The Columbia History of Western Philosophy

Richard Popkin

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9780231500340
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Richard Popkin has assembled 63 leading scholars to forge a highly approachable chronological account of the development of Western philosophical traditions. From Plato to Wittgenstein and from Aquinas to Heidegger, this volume provides lively, in-depth, and up-to-date historical analysis of all the key figures, schools, and movements of Western philosophy.

The Columbia History significantly broadens the scope of Western philosophy to reveal the influence of Middle Eastern and Asian thought, the vital contributions of Jewish and Islamic philosophers, and the role of women within the tradition. Along with a wealth of new scholarship, recently discovered works in 17th- and 18th-century philosophy are considered, such as previously unpublished works by Locke that inspire a new assessment of the evolution of his ideas. Popkin also emphasizes schools and developments that have traditionally been overlooked. Sections on Aristotle and Plato are followed by a detailed presentation on Hellenic philosophy and its influence on the modern developments of materialism and scepticism. A chapter has been dedicated to Jewish and Moslem philosophical development during the Middle Ages, focusing on the critical role of figures such as Averroës and Moses Maimonides in introducing Christian thinkers to classical philosophy. Another chapter considers Renaissance philosophy and its seminal influence on the development of modern humanism and science.

Turning to the modern era, contributors consider the importance of the Kaballah to Spinoza, Leibniz, and Newton and the influence of popular philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn upon the work of Kant. This volume gives equal attention to both sides of the current rift in philosophy between continental and analytic schools, charting the development of each right up to the end of the 20th century.

Each chapter includes an introductory essay, and Popkin provides notes that draw connections among the separate articles. The rich bibliographic information and the indexes of names and terms make the volume a valuable resource.

Combining a broad scope and penetrating analysis with a keen sense of what is relevant for the modern reader, The Columbia History of Western Philosophy will prove an accessible introduction for students and an informative overview for general readers.

1

Origins of Western Philosophic Thinking

INTRODUCTION

Philosophy is the attempt to give an account of what is true and what is important, based on a rational assessment of evidence and arguments rather than myth, tradition, bald assertion, oracular utterances, local custom, or mere prejudice. As with many of the arts and sciences that make up Western civilization and culture, philosophy was first defined as such by the Greeks around the fifth century B.C.E. However, evidence suggests that many of the problems, concepts, and approaches that became known as philosophy in Greece originated in other places and times. Of these sources, three are particularly notable: “Asian” or “oriental” (including Phoenician, Assyrian, Hittite, and Iranian influences); Hebrew (or biblical); and Egyptian.

The literary remains of oriental, Egyptian, and Hebrew cultures—works such as Gilgamesh, Kumarbi, The Song of Villikummi, Enuma Elish (the Babylonian story of creation), and the Hebrew Bible—display a fusion of what we call science, philosophy, and religion, though it is usually referred to as mythology. Mythology is, in part, a primitive attempt to understand the world. In general, mythopoeic (myth-making) thought has a different logical, imaginative, and emotional character than the kind of speculative thought that has come to characterize philosophy.

In these ancient works, for example, time and space are qualitative and concrete rather than quantitative and abstract, as they are generally considered today. Nevertheless, such religious myths show a concern for the origins and ends of things. They also see the visible order of the world as embedded in an invisible one that is maintained by human customs and institutions. This concept, despite its mythological source, motivated the more distinctly logical, rational, and speculative thought of the earliest Greek philosophers. Moreover, rather dramatic mythopoeic conceptions of nature—strife between the divine and demonic; the chaotic and cosmic aspects of the myths—persist in the writings of various pre-Socratics and in Plato’s Timaeus.

Oriental and Egyptian thought came to influence early philosophy by way of widespread Greek commerce throughout the Mediterranean. The “public workers,” mentioned by Homer in the Odyssey, for instance, who migrated into the Greek world, brought with them crafts, images, and cult practices, along with ideas about the gods, the cosmos, and the origins of human beings. The spread of these ideas was helped by a shared Indo-European language base.

