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

by Peter S. Adamson

As Thucydides has the Athenians observe, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

The most obvious example is naming: when a baby is on the way the parents confer with one another, and after overcoming bitter disagreement of the sort which makes each of them wonder if the other is going to be mature enough to raise a child, an agreement is reached. The baby gets a name.

But how do we come to live in the universe? Did the Demiurge create us? No, he did what all good executives do: he delegated.

He rewards and punishes, He grows angry, He loves his creatures. The Demiurge does none of these things. He may be providential and even generous, but in making the universe his attitude is more like aesthetic taste than love. Indeed, there is a good Platonic reason why the Demiurge cannot love us. The Demiurge is divine and perfect, and needs nothing.

It also explains why, to put it in modern terms, some people are homosexual and others heterosexual: men who love men are split from a man-man pairing, whereas those who love women are split from an androgynous pairing. Aristophanes adds that men who love men are more manly, since they derive from a composite creature which was entirely male

Aristotle would have had a rigorous training in dialectical analysis and argument at Plato’s feet, training which he would in due course use against the master.

In one of Aristotle’s own works, he excuses himself for attacking Platonic theories with the famous remark that we must honor truth above our friends

Alexander subjugated the entire known world, and then kept going. He was revered as a god and set the standard for imperial rulers of the future, so that no less a figure than Augustus Caesar was eager to invite comparison with Alexander. And he managed all that despite living only until the age of thirty-two. This just goes to show you what you can accomplish if you have the right philosophy teacher.

Ancient sources fancifully suggest that he may have killed himself by poison—thus imitating Socrates’ swan-song after all. I quite like one wildly implausible variation on this story found in the ancient sources, namely that his suicide was prompted by despair after he was unable to understand why the tide rises and falls.

If you think about it, nearly all argumentative discussion works like this: a topic for debate is identified, and the parties to the discussion try to find some point of agreement as a basis for further argument. If no point of agreement is found, then no argument is possible. Arguing without agreed premises isn’t rational disputation, it’s just posturing and shouting

To put it bluntly: Aristotle invented logic. We now take it for granted that philosophy involves, and even presupposes, logic.

In fact, this is a test you can use to decide whether Aristotle would count a given feature or predicate as being essential or accidental: if you can change a feature of something without destroying that thing, then the feature must be accidental.

Consider our friend the silent-film comedian Buster Keaton. Firstly, he is a human; that’s a predication in the category of substance, because it tells you what sort of thing he is. All his essential features will arise from his being this sort of substance, and the only way he can lose these essential features is to stop being a human, in other words, to die—which, I’m sad to report, Buster Keaton did do in 1966.

Thus individual items in the world around us are, as Aristotle puts it, primary beings, rather than derivative beings as Plato suggests. Where Plato thinks of beautiful things as caused by Beauty Itself, Aristotle holds that without beautiful things, there is no such thing as beauty.

Aristotle is sympathetic to Parmenides’ rule that there can be no generation from nothing, and no destruction into nothing.

according to Aristotle, there are four kinds of cause (or explanation), namely material, formal, efficient, and final. These English terms are drawn not from Greek, but from Latin translations of Aristotle’s Greek. For instance, “efficient” relates to the Latin verb efficio, which means “do” or “bring about.” Thus, the efficient cause is the one that brings something about—for instance, the carpenter who builds a table is the efficient cause of the table.

The final type of cause is, appropriately enough, the final type of cause. Final causes are purposes: Aristotle’s example is that health is the final cause of taking a walk or of administering medicine.

But I’m a philosopher, so I’m not going to let a few silly facts get in the way of a good example.)

To say that nature is teleological is simply to claim that nature involves final causation.

The apparent design we see in nature is merely apparent: it is actually nothing but randomness constrained by the mechanisms of survival pressure and genetic inheritance.

With all due respect to James Brown, it is really Aristotle who deserves the title “godfather of soul.”

the soul must be able to exert causal influence on the body, for instance, by initiating motion. It’s hard to see how this could happen if the soul were a harmony, any more than the tuning of the strings on a guitar can make the guitar play by itself.

What Aristotle gives us is not a theory of mind, but a theory of soul. For him, the soul explains mental events like seeing, desiring, and thinking; yet it also explains functions like digestion, reproduction, and growth. It is obvious to him that plants have souls, whereas it is equally obvious to us that plants do not have minds. In short, what Aristotle talks about in On the Soul is a principle of life, not a principle of mental life, which we usually call consciousness.

Aristotle traveled in the eastern Mediterranean. He had an especially productive time on the island of Lesbos, where he undertook extensive scientific investigations. He studied marine animals with particular intensity, and made some genuinely impressive discoveries. For instance, he was the first to note that whales and dolphins are not kinds of fish.

