Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #1)

by Peter S. Adamson

It’s naive to think that philosophy can be practiced, and preserved, without some degree of economic and political stability and support. Yet it’s cynical to think that philosophy is never anything more than an expression of political and economic power.

Occasionally we’re in luck and they quote the early Greek thinkers verbatim, or even better, say they are going to quote them verbatim and then do so.

So this is one reason to say that Thales was the first “philosopher”: he was the first person to gain a reputation for the sort of independent analysis of nature we describe as “scientific.”

We can follow his example by turning finally to Thales’ few attested philosophical claims. The best known is that he thought water was really, really important. It’s a little unclear, unfortunately, in what way exactly he thought water was important.

Aristotle tells us also that, according to Thales, “all things are full of gods”

The tradition claims that Anaximander was actually Thales’ student, and Anaximenes was then Anaximander’s. We don’t need to take this too seriously, because ancient authors loved to construct chains of teacher-student relationships whether they existed or not.

Anaximander is best known for saying that the principle of all things is what he called “the infinite.” The word in Greek is apeiron, which means, literally, “that which has no limit.”

They are not discarding religion, but rather throwing down a challenge to previous conceptions of the divine. The way they do this is fairly nuanced. But things are about to get a lot less subtle with the next philosopher we’ll discuss, Xenophanes. He staged a direct attack on the conception of the gods that we find in Homer and Hesiod. In doing so, he inaugurated a not-always-friendly rivalry between Greek religion and Greek philosophy that will persist right through Plato and Aristotle.

Greek philosophers, however, took a considerably more critical approach to religion than anything we can find in medieval Europe.

Hesiod wrote a poem called Works and Days, which has a lot to say about farming as well as the gods, though Hesiod also finds time to complain about his lazy jerk of a brother.

Xenophanes represents a new development in Pre-Socratic philosophy, because he’s the first explicitly to attack the authority of the poets.

In what may be the first joke in the history of philosophy, albeit a joke with a serious message, Xenophanes sarcastically remarks that if cattle or horses could depict the gods, they would show them looking like cattle or horses

He says that no one really knows about the gods and other things he is telling us about; rather, even if you are lucky enough to believe the truth, you won’t know (§186). This is just as revolutionary as his ideas about God. He’s distinguishing between believing something and really knowing it, a distinction which will be tremendously important down the line when we get to Plato, for example.

Heraclitus insults Hesiod and Xenophanes in the same breath, saying they both show us that learning many things doesn’t make you intelligent. But first we’ll be turning to another philosopher whom Heraclitus insults in that same passage.

I may as well break the news right away: there’s no good evidence that Pythagoras himself discovered the Pythagorean theorem. It was, however, known to his followers, the Pythagoreans. That rather sets the tone for the rest of our discussion of Pythagoras. We know a great deal about the tradition of Pythagoreans which takes its name from him, but we know hardly anything about the man himself.

Whereas Socrates would walk up to people in the marketplace and harass them by asking them to define virtue, Pythagoras and his young students in Croton supposedly observed a code of silence, to prevent their secret teachings from being divulged to the uninitiated.

His piety and religious teachings are emphasized throughout, and we hear Pythagoras’ advice about how to behave towards the gods and their temples. For instance, he says you should never visit a temple unless it is the primary reason for your journey; just stopping off at a temple on the way to somewhere else is inappropriate, even if you are walking right by one.

Xenophanes refers to Pythagoras by name (§260): he says that Pythagoras heard a puppy whining as it was beaten, and cried out: “Stop, for I recognize that its voice belongs to a friend of mine!” This is a little joke at Pythagoras’ expense, one that only makes sense if he was already known to believe in reincarnation.

But this theory of reincarnation at least relates to, and maybe even inaugurates, a philosophical theory with a grand lineage: dualism. Dualism is simply the view that the soul and the body are two distinct things. Many dualists draw the further inference that one can therefore exist without the other.

The soul postulated by the dualist has a great deal in common with numbers. Both are abstract, immaterial entities and look like they will always exist, assuming they exist at all. How are you going to kill an immaterial soul, or assassinate the number seven?

But of course, the most obvious fact about the Pre-Socratics is that we read only fragments of their thought. We know them only through intriguing quotations and paraphrases found in later authors. Heraclitus, though, more or less wrote in fragments. His body of work is not unlike that of a comedian from the 1950s: it consists mostly of one-liners.

Unlike his contemporaries in the sixth century, Pythagoras and Xenophanes, Heraclitus didn’t travel to the west. It seems he was quite happy to stay in the east and provoke people into deep thought, or more likely just plain annoyance, with his riddles.

At the beginning of his book, Heraclitus tells us that the logos he speaks of is something nobody understands, even once they’ve heard it. People go through life blissfully unaware of the logos, even though evidence of it is staring them in the face.

What about the other part of this fragment, that we should agree all things are one? This is pretty exciting because it makes Heraclitus the first philosopher to endorse what is called “monism”: the idea that everything is, in some sense, a unity.

So we’d have Heraclitus, who believes in constant change or flux, and Parmenides, who believes change is impossible. Nice and easy to remember. I’m all for making things easy to remember, so remember this: the flux interpretation of Heraclitus is wrong, and it’s all Plato’s fault.