“Asian” Sources and Influences

To many nineteenth-century European scholars, “Asian origins” of Greek thought were inconceivable. We know now, however, that the Greek alphabet and system of writing came from Phoenicia (present-day Syria and Lebanon). Archives with documents preserved on clay tablets and even libraries of literary texts were inherited from the Babylonians and the Sumerians. The importance of written language, books, and libraries for the development of Greek thought cannot be overestimated. The Greek language has also incorporated many words that are derived from various other Indo-European languages.

Anaximander and Anaximenes, for example, can clearly be seen to have been influenced by contemporaneous “Asian” ideas, such as a materialist explanatory impulse. They also seem involved in a tradition of metaphysical speculation found in earlier Iranian texts. These texts would likely have come to the attention of independent-minded Greeks living on the coast of Asia Minor. From this point of view, Heraclitus, to take another example, seems not so much a secular “philosopher” as essentially a religious thinker who pursued the minimum necessary physics and whose religious thought was strongly influenced by Persian religion. This suggests that he knew some learned Persians. Iranian influence can also be seen in the Greek theological and cosmological systems developed in the late sixth and early fifth centuries, such as those in Homer, Hesiod, Alcman, and Thales, as well as in Pythagoras, who was known as a “priest-prophet.”

The crucial period of this Iranian influence was from 750 to 600 B.C.E., when significant changes were occurring in the economic, social, and political organization of Greece. These changes included the transition from imperial kings to more autonomous city-states and the expansion of colonization efforts, which both spread Hellenic culture around the Mediterranean and brought outside influences to bear upon it. At the same time, great changes can be seen in Greek art, with the development of vase painting, architecture, and sculpture; in literature, in the works of Homer and Hesiod, in lyric poetry, and in expressions of behavior standards; and in thought. This is also the period to which most recent scholarship traces the origins of Greek literacy. These influences, however, do not continue to be felt through the fifth century B.C.E. Instead, Greek thought turned inward to digest what it had taken in.

Biblical Sources and Influences

Unlike these “oriental” influences, the impact of Judeo-Christian thinking on the main stream of Western philosophy came somewhat later, not beginning until the Hellenistic age. In particular, three ideas that have proven extremely fruitful for later Western thought derive from Judeo-Christianity and are not found in earlier Greek or Roman thought: creation, history, and personality.

Monotheism, often assumed to have been the main contribution of Judeo-Christian thought to the Western tradition, was actually not a new idea. It appears, for example, in the works of Xenophanes, Plato, and Aristotle. The absolute transcendence of the biblical God, who creates the universe and thus becomes the ground of all existence, however, was a new concept. It implied an extremely high degree of abstraction that far surpassed prior religious traditions but cohered with the directions of Greek philosophy.

In the Bible’s narrative of a people’s evolution from its selection by this god to its settlement in a homeland—a story in which such events as the Flood, the Exodus, the making of a king, and the building of the temple derive especial importance from their contribution to the story’s outcome—history acquires a meaning that it lacked in older and other traditions. Similarly, the poignancy and loneliness of the particular individuals whose stories are told—Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, and Ruth—provide the foundation for a rich theological and philosophical literature about personality.

Egyptian Sources and Influences

Egyptian influence on Greek culture has long been recognized in a number of areas, such as architecture and geometry. Elements of Egyptian religious myths have parallels in other ancient Near Eastern cultures. The wanderings of Innini resemble those of the Sumerian Tammuz and of Greek Demeter seeking Persephone. It is believed that the Egyptian Osiris derives from the same archetype as the Greek Dionysus, patron of a powerful mystery cult that arose in the sixth century. Orphic mystery cults consider human nature to be in part divine and remain influential in Greek theories of the soul.

