A Short Introduction to Ancient Philosophy

As you know, either from the My Beliefs page on my website or from my essay A Short Look at Religion, every religion has a code of ethics and moral standards that it lives by.  And yet when you look paganism that is not something that is immediately seen or found.

In this essay I want to give an introduction to ancient philosophy and philosophers where the first writings about ethics, morals, vices and virtues started.

So what time period of philosophical history makes up what is now called Ancient Philosophy?  The period is thought to be from 600 BCE to 550 CE, and it began in the Greek cities of coastal Asia Minor.  For this essay I’m going to divide ancient philosophy into Presocratic philosophy, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy and late Antique philosophy.  This brief look will contain ideas of ancient philosophy and the people who developed and furthered them.

The first phase in ancient philosophy is the period called Presocratic, and the people who contributed to this period is usually divided into two groups, the Presocratics and the Sophists, collectively their ideas were called Presocratic philosophy.  They were called philosophers because we can detect some resemblance of to the subject we call philosophy today and because they were looking for wisdom.  The Presocratic part of the name comes from the fact that they either precede Socrates (they were older than he was) or they could have been contemporary to him but have preceded him in philosophical terms and he was reacting to their ideas but they never reacted to his.

The interest in these philosophers comes from their influence on later philosophical figures and that their interest in wisdom took them in directions that would later become central to philosophy both ancient and modern.  They asked questions like: what there is and what causes it to be as it is?  What is being anyway?  Can we know what is real and what is not?  If we ever discover what is true, how do we prove it?  They also asked questions about ethics though not as much as the philosophers that came after them starting with Socrates.  These questions that began with the Presocratics grew out of an interest in cosmology and became what we know today as metaphysics, theory of knowledge, philosophy of language, logic and many other branches of philosophy. [1]

As was mentioned before the Presocratic philosophers are divided into Presocratic and Sophists.  These two groups influenced philosophers through the classical and Hellenistic periods and even down to the Late Antique period.  None of the two groups’ writings survived.  The knowledge we have of them comes from other ancient sources, which quoted their words or summarized and sometimes criticized their theories and this leaves us with a dilemma, did they really mean what these ancient philosophers thought they meant or was there more to what they had to say?  Most of the time these quotations were no more than snippets and fragments. [2]

The major philosophers of the Presocratic group were searching for the origins of the physical world.  Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes are early cosmologists; they gave ambitious accounts of the world as a whole.  Pythagoras was concerned with mysticism and concepts of authority among his mathematical theories.  Heraclitus talked about obscure aphorism (concise statements of a scientific principal, typically made by an ancient classical writers).  Xenophanes had a long time concern with knowledge and its grounds.  Parmenides and Zeno produced arguments about the physical world, which cannot be refuted but reached conclusions impossible to accept.  Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Leucippus and Democritus all wrote cosmologies in response to Parmenides and Zeno.  Leucippus and Democritus were the first to put forward Atom theories.

In the second half of the fifth century BCE the Sophists developed some philosophical skills in arguments and in ethical and social thought; the best known of the Sophists are Pratagoras, Hippias, Gorias, Thrasymachus and Prodicus.  The Sophists did not form a unified intellectual tradition, but they certainly represented a new direction.  They went around the Greek cities teaching for money.  They taught argument and rhetoric, which was considered important in public life. [3] The key ideas that the Sophists put forward were the proper way to educate the young, the validity of laws, customs and religion, the role of nature in establishing the norms of behavior, a person’s obligations to society, family, and self, and the abuse of persuasive language. [4] It was Pratagoras who first put forward the idea of relativism, which is the view that for a belief to be true it is just enough for it to be true to the person who holds it.  Prodicus was famous for his study of language.  Thrasymachus is famous for reducing justice to the interest of the strong. [5] Needless to say they became the bad guys because of the way they taught and the views they held.

Philosophy as we know it today started with Plato.  Plato was born to aristocratic parents around 429 BCE.  He lived most of his life in Athens with a few trips to Sicily and maybe Egypt.  He started an academy in Athens around 380s BCE and this academy continued to operate until 529 CE but with a change to its ideology at the end of the first century BCE.  Unlike his mentor Socrates, Plato died peacefully in his sleep in 347 BCE. [6] He is considered a constructive and systematic philosopher, who did not confine himself to matters of ethical conduct.  He investigated many issues in philosophical method, political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetic theory, morality and many more subjects. [7] Plato, like Socrates, influenced the people who came after him but his influence came in the form of his writings.  His works can be divided into three groupings.  The first group is his Socratic dialogues, which included Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Alcibiades, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Euthydemus, Hippias major and Hippias minor.  The second group is usually put in with the first but is considered transitional since it incorporates some features of early Platonic dialogues and it is made up of Protagoras, and Gorgias.  The third group is divided into Earlier Platonic dialogues (Meno, Phaedo, Cratylus, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus and Parmenides) and Later Platonic dialogues (Theaetetus, Timaeus, Philebus, Critias, Sophist, Stateman, and Laws).  Plato’s most important ideas are his theory of Forms, Knowledge, and his development of the discipline of ethics, whether normative or metaethical.

One of the most famous of Plato’s students is Aristotle.  He was born in Stagira in 484 BCE to a wealthy mother and a father who was a doctor.  They both died when he was young and he was brought up by a family friend or relative.  It is thought that when he was eighteen he went to Athens to study with Plato.

The works that have come to us from Aristotle are most definitely not the works that were read by ancient scholars like Cicero.  Cicero thought that Aristotle’s writing was much more elegant than Plato’s and that is not what we have.  It is thought that the works that came down to us were actually more like lecture notes and revisions of his actual works that he had submitted for public presentation.  The works that we have are dry, compact and technical.  That however, doesn’t take away from the fact that he wrote not just about philosophy but also about biology, political theory, the history of politics, aesthetic theory, ethical theory, physics and psychology just to name a few. [8]

Aristotle is very deferent than his teacher Plato in method.  He is a problem-centered philosopher, so when you are reading him you need to keep two things in mind.  He likes to start his philosophical works from puzzles left by previous philosophers (starting with Plato) and he uses technical terms, which he rarely explains.  He is a systematic thinker, and uses concepts like form and matter in a variety of philosophical contexts.  He invented formal logic; he talks about rhetoric, cosmology and he believes in moral realism, virtue ethics and communitarianism. [9]

The death of Aristotle signaled the beginning of a new phase in ancient philosophy and that is the Hellenistic philosophy.  This phase is usually dated from the death of Aristotle on 322 BCE to 31 BCE.  Greek philosophy during this time underwent a lot of changes and developments.  Besides the Academy (Plato’s School of philosophy) and the Lyceum (Aristotle’s school of philosophy), both of which stayed in Athens and when the rest of the intellectual pursuits moved to Alexandria in Africa, two new schools cropped up.  One is the school of Stoicism and the second is the school of Epicureanism.  In response to these school counter movements developed in response to them and they are the Skeptics and the Cynics, not to mention the fact that they also opposed each other.  Even the Academy joined in on the opposition bandwagon.  Both the Stoics and the Epicureans put forward a complete analysis of human nature.  To both the schools philosophy serves the interest of human happiness.  They also talked about ethics, physics and many other topics.  Of the two schools it was the Stoics that most resemble the modern philosophy and if we were to read their works they would make the most sense to us today.

The final phase of ancient philosophy is called Late Antique philosophy and it is dominated by the Neoplatonists.  Neoplatonism started with Plotinus and continued after him until the  arrival of Christianity.  It gives us an important link between pagan and Christian philosophy.  Even though the major Neoplatonists were anti-Christian some early Christian philosophers like Augustine (354-430 CE) and Boethius (475-524 CE) were influenced by their otherworldly writings.  Neoplatonism helped shape Christian thought and its influence on it continued to be seen through the Medieval period and beyond.   So what is Neoplatonism?  Well it was a school of thought that took as its historical founder Plato but was actually started by Plotinus who lived from 204 – 270 CE.  Plotinus was born in Egypt and at the age of 28 he went to Alexandria to study philosophy.  Ten years later he went to Rome and stayed there until he died.  Plotinus wrote about ethical matters, natural philosophy, metaphysics, the soul, epistemology, and mysticism.  Plotinus knew that his writings defied common sense and really didn’t care.  He had incoherent positions on the reality of the material world, the nature of the soul and its relation to the body and the activities of thought and sense perception.  Neoplatonism after Plotinus was a combination of Pythagoras, Aristotle, the Stoics and the writings of Plato and this made their writings even harder to figure out than Plotinus.  In fact most of the writings of the Neoplatoists (after Plotinus) have yet to be translated into a modern language. [10]

So why is this run down so important to Ethics?  These are the original pagans and their thoughts on ethics have influenced many generations of people, and still do.  This is why I had to go all the way back to the original pagan ethics writers, otherwise known as ancient philosophers for a better understanding of what Ethics is.  This is only the first step on the road to my own personal code of ethics.

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[1] Osborne, Catherine.  Presocratic Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004)

[2] Shields, Christopher. The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy. (NY: Wily, 2003)

[3] Annas, Julia. Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001)

[4] Shields, Christopher. The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy. (NY: Wily, 2003)

[5] Annas, Julia. Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001)

[6] Shields, Christopher. The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy. (NY: Wily, 2003)

[7] Shields, Christopher. Classical Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction (NY: Routledge, 2003)

[8] Shields, Christopher. The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy. (NY: Wily, 2003)

[9] Annas, Julia. Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001)

[10] Shields, Christopher. The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy. (NY: Wily, 2003)

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• Posted in: Essays ♦ Ethics and Philosophy
• Tagged: Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, Helenistic Philosophy, Late Antique Philosophy, Plato, Socrates