Chôra

Volume 12, 2014

La Causalité Platonicienne, Stoïcienne, Cynique et Médiévale

Œnomaus de Gadara : le dialogue contre le destin (Les charlatans démasqués, fr. 16)

Œnomaus of Gadara, in his work Detection of Deceivers (γoήτων ϕώρα), of which long fragments are preserved by Eusebius of Caesarea, contests Apollo’s oracles in name of the human action contingency. His targets are not only the Democritean and Stoic determinism, but also the Middle Platonic view of conditional fate. In a fictional address to Apollo, he demonstrates the contingency of the action, in an original way (the „dialectical cogito”), which he extends to the field of the animal action. The examination of his argument shows that the Stoic conceptions of what depends on us (ἐφ᾽ἡμῖν) and of consciousness (συναίσθησις) are cannibalized against determinism.