Ivor Ludlam: A Critical Edition of Antipater of Tarsus
A free critical edition with commentary on the life, works, and logic of the second-century BCE Stoic philosopher Antipater of Tarsus
Traditional View
Antipater of Tarsus was a second-century BCE Stoic philosopher and successor to Diogenes of Babylon as the sixth head of the Stoic school.
Ancient sources do associate Antipater of Tarsus with logic, but surviving testimonia deal mainly with ethics, including divination, fate, marriage, and the treatment of women
Antipater of Tarsus is treated as an important but somewhat transitional figure between Chrysippus and later Stoicism.
Modern discussions usually treat Antipater’s disconnected testimonia as interesting heterodox views, to be acknowledged in passing, or used to fill in gaps in the general picture of Stoic philosophy.
This Edition
Antipater of Tarsus was not the sixth head of a unified Stoic orthodoxy, because there was no orthodox Stoic institution to head.
Antipater of Tarsus was an outstanding logician who attempted a major reorganization and systematization of Stoicism.
Testimonia pertaining to Physics or Ethics are, in many cases, more plausibly to be attributed to another, later Stoic, Antipater of Tyre. It has seemed methodologically prudent to restrict this study to Logic.
The traditional “parts” of philosophy — Logic, Physics, and Ethics — were reinterpreted and systematized by Antipater of Tarsus as the exhaustive activities of the Stoic sage.
His system appears to have influenced significantly the later arrangement and exposition of Stoic doctrine. Although his broader conception of philosophy was not generally accepted, the organizational structure itself appears to have been retained for pedagogical and expository purposes.
Several obscure or puzzling ancient testimonia become intelligible once read within this broader systematic framework.
The edition suggests a reason for the evident admiration in which Antipater was held in antiquity, particularly as a dialectician: his logical discussions appear not as isolated technical exercises, but as components within an ambitious and highly integrated philosophical system.
The conclusions reached in this study indicate that Stoic philosophers should be treated as individual thinkers in their own right, not heterodox parts of an orthodox whole.
The Plato Paradigm
This critical edition and commentary of Antipater of Tarsus represents one aspect of my wider research into Greek philosophy. Readers interested in my work on Plato may wish to explore the analyses of the dialogues and the accompanying podcast available elsewhere on this site.
See also essays on the Jesuit Bellarmine’s Stoicizing treatment of Aristotle and the development of the concept of the probable, from Greek rhetoric to very near Pascal, but not quite.
The Plato Paradigm 