Speusippus (c. 410 - 337 BC)

He wrote extensively on topics in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and language, philosophy of nature, and ethics; but his thoughts have reached us only in tantalizingly incomplete and obscure form. There is some evidence for attributing to him a nominalist, anti-essentialist tendency in his theorizing on semantics, mathematics, and natural kinds. Thus he is reported by Aristotle as denying independent, substantive existence to numbers, and as maintaining that things should be defined not by their own intrinsic characters but rather in terms of their relations of similarity and dissimilarity to other things. If more were known about these ideas, it might illuminate many aspects of Aristotle's theorizing about essence.

J. D. G. E.

And this from:  THE LIVES AND OPINIONS OF EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS
BY DIOGENES LAERTIUS,
TRANSLATED BY C. D. YONGE LIFE OF SPEUSIPPUS

I. THE long account which I have given of Plato was compiled to the best of my power, and in it I collected with great zeal and industry all that was reported of the man.

II. And he was succeeded by Speusippus, the son of Eurymedon, and a citizen of Athens, of the Myrrhinusian burgh, and he was the son of Plato's sister Potone.

III. He presided over his school for eight years, beginning to do so in the hundred and eighth olympiad. And he set up images of the Graces in the temple of the Muses, which had been built in the Academy by Plato.

IV. And he always adhered to the doctrines which had been adopted by Plato, though he was not of the same disposition as he. For he was a passionate man, and a slave to pleasure. Accordingly, they say that he once in a rage threw a puppy into a well; and that for the sake of amusement, he went all the way to Macedonia to the marriage of Cassander.

V. The female pupils of Plato, Lasthenea of Mantinea, and Axiothea of Phlius, are said to have become disciples of Speusippus also. And Dionysius, writing to him in a petulant manner, says, "And one may learn philosophy too from your female disciple from Arcadia; moreover, Plato used to take his pupils without exacting any fee from them; but you collect tribute from yours, whether willing or unwilling."

VI. He was the first man, as Diodorus relates in the first book of his Commentaries, who investigated in his school what was common to the several sciences; and who endeavoured, as far as possible, to maintain their connection with each other. He was also the first who published those things which Isocrates called secrets, as Caeneus tells us. And the first too who found out how to make light baskets of bundles of twigs.

VII. But he became afflicted with paralysis, and sent to Xenocrates inviting him to come to him, and to become his successor in his school.

VIII. And they say that once, when he was being borne in a carriage into the Academy, he met Diogenes, and said, "Hail;" and Diogenes replied, "I will not say hail to you, who, though in such a state as you are, endure to live."

IX. And at last in despair he put an end to his life, being a man of a great age. And we have written this epigram on him:

Had I not known Speusippus thus had died, No one would have persuaded me that he Was e'er akin to Plato; who would never Have died desponding for so slight a grief. But Plutarch, in his Life of Lysander, and again in his Life of Sylla, says that he was kept in a state of constant inflammation by lice. For he was of a weak habit of body, as Timotheus relates in his treatise on Lives.

X. Speusippus said to a rich man who was in love with an ugly woman, "What do you want with her? I will find you a much prettier woman for ten talents."

XI. He left behind him a great number of commentaries, and many dialogues; among which was one on Aristippus; one on Riches; one on Pleasure; one on Justice; one on Philosophy; one on Friendship; one on the Gods; one called the Philosopher; one addressed to Cephalus; one called Cephalus; one called Clinomachus, or Lysias; one called the Citizen; one on the Soul; one addressed to Gryllus; one called Aristippus; one called the Test of Art. There were also Commentaries by way of dialogues; one on Art; and ten about those things which are alike in their treatment. There are also books of divisions and arguments directed to similar things; Essays on the Genera and Species of Examples; an Essay addressed to Amartynus; a Panegyric on Plato; Letters to Dion, and Dionysius, and Philip; an Essay on Legislation. There is also, the Mathematician; the Mandrobulus; the Lysias; Definitions; and a series of Commentaries. There are in all, forty-three thousand four hundred and seventy-five lines.

