michael-dean-k/

They shared a particular view of philosophical progress, in which the problems that define the philosophical enterprise are seen [...] ever more clearly, and in which their answers become more and more apparent. Aristotle in the first book of his Metaphysics, and Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy saw the teachings of the earlier philosophers they recorded as halting steps in the direction of a vision they were themselves to expound. Only someone with supreme self-confidence as a philosopher could write its history in such a way.

The temptation for most philosopher historians is to see philosophy not as culminating in their own work, but rather as a gradual progress to whatever philosophical system is currently in fashion. But this temptation should be resisted. There is no force that guarantees philosophical progress in any particular direction. Indeed, it can be called into question whether philosophy makes any progress at all.

The major philosophical problems, some say, are all still being debated after centuries of discussion, and are no nearer to any definitive resolution. [...] Most dissertations that begin with literature searches seek to show that all work hitherto has left a gap that will now be filled by the author’s original research. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is no exception. His not too hidden agenda is to show how previous philosophers neglected the remaining member of the quartet of causes: the final cause, which was to play a most significant role in his own philosophy of nature. The earliest philosophy, he concluded, is, on all subjects, full of babble, since in its beginnings it is but an infant.

Note: history as slanted evidence to support self-importance; russell did this; can you take the ego out of history? [e]

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There are those who think that the major task of philosophy is to cure us of intellectual confusion. On this modest view of the philosopher’s role, the tasks to be addressed differ across history, since each period needs a different form of therapy. The knots into which the undisciplined mind ties itself differ from age to age, and different mental motions are necessary to untie the knots. A prevalent malady of our own age, for instance, is the temptation to think of the mind as a computer, whereas earlier ages were tempted to think of it as a telephone exchange, a pedal organ, a homunculus, or a spirit. Maladies of earlier ages may be dormant, such as the belief that the stars are living beings; or they may return, such as the belief that the stars enable one to predict human behaviour.

Note: evolving era-specific confusion; are they different tasks or different metaphors? or both? has the mind as a computer metaphor been fully unpacked in terms of cultural operating systems, beyond McKenna's memes? [e]

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I should make clear at the outset that in the case of many of my historical subjects I write of necessity as an amateur rather than as an expert. In an age when the academic study of past philosophers has expanded exponentially, no one person can read more than a fraction of the vast secondary literature that has proliferated in recent years around every one of the thinkers discussed in this volume. I have myself contributed to the scholarly discussion of several of the great philosophers of the past, in particular Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and I have published monographs on some of the subjects covered by my thematic chapters, such as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion. But in compiling the bibliographies for the earlier parts I was made aware how vast was the extent of material I have not read in comparison with the amount that I am familiar with. Any single author who attempts to cover the entire history of philosophy is quickly made aware that in matters of detail he is at an enormous disadvantage in comparison with the scholars who have made individual philosophers their field of expertise. By compensation, a history written by a single hand may be able to emphasize features of the history of philosophy that are less obvious in the works of committees of specialists, just as an aerial photograph may bring out features of a landscape that are almost invisible to those close to the ground.

Note: depth vs breadth

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Aristotle offers a classification of the earliest Greek philosophers in accordance with the structure of his system of the four causes. Scientific inquiry, he believed, was above all inquiry into the causes of things; and there were four different kinds of cause: the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause.

Note: elments, actor, proportion, end

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Only two sayings are recorded of Thales of Miletus (c.625–545 BC), traditionally the founding father of Greek philosophy. They illustrate the mélange of science and religion, for one of them was ‘All things are full of gods’, and the other was ‘Water is the first principle of everything’. Thales was a geometer, the first to discover the method of inscribing a right-angled triangle in a circle; he celebrated this discovery by sacrificing an ox to the gods (D.L. 1. 24–5). He measured the height of the pyramids by measuring their shadows at the time of day when his own shadow was as long as he was tall. He put his geometry to practical use: having proved that triangles with one equal side and two equal angles are congruent, he used this result to determine the distance of ships at sea. Thales also had a reputation as an astronomer and a meteorologist. In addition to predicting the eclipse, he is said to have been the first to show that the year contained 365 days, and to determine the dates of the summer and winter solstices. He studied the constellations and made estimates of the sizes of the sun and moon. He turned his skill as a weather forecaster to good account: foreseeing an unusually good olive crop, he took a lease on all the oil mills and made a fortune through his monopoly. Thus, Aristotle said, he showed that philosophers could easily be rich if they wished (Pol. 1. 11. 1259a6–18).

Note: the first man of space and time [e]

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On the other hand, he became a byword for unworldly absent-mindedness. Plato, among others, tells the following tale: Thales was studying the stars and gazing into the sky, when he fell into a well, and a jolly and witty Thracian servant girl made fun of him, saying that he was crazy to know about what was up in the heavens while he could not see what was in front of him beneath his feet. (Theaetetus 174a) An unlikely story went around that he had met his death by just such a fall while stargazing.

Note: symbolic death, caused by your trade

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Thales’ remarks heralded many centuries of philosophical disdain for marriage. Anyone who makes a list of a dozen really great philosophers is likely to discover that the list consists almost entirely of bachelors. One plausible list, for instance, would include Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, none of whom were married.…

Note: on not trusting idea from someone before theyve had kids [e]

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people found it hard to understand Thales’ adoption of water as the ultimate principle of explanation. The earth, he said, rested on water like a log floating in a stream—but then, asked Aristotle, what does the water rest on? (Cael. 2. 13. 294a28–34). He went further and said that everything came from and was in some sense made out of water. Again, his reasons were obscure, and Aristotle could only conjecture that it…

Note: the truth in primitive intuitions

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Anaximander of Miletus (d. c.547 BC). We know rather more about his views, because he left behind a book entitled On Nature, written in prose, a medium just beginning to come into fashion. Like Thales he was credited with a number of original scientific achievements: the first map of the world, the first star chart, the first Greek sundial, and an indoor clock as well. He taught that the earth was cylindrical in shape, like a stumpy column no higher than a third of its diameter.

Note: His map of the world has the Mediterranean Sea at the middle with land all around it. The outlines of Greece and Italy are loosely correct, but the entire paradigm is inverted—a good metaphor for ego-centric perspective, probably better than the heliocentric overturn. Both examples of local frames with no global frames at all. Bigger question now is how the universe itself is just a local frame, and we are reaching for possible paradigms beyond it. [e]

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Anaximander offered an account of the origin of the present world, and explained what forces had acted to bring it into existence, inquiring, as Aristotle would say, into the efficient as well as the material cause. He saw the universe as a field of competing opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry. Sometimes one of a pair of opposites is dominant, sometimes the other: they encroach upon each other and then withdraw, and their interchange is governed by a principle of reciprocity. As Anaximander put it poetically in his one surviving fragment, ‘they pay penalty and render reparation to each other for their injustice under the arbitration of time’ (DK 12 B1). Thus, one surmises, in winter the hot and the dry make reparation to the cold and the wet for the aggression they committed in summer. Heat and cold were the first of the opposites to make their appearance, separating off from an original cosmic egg of the everlasting indeterminate stuff. From them developed the fire and earth which, we have seen, lay at the origin of our present cosmos.

Note: origins of spectrums? influenced arisroles ethics?

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In this way rarefaction and condensation can conjure everything out of the underlying air (KRS 140–1). In support of this claim Anaximenes appealed to experience, and indeed to experiment—an experiment that the reader can easily carry out for herself. Blow on your hand, first with the lips pursed, and then from an open mouth: the first time the air will feel cold, and the second time hot. This, argued Anaximenes, shows the connection between density and temperature (KRS 143).

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The Milesians, then, are not yet real physicists, but neither are they myth-makers. They have not yet left myth behind, but they are moving away from it. They are not true philosophers either, unless by ‘philosophy’ one simply means infant science. They make little use of conceptual analysis and the a priori argument that has been the stock-in-trade of philosophers from Plato to the present day. They are speculators, in whose speculations elements of philosophy, science, and religion mingle in a rich and heady brew.

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Pythagoras is credited with inventing the word ‘philosopher’: instead of claiming to be a sage or wise man (sophos) he modestly said that he was only a lover of wisdom (philosophos)

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Pythagoras’ philosophical community at Croton was the prototype of many such institutions: it was followed by Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Epicurus’ Garden, and many others. Some such communities were legal entities, and others less formal; some resembled a modern research institute, others were more like monasteries. Pythagoras’ associates held their property in common and lived under a set of ascetic and ceremonial rules: observe silence, do not break bread, do not pick up crumbs, do not poke the fire with a sword, always put on the right shoe before the left, and so on. The Pythagoreans were not, to begin with, complete vegetarians, but they avoided certain kinds of meat, fish, and poultry. Most famously, they were forbidden to eat beans (KRS 271–2, 275–6).

Note: intellectual commune history

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dietary rules were connected with Pythagoras’ beliefs about the soul. It did not die with the body, he believed, but migrated elsewhere, perhaps into an animal body of a different kind.3 Some Pythagoreans extended this into belief in a three-thousand-year cosmic cycle: a human soul after death would enter, one after the other, every kind of land, sea, or air creature, and finally return into a human body for history to repeat itself (Herodotus 2. 123; KRS 285).

Note: long scale reincarnation + recurrence / looping

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But Xenophanes elsewhere links water with earth as the original source of things, and indeed he believed that our earth must at one time have been covered by the sea. This is connected with the most interesting of his contributions to science: the observation of the fossil record. Seashells are found well inland, and on mountains too, and in the quarries in Syracuse impressions of fish and seaweed have been found. An impression of a bay leaf was found in Paros deep in a rock, and in Malta there are flat shapes of all kinds of sea creatures. These were produced when everything was covered with mud long ago, and the impressions dried in the mud. (KRS 184)

Note: prechristian evolution insights

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We possess more substantial portions of his work than of any previous philosopher, but that does not mean we find him easier to understand. His fragments take the form of pithy, crafted prose aphorisms, which are often obscure and sometimes deliberately ambiguous. Heraclitus did not argue, he pronounced. His delphic style may have been an imitation of the oracle of Apollo which, in his own words, ‘neither speaks, nor conceals, but gestures’ (KRS 244). The many philosophers in later centuries who have admired Heraclitus have been able to give their own colouring to his paradoxical, chameleon-like dicta. Even in antiquity Heraclitus was found difficult. He was nicknamed ‘the Enigmatic One’ and ‘Heraclitus the Obscure’ (D.L. 9. 6). He wrote a three-book treatise on philosophy—now lost—and deposited it in the great temple of Artemis (St Paul’s ‘Diana of the Ephesians’). People could not make up their minds whether it was a text of physics or a political tract. ‘What I understand of it is excellent,’ Socrates is reported as saying. ‘What I don’t understand may well be excellent also; but only a deep sea diver could get to the bottom of it’ (D.L. 2. 22). The nineteenth-century German idealist Hegel, who was a great admirer of Heraclitus, used the same marine metaphor to express an opposite judgement. When we reach Heraclitus after the fluctuating speculations of the earlier Presocratics, Hegel wrote, we come at last in sight of land. He went on to add, proudly, ‘There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my own Logic.’5

Note: origins of cryptic philosophy

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saw himself as making a completely new start in philosophy. He thought the work of previous thinkers was worthless: Homer should have been eliminated at an early stage of any poetry competition, and Hesiod, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes were merely polymaths with no real sense

