Seasonal telly

Took the darlings to London today - N. really wanted to see the massive spider sculpture thing in the turbine hall at Tate Modern and R. wanted to see the Museum of London's exhibition on the Great Fire. Both were excellent and, it must be emphasised, free! Better than the train ride which was super expensive even with a railcard. And we didn't get a seat going down to London.

Interesting news that someone thinks there is not enough religions programming on the BBC over Easter. (Love the headline: wonder how many complaints this will get.) Clearly this is someone who fails to see the deep spiritual dimension of a Doctor Who special. Isn't Ben Hur on somewhere? That's surely enough. And the Pope will get to see the same thing in various languages and disrupt usual Sunday morning telly. What more do they want?

Actually, I did a search for 'Urbi et orbi' on this listings site just to check and got the following:

If you like 'Urbi et Orbi', you may also like the upcoming shows...

Weapon Masters - Click to see when Weapon Masters is on next
Grow Your Own Drugs - Click to see when Grow Your Own Drugs is on next
Motorway Patrol - Click to see when Motorway Patrol is on next
Ashton Kutcher - Click to see when Ashton Kutcher is on next
Missing - Click to see when Missing is on next
Trawlers, Rigs & Rescue: North Sea - Click to see when Trawlers, Rigs & Rescue: North Sea is on next
Breaking Up the Biggest - Click to see when Breaking Up the Biggest is on next
Tunnellers - Click to see when Tunnellers is on next
Questions Pour Un Champion - Click to see when Questions Pour Un Champion is on next
Nightscreen - Click to see when Nightscreen is on next

They must have an excellent algorithm to generate that!

Epicurea

A full pdf of Usener's Epicurea can be downloaded from here. If you poke around a bit there are some other handy things to be found, including Madvig's De Finibus.

On n’a pas à rougir

What do historians of philosophy do? Are they doing philosophy when they are doing the history of philosophy? I've been re-reading two interesting answers to these questions in in B. Cassin ed. Nos grecs et leurs modernes (Paris, 1992; CR review by Simon Goldhill here):

Aubenque, P., 1992, ‘L’histoire de la philosophie est-elle philosophique? Oui et non’: 15–36

Brunschwig, J., 1992, ‘L’histoire de la philosophie est-elle philosophique? Non et oui’: 37–96

One of my favourite passages from Brunschwig's piece is this:

L’historien de la philosophie, je pense, n’a pas à rougir de sa vocation, qui est distincte de celle de la création ou, disons, de l’initiative philosophique, et qui répond à une autre curiosité, à une autre démande. La réflexion sure les doctrines philosophiques (qu’il s’agisse d’une réflexion historique, analytique, interprétative) relève d’un certain genre d’activité intellectuelle; la production de telles dotrines, ou de ce qui en tient lieu, relève d’un autre genre. (p.44)

I'm not sure I was much inclined to be embarrassed for what I get up to but it's good to have Jacques' assurance that there is no need.

Doomed! We're all doomed!

Some recent discussions about the place of the history of philosophy in philosophy teaching and also the prospect of a colloquium some time next year in Cambridge on a similar topic have got me thinking about ancient philosophy most generally and, particularly, what its prospects are. I did think they were pretty cheery: lots of departments, especially in the US, seem to be committed to maintaining a presence for ancient philosophy in philosophy departments and there are jobs in the UK too.

Then I read again Jonathan Barnes' 'Bagpipe music',Topoi 25, 17-20 (online here). It's entertaining, for sure, as you would expect. But it strikes a very different note. Many of its concerns apply generally to modern academic life (pressure to publish too much, too early; too many Companions to the Handbook Guide to Introductions to Reading so and so...) and Barnes’ concerns for the discipline relate in part to institutional pressures and the demands of a modern academic career. They are therefore somewhat more generic than his specific concerns for philologically informed scholarship in ancient philosophy. Here's a taster of the tone:

Q: Where is ancient philosophy going now?—A: Downhill, and to the dogs. Q: Where will it go in the future?—A: Further downhill, and right past the dogs. Q: What can be done?—A: Not much. Q: What will be done?—A: Nothing.’

How far past the dogs have we got? Have we even got within barking distance yet?