Simonides dedicated to him the Histories, in which he had related the actions of Dion and Bion. And in the second book of his Commentaries, Favorinus states that Aristotle purchased his books for three talents.

XII. There was also another person of the name of Speusippus, a physician of the school of Herophilus, 1 a native of Alexandria.

1. Herophilus was one of the most celebrated physicians of antiquity, who founded the Medical School at Alexandria, in the time of the first Ptolemy.

Bibliography Speusippus' writings have been collected and discussed by P. Lang, De Speusippi Academici Fragmenta (Bonn, 1911) and more recently by L. Tarán, Speusippus of Athens (Leiden, 1981).

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, © Oxford University Press 1995



The following is from Wikipedia:

Speusippus (c. 407 BC – 339 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher. Speusippus was Plato's nephew by his sister Potone. After Plato's death, Speusippus inherited the Academy and remained its head for the next eight years. However, following a stroke, he passed the chair to Xenocrates. Although the successor to Plato in the Academy, he frequently diverged from Plato's teachings. He rejected Plato's Theory of Forms, and whereas Plato had identified the Good with the ultimateprinciple, Speusippus maintained that the Good was merely secondary. He also argued that it is impossible to have satisfactory knowledge of any thing without knowing all the differences by which it is separated from everything else.

Speusippus was a native of Athens, and the son of Eurymedon and Potone, a sister of Plato.[1] We hear nothing of his life until the time when he accompanied his uncle Plato on his third journey toSyracuse, where he displayed considerable ability and prudence, especially in his amicable relations with Dion.[2] His moral worth is recognised even by Timon, though only that he may heap the more unsparing ridicule on his intellect.[3]

The report about his sudden fits of anger, his greed, and his debauchery, are probably derived from a very impure source: Athenaeus[4] and Diogenes Laërtius[5] can adduce as authority for them scarcely anything more than some abuse in certain letters of Dionysius the Younger, who was banished by Dion, with the cooperation of Speusippus. Having been selected by Plato as his successor as the leader (scholarch) of the Academy, he was at the head of the school for only eight years (347-339 BC.). He died, it appears, of a lingering paralytic illness,[6] presumably a stroke. He was succeeded as the head of the school by Xenocrates.


Diogenes Laërtius gives us a list of some of the titles of the many dialogues and commentaries of Speusippus, which is of little help in determining their contents, and the fragments provided by other writers provide us with only a little extra.

Speusippus was interested in bringing together those things which were similar in their philosophical treatment,[6]and to the derivation, and laying down, of the ideas of genera and species: for he was interested in what the various sciences had in common, and how they might be connected.[7] Thus he furthered the threefold division of philosophy into Dialectics, Ethics, and Physics, for which Plato had laid the foundation, without losing sight of the mutual connection of these three branches of philosophy. For he maintained that noone could arrive at a complete definition who did not know all the differences by which a thing which was to be defined was separated from the rest.[8]

With Plato, moreover, he distinguished between that which is the object of thought, and that which is the object of sensuous perception, between the cognition of the reason and sensuous perception. He tried, however, to show how perception can be taken up and transformed into knowledge, by the assumption of a perception, which, by participation in rational truth, raises itself to the rank of knowledge. By this he seems to have understood an immediate, (in the first instance aesthetic), mode of conception; since he appealed, in support of this view, to the consideration that artistic skill has its foundation not in sensuous activity, but in an unerring power of distinguishing between its objects, that is, in a rational perception of them.[9]

Speusippus rejected Plato's Theory of Forms; whereas Plato distinguished between ideal numbers (i. e. the Platonic Forms of numbers) and mathematical numbers, Speusippus rejected the ideal numbers, and consequently the ideas.[10] He tried to determine the idea of substance more distinctly by separating its types, the difference between which he considered would result from the difference between the principles (archai) on which they are based. Thus he distinguished substances of number, of size, of soul, while Plato had referred them, as separate entities, to the ideal numbers.[11]

