Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

Introduction

A very short introduction should have modest aims. It is also, however, an opportunity to give the reader direct ways into the subject, and lead him or her straight off to what is most important about the subject. In this book I have tried to engage the reader with ancient philosophy in the way that matters, as a tradition of discussion and engagement, a conversation which I hope will continue after the reader has finished this book.

Because I have focused on important and revealing features of ancient philosophy, I have not tried to work through a standard chronological account of the tradition. Not only does the very short nature of this book make that a bad idea (since the tradition is too rich to cram into a very short account), but there is no shortage of books available that will help the beginner deepen his or her interest in ancient philosophy. The list of Further Reading indicates good places to start; beginners have never been better served with reference books, translations and companions than they are today.

I start by introducing the reader, in Chapter 1 (‘Humans and beasts: understanding ourselves’) to an issue in ancient philosophy, about understanding the conflict of reason and emotion within ourselves, an issue which is readily understandable and one that a modern reader can engage with before knowing much about the background of the theories involved. I am hoping to get across the centrality to the ancient tradition of argument, and also of practical engagement with issues important to our lives. In the second chapter (‘Why do we read Plato’s Republic?’) I focus, by contrast, on factors that distance us from the ancient philosophical writers. One is the literal distance of time and the loss of much evidence. Another is the influence of other factors, which we should be aware of, which make our concern with the ancients a selective and changeable one, so that a text like Plato’s Republic is read very differently at different times. Both the immediacy and the distance are things we should be aware of. In Chapters 3 and 4 (‘The happy life, ancient and modern’ and ‘Reason, knowledge and scepticism’) I show how we can understand and engage with the ancient variety of views on ethics and on knowledge – how we can come to engage with the ancients in a respectful but critical way, both disagreeing with them and learning from them. Chapter 5 (‘Logic and reality’) takes up the rest of the ancient philosophy syllabus, focusing on one particular metaphysical debate, namely whether there are purposes in nature or not, and if so what they are. Chapter 6 (‘When did it all begin, and what it is anyway?’) raises the issue of what, if anything, unites the ancient philosophical tradition. This is a question better asked at the end than at the beginning of an account of it, since I hope that the reader will agree that the main lines of what I say have emerged from the previous chapters. (And if she disagrees, this will, I hope, be in the spirit of the debates which have been covered.)

However, if you are quite new to the subject you might appreciate a quick chronological sketch of the tradition you are being so briefly introduced to, so one follows. There is also a timeline placing the major figures in ancient philosophy, not all of whom can be adequately dealt with in this book, though many are discussed in the text and the text-boxes.

Ancient philosophy is traditionally held to begin in the sixth century BC, in the Greek cities of coastal Asia Minor. A large number of philosophers are generally grouped as ‘Presocratics’; their activities cover the sixth and fifth centuries. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes are early cosmologists, giving ambitious accounts of the world as a whole. Pythagoras began a tradition emphasizing mysticism and authority. Heraclitus produced notoriously obscure aphorisms. Xenophanes begins a long concern with knowledge and its grounds.

Parmenides and Zeno became famous for arguments which apparently cannot be refuted but which reach conclusions impossible to accept. These arguments provoke a crisis in philosophical accounts of the world; responses to it can be found in the cosmologies of Anaxagoras, Empedocles and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.

In the second half of the fifth century, intellectuals called sophists developed some philosophical skills, particularly in argument, and philosophical interests, particularly in ethical and social thought. The best known are Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias and Prodicus.

Some of these people are not strictly Presocratics, since their lives overlapped with that of Socrates, but Socrates is generally held to mark a turning-point in ancient philosophy. He wrote nothing, but greatly influenced a number of followers, including Aristippus, a founder of hedonism, the idea that our aim should be pleasure, and Antisthenes, a founder of Cynicism, the idea that our needs should be as minimal as possible. Socrates’ emphasis on questioning and argument made him the key symbolic figure of the Philosopher to the ancient world.

Socrates’ most famous follower is Plato, the best-known ancient philosopher, who wrote a number of philosophical dialogues famous for their literary skill. Plato founded the first philosophical school, and he and his most famous pupil, Aristotle, dominate the philosophy of the fourth century. Both left extensive works – Plato in finished form, Aristotle in the form of lecture and research notes.

The ‘Hellenistic’ period (traditionally from 323 BC, the death of Alexander the Great, to the end of the Roman republic at the end of the first century BC) is marked by the emergence of two new philosophical schools, those of Epicurus and the Stoics, and also of philosophical movements which were not institutionalized as schools, such as the Cynics, and Pyrrho, the first sceptic. Plato’s school practised a form of scepticism in this period, and several mixed or hybrid schools try to bring together the insights of different schools of thought.

During the first century BC to the second century AD, the early Roman empire, the existing schools continue, and philosophy flourishes. No new major schools emerge, but there is renewed interest in Pythagoras, and also in studying Plato’s ideas positively and systematically.

Late antiquity sees the emergence, in the second to third centuries, of an original new school, that of Plotinus, which revives some of Plato’s ideas and is called ‘Neoplatonism’). As Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman empire, which divides into an eastern and a western part, the dominant world-view becomes Platonism, and this is the tradition most influential on Christianity. The first major western Christian thinker, Augustine, is influenced by Platonism, but has already lost touch with the major traditions of ancient philosophical thinking.