Ancient philosophy can be said to be divided between the Pre-Socratic philosophers (i.e., those before Socrates) and the trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. 

The Pre-Socratics can roughly be encapsulated as asking, first, what is everything made out of (seeking the absolute most basic substance that explains reality) and second, the dual question of what can we know (limits of knowledge) and what can we doubt? 

Socrates / Plato and Aristotle can be differentiated from the Pre-Socratics in that we have more than mere fragments of their work and that we may well not be were it not for these three thinkers.  In other words, it is safe to say that they are the foundation of Western civilization.  There is no aspect of human thought not indebted in some way to them as they gave us a frame work by which to think (and left us thought on all of the divisions of philosophy defined in the last posting).

The following is a very brief (and therefore potentially misleading) sketch of the contributions of the major thinkers of the Ancient period.

Asian Thinkers:

Some of the earliest known philosophers were Asian thinkers, however, due to either definition or prejudice, these thinkers are rarely considered in American philosophy classes, instead, being  regulated to Asian studies or religious thought.  The earliest known main figures (who may or may not be individuals or collectives) include: Lao Tzu (Taoism, 7th-6th c. BCE), Confucius (Confucianism, 551-479 BCE), Buddha (563-483 BCE), Chuang Tzu (Taoism, 4th c. BCE), Mencius (371-289 BCE), Hsün tzu, Mo tzu (Mohism), Han Fei Tzu (legalism).  A later posting will discuss Asian, particularly Chinese, philosophy.

Pre-Socratic Philosophers:

The philosophers, mainly Greek, who lived before and during the time of Socrates (470-399 BCE).  Their surviving writings are in fragments only, and some of them only through the re-telling by later thinkers.  They are truly the fathers of Western Philosophy as they began to re-ask questions that their civilizations had answered primarily through myths.  We can roughly divide the Pre-Socratics by those who sought to know and those who doubted that that was possible. 

What is Everything Made Out of?

The earliest Pre-Socratic philosopher we know of is Thales (610-547 BCE; all dates are approximate) who was concerned with deducing the “basic stuff” of all nature—that which everything is composed of.  Thales considered this “basic stuff” to be water—i.e., a fluid, flexible substance that could take on many forms.  Many of the other Pre-Socratics, interested in this same search for the most primary matter, turned to one of the four elements of earth, air, water, and fire.   Anaximander (611-547 BCE), who had been a student of Thales, began to revolutionize this designation of the primary matter because he thought that the basic substance that made up everything else must be more elemental, i.e. must be ageless, boundless, and indeterminate.

Another approach was taken by Pythagoras (580-500 BCE) and his students, the Pythagoreans  {--anyone who has studied mathematics ought to recognize this name, as he is considered to be the father of the Pythagorean theorem --} Pythagoras proposed that the basic nature of everything was numbers i.e. this is a point, two points makes a line, three points determine a surface, and surfaces make a solid, and solids make up bodies, everything physical in this world is a body, thus, all is numbers.

As you can start to see, by asking what is everything made out of, we are also asking about Being and about the nature of all things.  For example, Heraclitus (535-475 BCE) believed that the basic substance of the world was fire, but why this was important was because it means that he was trying to account for the basic nature of everything as being change or motion.  Fire was named as the essential component because fire is perpetually changing.  This led him to say that there is no reality except for the reality of change.  Permanence is an illusion (For example, he said that one cannot step into the same river twice).  Change, however, is not random, but is fixed in order by logos (the word).  Logos creates a system where everything has in it its opposite in harmony.

In opposition to Heraclitus, Parmenides (515-450 BCE) invented a methodology to reveal the essential sameness of everything.  In a proto-scientific method, he assumed some basic principles and then tried to deduce from them what he thought must be therefore true about the nature of being.  He did this because he decided that we cannot just look around in the world for truths, because these truths are known to us prior to experience.  Today we call this a priori knowledge, where our knowledge does not depend on sensory experience.  His central tenet was that if something changed it was something different, therefore everything that is, is unchanging.  He also thought that everything was unitary, undifferentiated (no parts), and eternal.

Then we have a series of later Pre-Socratics who not only established greater methodological conclusions that can be seen as the basis of modern science, but also began looking at the human mind or reason’s role in study and social interactions. 

Empedocles (490-430 BCE) ended up examining the debate between appearance and reality in his attempt to reconcile Parmenides’ “all being is unchanging” and Heraclitus’ “all being is in flux.”  He said that reality is unchanging but change does exist and it is not an illusion.  This means that objects do change, but when they change their essential elements or makeup do not change.  This is very close to what we say today in our modern physics.  He also believed that WHY things change was just as important as HOW, so he proposed that it was love and strife (attraction and decomposition) that made all things change. 

Anaxagoras (500-428 BCE), a contemporary to Empedocles, also investigated the basic substance and the dichotomy of appearance and reality, and concluded that all changes in an object of experience are changes in the arrangements of underlying particles.  He also believed these particles were infinitely divisible.  Each substance had its own corresponding kind of particle (think of DNA), and each substance has every other kind of particle in it as well.  What distinguishes X from Y is the kind of particle unique to each.  (He was pre-cursor to the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus).

Anaxagoras laid the foundation for Democritus (460-370 BCE), a brilliant mathematician who worked out the familiar to our modern ears theory of atomism—essentially, that all things are composed of atoms.  Atoms were tiny, imperceptible, indestructible, eternal, and uncreated particles composed of exactly the same matter but different in size, shape, and weight.  Atoms are numerous and constantly in motion.  They combine and separate, which causes generation, decay, decomposition, erosion, and burning. 

Doubting:

In contradistinction to these theories of basic substances, methodological developments, questions of mind and knowledge, we also have the other side of the debate—those who question what it is that we can know. 

The two main divisions of these doubters were the Skeptics and the Sophists.  Both divisions can be broadly defined and classified, even equated as being the same thing, but essentially, the Skeptics doubted the possibility of certain knowledge, or truth, and the Sophists were rhetoricians, the earliest professors, who despised speculation for its uncertainty, yet used it for arguing, debating, and “proving” what was thought to be un-provable.  Many of these un-provable things were standards of behavior, and therefore, in a sense, they created moral philosophy.  They are accused of arguing for the sake of arguing about anything, and were said to be able to devise an argument, no matter how ridiculous, about anything.

Xenophanes (560-478 BCE) is our earliest know skeptic.  His skepticism is about ever being able to know the truth; he said that even if truth was stated it could not be known.  Essentially, he doubted that knowledge at all was possible.  And is this not a question that we still ask today?  Science may make us think we know true truth, but looking at the history of science we can find so many examples of when “true truths” turned out to be wrong—is the earth flat, does the sun revolve around the earth, etc.  A very similar statement comes from the latter Sophist Gorgias (485-380 BCE), who said that “There is no reality, and if there were, we could not know of it, and even if we could, we could not communicate our knowledge.”  This can be said even another way, as was by Protagoras (490-421 BCE), who famously said that “man is the measure of all things.”  This means that there is no absolute knowledge.  One’s person’s views about the world are just as valid as the next person’s views.

This doubting is taken to a very interesting level by Zeno of Elea (489-430 BCE), a famous student of Parmenides, who revealed both logic and absurdity by saying that an arrow traveling from the bow to the target can never get there because in order to get there it must travel half way, but to travel half way it must travel a quarter way, etc.  You can never reach your destination because there are infinite steps there.  A sliver of a step requires a sliver of time to transgress, which means each sliver of a step requires a sliver of time, which means that you need infinite time to cover an infinite distance, thus motion is impossible.  His other argument against movement is that when a thing, let’s say a dog, moves from here to there, at every moment of her travel she occupies a space equal to her length.  But, for a thing to occupy a space of its length means it is at rest.  Thus at each moment the dog is at rest.  If she is at rest at each moment, there is no movement.

Socrates and Plato:

Socrates wrote nothing of his philosophy, preferring to walk and talk with the young men of Athens, but we know of his exploits and thoughts as they are recorded as dialogues by his most famous student Plato.  Socrates had an amazing mind because he knew how to ask questions.    According to the record in Plato’s Apology, the famous Greek Oracle at Delphi pronounced Socrates the wisest person in Athens, which Socrates argued that it must mean that he was the person who knew his own ignorance.  Thus, we get the definition of wisdom being knowing what one does not know. 

Socrates demonstrated this wisdom by engaging people in conversations and working through philosophical problems by what we call a dialectical method: the topic is broached as a question; one proposes a thesis about that topic; Socrates would ask a question clarifying the thesis; seeing one’s mistake, one would refine it; and the questions would continue until one disproves that theory and moves to an alternative in order to deal with the new thesis in the same way.  Very few interlocutors made it past Socrates’ first few objections to their answers.  In general, one can say that Socrates used questions to get to the “bottom line.”  This was a search for proper definitions. 

The Apology, mentioned above, is the account of his trial and sentencing to death.  He was officially charged with corrupting the youth and not believing in Athens’ gods and thus inventing new ones.  Despite his solid refutation of the charges conducted though his typical manner of dialectical argument with Meletus, the young man who officially brought the charges, he was found guilty.  It may be that while his logic was clear, it was his character that he put on display in the trial and it was precisely this character that the people of Athens held against him.  As punishment he suggested that he ought to receive free meals like the olympic victors; instead, he was sentenced to death.  While awaiting his end, he was capable of escaping jail (an easy and perhaps desired option by the city officials) but he chose not to, and drank the poisonous juice from the hemlock tree.  According to Plato, he did not escape because he felt that by choosing to live in a place one also implicitly chooses to live by its laws.  To evade these laws is not standing up to the consequences of one’s decisions.

Plato was Socrates’ student and is considered to be the greatest mind in Western history.  He started the first multi-subject school, called the Academy, in 387 BCE and it lasted nine centuries.  He wrote on topics or recorded them from Socrates on everything from art to law to desire to governing.  Most of his writings are in dialogue (i.e., like in plays) and star Socrates; because of the form, it is difficult to say how much and many of the dialogues are expounding the beliefs of Socrates or are solely Plato’s thoughts. 

Perhaps Plato’s most famous contribution is his Theory of Forms (or Ideas) most clearly formulated in his dialogues the Republic and the Phaedrus, although underpins many of his works.  According to this theory, what we encounter in the world through sensory experience is not the truly real; instead, what is truly real is the eternal and unchanging Forms or Ideas, which can only be grasped intellectually.  The best way to understand this is to think about circles: imagine the perfect circle; this circle does not exist in the natural world, instead there are round things in the world, but no perfect circle.  The perfect circle is the Form “Circle.”  When we measure this or that round thing, we compare its roundness (mentally) to the perfect one, the Form (which we have an idea of in our minds even though we have never encountered it in the everyday world).  Perfection, therefore, is what is ideal; all of the ideals are Forms.  Beauty is also a Form; it is something that you cannot point to in the world, but it exists as some sort of ideal measure against which we compare things.  Good is also considered a Form.  As Plato expresses it, things “participate” in the in the Forms, so a beautiful or good thing participates in the Idea of Beauty or Goodness. 

Forms / Ideas have four main characteristics: they are eternal, unchanging, unmoving, and indivisible.  And some of the forms are ranked higher than others, for example, the Form circularity participates in the form beautiful, but the form beautiful does not participate in circularity.  Plato’s Phaedrus offers the elaboration of how we know the forms by a myth of the soul.  He explains, through Socrates, that our soul is like the composite figure of a charioteer pulled by two horses.  The divine soul has noble horses, but, our mortal soul has horses of mixed blood, one is noble and the other is ignoble.  Thus, we have a great deal of trouble controlling them.  When the soul is perfect, and winged, it will soar the heavens and the realm of Forms beyond the heavens.  But, with our less than perfect horses, we lose control of the horses, their wings will fail them, they lose their feathers and fall to earth to be embodied in a human form.  This will be the “hour of agony and extremest conflict of the soul.”  Why do some souls lose their feathers?  Because some are fed upon evil and foulness instead of beauty and goodness when the charioteer cannot control his horses.

So what is the realm above the heavens where souls can feed on beauty, wisdom, and goodness?  It is the realm of Forms.  It is the place of true knowledge.  The gods have access to this realm all the time, but other souls only get to see various glimpses of it.  In this realm the soul “…beholds justice, temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge absolute in existence absolute; and beholding other existences in like manner, and feeding upon them, she [the soul] passes down into the interior of the heavens and returns home [to heaven]…”  This is the life of gods.  The forms are the absolute thing-in-itself, The Good, The Just, The Beautiful…  Everything that is good, just, or beautiful down here mimics the Forms above the heavens. 

So, the charioteers who cannot control their horses can only see a glimpse of the Forms before falling to earth.  The order in which our souls fall to earth creates a hierarchy of people based upon how much of the Forms their souls saw.  The souls who:

Saw the most: become embodied as philosopher, artist, musician, or lover.

Saw in 2nd degree: become righteous king, warrior, or lord.

Saw in 3rd degree: become politician, economist, trader.

Saw in 4th degree: become lover of gymnastics, physician.

Saw in 5th degree: become prophet, hierophant (interpreter of sacred mysteries).

Saw in 6th degree: become poets, imitators.

Saw in 7th degree: become artisan, husbandman.

Saw in 8th degree: become sophist (rhetoricians with questionable argumentative reasoning) or a demagogue (leader who obtains power by passionate appeals to prejudices of the people).

Saw in 9th degree: become tyrant.

Plato proposes that 10,000 years must elapse before soul can return to where she came from and that only the soul of the philosopher can return in 3,000 years.  After first life, souls receive judgment: some go to hell (“houses of correction under the earth”), some to heaven.  1,000 years later, the souls may choose what to be embodied as (except, those who have not seen the truth, without intelligence, cannot be human).

Another depiction of the Theory of Forms comes from the masterwork The Republic, which divides reality into two realms, the sensible and the ideal; the sensible realm is envisioned as a cave where people are chained.  Behind these people a fire throws shadows of things on a wall like a movie theatre projects images.  The prisoners can only see the shadows, so, to them, the shadows are their world, they are the truth.  Yet, we can understand, as readers, that these shadows are flawed representations of objects.  The shadows are a source of error, illusion, and ignorance.  So, in analogy, we experience in our world imperfect things like the prisoners in the cave experience the shadows.  In the dialogue, one prisoner is cut free and forced to go out of the cave.  He does not willingly go, because his experience tells him that the real is the wall of shadows.  But, he is forced out into the light; initially, it is blinding and painful (much like the process of learning anything new).  Eventually, however, his eyes adjust and he has the epiphany that his senses deceived him and he sees the truth, of which the shadows were mere representations.  After experiencing the truth, he returns to the cave to teach his fellow prisoners the truth (which, as you can imagine, was not popularly received). 

According to Plato, knowledge is true because it is knowledge of what is.  It is not enough to know the truth, you must strive to become the truth.  Here epistemology becomes ontology: to know is to be.  Ignorance is almost universal, but what allows us to come out of the cave and see the light of knowledge is the Forms.  Everyone, in his/her soul has the Forms which can be remembered.  Something like innate knowledge.  Remembering these Forms is what constitutes true knowledge.  To remember the Forms is to know the absolute truth and to become just and wise. 

In the Symposium Plato tells us that the way a person can go from imperfection (a prisoner in the cave) to perfection and true knowledge is by love.  Love is a longing for, a striving for the object of perfection.  Love seeks to possess the beautiful and to recreate in beauty.  He believes that humans only come truly alive when they love, or, more accurately, when they seek a beloved (which can be a person, an idea, or a thing).  Love is the force that brings all things together and makes them beautiful.  It is that by which we can become perfect.

Love begins as an experience of lacking something (keep in mind how the definition of wisdom was knowing what one does not know, i.e., what knowledge one lacks).  Love provokes thought and effort in the pursuit of that which is lacking.  The deeper the thought and effort, the greater the love.  Physical love, having sexual relations, and physical beauty all play a role in this force, but they are lower forms of love.  This is related as akin to a “ladder” of love, which one climbs up to truth.  A higher instantiation of love, for example, consists in sharing beautiful thoughts with a beautiful person.  The next rung is when the singular focus becomes a broader one, as a love of humanity.  Then one realizes that to love a person is not as great as having love for the higher systems that humanity is a part of: the moral, social laws.  Love now transcends people to love what is like the functioning of and participating in a city-state.  Then the person sees that there is something higher than the city-state, and develops a love for the whole realm of beauty, or the integrated beauty of everything that is.  From this level, the person is ready to make a leap to the love-beauty-truth that is beyond all mortal things.  These levels continue in an ascent to the Absolute Beauty or Goodness.  To progress to this Absolute Love is to enter “the mysteries,” which essentially is a will to immortality.  It is the desire to create immortal “children,” ideas, and these “children” grant the author immortality.  Love is that by which we know and realize the truth.  Love, like wisdom, is a process of seeking higher stages of being. 

Aristotle:

Aristotle was Plato’s most distinguished pupil and spent most of his writings rebelling against his teacher.  He was incredibly influenced by Plato, but also disagreed with him on many details.  Aristotle’s topics even more remarkably diverse than Plato’s; he wrote about everything from poetry to ethics, the soul to biology, logic to being.  Judeao-Christian thought, heavily influenced by Plato, was equally dependent on Aristotle. 

Aristotle is probably most famous for his work the Metaphysics.  He is, in fact, responsible for the name “metaphysics,” or rather, those who catalogued his works.  What we think of today as meaning the study of reality and being originally meant that it was his book shelved after the Physics.  He opens this work with the famous line “all men by nature desire to know.”  The goal of the Metaphysics is comprehensive (not certain) knowledge about what it is to be.  For Aristotle, to be is to be something.  And things are composed of form and matter (i.e. a statue is carved (form) marble (matter)).  Both form and matter are crucial to a thing’s existence, but it is the form that is the essential nature of the thing because it is that which differentiates the thing from something else composed of the same matter. 

Another crucial issue in the question of being is potentiality and actuality.  Matter is pure potentiality (it can be moved but cannot move itself), matter and form together are actuality-potentiality mix, and pure actuality is god.  For example, an acorn is not a tree, but it is potentially a tree.  The source of change is actuality.  Actuality is therefore the thing that changes something but does not itself change, hence the unmoved mover.  The unmoved mover is god/spirit that oversees all the movement of the universe.  Everything that exists exists in between pure potentiality and pure actuality.

Existence (if it is), though, is only a first judgment to be made.  After we have decided something exists, we must determine its essence (that it is), or, as Aristotle called it, ousia, which can be translated as something like a mixture of being and substance.  Ousia has two levels, the first asks what is a thing in itself, what is it uniquely; and secondly, what is it that makes it like all these other things. 

After these two judgments, we then must determine “on account of what it is,” which means to find its cause, and “what it is,” which means to determine its being.  These often get collapsed together though.

Another way of determining what a thing is is to examine which category it falls under.  For Aristotle, there are eight basic categories of being (although some argue that there are ten): substance, quality, quantity, place, time, relation, action, and passion.

The Metaphysics is an extremely difficult and sometimes dry, repetitive work; yet, it is also a work of extreme importance and influence on later philosophy. Aristotle is a stickler for accuracy and thoroughness: he works through arguments very methodically.  Which is important, because it is also a work laced with many new, radical arguments, ideas, and definitions.  For example, he proffers interesting insights into knowledge, about having and privation, the sexes, and the same and the other.  One particularly interesting side comment is a social and political judgment in Book 1, Chap. 2, where he works through a deductive argument that runs: the wise are those who know all things.  The wise know difficult things.  The wise grasp precise and teachable things.  The wise know the tasteful.  The wise ought to rule.  This is similar to Plato, where he argues that the people in power should be philosopher kings (cf., the hierarchy of souls, above), or those who are wise and can therefore rule justly. 

Hellenistic Philosophy:

“Hellenism:” comes from the Greek work Hellen, which means “a Greek,” and, starting in the 1640’s was used to designate something “pertaining to Greece;” by 1865, it took on the meaning of that having to do with the culture and ideals of Ancient Greece.  Thus, it refers to a devotion to or imitation of ancient Greek thought by the newly-Greek in the time between the death of Alexander the Great and Aristotle (322/3 b.c.e.) to the 2nd or 3rd c. c.e., and specifically the adoption of their humanistic and classical ideals namely, reason, moderation, civic responsibility, and the pursuit of knowledge.  Its impact lasted well into the 15th c.  There are numerous schools encompassed under the label of “Hellenistic Philosophy,” including Pythagoreanism (and later Neo-Pythagoreanism), Sophism, Cynicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism, as well as the influence of these schools on Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 

Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king, successfully led the Greek armies against the Persian Empire and established Greek Kingdoms throughout Asia Minor (namely modern day Turkey), Egypt (especially Alexandria), Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia, parts of modern Afghanistan, and Pakistan, creating the largest empire of his time (from Greece to the Himalayan mountains, over 2 million square miles), thus spreading Greek culture to all of the “new Greeks.”  This spread of culture was intentional on Alexander’s part through the insertion of Greek ideals into the Persian culture (language, town planning, education, governance, and arts) and their forced hybridization, and gave rise to the Hellenistic civilization, whose impact lasted well into the 15th c.  (Some of the most striking hybridization is seen in statues of the Buddha in India that are modeled on statues of Apollo; there are also interesting parallels between Zen and Greek stoicism, especially Zeno.  Another important impact was Greek astrology on Indian cosmology.  But, no place felt this Greek frenzy more than Rome; the Romans adopted Greek fashion, values, and philosophies.)  This time period and geographic swath was Greek, but distinct from Classical Greek culture; Greek was a second language for most new-Hellenes.

Alexandria became a new locus of Greek education and culture, especially for science, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy, while Athens remained an educational and cultural center for philosophy and rhetoric.  During this time, educated Romans knew Greek and exerted much energy (especially Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca) translating and commenting on Greek philosophy in Latin, while many other thinkers simply wrote still in Greek (e.g., Epictetus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, and Plotinus).

Hellenistic philosophy, then, sees the massive proliferation of schools of thought, yet aspect where they coalesce, concerning their ties to the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle. 

Notable “schools” of thought in the Hellenistic period include (not all schools proper, but dominate strains, either continued from the ancients, or started thereafter): Pythagoreanism (mathematical, and, later, Neopythagoreanism, the more esoteric school, religious and ascetic; both postdated Pythagoras (4th/5th b.c.e.)), Sophism (following Protagoras, Gorgias, and Antiphon, all between 490-380 b.c.e.), Cynicism (ascetics, following Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope, Crates of Thebes, all between 445-285 b.c.e.), Skepticism (following Pyrrho, Timon, Aenesidemus, all between 365 b.c.e. and 1st c. c.e.), Cyrenaicism (extreme hedonists, following Aristippus of Cyrene, 435-360 b.c.e.), Hellenistic strains of Judaism (Philo of Alexandria), Islam, and Christianity (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Augustine), Epicureanism (Epicurus 341-270 b.c.e., Metrodorus, Zeno of Sidon, Philodemus, and Lucretius (all between 331 b.c.e. and 1st c. c.e.; universe ruled by chance, gods do not interfere, absence of pain is greatest pleasure, advocate simple life), Stoicism (Epicureanism’s main rival, more successful; Zeno of Citium (333-263 b.c.e.), Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Panaetius, Posidonius, Seneca (4 b.c.e.-65 c.e.), Epictetus (55-135 c.e.), Marcus Aurelius (121-180 c.e.); based on ethical ideas of the cynics, goal of life is to live in accord with nature, develop self-control and fortitude to overcome destructive emotions), and Neoplatonism (Plotinus, 205-270 c.e., Porphyry 233-309 c.e., Iamblichus of Chalcis 245-325 c.e.; religious and mystical). 

Cynicism:

Its name derives from kuon, “dog,” which referred to both shamelessness or audacity and also those faithful servants to the gods—the derogatory reference was likely more common. 

Started by Diogenes of Sinope (d. 323 b.c.e.).

Cynicism was a call to action to live life fully “in accord with nature,” which he interpreted as one that was completely free from restraint by social or civic conventions—those ‘bad habits’ that actually harm the soul.  Although, what this action often looked like, we would consider very bad, or at least terribly crude: it was replete with bold speech and utterly shameless behavior, be that as rudeness or public defecation.  Natural life is self-sufficient; it is realized through ascesis, training; this discipline keeps you from harm by tyche, chance or fortune; the success of such is the attainment of apatheia, indifference to suffering. 

Was Jesus a cynic?  He did live against social conventions and encourage others to do the same …

Epicureanism

Epicurus (ca. 341-271 b.c.e.)

Born seven years after Plato’s death; was 19 when Aristotle died.  Born in Samos, an island in the Mediterranean near Turkey, an Athenian colony.  Studied under followers of Democritus and Plato.  Moved to Athens in 306 b.c.e. (at 35 years old) and eventually founded his own school / philosophical community, “The Garden,” where they lived his philosophic principles.  The education provided was free, and he advocated equal rights for women and slaves; they kept to themselves, not engaging in the very public disputations of the other schools.  Over the arch to The Garden was the sign, “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.  The caretaker of that abode, a kindly host, will be ready for you; he will welcome you with bread, and serve you water also in abundance, with these words: Have you not been well entertained?  This garden does not whet your appetite; but quenches it.”  Died from kidney stones around 270/1.  After his death, his thought spread widely and battled Stoicism in popularity until its decline at the time of the rise of Christianity (however some of his principles were revived in the Renaissance and early modern thought).  Many, however, have been influenced by him, notable Thomas Jefferson (U.S. Constitution’s “the pursuit of happiness”) and Karl Marx (doctorate on Epicurus).  While he wrote an enormous amount in his life (some say over 300 books), almost none of his work survives, mainly due to Christian purges that considered his work blasphemous, ungodly, or just unseemly, except that preserved by other sources, including a number of his letters, which summarize his thought, and Principle Doctrines, a work of 40 sayings mainly on his ethics.  His further work is know primarily through the Romans Lucretius and Cicero and the Platonist Plutarch—the last two, however, were opponents of Epicureanism.

Materialist metaphysics: atomistic account of natural phenomenon, rejection of Platonic forms, rejection of influence of gods on our lives;

Empiricist epistemology: skepticism was wrong, we can have knowledge via senses;

Hedonist ethics: goal of action was pleasure (tranquility), achievable by limiting desires and eliminating fear of death and of gods; “minimize harm, maximize happiness”

Ethics:

Epicurus argued that pleasure is the greatest, unqualified good; all other goods are means to securing pleasure.  Thus, he partially follows and partially revises Aristotle’s conception of the highest good as happiness, as flourishing; Aristotle argued that happiness is pleasant, thus brings us pleasure, whereas Epicurus makes pleasure trump happiness.  Pleasure is the only motivator for our actions and introspection reveals the goodness of pleasure and the badness of pain immediately and naturally.  His ethics, then, is a hedonism—but hedonism is not what we typically construe it to be: a reckless, indulgent, perhaps sinful but certainly obsessive pursuit of pleasure (another ancient school, the Cyrenaics, did conceive of an ethics of something more like our modern idea of hedonism).  Instead, Epicurus believed that the attainment of pleasure was so important one must be assured of its attainment, thus advocated the moderate, virtuous life as best.  Thus, not all pleasures ought to be pursued, but only the best, most choice-worthy ones, especially those that will ensure long-lasting pleasure.

Reputedly, and perhaps ironically, given the cooking magazine that uses his name, Epicurus lived on barley bread and fruit, cheese was a delicacy only for feast days, and permitted his students to have no more than a pint of wine a day.  In addition, he was celibate and discouraged all sexual relations for his followers. 

Types of pleasure:

Moving Pleasures:  the pleasure that comes from the activity of satisfying a desire (e.g., eating when hungry);

Static Pleasures: the pleasure that follows the satisfaction of a desire (e.g., feeling of sated hunger); these are better. 

There is no intermediary between pleasure and pain: unfulfilled desire is painful/bad, being or having been fulfilled desire is pleasurable/good.

Physical pleasure and pain concern the present;

Mental pleasure and pain concern the past and the future;

The Goal (Ataraxia):

Anxiety about the future (esp. of gods/afterlife and death) are the greatest harms against pleasure.  If we can eliminate these anxieties, view the future with confidence in its pleasure, then we achieve tranquility (ataraxia), which is the best state. 

Ataraxia:  tranquility, a state free from worry; the only true happiness (optimal and enduring); one avoids stress of vexing people, disturbing politics, one is comfortable, virtuous, affectionate, worthy of trust.

Ataraxia is attained through “sober reasoning;” decency demands a decent standard of living, thus, the pleasant life is wise, honorable, and just.  Amongst the necessities for life, beyond food and shelter, Epicurus adds freedom, thought, and friendship.  Thus, all other things, like a nice meal or good drink, are pleasurable because they are social.  But, “It is better to be free of fear while lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.” 

Fragments from Epicurus, various classical sources: (numbers 10, 11, 12 in C. Bailey’s 1926 collection)

On the Goal of Life

“I do not know how I can conceive the good, if I withdraw the pleasures of taste, withdraw the pleasures of love, withdraw the pleasures of hearing, and withdraw the pleasurable emotions caused by the sight of a beautiful form.

“The stable condition of well-being in the body and the sure hope of its continuance holds the fullest and surest joy for those who can rightly calculate it.

“Beauty and virtue and the like are to be honored, if they give pleasure; but if they do not give pleasure, we must bid them farewell.

“Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more. Therefore, both old and young alike ought to seek wisdom ….  So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed towards attaining it” (Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus”).

“The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together” (Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, 3).

“When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul” (Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus”).

“It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life” (Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, 5).

Stoicism

Epictetus (ca. 50 -130 c.e.)

Born a slave in Hierapolis, Phrygia (now in Turkey), his name, in Greek, simply means “acquired;” being owned by Nero’s secretary, he was freed after Nero’s death in 68 c.e..  His study of philosophy began when he was still enslaved and continued vigorously after his emancipation and began teaching in Rome.  Eventually, he was banished from Rome, along with all philosophers (by Domitian around 93 c.e.), at which time he moved to Nicopolis in Greece, and founded a school there.  Like Socrates, he wrote nothing down, but his students’ notes give us his Discourses (four of eight books exist), Enchiridion [Handbook] …  His work markedly influenced Marcus Aurelius, as well as many writers, psychologists, military, and religious persons. 