Cratylus is famous for having held that it’s impossible to name anything, because it is always changing, flowing away before your eyes. Instead, you can only point. Rather wittily, he tried to outdo Heraclitus by saying that you can’t even step into the same river once.

But Parmenides and Heraclitus do agree about one thing: everyone else apart from them is completely confused, unaware of the nature of reality. Pre-Socratics were rarely short on self-confidence.

Being must be perfect, because if it were not it would lack something it could have: and in that case it would contain some kind of non-being, namely the absence of whatever it is lacking.

Whatever we make of his argument, this is a real quantum leap in the history of philosophy. Parmenides is not just offering explanations of what he can see around him, though he goes on to do that in the way of opinion. Rather, he puts all his trust in reason itself, and trusts the power of argument more than he trusts the evidence of his own eyes and ears.

Instead, the atomists said—and this is a respectable entry among the daring ideas proposed by the Pre-Socratics—that there is an infinite number of worlds

But instead Democritus took a more skeptical line, because he was impressed by the fact that the underlying reality of atoms and void is not evident to our senses. Thus he criticized the senses, saying in effect that things in the phenomenal world—the giraffes and tennis-courts—are unreal, because what is really real is the atomic universe we can’t see. He put this in a famous aphorism: “By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color, but really atoms and void”

We always think of Athens as the capital city of Greek philosophy, but as you may have noticed, so far none of the philosophers we’ve looked at came from Athens or spent a significant part of their lives there. Anaxagoras was the first to do so, and he is thus something of a one-man symbol for the transfer of philosophy from Ionia to Athens.

Anaxagoras has something else in common with Socrates, apart from his association with Athens: like Socrates, he was put on trial for being insufficiently reverential towards the gods. He didn’t wind up drinking hemlock, but instead left town, which is safer

Anaxagoras, rather ingeniously, suggests instead that absolute change is not required because everything is already everything else. He gave the example of food. You eat a loaf of bread with a hunk of cheese on it, and this manages to restore the flesh, bone, and blood in your body. Clearly, there must be flesh, bone, and blood in the bread and cheese. After all, there is nowhere else for it to come from.

Another thing we might wonder is, what exactly is the list of the ingredients? Is it really the case that everything is in everything? Do we really want to say that inside every particle of a giraffe there is just a hint of Eiffel Tower, and vice-versa? Here we’ve reached a somewhat controversial area of Anaxagoras’ philosophy.

Like Anaxagoras, Empedocles was very influential, responsible for systematizing the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. He was also a wonderfully over-the-top wise man, in the style of Pythagoras. He claimed to be an incarnate god capable of working miraculous healing, and he supposedly died by hurling himself into a volcano. Like Socrates, this was a philosopher who knew how to make an exit.

The poem was written by Empedocles. This could be verified, because some of the verses matched fragments of Empedocles known from other sources. Thus, in the early 1990s, the extant remains of Empedocles got a bit bigger. In ancient philosophy that’s about as exciting as it gets.

You might remember that the followers of Pythagoras believed that after death we return as other people and animals. Empedocles apparently was able to confirm this from personal experience. He tells us in one fragment that he has been a boy, a girl, a bird, and a fish, even a bush (§417). (One can’t help asking oneself what it is like to remember being a bush, but let’s pass over this and move on.)

Pericles is important not only for plain old history but also for the history of philosophy, because he associated with both philosophers and sophists.

Remember his famous remark that “man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not.”5 In this brief statement we have the roots of an ancient and, to many, disturbing philosophical tradition: relativism. This is how Plato understood Protagoras: he was saying that each man judges what is true for him, but no one is in a position to judge what is true for anyone else.

Thrasymachus and other radical sophists saw themselves as speaking up for nature, and unmasking morality as nothing but social convention.

The sophists were duly renowned for claiming they could “make the weaker argument the stronger.” This boast was the sort of thing that made Plato shudder, but it makes a certain amount of sense. After all, you don’t need an expensive lawyer, or sophist, to help you win a court-case when you’re clearly innocent. You need one when it looks pretty certain that you’re guilty.

Gorgias, like Protagoras, was more interested in persuasion than philosophy. Unlike Protagoras, however, Gorgias went out of his way to deny that he could teach virtue, and in fact stressed the moral neutrality of his art of rhetoric.

Persuasive speech, says Gorgias, is like a drug. If a skilled user of words really wants you to do something, you will do it, as surely as if someone were to come along and use physical force on you.

Socrates is without doubt the most influential and famous philosopher who never wrote anything.

In those dialogues, Socrates appears as one of the great literary characters of the ancient world—humorous, ironic, thoughtful, courageous, seductive, outrageous, and remarkably ugly.

After he has been found guilty, he is asked what sentence he proposes for himself, and he suggests that he should receive free meals at state expense for the rest of his life

Here we’ve come to one of Socrates’ most famous doctrines: that it is better to suffer wrongdoing than to do wrong oneself

Socrates thinks that the life Callicles describes, in which every desire is constantly being satisfied, sounds more like a life of slavery than mastery.

After all, people can be incredibly confident in their beliefs without having knowledge.