Cicero De Finibus 1.37-8

I’m still stuck in Cicero De Finibus 1. Currently I am trying to pick through 1.37–8 and I’m finding it difficult to pin down what Torquatus is saying. This is the present sticking point: I am trying to understand precisely what is meant by two phrases. The first is part of the argument for the pleasantness of the absence of pain in 1.37:

...cum privamur dolore, ipsa liberatione et vacuitate omnis molestiae gaudemus...

When Torquatus asserts that ‘we rejoice in the very freedom and absence of pain’ the message might be that the absence of pain is some kind of object in which we take joy (gaudium). It is not clear whether the absence of pain is already a pleasure and the gaudium is therefore some kind of second-order pleasure – a pleasant appreciation of one’s already pleasant and pain-free state – or whether the gaudium is, so to speak, what makes the pain-free state pleasant: the pleasure of being pain-free consists in the joy which we take in it. This is as interesting possibility because some recent interpretations of Epicurean hedonism argue for this latter alternative. It is worth noting that Torquatus can reasonably be interpreted as offering this very view, although it remains to be seen whether it is a coherent or helpful line for him to take. (I think it is not in fact a good idea for the Epicureans to pursue this too far.)

Now it occurs to me that a sentence in 1.38 might point in a similar direction:

quisquis enim sentit quem ad modum sit adfectus eum necesse est aut in voluptate esse aut in dolore.

Again, this manner of expression makes a distinction between (i) how one is affected and (ii) the perception of how one is affected. The implication here is that some perception of (i) is sufficient to be in pleasure or pain in the sense that it is impossible to perceive (i) and be neither in pleasure nor pain. But it is unclear whether perception of (i) is necessary for a person to be in either pleasure or pain (someone might be in pain but not notice it). And it is also unclear what the precise relationship is between being ‘in voluptate’ and each of (i) and (ii). I may have a tin ear for the natural reading of the Latin, but I can see two possibilities here.

Perhaps Torquatus is merely asserting that every conscious (perhaps self-conscious) agent is necessarily always experiencing pleasure or pain. This makes the sentence merely another way of stating that there is no intermediate state but leaves unclear why this ought to be taken as grounds for (enim) the previous assertion that the highest pleasure is the absence of pain.

Alternatively, Torquatus intends this to explain why there is no intermediate state by insisting that proprioception necessarily registers one’s current state with either pleasure (if it is not lacking) or pain (if it is lacking). Since one’s bodily state must either be lacking or not lacking then one will necessarily experience either pleasure or pain; tertium non datur. In that case, pleasure and pain are the results of some kind of self-perception and one’s currently bodily state is the object of that self-perception. Thus, the state of being without pain is the object of pleasant proprioception. What you might expect the Epicurean then to say is that one is always perceiving one’s own state and therefore must always be experiencing pleasure or pain since this will rule out the possibility of experiencing neither pleasure nor pain simply because one is not perceiving ‘how one is affected’. But as far as I can see, Torquatus does not say this. Should he?

Paying your way

Tuition fees for university students in England look likely to rise. Universities are expensive places to run and they do not receive sufficient direct funding to allow them to teach all the students they have without needing further payments directly from the students (or, rather, their parents/guardians) themselves.

This makes universities expensive places to attend. First of all, this cost may put off some people from the very idea of attending university. This is a bad thing and is at odds with the notion that, certainly at this university, we admit and teach the best students regardless of their background and economic clout. Well, the usual answer to that objection is something like the following: the cost can be in part delayed by loans and the like. But this shifts the problem into a graduate's later life and may well affect the sorts of careers a graduate will have to consider. It also makes a degree an investment, a gamble against future earnings.

Now I realise that we live in an imperfect world and one in which things cost money, people need to earn a salary, equipment must be bought, and the like. But, on the other hand, it does seem a little odd to consider an education to be something that can be given a price, a cash value that somewhere along the line has to be repayed or, better still, show a positive return. An education is not a commodity to be bought or acquired on a hire-purchase scheme. Nor is an education best thought of as an investment with a view to higher later earnings. If we start to think in these terms then the mere instrumentality of it all undermines the very point of the exercise. An education has a value, for sure, but not all values can be reduced to a set of commensurable list prices. And thinking that an education is worthwhile for the wrong reasons can have bad consequences for everyone.

We should fund universities so that they can teach the best people for particular courses because it is good for there to be people engaged in these intellectual activities, for there to be people teaching, learning, and thinking about these things. Full stop. This is not good for something further; it is just good. I happen also to think that holding this broader, more varied and richer notion of what is valuable will have general beneficial effects for us all, but whatever those further benefits might be they are not why education, for example, is to be valued. (For one thing, perhaps a broader notion of what is of value would encourage the sort of benefaction to universities which will allow them to go one doing what they do. If people just think that such an education is a good thing they will be encouraged to foster it and furthermore to do so without asking what the further knock-on benefits might be.)

