Ancient Philosophy. Daniel W. Graham

antecedents, and it is the job of the historian to tell a plausible story of how we, or our predecessors, got from point A to point B. The starting point of our story is Greek mythology. Before there was a philosophical account of the world, there was a mythical account. The world arose in a theogony, a birth of the gods in which one cosmic god begot another and that god begot another. Eventually they quarreled with each other, fought a war, and Zeus emerged as the victor and chief god. In this approach, every important event that happens in the world is the work of Zeus and his companions. The sun is the chariot of the sun‐god Helios, which he drives across the vault of heaven every day. Lightning consists of missiles thrown by Zeus, the Cloud‐Gatherer. Earthquakes are the work of Poseidon, the Earth‐Shaker. (Some) plagues are caused by Apollo, the Far‐Shooter.

That is the starting point of the story of philosophy. Beginning around 600 BC a small group of intellectuals rejected the mythological story and pioneered a new way of thinking about the world. The major events of the world resulted, not from divine interventions, but from processes that are in principle like everyday processes we meet in our experience. These thinkers looked for naturalistic explanations of phenomena in place of supernatural explanations. Their theories were at first, by modern standards, crude. But their ideas developed with remarkable rapidity. In less than three centuries the successors of the first thinkers had developed many of the concepts we use in philosophy today, and some basic principles of science. In effect, they invented philosophy as we know it, and began to call themselves philosophers in the fourth century BC. In the next chapter we will have something to say about how this happened. But for now the important thing is that it did happen.

1.2 History and Philosophy

      The early development of philosophy is indeed remarkable. But why do we even care about the ancient history of the field? Why not just do philosophy, as philosophers say, and forget about the boring ancient history stuff? Philosophers can be averse to history, interested only in the timeless interplay of ideas and propositions. Often we will discuss ancient philosophy ahistorically in this book: just treat ancient theories and arguments as if their authors were our contemporaries. The fact that we can do that shows just how contemporary ancient theories can be. And it allows us to think through problems with our predecessors.

      But the ancient philosophers are not our contemporaries, and we need to appreciate them not only as peers but as contributors to an ongoing conversation that started with them. While we can debate any point in the present, there are certain assumptions that change over time for broadly historical reasons: people tend to believe in certain things in one age that they reject in others, and to interpret their experience accordingly. Think for instance of supposing that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that slavery is an acceptable or inevitable social institution.

      For a long time philosophers pretty much ignored history. History, Aristotle said, deals with particular truths, whereas philosophy deals with universal truths. So philosophy is rigorously scientific while history is merely factual. It took another philosopher to convince philosophers that history was important: G. W. F. Hegel in the early 1800s. He went so far as to see history as the key to understanding philosophy. According to him, history reveals the unfolding of Spirit in time. There is a kind of logical progression of ideas as Spirit discovers itself in historical events, which will lead inevitably to self‐consciousness and the realization of Freedom. If we take Hegel seriously, there is a kind of March of History that leads in a virtually predetermined dialectical path to perfect knowledge.

What Hegel offered was the idea that there is a barrier between one age and another. Someone in Era 1 will tend to believe and understand things differently from someone in Era 2 at a later time. This is an important point. We tend to believe a great many things because our culture accepts them; no one can challenge all his or her community’s received beliefs (though Descartes notoriously tried his best to do so). So it seems unfair to be unduly critical of someone for holding the beliefs of his community. For instance, Aristotle believed that the Earth was the center of the universe; that women were inferior to men; that some people were natural‐born slaves. We can, of course, revile Aristotle for these views; but it seems unfair to do so. This is not, of course, to endorse his erroneous views. It is to recognize that he is a child of his time. Now there were, in fact, individuals who had questioned each of these views, even before Aristotle. But they were voices crying in the wilderness, and everyday “experience” seemed to confirm conventional beliefs to Aristotle and most of his contemporaries. (Before you start feeling too self‐satisfied about being enlightened, remember that someday people will look down on us for being so backward as to believe what we now believe.)

Some historians and philosophers have gone so far as to say that we cannot in principle have the same thoughts as someone from another time.³ This kind of historical relativism seems too extreme. We can, and good historians do, form sympathetic pictures of past people and events. We can also, and good historians do, make cogent historical judgments about past people and events. That is, in light of a sympathetic reconstruction, we evaluate them on the basis of present‐day standards. So we can defend some of Aristotle’s views as products of his time and his society’s beliefs, while wishing that he had been, for instance, as forward‐looking in his social theory as he was in his metaphysical and biological theories. The first step embodies a temporal, the second an atemporal approach.⁴ We first need to appreciate a past figure like Aristotle in light of his own times – and that includes understanding what problems he was trying to answer, and why – and then we can evaluate him in relation to contemporary expectations and developments. To skip the first part is to be unfair to our ancient subjects; to skip the second part is to become a mere antiquarian rather than a philosopher or historian.

Part of the challenge – and the fun – of studying the history of philosophy is trying to recognize new developments that become turning points in the history. Philosophy breaks off from mythology, so it starts out with no technical concepts, no real theory, of its own. In fact, philosophers seem to take for granted features of their mythological background – that the world has a beginning in time, and that the Earth is flat, for instance. Each new conception of the world tentatively advances new concepts, some of which become part of the vocabulary and background of philosophy and science. But, by the same token, early philosophy lacks the conceptual sophistication that we take for granted today. We are used to distinguishing between mind and body; thing and property; language, metalanguage, and reality; logic and metaphysics, and so on. But the early thinkers make no such rigorous or formal distinctions. How then do we read them? Do we apply our concepts to understand their theories or not? If we follow the distinction between temporal and atemporal studies, we will try to make sense of them in terms of their own time and intellectual context first; then we will try to fit them into our conceptual scheme – tentatively and reflectively, if possible. We need to recognize when we are putting new wine into old bottles, and old wine into new bottles. We change bottles at our own risk, but ultimately, we need to make the attempt if we are ever to understand our intellectual predecessors and ever to learn from them.

Here is an example. Modern philosophy (1600s to 1800s) is haunted by the Mind‐Body Problem that goes back to René Descartes: how does mind interact with body, and how does it know body? There is no such burning problem in the ancient world, though ancient theories do explore the relationship between mind and body. Anaxagoras is the first philosopher strongly to distinguish mind (Nous) from body; he says that a cosmic mind started a cosmic whirlpool that produced the world as we know it. He makes mind radically different from matter in some ways, for instance saying that every stuff is mixed with every other stuff, except for mind, which is pure and unmixed. Is he then a dualist, saying that mind and matter are utterly different? Not exactly. He does assign to mind physical properties such as location, and says mind is found in some things, especially living things. Plato for his part distinguishes between an immortal soul and a changeable body. He comes close to being a dualist, but he seems not to have a notion of persistent matter that could contrast in a strong sense with soul. Aristotle identifies mind as a function of soul, and locates soul in body, to which