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Again like Xenophanes, Heraclitus believed that the sun was new every day (Aristotle, Mete. 2. 2355b13–14), and, like Anaximander, he thought the sun was constrained by a cosmic principle of reparation (KRS 226). The ephemeral theory of the sun is indeed in Heraclitus expanded into a doctrine of universal flux. Everything, he said, is in motion, and nothing stays still; the world is like a flowing stream. If we step into the same river twice, we cannot put our feet twice into the same water, since the water is not the same two moments together (KRS 214). That seems true enough, but on the face of it Heraclitus went too far when he said that we cannot even step twice into the same river (Plato, Cra. 402a). Taken literally, this seems false, unless we take the criterion of identity for a river to be the body of water it contains rather than the course it flows. Taken allegorically, it is presumably a claim that everything in the world is composed of constantly changing constituents: if this is what is meant, Aristotle said, the changes must be imperceptible ones (Ph. 8. 3. 253b9 ff.). Perhaps…

Note: constant motion

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Heraclitus once said that the world was an ever-living fire: sea and earth are the ashes of this perpetual bonfire. Fire is like gold: you can exchange gold for all kinds of goods, and fire can turn into any of the elements (KRS 217–19). This fiery world is the only world…

Note: eternal fire

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‘Logos’ is the everyday Greek term for a written or spoken word, but from Heraclitus onwards almost every Greek philosopher gave it one or more of several grander meanings. It is often rendered by translators as ‘Reason’—whether to refer to the reasoning powers of human individuals, or to some more exalted cosmic principle of order and beauty. The term found its way into Christian theology when the author of the fourth gospel…

Note: logos as fractal order

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Humans fall into three classes, at various removes from the rational fire that governs the universe. A philosopher like Heraclitus is closest to the fiery Logos and receives most warmth from it; next, ordinary people when awake draw light from it when they use their own reasoning powers; finally, those who are asleep have the…

Note: histtory of transendence hierarchies

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What Hegel most admired in Heraclitus was his insistence on the coincidence of opposites, such as that the universe is both divisible and indivisible, generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal. Sometimes these identifications of opposites are straightforward statements of the relativity of certain predicates. The most famous, ‘The way up and the way down are one and the same’, sounds very deep. However, it need mean no more than that when, skipping down a mountain, I meet you toiling upward, we are both on the same path. Different things are attractive at different times: food when you are hungry, bed when you are sleepy (KRS 201). Different things attract different species: sea-water is wholesome for fish, but poisonous for humans; donkeys prefer rubbish to gold (KRS 199).

Note: paradox and conditionality

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Heraclitus did indeed believe that the cosmic fire went through stages of kindling and quenching (KRS 217). It is presumably also in this sense that we are to understand that the universe is both generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal (DK 22 B50). The underlying process has no beginning and no end, but each cycle of kindling and quenching is an individual world that comes into and goes out of existence.

Note: cosmological evolution

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What survives of Heraclitus amounts to no more than 15,000 words. The enormous influence he has exercised on philosophers ancient and modern is a matter for astonishment. There is something fitting about his position in Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican stanze, The School of Athens. In this monumental scenario, which contains imaginary portraits of many Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, as is right and just, occupy the centre stage. But the figure to which one’s eye is immediately drawn on entering the room is a late addition to the fresco: the booted, brooding figure of Heraclitus, deep in meditation on the lowest step.9

Note: art analysis

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Better known is the second argument, commonly known as Achilles and the tortoise. ‘The slower’, Zeno said, ‘will never be overtaken by the swifter, for the pursuer must first reach the point from which the fugitive departed, so that the slower must necessarily remain ahead.’ Let us suppose that Achilles runs four times as fast as the tortoise, and that the tortoise is given a forty-metre start when they run a hundred-metre race against each other. According to Zeno’s argument, Achilles can never win. For by the time he reaches the forty-metre mark, the tortoise is ahead by ten metres. By the time Achilles has run those ten, the tortoise is still ahead by two and a half metres. Each time Achilles makes up a gap, the tortoise opens up a new, shorter, gap, so he can never overtake him (Aristotle, Ph. 5. 9. 239b11–14). These and other similar arguments of Zeno assume that distances and motions are infinitely divisible. His arguments have been dismissed by some philosophers as ingenious but sophistical paradoxes. Others have admired them greatly: Bertrand Russell, for instance, claimed that they provided the basis of the nineteenth-century mathematical renaissance of Weierstrass and Cantor.12 Aristotle, who preserved Zeno’s puzzles for us, claimed to disarm them, and to re-establish the possibility of motion, by distinguishing between two forms of infinity: actual infinity and potential infinity.13 But it was not for many centuries that the issues raised by Zeno were given solutions that satisfied both philosophers and mathematicians.

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Empedocles’ philosophy of nature can be regarded, from one point of view, as a synthesis of the thought of the Ionian philosophers. As we have seen, each of them had singled out some one substance as the basic or dominant stuff of the universe: Thales had privileged water, Anaximenes air, Xenophanes earth, and Heraclitus fire. For Empedocles all four of these substances stood on equal terms as the fundamental ingredients, or ‘roots’ as he put it, of the universe. These roots had always existed, he maintained, but they mingle with each other in various proportions in such a way as to produce the familiar furniture of the world and also the denizens of the heavens. From these four sprang what was and is and ever shall: Trees, beasts, and human beings, males and females all, Birds of the air, and fishes bred by water bright; The age-old gods as well, long worshipped in the height. These four are all there is, each other interweaving And, intermixed, the world’s variety achieving.

Note: first synthesizer? is he deserving as more than just a presocratic? Main ideas: elemental composition, conversation of mass, yin-yang dynamics, evolution, fractal cyclical history [e]

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What Empedocles called ‘roots’ were called by Plato and later Greek thinkers stoicheia, a word earlier used to indicate the syllables of a word. The Latin translation elementum, from which our ‘element’ is derived, compares the roots not to syllables, but to letters of the alphabet: an elementum is an LMNtum. Empedocles’ quartet of elements was assigned a fundamental role in physics and chemistry by philosophers and scientists until the time of Boyle in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it can be claimed that it is still with us, in altered form. Empedocles thought of his elements as four different kinds of matter; we think of solid, liquid, and gas as three states of matter. Ice, water, and steam would be, for Empedocles, specific instances of earth, water, and air; for us they are three different states of the same substance, H2O. It was not unreasonable to think of fire, and especially the fire of the sun, as a fourth element of equal importance. One might say that the twentieth-century emergence of the science of plasma physics, which studies the properties of matter at the sun’s temperature, has restored Empedocles’ fourth element to parity with the other three. Aristotle praised Empedocles for having realized that a cosmological theory must not just identify the elements of the universe, but must assign causes for the development and intermingling of the elements to make the living and inanimate compounds of the actual world. Empedocles assigns this role to Love and Strife: Love combines the elements, and Strife forces them apart. At one time the roots grow to be one out of many, at another time they split to be many out of one. These things, he said, never cease their continual interchange, now through love coming together into one, now carried apart from each other by Strife’s hatred (KRS 348). Love and Strife are the picturesque ancestors of the forces of attraction and repulsion which have figured in physical theory throughout the ages. For Empedocles, history is a cycle in which sometimes Love is dominant, and sometimes Strife. Under the influence of Love the elements combine into a homogeneous, harmonious, and resplendent sphere, reminiscent of Parmenides’ universe. Under the influence of Strife the elements separate out, but when Love begins to regain the ground it had lost, all the different species of living beings appear (KRS 360). All compound beings, such as animals and birds and fish, are temporary creatures that come and go; only the elements are everlasting, and only the cosmic cycle goes on for ever.

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To explain the origin of living species, Empedocles put forward a remarkable theory of evolution by survival of the fittest. First flesh and bone emerged as chemical mixtures of the elements, flesh being constituted by fire, air, and water in equal parts, and bone being two parts water to two parts earth and four parts fire. From these constituents unattached limbs and organs were formed: unsocketed eyes, arms without shoulders, and faces without necks (KRS 375–6). These roamed around until they chanced to find partners; they formed unions, which were often, at this preliminary stage, quite unsuitable. Thus there arose various monstrosities: human-headed oxen, ox-headed humans, androgynous creatures with faces and breasts on front and back (KRS 379). Most of these fortuitous…

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A woman called Pantheia, the story goes, given up for dead by the physicians, was miraculously restored to life by Empedocles. To celebrate, he offered a sacrificial banquet to eighty guests in a rich man’s house at the foot of Etna. When the other guests went to sleep, he heard his name called from heaven. He hastened to the summit of the volcano, and then, in Milton’s words, to be deemed A god, leaped fondly into Aetna flames. (Paradise Lost iii. 470)

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Matthew Arnold dramatized this story in his Empedocles on Etna. He places these verses in the mouth of the philosopher at the crater’s rim: This heart will glow no more; thou art A living man no more, Empedocles! Nothing but a devouring flame of thought— But a naked, eternally restless mind! To the elements it came from Everything will return Our bodies to earth, Our blood to water, Heat to fire, Breath to air. They were well born, they will be well entomb’d— But mind? (lines 326 –38) Arnold gives the philosopher, before his final leap, the hope that in reward for his love of truth his intellect will never wholly perish.

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If Empedocles achieved a kind of immortality as a precursor of Darwin, his contemporary Anaxagoras is sometimes regarded as an intellectual ancestor of the…

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Here is his account of the beginning of the universe: ‘All things were together, infinite in number and infinite in smallness; for the small too was infinite. While all things were together, nothing was recognizable because of its smallness. Everything lay under air and ether, both infinite’ (KRS 467). This primeval pebble began to rotate, throwing off the surrounding ether and air and forming out of them the stars and the sun and the moon. The rotation caused the separation of dense from rare, of hot from cold, of dry from wet, and bright from dark. But the separation was never complete, and to this day there remains in every single thing a portion of everything else. There is a little whiteness in what is black, a little cold in what is hot, and so on: things are named after the item that is dominant in it (Aristotle, Ph. 1. 4. 187a23). This is most obvious in the case of semen, which must contain hair and flesh, and much, much more; but it must also be true of the food we eat (KRS 483–4, 496). In this…

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men have been formed and the other ensouled animals. And the men possess farms and inhabit cities just as we do, and they have a sun and a moon and the rest just like us. The earth produces things of every sort for them to be harvested and stored, as it does for us. I have said all this about the process of separating off, because it would have happened not only here with us, but elsewhere too. (KRS 498) Anaxagoras thus has a claim to be the originator of the idea, later proposed by Giordano Bruno and…

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Mind is infinite and separate, and has no part in the general commingling of elements; if it did, it would get drawn into the evolutionary process and could not control it. This teaching, placing mind firmly in control of matter, so struck his contemporaries that they nicknamed Anaxagoras himself the Mind. It is difficult, however, to assess exactly what his doctrine, though it greatly impressed both Plato and Aristotle, actually meant in practice…

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Teleological explanation was more profound than mechanistic explanation. ‘If anyone wants to find out the reason why each thing comes to be or perishes or exists, this is what he must find out about it: how is it best for that thing to exist, or to act or be acted upon in any way?’

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Anaxagoras made his final benefaction to humanity: the invention of the school holiday. Asked by the authorities of the city how they should honour him, he said that children should be let off school in the month of his death.

