SECTION 1: THE PRE-SOCRATICS
MYTH (Early Explanations):
[Beginning of Human History - 6thC BC]
Highly interlinked with the emergence of philosophy, the first expression of a desire for explanation. Relies primarily on causal thinking / the efficient cause (this God, then that God). Highly anthropomorphic, making a complex world:
1. Simplified, since man understands man, and so a Man-world is easy to understand.
2. Influenceable, the tides of a faceless nature do not care, but Gods accept sacrifices, and so man can take control of his own fate.
XENOPHANES (Against Myth):
[6th-5thC BC]
Noticing the cultural relativism of how Gods are portrayed he argues against both this anthropomorphism (with the portrayal of the Gods being wholly cultural), and against the entire Homeric/Hesiodic tradition, due to their attribution of the most vile of human tendencies to the Gods. He seems to, in one stray fragment, defend the existence of a monotheistic God who rules over all of nature.
THE DISCOVERY OF NATURE (Birth of the Pre-Socratics):
[6th-5thC BC]
Begins with the demarcation of the mystic and supernatural, and the natural, that which is rationally intelligible. Notably, this demarcation is what allows for science, medicine, early pre-Socratic philosophy and so on, by positing an intelligible world, explainable, graspable, and inventing the logos: reason itself, systematized rational thinking.
The pre-Socratic project is one searching for a single rational system that can explain the world. The Egyptians and Babylonians, although making incredible advancements in science, matemathics, etc. only ever restrained their research to practical matters (the predicting of faith, the irrigation of the Nile). It was the pre-Socratics (beginning with Thales) who ditched the practical and invented ‘theory’: the so-called disinterested search for universal truth, for knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
The search for an ‘arche’, a first, guiding, universal, atemporal principle of nature was another of the pre-Socratics’ inventions. Thales’ water, Anaximenes’ air, etc.
HERACLITUS (Becoming):
[6th-5thC BC]
Positing at the same time a world in absolute flux, and an intelligible singular Logos Heraclitus has been dubbed the obscure. For Hegel, a philosopher who reconciled opposites and invented the dialectic; For Nietzsche, one who reveled in dualities, fluxes, becomings. His Logos may best be understood as a flowing unity, a force gathering and structuring all into One, as all is always Becoming.
The three main themes of his fragments: the permanent flux, the harmony of opposites, and fire as arche, are the building blocks of his philosophy. The first stresses that everchanging river. The second that everything is always contradicting itself, comprehended from a variety of perspectives, that eventually reconcile into the object itself, the true unity of points of view. The third not as much a material principle, but a structural one: fire destroys and gives life (its burning and its warmth) is nevertheless a statement that the universe is rational, comprehensible, identifiable by men even in its muddled obscurity.
PARMENIDES (Being):
[6th-5thC BC]
The origins of ontology and to some extent metaphysics Parmenides posited a singular Being (What is), which is the same as thought (what can be thought is, what is can be thought). Against this is non-Being (What is not), which cannot be thought, conceived of, etc.
His conjugations of it is / to be are noteworthy, as a purely abstract Being is not yet posited, and as a best translation would be “a thing either is or is not”. Here the temporal element (absence of motion, everlasting present) may be underlined. Additionally, Aristotle himself notes how Metaphysics, having not yet been discovered, is in Parmenides conflated with Physics: the conflation of beings with Being.
Parmenides is the first to reject sense-perception, and argue for a purely rational, logos-driven conception of the world. He also denied generation and corruption: Being cannot emerge from non-Being, and Being must be eternal and unchanging if it is to be true, Absolute, etc.
His starting premise, that Being is and must be necessarily, has great ramifications. As mentioned, generation and corruption are impossible. That which is, is indivisible (all that is, is in the same way, in as much as B’s Being is equal in Being-ness to A’s Being). It is motionless and limited in extention. It is fully realizes (perfect, complete) since coming-to-be, which doesn’t happen, is simply a product of imperfection. This leads him to conclude that that which is, is a sphere.
Zeno, the great defender and crafter of motion-related paradoxes to defend Parmenides, has been refuted by Aristotle with the following position: time is not divisible into discrete units.
THE PLURALISTS (The Ant-Monism of Empedocles & Anaxagoras):
[5thC BC]
The pluralists emerged in reaction to Parmenides, affirming What is, but denying his complete Monism. Empedocles and Anaxagoras are the two premier philosophers, who reject the unity of Being, positing it as rather always plural. They posit that the QUALITIES of basic stuffs govern complex stuffs.
Empedocles, half mystic, half natural scientist, posited the four roots or elements. The real world is not to be trusted fully, and we must look deeper into it: it is built of fire, earth, water & fire. These elements are divisble, mobile and eternal. They mix to make our world, everywhere there is only a mixture of them, no void. It is then Love and Strife that cause and move their mixtures in a cyclical fashion. Love pulls them together creating a single, uniform sphere. Strife pulls them apart, resulting in four seperate spheres. We, ourselves, live in a transitory period between the one and the many. Aristotle would praise him for explaining material change, and critize him for equating Love/Hatered equally with material and motion.
