Ancient Concepts of Philosophy

William Jordan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138402638
• eBook ISBN: 9781134878390
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

For Socrates, philosophy, was the study of how to lead one's life, and for Wittgenstein, `philosophy leaves everything as it is.' Throughout this book, the work of the ancients is set in the context of the most recent thinking about the nature and value of philosophy, and the author questions how much there is to be learnt from the ancient philosophers' differing conceptions of the ideal life.

1: THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: THE FIRST PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS

THE MILESIANS

Philosophy emerged in the sixth century BC in Miletus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor, with three figures, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, who were interested in two main questions—’what is the world made of?’ and ‘how did the world originate?’. These three Milesians were not the first to ask, and answer, such questions; and today, discussion of them is the work of scientists as much as philosophers. None the less, these three Milesians are correctly regarded as the first philosophers, and in this chapter, I want to ask why this should be so. I shall argue that asking philosophical questions is part of the human condition, and that philosophical questioning arises naturally in the context of everyday life. But what marks out a philosopher is not, or is not simply, the questions that he asks, but the nature of his response to those questions. So I shall ask what it is about the thought of Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes that makes their response to these questions a philosophical response.

Let us ask first what it was about Miletus at the turn of the sixth century BC that led to these developments. Many theories have been advanced to account for the emergence of philosophy in Miletus. Aristotle pointed to an economic factor: man's interest in philosophical questions can only be liberated when all his time is not spent in a struggle for survival (Metaphysics 981bl7–24). Another idea (mentioned by Lloyd, 1979:235) is that magical beliefs are superseded by rational beliefs and rational discussion of beliefs, when men realise that they can control the world and are not at its mercy; this suggests that developments in technology are a crucial factor. A third suggestion is that reflection about ethics is forced on a primitive society as its members learn that people behave differently elsewhere, in other communities (see Horton, 1967).

All three theories are attractive. But, as Lloyd has argued, economic prosperity, technological advance and foreign travel were not confined to Greece of the sixth century BC and yet only in that context do we find an emergence of speculative thought (by which we mean, among other things, science and philosophy) (Lloyd, 1979, 234–238). We must ask what other factors may be involved.

Lloyd (1988) points to three such further factors. First there is a link between what Lloyd calls egotism and innovation. In the Greek lyric poets who succeed the oral poetry of Homer, we find a strong authorial ego, along with technical innovation, and poems that have the imprint of the author throughout. Lloyd cannot claim that the Milesian philosophers were egotistical in this sense—we do not have enough evidence to know whether or not they were egotistical. But he can, and does, claim that Heraclitus, their immediate successor, conforms to this pattern (see Lloyd, 1988: 59). Heraclitus claims that he has newly found the truth, and that it is he who has done so and no one else (below for comments). It may be then, that Greeks became at this period newly conscious of themselves as individuals, with a distinctive contribution to make to the world, and that with some individuals, this contribution took the form of philosophical thinking.

A second further factor is the development of alphabetic writing, and the spread of literacy through alphabetic texts (Lloyd, 1988:70ff.; Lloyd, 1979:239–40). These texts permit leisured critical scrutiny of their contents. And their existence makes it more likely that innovations will be recognised and will be cumulative. (And in philosophy, written texts may help in the survival of philosophical theories, and may thus foster competition between rival philosophical theories.) Furthermore, it may be that different forms of writing can themselves stimulate interest in different forms of question. (Thus the making of lists may stimulate an interest in questions of classification.)

But the advent of literacy cannot fully explain what happened in Miletus. For literacy often transforms primitive societies without giving rise to philosophical speculation. What is unique to speculative thought in ancient Greece, says Lloyd, is the development of the concept of proof as demonstration by deductive argu ment.¹ And this, he suggests, may originate from the political turmoil of the period, and the emergence of Greek democracy. It was necessary, both in taking political decisions and in arguing in the lawcourts, to pay due heed to the quality of argument and evidence in favour of a given decision. And attention to argument and evidence is precisely what is necessary for the successful practice of science and philosophy.²