Speusippus made still more kinds of substance, beginning with the One, and assuming principles for each kind of substance, one for numbers, another for spatial magnitudes, and then another for the soul; and by going on in this way he multiplies the kinds of substance.[12]

Nevertheless Speusippus also must have recognised something common in those different kinds of substances, inasmuch as, firstly, he set out from the absolute One, and regarded it as a formal principle which they had in common,[13] and, secondly, he appears to have assumed that multitude and multiformity was a common primary element in their composition. But it is only the difficulties which led him to make this and similar deviations from the Platonist doctrine, of which we can get any clear idea, not the way in which he thought he had avoided those difficulties by distinguishing different kinds of principles. The criticism of Aristotle, directed apparently against Speusippus, shows how little satisfied he was with the modification of the original Platonist doctrine.

With this deviation from Plato's doctrine is connected another which takes a wider range. As the ultimateprinciple, Speusippus would not, with Plato, recognise the Good, but, with others, (who doubtless were also Platonists), going back to the older Theologi, maintained that the principles of the universe were to be set down as causes of the good and perfect, but were not the good and perfect itself, which must rather be regarded as the result of generated existence, or development, just as the seeds of plants and animals are not the fully formed plants or animals themselves.[14]

Speusippus [supposes] that supreme beauty and goodness are not present in the beginning, because the beginnings both of plants and of animals are causes, but beauty and completeness are in the effects of these.[15]

The ultimate principle he designated, like Plato, as the absolute One, but it was not to be regarded as an existing entity, since all entities can only be the result of development.[16] When, however, with the Pythagoreans, he reckoned the One in the series ofgood things,[17] he probably conceived it only in its opposition to the Many, and wished to indicate that it was from the One and not from theMany, that the good and perfect is to be derived.[18] Nevertheless Speusippus seems to have attributed vital activity to the primordial Unity, as inseparably belonging to it,[19] probably in order to explain how it could grow, by a process of self-development, into the good, spirit, etc.; for spirit also he distinguished from the one, as well as from the good; and the good from pleasure and pain.[20] Less worthy of notice is the attempt by Speusippus to find a more suitable expression for the material principle, the indefinite duality of Plato;[21] and his Pythagorizingmode of treating the doctrine of numbers which we can see in the extracts of his treatise on the Pythagorean numbers.

Diogenes Laertius' list of Speusippus' works includes titles on justice, friendship, pleasure, and wealth. Clement of Alexandria (fr. 77 Tarán) reports that Speusippus considered happiness to be "a state that is complete in those things that are in accordance with nature, a condition desired by all human beings, while the good aim at freedom from disturbance; and the virtues would be productive of happiness." This testimony suggests that Speusippus' ethics may have been an important background to ethical ideas of the Stoics (the will's conformity with nature) andEpicureans (compare "freedom from disturbance," aochlsia, with the notion of ataraxia).

Modern scholars have detected a polemic between Speusippus and Eudoxus of Cnidus concerning the good. Eudoxus also accepts that the good will be that at which all people aim, but identifies this as pleasure, as opposed to Speusippus' exclusive focus on moral goods. Texts of Aristotle and Aulus Gellius suggest that Speusippus insisted that pleasure was not a good, but that the good was "in between the opposites of pleasure and pain." It is possible that the dispute between Speusippus and Eudoxus influenced Plato's Philebus (esp. 53c-55a).[22]

Speusippus also seems to have developed further Plato's ideas of justice and of the citizen, and the fundamental principles of legislation.