Such similarities and apparent borrowings or adaptations suggest that early Greek thought was as influenced in specific and limited ways by that of Egypt as it was by that of Phoenicia, Sumeria, and Babylonia. Recently, however, a much stronger case has been set forth. In 1987, Martin Bernal, an eminent expert on Chinese, published a most provocative book entitled Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. The first part of this projected four-volume study is subtitled “The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985.” Using evidence from philology, ancient history, and many other fields, Bernal advanced the thesis that much of what we call “classical civilization” came from Egypt and Phoenician and Hebraic sources. He further claimed that it was only when European racism came into full flower from the late eighteenth century onward that scholars tried to depict ancient Greece as a completely autonomous world that provided the complete foundations for European civilization. Such racism, according to Bernal, deliberately demeaned the Middle East and Africa as undeveloped, low-level areas with practically no influence on the “glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome,” or on the subsequent civilizations in Europe.

Bernal demonstrated that in ancient times Greek authors such as Herodotus and Plato traveled to Egypt, were much impressed by what they saw there, and brought their Egyptian experiences back home. The ancient Greeks accepted their involvement with the high civilization of Egypt in terms of art, architecture, agriculture, and so on. At the same time, basic intellectual tools such as the alphabet came from Phoenicia, while Greek mythology borrowed from both Egyptian and Middle Eastern cosmologies.

Bernal mentioned but did not stress that from the high Renaissance until the eighteenth century, it was a commonplace among humanists that wisdom originated with the Egyptian priest Hermes and the Hebrew leader Moses and was passed on as the “perennial philosophy” to European thinkers throughout the ages. It was generally accepted that Philo Judeaus, a leader of the Alexandrian Jewish community and a contemporary of Jesus, was right in saying that “Plato was just Moses talking Greek.”

This anchoring of European thought in ancient Egypt and Palestine was rejected as part of the Enlightenment’s critique of the Judeo-Christian tradition. By the mid-eighteenth century it was claimed that Jewish and “oriental” philosophy were not real philosophies, and that real philosophy had started in Greece and was developed truly and fully in postmedieval Europe. The rejection of the formerly accepted picture of where knowledge and wisdom came from, according to Bernal, was buttressed by European, principally German, scholars, who propounded ancient Greece as the unique, independent source of rational thought, philosophy, and science. Their motivation was largely based in racism, denying any dependence on swarthy Egyptians or Jews or Phoenicians, at a time when European colonial empires were pillaging the Third World.

Bernal’s thesis has aroused much controversy. Some scholars in Afro-American studies have been delighted to find an eminent ally to argue their case that modern civilization derived from black Africa and moved northward to Europe from Egypt. Others in Jewish studies have been delighted to advance the case that there were basic, important Semitic influences on Greek civilization. On the other hand, almost all classicists have expressed outrage first at Bernal and his evidence, then at the advocates of other causes who have adopted and adapted his views. Articles continue to appear, challenging point after point in Bernal’s argument. Scholars raised in the tradition of post-Enlightenment studies have challenged Bernal’s claims that the leading figures in classical studies of the last two centuries were motivated by racial prejudice. It has, on the other hand, become popular to claim that civilization came out of darkest Africa and that there has been a racist conspiracy to cover up this fact.

We cannot here fully adjudicate the arguments spawned by Bernal’s work, of which the mind-boggling second volume that gives linguistic evidence for his thesis has also appeared. Clearly, however, his work has alarmed traditionalists and encouraged innovators. It has given new impetus to the consideration of the many possible sources of the scientific and philosophical ideas that we first find articulated in texts from ancient Greece.

The ongoing quest to understand the ancient world, the interactions of various groups and cultures within it, the movements of peoples, ideas, and religions, involves finding new artifacts, reinterpreting artifacts and documents, analyzing economic and political conditions, comparing religious practices, beliefs, and ornaments, and so on. Bernal’s thesis is another contribution along the continuum of explanations of “our” understanding of the ancient world, including classical Greece. It does not necessarily undermine the ongoing project of improving our understanding of classical Greece.

—RHP

Foundations in Prephilosophic Greek Culture

Various aspects of Greek culture provide a foundation for what became philosophy, as do some resonances from other cultures. Wisdom (sophia), for example, can be seen as a traditional Greek value (see, for example, Homer, the Iliad, 2:15.42). Also, there is an old list of seven sages (sophoi or sophistai) that provides a link from sophistry to philosophy. The sophists’ “wisdom” is, however, related mostly to poetry and politics, and to “disinterested science” perhaps only in the case of Thales. Generally, sophia refers to skill with words (as in poetry, rhetoric, and knowledge) and deeds (as in politics).

