Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought

Victoria Wohl

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781107050495
• eBook ISBN: 9781139990592
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

This volume explores the conceptual terrain defined by the Greek word eikos: the probable, likely, or reasonable. A term of art in Greek rhetoric, a defining feature of literary fiction, a seminal mode of historical, scientific, and philosophical inquiry, eikos was a way of thinking about the probable and improbable, the factual and counterfactual, the hypothetical and the real. These thirteen original and provocative essays examine the plausible arguments of courtroom speakers and the 'likely stories' of philosophers, verisimilitude in art and literature, the likelihood of resemblance in human reproduction, the limits of human knowledge and the possibilities of ethical and political agency. The first synthetic study of probabilistic thinking in ancient Greece, the volume illuminates a fascinating chapter in the history of Western thought.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: eikos in ancient Greek thought
• 1 Eikos arguments in Athenian forensic oratory
• 2 Eikos in Plato’s Phaedrus
• 3 Aristotle on the value of “probability,” persuasiveness, and verisimilitude in rhetorical argument
• 4 “Likely stories” and the political art in Plato’s Laws
• 5 Open and speak your mind: citizen agency, the likelihood of truth, and democratic knowledge in archaic and classical Greece
• 6 Counterfactual history and Thucydides
• 7 Homer’s Achaean wall and the hypothetical past
• 8 Play of the improbable: Euripides’ unlikely Helen
• 9 Revision in Greek literary papyri
• 10 Likeness and likelihood in classical Greek art
• 11 “Why doesn’t my baby look like me?” Likeness and likelihood in ancient theories of reproduction
• 12 Galen on the chances of life
• 13 Afterword
• References
• Index locorum
• General index