[Editions Paul Lang, De Speusippi academici scriptis. Accedunt fragmenta, diss. Bonn, 1911 (repr. Frankfurt 1964, Hildesheim 1965)
Elias Bickermann and Johannes Sykutris, Speusipps Brief an König Philipp: Text, Übersetzung, Untersuchungen, Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig: Philologisch-historische Klasse 80:3 (1928)
Margherita Isnardi Parente, Speusippo: Frammenti. Edizione, traduzione e commento, Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1980
Leonardo Tarán, Speusippus of Athens: A Critical Study with a Collection of the Related Texts and Commentary, Leiden: Brill, 1982
Anthony Francis Natoli, The Letter of Speusippus to Philip II: Introduction, Test, Translation, and Commentary (Historia Einzeschriften 176), Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner, 2004 Notes ^ Diogenes Laërtius, iv.; Suda, Speusippos. ^ Plutarch, Dion, c. 22. 17 ^ Plutarch, Dion, 17 ^ Athenaeus, vii., xii.
Diogenes Laërtius, iv.; comp. Suda, Speusippos; Tertullian, Apolog. c. 46. ^ a b Diogenes Laërtius. iv. ^ Diodorus, ap. Diogenes Laërtius, iv. ^ Themistius, in Aristotle, Analytica Posteriora ^ Sextus Empiricus, adv. Math. vii. 145 ff. ^
Aristotle, Metaphysica, vii. 2, i. 6, xiii. 8-9 ^ Aristotle Metaphysica, vi. 2, 11, xii. 10, de Anima, i. 2; Iamblichus, ap.
Stobaeus, Eclog. i. ^ Aristotle, Metaphysics, vii. 2 ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, vi. 2, xiv. 3, xiii. 9 ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, 5, xiii. 7, xii. 10, Ethica Nicomachea, i. 4; Cicero, de Natura Reorum, i. 13 ; Stobaeus, Ecl. i.; Theophrastus, Metaphysica, 9 ^ Aristotle, Metaphysics, xii. 7 ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, xii. 7, ix. 8, xiv. 5 ^ Aristotle Ethica Nicomachea, i. 4 ^ comp. Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, xii. 10 ^ Cicero, de Natura Deorum, i. 13 ^ Stobaeus, Ecl. Phys. i. 1; comp. Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, Ethica Nicomachea, vii. 14 ^ Aristotle, Metaphysica, xiv. 4, 5, comp. 2, 1, xiii. 9 ^ Russell Dancy, "Speusippus," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2003

Plus this from the Classic Encyclopedia: http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Speusippus

SPEUSIPPUS (4th century B. C.), Greek philosopher, son of Eurymedonand Potone, sister of Plato, is supposed to have been born about 407 B. C. He was bred in the school of Isocrates; The Sperm-Whale (Physeter macrocephalus). in appearance and structure. The head is about one-third of the length of the body, very massive, high and truncated in front; and owing its size and form mainly to the accumulation of a peculiarly modified form of fatty tissue in the large hollow on the upper surface of the skull. The oil contained in cells in this cavity, when refined, yieldsspermaceti, and the thick covering of blubber, which everywhere envelopes the body, produces the valuable sperm-oil of commerce. The single blowhole is a longitudinal slit, placed at the upper and anterior extremity of the head to the left side of the middle line. The opening of the mouth is on the under side of the head, considerably behind the end of the snout. The lower jaw is extrem:. ly narrow, and 1 See Schiemann, op. cit., i. 81.
but, when Plato returned to Athens about 387, yielded to his influence and became a member of the Academy. In 361, when Plato undertook his third and last journey toSicily, Speusippus accompanied him. In 347 the dying philosopher nominated his nephew to succeed him as scholarch, and the choice was ratified by the school. Speusippus held the office for eight years, and died in 339 after a paralytic seizure. According to some authorities he committed suicide. There is a story that his youth was riotous, until Plato's example led him to reform his ways. In later life he was conspicuously temperate and amiable. He was succeeded by Xenocrates.