Lloyd's argument from the emergence of democracy is undoubtedly powerful. I shall argue, however, that human beings asked philosophical questions long before the emergence of philosophy as a discipline—and certainly before that of deductive argument as a tool of philosophy. In the Greek context, the first philosopher we know to have used the method of deductive argument is Parmenides (below). But there is a sense in which it is quite proper to see the Milesians and Heraclitus as philosophers. More generally, we shall discover that there is no one method of enquiry that is the philosophical method par excellence: Nietzsche is as much a philosopher as Descartes, and Anaxagoras is just as philosophical as Parmenides. We may feel, then, that Lloyd pays undue attention to philosophical method in his characterisation of philosophy, and that his conception of philosophical method is somewhat impoverished.³ A full account of the nature of philosophy will include a discussion of the nature of philosophical questions and philosophical results.

And yet it may be that we must focus on the nature of philosophical methods if we are to be successful in distinguishing philosophical from non-philosophical responses to philosophical questions. It is helpful here to refer to Horton's comparison of the role of magic in traditional societies with the role of science in modern societies. Horton suggests that both science and magic stand in the same relation to our everyday beliefs, by providing a more sophisticated theory of the world; and both are concerned with explanation, prediction and control of the world (Horton, 1982:240). Traditional beliefs are conservative, but open to ‘gradual adaptive change’ (Horton, 1982:243). There is, however, no competition between rival theories of the world in traditional societies; and wisdom in a traditional society gains authority because it has been handed down by the ancients, and not because, for example, it fits best with experience. Modern societies, by contrast, are characterised by such inter-theoretic competition; and rival theories are (rationally) assessed in terms of their fit with experience.

Horton's thesis is not designed to account for the emergence of philosophy in ancient Greece. He thinks, in fact, that modern societies began to emerge at AD 1200 or so (Horton 1982:237). But there is, none the less, a moral we can draw from his work that is relevant to our enquiry. And that is, that what we are concerned with is not primarily the emergence of philosophy (and science), but that of a degree of success in these endeavours, or the emergence of two disciplines with histories. What happened in Miletus at the turn of the sixth century BC, as a result of the coincidence, at that time and place, of the various different factors we have mentioned above, was that there arose the possibility of making some progress in controlling, predicting and understanding the world.⁴ The impetus to ask philosophical and scientific questions is to be seen as an intrinsic part of human nature and is common to all societies; it does not stand in need of explanation.

But is the impetus to seek answers to philosophical questions an intrinsic part of human nature? Craig's contention that philosophers typically articulate worldviews that are widely shared (above) carries this implication. And the view that in an important sense we are all philosophers has been persuasively defended by Popper (1986) and by Bambrough (1986). Bambrough recalls his war service as a miner, and his experience then of discussing philosphical questions with miners (Bambrough, 1986: 63), and his later experiences, as Dean of St John's, of discussing philosophical questions with rebellious students (Bambrough, 1986:66). He refers to ‘the general conversation of mankind from which philosophy arises and to which it must return’ (Bambrough, 1986:65), and he concludes (though not, of course, solely on this autobiographical basis) that ‘even the geniuses among writers and thinkers—Shakespeare and Tolstoy, Plato and Wittgenstein—are doing to a higher power something that we all do and need to do’ (Bambrough, 1986:60). Popper argues that ‘all men and all women are philosophers, though some are more so than others’ (Popper, 1986:198). If we do not all have philosophical problems, we have at least philosphical prejudices (Popper, 1986:204); and professional philosophy is, or should be, the critical examination of widespread and influential theories we take for granted in everyday life (Popper, 1986:204–5). But ‘all men are philosophers, because in one way or another, all take up an attitude towards life and death’ (Popper, 1986:211).

It is sometimes thought, not just that all adult human beings are philosophers, but that so too are all children. Nagel thinks that ‘around the age of fourteen…many people start to think about philosophical problems on their own’ (Nagel, 1987:3), while Matthews (1980) has detected an interest in philosophical questions among younger children. He tells us, in the Introduction to his book Philosophy And The Young Child, how ‘It occurred to me that my task as a college philosophy teacher was to reintroduce my students to an activity that they had once enjoyed and found natural, but that they had later been socialized to abandon’ (Matthews, 1980:vii). His book opens with a six-year-old child asking the question ‘how can we be sure that everything is not a dream?’—a question asked and deemed worthy of discussion by Descartes in his first Meditation.⁵

On this view of philosophy, ‘the philosophical raw material comes directly from the world and our relation to it, not from writings of the past’ as Nagel puts it (Nagel, 1987:4). And the questions that, as human beings, we necessarily ask—questions about ethics (how we should live), knowledge (what we can hope to know and how we can hope to know), metaphysics (what there is in the world; our own place in the world)—questions that arise naturally from the everyday conduct of our lives.

