Albrecht Dihle

Albrecht Dihle was the Heidelberg classicist whose The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (1982, Sather lectures) argued the thesis that has organized the Seba tradition’s treatment of ancient moral psychology: the modern concept of the will — a unified faculty by which the self elects among possibilities — is not found in the classical Greek corpus. It is a development of late antiquity, crystallizing in Augustine, built out of the ethical vocabulary of Stoicism, early Christianity, and the Aristotelian [[proairesis|prohairesis]] reread under Christian pressure.

For the tradition, Dihle’s argument is the philological companion to Bruno Snell’s thesis in The Discovery of the Mind: the unified self — volitional in Dihle’s account, introspective in Snell’s — is a historical achievement rather than a natural given. What precedes it is the Homeric plural self, the multiple agencies of thumos, phrenes, noos, menos. The Seba treatment of the middle-voice, of the verbs of partial agency, and of the homeric-plural-self stands in the Dihlean lineage. See dihle-theory-will-classical.

Relationships

• dihle-theory-will-classical
• proairesis
• homeric-plural-self