ABSTRACT
The fragmentary nature of evidence for Dicaearchus, of course, makes for familiar difficulties. Without exception, his views are reported either by hostile authors who are largely uninterested in the nuances of different types of materialism; or by doxographers whose main concern is to tabulate the voting records of philosophers on key questions, and so lump together very different positions under a single formula, often not in the original authors' phrasing. The picture which emerges is a philosophically coherent one, of power and interest. Against both Plato and Aristotle, Dicaearchus accepts a version of the “harmonia” theory of the soul, essentially a form of psychophysical supervenience. In Aristotle’s view, such a theory leaves no room for mental causation, a result he finds unacceptable. But Dicaearchus rises to this challenge and accepts the inefficacy of the mental, thus embracing a form of epiphenomenalism. Dicaearchus is not an eliminativist, then, in the sense of denying the existence of the mental in general.
