Biography

Thomas Slabon is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy at the University of South Florida specializing in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and a graduate student at Stanford University. His research has three primary themes: first, investigating the different conceptions and roles of value in our ancient sources; second, reconstructing the place of essential outlines or ‘typoi’ (and the conceptual structures this terminology tracks) in the philosophical methodology of authors including Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurus; finally, engaging with early Christian philosophers as philosophers, showing how these authors (often dismissed as philosophically irrelevant or uninteresting) offer innovative and compelling contributions to philosophical debates both ancient and modern.

The Value Question in Ancient Metaphysics

In this paper, I first aim to show that and how the ancient Greek philosophical tradition makes use of a distinct class of axiological arguments (that is, inferential structures involving judgements of value) in metaphysical contexts, with a particular focus on Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus. I identify three distinct species of axiological arguments: reasoning from the value of metaphysical first principles to the necessary existence of valuable downstream phenomena in the world; reasoning from value in the world to the necessary value of first principles; and finally, reasoning from a meta-metaphysical criterion (that the first principles must be maximally valuable) to a candidate principle being a genuine metaphysical first principle.

Then, having established that value judgements have a central role in ancient metaphysics, I discuss what kind of value is able to play this role and why the ancients think they are able to use value in this way when reasoning about first principles. I argue that in most metaphysical contexts, the ancients must be conceiving of value as absolute or intrinsic, with the non-relational quality of the value in question most clearly indicated by the fact that the value-property in such arguments is regularly picked out by the language of timē. My paper concludes by speculatively considering why the ancients think they can use value in these ways when engaged in metaphysics, suggesting that the use of axiological arguments in metaphysics depends on a theory of value-precontainment that represents an important instance of Aristotle’s principle of causal synonymy.