Historical Introduction to Philosophy

Albert B. Hakim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315509839
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This text/anthology is designed to lead beginning students to an appreciation of Western philosophy through an exploration of its history, the problems (classical questions) it has dealt with, and the major philosophers and their works within that historical setting.

PART ONE

THE ANCIENT PERIOD

The Spirit of Greek Philosophy

Just as it is impossible to think of a Renaissance figure without recalling the vibrant intellectual environment of that incredible epoch or of a seventeenth-century savant apart from the mathematical enthusiasm of the time, or of a contemporary scientist isolated from the whirlwind of technology, it is also impossible to think of philosophy without considering the history, heritage, ancestry, or culture in which it germinated. This does not mean that there was always a hand-in-glove relationship between philosophy and the prevailing culture, because often it was the prevailing culture that philosophers opposed; nevertheless, philosophers, like the rest of us, are children of their time.

The Greek world, where philosophy was born, included not only present-day Greece but extended east to the shores of Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) and the many islands in the Aegean, and west to Sicily and southern Italy; though not a political entity, it was united by race, language, custom, religious feeling, and tradition. In this Greek world, long before the first recognized philosopher appeared, a culture already existed: Civic life existed in city-states like Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth; the rich literature of Homer and Hesiod prevailed, filled with myths, heroes, and legends; and religion suffused the

Greeks’ daily life, though it was fragmented into countless beliefs and rites proper to the gods and goddesses who lorded it over all. Subsequently, Greek culture was enriched with the poetry of Solon (c. 640–558 B.C.), as well as by the wise measures he took as a respected statesman. Some one hundred to two hundred years later, in its flowering as the dominant city-state, Athens saw the rise of its three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and two of its great historians, Herodotus and Thucydides. The genius of Greece created such a climate of poetry, drama, religion, music, science, polity, and even sport that the total Greek experience was unparalleled in the history of the West. Part of this experience was philosophy itself as it unfolded from its beginnings with Thales, through the golden age of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. to the Stoics and Epicureans in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C.

If we ask what kinds of things the early philosophers thought about, we find the classic response in the opening pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters, for example, about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe.” Indeed, the first philosophers of Greece were awed by the world of nature, a world offering an endless variety of activity, of elements, of shapes, of movement, of bodily things both living and nonliving. Such a world inspired wonder—wonder both in the sense of admiration and in the sense of responding to an invitation to inquire why things are the way they are. This same spirit inspired the later philosophers too as they broadened the horizons of their predecessors, culminating in the achievements of Plato and Aristotle, who between them inaugurated two distinct, but complementary, traditions in the history of philosophy.

In a sense, Greek philosophy never died, for it continued to nourish generation after generation of thinkers. Of course, not every aspect of Greek philosophy produced its counterpart in subsequent thought, but allowing for the vagaries of history, its influence has been pervasive. For many Christian philosopher-theologians in the age that was its direct inheritor, Greek philosophy was the vehicle of reason (and, for some, providentially appointed) for conveying revealed truth, whether in claiming the existence of the very God who revealed, or in establishing the framework for temporal man’s imaging the eternal, or in providing rational support for the immortality of the soul. Further indebtedness to Greek philosophy is seen in every subsequent inquiry, down to our day, into the meaning of life, ethics, psychology, knowledge, death, destiny, cosmos, law, government, society, and happiness; indeed, two great Greek themes, the one and the many (unity in reality) and being and becoming (permanence in change), are so basic that they emerge in different guises throughout philosophy and can be used as guidelines in writing its history. Specific instances of influence aside, the priceless bequest of Greek philosophy to its heirs is its spirit of wonder in the face of reality. All else is derived from this spirit. To study this period is both a privilege and a necessity; it is its own reward.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Armstrong, A. H. An Introduction to Ancient Philosophy. Lanham, MD, Littlefield, 1981.

Barnes, J. Early Greek Philosophy. New York, Penguin, 2002.

Guthrie, W. R. C. A History of Greek Philosophy, 6 vols. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1962–1981.

Jaeger, W. Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. New York, Oxford University Press, 1965.

1

The Predecessors of Socrates

The Pre-Socratics

The philosophers preceding Socrates lived in the sixth and early fifth centuries B.C. and are collectively called the pre-Socratics. Their original writings suffered the fate of many works of antiquity and do not exist today, so that we do not have direct access to their thought. Nevertheless, through quotations and references to their work by later authors who either did have access to them or were in a position to pass on received information, some of their ideas have come down to us. By painstaking research, scholars have been able to reconstruct something of their background and to develop a picture of the main lines of their thought.

Philosophy began in that part of the Greek world known as Ionia, roughly corresponding to the western part of present-day Turkey and some nearby islands. Why philosophy originated in Ionia is a matter of conjecture, but it is certainly true that philosophy thrives along with other refinements of civilization, and the land whose creative impulse inaugurated the Greek epics inaugurated philosophy as well. The coastal cities of Asia Minor, having developed as sea and land termini joining east and west, tended to become active intellectual centers too and such a one was Miletus. It counted among its citizens Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, the first three Greek philosophers who are presumed to have had a successive teacher–student relationship. Because of the region, they are referred to as Ionians; because of their citizenship, they are referred to as Milesians; and because of their primary concern with the natural world, or cosmos, they are often referred to as cosmologists.