Traditional poetry concerned itself with themes and issues that were later the subjects of philosophical speculation, such as the human need for moderation illustrated in the Iliad, asserted by lyric poets such as Archilocus, and analyzed in Plato’s Charmides and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Prephilosophical Greek culture also had an accepted set of traditional and religious conceptions of the world, the gods, nature, and proper human conduct. Over time, these came to be criticized and “rationalized.” The gods were reinterpreted and moral standards were brought under their direction. These reinterpretations were part of the move toward what we now call philosophy.

These various Greek and non-Greek themes and conceptions inform the background of Greek philosophy. We will now turn to the earliest philosophical thinkers that we know of in the Greek tradition: the pre-Socratics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernal, M. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Burkert, W. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Frankel, H. Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Trans. M. Hadas and J. Willis. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Frankfort, H., et al. Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventures of Ancient Man. Baltimore: Pelican, 1973.

Momigliano, A. Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Snell, B. The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought. Trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953.

West, M. L. Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

—THOMAS M. ROBINSON

THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS

The thought of the pre-Socratics is preserved for us only in secondary sources. Some of the latter, such as Aristotle, wrote not much later than the pre-Socratics. Others, such as Hippolytus, a third-century Christian controversalist, and Diogenes Laertius, a third-century Greek author of The Lives of Eminent Philosophers (hereafter DL), wrote nearly a millennium later. Sometimes there are extant direct quotations, sometimes not, often causing major problems of interpretation. Almost a century after the first edition of the collected evidence about the pre-Socratics by Diels and Kranz, much still remains in dispute, including even what can be considered evidence, primary or secondary. This makes discussion of the pre-Socratics necessarily speculative on many points. Here, direct quotations from individual pre-Socratics are prefixed by the letter B, following the conventionally accepted Diels-Kranz notation.

The Early Ionians

A rational, as distinct from a mythological, approach to what we now consider philosophy is generally acknowledged to have been first elaborated in Miletus, Ionia (on what is now the western Turkish Mediterranean coast), by three thinkers: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Thales, born in the mid-seventh century B.C.E., was active in the early sixth century B.C.E. He seems to have believed that water is in some way central to our understanding of things. This concept was probably based upon a belief that the earth floated on water, and that all things originate with water. Although Aristotle, from whom we derive much of our knowledge of Thales, is widely believed to have shared this assumption about Thales, it is far from obvious that he also claimed that all things are in some way water. Indeed, although it is doubtful that Aristotle referred to water as the “principle” (arche) of all things (the term seems too technical for the period), it may perhaps have been used by him. The term could be Aristotle’s own importation, but in its more well-attested sense, common in Homer, of “source” or “beginning.”

Current opinion holds that Thales believed that whatever is real is in some significant sense “alive.” According to Aristotle, Thales “thought that all things are full of gods,” and as evidence of such powers even in apparently inanimate nature he points to the remarkable properties of what was referred to as the “Magnesian stone” (DL, 1.24). Although Aristotle’s statement is too slight to serve as a sure foundation for judgment, it seems more likely that Thales was arguing for the broader presence of life forces in the world than most people imagined, rather than that the real in its totality is alive.

His younger contemporary from Miletus, Anaximander, born toward the end of the seventh century B.C.E., found the explanatory principle of things in what he called “the apeiron,” a word that might be translated as “the indefinite,” “the boundless,” or both. This opens up the possibility that the apeiron is both immeasurably large in its temporal and physical extent and also qualitatively indefinite in that it is without measurable inner boundaries. One very plausible reason for preferring the apeiron over Thales’ water was, Aristotle suggested, that if any of the four major worldly elements—earth, air, fire, or water—were temporally or spatially boundless, it would have so swamped the other three that it is hard to see how they could in fact ever have emerged. But there is no surviving evidence from Anaximander himself to confirm that he shared this line of thought. The apeiron...