The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

by A. A. Long

  Sources

  D.L. I.22-44; Herodotus I.74-75, 170; others in DK 11 A.

  Works

  Diogenes Laetius’ sources report that Thales left nothing in writing and that a Nautical astronomy attributed to him is spurious (I.23).

  XENOPHANES

  Born c. 570 B.C. at Colophon on the Ionian mainland. After the Persian conquest of Lydia in 545, Xenophanes lived an itinerant life, which included stays in Sicilian cities. By his own testimony (DK 21 B8), he was still alive at the age of ninety-two. His surviving verses treat of cosmology and theology, criticize conventional values, adumbrate cultural relativism and scepticism, and also include traditional themes of sympotic poetry. In later antiquity he was regarded as the founder of Eleatic philosophy and teacher of Parmenides, but while he almost certainly influenced Parmenides, this tradition should not be accepted completely at face value.

  Sources

  DK 21 B1-3, B8; D.L. IX.18-21; Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis I.64; Plato, Soph. 242d; Aristotle, Metaph. I.5 986B18, and in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On Melissus, Xenophanes, Gorgias (DK 30 A5); others in DK 21 A.

  Works

  About 120 verses have been preserved. More than half are elegiacs, and one elegiac poem (B1) may be complete. Others, apart from one iambic trimeter (B14.1), are hexameters. Some of these are quoted from the Silloi (satirical verses) or Parodies and by late antiquity at least five books of Silloi were credited to him (B21a); Proclus says that they were directed “against all philosophers and poets” (DK 21A 22; cf. D.L. IX.18). The other extant lines may also come from this work, although certain fragments may belong to a poem entitled On nature in the Hellenistic period. Xenophanes is also said to have written 2,000 verses on the foundations of Colophon and Elea (D.L. IX.20).

  ZENO

  Born c. 490 B.C. at Elea in southern Italy, where he studied with Parmenides (Plato, Parm. 127a-b). Zeno is the author of paradoxes on the impossibility of motion and plurality. These are generally treated as a defence of Eleatic monism (but see McKirahan in this volume, p. 134). Stories of his visiting Athens, as “a very handsome forty year-old,” with the elderly Parmenides and encountering the young Socrates there (Plato op. cit.) may be fiction, as the chronology of the supposed meeting must be (see Mansfeld [32] 64–68). The length of his life is impossible to determine, but his work was almost certainly familiar to Democritus and probably to Anaxagoras as well.

  Sources

  D.L. IX.25-29; the Suda; others in DK 29 A.

  Works

  Zeno may have written only one work, the “writings” he is described by Plato as reading to the young Socrates (Parm. 127c).

  CHRONOLOGY

  This list of early Greek philosophers represents roughly who was contemporary with whom, and a second list of prominent individuals mentioned in this book is appended. Most of the dates are only approximate, and could extend forward or backward by ten to twenty years. Homer is traditionally dated to the 8th century B.C., Hesiod to the 8th or early 7th.

  A. A. LONG

  1 The scope of early Greek philosophy

  Unlike other books in this series, the present volume is not a “companion” to a single philosopher but to the set of thinkers who collectively formed the beginnings of the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece. Most of them wrote little, and the survival of what they wrote or thought is fragmentary, often mediated not by their own words but only by the testimony of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other much later authors. These remains are exceptionally precious not only because of their intrinsic quality but also for what they reveal concerning the earliest history of western philosophy and science. The fascination of the material, notwithstanding or even because of its density and lacunar transmission, grips everyone who encounters it.1 Two of our century’s most influential philosophers, Heidegger and Popper, have “gone back” to the earliest Greek philosophers in buttressing their own radically different methodologies and preoccupations.2 Many of these thinkers are so challenging that the small quantity of their surviving work is no impediment to treating each of them at book length. Even so, there are reasons beyond our fragmentary sources and conventional practice for presenting these and other early Greek philosophers in a collective volume.