Of Speusippus's many philosophical writings nothing survives except a fragment of a treatise On Pythagorean Numbers. Nor have secondary authorities preserved to us any general statement or conspectus of his system. Incidentally, however, we learn the following details. (A) In regard to his theory of being: (1) whereas Plato postulated as the basis of his system a cause which should be at once Unity, Good, and Mind, Speusippus distinguished Unity, the origin of things, from Good, their end, and both Unity and Good from controlling Mind or Reason; (2) whereas Plato recognized three kinds of numbers - firstly, ideal numbers, i. e. the " determinants " or ideas; secondly, mat hematical numbers, the abstractions ofmathematics; and thirdly sensible numbers, numbers embodied in things - Speusippus rejected the ideal numbers, and consequently the ideas; (3) Speusippus traced number, magnitude and soul each to a distinct principle of its own. (B) In regard to his theory of knowledge: (4) he held that a thing cannot be known apart from the knowledge of all things besides; for, that we may know what a thing is, we must know how it differs from other things, which other things must therefore be known; (5) accordingly, in the ten books of a work called "Quota, he attempted a classification of plants and animals; (6) the results thus obtained he distinguished at once from " knowledge" (Eirevrr b un) and from " sensation" (aQBjacs), holding that " scientific observation" (Lrcar fl oI'uc?? afvth6cs), though it cannot attain to truth, may, nevertheless, in virtue of a certain acquired tact, frame " definitions " (Xoyoe), (c) In regard to his theory of ethics: (7) he denied that pleasure was a good, but seemingly was not prepared to account it an evil.

In default of direct evidence, it remains for us to compare these scattered notices of Speusippus's teaching with what we know of its original, the teaching of Plato, in the hope of obtaining at least a general notion, firstly, of Speusippus's system, and, secondly, of its relations to the systems of Plato, of contemporary Platonists, such as Aristotle, and of the later Academy.

It has been suggested elsewhere (see Socrates) that the crude and unqualified " realism " of Plato's early manhood gave place in his later years to a theory of natural kinds founded upon a " thoroughgoing idealism," and that in this way he was led to recognize and to value the classificatory sciences of zoology and botany. More exactly, it may be said that the Platonism of Plato's maturity included the following principal doctrines: (i.) the supreme cause of all existence is the One, the Good, Mind, which evolves itself as the universe under certain eternal immutable forms called " ideas"; (ii.) the ideas are apprehended by finite minds as particulars in space and time, and are then called " things"; (iii.) consequently the particulars which have in a given idea at once their origin, their being, and their perfection may be regarded, for the purposes of scientific study, as members of a natural kind; (iv.) the finite mind, though it cannot directly apprehend the idea, may, by the study of the particulars in which the idea is revealed, attain to an approximate notion of it.

Now when Speusippus (1) discriminated the One, the Good. and Mind, (2) denied the ideas, and (3) abandoned the attempt to unify the plurality of things, he explicitly rejected the theory of being expressed in (i.) and (ii.); and the rejection of the theory of being, i. e. of the conception of the One evolving itself as a plurality of ideas, entailed consequential modifications in the theory of knowledge conveyed in (iii.) and (iv.). For, if the members of a natural kind had no common idea to unite them, scientific research, having nothing objective in view, could at best afford a Aoyos or definition of the appropriate particulars; and, as the discrimination of the One and the Good implied the progression of particulars towards perfection, such a Xbyos or definition could have only a temporary value. Hence, though, like Plato, Speusippus (4) studied the differences of natural products (5) with a view to classification, he did not agree with Plato in his conception of the significance of the results thus obtained; that is to say, while to Plato the definition derived from the study of the particulars included in a natural kind was an approximate definition of the idea in which the natural kind originated, to Speusippus the definition was a definition of the particulars studied, and, strictly speaking, of nothing else. Thus while Plato hoped to ascend through classificatory science to the knowledge of eternal and immutable laws of thought and being, Speusippus, abandoning ontological speculation, was content to regard classificatory science not as a means but as an end, and (6) to rest in the results of scientific observation. In a word, Speusippus turned from philosophy to science.

