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

by Peter S. Adamson

telling the story of philosophy in chronological order the way other podcasts had tackled topics like ancient Rome.

It would form a continuous narrative, and it would leave nothing out.

a continuous history of philosophy, which will be distinctive in paying attention to less commonly explored figures and movements.

whole history of philosophy, in an entertaining but not oversimplified way.

The point of the “without any gaps” approach is more to avoid skipping from highlight to highlight, the way a lot of university courses on history of philosophy have to do—where one jumps straight from, say, Aristotle to Descartes, vaulting over a gap of two thousand years or so. Rather, I want to show how each thinker built on those who came earlier, while also striking out in new directions.

We’re going to see that political, social, and religious forces had a lot to do with the way philosophy progressed, and even the fact that philosophy could happen at all. It’s an obvious, but easily overlooked, fact: philosophy occurs only in a society that can produce philosophers. Usually this has meant that philosophy happened in close proximity to wealth and power. 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.

For the period we’ll be studying in this volume, historical forces didn’t only help to determine who the philosophers were and what they thought. They also determined whether and how their ideas reached us. For most of the time between the ancient Greeks and ourselves, it was extremely laborious, and theref...

The question of what “philosophy” is, is of course itself a philosophical question. It is a question that has been answered differently in different ages. As we’ll be seeing, the ancient understanding of philosophy was rather more broad than ours, and included many disciplines we now think of as “science.”

Thales was famous for having predicted a solar eclipse

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.” For this reason it’s traditional to describe Thales and the other Pre-Socratics as being rational, as opposed to the presumably irrational culture that went before them.

I think a better way of understanding the Pre-Socratics would be to say that their views were, at least implicitly, grounded in arguments. This, to me, is the difference between early Greek philosophy and other early Greek cultural productions.

Aristotle tells us something else about Thales and water: he thought that water was a cosmic principle. Here Thales may well have been anticipating arguments that would be made by his immediate successors. As we’ll see very

soon, various Pre-Socratics thought that the materials the world is made of were formed out of the condensation or rarefaction of other materials.

if Thales got to his water principle in this kind of way, then at least it would show him giving a novel explanation of the cosmos, and using a process of argument to get to that explanation.

What you get is a nice little argument, which would go something like this: everything is full of gods, and I’ll show you this using the example of the magnet. It seems to be lifeless, but it must have soul, because it can initiate motion. So by extension, you should at least be open to the idea that everything has soul, which is divine.

The tradition claims that Anaximander was actually Thales’ student, and Anaximenes was then Anaximander’s.

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.”

He did apparently think that the apeiron was infinitely big, in other words, that it stretched out in space indefinitely far, and surrounds the cosmos in which we live.

different substances separated out of the apeiron generate and destroy each other, and that over the long haul this process balances out, so as to restore what Anaximander calls “justice.” The idea about the “ordering of time” might suggest that this all happens according to some kind of cycle,

Anaximander was fascinated by the opposed forces we see in nature around us. These countervailing forces, which are things like mist and flame, with opposing characteristics, are what pay retribution to one another. The infinite is indefinite—it has no characteristics that could be opposed to one another. But it is somehow the source of what does enter into opposition. And, because it is infinite in the sense of being inexhaustible, the process of mutual opposition will never cease.

This theme of constant and dynamic

opposition, which takes place against the background of an underlying unity, is one of the most enduring feat...

Also typically Pre-Socratic is the attempt to explain something huge and complicated—in fact, the whole cosmos—by invoking fundamental constituents and forces.

Overall, it looks like Anaximander had a more abstract approach—one is tempted to say, more philosophical approach—than Thales did. His infinite is a conceptual leap, and seems to be derived from pure argument rather than empirical observation.

Anaximenes, who seems to go in the other direction. He agreed with Anaximander that the principle of everything is infinite, but he was happy to go ahead and identify it with a particular substance: not water this time,

but air. It would, however, be wrong to think that Anaximenes was just ignoring his similarly-named predecessor and retrenching to a view like that of Thales. His philosophy actually builds on Anaximander’s in at least one important way, by explaining how the different stuffs that make up the cosmos are generated out of one another.

Why does he start with air and not fire, the thinnest stuff—or for that matter, rocks, the densest stuff? Three reasons, I’d guess. First, the sources suggest that Anaximenes was impressed by the fluidity of air. So perhaps he selected air as his principle because he wanted to emphasize the dynamism of the natural world, like Anaximander with his

constantly opposed forces. Second, a related point: just like Anaximander’s apeiron, Anaximenes’ air is that from which other things are separated out. The nice thing about air, at least on his theory, is that you can either thin it out and make fire, or thicken it and make cold things like water and earth. It is an in-between kind of stuff, and so can be the principle for both hot and cold things. Third, there’s the fact that air is invisible, unlike fire, clouds, seas, and rocks. So if there is some infinite, unbounded substance surrounding us in all directions, it must be air. Otherwise we would be able to see it.

Anaximenes also had something to say about the soul. Unsurprisingly, he said that the soul is made of his favorite stuff: air, which in this case is breath (§160). This idea

of the soul as breath, or in Greek pneuma—that’s where we get the word “pneumatic”—is going to have a long career in later ancient philosophy.

This also allows Anaximenes to make a comparison between the human body and the body of the cosmos: both are sustained by the most fundamental substance, namely air. Again, this is an idea with a long afterlife. Right down through the medieval period it will be popular to say that t...

parallel between man and the cosmos

Both Anaximander’s infinite and Anaximenes’ air are characterized as divine

What we see here is a subtle, but nonetheless pivotally important, feature of Pre-Socratic philosophy: these are thinkers who want to hold onto a sense of religious

awe in the face of the dynamically changing cosmos they describe. They are not discarding religion, but rather throwing down a challenge to previous conceptions of the divine.

Homer’s gods are the explanations of last resort, or even of first resort. Nothing can happen without the gods being involved.

On the one hand, this makes the humans seem like mere playthings of the gods. But on the other hand, the Homeric gods are a lot like humans, and not even particularly well-behaved humans. They get angry, they quarrel, they deceive and seduce one another. So one might look at it from the other point of view, and say that the human sphere has been extended to include the ultimate explanatory principles, namely the gods.

Like the Pre-Socratics, Hesiod is trying to explain things. But the things he tries to explain tend to be rather different.

Homer is much more interested in the human sphere than Hesiod is, at least in the Theogony.

Another important difference between Hesiod and the Pre-Socratics is that Hesiod isn’t giving us arguments, even implicitly.

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

One of his complaints was something I’ve already mentioned: the poets say scandalous things about the gods,

These gods aren’t just like humans, they are all too human.

Xenophanes sarcastically remarks that if cattle or horses could depict the gods, they would show them looking like cattle or horses

His God won’t be like humans; instead, he’ll be as much unlike humans as possible, and better in every way.

We might see this as another move in the direction of simplicity, as we found in the Milesians: they each had their single principle, be it water, air, or the infinite. Xenophanes has his one God.

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,

this is important for philosophy as a whole: the attempt to sort out what we can know from what we merely believe.