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He once said that he would prefer to discover a single scientific explanation than to become king of Persia (D.L. 9. 41; DK 68 B118). Democritus’ fundamental thesis is that matter is not infinitely divisible. We do not know his exact argument for this conclusion, but Aristotle conjectured that it ran as follows. If we take a chunk of any kind of stuff and divide it up as far as we can, we will have to come to a halt at tiny bodies which are indivisible. We cannot allow matter to be divisible to infinity: for let us suppose that the division has been carried out and then ask: what would ensue if the division was carried out? If each of the infinite number of parts has any magnitude, then it must be further divisible, which contradicts our hypothesis. If, on the other hand, the surviving parts have no magnitude, then they can never have amounted to any quantity: for zero multiplied by infinity is still zero. So we have to conclude that divisibility comes to an end, and the smallest possible fragments must be bodies with sizes and shapes. These tiny, indivisible bodies were called by Democritus ‘atoms’ (which is just the Greek word for ‘indivisible’) (Aristotle, GC 1. 2. 316a13–b16).16 Atoms, Democritus believed, are too small to be detected by the senses; they are infinite in number and come in infinitely many varieties, and they have existed for ever. Against the Eleatics, he maintained that there was no contradiction in admitting a vacuum: there was a void, and in this infinite empty space atoms were constantly in motion, just like motes in a sunbeam. They come in different forms: they may differ in shape (as the letter A differs from the letter N), in order (as AN differs from NA), and in posture (as N differs from Z). Some of them are concave and some convex, and some are like hooks and some are like eyes. In their ceaseless motion they bang into each other and join up with each other (KRS 583). The middle-sized objects of everyday life are complexes of atoms thus united by random collisions, differing in kind on the basis of the differences between their constituent atoms (Aristotle, Metaph.

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sententious

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The sophists made a systematic study of forensic debate and oratorical persuasion. In this pursuit they wrote on many topics. They started with basic grammar: Protagoras was the first to distinguish the genders of nouns and the tenses and moods of verbs (Aristotle, Rh. 3. 4. 1407b6–8). They went on to list techniques of argument, and tricks of advocacy. As interpreters of ambiguous texts, and assessors of rival orations, they were among the earliest literary critics. They also gave public lectures and performances, and set up eristic moots, partly for instruction and partly for entertainment (D.L. 9. 53). Altogether, their roles encompassed those in modern society of tutors, consultants, barristers, public relations professionals, and media personalities.

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He read aloud a tract entitled On the Gods, whose opening words were long remembered: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life’ (D.L. 9. 51). His most famous saying, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, encapsulated a relativist epistemology which will be examined in detail later in this book.18

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Prodicus from the island of Ceos in the Aegean, came to Athens, like Protagoras, on official business of his home state. He was a linguist, but more interested in semantics than grammar: he can perhaps be regarded as the first lexicographer. Aristophanes and Plato teased him as a pedant, who made quibbling distinctions between words that were virtually synonymous. In fact, however, some of the distinctions credited to him (such as that between two Greek equivalents of ‘want’, boulesthai and epithumein; Plato, Protagoras 340b2) were later of serious philosophical importance. Prodicus is credited with a romantic moral fable about the young Heracles choosing between two female impersonations of Virtue and Vice. He also had a theory of the origin of religion. ‘The men of old regarded the sun and the moon, rivers and springs, and whatever else is helpful for life, as gods, because we are helped by them, just as the Egyptians worship the Nile’ (DK 84 B5). Thus, the worship of Hephaestus is really the worship of fire, and the worship of Demeter is really the worship of bread.

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The first is a rhetorical exercise defending Helen of Troy against those who slander her, arguing that she deserves no blame for running off with Paris and thus sparking off the Trojan war. ‘She did what she did either because of the whims of fortune, the decisions of the gods and the decrees of necessity, or because she was abducted by force, or persuaded by speech, or overwhelmed by love’ (DK 82 B11, 21–4). Gorgias goes through these alternatives in turn, arguing in each case that Helen should be held free from blame. No human can resist fate, and it is the abductor, not the abductee, who merits blame. Thus far, Gorgias has an easy task: but in order to show that Helen should not be blamed if she succumbed to persuasion, he has to engage in an unconvincing, though no doubt congenial, encomium on the powers of the spoken word: ‘it is a mighty overlord, insubstantial and imperceptible, but it can achieve divine effects’. In this case, too, it is the persuader, not the persuadee, who should be blamed. Finally, if Helen fell in love, she is blameless: for love is either a god who cannot be resisted or a mental illness which should excite our pity. This brief and witty piece is the ancestor of many a philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism, force majeure, incitement, and irresistible impulse.

Location 849

The third argument, the most plausible of the three, argues that each individual’s sensations are private and that all we can pass on to our neighbours is words and not experiences.

Note: foundation of alienation, the central preidcament and cause of literature; that we use words to articulate our private experience but it can't even translate. Problems of qualia and consciousness too. rhetorical parody: (1) nothing exists; (2) if it did, we couldn't know; (3) if we knew, we couldn't communicate it. Pair this with this other work, his defense of Helen; the word as "a great lord that can work on the soul like a drug," that can reshape the psyche, values, emotions of the receiver; great power; (but perhaps, not responsibility) ... across 2 works; full theory of literature: we cannot communicate our inner world, but we can craft linguistic drugs to give someone an approximation; the limits and powers of language ... Giorgas as a ploy by Plato to account for objective knowledge systems, yet also he was the forefather of ancient greek prose. see Hegel & Wittgenstein; [e]

Location 866

In the history of philosophy Socrates has a place without parallel. On the one hand, he is revered as inaugurating the first great era of philosophy, and therefore, in a sense, philosophy itself. In textbooks all previous thinkers are lumped together in textbooks as ‘Presocratics’, as if philosophy prior to his age was somehow prehistoric. On the other hand, Socrates left behind no writing, and there is hardly a single sentence ascribed to him that we can be sure was his own utterance rather than a literary creation of one of his admirers. Our first-hand acquaintance with his philosophy is less than with that of Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, or Democritus. Yet his influence on subsequent philosophy, down to our own day, has been incomparably greater than theirs.

Note: Alt model where empodecles, plato, socrares are each T2 synthesis that feed into T3 Aristotelian synthesis; less about chronology or pre-socratic ... wonder if Plato cast a shadow over the pre-Socratics, most unique is that Socrates had a founding dramatic story [e]

Location 881

The hard facts of Socrates’ life do not take long to tell. He was born in Athens about 469 BC, ten years after the Persian invasions of Greece had been crushed at the battle of Plataea. He grew up during the years when Athens, a flourishing democracy under the statesman Pericles, exercised imperial hegemony over the Greek world. It was a golden age of art and literature, which saw the sculptures of Phidias and the building of the Parthenon, and in which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their great tragedies. At the same time Herodotus, ‘the father of history’, wrote his accounts of the Persian Wars, and Anaxagoras introduced philosophy to Athens. The second half of Socrates’ life was overshadowed by the Peloponnesian War (431–4), in which Athens was eventually forced to cede the leadership of Greece to victorious Sparta. During the first years of the war he served in

Location 891

An aspiring democrat politician, Anytus, with two associates, caused an indictment to be drawn up against Socrates in the following terms: ‘Socrates has committed an offence by not recognizing the gods whom the state recognizes but introducing other new divinities. He has also committed the offence of corrupting the young. Penalty demanded: death’ (D.L. 2. 40). We have no record of the trial, though two of Socrates’ admirers have left us imaginative reconstructions of his speech for the defence. Whatever he actually said failed to move a sufficient number of the 500 citizen jurors. He was found guilty, albeit by a small majority, and condemned to death. After a delay in prison, due to a religious technicality, Socrates died in spring 399, accepting a poisonous cup of hemlock from the executioner.

Note: real speech vs. plato's speech; historical recasting

Location 906

In 423 the dramatist Aristophanes had produced a comedy, The Clouds, in which he introduces a character called Socrates, who runs a college of chicanery which is also an institute of bogus research. Students at this establishment not only learn to make bad arguments trump good arguments, but also study astronomy in a spirit of irreverent scepticism about traditional religion. They invoke a new pantheon of elemental deities: air, ether, clouds, and chaos (260–6). The world, they are told, is governed not by Zeus, who does not exist, but by Dinos (literally ‘Vortex’), the rotation of the heavenly bodies (380–1). Much of the play is burlesque that is obviously not meant to be taken seriously: Socrates measures how many flea-feet a flea can leap, and explores the clouds in a ramshackle flying machine. But the allegation that astronomy was incompatible with piety, if it was a joke, was a dangerous one. After all, it was only in the previous decade that Anaxagoras had been banished for asserting that the sun was a fiery lump. At the end of the play Socrates’ house is burnt down by an angry crowd of people who wish to punish him for insulting the gods and violating the privacy of the moon. To those who recalled Aristophanes’ comedy, the events of 399 must have seemed a sorry case of life imitating art.

Note: synthesizes other: anaxagoras, empodecles, sophists ... christ like arc

Location 912

There is general agreement that he was pot-bellied and snub-nosed, pop-eyed and shambling in gait. He is regularly described as being shabby, wearing threadbare clothes, and liking to go barefoot. Even Aristophanes represents him as capable of great feats of endurance, and indifferent to privation: ‘never numb with cold, never hungry for breakfast, a spurner of wine and gluttony’ (414–17). From other sources it appears that he was a spurner of wine not in the sense of being a teetotaller, but as having an unusual ability to hold his liquor (Plato, Smp. 214a).…

Note: legends of pyth, S, and JC

Location 922

In antiquity, however, he was best known for his attachment to the flamboyant aristocrat Alcibiades, some twenty years his junior: an attachment which, though passionate, remained…

Note: interesting

Location 927

On more important issues, there is little that is certain about Socrates’ life and thought. For further information we are dependent above all on the two disciples whose works have come down to us intact, the soldierly historian Xenophon, and the idealist philosopher Plato. Both Xenophon and Plato composed, after the event, speeches for the defence at Socrates’ trial. Xenophon in addition wrote four books of memoirs of Socrates (memorabilia Socratis) and a Socratic dialogue, the Symposium. Plato, besides his Apology, wrote at least twenty-five dialogues, in all but one of which Socrates figures. Xenophon and Plato paint pictures of Socrates which differ from each other as much as the picture of Jesus given in the gospel of Mark differs from that in the gospel of John. While in Mark Jesus speaks in parables, brief aphorisms, and pointed responses to questions, the Jesus of the fourth gospel delivers extensive discourses that resonate at several levels. There is a similar contrast between Xenophon’s Socrates, who questions, argues, and exhorts in a workmanlike manner, and the Socrates of Plato’s Republic…

Note: the mode of historcal enshrinement

Location 930

Xenophon’s major concern in his memoirs was to exonerate Socrates from the charges made against him at his trial, and to show that his life was such that conservative Athenians should have revered him rather than condemned him to death. Xenophon is also anxious to place a distance between Socrates and the other philosophers of the age: unlike Anaxagoras he had no futile interest in physics or astronomy (Mem. 1. 1. 16), and unlike the sophists he did not charge any fees or pretend to expertise that he lacked

Note: spheres of damnation, still a thing! but shifted

Location 946

there is little in Xenophon’s work that would entitle Socrates to a prominent position in the history of philosophy. Several of the Presocratics would be more than a match for Xenophon’s Socrates in scope, insight, and originality. The Socrates who has captured the imagination of succeeding generations of philosophers is the Socrates of Plato,

Note: either Xenophon under rendered or Plato over rendered

Location 961

Plato’s dialogues do not assign a consistent role or personality to the character called Socrates. In some dialogues he is predominantly a critical inquirer, challenging the pretensions of other characters by a characteristic technique of question and answer—elenchus—which reduces them to incoherence. In other dialogues Socrates is quite willing to harangue his audience, and to present an ethical and metaphysical system in dogmatic form. In yet other dialogues he plays only a minor part, leaving the philosophical initiative to a different protagonist.