As Aristotle says, an eye removed from its socket is an eye in name only

You might believe that you can tell you are thinking with your brain, and that it is just obvious that your thoughts and sensory experiences are, as it were, happening in your head. But it is clearly not obvious: Aristotle, and the Stoics after him, thought that the heart was the controlling organ of the body, the seat of motion and sensation.

This is the sort of mistake that can lead modern readers to regard Aristotle with amused condescension. But in a way, I think we should congratulate him on his intellectual honesty. Within his system, spontaneous generation is clearly a problem. It is a major exception to his theory that form is passed on to offspring by parents. So it’s to his credit that he gave serious thought to an apparently unavoidable fact of observation, especially given the lowliness of many apparent products of spontaneous generation.

Not only are people poor judges about what will make them happy, as the happiness scientists have shown by studying lottery-winners. People are even poor judges about whether they are already happy. Or so Aristotle thinks.

If you think wealth will make you happy, Aristotle cautions, then think again. After all, when you pursue wealth what you really want is not wealth, it’s what wealth can buy

Happiness, by contrast, could never be the means to anything. As Aristotle points out, it is the most final end we have: there is no further purpose for which we wish to be happy.

Is it really obvious, though, that all humans share some purpose or function? Aristotle answers that question with a question of his own: how could it be that the parts of my body, like my eyes, have a function, without my having a function (1097b)?

Indeed, at the risk of giving away Aristotle’s punch-line, it will turn out that the life of theoretical inquiry is actually the happiest life of all.

Of course, this isn’t to say that you should literally engage in everything in moderation. You can’t do just the right amount of incest or unprovoked murder.

The Christian saints were not engaging in chastity, faith, and humility to a moderate degree, but rather striving towards perfect chastity, faith, and humility. If incest is excessive sexuality, then chastity must be deficient sexuality—so not a virtue at all, on Aristotle’s theory.

The great-souled man is perfectly virtuous, is well aware of his virtue, and acts accordingly, behaving with great dignity and seeing himself as significantly superior to those around him

Aristotle thinks that people who do not grow up in healthy societies have effectively no chance of becoming virtuous.

There’s another reason why Aristotle includes so-called “external goods” in the happy life, that is, goods like wealth, health, and family in addition to virtue. He believes that virtues must be exercised to be worth anything. You’ll have no opportunity to be generous if you have no money, or to be loyal if you have no friends. So the virtuous man needs a measure of material success just to make use of his virtue

More complex is the bad twin of the self-controlled man, the weak-willed man. Aristotle calls this condition of weak will akrasia, often translated as “incontinence.” Someone with this defect of character knows what he should do, unlike the vicious man. But he is unable to do it, because he is overcome by his desires and the prospect of pleasure or avoiding pain

But perhaps Aristotle’s most famous phrase appears in his work the Politics, when he describes man as a “political animal”

Aristotle agrees, remarking, for instance, that everyone who lives in Asia is a natural slave. He connects this to climate, in a way familiar from the Hippocratic corpus—there too, it is said that one’s character is affected by one’s environment. It just so happens, according to Aristotle, that the climate of Greece is perfectly temperate, so that the Greeks tend not to be naturally slavish

Of course, when Aristotle can’t claim to be a pioneer he does the next best thing: he complains that all his predecessors got things wrong.

He enumerates the parts of a tragedy and argues that they need to form a unified whole, just as the parts of a giraffe do. This notion was influential much later, when playwrights in modern Europe expanded on it to include the idea that a play should be unified in terms of time and place as well, rather than changing the setting from scene to scene. This idea doesn’t arise in Aristotle, but it’s not too far from the spirit of his Poetics.

This is only one of innumerable cases in his writings where Aristotle engages closely with Plato. Of course, Aristotle is usually thought of as an anti-Platonist—and we’ve seen him excuse himself for attacking Plato with the famous remark that truth is dearer than our friends. But this doesn’t do justice to the subtlety of Aristotle’s relationship to his master.

Iamblichus, our source for the legends concerning Pythagoras himself, refers to no fewer than seventeen female Pythagoreans. There were even ancient comedies written about women who “pythagorize.”

Did other women do philosophy in a more doctrinal sense? Apparently so. The most famous example from antiquity is certainly Hypatia, who was possibly a Platonist and certainly a highly skilled mathematician, and who taught (male) students. She’ll come along quite a bit later, having lived—and then died at the hands of a Christian mob—in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.

The most famous story about Plato’s unwritten doctrines, though, is found not in Aristotle but in later authors, beginning with Aristotle’s student Aristoxenus—who nonetheless is just reporting what Aristotle told him.

I’ve already mentioned the story about Diogenes the Cynic: mocking the Academy’s definition of man as “featherless biped,” he turned up with a plucked chicken and said, “Here is Plato’s man.”

Speusippus supposedly said that unless you can enumerate all the ways one thing differs from another, you lack knowledge about both things.