So if we do not educate merely to foster economic wealth and we do not any longer think that we educate in order to foster piety, then what sort of reason can there be? 'Why should I fund scholarships to enable bright and enthusiastic people to study Norse literature?' 'Because it is good for people to study and know about Norse literature.' Just that. (The same goes, by the way, for education earlier in life. To ask: 'Why should 9 year-olds learn algebra if it will not fit them for a thrusting entrepreneurial career? Shouldn't they learn lots of IT instead?' is just the same instrumentality extended to cover every aspect of a poor child's development.) Some things are valuable because they are ends in themselves.

Shipbuilding

I promise some ancient philosophy soon. But for now, I was reminded of this beautiful song by an excellent BBC4 doc on Rough Trade Records. Here is Elvis Costello.



You can see Suede doing the same song here and also Robert Wyatt (a heartbreaking version) here.

A little souvenir

Lack of thought for the day

I was unfortunate enough to be mid-shower when 'Thought' for the Day began on the radio this morning so had to endure when I can usually turn it off or run away. The BBC really ought to get rid of this but no doubt will not, even though the controller of Radio 4 thinks it is a 'genuinely difficult question'. Still, I have discovered a good antidote: Platitude of the day which summarises the morning's guff into a paragraph of bland but much funnier waffle. Thank you, Peter Hearty. (There's a similar site here. I love the interweb.)

Odd pants

I have no idea who would want to buy these but they are on sale all the same. The same people also do Churchill, Obama, Boris, Shakespeare and Thatcher (!) pants... Or Henry VIII... And they also do an interesting line in dad and child combination apparel, such as this....

More on Tom and Tim

Prompted by some good questions, I have continued to worry about Tom and Tim and their pleasures. I certainly have not go as far as what we ought to say about these cases, but I think I have a clearer grasp on what we do not want to say.

Faced with the two cases, we don't want to say:

1. Tom is not pleased although he thinks he is.

So we don't want to make actually winning the lottery a necessary condition of being pleased that one has one the lottery. This is the reason why we might be tempted to say that all you need is the belief...

But we also don't want to say:

2. Tim is pleased only because he believes that he won the lottery.

Because that is not what Tim says: he says he is pleased because he has won the lottery and indeed this is true.

And we also don't want to say:

3. Tim and Tom are both pleased because either they have won or believe that they have won the lottery. Since it would not be possible in each case for Tim or Tom to work out which of the disjuncts is the case for them. And indeed the same impossibility would hold for any case of being pleased at something, even put in first-personal terms.

Do I really feel satisfied at the thought that when I am pleased I should say 'I am pleased either because X or because I believe that X'?

Beliefs and pleasures

In a class yesterday we discussed Bernard Williams’ ‘Pleasure and belief’, PAS Suppl. vol. 33 (1959), 57–92. It was pretty hard going, so this is an attempt to ‘add water’ to the opening moves on pp.57–9. This section is interesting to me because it seems to be a useful commentary on the discussion between Protarchus and Socrates in Plato’s Philebus on the question of the possibility of false please. Specifically, it seems a useful commentary on Protarchus’ reaction at 38a, that in supposed cases of ‘false pleasure’ it is some judgement or belief that is false but which gives rise to a pleasure which is itself not to be said to be false.

One of the claims early in Williams’ discussion (59) is: Beliefs in so-and-so should not be made to function as the cause of a person’s pleasure at so-and-so. Why not?

Consider:

Tom is pleased because he has a winning lottery ticket.
Tim is also pleased because he has a winning lottery ticket.

Imagine also that Tom is in fact mistaken – he has misread the winning numbers (perhaps he has seen last week’s by mistake) so he has not won the lottery. But he is still pleased, at least until he realises his mistake at which point the pleasure ceases. Tim, on the other hand, has got it right.