Note: pessoa selves; fractured lore

Location 965

All scholars agreed on including in the group the dialogues Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, and Timaeus, and all agreed that the group represented the latest stage of Plato’s writing career. There was no similar consensus about ordering within the group: but it is notable that the group includes all the dialogues in which Socrates’ role is at a minimum. Only in the Philebus is he a prominent character. In Laws he does not appear at all, and in the Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, and Politicus he has only a walk-on part while the lead role is given to another: in the first two to the protagonist named in the dialogue’s title, and in the latter two to a stranger from Parmenides’ town of Elea. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to regard the dialogues of this group as expressing the views of the mature Plato rather than those of his long-dead teacher.

Note: anchor then diverge

Location 979

‘Two things may fairly be attributed to Socrates: inductive arguments and general definitions; both are starting points of scientific knowledge. But he did not regard the universal or the definitions as separate entities, but [the Platonists] did, and called them Ideas of things.’

Note: essayism as inductive reasoning; experience to conclusion [e]

Location 987

A third group of dialogues can be identified by a set of common features: (1) they are short; (2) Socrates appears as an inquirer, not an instructor; (3) the Theory of Ideas is not presented; and (4) stylometrically they are at the greatest remove from the late group first identified. This group includes Crito, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Ion, Euthydemus, and Hippias Minor. These dialogues are commonly accepted as those most likely to be presentations of the philosophical views of the historical Socrates. Here too belongs the Apology, in which Socrates is the sole speaker, on trial for his life, and which in philosophical content and stylometric features resembles the other dialogues of the group. The first book of the Republic, too, in both content and style, resembles this group more than it resembles the remaining books of the dialogue: some scholars suppose, with good reason, that it first existed as a separate dialogue, perhaps under the title Thrasymachus. It is difficult to assign a chronology within this early group, though some authors place the Lysis first and assign it before 399, on the basis of an ancient anecdote that it was read to Socrates himself, who said, ‘what a load of lies this young man tells about me’ (D.L. 3. 35). In my view there is good reason to accept the general consensus that thus divides the Platonic dialogues into three groups, early, middle, and late. The division results from the striking coincidence of three independent sets of criteria, dramatic, philosophical, and stylometric. Whether we focus on the dramatic role given to Socrates, or the…

Note: early plato

Location 992

According to both Plato and Xenophon, another factor that directed his interest was an oracle uttered in the name of Apollo by the entranced priestess in the shrine at Delphi. When asked if there was anyone in Athens wiser than Socrates, the priestess replied in the negative. Socrates professed to be puzzled by this response, and began to question different classes of people who claimed to possess wisdom of various kinds. It soon became clear that politicians and poets possessed no genuine expertise at all, and that craftsmen who were genuine experts in a particular area would pretend to a universal wisdom to which they had no claim. Socrates concluded that the oracle was correct in that he alone realized that his own wisdom was worthless

Note: does this speak to the inefectiveness of wisdom in society?

Location 1036

It was in matters of morality that it was most important to pursue genuine knowledge and to expose false pretensions. For according to Socrates virtue and moral knowledge were the same thing: no one who really knew what was the best thing to do could do otherwise, and all wrongdoing was the result of ignorance. This makes it all the more absurd that he should be accused of corrupting the young. Anyone would obviously prefer to live among good men than among bad men, who might harm him. He cannot, therefore, have any motive for corrupting the young on purpose; and if he is doing so unwittingly he should be educated rather than prosecuted (26a). Socrates, in the Apology, did not claim to possess himself the wisdom that is sufficient to keep a man from wrongdoing. Instead, he said that he relied on an inner divine voice, which would intervene if ever he was on the point of taking a wrong step (41d). So far from being an atheist, his whole life was dedicated to a divine mission, the campaign to expose false wisdom which was prompted by the Delphic oracle. What would really be a betrayal of God would be to desert his post through fear of death. If he were told that he could go free on condition that he abandon philosophical inquiry, he would reply, ‘Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy’

Note: non-virtuous baseline

Location 1041

The early dialogues of Plato portray Socrates carrying out his philosophical mission. Typically, the dialogue will be named after a personage who claims knowledge of a certain subject or who can be taken to represent a certain virtue: thus the Ion, on poetry, is named after a prizewinning rhapsode (a reciter of Homer), and the Laches, on courage, is named after a distinguished general. Charmides and Lysis, on passion, temperance, and friendship, are named after two bright young men who commanded a circle of aristocratic admirers. In each dialogue Socrates seeks a scientific account or definition of the topic under discussion, and by questioning reveals that the eponymous protagonist is unable to give one. The dialogues all end with the…

Note: aporia via elenchos; gadfly; midwife; love of the search of wisdom

Location 1051

Aristotle was right to pick out the search as a notable feature of Socratic method. The method has sometimes been criticized as involving the fallacious claim that we cannot ever know whether some particular action is or is not, say, just or pious unless we can give a watertight definition of justice and piety. Such a claim would be inconsistent with Socrates’ regular practice in the course of his elenchus of seeking agreement whether particular actions (such as returning a borrowed knife to a madman, or carrying out a strategic retreat in battle) do or do not exhibit particular virtues such as justice and courage. Socrates’ method involves only the weaker claim that unless we have a general definition of a virtue we will not (a) be able to say whether the virtue universally has a particular property, such as being teachable, or being beneficial, or (b) be able to decide difficult borderline cases, such as whether a son’s prosecuting his father for the manslaughter of an accused murderer is or is not an act of piety. The other feature of Socrates’ method emphasized by Aristotle, namely the use of inductive arguments, does in fact presuppose that we can be sure of truths about individual cases while still lacking universal definitions. Plato’s Socrates does not claim to have a watertight definition of techne, or craft; but over and over again he considers particular crafts in order to extract general truths about the nature of a craft. Thus, in Republic 1 he wishes to show that the test of a good craftsman is not whether he makes a lot of money, but whether he benefits the…

Note: on definitions

Location 1060

In the absence of the universal definition of a virtue, the general truths are applied to help settle difficult borderline cases of practice, and to evaluate…

Note: science of virtue

Location 1076

Can virtue be taught? For if virtue is knowledge, then surely it must be teachable; and yet it is difficult to point to any successful teachers of virtue. In Athens, however, there was no lack of people claiming to have the relevant expertise, namely the sophists. At the end of the early period, and before the central period of Plato’s writing career, we find a series of dialogues named after major sophists—Hippias, Gorgias, Protagoras—which address the question whether virtue can be taught and which deflate the pretensions of the sophists to possess the secret of its teachability. The Hippias Minor sets out a serious difficulty for the idea that virtue is a craft that can be learnt. A craftsman who makes a mistake unknowingly is inferior to a craftsman who makes a mistake deliberately; so if virtue is a craft, one who sins deliberately is more virtuous than one who sins in ignorance (376b). The Gorgias argues that rhetoric, the main arrow in the sophist’s quiver, is incapable of producing genuine virtue. The Protagoras seems to suggest—whether seriously or ironically—that virtue is indeed teachable, because it is the art of calculating the proportion of pleasure and pain among the consequences of one’s actions.23

Note: phronesis; personal decision; to abstract virtue atop moments; retroactive assignment of virtue

Location 1082

The Phaedo also contains Plato’s account of the last days of Socrates in prison. Socrates’ friend Crito has (in the dialogue named after him) failed to gain acceptance of a plan for escape. Socrates has rejected the proposal, saying that he owes so much to the laws of Athens, under which he was born and bred and lived contentedly, that he cannot now turn his back on his covenant with them and run away (51d–54c). The arrival of a ship from the sacred isle of Delos marks the end of the religious stay of execution, and Socrates prepares for death by engaging his friends in a long discussion of the immortality of the soul.24 The discussion ends with Socrates’ narrating a series of myths about the journeys in the underworld of the soul after it survives death. Crito asks whether Socrates has any instructions about his burial; he is told to remember that he will be burying only the body, and not the soul, which is to go to the joys of the blessed. After his last bath Socrates says farewell to his family, jokes with his gaoler, and accepts the cup of hemlock. He is represented (with a degree of medical improbability) as composing himself serenely as sensation gradually deserts his limbs. His last words, like so many in his life, are puzzling: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Aesculapius [the god of healing]. Please remember to pay the debt.’ Once again we ask ourselves whether he means his words literally or is employing his unique form of irony. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is in one and the same dialogue that Plato records the last hours of Socrates and introduces clearly for the first time his own characteristic Theory of Ideas. As well as the physical death of Socrates, we witness the demise of his personal philosophy, to be reincarnated henceforth in the more metaphysical and mythical form of Platonism. When Socrates died, Plato was in his late twenties, having been his pupil for about eight years. A member of an aristocratic Athenian family, Plato would have been just old enough to have fought in the Peloponnesian War, as his brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus certainly did. His uncles Critias and Charmides were two of the Thirty Tyrants, but he himself took no part in Athenian political life. At the age of 40 he went to Sicily and became an associate of Dion, the brother-in-law of the reigning monarch, Dionysius I; during this visit he made the acquaintance of the Pythagorean philosopher Archytas. On his return to Athens he founded a philosophical community, the Academy, in a private grove beside his own house. Here a group of thinkers, under his direction, shared with each other their interests in mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics, ethics, and mysticism. When 60 years old he was invited back to Sicily by Dion’s nephew, who had now succeeded to the throne as Dionysius II; but his visit was not a success because Dion and Dionysius quarrelled with each other. A third visit as a royal adviser was equally abortive, and Plato returned home…

Note: first greek to cover?

Location 1102

Plato’s works as handed down to us amount to some half a million words. Though probably some of the works in the corpus are spurious, there are no written works attributed to Plato in antiquity that have not survived today.

Note: word counts of greats

Location 1128

The dialogue form enabled Plato to suspend judgement about difficult philosophical issues, while presenting the strongest arguments he could think of on both sides of the question (cf. D.L. 3. 52).

Note: advantage over an essay? easier to explore arguments.. [e]

Location 1134

For each thing that there is three things are necessary if we are to come by knowledge: first, the name, secondly, the definition, and thirdly, the image. Knowledge itself is a fourth thing, and there is a fifth thing that we have to postulate, which is that which is knowable and truly real. To understand this, consider the following example and regard it as typical of everything. There is something called a circle; it has a name, which we have just this minute used. Then there is its definition, a compound of nouns and verbs. We might give ‘The figure whose limit is at every point equidistant from its centre’ as the definition of whatever is round, circular, or a circle. Thirdly, there is what we draw, or rub out, or rotate, or cancel. The circle itself which all these symbolize does not undergo any such change and is a quite different thing. In the fourth place we have knowledge, understanding, and true opinion on these matters—these, collectively, are in our minds and not in sounds or bodily shapes, and thus are clearly distinct from the circle itself and from the three entities already mentioned. Of all these items, it is understanding that is closest to the fifth in kinship and likeness; the others are at a greater distance. What is true of round is also true of straight, of colour, of good and beautiful, and just; of natural and manufactured bodies; of fire, water, and the other elements; of all living beings and moral characters; of all that we do and undergo. In each case, anyone who totally fails to grasp the first four things will never fully possess knowledge of the fifth. (342a–d)

Note: knowledge is full conceptual model of the circle itself in isolation; understanding is relational, how you get it relative to otger forms, unity, being; applies to EA patterns [e]

Location 1145

In his other writings Plato uses many other expressions to refer to Ideas. ‘Forms’ (eide) is probably the most common, but the Idea or Form of X may be called ‘the X itself’, ‘that very thing that is X’, or ‘Xness’, or ‘what X is’.

