Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy

Frisbee Sheffield, James Warren, Frisbee Sheffield, James Warren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317975496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Routledge Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of new essays on the philosophy and philosophers of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Written by a cast of international scholars, it covers the full range of ancient philosophy from the sixth century BC to the sixth century AD and beyond. There are dedicated discussions of the major areas of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle together with accounts of their predecessors and successors.

The contributors also address various problems of interpretation and method, highlighting the particular demands and interest of working with ancient philosophical texts. All original texts discussed are translated into English.

Part I

Before Plato

1

The World of Early Greek Philosophy

John Palmer

The first Greek prose work of which anything survives was written during the sixth century BC by Anaximander, a philosopher from the Ionian city of Miletus. His ambition was nothing less than to explain the origins of the heavens and earth as well as the more important aspects of their structure, population, and operation. Anaximander held that our world grew out of “the Boundless” after an initial separation of certain opposites, including heat and cold, fundamental to the generation of the world’s more complex entities. All these come from and eventually dissolve back into these opposites, he wrote, “according to necessity, for these things make amends and recompense to one another for their injustice according to the order of time.” The later stages of his cosmogony are reported to have involved the formation of a sphere of flame encompassing the air around the earth like bark around a tree and subsequently broken off and restricted to certain circles to form the sun, moon, and stars. He also provided a model of the heavenly bodies and their relations that served as a basis for explaining such celestial phenomena as eclipses and the lunar phases. He considered the orbits of the sun and the moon to be, respectively, twenty-seven and eighteen times the earth’s size, thus giving his celestial theory a rudimentary mathematical basis. The earth itself he said was shaped like the drum of an architectural column. He regarded it as maintaining its position at the center of the cosmos because there is no reason for it to move in one direction rather than another and because it obviously cannot move in different directions at once. He also gave a remarkable account of the origins of living creatures from a primordial ooze, and of human beings from a period of embryonic gestation in fish-like creatures.

Anaximander’s book established the framework not only for the cosmological theorizing of his Presocratic and later Greek successors but for scientific cosmology ever since. Even in this condensed overview, many of the most striking features of his achievement are apparent: the explanation of natural phenomena in naturalistic terms, the ambition of developing a global theory able to account for a comprehensive range of apparently disparate phenomena, the positing of certain basic material principles as underlying these phenomena along with certain principles of regularity governing their interactions, a mathematical model of the heavens, and, crucially, the justification of the theory’s claims on rational grounds rather than on any appeal to the authority of religious tradition.

Sir Karl Popper, in his 1958 Presidential Address to the Aristotelian Society, famously appealed to Anaximander’s conjecture regarding the earth’s suspensionless immobility in articulating his own rationalist view that science makes progress via the critical examination of boldly intuitive conjectures. Anaximander’s older contemporary, Thales of Miletus, reportedly held that the earth is immobile because it floats like a log on water (Arist. Cael. 2.13, 294a28–31). Aristotle would criticize Thales’ account for merely pushing the explanandum back a step and leaving unanswered the obvious question of what supports the water supporting the earth. Likewise, Popper proposed, Anaximander must have arrived at his own explanation, not by any empirical observation, but by pure speculative reasoning inspired by a critical reaction to the evident inadequacy of Thales’ explanation. Thus Popper claimed that what he regarded as the essential dynamic of scientific progress—that of successive conjecture, critical refutation, and new conjecture—can already be observed in this particular interaction between the very earliest philosopher-scientists. Popper also argued that the same dynamic, of successive conjecture and refutation leading to new conjecture, informs the broader development of Presocratic physical theory. He proposed that early Greek cosmology was unified by its focus on the central problem of how to theorize the phenomenon of change, and that successive attempts to do so proceeded toward a culmination in the atomistic theory that would ultimately survive until the beginning of the twentieth century.

