2013 Arthur O. Lovejoy Lecture: A Cognitive History of Divination in Ancient Greece

Ancient Greeks drew advice from oracles, dreams, entrails, the movements of birds, sneezes, and myriad other sources for divination. Classicists typically study such phenomena as examples of occult religion, or for their use as a social mechanism for managing dissent and forging consensus. Ancient philosophical accounts by contrast go a longer way toward considering them seriously, on their own terms. They take them as an invitation into developing speculative accounts of non-standard epistemological schemes. Plato is examined as a case study of a more general Greek philosophical tendency to treat divination as something akin to what we might call intuition.