Note: the essence of a thing requires understading of all other things, so you know what thing is not, and what makes it unique. ties to lexigraph. not just definitons and synonyms, but ones that denote a things suchness relative to related forms. without nuance this lets to muddled language and duiplicitous words [e]

Location 1160

He does not mention, even at the lowest level, actual material circular objects such as cartwheels and barrels. The reason for his omission is clear from other passages in his writings (e.g. Phd. 74a–c). The wheels and barrel we meet in experience are never perfectly circular: somewhere or other there will be a bend or bump which will interfere with the equidistance from the centre of every point on the circumference. This is true too, for that matter, of any diagram we may draw on paper or in the sand. Plato does not stress this point here, but it is the reason why he says that the diagram is at a greater distance from the circle itself than my concept is. My subjective concept of the circle—my understanding of what ‘circle’ means—is not the same as the Idea of the circle, because the Idea is an objective reality that is not the property of any individual mind. But at least the concept in my mind is a concept of a perfect circle; it is not merely an imperfect approximation to a circle, as the ring on my finger is.

Note: a wheel is its own eidos; no wheel meets the platonic wheel; and sure there can be subeiodtic wheels of an even tighter definition of which together distinguish themselves from cousin wheels, yet even within that family there is variance, and even if all were truly identical, each instance is then unique in its relaton to time, place, and event. no two bicycle wheels ever share a single sense of being... what interests me here is the web of eioditc relation, how bicycle wheel ladders up in multple directions, up to circle, up to two, up to travel... and so all real things are a congomerate of many forms

Location 1162

We may state a number of Platonic theses about Ideas and their relations to ordinary things in the world. (1) The Principle of Commonality. Wherever several things are F, this is because they participate in or imitate a single Idea of F (Phd. 100c; Men. 72c, 75a; Rep. 5. 476a10, 597c). (2) The Principle of Separation. The Idea of F is distinct from all the things that are F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211b). (3) The Principle of Self-Predication. The Idea of F is itself F (Hp. Ma. 292e; Prt. 230c–e; Prm. 132a–b). (4) The Principle of Purity. The Idea of F is nothing but F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211e). (5) The Principle of Uniqueness. Nothing but the Idea of F is really, truly, altogether F (Phd. 74d, Rep. 5. 479a–d). (6) The Principle of Sublimity. Ideas are everlasting, they have no parts and undergo no change, and they are not perceptible to the senses (Phd. 78d; Smp. 211b).

Note: instances embody a concept, but is not the concept, for a concept is only its abstract self, distinct from all other abstractions, and abstractions are supreme because they are everlasting, somehow embedded in the source code that generates all future instances

Location 1185

The Principle of Uniqueness is sometimes stated in a misleading way by commentators. Plato frequently says that only Ideas really are, and that the non-ideal particulars we encounter in sense-experience are between being and not being. He is often taken to be saying that only Ideas really exist, and that tangible objects are unreal and illusory. In context, it is clear that when Plato says that only Ideas really are, he does not mean that only Ideas really exist, but that only the Idea of F is really F, whatever F may be in the particular case. Particulars are between being and not being in that they are between being F and not being F—i.e. they are sometimes F and sometimes not F.27 For instance, only the Idea of Beauty is really beautiful, because particular beautiful things are (a) beautiful in one respect but ugly in another (in figure, say, but not in complexion), or (b) beautiful at one time but not another (e.g. at age 20 but not at age 70), (c) beautiful by comparison with some things, but not with others (e.g. Helen may be beautiful by comparison with Medea, but not by comparison with Aphrodite), (d) beautiful in some surroundings but not in others (Smp. 211 a–e). An important feature of the classical Theory of Ideas is the Principle of Sublimity. The particulars that participate belong to the inferior world of Becoming, the world of change and decay; the Ideas that are participated in belong to a superior world of Being, of eternal stability. The most sublime of all Ideas is the Idea of the Good, superior in rank and power to all else, from which everything that can be known derives its being (Rep. 509c).

Note: to take this literally though is to claim concepts and generalities actually speak to the configurations and parameters of the engine of reality; is this mostly through induction? ie: seeing particular to know universal; essayism [e]

Location 1208

Predicates. In modern logic a sentence such as ‘Socrates is wise’ is considered as having a subject, ‘Socrates’, and a predicate, which consists of the remainder of the sentence, i.e. ‘. . . is wise’. Some philosophers of logic, following Gottlob Frege, have regarded predicates as having an extra-mental counterpart: an objective predicate (Frege called it a ‘function’) corresponding to ‘. . . is a man’ in a way similar to that in which the man Socrates corresponds to the name ‘Socrates’. Frege’s functions, such as the function x is a man, are objective entities: they are more like the fifth items of the Seventh Letter than like the fourth items. They share some of the transcendental properties of Ideas: the function x is a man does not grow or die as human beings do, and nowhere in the world can one view or handle the function x is divisible by 7. But functions do not conform to the Principles of Self-Predication or Uniqueness. How could one ever imagine that the function x is a man, and only that function, was really and truly a human being? Classes. Functions serve as principles according to which objects can be collected into classes: objects that satisfy the function x is human, for instance, can be grouped into the class of human beings. Ideas in some way resemble classes: participation in an Idea can be assimilated to membership of a class. The difficulty in identifying Ideas with classes arises again over the Principle of Self-Predication. The class of men is not a man and we cannot say in general that the class of Fs is F. However, it seems at first sight as if there are, indeed, some classes that are members of themselves, such as the class of classes.

Note: predicates as relation layer

Location 1234

Socrates now presents a blueprint for a city with three classes. Those among the soldiers best fitted to rule are selected by competition to form the upper class, called guardians; the remaining soldiers are described as auxiliaries, and the rest of the citizens belong to the class of farmers and artisans (2. 374d–376e). How are the working classes to be brought to accept the authority of the ruling classes? A myth must be propagated, a ‘noble falsehood’, to the effect that members of the three classes have different metals in their soul: gold, silver, and bronze respectively. Citizens in general are to remain in the class in which they were born, but Socrates allows a limited amount of social mobility (3. 414c–415c). The rulers and auxiliaries are to receive an elaborate education in literature (based on a bowdlerized Homer), music (provided it is martial and edifying), and gymnastics (undertaken by both sexes in common) (2. 376e–3. 403b). Women as well as men are to be guardians and auxiliaries, but this involves severe restraints no less than privileges. Members of the upper classes are not allowed to marry; women are to be held in common and all sexual intercourse is to be public. Procreation is to be strictly regulated on eugenic grounds. Children are not to be allowed contact with their parents, but will be brought up in public creches. Guardians and auxiliaries may not own property or touch money; they will be given, free of charge, adequate but modest provisions, and they will live in common like soldiers in a camp (5. 451d–471c).

Note: On monastic officials [e]

Location 1293

Plato, we know from other dialogues, delighted in teasing his readers; he extended the irony he had learnt from Socrates into a major principle of philosophical illumination.

Note: Republic as totalitarian foil?

Location 1309

However, having woven the analogy with his classbound state into his moral psychology, Plato in later books of the Republic returns to political theory. His ideal state, he tells us, incorporates all the cardinal virtues: the virtue of wisdom resides in the guardians, fortitude in the auxiliaries, temperance in the working classes, and justice is rooted in the principle of the division of labour from which the city-state took its origin. In a just state every citizen and every class does that for which they are most suited, and there is harmony between the classes (4. 427d–434c). In less ideal states there is a gradual falling away from this ideal. There are five possible types of political constitution (8. 544e). The first and best constitution is called monarchy or aristocracy: if wisdom rules it does not matter whether it is incarnate in one or many rulers. There are four other inferior types of constitution: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism (8. 543c). Each of these constitutions declines into the next because of the downgrading of one of the virtues of the ideal state. If the rulers cease to be persons of wisdom, aristocracy gives place to timocracy, which is essentially rule by a military junta (8. 547c). Oligarchy differs from timocracy because oligarchic rulers lack fortitude and military virtues (8. 556d). Oligarchs do possess, in a rather miserly form, the virtue of temperance; when this is abandoned oligarchy gives way to democracy (8. 555b). For Plato, any step from the aristocracy of the ideal republic is a step away from justice; but it is the step from democracy to despotism that marks the enthronement of injustice incarnate (8. 576a). So the aristocratic state is marked by the presence of all the virtues, the timocratic state by the absence of wisdom, the oligarchic state by the decay of fortitude, the democratic state by contempt for temperance, and the despotic state by the overturning of justice. Plato recognizes that in the real world we are much more likely to encounter the various forms of inferior state than the ideal constitution described in the Republic. Nonetheless, he insists that there will be no happiness, public or private, except in such a city, and such a city will never be brought about unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers (5. 473c–d). Becoming a philosopher, of course, involves working through Plato’s educational system in order to reach acquaintance with the Ideas.

Note: Democracy vs philosopher king

Location 1310

Marriage, far from being abolished, is imposed by law, and bachelors over 35 have to pay severe annual fines

Note: Domestic enforcement

Location 1338

Finally, legislators must realize that even the best laws are constantly in need of reform

Note: History of thought on amendments; from Plato to America to the future

Location 1339

On the other hand, Magnesia has several features reminiscent of the Republic. Supreme power in the state rests with a Nocturnal Council, which includes the wisest and most highly qualified officials, specially trained in mathematics, astronomy, theology, and law (though not, like the guardians of the Republic, metaphysics).

Note: Council of monkish philo-kings

Location 1340

Each law must have a preamble setting out its purpose, so that citizens may conform to it with understanding. For instance, a law compelling marriage between the age of 30 and 35 should have a preamble explaining that procreation is the method by which human beings achieve immortality

Note: On legal legibility; also on the idea of children as immortality, and the thought of requiring it!

Location 1347

From time to time in the Laws Plato engages in theoretical discussion of sexual morality, though actual sexual legislation is restricted to a form of excommunication for adultery (7. 785d–e). In a way that has been very common during the Christian era, but was rare in pagan antiquity, he bases his sexual ethics on the notion that procreation is the natural purpose of sex. The Athenian says at one point that he would like to put into effect ‘A law to permit sexual intercourse only for its natural purpose, procreation, and to prohibit homosexual relations; to forbid the deliberate killing of a human offspring and the casting of seed on rocks and stone where it will never take root and fructify’ (8. 838e). He realizes, however, that it will be very difficult to ensure compliance with such a law, and instead he proposes other measures to stamp out sodomy and discourage all forms of non-procreative intercourse (8. 836e, 841d). We have reached a point in Plato’s thinking far distant from the arch homosexual banter which is such a predominant feature of the Socratic dialogues.

Note: Pre Christian roots of sexual repression

Location 1354

The world of the Timaeus is not a field of mechanistic causes: it is fashioned by a divinity, variously called its father, its maker, or its craftsman (demiourgos) (28c).

