by Scott Soames
THE WORLD PHILOSOPHY MADE
THE
WORLD
PHILOSOPHY
MADE
From Plato to the Digital Age
SCOTT
SOAMES
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Princeton & Oxford
COPYRIGHT © 2019 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Soames, Scott, author.
Title: The world philosophy made : from Plato to the digital age / Scott Soames.
Description: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019019545 | ISBN 9780691176925 (hardcover)
eISBN 9780691197418
Version 1.0
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy and civilization. | Philosophy—History.
Classification: LCC B59 .S63 2019 | DDC 306.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019545
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Editorial: Rob Tempio & Matt Rohal
Production Editorial: Ali Parrington
Text and Jacket/Cover Design: Chris Ferrante
Production: Merli Guerra
Publicity: James Schneider, Katie Lewis & Alyssa Sanford
This book is dedicated to my dear wife Martha
without whom it could not have been written
and
to my friend Frank Price
the wisest man I know
CONTENTS
Introduction ix
Timeline xiv
1 The Dawn of Western Philosophy 1
2 A Truce between Faith and Reason 20
3 The Beginnings of Modern Science 40
4 Free Societies, Free Markets, and Free People 73
5 Modern Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics 92
6 Logic, Computation, and the Birth of the Digital Age 113
7 The Science of Language 133
8 The Science of Rational Choice 157
9 Mind, Body, and Cognitive Science 188
10 Philosophy and Physics 220
11 Liberty, Justice, and the Good Society 250
12 Laws, Constitutions, and the State 303
13 The Objectivity of Morality 341
14 Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning in the Face of Death 373
Appendix: The Noble Deaths of Socrates and David Hume 386
Bios of Leading Figures 397
Acknowledgments 405
Notes 407
References 425
Index 435
INTRODUCTION
In May of 2016 I published an article, “Philosophy’s True Home,” at the New York Times Opinionator blog. The article was written in response to an earlier piece, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way” by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle, which contended that western philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late nineteenth century separated it from the study of humanity and nature, and diverted it from its central task of guiding us to live virtuous and meaningful lives. I responded that recent and contemporary philosophy in the west had not lost its way, but, on the contrary, was continuing its record of impressive success both in laying the conceptual foundations for advances in theoretical knowledge and in advancing the systematic study of ethics, political philosophy, and human well-being. After the article appeared, my editor, Rob Tempio, at Princeton University Press, suggested that I explore the topic in a book-length work, which I was initially not inclined to do.
Before long, however, I became intrigued by the idea and convinced that it might serve a larger purpose. Having spent my adult life trying to advance the areas in philosophy at which I am most adept, I had not given sufficient thought to the overall shape of the discipline and its place in the modern world. I knew that, in the aggregate, we philosophers have many productive, though rather specialized, professional contacts with mathematicians, physicists, biologists, psychologists, linguists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, economists, political scientists, law professors, historians, classicists, and others. As chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southern California, I was also aware of positive receptions our philosophy-led interdisciplinary undergraduate majors Philosophy, Politics, and Law and Philosophy and Physics have received, which I hope our new offering, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, will too. But I had, I am afraid, tended to dismiss, as unalterable, the depth of ignorance about who we are and what we do among the general educated public, large swaths of academia, and, most importantly, among many of the young who might otherwise profit from what we have to offer.
Thinking more about it, however, I have become more optimistic. I now believe that the ignorance I previously deplored is due, in part, to our own failure as philosophers to seriously address a larger audience. This book is an attempt to correct that by explaining what western philosophy is, what it has been, and what, I am convinced, it will continue to be. Contrary to the opinion of many, the study of western philosophy today is not the study of a frozen historical canon from Socrates and Plato to Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, offering a smorgasbord of previous responses to unanswerable questions yielding no genuine knowledge. Although history remains an important part of the subject, today’s philosophers generate new philosophical questions, while offering better answers to traditional questions than those given by earlier thinkers. As a result, philosophical knowledge is increasing and the canon in philosophy is always expanding.
Philosophers have been, and continue to be, deeply involved in all important areas of intellectual concern, including the arts, the sciences, and the humanities. Properly understood, philosophy is not an isolated discipline, but the partner of virtually all disciplines. Nor is western philosophy the whole story. Although this book is concerned with it alone, many of the remarkable advances in civilization that western philosophy has helped to bring about have become the common property of all cultures. As more works in different philosophical traditions are translated and new bodies of secondary literature grow up, new syntheses will become possible, sparking new philosophical departures.
