They shared a particular view of philosophical progress, in which the problems that define the philosophical enterprise are seen [...] ever more clearly, and in which their answers become more and more apparent. Aristotle in the first book of his Metaphysics, and Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy saw the teachings of the earlier philosophers they recorded as halting steps in the direction of a vision they were themselves to expound. Only someone with supreme self-confidence as a philosopher could write its history in such a way.
The temptation for most philosopher historians is to see philosophy not as culminating in their own work, but rather as a gradual progress to whatever philosophical system is currently in fashion. But this temptation should be resisted. There is no force that guarantees philosophical progress in any particular direction. Indeed, it can be called into question whether philosophy makes any progress at all.
The major philosophical problems, some say, are all still being debated after centuries of discussion, and are no nearer to any definitive resolution. [...] Most dissertations that begin with literature searches seek to show that all work hitherto has left a gap that will now be filled by the author’s original research. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is no exception. His not too hidden agenda is to show how previous philosophers neglected the remaining member of the quartet of causes: the final cause, which was to play a most significant role in his own philosophy of nature. The earliest philosophy, he concluded, is, on all subjects, full of babble, since in its beginnings it is but an infant.
Note: history as slanted evidence to support self-importance; russell did this; can you take the ego out of history? [e]
Location 74
Highlights (159)
There are those who think that the major task of philosophy is to cure us of intellectual confusion. On this modest view of the philosopher’s role, the tasks to be addressed differ across history, since each period needs a different form of therapy. The knots into which the undisciplined mind ties itself differ from age to age, and different mental motions are necessary to untie the knots. A prevalent malady of our own age, for instance, is the temptation to think of the mind as a computer, whereas earlier ages were tempted to think of it as a telephone exchange, a pedal organ, a homunculus, or a spirit. Maladies of earlier ages may be dormant, such as the belief that the stars are living beings; or they may return, such as the belief that the stars enable one to predict human behaviour.
Note: evolving era-specific confusion; are they different tasks or different metaphors? or both? has the mind as a computer metaphor been fully unpacked in terms of cultural operating systems, beyond McKenna's memes? [e]
Location 134I should make clear at the outset that in the case of many of my historical subjects I write of necessity as an amateur rather than as an expert. In an age when the academic study of past philosophers has expanded exponentially, no one person can read more than a fraction of the vast secondary literature that has proliferated in recent years around every one of the thinkers discussed in this volume. I have myself contributed to the scholarly discussion of several of the great philosophers of the past, in particular Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and I have published monographs on some of the subjects covered by my thematic chapters, such as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion. But in compiling the bibliographies for the earlier parts I was made aware how vast was the extent of material I have not read in comparison with the amount that I am familiar with. Any single author who attempts to cover the entire history of philosophy is quickly made aware that in matters of detail he is at an enormous disadvantage in comparison with the scholars who have made individual philosophers their field of expertise. By compensation, a history written by a single hand may be able to emphasize features of the history of philosophy that are less obvious in the works of committees of specialists, just as an aerial photograph may bring out features of a landscape that are almost invisible to those close to the ground.
Note: depth vs breadth
Location 230Aristotle offers a classification of the earliest Greek philosophers in accordance with the structure of his system of the four causes. Scientific inquiry, he believed, was above all inquiry into the causes of things; and there were four different kinds of cause: the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause.
Note: elments, actor, proportion, end
Location 370Only two sayings are recorded of Thales of Miletus (c.625–545 BC), traditionally the founding father of Greek philosophy. They illustrate the mélange of science and religion, for one of them was ‘All things are full of gods’, and the other was ‘Water is the first principle of everything’. Thales was a geometer, the first to discover the method of inscribing a right-angled triangle in a circle; he celebrated this discovery by sacrificing an ox to the gods (D.L. 1. 24–5). He measured the height of the pyramids by measuring their shadows at the time of day when his own shadow was as long as he was tall. He put his geometry to practical use: having proved that triangles with one equal side and two equal angles are congruent, he used this result to determine the distance of ships at sea. Thales also had a reputation as an astronomer and a meteorologist. In addition to predicting the eclipse, he is said to have been the first to show that the year contained 365 days, and to determine the dates of the summer and winter solstices. He studied the constellations and made estimates of the sizes of the sun and moon. He turned his skill as a weather forecaster to good account: foreseeing an unusually good olive crop, he took a lease on all the oil mills and made a fortune through his monopoly. Thus, Aristotle said, he showed that philosophers could easily be rich if they wished (Pol. 1. 11. 1259a6–18).
Note: the first man of space and time [e]
Location 416On the other hand, he became a byword for unworldly absent-mindedness. Plato, among others, tells the following tale: Thales was studying the stars and gazing into the sky, when he fell into a well, and a jolly and witty Thracian servant girl made fun of him, saying that he was crazy to know about what was up in the heavens while he could not see what was in front of him beneath his feet. (Theaetetus 174a) An unlikely story went around that he had met his death by just such a fall while stargazing.
Note: symbolic death, caused by your trade
Location 427Thales’ remarks heralded many centuries of philosophical disdain for marriage. Anyone who makes a list of a dozen really great philosophers is likely to discover that the list consists almost entirely of bachelors. One plausible list, for instance, would include Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, none of whom were married.…
Note: on not trusting idea from someone before theyve had kids [e]
Location 434people found it hard to understand Thales’ adoption of water as the ultimate principle of explanation. The earth, he said, rested on water like a log floating in a stream—but then, asked Aristotle, what does the water rest on? (Cael. 2. 13. 294a28–34). He went further and said that everything came from and was in some sense made out of water. Again, his reasons were obscure, and Aristotle could only conjecture that it…
Note: the truth in primitive intuitions
Location 437Anaximander of Miletus (d. c.547 BC). We know rather more about his views, because he left behind a book entitled On Nature, written in prose, a medium just beginning to come into fashion. Like Thales he was credited with a number of original scientific achievements: the first map of the world, the first star chart, the first Greek sundial, and an indoor clock as well. He taught that the earth was cylindrical in shape, like a stumpy column no higher than a third of its diameter.
Note: His map of the world has the Mediterranean Sea at the middle with land all around it. The outlines of Greece and Italy are loosely correct, but the entire paradigm is inverted—a good metaphor for ego-centric perspective, probably better than the heliocentric overturn. Both examples of local frames with no global frames at all. Bigger question now is how the universe itself is just a local frame, and we are reaching for possible paradigms beyond it. [e]
Location 442Anaximander offered an account of the origin of the present world, and explained what forces had acted to bring it into existence, inquiring, as Aristotle would say, into the efficient as well as the material cause. He saw the universe as a field of competing opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry. Sometimes one of a pair of opposites is dominant, sometimes the other: they encroach upon each other and then withdraw, and their interchange is governed by a principle of reciprocity. As Anaximander put it poetically in his one surviving fragment, ‘they pay penalty and render reparation to each other for their injustice under the arbitration of time’ (DK 12 B1). Thus, one surmises, in winter the hot and the dry make reparation to the cold and the wet for the aggression they committed in summer. Heat and cold were the first of the opposites to make their appearance, separating off from an original cosmic egg of the everlasting indeterminate stuff. From them developed the fire and earth which, we have seen, lay at the origin of our present cosmos.
Note: origins of spectrums? influenced arisroles ethics?
Location 462In this way rarefaction and condensation can conjure everything out of the underlying air (KRS 140–1). In support of this claim Anaximenes appealed to experience, and indeed to experiment—an experiment that the reader can easily carry out for herself. Blow on your hand, first with the lips pursed, and then from an open mouth: the first time the air will feel cold, and the second time hot. This, argued Anaximenes, shows the connection between density and temperature (KRS 143).
Location 477The Milesians, then, are not yet real physicists, but neither are they myth-makers. They have not yet left myth behind, but they are moving away from it. They are not true philosophers either, unless by ‘philosophy’ one simply means infant science. They make little use of conceptual analysis and the a priori argument that has been the stock-in-trade of philosophers from Plato to the present day. They are speculators, in whose speculations elements of philosophy, science, and religion mingle in a rich and heady brew.
Location 484Pythagoras is credited with inventing the word ‘philosopher’: instead of claiming to be a sage or wise man (sophos) he modestly said that he was only a lover of wisdom (philosophos)
Location 492Pythagoras’ philosophical community at Croton was the prototype of many such institutions: it was followed by Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Epicurus’ Garden, and many others. Some such communities were legal entities, and others less formal; some resembled a modern research institute, others were more like monasteries. Pythagoras’ associates held their property in common and lived under a set of ascetic and ceremonial rules: observe silence, do not break bread, do not pick up crumbs, do not poke the fire with a sword, always put on the right shoe before the left, and so on. The Pythagoreans were not, to begin with, complete vegetarians, but they avoided certain kinds of meat, fish, and poultry. Most famously, they were forbidden to eat beans (KRS 271–2, 275–6).
Note: intellectual commune history
Location 501dietary rules were connected with Pythagoras’ beliefs about the soul. It did not die with the body, he believed, but migrated elsewhere, perhaps into an animal body of a different kind.3 Some Pythagoreans extended this into belief in a three-thousand-year cosmic cycle: a human soul after death would enter, one after the other, every kind of land, sea, or air creature, and finally return into a human body for history to repeat itself (Herodotus 2. 123; KRS 285).
Note: long scale reincarnation + recurrence / looping
Location 506But Xenophanes elsewhere links water with earth as the original source of things, and indeed he believed that our earth must at one time have been covered by the sea. This is connected with the most interesting of his contributions to science: the observation of the fossil record. Seashells are found well inland, and on mountains too, and in the quarries in Syracuse impressions of fish and seaweed have been found. An impression of a bay leaf was found in Paros deep in a rock, and in Malta there are flat shapes of all kinds of sea creatures. These were produced when everything was covered with mud long ago, and the impressions dried in the mud. (KRS 184)
Note: prechristian evolution insights
Location 521We possess more substantial portions of his work than of any previous philosopher, but that does not mean we find him easier to understand. His fragments take the form of pithy, crafted prose aphorisms, which are often obscure and sometimes deliberately ambiguous. Heraclitus did not argue, he pronounced. His delphic style may have been an imitation of the oracle of Apollo which, in his own words, ‘neither speaks, nor conceals, but gestures’ (KRS 244). The many philosophers in later centuries who have admired Heraclitus have been able to give their own colouring to his paradoxical, chameleon-like dicta. Even in antiquity Heraclitus was found difficult. He was nicknamed ‘the Enigmatic One’ and ‘Heraclitus the Obscure’ (D.L. 9. 6). He wrote a three-book treatise on philosophy—now lost—and deposited it in the great temple of Artemis (St Paul’s ‘Diana of the Ephesians’). People could not make up their minds whether it was a text of physics or a political tract. ‘What I understand of it is excellent,’ Socrates is reported as saying. ‘What I don’t understand may well be excellent also; but only a deep sea diver could get to the bottom of it’ (D.L. 2. 22). The nineteenth-century German idealist Hegel, who was a great admirer of Heraclitus, used the same marine metaphor to express an opposite judgement. When we reach Heraclitus after the fluctuating speculations of the earlier Presocratics, Hegel wrote, we come at last in sight of land. He went on to add, proudly, ‘There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my own Logic.’5
Note: origins of cryptic philosophy
Location 541saw himself as making a completely new start in philosophy. He thought the work of previous thinkers was worthless: Homer should have been eliminated at an early stage of any poetry competition, and Hesiod, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes were merely polymaths with no real sense
Location 552Again like Xenophanes, Heraclitus believed that the sun was new every day (Aristotle, Mete. 2. 2355b13–14), and, like Anaximander, he thought the sun was constrained by a cosmic principle of reparation (KRS 226). The ephemeral theory of the sun is indeed in Heraclitus expanded into a doctrine of universal flux. Everything, he said, is in motion, and nothing stays still; the world is like a flowing stream. If we step into the same river twice, we cannot put our feet twice into the same water, since the water is not the same two moments together (KRS 214). That seems true enough, but on the face of it Heraclitus went too far when he said that we cannot even step twice into the same river (Plato, Cra. 402a). Taken literally, this seems false, unless we take the criterion of identity for a river to be the body of water it contains rather than the course it flows. Taken allegorically, it is presumably a claim that everything in the world is composed of constantly changing constituents: if this is what is meant, Aristotle said, the changes must be imperceptible ones (Ph. 8. 3. 253b9 ff.). Perhaps…
Note: constant motion
Location 557Heraclitus once said that the world was an ever-living fire: sea and earth are the ashes of this perpetual bonfire. Fire is like gold: you can exchange gold for all kinds of goods, and fire can turn into any of the elements (KRS 217–19). This fiery world is the only world…
Note: eternal fire
Location 567‘Logos’ is the everyday Greek term for a written or spoken word, but from Heraclitus onwards almost every Greek philosopher gave it one or more of several grander meanings. It is often rendered by translators as ‘Reason’—whether to refer to the reasoning powers of human individuals, or to some more exalted cosmic principle of order and beauty. The term found its way into Christian theology when the author of the fourth gospel…
Note: logos as fractal order
Location 571Humans fall into three classes, at various removes from the rational fire that governs the universe. A philosopher like Heraclitus is closest to the fiery Logos and receives most warmth from it; next, ordinary people when awake draw light from it when they use their own reasoning powers; finally, those who are asleep have the…
Note: histtory of transendence hierarchies
Location 576What Hegel most admired in Heraclitus was his insistence on the coincidence of opposites, such as that the universe is both divisible and indivisible, generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal. Sometimes these identifications of opposites are straightforward statements of the relativity of certain predicates. The most famous, ‘The way up and the way down are one and the same’, sounds very deep. However, it need mean no more than that when, skipping down a mountain, I meet you toiling upward, we are both on the same path. Different things are attractive at different times: food when you are hungry, bed when you are sleepy (KRS 201). Different things attract different species: sea-water is wholesome for fish, but poisonous for humans; donkeys prefer rubbish to gold (KRS 199).