Note: How does this differ from monotheism?

Location 1367

Like the Lord God in Genesis, the maker of the world looked at what he had made and found that it was good; and in his delight he adorned it with many beautiful things. But the Demiurge differs from the creator of Judaeo-Christian tradition in several ways. First of all, he does not create the world from nothing: rather, he brings it into existence from a primordial chaos, and his creative freedom is limited by the necessary properties of the initial matter (48a). ‘God, wishing all things to be good and nothing, if he could help it, paltry, and finding the visible universe in a state not of peace but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, brought it from disorder into an order that he judged to be altogether better’ (30a). Secondly, while the Mosaic creator infuses life into an inert world at a certain stage of its creation, in Plato both the ordered universe and the archetype on which it was patterned are themselves living beings. What is this living archetype? He does not tell us, but perhaps it is the world of Ideas which, he concluded belatedly in the Sophist, must contain life. God created the soul of the world before he formed the world itself: this world-soul is poised between the world of being and the world of becoming

Note: compare this to recent logs [e]

Location 1374

In contrast to those earlier philosophers who spoke of multiple worlds, Plato is very firm that our universe is the only one (31b).

Note: No multiverse

Location 1386

He follows Empedocles in regarding the world as made up of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and he follows Democritus in believing that the different qualities of the elements are due to the different shapes of the atoms that constitute them. Earth atoms are cubes, air atoms are octahedrons, fire atoms are pyramids, and water atoms are icosahedrons. Pre-existent space was the receptacle into which the maker placed the world, and in a mysterious way it underlies the transmutation of the four elements, rather as a lump of gold underlies the different shapes that a jeweller may give to it (50a). In this Plato seems to anticipate the prime matter of Aristotelian hylomorphism.31

Note: Evolution of elemental thinking

Location 1387

The fourth century saw a shift in political power from the city-states of classical Greece to the kingdom of Macedon to the north. In the same way, after the Athenians Socrates and Plato, the next great philosopher was a Macedonian. Aristotle was born, fifteen years after Socrates’ death, in the small colony of Stagira, on the peninsula of Chalcidice. He was the son of Nicomachus, court physician to King Amyntas, the grandfather of Alexander the Great. After the death of his father he migrated to Athens in 367, being then 17, and joined Plato’s Academy. He remained for twenty years as Plato’s pupil and colleague, and it can safely be said that on no other occasion in history was such intellectual power concentrated in a single institution.

Location 1404

Another Platonic work of Aristotle’s youth is his Protrepticus, or exhortation to philosophy. This too is lost, but it was so extensively quoted in later antiquity that some scholars believe they can reconstruct it almost in its entirety. Everyone has to do philosophy, Aristotle says, for arguing against the practice of philosophy is itself a form of philosophizing. But the best form of philosophy is the contemplation of the universe of nature. Anaxagoras is praised for saying that the one thing that makes life worth living is to observe the sun and the moon and the stars and the heavens. It is for this reason that God made us, and gave us a godlike intellect. All else—strength, beauty, power, and honour—is worthless (Barnes, 2416).

Note: universe becoming conscious

Location 1419

It is indeed one of Aristotle’s many claims on posterity that he was logic’s founder. His most important works on the subject are the Categories, the de Interpretatione, and the Prior Analytics. These set out his teaching on simple terms, on propositions, and on syllogisms. They were grouped together, along with the two works already mentioned, and a treatise on scientific method, the Posterior Analytics, into a collection known as the Organon, or ‘tool’ of thought. Most of Aristotle’s followers thought of logic not as itself a scientific discipline, but as a propaedeutic art which could be used in any discipline; hence the title. The Organon, though shown already in antiquity to be incomplete as a system of logic, was regarded for two millennia as providing the core of the subject.1

Note: aristotle deduction; socrates induction

Location 1436

In his surviving works Aristotle often take issue with the theory. Sometimes he does so politely, as where, in the Nicomachean Ethics, he introduces a series of arguments against the Idea of the Good with the remarks that he has an uphill task because the Forms were introduced by his good friends. However, his duty as a philosopher is to honour truth above friendship. In the Posterior Analytics, however, he dismisses Ideas contemptuously as ‘tarradiddle’ (1. 22. 83a33). More seriously, in his Metaphysics he argues that the theory fails to solve the problems it was meant to address. It does not confer intelligibility on particulars, because immutable and everlasting forms cannot explain how particulars come into existence and undergo change. Moreover, they do not contribute anything either to the knowledge or to the being of other things (A 9. 991a8 ff.). All the theory does is to bring in new entities equal in number to the entities to be explained: as if one could solve a problem by doubling it (A 9. 990b3).

Note: refuting forms / tarradiddle [v]

Location 1456

During his period in Assos, and during the next few years, when he lived at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, Aristotle carried out extensive scientific research, particularly in zoology and marine biology. These researches were written up in a book later known, misleadingly, as the History of Animals, to which he added two shorter treatises, On the Parts of Animals and On the Generation of Animals. Aristotle does not claim to have founded the science of zoology, and his books contain copious citations of earlier writers, accompanied by a judicious degree of scepticism about some of their wilder reports. However, his detailed observations of organisms of very various kinds were quite without precedent, and in many cases they were not superseded until the seventeenth century. Though he does not claim to be the first zoologist, Aristotle clearly saw himself as a pioneer, and indeed felt some need to justify his interest in the subject. Previous philosophers had given a privileged place to the observation of the heavens, and here was he prodding sponges and watching the hatching of grubs. In his defence he says that while the heavenly bodies are marvellous and glorious, they are hard to study because they are so distant and different from ourselves. Animals, however, are near at hand, and akin to our own nature, so that we can investigate them with much greater precision. It is childish to be squeamish about the observation of the humbler animals. ‘We should approach the investigation of every kind of animal without being ashamed, for each of them will exhibit to us something natural and something beautiful’ (PA 1. 5. 645a20–5). The scope of Aristotle’s researches is astonishing. Much of his work is taken up with classification into genus (e.g. Testacea) and species (e.g. seaurchin). More than 500 species figure in his treatises, and many of them are described in detail. It is clear that Aristotle was not content with the observation of a naturalist: he also practised dissection like an anatomist. He acknowledges that he found dissection distasteful, particularly in the case of human beings: but it was essential to examine the parts of any organism in order to understand the structure of the whole (PA 1. 5. 644b22–645a36). Aristotle illustrated his treatises with diagrams, now sadly lost. We can conjecture the kind of illustrations he provided when we read passages such as the following, where he is explaining the relationship between the testicles and the penis. In the accompanying diagram the letter A marks the starting point of ducts leading down from the aorta; the letters KK mark the heads of the testicles and the ducts that descend to them; the ducts leading from them through the testicles are marked ΩΩ, and the reverse ducts containing white fluid and leading to the testicles are marked BB; the penis ∆, the bladder E, and the testicles ψψ. (HA 3. 1. 510a30–4) Only a biologist could check the accuracy of the myriad items of information that…

Location 1469

Despite an admixture of old wives’ tales, Aristotle’s biological works must strike us as a stupendous achievement, when we remember the conditions under which he worked, unequipped with any of the aids to investigation that have been at the disposal of scientists since the early modern period. He, or one of his research assistants, must have been gifted with remarkably acute eyesight, since some of the features of insects that he accurately reports were not again observed until the invention of the microscope. His inquiries were conducted in a genuinely scientific spirit, and he is always ready to confess ignorance where evidence is insufficient. With regard to the reproductive mechanism in bees, for example, he has this to say: The facts have not yet been sufficiently ascertained. If ever they are, then we must trust observation rather than theory, and trust theories only if their results conform with the observed phenomena. (GA 3. 10. 760b28–31)

Note: proto-scientist

Location 1512

About eight years after the death of Hermias, Aristotle was summoned to the Macedonian capital by King Philip II as tutor to his 13-year-old son, the future Alexander the Great. We know little of the content of his instruction: the Rhetoric for Alexander that appears in the Aristotelian corpus is commonly regarded as a forgery. Ancient sources say that Aristotle did write essays on kingship and colonization for his pupil, and gave him his own edition of Homer. Alexander is said to have slept with this book under his pillow; and when he became king in 336 and started upon his spectacular military career, he arranged for biological specimens to be sent to his tutor from all parts of Greece and Asia Minor. Within ten years Alexander had made himself master of an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indus and included Libya and Egypt. While Alexander was conquering Asia, Aristotle was back in Athens, where he established his own school in the Lyceum, a gymnasium just outside the city boundary. Now aged 50, he built up a substantial library, and gathered around him a group of brilliant research students, called ‘Peripatetics’ from the name of the avenue (peripatos) in which they walked and held their discussions. The Lyceum was not a private club like the Academy; many of the lectures given there were open to the general public without fee. Aristotle’s anatomical and zoological studies had given a new and definitive turn to his philosophy. Though he retained a lifelong interest in metaphysics, his mature philosophy constantly interlocks with empirical science, and his thinking takes on a biological cast. Most of the works that have come down to us, with the exception of the zoological treatises, probably belong to this second Athenian sojourn. There is no certainty about their chronological order, and indeed it is probable that the main treatises—on physics, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and politics—were constantly rewritten and updated. In the form in which they have survived it is possible to detect evidence of different layers of composition, though no consensus has been reached about the identification or dating of these strata.

Note: state sponsor

Location 1520

Aristotle’s style is very different from that of Plato or any of his other philosophical predecessors. In the period between Homer and Socrates most philosophers wrote in verse, and Plato, writing in the great age of Athenian tragedy and comedy, composed dramatic dialogue. Aristotle, an exact contemporary of the greatest Greek orator Demosthenes, preferred to write in prose monologue. The prose he wrote is commonly neither lucid nor polished, though he could compose passages of moving eloquence when he chose. It may be that the texts we have are the notes from which he lectured; perhaps even, in some cases, notes taken at lectures by students present. Everything Aristotle wrote is fertile of ideas and full of energy; every sentence packs a massive…

Note: first greek prose?

Location 1535

the notion of a discipline, in the modern academic sense, is made very explicit by Aristotle in his Lyceum period. There are three kinds of sciences, Aristotle tells us in the Metaphysics (E 1. 1025b25): productive, practical, and theoretical sciences. Productive sciences are, naturally enough, sciences that have a product. They include engineering and architecture, with products like bridges and houses, but also disciplines such as strategy and rhetoric, where the product is something less concrete, such as victory on the battlefield or in the courts. Practical sciences are ones that guide behaviour, most notably ethics and politics. Theoretical sciences are those that have no product and no practical goal, but in which information and understanding is sought for its own sake. There are three theoretical sciences: physics, mathematics, and theology (Metaph. E 1. 1026a19). In this trilogy only mathematics is what it seems to be. ‘Physics’ means natural philosophy or the study of nature (physis). It is a much broader study than physics as understood nowadays, including chemistry and meteorology and even biology and psychology. ‘Theology’ is, for Aristotle, the study of entities above and superior to human beings, that is to say, the heavenly bodies as well as whatever divinities may inhabit the starry skies. His writings on this topic resemble a textbook of astronomy more than they resemble any discourse on natural religion. It may seem surprising that metaphysics, a discipline theoretical par excellence, does not figure in Aristotle’s list of theoretical sciences, since so much of his writing is concerned with it, and since one of his longest treatises bears…

Note: disciplines as taxonomy, of nature, of knowledge, of essays too [e]

Location 1545

Rhetoric, Aristotle says, is the discipline that indicates in any given case the possible means of persuasion: it is not restricted to a particular field, but is topic-neutral. There are three bases of persuasion by the spoken word: the character of the speaker, the mood of the audience, and the argument (sound or spurious) of the speech itself. So the student of rhetoric must be able to reason logically, to evaluate character, and to understand the emotions (1. 2. 1358a1–1360b3). Aristotle wrote more instructively about logic and character in other treatises, but the second book of the Rhetoric contains his fullest account of human emotions. Emotions, he says, are feelings that alter people’s judgements, and they are accompanied by pain and pleasure. He takes each major emotion in turn, offering a definition of the emotion and a list of its objects and causes. Anger, for instance, he defines as a desire, accompanied by pain, for what appears to be revenge for what appears to be an…

Note: probably should read this; essays arent primarily about persuasion, but there isba similar tripartite bance [e]

Location 1562

Aristotle takes us on a detailed tour of the emotions of anger, hatred, fear, shame, pity, indignation, envy, and jealousy. In each case his treatment is clear and systematic, and often shows—as in the above passage—acute psychological insight.