How do we explain Tom’s and Tim’s pleasures? Tom cannot in fact be pleased at having a winning lottery ticket because he does not have a winning lottery ticket. Perhaps we’d better say that Tom is pleased because he believes (at least initially) that he has a winning lottery ticket. But what about Tim? Would we then have to say about him too that he is pleased because he too believes he has a winning lottery ticket? That seems odd: surely it would be better to say that he is pleased at having, not merely believing that he has, a winning lottery ticket. Yet saying something different about the causes of Tom’s and Tim’s pleasures is not very satisfying either; after all, at the moment they are being experienced they appear indistinguishable to the two people concerned.

The most promising move, it seems, is to hypothesise that Beliefs Cause Pleasures (BCP) since that might allow us to account for both Tim’s and Tom’s pleasures alike.

Williams gives three reasons to reject BCP (58–9). I am not entirely sure how to understand these, but this is a first attempt at filling out the first reason:

Williams refers to what he calls ‘the previous argument’, which I think is the one earlier on p.58. This goes, I think, as follows: The assertion of BCP requires us to consider cases like Tim and Tom and imagining ourselves in their respective places. This in turn requires us to think that, in Tom’s place, we would originally and sincerely have said ‘I am pleased because I have a winning lottery ticket’. But this is in fact at odds with BCP since BCP says that we really at the time were pleased because we believed we had a winning lottery ticket. We arrive at BCP only on the basis of a prior sincere assertion of something which is incompatible with it.

That’s why (I think), Williams concludes that it is ‘extremely doubtful whether I am in a position to arrive at the correct hypothesis, and distinguish it from rivals – at the very least, it seems that it would be a necessary condition of doing so that I had engaged in philosophical reflection’.

I need to think more about whether this is a good argument against BCP. Any thoughts?

Oscar Mike

This is an experiment: a mobile blog post. I wondered about twittering for a bit but I don't really get it. Anyway, I need a doppio before facing the day and - thankfully - the machine is working without needing prior servicing. Then back to proofs and lots more emails.

Psychological hedonism in Laws V

Does Plato advocate a form of psychological hedonism in Laws V? Certainly, the famous argument against akrasia in Protagoras seems to invoke such a view, but it is notoriously difficult to know whether that view should even be attributed to Socrates the character in that dialogue, let alone to the author. What about Laws V? The Athenian seems to be offering something in that direction.

The passage I'm interested in is 732d8ff. The Athenian says that the finest (kallistos) life is praiseworthy not only because of its glorious reputation but also because it provides what we all want, namely a preponderance of pleasure over pain throughout a life (732e7–3a4). He will eventually conclude that the life of psychic and bodily virtue is not only better than other lives in its nobility (kallos) and correctness (orthotēs) but also by virtue of being more pleasant (734d4–e2).

At 733a9ff. the Athenian sets out a list of principles which he thinks govern our general preferences within a life and between possible lives. The principles listed here seem to be as follows:

1. We want to have pleasure but we neither choose nor want to have pain.
2. We prefer pleasure to a state of neither pleasure nor pain.
3. We prefer a state of neither pleasure nor pain to pain.
4. We do not prefer a state of neither pleasure nor pain to pleasure
5. We want smaller pain and larger pleasure.
6. We do not want larger pain and smaller pleasure.
7. It is not possible to make clear any preference between two cases in which the pleasures and pains are equal.

This much is probably uncontroversial, apart from the minor question whether there is indeed an intermediate state between pleasure and pain. It amount to a general ranking in descending order of choice-worthiness: pleasure --- neutral state --- pain (2–4), combined with a relative ranking of mixtures of pleasure and pain (5 and 6). Two things here are worthy of attention before moving on. First, we ought perhaps to notice that there is no explicit discussion of whether we prefer a combination of large pleasure and large pain to a combination of small pleasure and small pain. Presumably, the question is supposed to be settled by 7: the only case in which preferences are possible are those in which there is some inequality between pleasures and pains and in those cases the preference will be settled by the most basic preferences outlined in 1–4.

Second, we might note that ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ in 5 and 6 are not clarified so it is unclear whether a larger pain, say, is a more intense or a longer-lasting pain, or both. It is unclear what the ranking would be between a shorter but more intense pain and a longer but less intense one. The Athenian does indeed refer to a variety of variables which might differentiate one pleasure from another or one pain from another or indeed one set of pleasures from another and so on, namely: number, size, intensity, equality and their opposites (733b6–7) and says that our preferences may or may not be affected by them. There is, however, very little interest in what readers familiar with the intricacies of hedonic calculations demanded by various utilitarian theories.