Note: paradox and conditionality
Location 586Heraclitus did indeed believe that the cosmic fire went through stages of kindling and quenching (KRS 217). It is presumably also in this sense that we are to understand that the universe is both generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal (DK 22 B50). The underlying process has no beginning and no end, but each cycle of kindling and quenching is an individual world that comes into and goes out of existence.
Note: cosmological evolution
Location 595What survives of Heraclitus amounts to no more than 15,000 words. The enormous influence he has exercised on philosophers ancient and modern is a matter for astonishment. There is something fitting about his position in Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican stanze, The School of Athens. In this monumental scenario, which contains imaginary portraits of many Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, as is right and just, occupy the centre stage. But the figure to which one’s eye is immediately drawn on entering the room is a late addition to the fresco: the booted, brooding figure of Heraclitus, deep in meditation on the lowest step.9
Note: art analysis
Location 610Better known is the second argument, commonly known as Achilles and the tortoise. ‘The slower’, Zeno said, ‘will never be overtaken by the swifter, for the pursuer must first reach the point from which the fugitive departed, so that the slower must necessarily remain ahead.’ Let us suppose that Achilles runs four times as fast as the tortoise, and that the tortoise is given a forty-metre start when they run a hundred-metre race against each other. According to Zeno’s argument, Achilles can never win. For by the time he reaches the forty-metre mark, the tortoise is ahead by ten metres. By the time Achilles has run those ten, the tortoise is still ahead by two and a half metres. Each time Achilles makes up a gap, the tortoise opens up a new, shorter, gap, so he can never overtake him (Aristotle, Ph. 5. 9. 239b11–14). These and other similar arguments of Zeno assume that distances and motions are infinitely divisible. His arguments have been dismissed by some philosophers as ingenious but sophistical paradoxes. Others have admired them greatly: Bertrand Russell, for instance, claimed that they provided the basis of the nineteenth-century mathematical renaissance of Weierstrass and Cantor.12 Aristotle, who preserved Zeno’s puzzles for us, claimed to disarm them, and to re-establish the possibility of motion, by distinguishing between two forms of infinity: actual infinity and potential infinity.13 But it was not for many centuries that the issues raised by Zeno were given solutions that satisfied both philosophers and mathematicians.
Location 656Empedocles’ philosophy of nature can be regarded, from one point of view, as a synthesis of the thought of the Ionian philosophers. As we have seen, each of them had singled out some one substance as the basic or dominant stuff of the universe: Thales had privileged water, Anaximenes air, Xenophanes earth, and Heraclitus fire. For Empedocles all four of these substances stood on equal terms as the fundamental ingredients, or ‘roots’ as he put it, of the universe. These roots had always existed, he maintained, but they mingle with each other in various proportions in such a way as to produce the familiar furniture of the world and also the denizens of the heavens. From these four sprang what was and is and ever shall: Trees, beasts, and human beings, males and females all, Birds of the air, and fishes bred by water bright; The age-old gods as well, long worshipped in the height. These four are all there is, each other interweaving And, intermixed, the world’s variety achieving.
Note: first synthesizer? is he deserving as more than just a presocratic? Main ideas: elemental composition, conversation of mass, yin-yang dynamics, evolution, fractal cyclical history [e]
Location 683What Empedocles called ‘roots’ were called by Plato and later Greek thinkers stoicheia, a word earlier used to indicate the syllables of a word. The Latin translation elementum, from which our ‘element’ is derived, compares the roots not to syllables, but to letters of the alphabet: an elementum is an LMNtum. Empedocles’ quartet of elements was assigned a fundamental role in physics and chemistry by philosophers and scientists until the time of Boyle in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it can be claimed that it is still with us, in altered form. Empedocles thought of his elements as four different kinds of matter; we think of solid, liquid, and gas as three states of matter. Ice, water, and steam would be, for Empedocles, specific instances of earth, water, and air; for us they are three different states of the same substance, H2O. It was not unreasonable to think of fire, and especially the fire of the sun, as a fourth element of equal importance. One might say that the twentieth-century emergence of the science of plasma physics, which studies the properties of matter at the sun’s temperature, has restored Empedocles’ fourth element to parity with the other three. Aristotle praised Empedocles for having realized that a cosmological theory must not just identify the elements of the universe, but must assign causes for the development and intermingling of the elements to make the living and inanimate compounds of the actual world. Empedocles assigns this role to Love and Strife: Love combines the elements, and Strife forces them apart. At one time the roots grow to be one out of many, at another time they split to be many out of one. These things, he said, never cease their continual interchange, now through love coming together into one, now carried apart from each other by Strife’s hatred (KRS 348). Love and Strife are the picturesque ancestors of the forces of attraction and repulsion which have figured in physical theory throughout the ages. For Empedocles, history is a cycle in which sometimes Love is dominant, and sometimes Strife. Under the influence of Love the elements combine into a homogeneous, harmonious, and resplendent sphere, reminiscent of Parmenides’ universe. Under the influence of Strife the elements separate out, but when Love begins to regain the ground it had lost, all the different species of living beings appear (KRS 360). All compound beings, such as animals and birds and fish, are temporary creatures that come and go; only the elements are everlasting, and only the cosmic cycle goes on for ever.
Location 690To explain the origin of living species, Empedocles put forward a remarkable theory of evolution by survival of the fittest. First flesh and bone emerged as chemical mixtures of the elements, flesh being constituted by fire, air, and water in equal parts, and bone being two parts water to two parts earth and four parts fire. From these constituents unattached limbs and organs were formed: unsocketed eyes, arms without shoulders, and faces without necks (KRS 375–6). These roamed around until they chanced to find partners; they formed unions, which were often, at this preliminary stage, quite unsuitable. Thus there arose various monstrosities: human-headed oxen, ox-headed humans, androgynous creatures with faces and breasts on front and back (KRS 379). Most of these fortuitous…
Location 708A woman called Pantheia, the story goes, given up for dead by the physicians, was miraculously restored to life by Empedocles. To celebrate, he offered a sacrificial banquet to eighty guests in a rich man’s house at the foot of Etna. When the other guests went to sleep, he heard his name called from heaven. He hastened to the summit of the volcano, and then, in Milton’s words, to be deemed A god, leaped fondly into Aetna flames. (Paradise Lost iii. 470)
Location 727Matthew Arnold dramatized this story in his Empedocles on Etna. He places these verses in the mouth of the philosopher at the crater’s rim: This heart will glow no more; thou art A living man no more, Empedocles! Nothing but a devouring flame of thought— But a naked, eternally restless mind! To the elements it came from Everything will return Our bodies to earth, Our blood to water, Heat to fire, Breath to air. They were well born, they will be well entomb’d— But mind? (lines 326 –38) Arnold gives the philosopher, before his final leap, the hope that in reward for his love of truth his intellect will never wholly perish.
Location 733If Empedocles achieved a kind of immortality as a precursor of Darwin, his contemporary Anaxagoras is sometimes regarded as an intellectual ancestor of the…
Location 740Here is his account of the beginning of the universe: ‘All things were together, infinite in number and infinite in smallness; for the small too was infinite. While all things were together, nothing was recognizable because of its smallness. Everything lay under air and ether, both infinite’ (KRS 467). This primeval pebble began to rotate, throwing off the surrounding ether and air and forming out of them the stars and the sun and the moon. The rotation caused the separation of dense from rare, of hot from cold, of dry from wet, and bright from dark. But the separation was never complete, and to this day there remains in every single thing a portion of everything else. There is a little whiteness in what is black, a little cold in what is hot, and so on: things are named after the item that is dominant in it (Aristotle, Ph. 1. 4. 187a23). This is most obvious in the case of semen, which must contain hair and flesh, and much, much more; but it must also be true of the food we eat (KRS 483–4, 496). In this…
Location 745men have been formed and the other ensouled animals. And the men possess farms and inhabit cities just as we do, and they have a sun and a moon and the rest just like us. The earth produces things of every sort for them to be harvested and stored, as it does for us. I have said all this about the process of separating off, because it would have happened not only here with us, but elsewhere too. (KRS 498) Anaxagoras thus has a claim to be the originator of the idea, later proposed by Giordano Bruno and…
Location 754Mind is infinite and separate, and has no part in the general commingling of elements; if it did, it would get drawn into the evolutionary process and could not control it. This teaching, placing mind firmly in control of matter, so struck his contemporaries that they nicknamed Anaxagoras himself the Mind. It is difficult, however, to assess exactly what his doctrine, though it greatly impressed both Plato and Aristotle, actually meant in practice…
Location 760Teleological explanation was more profound than mechanistic explanation. ‘If anyone wants to find out the reason why each thing comes to be or perishes or exists, this is what he must find out about it: how is it best for that thing to exist, or to act or be acted upon in any way?’
Location 769Anaxagoras made his final benefaction to humanity: the invention of the school holiday. Asked by the authorities of the city how they should honour him, he said that children should be let off school in the month of his death.
Location 774He once said that he would prefer to discover a single scientific explanation than to become king of Persia (D.L. 9. 41; DK 68 B118). Democritus’ fundamental thesis is that matter is not infinitely divisible. We do not know his exact argument for this conclusion, but Aristotle conjectured that it ran as follows. If we take a chunk of any kind of stuff and divide it up as far as we can, we will have to come to a halt at tiny bodies which are indivisible. We cannot allow matter to be divisible to infinity: for let us suppose that the division has been carried out and then ask: what would ensue if the division was carried out? If each of the infinite number of parts has any magnitude, then it must be further divisible, which contradicts our hypothesis. If, on the other hand, the surviving parts have no magnitude, then they can never have amounted to any quantity: for zero multiplied by infinity is still zero. So we have to conclude that divisibility comes to an end, and the smallest possible fragments must be bodies with sizes and shapes. These tiny, indivisible bodies were called by Democritus ‘atoms’ (which is just the Greek word for ‘indivisible’) (Aristotle, GC 1. 2. 316a13–b16).16 Atoms, Democritus believed, are too small to be detected by the senses; they are infinite in number and come in infinitely many varieties, and they have existed for ever. Against the Eleatics, he maintained that there was no contradiction in admitting a vacuum: there was a void, and in this infinite empty space atoms were constantly in motion, just like motes in a sunbeam. They come in different forms: they may differ in shape (as the letter A differs from the letter N), in order (as AN differs from NA), and in posture (as N differs from Z). Some of them are concave and some convex, and some are like hooks and some are like eyes. In their ceaseless motion they bang into each other and join up with each other (KRS 583). The middle-sized objects of everyday life are complexes of atoms thus united by random collisions, differing in kind on the basis of the differences between their constituent atoms (Aristotle, Metaph.
Location 785sententious
Location 812The sophists made a systematic study of forensic debate and oratorical persuasion. In this pursuit they wrote on many topics. They started with basic grammar: Protagoras was the first to distinguish the genders of nouns and the tenses and moods of verbs (Aristotle, Rh. 3. 4. 1407b6–8). They went on to list techniques of argument, and tricks of advocacy. As interpreters of ambiguous texts, and assessors of rival orations, they were among the earliest literary critics. They also gave public lectures and performances, and set up eristic moots, partly for instruction and partly for entertainment (D.L. 9. 53). Altogether, their roles encompassed those in modern society of tutors, consultants, barristers, public relations professionals, and media personalities.
Location 821He read aloud a tract entitled On the Gods, whose opening words were long remembered: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life’ (D.L. 9. 51). His most famous saying, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, encapsulated a relativist epistemology which will be examined in detail later in this book.18
Location 829Prodicus from the island of Ceos in the Aegean, came to Athens, like Protagoras, on official business of his home state. He was a linguist, but more interested in semantics than grammar: he can perhaps be regarded as the first lexicographer. Aristophanes and Plato teased him as a pedant, who made quibbling distinctions between words that were virtually synonymous. In fact, however, some of the distinctions credited to him (such as that between two Greek equivalents of ‘want’, boulesthai and epithumein; Plato, Protagoras 340b2) were later of serious philosophical importance. Prodicus is credited with a romantic moral fable about the young Heracles choosing between two female impersonations of Virtue and Vice. He also had a theory of the origin of religion. ‘The men of old regarded the sun and the moon, rivers and springs, and whatever else is helpful for life, as gods, because we are helped by them, just as the Egyptians worship the Nile’ (DK 84 B5). Thus, the worship of Hephaestus is really the worship of fire, and the worship of Demeter is really the worship of bread.