Location 1576

Poetics, unlike the Rhetoric, has been very widely read throughout history. Only its first book survives, a treatment of epic and tragic poetry. The second book, on comedy, is lost. Umberto Eco, in The Name of the Rose, wove a dramatic fiction around its imagined survival and then destruction in a fourteenth-century abbey.

Location 1578

One of Aristotle’s aims was to resolve this quarrel between poetry and philosophy. Imitation, he says, so far from being the degrading activity that Plato describes, is something natural to humans from childhood. It is one of the features that makes men superior to animals, since it vastly increases their scope for learning.

Location 1586

Six things, Aristotle says, are necessary for a tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and melody (6. 1450a11 ff.). It is the first two of these that chiefly interest him. Stage setting and musical accompaniment are dispensable accessories: what is great in a tragedy can be appreciated from a mere reading of the text. Thought and diction are more important: it is the thoughts expressed by the characters that arouse emotion in the hearer, and if they are to do so successfully they must be presented convincingly by the actors. But it is character and plot that really bring out the genius of a tragic poet, and Aristotle devotes a long chapter to character, and no less than five chapters to plot.

Note: plot and character in essay

Location 1597

The most important element of all is plot: the characters are created for the sake of the plot, and not the other way round. The plot must be a self-contained story with a clearly marked beginning, middle, and end; it must be sufficiently short and simple for the spectator to hold all its details in mind. Tragedy must have a unity. You do not make a tragedy by stringing together a set of episodes connected only by a common hero; rather, there must be a single significant action on which the whole plot turns (8. 1451a21–9).

Note: linearity

Location 1607

These observations are illustrated by constant reference to actual Greek plays, in particular to Sophocles’ tragedy King Oedipus. Oedipus, at the beginning of the play, enjoys prosperity and reputation. He is basically a good man, but has the fatal flaw of impetuosity. This vice makes him kill a stranger in a scuffle, and marry a bride without due diligence. The ‘revelation’ that the man he killed was his father and the woman he married was his mother leads to the ‘reversal’ of his fortune, as he is banished from his kingdom and blinds himself in shame and remorse.

Location 1615

From what has been said it is clear that the poet’s job is to describe not something that has actually happened, but something that might well happen, that is to say something that is possible because it is necessary or likely. The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of prose v. verse—you might turn Herodotus into metre and it would still be history. It is rather in this matter of writing what happens rather than what might happen. For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more important than history; for poetry tells us of the universal, history tells us only of the particular. (9. 1451b5–9)

Note: in response to plato that art is inferior

Location 1621

Three treatises of moral philosophy have been handed down in the corpus: the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) in ten books, the Eudemian Ethics (EE) in seven books, and the Magna Moralia in two books. These texts are highly interesting to anyone who is interested in the development of Aristotle’s thought.

Location 1630

The NE covers much the same ground as Plato’s Republic, and with some exaggeration one could say that Aristotle’s moral philosophy is Plato’s moral philosophy with the Theory of Ideas ripped out. The Idea of the Good, Aristotle says, cannot be the supreme good of which ethics treats, if only because ethics is a practical science, about what is within human power to achieve, whereas an everlasting and unchanging Idea of the Good could only be of theoretical interest. In place of the Idea of the Good, Aristotle offers happiness (eudaimonia) as the supreme good with which ethics is concerned, for, like Plato, he sees an intimate connection between living virtuously and living happily. In all the ethical treatises a happy life is a life of virtuous activity, and each of them offers an analysis of the concept of virtue and a classification of virtues of different types. One class is that of the moral virtues, such as courage, temperance, and liberality, that constantly appeared in Plato’s ethical discussions. The other class is that of intellectual virtues: here Aristotle makes a much sharper distinction than Plato ever did between the intellectual virtue of wisdom, which governs ethical behaviour, and the intellectual virtue of understanding, which is expressed in scientific endeavour and contemplation. The principal difference between the NE and the EE is that in the former Aristotle regards perfect happiness as constituted solely by the activity of philosophical contemplation, whereas in the latter it consists of the harmonious exercise of all the virtues, intellectual and moral.6

Note: diaciplimes of virtue

Location 1661

Even in the EE it is ‘the service and contemplation of God’ that sets the standard for the appropriate exercise of the moral virtues, and in the NE this contemplation is described as a superhuman activity of a divine part of ourselves. Aristotle’s final word here is that in spite of being mortal we must make ourselves immortal as far as we can.

Note: immortal how?

Location 1674

The Politics itself was probably not written at a single stretch, and here as elsewhere there is probably an overlap and interplay between the records of observation and the essays in theory. The structure of the book as we have it corresponds reasonably well to the NE programme: books 1–3 contain a general theory of the state, and a critique of earlier writers; books 4–6 contain an account of various forms of constitution, three tolerable (monarchy, aristocracy, polity) and three intolerable (tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy); books 7 and 8 are devoted to the ideal form of constitution. Once again, the order of the discourses in the corpus probably differs from the order of their composition, but scholars have not reached agreement on the original chronology.

Note: interesting to see democracy alongside tyranny and oligarchy

Location 1685

Families combine to make a village, and several villages combine to make a state, which is the first self-sufficient community, and is just as natural as is the family (1. 2. 1253a2). Indeed, though later than the family in time, the state is prior by nature, as an organic whole like the human body is prior to its organic parts like hands and feet. Without law and justice, man is the most savage of animals. Someone who cannot live in a state is a beast; someone who has no need of a state must be a god. The foundation of the state was the greatest of benefactions, because only within a state can human beings fulfil their potential (1. 2. 1253a25–35).

Note: proto Hobbes

Location 1693

Aristotle thinks that Platonic communism will bring nothing but trouble: the use of property should be shared, but its ownership should be private. That way owners can take pride in their possessions and get pleasure out of sharing them with others or giving them away. Aristotle defends the traditional family against the proposal that women should be held in common, and he frowns even on the limited military and official role assigned to women in the Laws. Over and over again he describes Plato’s proposals as impractical; the root of his error, he thinks, is that he tries to make the state too uniform. The diversity of different kinds of citizen is essential, and life in a city should not be like life in a barracks (2. 3. 1261a10–31).

Location 1700

The government, that is to say the supreme authority in a state, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many. The rightful true forms of government, therefore, are ones where the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or the few, or the many, are perversions. Those who belong to a state, if they are truly to be called citizens, must share in its benefits. Government by a single person, if it aims at the common interest, we are accustomed to call ‘monarchy’; similar government by a minority we call ‘aristocracy’, either because the rulers are the best men, or because it aims at the best interests of the state and the community. When it is the majority that governs in the common interest we call it a ‘polity’, using a word which is also a generic term for a constitution . . . Of each of these forms of government there exists a perversion. The perversion of monarchy is tyranny; that of aristocracy is oligarchy; that of polity is democracy. For tyranny is a monarchy exercised solely for the benefit of the monarch, oligarchy has in view only the interests of the wealthy, and democracy the interests only of the poorer classes. None of these aims at the common good of all. (3. 6. 1279a26–b10)

Note: summary of 3 types [e]

Location 1708

If a community contains an individual or family of outstanding excellence, then monarchy is the best constitution. But such a case is very rare, and the risk of miscarriage is great: for monarchy corrupts into tyranny, which is the worst of all constitutions. Aristocracy, in theory, is the next best constitution after monarchy, but in practice Aristotle preferred a kind of constitutional democracy, for what he called ‘polity’ is a state in which rich and poor respect each others’ rights, and in which the best-qualified citizens rule with the consent of all the citizens (4. 8. 1293b30 ff.). The corruption of this is what Aristotle calls ‘democracy’, namely, anarchic mob rule. Bad as democracy is, it is in Aristotle’s view the least bad of the perverse forms of government.

Location 1720

we are familiar with the division of government into three branches: the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary. The essentials of this system is spelt out by Aristotle, though he distributes the powers in a somewhat different way from, say, the US constitution. All constitutions, he tells us, have three elements: the deliberative, the official, and the judicial. The deliberative element has authority in matters of war and peace, in making and unmaking alliances; it passes laws, controls the carrying out of judicial sentences, and audits the accounts of officers. The official element deals with the appointment of ministers and civil servants, ranging from priests through ambassadors to the regulators of female affairs. The judicial element consists of the courts of civil and criminal law

Note: was this ever implemented pre-America in a psuedo form?

Location 1725

Slaves, for Aristotle, are living tools—and on this basis he is willing to grant that if non-living tools could achieve the same purpose there would be no need for slavery. ‘If every instrument could achieve its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus . . . if the shuttle could weave and the plectrum pluck the lyre in a similar manner, overseers would not need servants, nor masters slaves’ (1. 4. 1253b35–54a1). So perhaps, in an age of automation, Aristotle would no longer defend slavery.

Note: [e]

Location 1738

Aristotle had an aristocratic disdain for commerce. Our possessions, he says, have two uses, proper and improper. The proper use of a shoe, for instance, is to wear it: to exchange it for other goods or for money is an improper use (1. 9. 1257a9–10). There is nothing wrong with basic barter for necessities, but there is nothing natural about trade in luxuries, as there is in farming. In the operation of retail trade money plays an important part, and money too has a proper and an improper use. The most hated sort of wealth-getting is usury, which makes a profit out of money itself, rather than from its natural purpose, for money was intended to be used for exchange, not to increase at interest. It got the name ‘interest’ (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, because an offspring resembles its parent. For this reason, of all the modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural. (1. 10. 1258b5–7) Aristotle’s hierarchical preference places farmers at the top, bankers at the bottom, with merchants in between. His attitude to usury was one source of the prohibition, throughout medieval Christendom, of the charging of interest even at a modest rate. ‘When did friendship’, Antonio asks Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, ‘take a breed for barren metal of his friend?’

Note: anti-interest

Location 1742

His own ideal state is described as having no more than a hundred thousand citizens, small enough for them all to know one another and to take their share in judicial and political office. It is very different from Alexander’s empire.