  First, we are dealing with an era marked by thinkers who were profoundly innovatory and experimental. The younger of them did not ignore their predecessors, and within the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. (the chronology of our period) a number of distinct movements developed which are distinguishable geographically or dialectically – the early Ionian cosmologists, the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the atomists, and the sophists. Yet, this is not a period of schools in the literal sense of Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum, with a formal head, a curriculum, and an ongoing succession. Melissus can be called an Eleatic or follower of Parmenides, by virtue of the conclusions for which he argued, but as a Samian admiral he may have had no personal acquaintance with Parmenides, whose place of birth and presumed residence was Elea in southern Italy. Zeno of Elea, who must have known his fellow countryman Parmenides, may have followed him more literally than Melissus did, but Zeno’s arguments bear directly, as Parmenides’ do not, on the early history of Greek mathematics. Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Empedocles all trumpet the individuality of their ideas, and explicitly or implicitly criticize other thinkers as well as ordinary people. In order to interpret the work of any early Greek philosopher, reference to the whole period is indispensable.

  Secondly, even allowing for the numerous gaps in our knowledge, we can observe significant differences among the methodologies and interests of the early Greek philosophers. This is particularly evident in the case of Pythagoras, the only one of them whose name, albeit years after his death, came to stand for a determinate movement. Pythagoras taught a way of life which included purificatory practices and their supreme importance for the destiny of the human soul after death. His contributions to philosophy and science, as we today understand these, are harder to discern, especially by comparison with such figures as Zeno or Democritus or Anaxagoras. Yet, it would be a grave mistake to excise Pythagoras from the main stream of early Greek philosophy. Criticism of conventional religious rituals, such as blood sacrifice, and the promise that a true understanding of the world will transform a person’s life, are emphatically stated also by Heraclitus and Empedocles. Some early Greek philosophers have little or no attested interest in psychology, epistemology, ethics, and theology; others incorporate contributions to these subsequently demarcated fields in their work.

  The fluidity and diversity of early Greek philosophy are a central part of its character and importance. For that reason too, the subject is particularly apt for treatment in a multi-authored volume, not only because of the opportunity this gives for a pooling of expertise, but also as a way of articulating some of the many interpretive approaches to the style and content of early Greek philosophy. In the earlier years of this century, debates raged about its scientific or nonscientific character, its common-sense or counter-intuitive biases, its theological dimensions, and much else.3 Those debates will never entirely disappear. The material is too complex for that, and in this field, more than in most, every interpreter is bound to project a viewpoint in order to say anything worth saying. That is not to invalidate attempts to describe what the main thinkers have in common, such as “the inquiry into nature.” More on this later in the chapter. For now, it is essential to recognize that, with the possible exception of Pythagoras, none of the figures treated in this book identified himself expressly as a “philosopher” or called his project “philosophy.”4 The point is not that we should avoid calling them philosophers, but that we should beware of attributing to them anachronistic conceptions of the scope of philosophy and its subdivision into fields such as logic, metaphysics, and ethics. Even Plato, who was the first Greek thinker to theorise explicitly about the nature of philosophy, is innocent of this kind of demarcation.

  Nevertheless, early Greek ph
ilosophers made pioneering contributions not only to the understanding of the world in general but also to philosophical topics that were later described more specifically. For ease of exposition and to facilitate a broad grasp of what early Greek philosophy comprised, this book is divided between chapters on particular thinkers and chapters on topics. In the case of the sophists (Chapters 14–15), the topics and the individual thinkers largely coincide because, so far as our record is concerned, the sophists’ most distinctive contribution to early Greek philosophy was their teaching of rhetoric and linguistics, relativism and political theory. Chapters 10–13, on the other hand, are devoted to topics that are quite heterogeneous in the thinkers whose views are discussed there – chapters on rational theology; the beginnings of epistemology; soul, sensation, and thought; and responsibility and causality. The principal heroes of this last topic chapter, by Mario Vegetti, are Hippocratic doctors. It was they, he argues, rather than those we conventionally count as early Greek philosophers, who pioneered rigorous thinking about causes. His chapter also includes the historians Herodotus and Thucydides. Rather than trespassing outside the proper limits of early Greek philosophy, this material is an important indication of their instability. If space were not an issue, this book would have included much more from the rich field of Hippocratic medicine.5