Location 838The first is a rhetorical exercise defending Helen of Troy against those who slander her, arguing that she deserves no blame for running off with Paris and thus sparking off the Trojan war. ‘She did what she did either because of the whims of fortune, the decisions of the gods and the decrees of necessity, or because she was abducted by force, or persuaded by speech, or overwhelmed by love’ (DK 82 B11, 21–4). Gorgias goes through these alternatives in turn, arguing in each case that Helen should be held free from blame. No human can resist fate, and it is the abductor, not the abductee, who merits blame. Thus far, Gorgias has an easy task: but in order to show that Helen should not be blamed if she succumbed to persuasion, he has to engage in an unconvincing, though no doubt congenial, encomium on the powers of the spoken word: ‘it is a mighty overlord, insubstantial and imperceptible, but it can achieve divine effects’. In this case, too, it is the persuader, not the persuadee, who should be blamed. Finally, if Helen fell in love, she is blameless: for love is either a god who cannot be resisted or a mental illness which should excite our pity. This brief and witty piece is the ancestor of many a philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism, force majeure, incitement, and irresistible impulse.
Location 849The third argument, the most plausible of the three, argues that each individual’s sensations are private and that all we can pass on to our neighbours is words and not experiences.
Note: foundation of alienation, the central preidcament and cause of literature; that we use words to articulate our private experience but it can't even translate. Problems of qualia and consciousness too. rhetorical parody: (1) nothing exists; (2) if it did, we couldn't know; (3) if we knew, we couldn't communicate it. Pair this with this other work, his defense of Helen; the word as "a great lord that can work on the soul like a drug," that can reshape the psyche, values, emotions of the receiver; great power; (but perhaps, not responsibility) ... across 2 works; full theory of literature: we cannot communicate our inner world, but we can craft linguistic drugs to give someone an approximation; the limits and powers of language ... Giorgas as a ploy by Plato to account for objective knowledge systems, yet also he was the forefather of ancient greek prose. see Hegel & Wittgenstein; [e]
Location 866In the history of philosophy Socrates has a place without parallel. On the one hand, he is revered as inaugurating the first great era of philosophy, and therefore, in a sense, philosophy itself. In textbooks all previous thinkers are lumped together in textbooks as ‘Presocratics’, as if philosophy prior to his age was somehow prehistoric. On the other hand, Socrates left behind no writing, and there is hardly a single sentence ascribed to him that we can be sure was his own utterance rather than a literary creation of one of his admirers. Our first-hand acquaintance with his philosophy is less than with that of Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, or Democritus. Yet his influence on subsequent philosophy, down to our own day, has been incomparably greater than theirs.
Note: Alt model where empodecles, plato, socrares are each T2 synthesis that feed into T3 Aristotelian synthesis; less about chronology or pre-socratic ... wonder if Plato cast a shadow over the pre-Socratics, most unique is that Socrates had a founding dramatic story [e]
Location 881The hard facts of Socrates’ life do not take long to tell. He was born in Athens about 469 BC, ten years after the Persian invasions of Greece had been crushed at the battle of Plataea. He grew up during the years when Athens, a flourishing democracy under the statesman Pericles, exercised imperial hegemony over the Greek world. It was a golden age of art and literature, which saw the sculptures of Phidias and the building of the Parthenon, and in which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their great tragedies. At the same time Herodotus, ‘the father of history’, wrote his accounts of the Persian Wars, and Anaxagoras introduced philosophy to Athens. The second half of Socrates’ life was overshadowed by the Peloponnesian War (431–4), in which Athens was eventually forced to cede the leadership of Greece to victorious Sparta. During the first years of the war he served in
Location 891An aspiring democrat politician, Anytus, with two associates, caused an indictment to be drawn up against Socrates in the following terms: ‘Socrates has committed an offence by not recognizing the gods whom the state recognizes but introducing other new divinities. He has also committed the offence of corrupting the young. Penalty demanded: death’ (D.L. 2. 40). We have no record of the trial, though two of Socrates’ admirers have left us imaginative reconstructions of his speech for the defence. Whatever he actually said failed to move a sufficient number of the 500 citizen jurors. He was found guilty, albeit by a small majority, and condemned to death. After a delay in prison, due to a religious technicality, Socrates died in spring 399, accepting a poisonous cup of hemlock from the executioner.
Note: real speech vs. plato's speech; historical recasting
Location 906In 423 the dramatist Aristophanes had produced a comedy, The Clouds, in which he introduces a character called Socrates, who runs a college of chicanery which is also an institute of bogus research. Students at this establishment not only learn to make bad arguments trump good arguments, but also study astronomy in a spirit of irreverent scepticism about traditional religion. They invoke a new pantheon of elemental deities: air, ether, clouds, and chaos (260–6). The world, they are told, is governed not by Zeus, who does not exist, but by Dinos (literally ‘Vortex’), the rotation of the heavenly bodies (380–1). Much of the play is burlesque that is obviously not meant to be taken seriously: Socrates measures how many flea-feet a flea can leap, and explores the clouds in a ramshackle flying machine. But the allegation that astronomy was incompatible with piety, if it was a joke, was a dangerous one. After all, it was only in the previous decade that Anaxagoras had been banished for asserting that the sun was a fiery lump. At the end of the play Socrates’ house is burnt down by an angry crowd of people who wish to punish him for insulting the gods and violating the privacy of the moon. To those who recalled Aristophanes’ comedy, the events of 399 must have seemed a sorry case of life imitating art.
Note: synthesizes other: anaxagoras, empodecles, sophists ... christ like arc
Location 912There is general agreement that he was pot-bellied and snub-nosed, pop-eyed and shambling in gait. He is regularly described as being shabby, wearing threadbare clothes, and liking to go barefoot. Even Aristophanes represents him as capable of great feats of endurance, and indifferent to privation: ‘never numb with cold, never hungry for breakfast, a spurner of wine and gluttony’ (414–17). From other sources it appears that he was a spurner of wine not in the sense of being a teetotaller, but as having an unusual ability to hold his liquor (Plato, Smp. 214a).…
Note: legends of pyth, S, and JC
Location 922In antiquity, however, he was best known for his attachment to the flamboyant aristocrat Alcibiades, some twenty years his junior: an attachment which, though passionate, remained…
Note: interesting
Location 927On more important issues, there is little that is certain about Socrates’ life and thought. For further information we are dependent above all on the two disciples whose works have come down to us intact, the soldierly historian Xenophon, and the idealist philosopher Plato. Both Xenophon and Plato composed, after the event, speeches for the defence at Socrates’ trial. Xenophon in addition wrote four books of memoirs of Socrates (memorabilia Socratis) and a Socratic dialogue, the Symposium. Plato, besides his Apology, wrote at least twenty-five dialogues, in all but one of which Socrates figures. Xenophon and Plato paint pictures of Socrates which differ from each other as much as the picture of Jesus given in the gospel of Mark differs from that in the gospel of John. While in Mark Jesus speaks in parables, brief aphorisms, and pointed responses to questions, the Jesus of the fourth gospel delivers extensive discourses that resonate at several levels. There is a similar contrast between Xenophon’s Socrates, who questions, argues, and exhorts in a workmanlike manner, and the Socrates of Plato’s Republic…
Note: the mode of historcal enshrinement
Location 930Xenophon’s major concern in his memoirs was to exonerate Socrates from the charges made against him at his trial, and to show that his life was such that conservative Athenians should have revered him rather than condemned him to death. Xenophon is also anxious to place a distance between Socrates and the other philosophers of the age: unlike Anaxagoras he had no futile interest in physics or astronomy (Mem. 1. 1. 16), and unlike the sophists he did not charge any fees or pretend to expertise that he lacked
Note: spheres of damnation, still a thing! but shifted
Location 946there is little in Xenophon’s work that would entitle Socrates to a prominent position in the history of philosophy. Several of the Presocratics would be more than a match for Xenophon’s Socrates in scope, insight, and originality. The Socrates who has captured the imagination of succeeding generations of philosophers is the Socrates of Plato,
Note: either Xenophon under rendered or Plato over rendered
Location 961Plato’s dialogues do not assign a consistent role or personality to the character called Socrates. In some dialogues he is predominantly a critical inquirer, challenging the pretensions of other characters by a characteristic technique of question and answer—elenchus—which reduces them to incoherence. In other dialogues Socrates is quite willing to harangue his audience, and to present an ethical and metaphysical system in dogmatic form. In yet other dialogues he plays only a minor part, leaving the philosophical initiative to a different protagonist.
Note: pessoa selves; fractured lore
Location 965All scholars agreed on including in the group the dialogues Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, and Timaeus, and all agreed that the group represented the latest stage of Plato’s writing career. There was no similar consensus about ordering within the group: but it is notable that the group includes all the dialogues in which Socrates’ role is at a minimum. Only in the Philebus is he a prominent character. In Laws he does not appear at all, and in the Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, and Politicus he has only a walk-on part while the lead role is given to another: in the first two to the protagonist named in the dialogue’s title, and in the latter two to a stranger from Parmenides’ town of Elea. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to regard the dialogues of this group as expressing the views of the mature Plato rather than those of his long-dead teacher.
Note: anchor then diverge
Location 979‘Two things may fairly be attributed to Socrates: inductive arguments and general definitions; both are starting points of scientific knowledge. But he did not regard the universal or the definitions as separate entities, but [the Platonists] did, and called them Ideas of things.’
Note: essayism as inductive reasoning; experience to conclusion [e]
Location 987A third group of dialogues can be identified by a set of common features: (1) they are short; (2) Socrates appears as an inquirer, not an instructor; (3) the Theory of Ideas is not presented; and (4) stylometrically they are at the greatest remove from the late group first identified. This group includes Crito, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Ion, Euthydemus, and Hippias Minor. These dialogues are commonly accepted as those most likely to be presentations of the philosophical views of the historical Socrates. Here too belongs the Apology, in which Socrates is the sole speaker, on trial for his life, and which in philosophical content and stylometric features resembles the other dialogues of the group. The first book of the Republic, too, in both content and style, resembles this group more than it resembles the remaining books of the dialogue: some scholars suppose, with good reason, that it first existed as a separate dialogue, perhaps under the title Thrasymachus. It is difficult to assign a chronology within this early group, though some authors place the Lysis first and assign it before 399, on the basis of an ancient anecdote that it was read to Socrates himself, who said, ‘what a load of lies this young man tells about me’ (D.L. 3. 35). In my view there is good reason to accept the general consensus that thus divides the Platonic dialogues into three groups, early, middle, and late. The division results from the striking coincidence of three independent sets of criteria, dramatic, philosophical, and stylometric. Whether we focus on the dramatic role given to Socrates, or the…
Note: early plato
Location 992According to both Plato and Xenophon, another factor that directed his interest was an oracle uttered in the name of Apollo by the entranced priestess in the shrine at Delphi. When asked if there was anyone in Athens wiser than Socrates, the priestess replied in the negative. Socrates professed to be puzzled by this response, and began to question different classes of people who claimed to possess wisdom of various kinds. It soon became clear that politicians and poets possessed no genuine expertise at all, and that craftsmen who were genuine experts in a particular area would pretend to a universal wisdom to which they had no claim. Socrates concluded that the oracle was correct in that he alone realized that his own wisdom was worthless
Note: does this speak to the inefectiveness of wisdom in society?