In sum, this book is about the contributions philosophers have made, and continue to make, to our civilization. Of course, it wasn’t philosophers alone, whether western or not, who made the civilized world we enjoy today. But the effects of their efforts have been more profound and far-reaching than is commonly realized. Our natural science, mathematics, and technology, our social science, political institutions, and economic life, our education, culture, religion, and our understanding of ourselves have been shaped by philosophy. This is no accident; it is due to the essential interconnection of philosophy with all foundational knowledge.
Philosophy never advances against a background of rank ignorance. It flourishes when enough is known about some domain to make great progress conceivable, even though it remains incompletely realized because new methods are needed. Philosophers help by giving us new concepts, reinterpreting old truths, and reconceptualizing questions to
expand their solution spaces. Sometimes philosophers do this when sciences are born, but they also do it as disciplines mature. As science advances, there is more, not less, for philosophy to do. Our knowledge of the universe and ourselves grows like an expanding sphere of light from a point of illumination. As light travels in all directions away from the source, the volume of the sphere, representing our secure knowledge, grows exponentially. But so does the surface area of the sphere, representing the border where knowledge blurs into doubt, bringing back methodological uncertainty. Philosophy monitors the border, ready to help plot our next move.
The reader will, I hope, gain a sense of what this means when moving through the book. The first six chapters cover ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, followed by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There you will see remarkable advances by all manner of intermixtures of philosophical thought with mathematical, scientific, political, and religious thought—sometimes in single minds and sometimes in communicating minds. The focus will shift a bit when chapters 7 through 10 move you deeply into the twentieth century and beyond, examining the genesis of modern theories of rational decision and action, the efforts to advance our understanding of language and mind, and the struggle to make sense of what modern physics is telling us about the universe. Here the focus is less on the origins of easily recognizable tangible benefits we enjoy today (though there are some), and more on the role of philosophers, sometimes leading, sometimes merely supporting and supplementing, the work of specialists trying to bring order to natural phenomena that are difficult to conceptualize in both emerging and well-established sciences. The final chapters, 11–14, attack pressing legal, political, moral, and even existential questions. Here no problems are definitively solved. The contributions, if they are such, lie in articulating productive perspectives for attacking them.
I close with an invitation and a warning. Much in this book reports on the impact of philosophers and their work on broader areas of thought and action, as well as the impact of developments outside of philosophy on philosophy itself. But not all of the reasoning you will encounter is about philosophy. Some of it is philosophy itself—expositions of some leading ideas of the great philosophers, criticism and assessment of those ideas, and independent reflection on philosophical themes. In short, some of what you will encounter is philosophical reasoning and argument pure and simple. Thus, you are invited not only to review a picture of what philosophy has done up to now, but to engage with philosophy in the making, and, thereby, to do a bit of philosophy yourself by critically assessing the philosophical reasoning you find here.
THE WORLD PHILOSOPHY MADE
CHAPTER 1
THE DAWN OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY
The world-transforming goals of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; rational inquiry as the means to theoretical knowledge of the world and practical wisdom in the art of living; the intertwining of Greek science, mathematics, and philosophy; Plato’s Academy; the later schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism.
There is no better expression of the spirit animating the birth of western philosophy than the first sentence of Book I of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, “All men by nature desire to know.”1 What we desire to know includes not only particular facts, but also general truths that explain such facts in terms of features of the world that transcend the varying deliverances of our senses. It was a founding principle of western philosophy that such knowledge requires precisely delineated concepts—e.g., number, element, point, line, angle, shape, circle, sphere, circumference, area, dimension, space, volume, matter, density, body, velocity, motion, direction, proportion, causation, change, permanence, quantity, and quality—deployed according to the laws of logic, and used to formulate principles of mathematics, and universal laws of nature. In addition to knowledge of the world, what we seek also includes knowledge of ourselves, our common human nature, the good lives we aspire to live, and the good societies to which we hope to contribute. It was a further founding principle of western philosophy that knowledge of these normative matters can be objective, and so requires precise concepts of goodness, happiness, virtue, and justice, deployed with all appropriate rigor. It is to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, more than any others, that we owe these world-transforming ideas.