  A final topic chapter, or rather a coda to the whole book, is provided by Glenn Most in his wide-ranging study of “the poetics of early Greek philosophy.” Three of the early Greek philosophers, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Empedocles, chose verse rather than the newer medium of prose as the vehicle for expressing their thought; Heraclitus, though he did not compose in any of the formal modes of Greek verse, adopted a rhythmical and epigrammatic style that is uniquely his own. Here we have yet another indication of the fluid character of Greek philosophy in its formative years; for from the second half of the fifth century onward, discursive prose would become the standard medium for writing philosophy, and poetic “truth” would be treated as different in kind from the probative ambitions of philosophy. However, “poetics” is an integral feature of our subject for deeper reasons than the philosopher poets’ literary form. Traditional Greek wisdom was virtually identical to the epic poetry of Homer and Hesiod. As the staple of primary education, these great texts, more than any others, influenced and provoked both the style and the content of early Greek philosophy. If innovative thought was to take root, Homer and Hesiod had to be dethroned or at least shifted away from their commanding position, and so we find explicit criticism of them in Xenophanes and Heraclitus. Yet, in numerous ways, as Most so convincingly shows, Homeric and Hesiodic patterns of thought as well as expression are still palpable in early Greek philosophy, not to mention such obvious points of contact as the “divine” inspiration invoked by Parmenides and Empedocles, or the explicit interpretations of poetry essayed by Democritus, Gorgias, and Protagoras.

  The topic chapters distinguish this book’s account of early Greek philosophy from many standard treatments of the subject.6 So too, to some extent, our treatment of individuals. The Milesian trio, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, are the main theme of a single study – Chapter 3. We have no chapters solely devoted to Xenophanes or to Diogenes of Apollonia, while Empedocles and Anaxagoras are discussed together in Chapter 8 from the perspective of their responses to Parmenides. Zeno is given a chapter to himself, but Parmenides and Melissus are presented in conjunction. If this procedure looks partial or idiosyncratic, the chapters on topics and the index will provide the reader with many additional perspectives on all the main thinkers. Thus Xenophanes is accorded a good many pages in Chapters 3, 10, 11, and 16. Empedocles, one of the most many-sided thinkers, figures prominently in the topic chapters and also in Chapter 4, on the Pythagorean tradition. A great advantage of this procedure, or so we believe, is its combination of diachronic history, treating of individuals, with the analysis of salient themes and methodologies to which they collectively contributed.

  However, there is more than that to the book’s rationale. We start, after this introduction and Chapter 2 on sources, with the beginnings of cosmology at Miletus (Chapter 3). For evidence on this subject, we are almost entirely dependent on the tradition of interpretation initiated by Aristotle and Theophrastus. Whatever we make of that tradition, there is no question that it imports some anachronism and misrepresentation.7 In addition, it has helped to promote the view that early Greek philosophers in general were predominantly, if not exclusively, cosmologists, whose chief questions were about the origins and material principles of the world.8 Cosmologists, indeed, most of them were if we exempt the sophists. But should the sophists be extruded from the ranks of early Greek philosophers because they did not engage, to any great extent, in cosmology?9 Apart from the inappropriateness of answering yes to that question, identifying early Greek philosophy as predominantly cosmology has had the unfortunate effect of making its contributions to epistemology, ethics, and other topics seem ancillary and perfunctory. That misconception is no longer so entrenched, but it has hardly disappeared. Therefore, one of the aims of this book is to show how much these early thinkers contributed not only to cosmology but also to other topics that would become part of the main agenda of philosophy.

  TOWARDS A DEFINITION OF EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY

  Thus far I have refrained from calling the early Greek philosophers by the familiar term Presocratics. The word first became current in English after the German scholar Hermann Diels nearly a hundred years ago used it for the title of his great collection of evidence on early Greek philosophy, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The fragments of the Presocratics).10 Since then, it has become standard terminology. Those who first encounter the word probably suppose that it refers simply to thinkers who were chronologically prior to Socrates, and that is broadly true for the figures in Diels’ first volume, who range from the mythical Orpheus to “the Pythagorean school.” But in Diels’ own usage, Presocratic is more than a chronological marker. As his younger collaborator Walther Kranz explained, the second volume of their collection includes “many contemporaries of Socrates, and indeed some who outlived him. Even so the book is a unity” because in it “a philosophy speaks which has not passed through the intellectual schools of Socrates (and Plato) – not just the Presocratic but also the non-Socratic early philosophy.”11