Anaxagoras, rather than positing 4 primary elements, posited an infinity of them. That is, an infinity of seeds, everything is made of seeds, the seeds of everything. Air-seed, chair-seed, fart-seed, piss-seed, TV-seed, hand-seed… Essentially: Alles in Allem, Everything in Anything. Things take their shape from the prevelence of one seed over the others. This is a bit absurd, but simply: what is cannot arise from that which is not, and therefore that what is must be everywhere. For Aristotle he merely doubled the world, and explained very little. There is one special seed: Nous, mind. It is unmixed, a governing, ordering, causal force more sophisticated than Empedocles’ Love/Strife. Althought psychological, it only accounts for the beginning of motion, not the perfection of matter, not the deisgn of the world, and not the teleolistic motion of everything; this displeased Plato in the Phaedo.
THE ATOMISTS (Atom & Void):
[5thC BC]
Begins as a form of pluralism based on the QUANTIATIVE simple stuffs impacting the complex stuffs. Its main proponent is Democritus. Alike the pluralists, for the atomists there is no generation or corruption, change emerges from combinations of primary particles.
These atoms are magnitudes, indivisible and infinite in number. For them, unlike for the pluralists, there is empty space, void, as a part of reality, through which atoms move. Atomic difference is due to shape (A vs N), position (N vs Z) or order (AN vs NA). Atoms are attracted to similar atoms, and combine to make up relatively self-same stuffs.
This leaves them without a Final Cause: no account of why motion takes place, unlike with Love/Strife, or nous.
Sense perception was, for them, a kind of atomic image-touching. All of sense-perception (colour, shape, taste…) is entirely convention. There are only atoms and void.
SECTION 2: THE CLASSICAL PERIOD
SOCRATES (And the Question of Who He Was):
[5thC BC]
The great philosopher is best defined by his namesake problem (the so-called Socratic Problem): Who was he? What did he actually believe? There are 4 extant sources with varying portrayals of the man and his ideas: Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes & Aristotle.
For Xenophon (a military general) he was a rather conservative practical moralist, and not a metaphysician. For Aristophanes a pseudo-Sophist, intellectual nothing man, the dialectician who got himself taken seriously. For Aristotle he was an anti natural philosopher, the pioneer of ethics, and a man on a search for universal values. In Plato’s early works he was a dialectician, a martyr of philosophy, a lover of reason, and too an ethical philosopher.
From these 4 accounts we can see certain similarities: the ethical philosophy, the dialectic approach, and his status as the first man to admit he knew nothing. The man asking questions through the guidance of his Daimonion, the voice in his head telling him what is wrong, but not what is right. Perhaps his search for universal truth was indeed the case, and it was his critiques of the Sophists and the traditional account of knowledge that got him killed.
His method consisted of making his opponents realize their own lack of knowledge before both interlocutors could move on to an investigation of the true nature of a given virtue: what is justice, etc. Eventually an intellectual realization must lead to a change in a person’s life, and one cannot be ethical without this realization, without knowledge. As his mantra goes: no one errs willingly.
PLATO (The Dialectician, Moralist, The Pythagorean):
[5thC BC]
His dialouges which omit him almost entirely, his meta-philosophy, the high preservation of his work, alongside the incongruence of his development present an interpretational problem: Where does Socrates end and Plato begin? And yet, even if we were to uncover the ‘true’ Plato beneath the Socratic dialogue it will never be a capital T ‘True’ Plato. The Phaedrus presents writing as a pharmakon: cure and poison. The cure of forgetting, the poison of remembering. And so his written works, and whatever glimmer of him is present in them, may in fact be close to useless for comprehending his ‘True’ doctrines.
There are several ways to order the dialogues: dramatically (based on the dates mentioned), thematically and stylistically (into an early, middle and late period). The early are aporetic, inconclusive dialectic exercises. The middle more technical and elaborate discussions. The late monologue-esque, with Socrates often having minimal participation.
The major Sophist-Platonic break is this: most people have unexamined moral beliefs. The Sophists do a good job of selling these same beliefs back to them, but there is no critical reflection here. Knowledge (more than mere true opinion) is needed, something to ground those floating propositional statues. It is the philosopher who can reach true virtue, although of course the common man is perfectly capable of living a virtious life, just not a TRULY virtious one.
The Republic is an investigation of justice. For Socrates a town must be split, with guardians and craftsmen, where everyone performs their own task. The traditional criticism of totalitarianism holds, but only partially: the Guardians are men who have reached absolute knowledge, where the law is merely a stand-in for them, etc. Notably, their knowledge/virtue is what would lead them to making the city the best it can be for everyone. Politics is then the education of the masses by a learned class towards a good life, even for the Laws, which revisits and revises many of the ideas in The Republic.