Epictetus was said to have been a masterful speaker, most talented at being able to make his audience feel what was being discussed.  This reveals a critical connection between knowing and feeling, or being, and this reveals something important about all Hellenistic philosophy, but especially that of Epictetus.  Philosophy, for him, is not a theoretical study alone, but one that is about and for life; philosophy, then, is a way of life.  One has no sharp division between life and philosophic thought, but these two are intimately connected.  His life and his philosophy were compelling, concernful about the self and others, and advocated simplicity. 

Metaphysics: fate determines all external events; these are utterly beyond our control; what is in our control is how we react. 

Ethics: Ideally, we must react with acceptance, that is, calmly and without passion.  When we do otherwise, we invite suffering.  Our responsibility is intensely personal, but as a member of an universe of fellow humans, we are also responsible to care for others.  Abiding by such yields happiness as a complete peace of mind.

Epistemology: This demands a high level of self-control, which is only possible with enough careful self-reflection so as to know what is and is not in our control.  With the critical role self-knowledge must play, he advocated the first study ought to be in logic. 

What is in our power:  desires (make us slaves), aversions, impulses, and opinions (a very broad category, so that weeping, quarrelling, misfortune, and complaint are all opinions, and this includes the perfecting of our reason).

What is not in our power:  bodies, things/possessions, honor/glory, and power.

Reason is good; the irrational is evil.  Perfecting our reason is within our power.  Perfect reason allows us to command the emotions (apatheia, eliminate their influence) and permit the peace of mind or tranquility (ataraxia).  Pleasure most often charms us and sways our reason, thus we should be most on guard concerning pleasures.  The task of philosophy is to purify the self (the mind) for the end of tranquility.

The Goal:

The goal was also ataraxia, mental tranquility, but more dramatic, an apatheia, an apathy that is the absence of passion.

Apatheia:  a state free from emotional disturbance; peace of mind;

The difference from Aristotle: Aristotle’s virtue is a mean, a state between excess and deficiency wherein one had the right degree of each for the circumstances.  The stoics sought an absence of passion, a complete deficiency of emotion.

This, for the Stoics, was the perfect rational response to the world, thus, was not a complete withdrawal from the world, but a realization of what one can control therein—only what one wills oneself.  Instead of a solitary ascetic life, one must realize one’s part within the whole, fulfill one’s duties, and be compassionate (especially realizing that most wrongs are due to ignorance), thus, an over-all good person.  The most often cited example is his illustration that we are like guests at a stranger’s banquet or inn; we ought to take what is given us and be thankful, thus being a worthy guest, and sometimes we ought to refuse what is offered, thus sharing in the power of the hosts.  In essence, life should always be tolerable, never intolerable or worthy of complaint. 

Some of his persuasive speech can be seen in the following (Discourses, Book 1, ch. 9), a sad account of today’s tie to our bodies and desire:

“But a man may say, ‘Whence shall I get bread to eat when I have nothing?’  And how do slaves, and runaways, on what do they rely when they leave their masters?  Do they rely on their lands or slaves, or their vessels of silver?  They rely on nothing but themselves, and food does not fail them. … But now what happens?  The teacher is a lifeless body, and you are lifeless bodies.  When you have been well filled to-day, you sit down and lament about the morrow, how shall you get something to eat.  Wretch, if you have it, you will have it; if you have it not, you will depart from life.  The door is open.  Why do you grieve?  Where does there remain any room for tears?  And where is there occasion for flattery?  Why shall one man envy another?  Why should a man admire the rich or the powerful …?   But we think about ourselves as if we were only stomachs, and intestines, and shameful parts; we fear, we desire; we flatter those who are able to help is in these matters, and we fear them also.”

The ideal:  “Irrevocable is my word and shall not fail.  Such will I show myself to you, faithful, modest, noble, free from perturbation.  ‘What, and immortal too, exempt from old age, and from sickness?’  No, but dying as becomes a god, sickening as becomes a god.  This power I possess; this I can do.  But the rest I do not possess, nor can I do.  I will show the nerves of a philosopher.  ‘What nerves are these?’  A desire never disappointed, an aversion which never falls on that which it would avoid, a proper pursuit, a diligent purpose, an assent which is not rash.  These you shall see” (Discourses, Book II, Ch. 8).

Late Antique philosophers will be included within the introduction to Medieval Philosophy ...