On this view of the nature of philosophical questions, it will be easy to understand why philosophy emerged as soon as conditions were favourable. The emergence of philosophy is the emergence of a distinctively philosophical response to philosophical questions; these in turn arise from a natural desire we have as human beings to understand the world and to orient ourselves in relation to the world. (Other views of the nature of philosophical questions will be discussed in later chapters.)

We can now turn to the Milesians, and ask why their treatment of philosophical questions should be seen as philosophical in character.

Aristotle tells us that Thales thought that the arche, ‘principle’ or ‘origin’, was water, ‘perhaps taking this supposition from seeing the nurture of all things to be moist’ (Metaphysics A3). Aristotle's account seems tentative, and it is hard to interpret. It may be that Thales held that ‘everything is water’ or it may be that Thales held that ‘everything originates from water’ (thus KRS 1983:90). But there is not much doubt that Anaximenes held that ‘everything is air’. And of the other Presocratics, Heraclitus maintained that everything is fire (but there is also a cosmic cycle), Anaxagoras held that there is something of everything in everything (everything is a mixture), and the atomists held that everything was composed of atoms and void. We can be confident then that claims such as ‘everything is water’ were amongst the first philosophical claims— and I propose to proceed on the basis that this particular claim was actually advanced by Thales (although I accept that there is no conclusive evidence that this was Thales’ central doctrine). As we are really concerned with asking what sort of a claim this is, and why such claims should be regarded as philosophical in character, it will not matter too much if the claim is incorrectly ascribed to Thales.

Let us first ask what sort of a question a philosopher who claims that ‘everything is air’ or ‘everything is water’ is addressing. For Aristotle, it was not difficult to formulate the question to which such views are a response. Aristotle says, in Metaphysics Z that ‘This is the question to which men have always sought the answer, but which has always perplexed them—what is being?’ (1028b2–4). In Greek, the question is ti to on?, and Aristotle feels free to gloss the question immediately as tis he ousia.?, ‘what is substance?’. Guthrie comments that ‘the question “what is being?” is nothing vague or obscure, but a perfectly natural and sensible one to ask’ (Guthrie, 1981:204). Guthrie thinks that what the question means is ‘how are we to set about answering the question “what is it?” when confronted with any object?’ (Guthrie, 1981: 208). Aristotle himself thinks that we can answer the question ‘what is it?’ in many different ways (below). He says, However, in Metaphysics A3 that the Milesians were primarily interested in material causation, in the question of what things are composed. A Milesian, on this view, will always answer the question ‘what is it?’ in the same way. Whatever we point to, he will tell us, for example, that ‘it is water’.

It may be, then, that the Milesians were not asking ‘what is being?’, or ‘what is substance?’ but ‘what is the world made of?’. And about this latter question, Williams contends that

it is one of the achievements of intellectual progress that [this question] now has no determinate meaning; if a child asks it, we do not give him one or many answers to it, but rather lead him to the point where he sees why it should be replaced with a number of different questions. Of course, there is a sense in which modern particle theory is a descendant of enquiries started by the Milesians, but that descent has so modified the questions that it would be wrong to say that there is one unambiguous question to which we give the answer “electrons, protons, etc.” and Thales (perhaps) gave the answer “water”.