The notion that the “problem of change” was the central preoccupation driving the development of early Greek philosophy would ground a widely accepted picture regarding the period’s philosophical development. On this view, the Milesian school of philosopher-scientists comprising Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes held that the world developed from a primal monistic source that even now continues to function as the underlying substance of all things. This one stuff came to manifest itself in different forms due to its own essential animation rather than to any external principle or cause. None of the next generation of Ionian philosophers—Pythagoras, Xenophanes, and Heraclitus—fits easily into this story of the Presocratics’ engagement with the problem of change, and each has thus been regarded as idiosyncratic in one way or another. Pythagoras and his followers in the Greek colonies of southern Italy have been viewed as more a religious sect than a philosophical school. Xenophanes has been regarded as primarily a religious poet because of his powerful criticisms of anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine. The enigmatic Heraclitus has been seen as positing fire less for its suitability as the monistic material principle of things, than because its essentially dynamic nature made it a suitable vehicle of the divine Logos that maintains unity in diversity and thereby governs all things. Nonetheless, since Heraclitus regarded everything as subject to ceaseless flux and change, he has been cast as standing in polar opposition to Parmenides of Elea, whose metaphysics of absolute changelessness is regarded as having prompted a major crisis in the development of early Greek natural philosophy. Parmenides is supposed to have developed a radical form of monism via a critical reductio of Milesian material monism. According to the widely endorsed interpretation that figures in this narrative, he argued that what exists is a strict unity free from any sort of differentiation or change and, consequently, that the world as we perceive it is altogether unreal. Parmenides’ impact on subsequent developments has been understood as mediated by two staunch defenders of his radical monism in the generation to follow: Zeno of Elea, whose paradoxes likewise problematized change and plurality, and Melissus of Samos, who developed the radical metaphysics of strict monism along lines of his own.

Despite some uncertainty regarding their dating and thus regarding the relation of their activity to that of Zeno and Melissus, the major Presocratic cosmologists of the fifth century—Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the early atomists, Leucippus and Democritus—have all been understood as positing a plurality of material principles, in an effort to account for change in such a way as to rescue the threatened project of natural philosophy from the apparently devastating results of Parmenides’ critique of earlier systems. Since Parmenides had supposedly demonstrated the impossibility of deriving plurality from unity, these “post-Parmenidean pluralists” attempt to save the phenomena, and the enterprise of cosmology, by positing a plurality of physical principles or elements, each of which replicates the attributes of his monistic reality. Accepting supposedly Eleatic strictures against generation and destruction, these thinkers reconceived these processes in terms of mixture and separation. Empedocles and Anaxagoras are also credited with introducing distinct moving causes, which had become necessary in light of Parmenides’ challenge to the Milesian conception of the single substrate as containing a moving cause within itself. Presocratic natural philosophy culminates in the atomist theory developed by Leucippus and Democritus, which is regarded as the most successful attempt to provide a theoretical basis for understanding the world’s changing phenomena while obeying at the level of the material principles the Eleatic strictures regarding mutability and division. Having posited a limitless number of indivisible bodies, each of which replicates the attributes of Eleatic being, it only remained for them to posit the existence of void interspersed among these atoms to secure both plurality and motion.

Such is the overarching narrative employed by many twentieth century historians of Greek philosophy in their accounts of its early period. However, this narrative’s depiction of early Greek philosophy is problematic in fundamental respects. Not only does it rely on Aristotle for a validation and authorization that he does not in fact provide, but it also presumes that the problems Aristotle approached by considering the views of his Presocratic predecessors were in fact the defining problems of early Greek philosophy.

The historian of early Greek philosophy should never lose sight of the enormous difficulty of achieving an accurate view of the period’s philosophical development, given the conspicuous fact that none of the Presocratics’ writings survive intact. The fraction of their works we do possess has survived only because later authors in antiquity had some reason to quote from these early authors in their own writings. (The exceptions, where portions of the direct tradition of transmission survive on scraps of papyrus, can be counted on one hand.) The historical reconstruction of early Greek philosophy is therefore based on a sort of textual archaeology. In the first place, the remains of the Presocratics’ lost works buried in the extant writings of later authors from the fifth century BC to the sixth century AD (and beyond) have been identified and extracted as “fragments” of the lost originals (labeled “B” texts in Diels and Kranz’s standard edition). Fortunately, reconstruction of the early Greek philosophers’ thought is not based solely on these fragments. There are also indirect “testimonia” in the paraphrases, discussions, or other representations of their views in the works of later authors (labeled “A” texts in Diels and Kranz’s standard edition). Regardless of whether one is dealing with fragments or testimonia, one must not lose sight of the fact that we have this evidence only because some later philosopher or writer found it useful for his own purposes to record it in his own work. It will often be important to understand the use being made of the earlier figure by the later one, so as to determine in what ways that use conditions the evidence of the quotation.