What precisely does he mean when he says that our preferences may or may not be affected by them? Is it that some differences in intensity, for example, are irrelevant to our preferences? (In that case the Athenian is continuing to express our general preferences and practices as in some way correct and justified in the choice between different hedonic arrangements). Or is the idea that sometimes we do take into account relevant and significant differences and sometime we do not? If the latter, what explains this variety in our competence at enacting the preferences outlined in 1–6? In particular, what is the import of the comment later in the passage at 734b4: everyone who is akolastos is so unwillingly?

The obvious answer will be that the preferences in 1–6 express a kind of psychological hedonism. If so, anyone who as a matter of fact ends up living a life in which pain predominates over pleasure must all along have been trying to live a life in which pleasure predominates over pain. So his end result is not what he would have wished. As the stranger puts it at 733d2–4, we are being offered a choice between the sort of life we want by nature and the sort that we do not want by nature.

The introduction to this section, at 732e3–7 says only that humans are particularly (malista) concerned with pleasures, pains, and desires (and this is what contrasts them with gods) and also that humans are held suspended like puppets by these, the greatest influences on us (megistai spoudai). Further comments suggest a similar picture. At 733d4–6 he says that if someone asserts that they want something besides these things – by which he must mean the things revealed by the various preferences he has just outlined – then such a person is talking out of ignorance or an inexperience of actual life (ontes bioi).

But does this commit the Athenian to psychological hedonism? The suggestion here may be only that the way people generally are, they are motivated only by pleasure and pain. But perhaps the Athenian would not say also that it is impossible for us ever to alter so as to be motivated by some other value, albeit perhaps still alongside these hedonic preferences.

Cambridge museums

This evening we went along to the 'Twilight at the museums' event, visiting both the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences (dinosaurs!) and the Museum of Classical Archaeology (pictured). The cast gallery looked super in the low light, with lots of kids running around with torches. And some great story telling.

Job

Would you like a lectureship in Greek (NB, not 'ancient') philosophy? If so, perhaps you should apply to this job in the excellent UCL Philosophy department. Good to see that some places are hiring specialists in this area still.

Universally challenged

The University of Cambridge is thinking up lots of ways to celebrate its 800th anniversary. This is one of the bright ideas:

Your department wants YOU--to represent it in the ultimate battle of the brains!

In celebration of the university's 800th anniversary, the Cambridge Quiz Society is organising a live, University Challenge style competition to establish once and for all which department can claim to be the most knowledgeable. Each department is invited to enter one or more teams of 4 competitors, comprising of anyone from undergrads to administrators to department heads. So get together a team of your four cleverest friends, colleagues, teachers, and students and go to www.srcf.ucam.org/quizsoc for dates,
rules, and application details.

Remember--If you don't enter, you're just letting the competition win!

Somehow, I don't really fancy it.

Generation Kill

FX UK has now shown the first three episodes of Generation Kill and it's beginning to grow on me. Like The Wire it is initially alienating and confusing (although the info available on the website is very useful just for getting to grips with the command structure). The subject matter is tackled in a similar way too -- last night's episode involved a marine who might have shot two Iraqi children during an assault on a (deserted) air-strip. The situation is presented without commentary. The characters have different reactions to the morality of the situation, indeed to the very facts of the situation. Was the action wrong? What were the Rules of Engagement at the time and who was aware of them? What are they required to do now? By what standards are those requirements to be determined? Nothing is simple and no one is made into either a paragon or a villain. It treats the audience and the subject matter with respect.

However, it lacks the variety of The Wire both in terms of subject matter and cast. So far we have learned nothing about the Iraqi population since the whole situation is being focalised through the various marines. I suppose this makes the country they are in seem alien and disorientating too -- we, like they, are very much in the dark about where they are and whom they are fighting or helping. Still, the fare is a little more uniform than some might like. Later episodes promise to fill-in the picture somewhat (when, for example, they eventually get to Baghdad) but there is less of a rich variety of perspective than the earlier series provided.

I'm sticking with it.

New book

The cover design for the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, which I edited, has now appeared. Here it is:

I rather like it. The picture is of a mosaic from a Roman villa at Autun, in central France, now in the Musée Rolin. It depicts the Epicurean philosopher Metrodorus contemplating the wisdom of Vatican Saying 14, which is repeated around the sitting figure: ‘We have been born just the once; it is impossible to be born twice and it is necessary eternally to be no longer. But you, though you are not master of tomorrow, throw away enjoyment. Life is worn out by procrastination and each and every one of us dies without time on our hands.’

