**Ancient Philosophy
Historical survey of ancient philosophy. From the start in the 6th century BCE, until 6 century CE.
In ancient history, philosophers tend to build and work on their predecessors and refer back to earlier authors all the time. As we go on, the story becomes more and more complex and presupposes more and more foreknowledge. We get to know the authors as they present themselves and refer back to predecessors.
The reader is part of the class, are necessary. In the exam there will be referens to the texts. Explain what is being said in the excerpt. Translate what is said in the class into the given text. Need flexible knowledge from ancient philosophy.
Exam is oral with three questions: factual knowledge, broader compare/contrast question and explanation of a text fragment.
Myth
The earliest philosophers explicitly reacted against the situation that came before them. At the beginning of human culture which was very early on, 10000 BCE. This period of epistemic encounters with the world has lasted for very long. Before the philosophers there was definitely rational reflection too. People in those pre-philosophic ages really took something from their stories and the transmission of culture. Before there was an oral transmission of culture. The most fundamental questions were asked orally and answered by referring to stories, the mythos. Plato still used this word in some contexts as synonymous with logos. It is not a negative term like we ascribe it to be. Those stories which were given to wandering questions are always referring to sacred things. Things that have to do with gods and their interactions and interacting with us. ie. supernatural forces. There is however not really a term for nature at this point, so not really a relevant term. They themselves did not refer to this as myth. Myth has been for millenia a valid system of explanation of the world. If we talk about the existance of philosophy wherever around the world, it exists from the 1st millenium BCE, so there have been more millenia before that time then there has been since. So we are only doing philosophy since the Greeks began it.
What do those stories talk about?
They refer to situations or events that took place out of time. They may have historical systematisation, but this is already introducing some rationality. In their essence, myths refer to timeless events, in which divine forces interact with each other and humans as they want. We have to obey the perverse or odd acts of the gods. If we ask why the sun comes up and comes down, it is because during timeless time, one god decided to carry a large fire from east to west everyday. We only want to know how it comes to be that we at this stable place in time have these stable reocurring events.
Why are there seasons? Because at some point 1 goddess brought her daughter to marry the king of the underworld, and the poor girl now lives in the underworld and can only visit her mother every 6 months, and when she is in the underworld, nature dies, and when she is back the crops start growing again. What this model of explanation does is take for granted the situation as we have it, we see the seasons and the sun, and we see that there aren’t necessarily causes, it only legitimises the situation as we find it.
The mode of explanation is not questioned, but is taken to legitimise the events that are already there. You just want confirmation that the situation as you had it was foreseen in the course of the universe.
Once rationality enters the stage, everything changes. You cant just pretend nothing happens once people say that we need a rational explanation, this also changes all the terms of your faith. If you are talking about belief in the two cases of pre and post rationalism, they are totally different things. Everywhere in the world where this type of explanation existed or exists people are certain that there are gods. There are gods and whatever happens is because of their interaction with us. If you are a believer and you have faith in present day society, you are saying something similar, but you are already taking stock of what rationality asks of you. This is an entirely arational perspective. Once rationality enters the stage you can only react against it through irrationality. Once rationality takes over as an explanatory force, any investment in saying that you must take these myths seriously leads to irrationality. Take for example the nazis and the myth of the aryan race. This is sheer irrationality, because they return to a use of myth, which can only be contrasted with a rational mode of explanation. When we take distance from rationality, we become irrational.
Having recourse to mythical explanation changes once you have rationality as the explanatory force of the world. With that said, it is true that the myths of the Greeks are no longer those arational myths. They have gone through an age-long process of rationalisation. This is because we talk about greek mytho_logy_. It is a rational kind of discourse at this point. We are dealing with something qualitatively different. The Greek myths about what is before philosophy are already philosophised to some extent. Power would always be justified through a divine installment of the king and no one questions this until it is questioned; but when it is questioned, it is the end of that mentality itself.
The structures underlying this mode of explanation change.
Plato, the inventor of philosophia as we do it, uses myth, at least a lot in the republic.
In early christian times there was a resacralisaiton of the divine presence in the world which lasted until the French revolution, but there was always opposition to the idea that rulers were always invested by God. The investitura struggle between the german emperor and the pope was not random. When Napoleon crowns himself this was scandalous to those who believed in the ancien regime.
Rationality implies that the question must be debatable, if the question is totally undebatable, it is irrationality perhaps.
The omnipresence of the gods is taken for granted, and does not have the dimension of being questioned.
