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

by Peter S. Adamson

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.

ancient authors liked to give him credit for founding a distinctive philosophical tradition, the so-called “Italian school” of philosophy.

bits of reliable evidence are buried under an avalanche of more dubious evidence from people who thought of themselves as “Pythagoreans.”

It’s really the fifth-century Pythagoreans, after Pythagoras himself was dead but before Plato comes along, who should get the credit for fusing philosophy with mathematics.

The ancient authors who talk about early Pythagoreanism build up a probably fictitious contrast between two types of followers of the divine Pythagoras (§280). There are the ones who are interested in the religious and ethical precepts that he laid down, the so-called acusmata (§§275–6); and then there are the math geeks.

These were thinkers who went so far as to say that things in the physical universe are somehow made of numbers

if we’re feeling generous we might want to see here an anticipation of the modern idea that mathematical concepts are at the foundations of physics.

The mathematically inclined Pythagoreans had a deeply symbolic, maybe even mystical, understanding of number.

A particularly important number for them was 10, which among other things is the sum of the first four numbers, which they called the tetraktys; in other words, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10.

we call the late ancient philosophers of the third to sixth centuries BC Neoplatonists because they were followers of Plato, but also had a lot of “new” ideas which modern scholars do not find in Plato. For them one of the biggest influences was the tradition of Pythagoras, whom they saw as an ultimate source of Plato’s own ideas. Thus Pythagoras, one of the very earliest Greek thinkers, became one of the most important authorities and intellectual heroes of the Greek thinkers in late antiquity, a full millenium later.

It’s been suggested that the Pythagoras legend was emphasized by authors like Iamblichus because they lived in a time when their pagan religious beliefs were under pressure from the rapid spread of Christianity. For a Platonist pagan like Iamblichus, or his teacher Porphyry, who wrote venomous attacks on the Christians, Pythagoras could serve as an ideal holy man to rival Jesus.

On this account, Pythagoras was the first to make the love of wisdom into a way of life.

The Pythagoreans believed that the musical harmonies had some kind of affinity with, and effect on, the human soul.

The idea that the soul and its states would somehow resonate to music, if you will,

chimes with the idea that the soul itself might be a kind of harmony.

On this view, the soul is not some entity separate from the body, but is rather the attunement or proportion that keeps the body in functioning order.

it is almost certainly not the theory of soul Pythagoras himself adopted. For, according to Pythagoras, the soul can leave one body and go on to reside in other bodies, including the bodies of animals (§285).6 In other words, Pythagoras believed in reincarnation.

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. This is implied by reincarnation,

according to most Pythagoreans in ancient philosophy, the soul and the body are utterly different sorts of thing. The soul is immaterial and probably indestructible. The body is material and will inevitably be destroyed.

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.

One

reason Platonism and Pythagoreanism were able to combine together so easily is that both Plato and the followers of Pythagoras were interested in these stable, immaterial objects. They wanted to get away from the messiness of physical things, with their constant change and their being subject to an infinite number of various features. That certainly isn’t the only idea that drives Plato, but it seems to be one of the most import...

Heraclitus of Ephesus is, you might say, the ultimate Pre-Socratic. He brings together many of the features we associate with Greek philosophy before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came along. For instance, most of the thinkers we’ve looked at so far wanted to reduce the whole cosmos to one fundamental principle: Thales chooses water, Anaximenes chooses air, Anaximander has his more abstract principle, the unlimited. Heraclitus too has his basic element, namely fire. Another

example: these thinkers also wanted to explain change and opposition, and once Heraclitus comes along their forays in this direction seem like a mere prologue to his theory of the unity of opposites.

For example, “The road up and down is one and the same” (§200). Or, to paraphrase slightly: “Sea-water: healthy for fish, unhealthy for men” (§199). Or the most famous of all, “You can’t step into the same river twice” (cf. §214).

“Of the logos which is always men prove not to understand.” Here he carefully places the word “always” (aei) so that it can be read either with what comes before: the logos always is—or with what comes after: men always prove not to understand.

“logos”?

Basically logos means “word,” but it expands to mean many other things too, like “account” and “reason,” or even “proportion” or “measure.”

People go through life blissfully unaware of the logos, even though evidence of it is staring them in the face. Which is a shame, because the logos Heraclitus is trying to get

you to listen to is one that he claims explains absolutely everything;

Heraclitus the first philosopher to endorse what is called “monism”: the idea that everything is, in some sense, a unity.

His idea isn’t that reality is one and not multiple; his idea is that reality is both a multiplicity and a unity.

Heraclitus’ philosophy is designed to teach us to see all of nature—everything there is—as one unified whole, but a whole which includes many different things.

core idea, the so-called “unity of opposites.”

Our different perspectives are relevant only insofar as they cause us to grasp only one of the opposed aspects of each thing.

his attention to the phenomenon of change.

think about a salad vinaigrette: how you have to stir it and then pour it over the salad quickly after stirring it, before the oil separates from the vinegar. The nature of the drink or the dressing depends on the fact that it is in motion, or changing.

the truth he was trying to express was itself paradoxical, that stability resides precisely in change, that unity resides precisely in opposition.

“Different waters flow over those who step into the same rivers” (§214). It is the same river on different occasions, but with different bits of water each time. This illustrates the point we’ve already been talking about, the unity of opposites: just like the gold is both valuable and worthless, the river is both the same and different. So maybe he did think that all things were constantly changing, and in flux, while also being the same and stable. This would explain his making war or strife a kind of universal principle. But it leaves standing his idea that all things are one; in fact, it explains why he thinks all things are one.

he sees a fundamental opposition between fire and water.

human soul is just made of fire. When we die, it is because our souls have turned into water

Heraclitus won’t be the last Greek thinker to suggest that the soul has some fiery aspect. He adds—and again this is something later philosophers will agree with—that our breath is closely related to the soul,

he makes both the stars and our souls fiery, suggesting that we share a nature with the divine heavenly world.

different aspects of Heraclitus’ philosophy: the riddles, the severity towards human society, the association of heat with health and life.

it was Heraclitus, a riddler with his ready-made fragments, who first really begins to indulge in this systematic way of doing philosophy.

Both the word “ethics” and the word “political” come from Greek: in ancient Greek ethos means custom or character, and politike means, well, “political,” because polis means “city.”

Epistemology is from episteme meaning “knowledge”; and so epistemology is the study of knowledge. For instance, epistemologists want to know what the difference is between knowledge and mere belief, or whether it is possible to know anything at all.

Metaphysics is a bit stranger in its etymology. It really means “after physics,” and many later ancient and medieval

philosophers took it that metaphysics is quite literally the discipline one studies after studying physics: you graduate from studying the physical world to studying the “met...