And, of course, the volume is now available to pre-order. At amazon (UK, US) or via CUP... Here is the list of its contents:

Introduction James Warren; 1. The Athenian garden Diskin Clay; 2. Epicureanism in the Roman Republic David Sedley; 3. Epicureanism in the Roman Empire Michael Erler; 4. Epicurean atomism Pierre-Marie Morel; 5. Epicurean empiricism Elizabeth Asmis; 6. Cosmology and meteorology Liba Taub; 7. Psychology Christopher Gill; 8. Action and responsibility Tim O’Keefe; 9. Pleasure and desire Raphael Woolf; 10. Politics and society Eric Brown; 11. Philosophy of language Catherine Atherton; 12. Poetry and rhetoric David Blank; 13. Removing fear: the gods and death James Warren; 14. Epicurean therapy: pedagogy and improvement Voula Tsouna; 15. Epicureanism in the early modern period Catherine Wilson

Chrysippus' hand

I gave a short paper today to the 1st c. BC philosophy research group on this chapter from Cicero's De Finibus (1.39). It's part of a longer thing I'm working on on the presentation of Epicurean conceptions of pleasure in Fin. 1 and 2 but I'm beginning to think that it's a sufficiently rich little bit of text to warrant some concentrated work. Here it is:

at etiam Athenis, ut e patre audiebam facete et urbane Stoicos irridente, statua est in Ceramico Chrysippi sedentis porrecta manu, quae manus significet illum in hae esse rogatiuncula delectatum: 'Numquidnam manus tua sic affecta, quem ad modum affecta nunc est, desiderat?'– Nihil sane. -- 'At, si voluptas esset bonum, desideraret.'– Ita credo. – 'Non est igitur voluptas bonum.' Hoc ne statuam quidem dicturam pater aiebat, si loqui posset. conclusum est enim contra Cyrenaicos satis acute, nihil ad Epicurum. nam si ea sola voluptas esset, quae quasi titillaret sensus, ut ita dicam, et ad eos cum suavitate afflueret et illaberetur, nec manus esse contenta posset nec ulla pars vacuitate doloris sine iucundo motu voluptatis. sin autem summa voluptas est, ut Epicuro placet, nihil dolere, primum tibi recte, Chrysippe, concessum est nihil desiderare manum, cum ita esset affecta, secundum non recte, si voluptas esset bonum, fuisse desideraturam. idcirco enim non desideraret, quia, quod dolore caret, id in voluptate est.

My father used to mock the Stoics with wit and elegance by telling me how, in the Cerameicus at Athens, there is a statue of Chrysippus sitting with an outstretched hand, that hand symbolizing the delight Chrysippus took in the following little piece of argument: “Does your hand, in its present condition, want anything?” “Not at all.” “But if pleasure were a good, it would be wanting it.” “I suppose so.” “Therefore pleasure is not a good.” My father remarked that not even a statue would produce such an argument, if it could speak. Though the reasoning has some force against a Cyrenaic position, it has none whatsoever against Epicurus. If pleasures were simply the kind of thing which, so to speak, titillated the senses and flooded them with a stream of sweetness, then neither the hand nor any other part of the body could be satisfied with the mere absence of pain and no delightful surge of pleasure. But if, as Epicurus maintains, the highest pleasure is to feel no pain, well then, Chrysippus, the initial concession, that the hand in its present condition wants nothing, was correct; but the subsequent one, that if pleasure were a good the hand would have wanted it, is not. For the reason that it did not want it was that to have no pain is precisely to be in a state of pleasure. (trans. R. Woolf)

I think it's very interesting and the discussion set me thinking in some interesting directions. But I am surprised that I can't find very much written about it. Gosling and Taylor say a little bit in The Greeks on pleasure (though they aren't interested at all in the dialogue's internal dialectic and report this all as what 'Cicero' writes) and there are some pointers in Madvig's notes, but there isn't much else. I wonder if anyone out there knows of something else.

I'm particularly interested in the presentation of Chrysippus here. I think there's enough evidence that he and Zeno liked to use hands and hand gestures to illustrate philosophical points. But what about the argument itself? Torquatus seems to be made out to present a nice Stoic dialectical syllogism, in question-and-answer form. He even refers to the premises in Stoic terms (primum... secundum...) So is this ever discussed in the treatments of Stoic logic (esp. Stoic conditionals)?