Thales of Miletus: The Problem of the One and the Many

The philosopher generally recognized as the first in Western philosophy was Thales, who was born in the last quarter of the seventh century B.C. and who flourished in Miletus in the early part of the sixth century. Though he apparently wrote little, he was acknowledged as a man of great wisdom, displaying an enormous range of knowledge as an astronomer, a mathematician, and a statesman. He was accorded the honor of being listed among the Seven Sages of Greece. In converting his theoretical knowledge into practice, he seemed to have little trouble: he gave ship pilots the means of charting their course by the stars; he made recommendations for the establishment of effective governing bodies; and once, when the soldiers of King Croesus could not cross a river running in front of them, he is said to have diverted the flow so that the river ran behind them. His practical sense took an economic turn too when, on one occasion, having predicted a large olive crop, he cornered the market on olive presses so that the growers had to rent them from him—a story to which Aristotle wryly adds that Thales demonstrated how easy it was for philosophers to become rich if they so wanted. But not even his renown, Plato writes, prevented a servant girl from laughing at him when he “was looking up to study the stars and tumbled down a well. She scoffed at him for being so eager to know what was happening in the sky that he could not see what lay at his feet.”

From his observation of the all-pervading presence of water in the growth and nourishment of living things, and from his belief that the earth rests on water, Thales concluded that all things derive in some way from water. In terms of the one and the many previously mentioned, the many things of the natural world are held together as one, as a universe, because water is their underlying principle and the source of their unity. We must not be put off by the seeming naiveté of Thales; he clearly saw that, where there are many things, no unity is possible unless there is a basis for it, unless the many share it. In his view of water as the primal element, Thales discovered what, for him, was the substrate of unity in the cosmos and the basic reason why the cosmos was able to render itself shareable in the manifold of physical things.

He was making sure that reality as a whole did not rob the individual of its individuality. In fact, the relationship between the one and the many is reciprocal, and it is an enduring insight that the very uniqueness of the individual flows from its relationship to reality as a whole. Philosophers have to maintain a delicate balance: not to emphasize the one (reality as a whole) at the expense of the many (as individuals), or the many at the expense of the one. The reciprocal relationship is what supports both the individual and the whole.

Add to this notion of cosmic unity the belief, for Thales, that all things are “full of gods.” Now there is no notion in Greek literature that has a meaning more variegated than that of “god” as it fluctuates from sublime divinity to barely more than human, yet, it is consistent with what we have seen already that Thales was trying to express the vitality, the life of the cosmos, which, as god-filled, commands our wonder and our reverence all the more.

The naming of someone as the “first philosopher” is a highly privileged designation, especially when you consider the bounteous culture of early Greece. We can be sure that others philosophized long before Thales, but he is the first one we have a record of; that is, the first in the recorded history of the West to be so recognized. By the same token if the goal of philosophy is to seek the explanations of things, hasn’t the human mind sought them since the beginning of time? What is there so distinctive about Thales in virtue of which we call him a philosopher, let alone the first? The term philosopher refers to one who looks for a rational explanation of his experience of reality, who tries to grasp the real as a matter of understanding, as opposed, let us say, to a magical, mythical, fictional, or even a revealed explanation of things. Despite the fact that Thales was wrong-headed about the physical role of water in unifying the cosmos, he was right-headed in the way he sought for a rational explanation.

Faithful to the central thought of Thales, the other Milesians sought elsewhere for the unifying factor of the cosmos. Anaximander, relying perhaps on the notion that things are generated only by their opposites, believed that the common origin of all things was completely unlike that which was generated; if that which was generated was finite and bounded and many, then that which generated it was Infinite and Boundless and One. For Anaximenes the unifying substrate was air, from which, by its properties of condensation and rarefaction, the many were formed.

Pythagoras of Croton: The Adaptability of Mathematics

In his enthusiasm for geometry, Thales proved to be a herald of the love affair the Greeks had with mathematics. Wherever there is an intellectual ferment in the natural sciences, there is bound to be one in mathematics as well. This was true of Greece, where all the cultural ingredients were present for science and mathematics to grow. We can ask what there is about mathematics which makes for the incredible fascination it has over the human mind. Perhaps it is because mathematics extends the mind and leads it to unassailable conclusions or because it produces order, organizing things under the umbrella of unity, thereby doing precisely what the mind naturally yearns to do. At any rate, mathematics is the favorite language of the sciences in its capacity to express their findings, to unify them, and to open up new avenues of discovery.

There was every reason then for Pythagoras, the sixth-century mathematician-philosopher who spent his early years on the island of Samos and his later years at Croton in southern Italy, in his inquiry into unity, to think that real things and their relationships are somehow expressible by number, if indeed they are not actual numbers themselves. There must be a profound analogy between the unity of numbers and the unity of the universe. Though there are many numbers, they are still one, for no number is conceivable without 1;further, every number other than 1 is generated by 1. So, without surrendering the difference between a given number and all other numbers, or differences like odd and even, all numbers must be seen as belonging to the unity of their common origin in 1. And if many numbers are the expression of a basic harmonious unity, there is no reason why the many things of the universe cannot be the expression of a basic unity as well. That at least seemed to be Pythagoras’ hope, and he received some encouragement from his interest in music when he discovered that the interval between notes on the musical scale can be expressed numerically, depending on the length of the string required to produce them; if physical length and tone are so easily expressed by number, perhaps the rest of the universe is too.

For an ardent thinker like Pythagoras, mathematics became the touchstone for a deeper vision of cosmic unity; for if the number 1 is found in the composition of every other number, and if all numbers share the unity of 1, then can we not envision that at the head of all reality stands the One, Unity, and that all things share it? It is the culmination of man’s desire to rest in a transcendent peace. The possibility of sharing the One was, for Pythagoras, the mystical aspect of mathematics. There is a level of reality that man is drawn to, that he does not truly comprehend, yet is convinced that reaching it is his calling as a human being. This idea may not be found explicitly in the works of Pythagoras, but it is the only way in which our knowledge of his teaching and his life fit together.

An anecdote informs us that Pythagoras believed in the transmigration of souls; that is, the soul does not cease to exist when the body dies but is reembodied in another: “And once, they saw h...