(Williams, 1981:208)

Similarly, the question ‘what is everything made of?’ is criticised by Berlin (1950). Berlin sees the propensity of philosophers to ask this question as unfortunate, and remarks that it is really a scientific one. Philosophers give non-empirical answers to the question, but the only meaningful one would be empirical. Their answers cannot be doubted on empirical grounds; but ‘a proposition that cannot significantly be denied or doubted can offer us no information’ (Berlin, 1950:76–77). Berlin, of course, is writing in the climate of logical positivism; but thinking along these lines also seems to lie behind Williams’ denial that there is a single coherent question here. Not that Williams shares the logical positivist attitude towards metaphysics; but he does, like Berlin, think that a philosophical question is entangled here with a scientific one; and he does, implicitly, agree with Berlin that the discussions we find in the Greek philosophers of the question ti to on? are on the wrong track. Berlin implies that they asked a scientific question which they mistook for a philosophical one; Williams implies that they failed to distinguish at least two separate questions.

But it is not self-evident that the question ti to on? is either ambiguous or unclear. In the early years of this century G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell took the (related) question ‘what is there?’ to be entirely coherent. Indeed G.E.Moore holds that the ‘first and most interesting problem of philosophy’ is to give ‘a general description of the whole Universe’, or for philosphers ‘to express their opinions as to what there is or is not in the Universe’ (Moore, 1953:23). And he thinks that different answers are returned, in this task, by common sense, on the one hand, and by various different philosophers, on the other, some of whom add something to common sense, and some of whom contradict common sense. Russell, in his Problems Of Philosophy, drawing on Moore's work, takes the table on which he is writing as an example of an object of common sense, and remarks that for philosphers it is a ‘problem full of surprising possibilities’. The philosophers’ answers to the question ‘what sort of object is it?’

diverge from the views of ordinary mortals… Leibniz tells us it is a community of souls; Berkeley tells us it is an idea in the mind of God; sober science, scarcely less wonderful, tells us it is a vast collection of electric charges in violent motion… doubt suggests that perhaps there is no table at all.

(Russell, 1912:6)

Moore and Russell, then, hold that there is a single question here to which common sense, science and various different philosophers return different, and conflicting answers. Are science and philosophy offering more sophisticated theories about the world than common sense, as Russell seems to suggest in this passage? Or is Williams right to diagnose an absence of conflict here, once the questions have been clarified?

In favour of Williams’ view, we can argue that the context in which someone asks the question ‘what is there?’ will indeed help determine the kind of answer we will give to it. And perhaps the very fact that different answers, or different kinds of answer— scientific and philosophical, philosophical and common sense—can be proffered to this question, is some indication that the question is in fact ambiguous (or that is has no clear meaning). But at the same time, we must acknowledge that philosophers (if not scientists) have often taken themselves to be either contradicting, or adding to, the common sense view of what there is. And certainly, they try hard to contradict and supplement the views of other philosophers. Moreover, there remains a major philosophical problem of how we should relate what Williams has termed the ‘absolute’ conception of the world to more local and particular representations of it (Williams, 1978).

We shall return to the question of how the results of philosophical reflection or scientific enquiry relate to our common sense view of the world in pp. 54–9 below. Let us here simply accept that scientists, philosophers, and common sense, all, on occasion, ask the question ‘what is there?’, and examine the Milesians’ answers to this question.

It seems clear that in asserting that ‘everything is water’ or ‘everything is air’, Thales and Anaximenes were not aiming to formulate the traditional wisdom of Milesian society or to articulate a common sense worldview. Dummett has plausibly suggested that common sense does not offer a ‘single, permanent, unified “theory of the world”‘ (Dummett, 1981:18), but that it is ‘culturally conditioned and subject to evolution’ (Dummett 1981: 20). But it seems clear that at no time or place has it been a common sense view that the world is composed of water or air. Rather, the world is composed of a diversity of inanimate physical objects such as tables and chairs, together with a diversity of animate objects such as human beings.

As adults, we do not reflect very much on what there is, or on what the world is composed of. We take the answers to these questions for granted in everyday life. (Children, of course, do ask questions about what there is as they try to understand the workings of...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
• REFERENCES TO ANCIENT TEXTS
• INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY ANCIENT AND MODERN
• 1: THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS: THE FIRST PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS THE MILESIANS
• 2: SOCRATES: A METHOD OF DOUBT
• 3: PLATO: THE LIFE OF PHILOSOPHY
• 4: ARISTOTLE: PHILOSOPHY, METHOD, BEING AND THE GOOD LIFE
• 5: THE HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHERS: PHILOSOPHY, NATURE AND THERAPY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY