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This chapter examines the methods and doctrines that Plato treats as distinctive of Socrates. Socrates commits himself to three main paradoxes and the chapter discusses what Socrates means by his paradoxical claims, and why he believes them. The main ostensible source consists of the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates is a principal speaker. However, ancient readers do not treat all these dialogues as evidence for Socrates' views. Diogenes and Aristippus claim to be followers of Socrates, but they have harsh words for Plato and his doctrines. Aristotle attributes some of the doctrines found in the Platonic dialogues to Socrates, and others to Plato. The Stoics criticize Plato, but not Socrates, on some ethical questions. The division that these readers mark, explicitly or implicitly, between Socrates and Plato can be understood on the assumption that they agree with Aristotle's judgment about which doctrines are Socratic and which are Platonic. He often contrasts Socrates' ethical theory with Plato's. He ascribes a purely cognitive view of virtue to Socrates, but never to Plato.

In Plato's lifetime, Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates, defended at least some aspects of the hedonist position that came to be known as Cyrenaic. At the same time, Antisthenes defended the sufficiency of virtue for happiness, and understood this doctrine to exclude hedonism. His views were taken to extremes by Diogenes the Cynic. Later critics were surprised that moralists with such sharply opposed views could all claim to defend a Socratic position. Some have called the Cyrenaics and Cynics ‘the incomplete Socratics’, conveying the suggestion that they saw only one side of Socrates, and presumably that Plato and Aristotle saw both sides, and so reached a more accurate picture of him. This suggestion may not be quite fair to the one-sided Socratics. Socrates' views may have been indefinite enough to make each ‘incomplete’ construal of him a defensible way of tying up some loose ends that Socrates left.

This chapter examines the significance of all the named Cyrenaics, as well as the culture of ancient Cyrene, and introduces the members of the Cyrenaic movement. The principal figures are Aristippus, their notional founder, who followed Socrates; the mainstream Cyrenaics, who first codified Aristippus' inspirational example; Hegesias, who accentuated the mainstream Cyrenaics' egoistic individualism and introduced pessimism; Anniceris, who opposed Hegesias by reasserting the importance of personal and civic relationships; and Theodorus, an eclectic and flamboyant thinker, who is most renowned for his supposed “atheism.” The chapter traces their history from around 435 BCE to around 250 BCE. Most of these philosophers were born in or around Cyrene, though some are known to have been active abroad.

This chapter deals with Cyrenaic positions on personal and civic relationships, beginning with a short overview of assumptions about positive and negative reciprocity in ancient Greek culture—friendship and enmity, benefaction and injury, intra-polis solidarity and inter-polis war, etc. The chapter then looks at the tension between involvement in these cultural institutions and withdrawal into self-sufficiency, which develops from Aristippus through mainstream Cyrenaicism. This tension is abolished by Hegesias and Theodorus, who repudiate all of the relationships involved and embrace what we might call ethical solipsism. Finally, the chapter analyzes how Anniceris opposes Hegesias by reappraising the importance of friendship, filial piety, and civic participation for effective hedonism.

This concluding chapter argues for a new understanding of ancient Cyrenaic ethics, including the development of the movement from Aristippus through to the mainstream Cyrenaics, Hegesiacs, Annicereans, and Theodoreans. Such a comprehensive study would need not only to reconstruct the surviving doctrines and arguments, but also to understand the behavioral and cultural contexts within which Cyrenaic theories seemed both cogent and attractive, at least to certain individuals. The chapter also seeks to illuminate the philosophical significance of Cyrenaic ethics. This significance is sometimes spelled out by making the Cyrenaics the originators of the hedonistic tradition in Western philosophy. While all hedonists organize their beliefs around the high valuation of pleasure, those beliefs are also shaped by many other contexts, among them intellectual history, popular ethics, and the practices and institutions which define philosophy in any given era.

This chapter turns from theoretical foundations to ideals of happiness. First, it focuses on what Aristippus, the mainstream Cyrenaics, and Annicereans say about education, virtue, and happiness. This analysis shows how their foundational beliefs support a vision of what it means to have a successful life. The chapter then addresses their formulations of the ethical end, where Anniceris appears to have introduced a position that is strikingly unusual in ancient Greek ethics. Happiness is not the end, he says, nor is there any single end for the whole of life. Rather, each action has its own particular end. The chapter attempts a sympathetic interpretation of this innovation, yet acknowledges the problems it creates for other areas of Cyrenaic theory.

Presents some typical textbook formulations of hedonism. Shows that they are unacceptable as formulations of the view—they fail to state the intended view in a coherent and consistent way. A simple form of sensory hedonism—‘Default Hedonism’—is then presented. This formulation does not have the defects of typical textbook formulations. Default Hedonism provides a starting point for all the other forms of hedonism to be discussed in the book. Concludes with a somewhat speculative discussion of the hedonism of Aristippus.

“Aristippus of Cyrene” re-evaluates the evidence concerning, on the one hand, Aristippus’ alleged hedonism and, on the other, his affiliation with Socrates and the Socratic circle. The central thesis of the chapter is this: even though some sources attribute to Aristippus the sort of ethical hedonism that we know to have been held by his grandson (Aristippus the Younger), there is strong evidence that in fact Aristippus of Cyrene was not an ethical hedonist but endorsed Socratic concerns and values. These latter include philosophical inquiry focused on ethics, the paramount importance of philosophy for education and the care of one’s soul, concern to develop the virtues and assess the relative value of external goods, the crucial role of reason and prudence in ethical conduct, the ethical implications of systematically pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, and the rationalism that should determine one’s attitudes toward relatives, acquaintances, fellow-citizens, and the city itself.

Eudaimonia, happiness, is a property of a whole life, not of some portion of it. What can this mean for hedonists? For Epicurus, it is made possible by the mind’s capacity to enjoy one’s whole life from any temporal viewpoint: to relive past pleasures and enjoy future ones in anticipation, importantly including confidence in a serene closure. Enjoying your life is like enjoying a day as a whole, not least its sunset. Although pleasure is increased by greater duration (contrary to a more favoured reading), and premature death therefore better avoided, the finitude of human life as such does not lessen its value, and even a premature death need not prevent a life’s being enjoyed as ‘complete’. In this chapter, the above interpretation is documented, explained, and contextualized in terms of Epicurus’ diametrical opposition to his contemporaries, the Cyrenaics.

For Horace, the achievement of happiness presupposes a rational selection of pleasures. Those who aim to find happiness in the unrestrained enjoyment of every pleasure are described as fool or mad. But sometimes Horace seems to suggest that the fool may find a happiness of his own in the enjoyment of a pleasure whose vanity he does not understand. In Epistles 1.15, he confesses that luxury gives him pleasure, and provocatively proposes its enjoyment as true sapientia: the pleasure of luxury is an obvious truth, but, if theoretically admitted, it overturns the rational construction of ancient moral philosophy, and Horace here suggests the disturbing force of this point of view. In Epistles 2.2, the anecdote of a man who, while hallucinating, could experience pleasures (of aesthetic kind) more intense than those based on real experiences, proves that Horace’s ideas, and doubts, on pleasure, depend on Greek philosophical debates.