It is also important to bear in mind that Aristotle is responsible, either directly or indirectly, for the survival of the larger part of the extant evidence. The later tradition affords us significantly more information about the early philosophers who most interested Aristotle than about other apparently significant figures. Archelaus of Athens, for instance, though reportedly a pupil of Anaxagoras, who instructed Socrates and Euripides in natural philosophy, is never mentioned by Aristotle and is for us little more than a name and some rumors. Aristotle’s treatises contain numerous quotations from the early Greek philosophers and even more discussions of their views, most often in surveys of earlier opinions on questions with which he was especially concerned. Two works in particular, Physics 1 and Metaphysics A, are so filled with reports of Presocratic views that they could easily be mistaken for historical surveys of Presocratic philosophy. There are also extensive discussions of the Presocratics in many other treatises, most notably On the Heavens (De Caelo), On Generation and Corruption, and On the Soul (De Anima). Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus, systematically assembled, as a propaedeutic to further inquiry, the views of earlier thinkers, including the Presocratics, in his Tenets in Natural Philosophy and On the Senses. The influence of these Theophrastean works on the later historiographic tradition was profound and long-lasting, even if it has sometimes been overstated. In later antiquity, moreover, commentators on Aristotle’s treatises often included further quotations and paraphrases to illustrate or support points made in their own exposition of Aristotle’s discussions of his predecessors. Of particular importance are Simplicius’ commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics and On the Heavens. If one counts both his direct and indirect influence, then, Aristotle’s concerns prove to be the most significant determinant of what has survived from the earliest period of Greek philosophy. Of course, Plato also had his influence on this transmission and the influence of Presocratic philosophy, especially in its Italian strains, runs deeper in Plato’s philosophy than in Aristotle’s. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s more systematic approach and his commitment to the utility of reviewing earlier attempts to address the philosophical problems with which he was concerned were more crucial to the development of ancient philosophical historiography.

In modern times, moreover, Aristotle’s surveys of earlier opinions in Physics 1 and Metaphysics A have continued to influence histories of early Greek philosophy in profound ways, despite the fact that his discussions of his predecessors are never purely historical. Harold Cherniss’ landmark study, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy, demonstrated this point in detail as a corrective to the largely uncritical reliance on the Aristotelian evidence among historians such as Zeller. More specifically, Cherniss argued that Aristotle’s perspective was so imbued with Platonic ideology and his own repertoire of concepts and analytical tools that he repeatedly distorted and misrepresented the views of the Presocratics so as to find in them confirmation of the truth of his own ideas. This would seem most obvious in Metaphysics A, in which Aristotle seeks to confirm his view that there are four main types of cause—the material, formal, efficient, and final cause—by showing that earlier thinkers progressively identified causes of just these and no other types. One lesson that should have been learned from Cherniss’ study is that every effort must be made to develop an account of early Greek philosophy that does not present it as progressing teleologically towards the culminating perfection of the Aristotelian system. Other historians, however, would cling to an Aristotelian narrative. Thus W. K. C. Guthrie argued that the judgment of as fine a philosopher as Aristotle must be regarded as generally sound and thus had no qualms about making the analysis of change and the successive isolation of the material, formal, and efficient causes central concerns in the development of Presocratic philosophy.

However, Aristotle’s treatment of his predecessors’ views regarding the principles of change does not in fact authorize the story of a progression from Milesian material monism, via the Eleatic reductio and rejection of all change, to the subsequent pluralistic systems of Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the early atomists. In the first place, Aristotle does not treat the Milesian Anaximander as a material monist. In Physics 1 Aristotle undertakes a preliminary review of what he takes to have been the relevant views of his Presocratic predecessors regarding the principles...