Theogony, the birth of the gods, or the coming to be of the gods. Hesiod.
Everything is born from sexual intercourse between things. All the things in the world are gods, as persons. Typical for Greek mythology is that gods are not natural forces but anthropomorphic representations of divine forces, with their own personalities. Like the extreme sexual appetite of Zeus. Particular about the greeks is that Zeus is someone who interacts with other gods, and produces by sexual intercourse natural things. They also take power in turn so the next generation takes over after the first. The whole course of events in the Theogony can be sort of applied to human families. This is the mythological representation of the universe of course, but something new is going on. People paid Hesiod to write a text in which finally someone systematises the family relations between the gods. This is really novel. Earlier times were not really bothered about the actual geneaology. Zeus is worshipped as being reborn every year on Crete, so the cycles of the year are explained by the death and rebirth of Greece, whilst in Dodona, the same Zeus was worshipped as an eternal divine force whoes messages echo through oaks. So you have two contradictory versions of the same mythological person. They may not really have been aware of these things or seen this as contradictions, they may have been very flexible. But what Hesiod is doing is saying that there must be a stop of all of these different geneaologies, I want to make a logos of the gods, a systematisation, which comes together with the introduction of rationality. Even from the very start in which we start reading Greek myth, because Homer is not telling myth. He is using myth to tell a story of the Trojan war, and the gods play a very whimsical role. The start of the war is already a kind of stupid argument between two godesses who want to be the most beautiful. Why have a war between humans if a goddess is jealous about not winning a beauty contest. When the crown of king Menelaos is described, it is made in iron, but it is very special. What Homer values is iron, in a period of the iron age. This is from the bronze age. 400 years later someone, Homer, is still repeating those ideas.
Poets were seen as the educators of the people of the people. Someone from the westcoast of present day turkey. A city called Colophon. A poet called Xenophanes was reacting against the traditional image of the coast. After the Greco-persian war they became independent greek cities on the west coast of asia minor. Same goes for southern Italy and Sicily which was Greek territory. But it was threathened by the carthaginians who conquered some of Sicily, though some city-states remained until the existance of the roman empire. Even now a days in the south of Calabria and Celento there are villages where Greek is still the native language.
Xenophanes is already in the 6th century. He has a very specific message which we need to look at to see the consolidation of the change of mentality. In the area of speaking of the gods: we cannot speak of them as fundamentally evil beings.
When we are dealing with early Greek philosophy we have only fragements, transmitted through the manuscrips of different authors. Everything we know of presocratic philosophy is actually fragmentary. That there are so many quotations means that the next generations have again been dealing with the things that the presocratics said in dialogue.
Xenophanes rejects the immorality of the gods. The Zeus that sleeps with any woman he can find, and we are the subjects who have to undergo the consequences, doesn’t make sense. We should only talk of the gods well. It is blasphemous otherwise. There is a palpable tendency to purify the image of the divine. Not yet in terms of a cosmological argument about what gods fundamentally are, just a bit about what they aren’t. If the presocratics had something interesting to say about cosmology they may have been quoted on it at some point. It is to say that the fragments may be trusted with the essential things these authors were saying. If the super-horse was able to draw its gods, it would draw it to their own image in likeness. The gods are represented as the humans find themselves. Xenophanes also questions anthropomorphism as such. Anthropomorphism was the central idea around theological speculation for the greeks. They had already fused together the natural cosmological functions of the gods with human-like shapes and behaviour. If Athena is the real personification of wisdom, and then shown to act out of jealousy, that’s blasphemous. Homer and Hesiod would attribute virtuous behaviour to gods also, but for Xenophanes this is undone in that the gods are viscious. That is anthropomorphism gone bad. In later stages of Greek religion virtue itself is divine. Virtue with a capital letter which is detached from human shape, and you only pray to Virtue as such. There is a tendency of purification, though not yet of abstraction, this comes first with Aristotle. Not with Plato. Gods with a metaphysical function, gods with philosophical functions.
