by A. A. Long
CONCLUSION
With these modifications my version of the salient features of early Greek philosophy is largely in line with current views, whether these emphasize the reform of theology, the capacity for abstract generalization, totalizing explanations, counter-intuitive hypotheses driven by argument, or commitment to critical inquiry. Some of the thinkers incline more to science and to findings broadly reliant on observation. Others call the appearances of things into question, and adumbrate thoughts that will much later be grist to the sceptics’ mill. With Parmenides and his fellow Eleatics, we can observe logic and metaphysics in the making. We find cosmological models that are breathtaking in their boldness, incipient ideas of an evolving and self-regulating universe, systematic in its structure and basic ingredients. Distinctions are drawn between nature and convention, setting the stage for investigation into the foundations of language, social practices, and justice. Truth is objectified by some and relativized by others. Throughout the period discussed in this book a sense of intellectual excitement and challenge is palpable. One theory succeeds and competes with another. The accounts of “all things” have little basis in measurement or the rigorous checks and controls we associate with physics. Yet, as the period advances, culminating in Democritean atomism, one scientific theory of astonishing prescience is formulated – the theory that nature’s basic structure is nothing more than matter in motion.
Why all this happened when and where it did is a question both fascinating to raise and impossible to answer with any degree of precision. Numerous factors can be adduced, among which some of the most telling (in no order of priority) are political freedom and opportunity for debate, interstate trade and communication with the older civilizations of Egypt and Asia, the rise of literacy, codification of laws, dissatisfaction with anthropomorphic myths, the prizing of innovation and self-assertion, a general interest in verbal dexterity, skill that can withstand competition, a perceived need for higher education, anxieties about the nature of human identity and its place both in the world and after death.34 All this is relevant to our understanding of the cultural context and content of early Greek philosophy; but whatever we say about that, we should not let our proper wonder at it lapse into talk about the Greeks’ peculiar genius. This book does not attempt to make any comparisons between early Greek intellectual life and that of neighbouring cultures, but that is due entirely to exigency of space and the need to impose manageable limits on any history.
The Greeks themselves acknowledged their newness relative to the much older civilizations of Egypt and Asia, and the indebtedness of their early mathematics and astronomy to Egypt and Babylon.35 It is virtually certain that Thales and his fellow Ionians knew and were influenced by near-eastern accounts of the world’s origin. For the purposes of this book, the important questions are not, who said something like this first or where did X get this idea from, but what Heraclitus and the rest did with their own thoughts (however those thoughts arose), and in what context they situated themselves and their audience. Globally speaking, the Greeks were not the only ancient people to start philosophizing.36 The importance of their start is twofold – its position at the beginning of the European tradition of philosophy, and the kind of philosophy that it initiated.
People often use the word “tradition” rather loosely, to signify a long-standing set of practices whose historical phases are successively connected rather than cumulative and symbiotic. From its earliest Greek beginnings, the tradition in western philosophy has been of the latter kind, with new questions, conjectures, and refutations continuously feeding off, revisiting, and revising earlier theories and methodologies. If there is progress in philosophy, it largely proceeds by such dialectical encounters with the tradition, whether or not the current participants acknowledge that relationship. It is also part and parcel of good philosophy to treat its earlier contributors as partners whom we can engage in fruitful conversation, especially when we allow for the historical contingencies that distance them from us and help to shape their outlook. If such conversations elide history and context, they tend to become polemical, artificial, and myopic, a failing that I hope this book has completely avoided. Contextualising early Greek philosophy, in the ways our contributors try to do, was not a Graeco-Roman practice, but enlisting past philosophers in present inquiries has a pedigree that is an essential part of the Greek tradition. It was beautifully expressed by Aristotle, when he wrote:37
The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.
Early Greek philosophy was both the beginning of the ancient tradition and also an integral part of its subsequent phases. Plato’s later thought cannot be captured in a sentence or two, but it clearly involves his acknowledgment that a coherent account of the world must come to terms both with Eleatic uniformity and stability on the one hand and Heraclitean contrarieties and flux on the other. Aristotle systematically discusses the early Greek philosophers in his critical review of the data that a scientific inquirer must take into consideration. When the post-Aristotelian schools are founded, Democritean atomism is launched on a new life by Epicurus, while Zeno of Citium and Cleanthes, the earliest heads of the Stoa, look closely to Heraclitus in formulating their physics and theology. At the same time, when scepticism too becomes an acknowledged stance, first with Pyrrho and then in the post-Platonic Academy, Xenophanes, Protagoras, and Democritus, are invoked as being at least partial precursors. Pythagoreanism has a future that will be increasingly potent in the early Christian era, and its numerology was already embraced by the earliest Platonists.
Apart from such obvious indications of the early Greek philosophers’ after-life, some of their salient doctrines become virtually axiomatic for all their successors who are not sceptics. These include the Parmenidean principle that reality as such cannot be reduced to or simply identified with everyday appearances; the Empedoclean selection of earth, air, fire, and water as primary elements; and above all, the assumption that the world as a whole is an intelligible structure with underlying principles that are accessible to human understanding. By the end of our period, with such figures as Democritus, Anaxagoras and Diogenes of Apollonia, the stage is set for the great cosmological issue that will in due course unite Platonists, Aristotelians, and Stoics against the atomistic Epicureans – the issue of whether the world is governed by a purposive mind or by purely mechanistic forces. In the areas of psychology and epistemology too, theories of the early Greek philosophers continue to influence later Greek thinkers, as, for instance, in debates about the composition of the soul or the reliability of sense perception.
Even outside the philosophical tradition itself, early Greek philosophers have captured the imagination of modern writers: Matthew Arnold wrote “Empedocles on Etna,” one of his most ambitious poems; T. S. Eliot prefaced his Four Quartets with two citations from Heraclitus; Tom Stoppard, in his play Jumpers, recalls Zeno’s arrow, which unfortunately kills a hare, and thus invokes another Zenonian paradox; Karl Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on the differences between Epicurus and Democritus, and Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, wrote his dissertation on Heraclitus. These are but a few indications of early Greek philosophy’s extraordinary impact on our cultural sensibility.
NOTES
1 See Mourelatos [155] 3: “No other field offers as inviting a challenge to the philosophical imagination, yet in as demanding an environment of evidential and interpretive controls.” (Bibliographical citations in this numbered form refer to the serial bibliography at the end of the volume.)
2 See Heidegger [152]; Popper [122]; and Cambiano [86].
3 See especially Burnet [6] ch. 1; Cornford [89]; Vlastos [187], [482]
; Jaeger [481]; Kirk [123]. Comparison of the introductory pages of the following books will give a good sense of the different approaches of leading interpreters: Guthrie [15], Hussey [13], Barnes [14], and cf. Lloyd [124] 100–104.
4 In later antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with being the first to use the word “philosophy” and to call himself a “philosopher” (D. L. I.12). Even if this is accurate, it would be quite wrong to take the words in other than their literal sense, “love(r) of wisdom,” without any technical or professional connotations. For further remarks on the fluidity of philosophy at this date, see Lloyd [154] 102–103.
5 The artificiality of excluding Hippocratic medicine from the history of early Greek philosophy has been eloquently argued in numerous works by Geoffrey Lloyd: see Lloyd [110], [111], and [154].
6 For instance Zeller [18]; Burnet [6]; Guthrie [15]; [16]; KRS [4], and largely Hussey [13]. An important exception is Barnes [14] whose massive study includes chapters on psychology, epistemology, ethics, and more.
7 See in this volume Algra, p. 50, and Graham, p. 176.
8 That view is particularly prominent in Burnet [6], and it is also emphasized in KRS [4]. This explains why both books exclude the sophists.
9 For an excellent justification of making the sophists integral to early Greek philosophy, see Kerferd [433] 2–14, where the history of modern misinterpretations is illuminatingly illustrated.
10 Diels [1]. For discussion of Diels’ seminal work on early Greek philosophy, see Mansfeld in this volume p. 23, with much more detail in Mansfeld and Runia [27].
11 My translation of Kranz in Diels [1] vol.1, viii. Although Diels seems to have been the first to write a book with “Presocratics” in its title, the concept the term expresses is decisive in Eduard Zeller’s great history of Greek philosophy, which strongly influenced Diels, as it has everyone since. Part I of Zeller’s work ( = Zeller [18]) concludes with the sophists, and he begins his Part II with Socrates. Zeller in turn was much influenced by Hegel [22], but Hegel’s “first period, second division” comprises the sophists, Socrates, and the Socratic philosophers other than Plato and Xenophon.
12 Burnet [6] 1 n. 1 already registers this complaint.
13 See Kahn [416].
14 See Most in this volume p. 332.
15 Metaph. 1.6 987a29–b7. See also Metaph. XIII.4 1078b17–31, where Aristotle identifies Socrates’ special contribution not with ethics but with inductive arguments and universal definition. It is doubtful whether Aristotle has any authority for saying this other than inference from Plato’s early dialogues.
16 Opposition between pre-Platonic and pre-Socratic runs through the nineteenth century in German scholarship; see Most’s article, cited in n. 1 of his chapter in this volume, p. 360.
17 See D. L. I.18–19.
18 D. L. I.14. Diogenes’ preface is the best evidence we have for ancient classifications of philosophers, divisions of philosophy, and how the whole tradition might be viewed in the later Roman Empire.
19 On Zeller, see n. 11.
20 See H. Schibli, Pherekydes of Skiros (Oxford, 1990).
21 Most standard histories of early Greek philosophy include some discussion of “forerunners,” the fullest being KRS [4]. Barnes [14] is the most austere, barely mentioning Hesiod and finding Pherecydes of “no philosophical interest.” In this volume, exigencies of space are the main reason for restricting discussion of what, for want of a better term, we call forerunners. See, however, Algra, p. 45, Broadie, p. 205, Lesher, p. 225, and especially Most, p. 342.
22 Xenophanes is generally construed to be saying: “No man will ever have knowledge about … everything of which I speak.” But the grammar also permits the construal ”… knowledge of … all that I say about all things” (see Guthrie [15] 395 n. 3), which makes a more pointed statement in the context. I follow Lesher (in this volume, p. 229) in taking the Greek this way.
23 For Xenophanes’ use of “all things,” see Broadie and Lesher in this volume, pp. 211, 229. Notice that Parmenides’ goddess tells her youthful addressee that he is to learn “all things” (DK 28 B1.28), and this expression is ubiquitous in Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Philolaus.
24 I am grateful to David Sedley for this point, and for his calling attention to the absence of Homer from Heraclitus’ list. Heraclitus does criticize Homer elsewhere, but he probably did not take him (as allegorists later did) to be a didactic polymath who gave a universalist account of the world.
25 For objections to this approach to the material, see Long [305] 127–32, and cf. Cherniss [87].
26 See Kahn [162] 109–13, KRS [4] 141–42, and Guthrie [15] 101–104.
27 See in this volume Algra, p. 59, and Laks, p. 252.
28 D. L. II.11. See Most in this volume, p. 340.
29 Plato, Gorg. 449b-c, Hippias minor 363c-369a, Hippias major 285b, and Prot. 318e; cf. Lloyd [III] 91–95.
30 Popper [122] 130.
31 Pierre Hadot. See his Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford/Cambridge, Mass. 1995) and Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Paris, 1995).
32 Euripides, fr. 910. The passage, from an unknown play, is cited in Greek by Burnet [6] 10; my translation.
33 In characterizing early Greek philosophy as I have done, I do not presume to speak for my fellow contributors. They have gone along with my preference to avoid the term “Presocratic,” but it should not be assumed that they endorse the reservations about it that I have expressed.
34 My only distinctive contribution to this list is the last point concerning anxiety. The most sustained and careful treatment of social factors that may have helped to promote early Greek philosophy, and make it culturally distinctive, is the work of Lloyd; see especially Lloyd [110], [111], [154] 121–40.
35 See Herodotus II.109 and Aristotle, Metaph. I.1 981b23.
36 The question of which people originated philosophy was already debated among the Greeks; some assigned it to foreign peoples and others insisted on its Hellenic origin. See D. L. I.1-11.
37 Metaph. II.1 993a30-4, transl. W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Oxford, 1984).
JAAP MANSFELD
2 Sources
DOXOGRAPHI GRAECI
Because the works of the early Greek philosophers have been lost, our knowledge of their content is entirely dependent either on sparse verbatim quotations (though less sparse than for instance those relating to the early Stoics) or on various forms of reportage in all sorts of ancient authors. It has thus become customary to begin books of this kind with a critical review of our sources of information.
What is at stake is the reliability of these sources.1 The ideal of an objective history of philosophy is a nineteenth-century invention. In antiquity history of philosophy was part of systematic philosophy, serving a variety of purposes. The ideas of earlier philosophers were used and interpreted in many ways, and, more often than not, served merely as springboards. This holds not only for the attitude of major thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle but also for the far humbler works consisting of collections of doctrines, with or without some biographical detail, that circulated on a fairly extensive scale. Such works were used, it would seem, in the context of a primary education in philosophy and also as quarries to be exploited whenever someone writing about a philosophical issue felt he should set off his own view against those of others, to improve upon an already existing view or to replace it with another.
Surveys of earlier philosophers and philosophies and even anthologies containing purple passages were also composed for the delectation of a more general public, but the doctrinal contents of such works as well as the selections that were made, though containing mostly traditional material, were often updated and reflected the interests and predilections of their times, which as a rule were indebted to those of the professional philosophers. The transmission of the views of the early Greek philosophers (the so-called physikoi) therefore is not only quite fragmentary but also often coloured or even biased.
The view of a part of this process of transmission that is still dominant but is beginning to be revised today was developed by Hermann Diels in his monumental Doxographi graeci of 1879 (still available in an unaltered reprint).2 “Doxographer” and “doxography” are not ancient Greek words but neologisms coined by Diels presumably to express a fundamental contrast with biography, a genre he believed to be in principle unreliable. Doxography is concerned with doxai, “views” or “tenets” (also designated dokounta, or areskonta; Latin placita, or opiniones). Working out the ideas of his teacher Usener and in fact depending not only on the nineteenth-century Altertum-swissenschaft but also to a certain extent on a (by his time partly forgotten) tradition starting in the sixteenth century, Diels argued that doxography proper began with a topic-oriented treatise in sixteen books, of which only fragments (already collected and edited by Usener) are extant. This was composed by Aristotle’s pupil and successor Theophrastus: the Physikôn doxai or “Tenets of the natural philosophers.” (Almost certainly, however, the title is Physikai doxai, “Physical tenets.”)
According to Diels, some time in the Hellenistic period Theophrastus’ work underwent a revision; it was abridged, but also expanded to include the doctrines of the Hellenistic philosophers and of some doctors and astronomers. This collection, purportedly used by later Epicureans; Cicero; Varro; Aenesidemus, who is a main source of the Neopyrrhonist Sextus Empiricus (later second century A.D.); the physician Soranus (c. A.D. 100); the Church Father Tertullian (c. A.D. 200); and numerous other writers, was called by Diels Vetusta placita, “Oldest tenets.” That now lost work was then abridged in its turn and updated somewhat by an otherwise unknown person called Aetius, to be dated somewhere in the first century A.D.