  This comment is less innocent of assumptions than it may seem to be. What is especially telling is that Kranz puts Plato’s name in a parenthesis. In fact, of course, Plato’s writings are our principal source for determining Socrates’ unwritten philosophy and for distinguishing it from that of his contemporaries, including especially the sophists. Most of what we can learn about the sophists, apart from the surviving work of Gorgias, stems from Plato, and nothing mattered more to Plato than defending Socrates from the widespread belief that he was, to many intents and purposes, a sophist. Plato, then, is far from being an unbiased witness to the distinctiveness of Socrates’ philosophy. Certainly, he is the best we have, and unquestionably Socrates, in his interrogative methodology, his search for definitions of moral concepts, his self-examined life, and in a great deal else was a massively original figure. However, Diels and Kranz were writing at a time when scholars supposed that they knew much more about the historical Socrates than many experts are confident of knowing today.

  We can be confident that the historical Socrates was much more like his namesake in Plato’s Apology and Crito than the character “Socrates,” investigator of nature and sophist, who is travestied in Aristophanes’ raucous comedy, The Clouds. I am not suggesting that Presocratic is a term that should be totally abandoned; even if that were desirable, it would not be practicable. Given the sources at our disposal and Socrates’ remarkable afterlife, it would be irresponsible to treat him simply as one among other thinkers of the fifth century B.C. He must be viewed in association with Plato, and hence he is scarcely discussed in this book (but see Chapters 14–15). Still, that requirement does not license us t
o regard even Plato’s Socrates as a figure so seminal that those he influenced were quite discontinuous with those who missed his impact.

  By representing the early Greek philosophers as conceptually or methodologically Presocratic, we have tended to overlook or marginalise their interest in such topics as I have already mentioned, including ethics, psychology, theology, and epistemology. Because Plato never mentions Democritus, it is easy to forget that Democritus was Socrates’ contemporary.12 Yet, there are striking affinities between Democritus’ moral psychology and ideas voiced by Plato’s Socrates.13 Writers of later antiquity, who credit Socrates with single-handedly originating philosophical ethics, were too keen on identifying “first discoverers.” Far from undercutting Socrates’ significance, we highlight it when we acknowledge the ethical dimensions of Xenophanes or Heraclitus, or indicate the interests he shared with, and doubtless debated with, the sophists. The Presocratic label is also misleading because of its generality. Vague though it is, it suggests that all the early Greek philosophers are easily identifiable as a group, and chiefly so by their non-Socratic features. In that way, the term conceals the fluidity and diversity I have already emphasized. Presocratic also tends to obscure Plato’s dialectical relation to his other predecessors, especially the Pythagoreans, Eleatics, and Heraclitus: a relation that takes on increasing importance in Plato’s later dialogues where he replaces Socrates with the Eleatic and Athenian “strangers” and with Timaeus.

  Neither in antiquity nor subsequently has unanimity reigned over the scope, boundaries, and subdivisions of early Greek philosophy. Aristotle and Theophrastus, as Jaap Mansfeld explains in the next chapter, were chiefly interested in classifying the opinions of their predecessors on topics such as the number and identity of the world’s principles, the soul, and sense perception. All of these fell under the Peripatetic concept of “nature,” so they called the proponents of these views inquirers into nature (physikoi or physiologoi).14 Sometimes Aristotle comments on their relative chronology, but whether he does so, or who he includes within a given context, depends on his view of their relevance to his topic. In his treatment of “causes,” he makes a clear break between Plato and those who preceded him, including Parmenides and the Pythagoreans, and here (but only here) he famously emphasizes Socrates’ concentration on ethics to the exclusion of any inquiry into “nature as a whole.”15 In his treatment of “principles” (Physics I), Aristotle discusses the early Ionian cosmologists, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Parmenides, and Melissus and briefly alludes to Plato. In book I of his work On the soul, his discussion of his predecessors is synchronic, independent of any attempts to define periods of thought, and treats Plato alongside earlier philosophers (as does Theophrastus in his work On the senses). Aristotle nowhere calls Protagoras a sophist, and after he has argued against Protagoras’ “man measure” doctrine (Metaph. IV.5), he likens its rationale to statements by Anaxagoras, Democritus, and others.