Location 1036It was in matters of morality that it was most important to pursue genuine knowledge and to expose false pretensions. For according to Socrates virtue and moral knowledge were the same thing: no one who really knew what was the best thing to do could do otherwise, and all wrongdoing was the result of ignorance. This makes it all the more absurd that he should be accused of corrupting the young. Anyone would obviously prefer to live among good men than among bad men, who might harm him. He cannot, therefore, have any motive for corrupting the young on purpose; and if he is doing so unwittingly he should be educated rather than prosecuted (26a). Socrates, in the Apology, did not claim to possess himself the wisdom that is sufficient to keep a man from wrongdoing. Instead, he said that he relied on an inner divine voice, which would intervene if ever he was on the point of taking a wrong step (41d). So far from being an atheist, his whole life was dedicated to a divine mission, the campaign to expose false wisdom which was prompted by the Delphic oracle. What would really be a betrayal of God would be to desert his post through fear of death. If he were told that he could go free on condition that he abandon philosophical inquiry, he would reply, ‘Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy’
Note: non-virtuous baseline
Location 1041The early dialogues of Plato portray Socrates carrying out his philosophical mission. Typically, the dialogue will be named after a personage who claims knowledge of a certain subject or who can be taken to represent a certain virtue: thus the Ion, on poetry, is named after a prizewinning rhapsode (a reciter of Homer), and the Laches, on courage, is named after a distinguished general. Charmides and Lysis, on passion, temperance, and friendship, are named after two bright young men who commanded a circle of aristocratic admirers. In each dialogue Socrates seeks a scientific account or definition of the topic under discussion, and by questioning reveals that the eponymous protagonist is unable to give one. The dialogues all end with the…
Note: aporia via elenchos; gadfly; midwife; love of the search of wisdom
Location 1051Aristotle was right to pick out the search as a notable feature of Socratic method. The method has sometimes been criticized as involving the fallacious claim that we cannot ever know whether some particular action is or is not, say, just or pious unless we can give a watertight definition of justice and piety. Such a claim would be inconsistent with Socrates’ regular practice in the course of his elenchus of seeking agreement whether particular actions (such as returning a borrowed knife to a madman, or carrying out a strategic retreat in battle) do or do not exhibit particular virtues such as justice and courage. Socrates’ method involves only the weaker claim that unless we have a general definition of a virtue we will not (a) be able to say whether the virtue universally has a particular property, such as being teachable, or being beneficial, or (b) be able to decide difficult borderline cases, such as whether a son’s prosecuting his father for the manslaughter of an accused murderer is or is not an act of piety. The other feature of Socrates’ method emphasized by Aristotle, namely the use of inductive arguments, does in fact presuppose that we can be sure of truths about individual cases while still lacking universal definitions. Plato’s Socrates does not claim to have a watertight definition of techne, or craft; but over and over again he considers particular crafts in order to extract general truths about the nature of a craft. Thus, in Republic 1 he wishes to show that the test of a good craftsman is not whether he makes a lot of money, but whether he benefits the…
Note: on definitions
Location 1060In the absence of the universal definition of a virtue, the general truths are applied to help settle difficult borderline cases of practice, and to evaluate…
Note: science of virtue
Location 1076Can virtue be taught? For if virtue is knowledge, then surely it must be teachable; and yet it is difficult to point to any successful teachers of virtue. In Athens, however, there was no lack of people claiming to have the relevant expertise, namely the sophists. At the end of the early period, and before the central period of Plato’s writing career, we find a series of dialogues named after major sophists—Hippias, Gorgias, Protagoras—which address the question whether virtue can be taught and which deflate the pretensions of the sophists to possess the secret of its teachability. The Hippias Minor sets out a serious difficulty for the idea that virtue is a craft that can be learnt. A craftsman who makes a mistake unknowingly is inferior to a craftsman who makes a mistake deliberately; so if virtue is a craft, one who sins deliberately is more virtuous than one who sins in ignorance (376b). The Gorgias argues that rhetoric, the main arrow in the sophist’s quiver, is incapable of producing genuine virtue. The Protagoras seems to suggest—whether seriously or ironically—that virtue is indeed teachable, because it is the art of calculating the proportion of pleasure and pain among the consequences of one’s actions.23
Note: phronesis; personal decision; to abstract virtue atop moments; retroactive assignment of virtue
Location 1082The Phaedo also contains Plato’s account of the last days of Socrates in prison. Socrates’ friend Crito has (in the dialogue named after him) failed to gain acceptance of a plan for escape. Socrates has rejected the proposal, saying that he owes so much to the laws of Athens, under which he was born and bred and lived contentedly, that he cannot now turn his back on his covenant with them and run away (51d–54c). The arrival of a ship from the sacred isle of Delos marks the end of the religious stay of execution, and Socrates prepares for death by engaging his friends in a long discussion of the immortality of the soul.24 The discussion ends with Socrates’ narrating a series of myths about the journeys in the underworld of the soul after it survives death. Crito asks whether Socrates has any instructions about his burial; he is told to remember that he will be burying only the body, and not the soul, which is to go to the joys of the blessed. After his last bath Socrates says farewell to his family, jokes with his gaoler, and accepts the cup of hemlock. He is represented (with a degree of medical improbability) as composing himself serenely as sensation gradually deserts his limbs. His last words, like so many in his life, are puzzling: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Aesculapius [the god of healing]. Please remember to pay the debt.’ Once again we ask ourselves whether he means his words literally or is employing his unique form of irony. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is in one and the same dialogue that Plato records the last hours of Socrates and introduces clearly for the first time his own characteristic Theory of Ideas. As well as the physical death of Socrates, we witness the demise of his personal philosophy, to be reincarnated henceforth in the more metaphysical and mythical form of Platonism. When Socrates died, Plato was in his late twenties, having been his pupil for about eight years. A member of an aristocratic Athenian family, Plato would have been just old enough to have fought in the Peloponnesian War, as his brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus certainly did. His uncles Critias and Charmides were two of the Thirty Tyrants, but he himself took no part in Athenian political life. At the age of 40 he went to Sicily and became an associate of Dion, the brother-in-law of the reigning monarch, Dionysius I; during this visit he made the acquaintance of the Pythagorean philosopher Archytas. On his return to Athens he founded a philosophical community, the Academy, in a private grove beside his own house. Here a group of thinkers, under his direction, shared with each other their interests in mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics, ethics, and mysticism. When 60 years old he was invited back to Sicily by Dion’s nephew, who had now succeeded to the throne as Dionysius II; but his visit was not a success because Dion and Dionysius quarrelled with each other. A third visit as a royal adviser was equally abortive, and Plato returned home…
Note: first greek to cover?
Location 1102Plato’s works as handed down to us amount to some half a million words. Though probably some of the works in the corpus are spurious, there are no written works attributed to Plato in antiquity that have not survived today.
Note: word counts of greats
Location 1128The dialogue form enabled Plato to suspend judgement about difficult philosophical issues, while presenting the strongest arguments he could think of on both sides of the question (cf. D.L. 3. 52).
Note: advantage over an essay? easier to explore arguments.. [e]
Location 1134For each thing that there is three things are necessary if we are to come by knowledge: first, the name, secondly, the definition, and thirdly, the image. Knowledge itself is a fourth thing, and there is a fifth thing that we have to postulate, which is that which is knowable and truly real. To understand this, consider the following example and regard it as typical of everything. There is something called a circle; it has a name, which we have just this minute used. Then there is its definition, a compound of nouns and verbs. We might give ‘The figure whose limit is at every point equidistant from its centre’ as the definition of whatever is round, circular, or a circle. Thirdly, there is what we draw, or rub out, or rotate, or cancel. The circle itself which all these symbolize does not undergo any such change and is a quite different thing. In the fourth place we have knowledge, understanding, and true opinion on these matters—these, collectively, are in our minds and not in sounds or bodily shapes, and thus are clearly distinct from the circle itself and from the three entities already mentioned. Of all these items, it is understanding that is closest to the fifth in kinship and likeness; the others are at a greater distance. What is true of round is also true of straight, of colour, of good and beautiful, and just; of natural and manufactured bodies; of fire, water, and the other elements; of all living beings and moral characters; of all that we do and undergo. In each case, anyone who totally fails to grasp the first four things will never fully possess knowledge of the fifth. (342a–d)
Note: knowledge is full conceptual model of the circle itself in isolation; understanding is relational, how you get it relative to otger forms, unity, being; applies to EA patterns [e]
Location 1145In his other writings Plato uses many other expressions to refer to Ideas. ‘Forms’ (eide) is probably the most common, but the Idea or Form of X may be called ‘the X itself’, ‘that very thing that is X’, or ‘Xness’, or ‘what X is’.
Note: the essence of a thing requires understading of all other things, so you know what thing is not, and what makes it unique. ties to lexigraph. not just definitons and synonyms, but ones that denote a things suchness relative to related forms. without nuance this lets to muddled language and duiplicitous words [e]
Location 1160He does not mention, even at the lowest level, actual material circular objects such as cartwheels and barrels. The reason for his omission is clear from other passages in his writings (e.g. Phd. 74a–c). The wheels and barrel we meet in experience are never perfectly circular: somewhere or other there will be a bend or bump which will interfere with the equidistance from the centre of every point on the circumference. This is true too, for that matter, of any diagram we may draw on paper or in the sand. Plato does not stress this point here, but it is the reason why he says that the diagram is at a greater distance from the circle itself than my concept is. My subjective concept of the circle—my understanding of what ‘circle’ means—is not the same as the Idea of the circle, because the Idea is an objective reality that is not the property of any individual mind. But at least the concept in my mind is a concept of a perfect circle; it is not merely an imperfect approximation to a circle, as the ring on my finger is.
Note: a wheel is its own eidos; no wheel meets the platonic wheel; and sure there can be subeiodtic wheels of an even tighter definition of which together distinguish themselves from cousin wheels, yet even within that family there is variance, and even if all were truly identical, each instance is then unique in its relaton to time, place, and event. no two bicycle wheels ever share a single sense of being... what interests me here is the web of eioditc relation, how bicycle wheel ladders up in multple directions, up to circle, up to two, up to travel... and so all real things are a congomerate of many forms
Location 1162We may state a number of Platonic theses about Ideas and their relations to ordinary things in the world. (1) The Principle of Commonality. Wherever several things are F, this is because they participate in or imitate a single Idea of F (Phd. 100c; Men. 72c, 75a; Rep. 5. 476a10, 597c). (2) The Principle of Separation. The Idea of F is distinct from all the things that are F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211b). (3) The Principle of Self-Predication. The Idea of F is itself F (Hp. Ma. 292e; Prt. 230c–e; Prm. 132a–b). (4) The Principle of Purity. The Idea of F is nothing but F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211e). (5) The Principle of Uniqueness. Nothing but the Idea of F is really, truly, altogether F (Phd. 74d, Rep. 5. 479a–d). (6) The Principle of Sublimity. Ideas are everlasting, they have no parts and undergo no change, and they are not perceptible to the senses (Phd. 78d; Smp. 211b).
Note: instances embody a concept, but is not the concept, for a concept is only its abstract self, distinct from all other abstractions, and abstractions are supreme because they are everlasting, somehow embedded in the source code that generates all future instances
Location 1185The Principle of Uniqueness is sometimes stated in a misleading way by commentators. Plato frequently says that only Ideas really are, and that the non-ideal particulars we encounter in sense-experience are between being and not being. He is often taken to be saying that only Ideas really exist, and that tangible objects are unreal and illusory. In context, it is clear that when Plato says that only Ideas really are, he does not mean that only Ideas really exist, but that only the Idea of F is really F, whatever F may be in the particular case. Particulars are between being and not being in that they are between being F and not being F—i.e. they are sometimes F and sometimes not F.27 For instance, only the Idea of Beauty is really beautiful, because particular beautiful things are (a) beautiful in one respect but ugly in another (in figure, say, but not in complexion), or (b) beautiful at one time but not another (e.g. at age 20 but not at age 70), (c) beautiful by comparison with some things, but not with others (e.g. Helen may be beautiful by comparison with Medea, but not by comparison with Aphrodite), (d) beautiful in some surroundings but not in others (Smp. 211 a–e). An important feature of the classical Theory of Ideas is the Principle of Sublimity. The particulars that participate belong to the inferior world of Becoming, the world of change and decay; the Ideas that are participated in belong to a superior world of Being, of eternal stability. The most sublime of all Ideas is the Idea of the Good, superior in rank and power to all else, from which everything that can be known derives its being (Rep. 509c).
Note: to take this literally though is to claim concepts and generalities actually speak to the configurations and parameters of the engine of reality; is this mostly through induction? ie: seeing particular to know universal; essayism [e]
Location 1208Predicates. In modern logic a sentence such as ‘Socrates is wise’ is considered as having a subject, ‘Socrates’, and a predicate, which consists of the remainder of the sentence, i.e. ‘. . . is wise’. Some philosophers of logic, following Gottlob Frege, have regarded predicates as having an extra-mental counterpart: an objective predicate (Frege called it a ‘function’) corresponding to ‘. . . is a man’ in a way similar to that in which the man Socrates corresponds to the name ‘Socrates’. Frege’s functions, such as the function x is a man, are objective entities: they are more like the fifth items of the Seventh Letter than like the fourth items. They share some of the transcendental properties of Ideas: the function x is a man does not grow or die as human beings do, and nowhere in the world can one view or handle the function x is divisible by 7. But functions do not conform to the Principles of Self-Predication or Uniqueness. How could one ever imagine that the function x is a man, and only that function, was really and truly a human being? Classes. Functions serve as principles according to which objects can be collected into classes: objects that satisfy the function x is human, for instance, can be grouped into the class of human beings. Ideas in some way resemble classes: participation in an Idea can be assimilated to membership of a class. The difficulty in identifying Ideas with classes arises again over the Principle of Self-Predication. The class of men is not a man and we cannot say in general that the class of Fs is F. However, it seems at first sight as if there are, indeed, some classes that are members of themselves, such as the class of classes.
Note: predicates as relation layer
Location 1234Socrates now presents a blueprint for a city with three classes. Those among the soldiers best fitted to rule are selected by competition to form the upper class, called guardians; the remaining soldiers are described as auxiliaries, and the rest of the citizens belong to the class of farmers and artisans (2. 374d–376e). How are the working classes to be brought to accept the authority of the ruling classes? A myth must be propagated, a ‘noble falsehood’, to the effect that members of the three classes have different metals in their soul: gold, silver, and bronze respectively. Citizens in general are to remain in the class in which they were born, but Socrates allows a limited amount of social mobility (3. 414c–415c). The rulers and auxiliaries are to receive an elaborate education in literature (based on a bowdlerized Homer), music (provided it is martial and edifying), and gymnastics (undertaken by both sexes in common) (2. 376e–3. 403b). Women as well as men are to be guardians and auxiliaries, but this involves severe restraints no less than privileges. Members of the upper classes are not allowed to marry; women are to be held in common and all sexual intercourse is to be public. Procreation is to be strictly regulated on eugenic grounds. Children are not to be allowed contact with their parents, but will be brought up in public creches. Guardians and auxiliaries may not own property or touch money; they will be given, free of charge, adequate but modest provisions, and they will live in common like soldiers in a camp (5. 451d–471c).
Note: On monastic officials [e]
Location 1293Plato, we know from other dialogues, delighted in teasing his readers; he extended the irony he had learnt from Socrates into a major principle of philosophical illumination.
Note: Republic as totalitarian foil?