It may seem strange that, differing thus widely from his master, Speusippus should have regarded himself and should have been regarded by others as a Platonist, and still more strange that Plato should have chosen him to be his successor. It is to be observed, however, firstly, that the scientific element occupied a larger place in Plato's later system than is generally supposed,' and, secondly, that other Academics who came into competition with Speusippus agreed with him in his rejection of the theory of ideas. Hence Plato, finding in the school no capable representative of his ontological theory, might well choose to succeed him a favourite pupil whose scientific enthusiasm and attainment were beyond question; and Speusippus's rivals, having themselves abandoned the theory of ideas, would not be in a position to tax him with his philosophical apostasy. ' In abandoning the theory of ideas - that is to say, the theory of figures and numbers, the possessions of universal mind, eternally existent out of space and time, which figures and numbers when they pass into space and time as the heritage of finite minds are regarded as things - Speusippus had the approval, as of the Platonists generally, so also of Aristotle. But, whereas the new scholarch, confining himself to the detailed examination of natural kinds, attempted no comprehensive explanation of the universe, Aristotle held that a theory of its origin, its motions, and its order was a necessary adjunct to the classificatory sciences; and in nearly all his references to Speusippus he insists upon this fundamental difference of procedure. Conceiving that the motions of the universe and its parts are due to the desire which it and they feel towards the supreme external mind and its several thoughts, so that the cosmical order planned by the divine mind is realized in the phenomenal universe, Aristotle thus secures the requisite unification, not indeed of mind and matter, for mind and matter are distinct, but of the governing mind, the prime unmoved movent, since it and its thoughts are one. Contrariwise, when Speusippus distinguishes One, Good, and Mind, so that Mind, not as yet endowed with an orderly scheme, adapts the initial One to particular Goods or ends, his theory of nature appears to his rival " episodical," i. e. to consist of a series of tableaux wanting in dramatic unity, so that it reminds him of Homer's line - obK ayaBov lroXuKocpavi' eis Koipavos Eutw. Speusippus and his contemporaries in the school exercised an important and far-reaching influence upon Academic doctrine. When they, the immediate successors of Plato, rejected their master'sontology and proposed to themselves as ends mere classificatory sciences which with him had been means, they bartered their hope of philosophic certainty for the tentative and provisional results of scientific experience. Xenocrates indeed, identifying ideal and mathematical numbers, sought to ' That Plato did not neglect, but rather encouraged, classificatory science is shown, not only by a well-known fragment of the comic poet Epicrates, which describes a party of Academics engaged in investigating, under the eye of Plato, the affinities of the common pumpkin, but also by the Timaeus, which, while it carefully discriminates science from ontology, plainly recognizes the importance of the study of natural kinds.

shelter himself under the authority of Plato; but, as the Xenocratean numbers, though professedly ideal as well as mathematical, were in fact mathematical only, this return to the Platonic terminology was no more than an empty form. It would seem, then, that Academic scepticism began with those who had been reared by Plato himself, having its origin in their acceptance of the scientific element of his teaching apart from the ontology which had been its basis. In this way, and, so far as the present writer can see, in this way only, it is possible to understand the extraordinary revolution which converted Platonism, philosophical and dogmatic, into Academicism, scientific and sceptical. It is as the official representative of this scientific and sceptical departure that Speusippus is entitled to a place in the history of philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-
J. G. F. Ravaisson, Speusippi de primis rerum principiis placita (Paris, 1838); Chr. Aug. Brandis, Geschichte der griechisch-rOmischen Philosophie
(Berlin,
1853), II. ii. 1; Zeller, Die Philosophie d. Griechen (Leipzig, 1875), II. i.; Mullach, Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, iii. 62-69 (Paris, 1881). (H. JA.)