Matthew Duncombe, "Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics" (Oxford UP, 2020)
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What is “ancient relativity” and why does it matter for philosophy?
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Fiechdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa, and I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Matthew Dunco, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. His new book, Ancient Relativity, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, and Skeptics is just out from Oxford University Press. As a matter of basic metaphysics, we classify individuals in terms of their relations to other things, for example.
A parent is a parent of someone, a larger object is larger than a smaller object. The nature of relativity, the question of how things relate to other things, is a topic that winds its way throughout the history of philosophy to the present day. In his book, Duncombe considers ancient views of relativity from Plato, Aristotle, the skeptics, particularly Simplicius, and the Stoics, particularly Sextus and Pyrrhus. He defends the view that these thinkers shared a common basic position, which he calls constitutive relativity. This is the idea that relativity is a matter of the relative being a certain way. Rather than for example, having a certain predicate true of it or of having a certain feature. He argues that this reading enables us to make sense of
Such arguments as Parmenides' main objection to Plato's theory of the forms And then it comes into its own in its role in the skeptics opposition to dogmatic belief. Let's turn to the interview. Uh hello, Matthew Doncomb. Welcome to New Books and Philosophy. Thank you very much. Um I'm uh very pleased to be talking to you about your new book, Ancient Relativity. Plato, Aristotle, Stoics and Skeptics, um which is a very nice departure into ancient metaphysics from our current situation with the coronavirus. Um It's like, you know, let's let's do something completely different for a chain. Um it
is different.
Yes, it definitely is. Um, which is which is a good thing, I think, in these circumstances in particular. Um before we delve into, you know, and deep dive into metaphysics uh of Plato, Aristotle, and so forth, um Uh maybe you can tell us a bit about yourself and your interest in in this particular topic and then how the book kind of came apart. Came came Uh came about. Sorry.
Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for for having me on. I'm uh really big fan of the podcast, so it's it's great to be on. Um I'm yeah, so I'm an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of Nottingham. And really this is my first sort of big monograph project. Uh, before I was at at Nottingham I had a postdoc in Durham, a British Academy postdoc, which really was the sort of meat of when this this kind of book was written uh when I was up there in uh in Durham. And before that I had a sort of separate postdoc in the Netherlands where I was working on the project on ancient logic. And before that I did my PhD in classics um at Cambridge and that was yeah that was kind of really where I wrote that that was kind of really the genesis of this
project because my PhD project was on relativity in fact in in Plato, or relative terms in Plato as I was thinking of it then. And The PhD project really uh doesn't have a huge amount in common with what ended up in the book, even though the first sort of three chapters of the book cover Plato. I changed a lot of the arguments and a lot of the ways of thinking about relativity from from the PhD, including in Plato. But yeah, that was really the genesis of of where these kind of ideas, this this idea to work on ancient relativity came from, and that was suggested by my kind of supervisor originally. I got into Maybe I should say something about how I got into ancient philosophy because my background was really in in contemporary philosophy.
My undergraduate degree was in contemporary philosophy, and I was very interested in
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is “ancient relativity” and why does it matter for philosophy?
0:08–8:25
2
How does Matthew Duncombe define “constitutive relativity”?
8:25–16:06
3
Why do Plato and Aristotle share a common view on relativity?
16:06–24:03
4
What is the “greatest difficulty” argument against Plato’s Theory of Forms?
24:03–31:07
5
How does Aristotle’s Category VII revise the Platonic view of relatives?
31:07–38:52
6
What are the Stoic distinctions between differentiated and disposed relatives?
38:52–46:08
7
How do the Peripatetic skeptics use relativity to undermine dogmatic claims?
46:08–53:49
8
What future research projects does Duncombe plan on ancient relativity?
53:49–1:00:51
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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