Location 1309However, having woven the analogy with his classbound state into his moral psychology, Plato in later books of the Republic returns to political theory. His ideal state, he tells us, incorporates all the cardinal virtues: the virtue of wisdom resides in the guardians, fortitude in the auxiliaries, temperance in the working classes, and justice is rooted in the principle of the division of labour from which the city-state took its origin. In a just state every citizen and every class does that for which they are most suited, and there is harmony between the classes (4. 427d–434c). In less ideal states there is a gradual falling away from this ideal. There are five possible types of political constitution (8. 544e). The first and best constitution is called monarchy or aristocracy: if wisdom rules it does not matter whether it is incarnate in one or many rulers. There are four other inferior types of constitution: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism (8. 543c). Each of these constitutions declines into the next because of the downgrading of one of the virtues of the ideal state. If the rulers cease to be persons of wisdom, aristocracy gives place to timocracy, which is essentially rule by a military junta (8. 547c). Oligarchy differs from timocracy because oligarchic rulers lack fortitude and military virtues (8. 556d). Oligarchs do possess, in a rather miserly form, the virtue of temperance; when this is abandoned oligarchy gives way to democracy (8. 555b). For Plato, any step from the aristocracy of the ideal republic is a step away from justice; but it is the step from democracy to despotism that marks the enthronement of injustice incarnate (8. 576a). So the aristocratic state is marked by the presence of all the virtues, the timocratic state by the absence of wisdom, the oligarchic state by the decay of fortitude, the democratic state by contempt for temperance, and the despotic state by the overturning of justice. Plato recognizes that in the real world we are much more likely to encounter the various forms of inferior state than the ideal constitution described in the Republic. Nonetheless, he insists that there will be no happiness, public or private, except in such a city, and such a city will never be brought about unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers (5. 473c–d). Becoming a philosopher, of course, involves working through Plato’s educational system in order to reach acquaintance with the Ideas.
Note: Democracy vs philosopher king
Location 1310Marriage, far from being abolished, is imposed by law, and bachelors over 35 have to pay severe annual fines
Note: Domestic enforcement
Location 1338Finally, legislators must realize that even the best laws are constantly in need of reform
Note: History of thought on amendments; from Plato to America to the future
Location 1339On the other hand, Magnesia has several features reminiscent of the Republic. Supreme power in the state rests with a Nocturnal Council, which includes the wisest and most highly qualified officials, specially trained in mathematics, astronomy, theology, and law (though not, like the guardians of the Republic, metaphysics).
Note: Council of monkish philo-kings
Location 1340Each law must have a preamble setting out its purpose, so that citizens may conform to it with understanding. For instance, a law compelling marriage between the age of 30 and 35 should have a preamble explaining that procreation is the method by which human beings achieve immortality
Note: On legal legibility; also on the idea of children as immortality, and the thought of requiring it!
Location 1347From time to time in the Laws Plato engages in theoretical discussion of sexual morality, though actual sexual legislation is restricted to a form of excommunication for adultery (7. 785d–e). In a way that has been very common during the Christian era, but was rare in pagan antiquity, he bases his sexual ethics on the notion that procreation is the natural purpose of sex. The Athenian says at one point that he would like to put into effect ‘A law to permit sexual intercourse only for its natural purpose, procreation, and to prohibit homosexual relations; to forbid the deliberate killing of a human offspring and the casting of seed on rocks and stone where it will never take root and fructify’ (8. 838e). He realizes, however, that it will be very difficult to ensure compliance with such a law, and instead he proposes other measures to stamp out sodomy and discourage all forms of non-procreative intercourse (8. 836e, 841d). We have reached a point in Plato’s thinking far distant from the arch homosexual banter which is such a predominant feature of the Socratic dialogues.
Note: Pre Christian roots of sexual repression
Location 1354The world of the Timaeus is not a field of mechanistic causes: it is fashioned by a divinity, variously called its father, its maker, or its craftsman (demiourgos) (28c).
Note: How does this differ from monotheism?
Location 1367Like the Lord God in Genesis, the maker of the world looked at what he had made and found that it was good; and in his delight he adorned it with many beautiful things. But the Demiurge differs from the creator of Judaeo-Christian tradition in several ways. First of all, he does not create the world from nothing: rather, he brings it into existence from a primordial chaos, and his creative freedom is limited by the necessary properties of the initial matter (48a). ‘God, wishing all things to be good and nothing, if he could help it, paltry, and finding the visible universe in a state not of peace but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, brought it from disorder into an order that he judged to be altogether better’ (30a). Secondly, while the Mosaic creator infuses life into an inert world at a certain stage of its creation, in Plato both the ordered universe and the archetype on which it was patterned are themselves living beings. What is this living archetype? He does not tell us, but perhaps it is the world of Ideas which, he concluded belatedly in the Sophist, must contain life. God created the soul of the world before he formed the world itself: this world-soul is poised between the world of being and the world of becoming
Note: compare this to recent logs [e]
Location 1374In contrast to those earlier philosophers who spoke of multiple worlds, Plato is very firm that our universe is the only one (31b).
Note: No multiverse
Location 1386He follows Empedocles in regarding the world as made up of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and he follows Democritus in believing that the different qualities of the elements are due to the different shapes of the atoms that constitute them. Earth atoms are cubes, air atoms are octahedrons, fire atoms are pyramids, and water atoms are icosahedrons. Pre-existent space was the receptacle into which the maker placed the world, and in a mysterious way it underlies the transmutation of the four elements, rather as a lump of gold underlies the different shapes that a jeweller may give to it (50a). In this Plato seems to anticipate the prime matter of Aristotelian hylomorphism.31
Note: Evolution of elemental thinking
Location 1387The fourth century saw a shift in political power from the city-states of classical Greece to the kingdom of Macedon to the north. In the same way, after the Athenians Socrates and Plato, the next great philosopher was a Macedonian. Aristotle was born, fifteen years after Socrates’ death, in the small colony of Stagira, on the peninsula of Chalcidice. He was the son of Nicomachus, court physician to King Amyntas, the grandfather of Alexander the Great. After the death of his father he migrated to Athens in 367, being then 17, and joined Plato’s Academy. He remained for twenty years as Plato’s pupil and colleague, and it can safely be said that on no other occasion in history was such intellectual power concentrated in a single institution.
Location 1404Another Platonic work of Aristotle’s youth is his Protrepticus, or exhortation to philosophy. This too is lost, but it was so extensively quoted in later antiquity that some scholars believe they can reconstruct it almost in its entirety. Everyone has to do philosophy, Aristotle says, for arguing against the practice of philosophy is itself a form of philosophizing. But the best form of philosophy is the contemplation of the universe of nature. Anaxagoras is praised for saying that the one thing that makes life worth living is to observe the sun and the moon and the stars and the heavens. It is for this reason that God made us, and gave us a godlike intellect. All else—strength, beauty, power, and honour—is worthless (Barnes, 2416).
Note: universe becoming conscious
Location 1419It is indeed one of Aristotle’s many claims on posterity that he was logic’s founder. His most important works on the subject are the Categories, the de Interpretatione, and the Prior Analytics. These set out his teaching on simple terms, on propositions, and on syllogisms. They were grouped together, along with the two works already mentioned, and a treatise on scientific method, the Posterior Analytics, into a collection known as the Organon, or ‘tool’ of thought. Most of Aristotle’s followers thought of logic not as itself a scientific discipline, but as a propaedeutic art which could be used in any discipline; hence the title. The Organon, though shown already in antiquity to be incomplete as a system of logic, was regarded for two millennia as providing the core of the subject.1
Note: aristotle deduction; socrates induction
Location 1436In his surviving works Aristotle often take issue with the theory. Sometimes he does so politely, as where, in the Nicomachean Ethics, he introduces a series of arguments against the Idea of the Good with the remarks that he has an uphill task because the Forms were introduced by his good friends. However, his duty as a philosopher is to honour truth above friendship. In the Posterior Analytics, however, he dismisses Ideas contemptuously as ‘tarradiddle’ (1. 22. 83a33). More seriously, in his Metaphysics he argues that the theory fails to solve the problems it was meant to address. It does not confer intelligibility on particulars, because immutable and everlasting forms cannot explain how particulars come into existence and undergo change. Moreover, they do not contribute anything either to the knowledge or to the being of other things (A 9. 991a8 ff.). All the theory does is to bring in new entities equal in number to the entities to be explained: as if one could solve a problem by doubling it (A 9. 990b3).
Note: refuting forms / tarradiddle [v]
Location 1456During his period in Assos, and during the next few years, when he lived at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Aristotle carried out extensive scientific research, particularly in zoology and marine biology. These researches were written up in a book later known, misleadingly, as the History of Animals, to which he added two shorter treatises, On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals. Aristotle does not claim to have founded the science of zoology, and his books contain copious citations of earlier writers, accompanied by a judicious degree of scepticism about some of their wilder reports. However, his detailed observations of organisms of very various kinds were quite without precedent, and in many cases they were not superseded until the seventeenth century. Though he does not claim to be the first zoologist, Aristotle clearly saw himself as a pioneer, and indeed felt some need to justify his interest in the subject. Previous philosophers had given a privileged place to the observation of the heavens, and here was he prodding sponges and watching the hatching of grubs. In his defence he says that while the heavenly bodies are marvellous and glorious, they are hard to study because they are so distant and different from ourselves. Animals, however, are near at hand, and akin to our own nature, so that we can investigate them with much greater precision. It is childish to be squeamish about the observation of the humbler animals. ‘We should approach the investigation of every kind of animal without being ashamed, for each of them will exhibit to us something natural and something beautiful’ (PA 1. 5. 645a20–5). The scope of Aristotle’s researches is astonishing. Much of his work is taken up with classification into genus (e.g. Testacea) and species (e.g. seaurchin). More than 500 species figure in his treatises, and many of them are described in detail. It is clear that Aristotle was not content with the observation of a naturalist: he also practised dissection like an anatomist. He acknowledges that he found dissection distasteful, particularly in the case of human beings: but it was essential to examine the parts of any organism in order to understand the structure of the whole (PA 1. 5. 644b22–645a36). Aristotle illustrated his treatises with diagrams, now sadly lost. We can conjecture the kind of illustrations he provided when we read passages such as the following, where he is explaining the relationship between the testicles and the penis. In the accompanying diagram the letter A marks the starting point of ducts leading down from the aorta; the letters KK mark the heads of the testicles and the ducts that descend to them; the ducts leading from them through the testicles are marked ΩΩ, and the reverse ducts containing white fluid and leading to the testicles are marked BB; the penis ∆, the bladder E, and the testicles ψψ. (HA 3. 1. 510a30–4) Only a biologist could check the accuracy of the myriad items of information that…
Location 1469Despite an admixture of old wives’ tales, Aristotle’s biological works must strike us as a stupendous achievement, when we remember the conditions under which he worked, unequipped with any of the aids to investigation that have been at the disposal of scientists since the early modern period. He, or one of his research assistants, must have been gifted with remarkably acute eyesight, since some of the features of insects that he accurately reports were not again observed until the invention of the microscope. His inquiries were conducted in a genuinely scientific spirit, and he is always ready to confess ignorance where evidence is insufficient. With regard to the reproductive mechanism in bees, for example, he has this to say: The facts have not yet been sufficiently ascertained. If ever they are, then we must trust observation rather than theory, and trust theories only if their results conform with the observed phenomena. (GA 3. 10. 760b28–31)
Note: proto-scientist
Location 1512About eight years after the death of Hermias, Aristotle was summoned to the Macedonian capital by King Philip II as tutor to his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. We know little of the content of his instruction: the Rhetoric for Alexander that appears in the Aristotelian corpus is commonly regarded as a forgery. Ancient sources say that Aristotle did write essays on kingship and colonization for his pupil, and gave him his own edition of Homer. Alexander is said to have slept with this book under his pillow; and when he became king in 336 and started upon his spectacular military career, he arranged for biological specimens to be sent to his tutor from all parts of Greece and Asia Minor. Within ten years Alexander had made himself master of an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indus and included Libya and Egypt. While Alexander was conquering Asia, Aristotle was back in Athens, where he established his own school in the Lyceum, a gymnasium just outside the city boundary. Now aged 50, he built up a substantial library, and gathered around him a group of brilliant research students, called ‘Peripatetics’ from the name of the avenue (peripatos) in which they walked and held their discussions. The Lyceum was not a private club like the Academy; many of the lectures given there were open to the general public without fee. Aristotle’s anatomical and zoological studies had given a new and definitive turn to his philosophy. Though he retained a lifelong interest in metaphysics, his mature philosophy constantly interlocks with empirical science, and his thinking takes on a biological cast. Most of the works that have come down to us, with the exception of the zoological treatises, probably belong to this second Athenian sojourn. There is no certainty about their chronological order, and indeed it is probable that the main treatises—on physics, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and politics—were constantly rewritten and updated. In the form in which they have survived it is possible to detect evidence of different layers of composition, though no consensus has been reached about the identification or dating of these strata.
