Series | History of Ancient Western Philosophy, Pt. 1
The Foundations of Hellenic Philosophy
Early Traditions from the Neolithic to the Archaic Periods
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Hello and welcome!
This is the first part in a series on the history of Greek & Roman philosophy. As entries are added, they can be found here:
https://christopher-kirby.medium.com/christopher-kirby-series-on-medium-8dc26b681d52
This first installment will be an overview of the cultural developments that gave rise to the philosophy of Classical Greece — which, by the way, was a name given to this land by their Roman conquerors for reasons unknown. If we wanted to call this philosophy by the name they chose for themselves, we’d call it the philosophy of Hellas, or simply “Hellenic philosophy.”
Consider that little piece of trivia your first lesson in how history is often written by the victors.
Since you’re here, you probably have some interest in ancient thought and culture. Maybe you’ve read one of the Greek classics already. Maybe you’ve heard of Socrates, Plato, or Marcus Aurelius and you’d like to learn a little more.
Or, maybe it’s just a happy accident that’s landed you at this tiny corner of the internet.
Whatever the case, getting a handle on the history of ancient philosophy can be a pretty daunting task — after all, these ideas stretch back thousands of years and the texts from which they derive are tied up in a complex historical, linguistic, and cultural framework.
Don’t worry… I’m here to help!
I’ve taught college courses in ancient philosophy for almost 15 years and in this introduction, I’ll help narrow the focus, so you aren’t overwhelmed by everything classical philosophy has to offer.
Doing Philosophy Historically
But first, you might be wondering why this series has such a long title…
Why should it be called the HISTORY of ancient WESTERN philosophy and not simply “Ancient Philosophy” like many college courses across the world?
Well, as it turns out, there are some philosophers who think the best way, or even the ONLY way, to do philosophy is to regard arguments in their pure, abstract form… completely removed from their historical contexts.
If you consider the quip of the famous 20th century philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine — that there are two sorts of people claiming to be interested in philosophy… those ACTUALLY interested in philosophy and those MERELY interested in the HISTORY of philosophy — then you’ll get a good sense of how some academic philosophers have regarded the history of philosophy until pretty recently.
Such dismissals of history weren’t meant to be elitist or nasty. They actually stemmed from a fairly noble scholarly ideal: viz. a push for greater self-reliance by freeing philosophy from the dead wood of bygone mistakes and philosophical eddies. Unfortunately, such an approach tended to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
In other words, as George Santayana famously put it,
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that many of those same philosophers who dismissed historical approaches also tended to disregard the philosophical contributions of non-Western cultures.
That’s why this series’ title makes it clear that this is just ancient philosophy, FROM A WESTERN PERSPECTIVE.
There are many incredibly rich ideas hailing from Asia, Africa, and the indigenous groups of the Americas which are just as deserving of being called “ancient philosophy.”
As someone who also teaches the history of Chinese philosophy, I’ve been deeply moved and shaped by many non-Western ideas.
So, in this series, we’ll take a deep dive into the tradition that’s most proximal to English speakers, while keeping in mind that it wasn’t the only “game in town” when it comes to philosophy in the ancient world.
With that said, I’d argue it’s a good idea for philosophers to be BOTH students of other cultures AND of history, even if they’re skeptical about the value of ideas they might find there.
One reason for this is that “Philosophers,” as Bertrand Russell once put it…
“are both causes and effects: effects of their social circumstances and of the politics and institutions of their time; causes (if they are fortunate) of beliefs which mould the politics and institutions of later ages.” — p. 5
Often, last century’s philosophy becomes this century’s common sense. After all, I bet many of you were already familiar with that quote above about being doomed to repeating history — even if you’ve never heard of Santayana.
Here’s another example. Finish this sentence: “That which does not kill me, makes me…” What?
Did you say stronger? Yeah, Nietzsche wrote that in 1889, in a book called The Twilight of the Idols.
So, doing philosophy historically means looking closely at WHY certain ideas seem to have caught on when others have not. The history of philosophy looks to explain the ideas of past thinkers in terms today’s philosophers can understand. It’s NOT the philosophy of history, because it’s not asking about the meaning of history itself. Instead, it’s motivated by questions like:
1. Given our best understanding of those times, what did the philosopher say?
2. What did the philosopher mean to say and is that what was said?
3. Could it have been said better?
4. What developed from the philosopher’s work?
A careful study of the history of philosophy can also aid in overcoming implicit biases and structures of oppression built into intellectual traditions. We’ll explore how in future installments.
Historical Periods of the Ancient World
Now that we’ve got those preliminaries out of the way, we can take a closer look at the very early history of the Greek and Italian peninsulas.
Although we usually think of Greek civilization as starting with the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenean cultures, the archeological record actually shows significant social organization all the way back to the Neolithic period.
Around 1100 BCE, the last of the major Bronze Age societies collapsed, perhaps due to environmental catastrophe, disease, pressure from foreign invaders, or a combination of all of these — as archeological records show the neighboring Hittite and Egyptian cultures also suffered similar collapses around the same time.
The resulting period is known as Greece’s “Dark Age.” This was the time that most of the Greek city-states were beginning to take shape alongside the Greek mythological pantheon. The epic and didactic poetry of Homer and Hesiod was produced towards the end of this period and both were probably the culmination of longstanding oral traditions.
We’ll be starting next week with the philosophy of the Archaic period, which is grouped together as “pre-Socratic,” even though it spans over 200 years of history and hails from all over the Greek speaking world — from Sicily to Asia Minor.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all fall within the Classical period, and will comprise the majority of what’s covered in this series, but towards the end we’ll turn to the period that immediately followed Classical Greece — known as the Hellenistic period — in which Rome rose to dominance.
For those who want some finer grained details, I’ve added this short TedEd video on “A Day in the Life of an Ancient Athenian.”
Major Conflicts in Ancient Greece
The Classical period was defined as much by war as it was the rise of democracy and philosophy. If we were doing a deeper dive into intellectual life during these conflicts, we’d probably want to take a look at the historical writings of Herodotus and Thucydides, who wrote on the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, respectively.
Although this series will mainly focus on philosophical works, it’s still a good idea to keep in mind how the ideas we’re considering developed against the backdrop of conflict surrounding these wars.
The map below gives a rough view of how Greece was split during the Peloponnesian war. The dialogues of Plato were written after Athens had been defeated, but many are set during the height of the conflict.
Pre-Classical Cultural Movements
In order to fully appreciate the philosophy of the Classical period, one should keep in mind the major cultural developments from which it sprang.
The centuries old oral traditions that gave rise to the poetry of Hesiod and Homer were connected to a complex system of folkways, norms, and mores. This is often left out of the conversation wherever Ancient philosophy is discussed — as if Greek cultural values suddenly sprung up, ex nihilo, at the end of the 5th century.
But, in fact, most Greek myths offer clear depictions of moral exemplars, notions of reciprocity, and social taboos. During these early times, the word mythos actually referred to “true speech” whereas logos referred to “deceptive or ambiguous speech” and was only given preference much later by philosophers like Plato.
As Bruce Lincoln has pointed out,
“many Greeks found the juxtaposition of mytheomai to legein the most comprehensible and most effective way to draw a multivalent contrast between true speech and deception (or at least ambiguity), the straight and the crooked…” — p. 4
The tragedians of Classical Athens, in many ways, offered social critiques of the mytho-heroic tradition. Often their plays portrayed heroic figures as weak or even villainous in order to convey the frailties of the human condition.
Elsewhere in the Greek speaking world, another group of thinkers had already begun to forsake the mythic tradition in favor of studying the natural world. Today we call these figures the pre-Socratic philosophers, but in the ancient world they were known as the Physikoi — or the “naturalists.”
Finally, most proximate to the lives and times of Socrates and Plato were the Sophists — a class of intellectuals which made a living teaching rhetoric to the sons of the Athenian elite.
Many of these figures appear as characters in Plato’s dialogues and we’ll use that as an opportunity to consider their work.
One of the themes that runs throughout these early intellectual developments is the idea of hubris, or “regarding oneself as god-like.” From Ikarus and Arachne to Achilles and Odysseus, the mytho-heroic poets make it clear what happens when one tries to rise beyond their mortal station.
Tragedies like Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and his Agamemnon paint a similar picture of the dangers involved in provoking the wrath of the gods.
Try keeping this in mind once this series gets to Plato’s account of Socrates, as it might color your understanding in some interesting ways.
There are likewise several themes running throughout the philosophical works we’ll be considering.
The most prominent is probably change vs. permanence… nearly EVERY ancient Greek philosopher tried to find some semblance of order in the chaos of their world.
Theirs was a maritime culture, built by the chapped hands and weathered brows of sailors. The early Greeks were a people who understood all too well how quickly tranquil conditions can take a turn for the worse.
There’s a reason why, to this day, anyone on a long, arduous journey fraught with danger is said to be on an “Odyssey!”
Philosophers like Heraclitus and Parmenides or Democritus and Aristotle may not have faced the same kinds of trials endured by Odysseus, but they did witness enough political and social upheaval to leave them casting about for answers. When one is on that kind of intellectual quest, it’s natural to wonder if things really are as they seem.
This is why so many of the Greek philosophers considered the distinction between appearance and reality.
They wondered if there was some “ultimate principle” or arche, underlying the world they experienced and so they posited that reason, or logos, as they called it, might be one way to organize all of the noise into one coherent theory, or theoria.
In Part 2 we’ll discuss how the pre-Socratic philosophers incorporated these kinds of concepts into their speculations about nature, or what the Greeks called physis.
