Matthew Duncombe

University of Nottingham

Matthew Duncombe is an Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, where he previously was an Assistant Professor. Before that he was a Post Doctoral Fellow in Classics at Durham University (2014-2016) and a post-doc in philosophy at the University of Groningen (2012-2014). He has published Ancient Relativity: Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, and Sceptics (OUP, 2020) and Relative Change (CUP, 2020), as well as many articles on ancient metaphysics, logic and epistemology in OSAP, Apeiron, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Phronesis and elsewhere.

Abstract

Diodorus Cronus, dialectic, cosmology and the game of Five Lines

Compared to Eubulides’ masterpieces, the Liar and Sorites, the Veiled Argument seems to be a trivial
sophism. It is therefore puzzling why a dialectician of Diodorus’ (or Eubulides’) ability would be
concerned with it. Following a remark of Martha Kneale, one explanation suggests that the Veiled
indirectly argues for some thesis which would be acceptable to Eubulides (and/or Diodorus) Just as
Zeno’s paradoxes indirectly defends ontological monism, so the Veiled defends epistemic monism:
(EM) to know something, one must know everything about it. If you accept (EM), then you can solve
the Veiled.

In this paper, I argue that the Veiled Argument is neither a mere sophism, nor an indirect
argument for EM, but, in fact, a paradox that does pose a genuine problem for a range of ancient
positions, in particular, Plato and Aristotle. The Veiled can therefore be thought of as an ‘internal’
paradox in the sense that Sattler has recently proposed: a deep challenge to a broad range of
positions because the paradox arises from an internal tension within a set of plausible and widely
accepted principles.