Note: state sponsor
Location 1520Aristotle’s style is very different from that of Plato or any of his other philosophical predecessors. In the period between Homer and Socrates most philosophers wrote in verse, and Plato, writing in the great age of Athenian tragedy and comedy, composed dramatic dialogue. Aristotle, an exact contemporary of the greatest Greek orator Demosthenes, preferred to write in prose monologue. The prose he wrote is commonly neither lucid nor polished, though he could compose passages of moving eloquence when he chose. It may be that the texts we have are the notes from which he lectured; perhaps even, in some cases, notes taken at lectures by students present. Everything Aristotle wrote is fertile of ideas and full of energy; every sentence packs a massive…
Note: first greek prose?
Location 1535the notion of a discipline, in the modern academic sense, is made very explicit by Aristotle in his Lyceum period. There are three kinds of sciences, Aristotle tells us in the Metaphysics (E 1. 1025b25): productive, practical, and theoretical sciences. Productive sciences are, naturally enough, sciences that have a product. They include engineering and architecture, with products like bridges and houses, but also disciplines such as strategy and rhetoric, where the product is something less concrete, such as victory on the battlefield or in the courts. Practical sciences are ones that guide behaviour, most notably ethics and politics. Theoretical sciences are those that have no product and no practical goal, but in which information and understanding is sought for its own sake. There are three theoretical sciences: physics, mathematics, and theology (Metaph. E 1. 1026a19). In this trilogy only mathematics is what it seems to be. ‘Physics’ means natural philosophy or the study of nature (physis). It is a much broader study than physics as understood nowadays, including chemistry and meteorology and even biology and psychology. ‘Theology’ is, for Aristotle, the study of entities above and superior to human beings, that is to say, the heavenly bodies as well as whatever divinities may inhabit the starry skies. His writings on this topic resemble a textbook of astronomy more than they resemble any discourse on natural religion. It may seem surprising that metaphysics, a discipline theoretical par excellence, does not figure in Aristotle’s list of theoretical sciences, since so much of his writing is concerned with it, and since one of his longest treatises bears…
Note: disciplines as taxonomy, of nature, of knowledge, of essays too [e]
Location 1545Rhetoric, Aristotle says, is the discipline that indicates in any given case the possible means of persuasion: it is not restricted to a particular field, but is topic-neutral. There are three bases of persuasion by the spoken word: the character of the speaker, the mood of the audience, and the argument (sound or spurious) of the speech itself. So the student of rhetoric must be able to reason logically, to evaluate character, and to understand the emotions (1. 2. 1358a1–1360b3). Aristotle wrote more instructively about logic and character in other treatises, but the second book of the Rhetoric contains his fullest account of human emotions. Emotions, he says, are feelings that alter people’s judgements, and they are accompanied by pain and pleasure. He takes each major emotion in turn, offering a definition of the emotion and a list of its objects and causes. Anger, for instance, he defines as a desire, accompanied by pain, for what appears to be revenge for what appears to be an…
Note: probably should read this; essays arent primarily about persuasion, but there isba similar tripartite bance [e]
Location 1562Aristotle takes us on a detailed tour of the emotions of anger, hatred, fear, shame, pity, indignation, envy, and jealousy. In each case his treatment is clear and systematic, and often shows—as in the above passage—acute psychological insight.
Location 1576Poetics, unlike the Rhetoric, has been very widely read throughout history. Only its first book survives, a treatment of epic and tragic poetry. The second book, on comedy, is lost. Umberto Eco, in The Name of the Rose, wove a dramatic fiction around its imagined survival and then destruction in a fourteenth-century abbey.
Location 1578One of Aristotle’s aims was to resolve this quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Imitation, he says, so far from being the degrading activity that Plato describes, is something natural to humans from childhood. It is one of the features that makes men superior to animals, since it vastly increases their scope for learning.
Location 1586Six things, Aristotle says, are necessary for a tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and melody (6. 1450a11 ff.). It is the first two of these that chiefly interest him. Stage setting and musical accompaniment are dispensable accessories: what is great in a tragedy can be appreciated from a mere reading of the text. Thought and diction are more important: it is the thoughts expressed by the characters that arouse emotion in the hearer, and if they are to do so successfully they must be presented convincingly by the actors. But it is character and plot that really bring out the genius of a tragic poet, and Aristotle devotes a long chapter to character, and no less than five chapters to plot.
Note: plot and character in essay
Location 1597The most important element of all is plot: the characters are created for the sake of the plot, and not the other way round. The plot must be a self-contained story with a clearly marked beginning, middle, and end; it must be sufficiently short and simple for the spectator to hold all its details in mind. Tragedy must have a unity. You do not make a tragedy by stringing together a set of episodes connected only by a common hero; rather, there must be a single significant action on which the whole plot turns (8. 1451a21–9).
Note: linearity
Location 1607These observations are illustrated by constant reference to actual Greek plays, in particular to Sophocles’ tragedy King Oedipus. Oedipus, at the beginning of the play, enjoys prosperity and reputation. He is basically a good man, but has the fatal flaw of impetuosity. This vice makes him kill a stranger in a scuffle, and marry a bride without due diligence. The ‘revelation’ that the man he killed was his father and the woman he married was his mother leads to the ‘reversal’ of his fortune, as he is banished from his kingdom and blinds himself in shame and remorse.
Location 1615From what has been said it is clear that the poet’s job is to describe not something that has actually happened, but something that might well happen, that is to say something that is possible because it is necessary or likely. The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of prose v. verse—you might turn Herodotus into metre and it would still be history. It is rather in this matter of writing what happens rather than what might happen. For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more important than history; for poetry tells us of the universal, history tells us only of the particular. (9. 1451b5–9)
Note: in response to plato that art is inferior
Location 1621Three treatises of moral philosophy have been handed down in the corpus: the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) in ten books, the Eudemian Ethics (EE) in seven books, and the Magna Moralia in two books. These texts are highly interesting to anyone who is interested in the development of Aristotle’s thought.
Location 1630The NE covers much the same ground as Plato’s Republic, and with some exaggeration one could say that Aristotle’s moral philosophy is Plato’s moral philosophy with the Theory of Ideas ripped out. The Idea of the Good, Aristotle says, cannot be the supreme good of which ethics treats, if only because ethics is a practical science, about what is within human power to achieve, whereas an everlasting and unchanging Idea of the Good could only be of theoretical interest. In place of the Idea of the Good, Aristotle offers happiness (eudaimonia) as the supreme good with which ethics is concerned, for, like Plato, he sees an intimate connection between living virtuously and living happily. In all the ethical treatises a happy life is a life of virtuous activity, and each of them offers an analysis of the concept of virtue and a classification of virtues of different types. One class is that of the moral virtues, such as courage, temperance, and liberality, that constantly appeared in Plato’s ethical discussions. The other class is that of intellectual virtues: here Aristotle makes a much sharper distinction than Plato ever did between the intellectual virtue of wisdom, which governs ethical behaviour, and the intellectual virtue of understanding, which is expressed in scientific endeavour and contemplation. The principal difference between the NE and the EE is that in the former Aristotle regards perfect happiness as constituted solely by the activity of philosophical contemplation, whereas in the latter it consists of the harmonious exercise of all the virtues, intellectual and moral.6
Note: diaciplimes of virtue
Location 1661Even in the EE it is ‘the service and contemplation of God’ that sets the standard for the appropriate exercise of the moral virtues, and in the NE this contemplation is described as a superhuman activity of a divine part of ourselves. Aristotle’s final word here is that in spite of being mortal we must make ourselves immortal as far as we can.
Note: immortal how?
Location 1674The Politics itself was probably not written at a single stretch, and here as elsewhere there is probably an overlap and interplay between the records of observation and the essays in theory. The structure of the book as we have it corresponds reasonably well to the NE programme: books 1–3 contain a general theory of the state, and a critique of earlier writers; books 4–6 contain an account of various forms of constitution, three tolerable (monarchy, aristocracy, polity) and three intolerable (tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy); books 7 and 8 are devoted to the ideal form of constitution. Once again, the order of the discourses in the corpus probably differs from the order of their composition, but scholars have not reached agreement on the original chronology.
Note: interesting to see democracy alongside tyranny and oligarchy
Location 1685Families combine to make a village, and several villages combine to make a state, which is the first self-sufficient community, and is just as natural as is the family (1. 2. 1253a2). Indeed, though later than the family in time, the state is prior by nature, as an organic whole like the human body is prior to its organic parts like hands and feet. Without law and justice, man is the most savage of animals. Someone who cannot live in a state is a beast; someone who has no need of a state must be a god. The foundation of the state was the greatest of benefactions, because only within a state can human beings fulfil their potential (1. 2. 1253a25–35).
Note: proto Hobbes
Location 1693Aristotle thinks that Platonic communism will bring nothing but trouble: the use of property should be shared, but its ownership should be private. That way owners can take pride in their possessions and get pleasure out of sharing them with others or giving them away. Aristotle defends the traditional family against the proposal that women should be held in common, and he frowns even on the limited military and official role assigned to women in the Laws. Over and over again he describes Plato’s proposals as impractical; the root of his error, he thinks, is that he tries to make the state too uniform. The diversity of different kinds of citizen is essential, and life in a city should not be like life in a barracks (2. 3. 1261a10–31).
Location 1700The government, that is to say the supreme authority in a state, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many. The rightful true forms of government, therefore, are ones where the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or the few, or the many, are perversions. Those who belong to a state, if they are truly to be called citizens, must share in its benefits. Government by a single person, if it aims at the common interest, we are accustomed to call ‘monarchy’; similar government by a minority we call ‘aristocracy’, either because the rulers are the best men, or because it aims at the best interests of the state and the community. When it is the majority that governs in the common interest we call it a ‘polity’, using a word which is also a generic term for a constitution . . . Of each of these forms of government there exists a perversion. The perversion of monarchy is tyranny; that of aristocracy is oligarchy; that of polity is democracy. For tyranny is a monarchy exercised solely for the benefit of the monarch, oligarchy has in view only the interests of the wealthy, and democracy the interests only of the poorer classes. None of these aims at the common good of all. (3. 6. 1279a26–b10)
Note: summary of 3 types [e]
Location 1708If a community contains an individual or family of outstanding excellence, then monarchy is the best constitution. But such a case is very rare, and the risk of miscarriage is great: for monarchy corrupts into tyranny, which is the worst of all constitutions. Aristocracy, in theory, is the next best constitution after monarchy, but in practice Aristotle preferred a kind of constitutional democracy, for what he called ‘polity’ is a state in which rich and poor respect each others’ rights, and in which the best-qualified citizens rule with the consent of all the citizens (4. 8. 1293b30 ff.). The corruption of this is what Aristotle calls ‘democracy’, namely, anarchic mob rule. Bad as democracy is, it is in Aristotle’s view the least bad of the perverse forms of government.
Location 1720we are familiar with the division of government into three branches: the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. The essentials of this system is spelt out by Aristotle, though he distributes the powers in a somewhat different way from, say, the US constitution. All constitutions, he tells us, have three elements: the deliberative, the official, and the judicial. The deliberative element has authority in matters of war and peace, in making and unmaking alliances; it passes laws, controls the carrying out of judicial sentences, and audits the accounts of officers. The official element deals with the appointment of ministers and civil servants, ranging from priests through ambassadors to the regulators of female affairs. The judicial element consists of the courts of civil and criminal law
Note: was this ever implemented pre-America in a psuedo form?
Location 1725Slaves, for Aristotle, are living tools—and on this basis he is willing to grant that if non-living tools could achieve the same purpose there would be no need for slavery. ‘If every instrument could achieve its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus . . . if the shuttle could weave and the plectrum pluck the lyre in a similar manner, overseers would not need servants, nor masters slaves’ (1. 4. 1253b35–54a1). So perhaps, in an age of automation, Aristotle would no longer defend slavery.
Note: [e]
Location 1738Aristotle had an aristocratic disdain for commerce. Our possessions, he says, have two uses, proper and improper. The proper use of a shoe, for instance, is to wear it: to exchange it for other goods or for money is an improper use (1. 9. 1257a9–10). There is nothing wrong with basic barter for necessities, but there is nothing natural about trade in luxuries, as there is in farming. In the operation of retail trade money plays an important part, and money too has a proper and an improper use. The most hated sort of wealth-getting is usury, which makes a profit out of money itself, rather than from its natural purpose, for money was intended to be used for exchange, not to increase at interest. It got the name ‘interest’ (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, because an offspring resembles its parent. For this reason, of all the modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural. (1. 10. 1258b5–7) Aristotle’s hierarchical preference places farmers at the top, bankers at the bottom, with merchants in between. His attitude to usury was one source of the prohibition, throughout medieval Christendom, of the charging of interest even at a modest rate. ‘When did friendship’, Antonio asks Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, ‘take a breed for barren metal of his friend?’
Note: anti-interest
Location 1742His own ideal state is described as having no more than a hundred thousand citizens, small enough for them all to know one another and to take their share in judicial and political office. It is very different from Alexander’s empire.
