Abstract:

What makes something valuable for you, something that it is worth your concern? In this paper I argue that Plato and Aristotle provide evidence for a pre-Platonic theory according to which a thing’s being your own, as naturally proper to you, is the crucial determinant of its value. It is hard to reconstruct this theory in detail, since our access to it is indirect: via reports by Plato and Aristotle in which they argue that it is inferior to, or assimilable to, their own notion of the good as a distinctive source of value. The theory that takes something’s being one’s own as the source of its value is of a piece with a pre-Socratic naturalist anthropology that was at odds with the moralized anthropology of Plato and Aristotle. I then go on to suggest how Stoic ethics (and in particular its notion of oikeiosis, or “familiarizing”) represents an ambiguous reconciliation of these two approaches to value.