Of these, the central figure is Plato—in part because Aristotle was his student, and in part because what we know of Socrates is derived largely from the Socrates-figure of Plato’s dialogues. Born in Athens in or about 427 BCE, Plato was raised in a culture in which one’s knowledge of the world, one’s place in it, and the models for one’s conduct were derived largely from imaginative identification with the gods and heroes of orally performed epic poetry.2 At the time of his birth, the poetry of Homer and Hesiod was still the primary vehicle of instruction in Athens. Such poetry was not only, or even primarily, a form of entertainment; it was, as Walter Burkert says, the glue that held Greek society and culture together.
The authority to whom the Greeks appealed was the poetry of Hesiod and, above all, of Homer. The spiritual unity of the Greeks was founded and upheld by poetry—a poetry which could still draw on living oral tradition to produce a felicitous union of freedom and form, spontaneity and discipline. To be a Greek was to be educated, and the foundation of all education was Homer.3
Eric Havelock, whose pioneering work documented the transformation of ancient Greek culture from oral and narrative to written and rationally critical, saw epic poetry as a living encyclopedia for transmitting Greek history and culture to the young. The individual, he observed,
is required as a civilised being to become acquainted with the history, the social organization, the technical competence and the moral imperatives of his group.… This over-all body of experience … is incorporated in a rhythmic narrative … which he memorizes … something he accepts uncritically, or else it fails to survive in his living memory. Its acceptance and retention are made psychologically possible by a mechanism of … self-identification with the situations and the stories related in the performance.… “His is not to reason why.”4
This was the mindset Plato set out to change. Deriving inspiration from Socrates, he sought to transform his culture into a rationally critical one in which all knowledge—normative and nonnormative alike—was objectively stateable, logically testable, and intellectually defensible. In short, he attempted to change the culture from one based on the oral story (narrative) to one based on the written statement (objective description).5
The monumental change Plato sought, and largely achieved, did not begin with him; it was already underway in pre-Socratic philosophy, science, and mathematics.6 The pre-Socratic philosophers—Thales (624–547 BCE), Heraclitus (535–475), Parmenides (born circa 510), Democritus (died circa 465), and others—mediated the transformation from the narrative culture of the Homeric age to the rationally critical culture brought to fruition by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. To take one telling example, prior to the transition, the Greeks had no word for matter and no abstract notion of motion applying equally to animate and otherwise inert bodies. After the transition, they had measurable conceptions of matter, motion, velocity, shape, direction, and other abstract concepts that were used to formulate and test explanatory hypotheses purporting to be universal laws.7
The pre-Socratic philosophers, who set the stage for the transition from an oral, narrative culture to a written, rationally critical one, had a foot in both. Unlike the narrators of epic poetry, they were more teachers than entertainers. Still, they often performed their written compositions, and so expected more to be heard than read, which affected their texts, which weren’t treatises in the style of Aristotle. Greek mathematicians, who were often philosophers and sometimes astronomers (investigating the trajectories of celestial bodies), were also crucial to the cultural transformation culminating in Plato and Aristotle. Their important pre-Socratic achievements included:
The observations (probably not
proofs) of Thales (who famously held that water is the element out of which everything is constituted)
a) that a circle is bisected by its diameter,
b) that the angles at the base of a triangle with two equal sides are equal, and
c) that triangles with an equal side and two equal angles are themselves equal.8
The proofs by followers of Pythagoras
a) that the sum of the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles (prior to 450 BCE),
b) that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides (prior to 450),
c) that the square root of 2 is irrational, i.e., a number that can’t be expressed as a fraction (prior to 450), and
d) that the square roots of 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 17 are (like that of 2) also irrational (Theodorus, pupil of Protagoras and teacher of Plato, circa 400).9
The discoveries by Democritus (who developed the classical metaphysical theory of atomism)
a) that the volume of a cone is ⅓ that of a cylinder with the same base and height, and
b) that the volume of a pyramid is ⅓ that of a prism with the same base and height.10
The proof by Hippocrates (circa 440) that the ratio of the areas of two circles equals the ratios of the squares of their diameters.11
The astronomical observations and hypotheses
a) that the earth is a sphere, conjectured by both Anaxagoras and Pythagoras, and
b) that the Morning Star is the Evening Star.12
Summing up the scope of these and other advances, the distinguished historian of Greek mathematics Sir Thomas Heath estimates that
there is … probably little in the whole compass of the Elements of Euclid, except the new theory of proportions due to Eudoxus …, which was not in substance included in the recognized content of geometry and arithmetic by Plato’s time.13