Note: what is dunbars law for a state? [e]
Location 1754Indeed, during the years of the Lyceum, relations between the world-conqueror and his former tutor seem to have cooled. Alexander became more and more megalomaniac and finally proclaimed himself divine. Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes led the opposition to the king’s demand, in 327, that Greeks should prostrate themselves before him in adoration. He was falsely implicated in a plot, and executed. The magnanimous and magnificent man who is the hero of the earlier books of the NE has some of the grandiose traits of Alexander. In the EE, however, the alleged virtues of magnanimity and magnificence are downgraded, and gentleness and dignity take centre stage.7
Location 1757Aristotle’s vision of the cosmos owes much to his Presocratic precursors and to Plato’s Timaeus. The earth was in the centre of the universe: around it a succession of concentric crystalline spheres carried the moon, the sun, and the planets in their journeys around the visible sky. The heavenly bodies were not compounds of the four terrestrial elements, but were made of a superior fifth element or quintessence. They had souls as well as bodies: living supernatural intellects, guiding their travels through the cosmos. These intellects were movers which were themselves in motion, and behind them, Aristotle argued, there must be a source of movement not itself in motion. The only way in which an unchanging, eternal mover could cause motion in other beings was by attracting them as an object of love, an attraction which they express by their perfect circular motion. It is thus that Dante, in the final lines of his Paradiso, finds his own will, like a smoothly rotating wheel, caught up in the love that moves the sun and all the other stars. Even the best of Aristotle’s scientific work has now only a historical interest.
Note: symbolism of gravity
Location 1776The Aristotelian corpus, in addition to the systematic scientific treatises, contains a massive collection of occasional jottings on scientific topics, the Problems. From its structure this appears to be a commonplace book in which Aristotle wrote down provisional answers to questions that were put to him by his students or correspondents. Because the questions are grouped rather haphazardly, and often appear several times—and are sometimes given different answers—it seems unlikely that they were generated by Aristotle himself, whether as a single series or over a lifetime. But the collection contains many fascinating details that throw insight into the workings of his omnivorous intellect. Some of the questions are the kind of thing a patient might bring to a doctor. Ought drugs to be used, rather than surgery, for sores in the armpits and groin? (1. 34. 863a21). Is it true that purslane mixed with salt stops inflammation of the gums? (1. 38. 863b12). Does cabbage really cure a hangover? (3. 17. 873b1). Why is it difficult to have sex under water? (4. 14. 878a35). Other questions and answers make us see Aristotle more in the role of agony aunt. How should one cope with the after-effects of eating garlic? (13. 2. 907b28–908a10). How does one prevent biscuit from becoming hard? (21. 12. 928a12). Why do drunken men kiss old women they would never kiss when sober? (30. 15. 953b15). Is it right to punish more seriously thefts from a public place than thefts from a private house? (29. 14. 952a16). More seriously, why is it more terrible to kill a woman than a man, although the male is naturally superior to the female? (29. 11. 951a12). A whole book of the Problems (26) is devoted essentially to weather forecasting. Other books contain questions that simply reflect general curiosity. Why does the noise of a saw being sharpened set our teeth on edge? (7. 5. 886b10). Why do humans not have manes? (10. 25. 893b17). Why do non-human animals not sneeze or squint? (Don’t they?) (10. 50. 896b5; 54. 897a1). Why do barbarians and Greeks alike count up to ten? (15. 3. 910b23). Why is a flute better than a lyre as an accompaniment to a solo voice? (19. 43. 922a1). Very often, the Problems ask ‘Why is such and such the case?’ when a more appropriate question would have been ‘Is such and such the case?’ For instance, Why do fishermen have red hair? (37. 2. 966b25). Why does a large choir keep time better than a small one? (19. 22. 919a36). The Problems let us see Aristotle with his hair down, rather like the table talk of later writers. One of his questions is particularly endearing to those who may have found it hard to read their way through his more difficult works: Why is it that some people, if they begin to read a serious book, are overcome by sleep even against their will? (18. 1. 916b1).
Note: On FAQ and the documentation of opn curiosity [e]
Location 1788His library was left to Theophrastus, his successor as head of the Lyceum. His own papers were vast in size and scope—those that survive today total around a million words, and it is said that we possess only one-fifth of his output. As we have seen, in addition to philosophical treatises on logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and politics, they included historical works on constitutions, theatre and sport, and scientific works on botany, zoology, biology, psychology, chemistry, meteorology, astronomy, and cosmology.
Note: 5-million word archive
Location 1813it has been traditional to regard the Academy and the Lyceum as two opposite poles of philosophy. Plato, according to this tradition, was idealistic, utopian, other-worldly; Aristotle was realistic, utilitarian, commonsensical. Thus, in Raphael’s School of Athens Plato, wearing the colours of the volatile elements air and fire, points heavenwards; Aristotle, clothed in watery blue and earthy green, has his feet firmly on the ground. ‘Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist,’ wrote S. T. Coleridge. ‘They are the two classes of men, besides which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.’ The philosopher Gilbert Ryle in the twentieth century improved on Coleridge. Men could be divided into two classes on the basis of four dichotomies: green versus blue, sweet versus savoury, cats versus dogs, Plato versus Aristotle. ‘Tell me your preference on one of these pairs’, Ryle used to say, ‘and I will tell you your preference on the other three.’8 In fact, as we have already seen and will see in greater detail later, the doctrines that Plato and Aristotle share are…
Location 1817a philosopher should be judged by the importance of the questions he raises, not the correctness of the answers he gives. If that is so, then Plato has an uncontestable claim to pre-eminence as a philosopher. He was the first to pose questions of great profundity, many of which remain open questions in philosophy today. But Aristotle too can claim a significant contribution to the intellectual patrimony of the world. For it was he who…
Note: essays and philo as question-centered [e]
Location 1827he is the first person whose surviving works show detailed observations of natural phenomena. Secondly, he was the first philosopher to have a sound grasp of the relationship between observation and theory in scientific method. Thirdly, he identified and classified different scientific disciplines and explored their relationships to each other: the very concept of a distinct discipline is due to him. Fourthly, he is the first professor to have organized his lectures into courses, and to have taken trouble over their appropriate place in a syllabus (cf. Pol. 1. 10. 1258a20). Fifthly, his Lyceum was the first research institute of which we have any detailed knowledge in which a number of scholars and investigators joined in collaborative inquiry and documentation. Sixthly, and not least important, he was the first person in history to build up a research library—not simply a handful of books for his own bookshelf, but a systematic…
Note: "First" .. good overview
Location 1831Like his master, he wrote copiously, and the mere list of the titles of his works takes up sixteen pages in the Loeb edition of his life by Diogenes Laertius. They include essays on vertigo, on honey, on hair, on jokes, and on the eruption of Etna. The best known of his surviving works is a book entitled Characters, modelled on Aristotle’s delineation in his Ethics of individual virtues and vices, but sketching them with greater refinement and with a livelier wit. He was a diligent historian of…
Note: theophrastus essays? [r]
Location 1843Theophrastus’ pupils, Demetrius of Phaleron, was an adviser to one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy, who made himself king of Egypt in 305. It is possible that it was he who suggested the creation in the new city of Alexandria of a library modelled on that of Aristotle, a…
Note: origins of alexandria
Location 1848history of Aristotle’s own library is obscure. On Theophrastus’ death it seems to have been inherited not by the next head of the Lyceum, the physicist Strato, but by Theophrastus’ nephew Neleus of Skepsis, one of the last surviving pupils of Aristotle himself. Neleus’ heirs are said to have hidden the books in a cave in order to prevent them from being confiscated by agents of King Eumenes, who was building up a library at Pergamon to rival that of Alexandria. Rescued by a bibliophile and taken to Athens, the story goes, the books were confiscated by the Roman general Sulla when he captured the city in 86 BC, and shipped…
Note: texts in limbo for centuries; how many circulating copies in Aristotle's own life? i imagine an ancient portfolio is jagged; 10% of works have 10-100 copies and 90% have only the original
Location 1850Epicurus was born into a family of Athenian expatriates in Samos, and paid a brief visit to Athens in the last year of Aristotle’s life. During early travels he studied under a follower of Democritus, and established more than one school in the Greek islands. In 306 he set up house in Athens and lived there until his death in 271. His followers in the Garden included women and slaves; they lived in seclusion and ate simple fare. He wrote 300 books, we are told, but all that survive intact are three letters and two groups of maxims. His philosophy of nature is set out in a letter to Herodotus and a letter to Pythocles; in the third letter, to Menoecus, he summarizes his moral teaching. The first set of maxims, forty in number, has been preserved, like the three letters, in the life of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius: it is called Kyriai Doxai, or major doctrines. Eighty-one similar aphorisms were discovered in a Vatican manuscript in 1888. Fragments from Epicurus’ lost treatise On Nature were buried in volcanic ash at Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. Painstaking efforts to unroll and decipher them, begun in 1800, continue to the present day.
Note: more lost ancient writing
Location 1865The aim of Epicurus’ philosophy is to make happiness possible by removing the fear of death, which is the greatest obstacle to tranquillity. Men struggle for wealth and power so as to postpone death; they throw themselves into frenzied activity so that they can forget its inevitability. It is religion that causes us to fear death, by holding out the prospect of suffering after death. But this is an illusion. The terrors held out by religion are fairy tales, which we must give up in favour of a scientific account of the world.
Note: fear of death vs. lesser anxieties
Location 1874Nothing comes into being from nothing: the basic units of the world are everlasting, unchanging, indivisible units or atoms. These, infinite in number, move about in the void, which is empty and infinite space: if there were no void, movement would be impossible. This motion had no beginning, and initially all atoms move downwards at constant and equal speed. From time to time, however, they swerve and collide, and it is from the collision of atoms that everything in heaven and earth has come into being. The swerve of the atoms allows scope for human freedom, even though their motions are blind and purposeless. Atoms have no properties other than shape, weight, and size. The properties of perceptible bodies are not illusions, but they are supervenient on the basic properties of atoms. There is an infinite number of worlds, some like and some unlike our own (Letter to Herodotus, D.L. 10. 38–45). Like everything else, the soul consists of atoms, differing from other atoms only in being smaller and subtler; these are dispersed at death and the soul ceases to perceive (Letter to Herodotus, D.L. 10. 63–7). The gods too are built out of atoms, but they live in a less turbulent region, immune to dissolution. They live happy lives, untroubled by concern for human beings. For that reason belief in providence is superstition, and religious rituals a waste of time (Letter to Menoecus, D.L. 10. 123–5). Since we are free agents, thanks to the atomic swerve, we are masters of our own fate: the gods neither impose necessity nor interfere with our choices. Epicurus believed that the…
Note: atomists. PA>D (Democritus)
Location 1878Stoics, like Epicureans, sought tranquillity, but by a different route. The founder of Stoicism was Zeno of Citium (334–262 BC). Zeno was born in Cyprus, but migrated to Athens in 313. He read Xenophon’s memoir of Socrates, which gave him a passion for philosophy. He was told that the nearest contemporary equivalent of Socrates was Crates
Note: lineage of Socrates
Location 1902Cynicism was not a set of philosophical doctrines, but a way of life expressing contempt for wealth and disdain for conventional propriety. Its founder was Diogenes of Sinope, who lived like a dog (‘cynic’ means ‘dog-like’) in a tub for a kennel, wearing coarse clothes and subsisting on alms. A contemporary of Plato, for whom he had no great respect, Diogenes was famous for his snub to Alexander the Great. When the great man visited him and asked, ‘What can I do for you’, Diogenes replied, ‘You can move out of my light’ (D.L. 6. 38).
Location 1904Zeno’s writings do not survive: the most famous of them in antiquity was his Republic. This combined Platonic utopianism with some cynic elements. Zeno rejected the conventional educational system, and thought it a waste of effort to build gymnasia, law courts, and temples. He recommended community of wives, and thought that men and women should wear the same, revealing, clothing. Money should be abolished and there should be a single legal system for all mankind, who should be like a herd grazing together nurtured by a common law (LS 67A). In spite of these communistic proposals, which many of his own later disciples found shocking, Zeno in his lifetime was held in honour by the Athenians, who gave him the freedom of the city. King Antigonus of Macedon invited him to become his personal philosopher, but Zeno pleaded old age and sent to court instead two of his brightest pupils.
Note: lived utopianism
Location 1918Cleanthes was succeeded as head of the school by Chrysippus of Soli, who governed it from 232 to 206. Chrysippus had been Cleanthes’ pupil, but he seems to have had no great respect for his teacher. ‘You tell me your theorems’, he is said to have told him, ‘and I’ll supply them with proofs.’ He spent some time as a student at the Academy, inoculating himself against scepticism. He was the most intelligent and the most industrious of the Hellenistic Stoics. His literary output was prodigious: his housekeeper reported that he wrote at a rate of 500 lines a day, and he left 705 books behind. Nothing but fragments survive. But it is clear that it was he who rounded Stoicism into a system; it used to be said, ‘If there had been no Chrysippus, there had been no Stoa’ (D.L. 6. 183).
Note: prolific output
Location 1930The fully developed Stoic physical system can be summarized as follows. Once upon a time, there was nothing but fire; gradually there emerged the other elements and the familiar furniture of the universe. Later, the world will return to fire in a universal conflagration, and then the whole cycle of its history will be repeated over and over again. All this happens in accordance with a system of laws which may be called ‘fate’ (because the laws admit of no exception), or ‘providence’ (because the laws were laid down by God for beneficent purposes). The divinely designed system is called Nature, and our aim in life should be to live in accord with Nature. Chrysippus was also the principal author of the Stoic ethical system, which is based on the principle of submission to Nature. Nothing can escape Nature’s laws, but despite the determinism of fate human beings are free and responsible. If the will obeys reason it will live in accordance with Nature. It is this voluntary acceptance of Nature’s laws that constitutes virtue, and virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness.15
Note: stoic detetminism as source of fortitude?