The Sophist claim that man is the measure of all things, part of a greater debate about sense-perception, is something Plato goes against greadly, reshaping Western thought in the process: knowledge must be universal, its object beyond the sensible. This is the tension that leads to the Forms/Ideas, and to a world of becoming against their being. The sensible is always equivocal, in a highly Heraclitian sense, but for Plato its dualities are never resolved, only resulting in muddled opinion. Concrete things try to imitate the Forms, to participate in/with them, etc. Forms then have sub-categories: being, same/other, motion/rest. Goodess, the Idea of the Good, is what all Forms participate in, due to their eternal perfection; the Good is the union of the Forms. Dialectic is then what gathers disperate thoughts into one, or breaks apart complex thoughts into smaller ones.
The soul, a Pythagorean entity, is governed by virtues, highest of which is Justice: that which orders the soul the same way it orders the city. This includes a rejection of the corporeal, Reason, the search for absolute knowledge & the Forms through recollection, all leading to rebirth.
ARISOTLE (From Universal to Individual, The Great Systematizer):
[4thC BC]
Whereas Plato began with the univeral, Aristotle started with the particulars, generalized them, collected them, and finally extrapolated them towards the univerals.
His predecessors had discovered only one cause of the world: Material, what the world was made of, with some (Anaxagoras’ nous) forshadowing the Efficient one. They are the Material, Efficient, Formal and Final. In that order they represent: the fundamental material, the reason for its change/motion, the matter’s formal structure, and its final purpose. Additionally, every-thing is ontologically described through ten categories/predicates: substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, time, action, affection, position, state. Substance/Essence (a hylomorphic Matter-Form mixture) is that thing being predicated, and functions like a Platonic Form, but imminent. Of these there are primary and secondary substances: the individual thing, and its universal categories (with its universal category being its ‘essence’).
The Formal and Final causes of any thing are always mixed, this is Aristotle’s teleology: the fusion between what a thing us, and what its destined to do. Souls are entelichi (holding of the end goal within itself, not prescribed externally by a maker), holding the ends of a body within themselves as first actualities.
The Unmoving Mover is a result of a series of frictions, a necessary outcome of Aristotle’s prior philosphy. Pure form, because matter changes. Pure actuality, because potentiality can always stop. Unmoved, because a chain of moving things moving other things is always regressive. It is the object of desire of everything and moves everything. God is then a self-thinking thought, perpetually contemplating itself.
SECTION 3: THE HELLENISTIC TIMES & THE IMPERIAL ERA
HELLENISM (Background):
[4thC BC]
A post-Alexandrian period, where Greek culture serves as uniting force of a non-Greek empire. In this period Ethics and practical philosophy take center stage. The four main schools were the Peripatetic, the Skeptic/Academy, the Stoic, and the Epicurean.
THE STOICS (Assent & The Passions):
[3rdC BC]
Their view of the causal world was wholly imminent. Nothing transcendent caused or affected. Even the governing, ordering intellect, Logos, was an imminent all-permiating substance. There are only four ‘incorporeal’ things, Sayables (abstractions), Emptyness, Place & Time.
Their system of affects is as follow: I recieve representations of the world, which form propositions. Then I can give assent to these, and if I do, then I feel an impulse/mental inclination towards the given representation.
The point is acting according to one’s nature. Assents can be indifferent, and with either a mixed or non-existent effect. Or in accordance with, or against our nature. The latter are the passions, passive wrong judgements such as desire, fear, pleasure or pain. They’re merely the result of wrong judgement/wrong assent. It is also important to, of course, give assent only to that which you can influence/change. Everything else is indifferent, and so you may be happy as you’re getting tortured. All this is, perhaps, too inhuman, too callous.
EPICUREANISM ():
[4thC BC]
Epicurious posits a materialist,atomistic world emergent from pure chance. Pleasure is good, pain is bad, and sense perception is innately correct. Errs stem from misjudgements.
We must reach a state of still pleasure, avoiding un-natural, non-necessary desires (for money, political power, etc.). Desires must be limited to the natural, and preferably only the necessary ones. Pointless desires are never satisfied. Philosophy then becomes a kind of soul-medicine, curing us from fear of death and the gods, teaching us how to cope with pain, and accepting simple, static pleasures.
In the end the Epicurean philosophy promotes living a sober, simple life within one’s means.
SECTION 4: LATE ANTIQUITY & NEOPLATONISM
NEO-PLATONISM (The One Good):
[3rd-6thC AD]
The Neo-Platonists, in interpreting Plato, arrived at his obscure notion of the Good (that which participates in all Forms, is their perfection). The One Good is a transcendent principle that does not participate in Being, but through emmination its effects can be felt in the sensible world.
Plotinus posits this emmination of the One, which comes prior to all being as a first principle, and is a complete singularity with no divisions or demarcations. From the One emerges the Intellect, a first duality. It is, in a sense, the Forms, thinking the One in adoration (thus, a splitting of the singularity). From the Intellect then emerges the Soul. This process subdivides eternity into 3 hypostates, each with its own ontological qualities.
The Soul wanders, from Intellect and One to corporeal matter. Matter, which in its un-eternal changes, does not qualify as a hypostate. Philosophy emerges as a way to unchain the Soul from the corporeal (from which evil emerges), and to tie it back with the Intellect and the One. This process is, personally, experienced as a rejection of our own unity and a discovery of our innate indivisible one-ness.