes. I demonstrate that, as a result, Xenophanes B34, as interpreted by Sextus, does not consistently and straightforwardly express either view (i) or view (ii). Sextus, I argue, in fact develops a fundamentally incoherent interpretation of Xenophanes B34. On Sextus’ interpretation, Xenophanes justifies the proposition “No human knows” by arguing that, even if a human does, in fact, know, he does not know that he knows. Finally, I argue that Sextus’ incoherent account reflects not unthinking negligence, but a sophisticated if ultimately doomed attempt to interpret the logical structure of Xenophanes B34 in line with later models of second-order scepticism.
We invite proposals for papers to be given at an online conference on varieties of ineffability i... more We invite proposals for papers to be given at an online conference on varieties of ineffability in ancient philosophy (spanning ancient Chinese, Graeco-Roman and Indian thought), on 18th-21st September 2023.