Location 1941During the latter part of the third century Stoic doctrine came under attack from the Academy. The academic heirs of Plato began to take their inspiration from Plato’s questioning master, Socrates, and turned to a form of scepticism. The leader of the Academy from 273 to 242 was Arcesilaus, a pupil of Pyrrho of Elis, a man often regarded as the founder of philosophical scepticism. Pyrrho, an older contemporary of Epicurus, who had served as a soldier in Alexander’s army, taught that nothing could be known and, accordingly, wrote no books. It was Arcesilaus and another of Pyrrho’s pupils, Timon, who brought scepticism to Athens in the early years of the third century. Timon denied the possibility of finding any self-evident principles to serve as the foundation of sciences. In the absence of such axioms, all lines of reasoning must be circular or endless.
Note: montaigne esque; anti-aristotelean
Location 1954In 155 Carneades was sent by Athens, along with a Stoic and a Peripatetic philosopher, on an embassy to Rome. During this embassy he displayed his rhetorical skill by arguing on successive days for and against justice. Cato the Roman Censor, who heard his performance, sent him packing as a subversive influence
Location 1963Arcesilaus criticized the Stoics because they had claimed to found their search for truth upon mental impressions incapable of falsehood: there were, he argued, no such impressions. Carneades too attacked Stoic epistemology, and taught that probability, not unattainable truth, should be the guide to life. Though not himself an atheist, he ridiculed mercilessly both the traditional pantheon and Stoic pantheism. His arguments against the Stoic theory of divination were adopted and skilfully developed by Cicero.16
Location 1965Lucretius was an adoring admirer of Epicurus, and the six books of the poem set out the Epicurean system in verse which, as Cicero observed, always displays great artistry and sometimes shows flashes of genius. Lucretius himself described his poetic skill as honey to disguise the wormwood of philosophy (1. 947). Parts of the poem were translated into English by John Dryden. Had he completed the task, his version would have been a worthy rival of Pope’s Essay on Man.
Location 1974Even Epicurus had to die, though his genius shone so brightly in comparison with other thinkers that he reduced them to nothing just as the rising sun puts out the stars
Location 1994Cicero wrote philosophy without profundity, but his arguments are often acute, his style is always elegant, and he is capable of great warmth. His essays on friendship and old age have been popular throughout the ages. His final work on moral philosophy, On Duties (de Officiis), was addressed to his son shortly after the assassination of Julius Caesar in March 44. It was, during various periods of history, regarded as an essential item in the education of a gentleman.
Note: find cicero essats [r]
Location 2020The impact of his teaching on philosophy was, of course, delayed and indirect, and his own moral doctrine was not without precedent. He taught that we should not render evil for evil; but so had Plato’s Socrates. He urged his hearers to love their neighbours as themselves; but he was quoting the ancient Hebrew book of Leviticus. He told us that we must refrain not just from wrong deeds, but from wrong thoughts and desires; Aristotle too had said that the really virtuous person is one who never even wants to do wrong. Jesus taught his disciples to despise the pleasures and honours of the world; but so, in their different ways, did the Epicureans and the Stoics. Considered as a moral philosopher, Jesus was not a great innovator: but that, of course, was not at all how he and his disciples saw his role.
Note: jesus as synthesis
Location 2028Like Heraclitus and other Greek and Jewish thinkers, Jesus predicted that there would be a divine judgement on the world, amid cosmic catastrophe. Unlike the Stoics, who placed the cosmic denouement in the indefinite and distant future, Jesus saw it as an imminent event, in which he would himself play a crucial role as the Messiah.
Note: heraclitus as source of judgment day
Location 2035the time of Jesus’ crucifixion (c. AD 30) Jewish ideas were gaining a hearing in Rome. Since the Hebrew Scriptures had been translated into Greek in Alexandria in the time of the first Ptolemys, there had been a substantial Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora. In the first century AD the outstanding representative of Hellenistic Jewish culture was Philo, who led a delegation to the emperor Caligula in 40 to protest against the persecution of the Jews in Alexandria and the imposition of emperor-worship. He wrote a life of Moses and a series of commentaries on the Pentateuch designed to make the Hebrew Scriptures intelligible and palatable to those educated in Greek culture. In its early days Christianity spread through the empire via the Greek-speaking diaspora, but it soon came into contact with Gentile philosophy. St Paul, preaching the gospel in Athens, held a debate with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, and the sermon against idolatry placed in his mouth in the Acts of the Apostles is skilfully crafted, and shows an awareness of matters at issue between the philosophical sects. Taking his cue from the altar of the unknown God, Paul undertook to show the philosophers the god whom they worshipped in ignorance. [God] is not far from every one of us. For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone,…
Note: paul as response to late hellenistic greeks
Location 2038Seneca was the most significant philosopher of the first century. Born in Spain, at Cordoba, at the beginning of the Christian era, he was in 49 made tutor to the 12-year-old Nero. When Nero came to the throne in 54 he became a senior adviser, and guided the emperor through a period of comparatively good government, which came to an end in the year 59 when Nero murdered his own mother. Seneca lost all influence on Nero after 62 and gradually withdrew from public life.…
Note: socratic death
Location 2052his reputation as a philosopher rests on his ten ethical dialogues, and his 124 moral epistles, mostly written during the period of his retirement. Seneca’s style is more exhortatory than argumentative; he prefers preaching to debate. He was not interested in logic, and he had a philistine attitude to the liberal arts: he compared a person over-learned in literature to a man with an over-furnished house (Ep. 88. 36). He had a certain interest in the physical sciences, and wrote a treatise On Natural Questions, but…
Note: socrates/seneca/montaigne
Location 2057In the longest and best known of his dialogues, On Anger, he insists on the crucial difference between bodily turmoil on the one hand, and the false judgements which were the essential element from which we need purification. On this issue, earlier Stoics had not spoken with a single voice. ‘None of those things that strike the mind fortuitously should be called passions: they are not things the mind causes but things that happen to it. It is not passion to be affected by the appearances of things that present themselves; passion consists in surrendering oneself to them and following up this fortuitous impact’ (2. 3. 1). Weeping, turning pale, sudden intakes of breath, and sexual arousal are not passions, but mere bodily…
Location 2062‘The human heart is never more divine than when it meditates on its own mortality, and realises that a human being is born in order to give up life, and that this body is not a home but a short-term hostelry which one must leave as soon…
Note: seneca on overcoming death
Location 2070There are those who have given up some vices but not all—they are without avarice, but not without anger; without lust but not without ambition; and so on. Then there are those who have given up all passions but are not yet safe from relapse. The third class, the closest approximation to wisdom, consists of those who are…
Note: stages of virtue development
Location 2073the distinction in Stoicism between doctrines and precepts. The doctrines provided the general philosophical framework; the precepts enabled the true concept of the highest good to find expression in specific prescriptions to individuals (Ep. 94. 2). This distinction enabled Stoics to counter the allegation that their system was too elevated to be of any practical use, and…
Note: theory vs. practice
Location 2076in both ancient and modern times, have regarded Seneca as a hypocrite: a man who praised mercy but was implicated in a tyrant’s crimes; a man who preached the worthlessness of earthly goods but piled up a gigantic fortune. In his defence it can be said that he acted as a restraining influence on Nero, and that in his last years he sought genuine detachment from the world. He was under no illusion that he lived up to Stoic standards. ‘I am a long way, not only from perfection, but from being a halfway decent person,’ he wrote (Ep. 57. 3). Seneca was the founding father of the Imperial Stoa. Two other prominent members of the school show how wide was the appeal of Stoicism under the empire: the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics of the imperial…
Note: counter-culture to government backed
Location 2079Marcus Aurelius Antoninus became emperor in 161 and spent much of his life defending the frontiers of the Roman Empire, now at its furthest extent. Though himself a Stoic, he founded chairs of philosophy at Athens for all of the major schools, Platonic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean. During his military campaigns he found time to make entries into a philosophical notebook, which has been known in modern times as the Meditations. It is a collection of aphorisms and discourses on themes such as the brevity of life, the need to work for the common good, the unity of mankind, and the corrupting nature of power. He sought to combine patriotism with a universalist viewpoint. ‘My city and country,’ he says, ‘so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; but so far as I am a man, it is the world.’ He hails the universe as ‘Dear City of Zeus’.
Location 2107histrionic.
Location 2121Clement of Alexandria published a set of Miscellanies (Stromateis), written in the style of table talk, in which he argued that the study of philosophy was not only permissible, but necessary, for the educated Christian. The Greek thinkers were pedagogues for the world’s adolescence, divinely appointed to bring it to Christ in its maturity. Clement enrolled Plato as an ally against dualist Christian heretics, he experimented with Aristotelian logic, and he praised the Stoic ideal of freedom from passion. In the manner of Philo, he explained away as allegorical aspects of the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, which repelled educated Greeks. In this he founded a tradition that was to have a long history in Alexandria.
Note: a book of essays? [e]
Location 2123He believed, with Plato, that human souls existed before birth or conception. Formerly free spirits, human souls in their embodied state could use their free will to ascend, aided by the grace of Christ, to a heavenly destiny. In the end, he believed, all rational beings, sinners as well as saints, and devils as well as angels, would be saved and find blessedness. There would be a resurrection of the body which (according to some of our sources) he believed would take spherical form, since Plato had decreed that the sphere was the most perfect of all shapes.
Location 2131Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120) was born in Boeotia and spent most of his life there, but he had studied at Athens and at least once gave lectures in Rome. He is best known as a historian for his parallel lives of twenty-three famous Greeks paired with twenty-three famous Romans, which in an Elizabethan translation by Sir Thomas North provided the plot and much of the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Roman plays. But he also wrote some sixty short treatises on popular philosophical topics, which were collected under the title Moralia. He was a Platonist and commented on the Timaeus. He wrote a number of polemical treatises against the Stoics and Epicureans which contributed to the decline of those systems: they bear parallel titles such as On the Contradictions of the Epicureans and On the Contradictions of the Stoics or On Free Will in Reply to Epicurus and On Free Will in Reply to the Stoics. One of the longest of his surviving essays bears the title That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, and another is an attack on an otherwise unknown work by Colotes, one of Epicurus’ earliest disciples. Though his works are not often read by philosophers for their own sake, they have long been quarried by historians for the information they provide about their targets of attack.
Location 2140Contemporary with the Christian Origen, and a fellow pupil of Ammonius Saccas, was the last great pagan philosopher, Plotinus (205–70).
Location 2158The dominant place in Plotinus’ system is occupied by ‘the One’: the notion is derived, through Plato, from Parmenides, where Oneness is a key property of Being. The One is, in a mysterious way, identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good: it is the basis of all being and the standard of all value, but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness. Below this supreme and ineffable summit, the next places are occupied by Mind (the locus of Ideas) and Soul, which is the creator of time and space. Soul looks upward to Mind, but downward to Nature, which in turn creates the physical world. At the lowest level of all is bare matter, the outermost limit of reality. These levels of reality are not independent of each other. Each level depends for its existence and activity on the level above it. Everything has its place in a single downward progress of successive emanations from the One. This impressive and startling metaphysical system is presented by Plotinus not as a mystical revelation but on the basis of philosophical principles derived from Plato and Aristotle. It will be examined in detail in Chapter 9 below.
Location 2162But it was Christians, not pagans, who transmitted Plotinus’ ideas to the post-classical world, and foremost among them was St Augustine of Hippo, who was to prove the most influential of all Christian philosophers.
Location 2172Most of what we know of his early life comes from his own autobiography, the Confessions, a portrait, by a biographer nearly as gifted as Boswell, of a mind more capacious than Johnson’s.
Location 2175For about ten years he was a follower of Manichaeism, a syncretic religion which taught that there were two worlds, one of spiritual goodness and light created by God, and one of fleshly darkness created by the devil.
Location 2178For some time after his baptism Augustine remained under the philosophical influence of Plotinus. A set of dialogues on God and the human soul articulated a Christian Neoplatonism. Against the Academics set out a detailed line of argument against Academic Scepticism. In On Ideas he presented his own version of Plato’s Theory of Ideas: the Ideas have no extra-mental existence, but they exist, eternal and unchangeable, in the mind of God. He wrote On Free Choice on human freewill, choice, and the origin of evil, a text still used in a number of philosophy departments. He also wrote a donnish Platonic tract, the 83 Different Questions. He also wrote six books on music, and an energetic work On the Teacher, reflecting imaginatively on the nature and power of words.
Note: research Augusine's works [r]
Location 2184He had a prodigious writing career ahead of him, including his masterpiece The City of God, but the year 391 marks an epoch. Up to this point Augustine showed himself the last fine flower of classical philosophy. From then onwards he writes not as the pupil of the pagan Plotinus, but as the father of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. We shall follow him into this creative phase in the next volume of this work. Augustine did not see himself, in his maturity, as a philosophical innovator. He saw his task as the expounding of a divine message that had come to him from Plato and Paul, men much greater than himself, and from Jesus, who was more than man. But the way in which succeeding generations have conceived and understood the teaching of Augustine’s masters has been in great part the fruit of Augustine’s own work. Of all the philosophers in the ancient world, only Aristotle had a greater influence on human thought.
Note: the city of god [r]
Location 2191