You can historicise how Xenophanes came to this viewpoint. If he speaks of ethiopians and thracians he needs to know about these people. There must be intercultural contact and travelling. When Homer lived on the island of Chios, of course he was also performed in Sicily. The Greek expansion in the 7th century brought one much further than the Greek-speaking world itself. He is going back to a kind of cultural relativism, and he is aware that people portray the same things differently. So he is looking for a new paradigm of talking about the divine. There is referens to one god who is different from the others. This is not to say he was a monotheist. He is rather saying there should be a divine force which leads the other gods, and men. Not anthropomorphic in either body or thought. It is a bit uncertain what Xenophanes is actually saying here, because we do not have enough of the fragment. But at least it is the furthering of the rejection of anthropomorphism. He is looking for something novel which is not imbued with representations of the gods which lead to immorality. The anthropomorphic characteristics for Hesiod and Homer were the explanation for things in the cosmos. Cosmos is the playing ground for gods doing what they like. The gods are not omnipotent either in the cosmos, but are subjected themselves to fate. There is a force higher than them, and fate is almost never personified, so there may be a god greatest among men already in homer. This may play a role in the gradual purification of religious beliefs.
The text comes from a christian author called Clemens who argues that there are authors among the pagans who are a little bit monotheist, though it is awkward to see whether this is actually what he says. Colonists from Phocaea, close to Colophon, settled in Elea. The eleatic school refers to xenophanes as their first inspirator. Xenophanes ’says’ what Parmenides also wants to say. There is a trace of direct historical importance which those colonists would know first-hand due to where they came from.
There is a theory that philistines had similar pottery to mycenean pottery. They may have been the people of myceneae who fled the bronze-age collapse.
Preplatonic philosophy never discovered the intelligible world as something intelligible. They saw it as a body of bodies. What makes plato so important in the history of philosophy is the discovery of the immateriality of what really counts in the universe. Whatever you say about the gods in presocratic times can never presuppose that the gods are immaterial beings. The gods are always some kind of body. The Greeks themselves referred to the planets as gods. They had to explain how their anthropomorphic vision of the gods could also be the stars. Even Xenophanes’ highest god cannot have been immaterial.
At a certain point, in the 6th century bce, nature was discovered. There is something going on in Greek culture at this point which has been termed by Francis Cornford as the discovery of nature. It is something we have to look into when we speak of the first beginnings of philosophy. We have to know that if we talk about the discovery of nature, we are talking of something that was there but was not recognised as such. Nature comes from latin natura, and tura is the latin derivative that makes a verb into a noun. The verb was nasci meaning to be born. Natura in its essential meaning refers to the fact of giving birth, the fact of growth. Not coincidentally this is the translation of the greek word phyo, to grow. Physis is the noun. We are then referring to the fact that nature grows out of itself. Nature is the thing the essence of which is the reproduce itself. This is spectacular. Using the word nature as meaning something that should be understood as a growing force out of itself. Not referring to external or divine forces that make it grow. In the prephilosophical stage, any growth is carried out by the gods. When you destroy a plant, you are a destroying a divine thing. The nymph that inahbits the plant may take revenge on you. If you call it nature by referring to things that can grow out of themselves you detach them from the divine. This means that if you now want to explain the growth in nature, you have to rely on different principles from before. Just through the use of this very simple word, physis reveals a new mentality, an anti-hesiodic state of culture, even if hesiod already has hints of it. Even in Hesiod the gods are on mount olympos, some kind of wondrous place than worldly interactions, but not abstract. With the discovery of nature in the Greek cultural world, people start to say that the gods inhabit mount olympos and nowhere else. There are no dryads or nymphs in the plants, and if there are you have to explain it as an interaction with the things in nature themselves. Now the gods become supernatural, because they are not in nature in the same way. Hesiod could never understand such a term.
Aristotle refers to nature just as was defined above. A principle of being moved and adressed in something that bears that principle in itself. Motion and rest do what they do because the thing in itself is subordinate to this being moved and adressed. Nature are things that can move themselves and which can be moved. Self-motion is an exception, given that it needs the soul. A human body is physical, defined under nature, because it is susceptible to motion and rest, but also self-motion. It is interesting to see that aristotle’s definition of nature repeats the discovery of nature as something that exists by itself and regenerates itself. The cells of my body know where to go in order to transform themselves to heal the wound. You don’t even feel the process at a certain point in time. The body does its job of regenerating itself. It becomes viable to say that this is nature at work. Not a god. Anaxagoras’ intellect is one explanation of how this process runs. All of this needs to be taken care of, but at least we have a definition of a reality that operates by itself without intervention. Human life is emancipated from the gods alongside this. In this explanation of societies we see that people are now not attributing their own state organisation and constitution out of itself. The mentality of explaining nature is transposed onto the explanation of sociological structures. It is human decision-making which makes a certain type of government. It is not just given. Are constitutions by nature or by convention? By nature would here weirdly mean the divine. By convention then it is possible to have things like democracy which is built on an agreement between citizens.**