Note: what is dunbars law for a state? [e]

Location 1754

Indeed, during the years of the Lyceum, relations between the world-conqueror and his former tutor seem to have cooled. Alexander became more and more megalomaniac and finally proclaimed himself divine. Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes led the opposition to the king’s demand, in 327, that Greeks should prostrate themselves before him in adoration. He was falsely implicated in a plot, and executed. The magnanimous and magnificent man who is the hero of the earlier books of the NE has some of the grandiose traits of Alexander. In the EE, however, the alleged virtues of magnanimity and magnificence are downgraded, and gentleness and dignity take centre stage.7

Location 1757

Aristotle’s vision of the cosmos owes much to his Presocratic precursors and to Plato’s Timaeus. The earth was in the centre of the universe: around it a succession of concentric crystalline spheres carried the moon, the sun, and the planets in their journeys around the visible sky. The heavenly bodies were not compounds of the four terrestrial elements, but were made of a superior fifth element or quintessence. They had souls as well as bodies: living supernatural intellects, guiding their travels through the cosmos. These intellects were movers which were themselves in motion, and behind them, Aristotle argued, there must be a source of movement not itself in motion. The only way in which an unchanging, eternal mover could cause motion in other beings was by attracting them as an object of love, an attraction which they express by their perfect circular motion. It is thus that Dante, in the final lines of his Paradiso, finds his own will, like a smoothly rotating wheel, caught up in the love that moves the sun and all the other stars. Even the best of Aristotle’s scientific work has now only a historical interest.

Note: symbolism of gravity

Location 1776

The Aristotelian corpus, in addition to the systematic scientific treatises, contains a massive collection of occasional jottings on scientific topics, the Problems. From its structure this appears to be a commonplace book in which Aristotle wrote down provisional answers to questions that were put to him by his students or correspondents. Because the questions are grouped rather haphazardly, and often appear several times—and are sometimes given different answers—it seems unlikely that they were generated by Aristotle himself, whether as a single series or over a lifetime. But the collection contains many fascinating details that throw insight into the workings of his omnivorous intellect. Some of the questions are the kind of thing a patient might bring to a doctor. Ought drugs to be used, rather than surgery, for sores in the armpits and groin? (1. 34. 863a21). Is it true that purslane mixed with salt stops inflammation of the gums? (1. 38. 863b12). Does cabbage really cure a hangover? (3. 17. 873b1). Why is it difficult to have sex under water? (4. 14. 878a35). Other questions and answers make us see Aristotle more in the role of agony aunt. How should one cope with the after-effects of eating garlic? (13. 2. 907b28–908a10). How does one prevent biscuit from becoming hard? (21. 12. 928a12). Why do drunken men kiss old women they would never kiss when sober? (30. 15. 953b15). Is it right to punish more seriously thefts from a public place than thefts from a private house? (29. 14. 952a16). More seriously, why is it more terrible to kill a woman than a man, although the male is naturally superior to the female? (29. 11. 951a12). A whole book of the Problems (26) is devoted essentially to weather forecasting. Other books contain questions that simply reflect general curiosity. Why does the noise of a saw being sharpened set our teeth on edge? (7. 5. 886b10). Why do humans not have manes? (10. 25. 893b17). Why do non-human animals not sneeze or squint? (Don’t they?) (10. 50. 896b5; 54. 897a1). Why do barbarians and Greeks alike count up to ten? (15. 3. 910b23). Why is a flute better than a lyre as an accompaniment to a solo voice? (19. 43. 922a1). Very often, the Problems ask ‘Why is such and such the case?’ when a more appropriate question would have been ‘Is such and such the case?’ For instance, Why do fishermen have red hair? (37. 2. 966b25). Why does a large choir keep time better than a small one? (19. 22. 919a36). The Problems let us see Aristotle with his hair down, rather like the table talk of later writers. One of his questions is particularly endearing to those who may have found it hard to read their way through his more difficult works: Why is it that some people, if they begin to read a serious book, are overcome by sleep even against their will? (18. 1. 916b1).

Note: On FAQ and the documentation of opn curiosity [e]

Location 1788

His library was left to Theophrastus, his successor as head of the Lyceum. His own papers were vast in size and scope—those that survive today total around a million words, and it is said that we possess only one-fifth of his output. As we have seen, in addition to philosophical treatises on logic, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, and politics, they included historical works on constitutions, theatre and sport, and scientific works on botany, zoology, biology, psychology, chemistry, meteorology, astronomy, and cosmology.

Note: 5-million word archive

Location 1813

it has been traditional to regard the Academy and the Lyceum as two opposite poles of philosophy. Plato, according to this tradition, was idealistic, utopian, other-worldly; Aristotle was realistic, utilitarian, commonsensical. Thus, in Raphael’s School of Athens Plato, wearing the colours of the volatile elements air and fire, points heavenwards; Aristotle, clothed in watery blue and earthy green, has his feet firmly on the ground. ‘Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist,’ wrote S. T. Coleridge. ‘They are the two classes of men, besides which it is next to impossible to conceive a third.’ The philosopher Gilbert Ryle in the twentieth century improved on Coleridge. Men could be divided into two classes on the basis of four dichotomies: green versus blue, sweet versus savoury, cats versus dogs, Plato versus Aristotle. ‘Tell me your preference on one of these pairs’, Ryle used to say, ‘and I will tell you your preference on the other three.’8 In fact, as we have already seen and will see in greater detail later, the doctrines that Plato and Aristotle share are…

Location 1817

a philosopher should be judged by the importance of the questions he raises, not the correctness of the answers he gives. If that is so, then Plato has an uncontestable claim to pre-eminence as a philosopher. He was the first to pose questions of great profundity, many of which remain open questions in philosophy today. But Aristotle too can claim a significant contribution to the intellectual patrimony of the world. For it was he who…

Note: essays and philo as question-centered [e]

Location 1827

he is the first person whose surviving works show detailed observations of natural phenomena. Secondly, he was the first philosopher to have a sound grasp of the relationship between observation and theory in scientific method. Thirdly, he identified and classified different scientific disciplines and explored their relationships to each other: the very concept of a distinct discipline is due to him. Fourthly, he is the first professor to have organized his lectures into courses, and to have taken trouble over their appropriate place in a syllabus (cf. Pol. 1. 10. 1258a20). Fifthly, his Lyceum was the first research institute of which we have any detailed knowledge in which a number of scholars and investigators joined in collaborative inquiry and documentation. Sixthly, and not least important, he was the first person in history to build up a research library—not simply a handful of books for his own bookshelf, but a systematic…

Note: "First" .. good overview

Location 1831

Like his master, he wrote copiously, and the mere list of the titles of his works takes up sixteen pages in the Loeb edition of his life by Diogenes Laertius. They include essays on vertigo, on honey, on hair, on jokes, and on the eruption of Etna. The best known of his surviving works is a book entitled Characters, modelled on Aristotle’s delineation in his Ethics of individual virtues and vices, but sketching them with greater refinement and with a livelier wit. He was a diligent historian of…

Note: theophrastus essays? [r]

Location 1843

Theophrastus’ pupils, Demetrius of Phaleron, was an adviser to one of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy, who made himself king of Egypt in 305. It is possible that it was he who suggested the creation in the new city of Alexandria of a library modelled on that of Aristotle, a…

Note: origins of alexandria

Location 1848

history of Aristotle’s own library is obscure. On Theophrastus’ death it seems to have been inherited not by the next head of the Lyceum, the physicist Strato, but by Theophrastus’ nephew Neleus of Skepsis, one of the last surviving pupils of Aristotle himself. Neleus’ heirs are said to have hidden the books in a cave in order to prevent them from being confiscated by agents of King Eumenes, who was building up a library at Pergamon to rival that of Alexandria. Rescued by a bibliophile and taken to Athens, the story goes, the books were confiscated by the Roman general Sulla when he captured the city in 86 BC, and shipped…

Note: texts in limbo for centuries; how many circulating copies in Aristotle's own life? i imagine an ancient portfolio is jagged; 10% of works have 10-100 copies and 90% have only the original

Location 1850

Epicurus was born into a family of Athenian expatriates in Samos, and paid a brief visit to Athens in the last year of Aristotle’s life. During early travels he studied under a follower of Democritus, and established more than one school in the Greek islands. In 306 he set up house in Athens and lived there until his death in 271. His followers in the Garden included women and slaves; they lived in seclusion and ate simple fare. He wrote 300 books, we are told, but all that survive intact are three letters and two groups of maxims. His philosophy of nature is set out in a letter to Herodotus and a letter to Pythocles; in the third letter, to Menoecus, he summarizes his moral teaching. The first set of maxims, forty in number, has been preserved, like the three letters, in the life of Epicurus by Diogenes Laertius: it is called Kyriai Doxai, or major doctrines. Eighty-one similar aphorisms were discovered in a Vatican manuscript in 1888. Fragments from Epicurus’ lost treatise On Nature were buried in volcanic ash at Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. Painstaking efforts to unroll and decipher them, begun in 1800, continue to the present day.

Note: more lost ancient writing

Location 1865

The aim of Epicurus’ philosophy is to make happiness possible by removing the fear of death, which is the greatest obstacle to tranquillity. Men struggle for wealth and power so as to postpone death; they throw themselves into frenzied activity so that they can forget its inevitability. It is religion that causes us to fear death, by holding out the prospect of suffering after death. But this is an illusion. The terrors held out by religion are fairy tales, which we must give up in favour of a scientific account of the world.

Note: fear of death vs. lesser anxieties

Location 1874

Nothing comes into being from nothing: the basic units of the world are everlasting, unchanging, indivisible units or atoms. These, infinite in number, move about in the void, which is empty and infinite space: if there were no void, movement would be impossible. This motion had no beginning, and initially all atoms move downwards at constant and equal speed. From time to time, however, they swerve and collide, and it is from the collision of atoms that everything in heaven and earth has come into being. The swerve of the atoms allows scope for human freedom, even though their motions are blind and purposeless. Atoms have no properties other than shape, weight, and size. The properties of perceptible bodies are not illusions, but they are supervenient on the basic properties of atoms. There is an infinite number of worlds, some like and some unlike our own (Letter to Herodotus, D.L. 10. 38–45). Like everything else, the soul consists of atoms, differing from other atoms only in being smaller and subtler; these are dispersed at death and the soul ceases to perceive (Letter to Herodotus, D.L. 10. 63–7). The gods too are built out of atoms, but they live in a less turbulent region, immune to dissolution. They live happy lives, untroubled by concern for human beings. For that reason belief in providence is superstition, and religious rituals a waste of time (Letter to Menoecus, D.L. 10. 123–5). Since we are free agents, thanks to the atomic swerve, we are masters of our own fate: the gods neither impose necessity nor interfere with our choices. Epicurus believed that the…

Note: atomists. PA>D (Democritus)

Location 1878

Stoics, like Epicureans, sought tranquillity, but by a different route. The founder of Stoicism was Zeno of Citium (334–262 BC). Zeno was born in Cyprus, but migrated to Athens in 313. He read Xenophon’s memoir of Socrates, which gave him a passion for philosophy. He was told that the nearest contemporary equivalent of Socrates was Crates

Note: lineage of Socrates

Location 1902

Cynicism was not a set of philosophical doctrines, but a way of life expressing contempt for wealth and disdain for conventional propriety. Its founder was Diogenes of Sinope, who lived like a dog (‘cynic’ means ‘dog-like’) in a tub for a kennel, wearing coarse clothes and subsisting on alms. A contemporary of Plato, for whom he had no great respect, Diogenes was famous for his snub to Alexander the Great. When the great man visited him and asked, ‘What can I do for you’, Diogenes replied, ‘You can move out of my light’ (D.L. 6. 38).

Location 1904

Zeno’s writings do not survive: the most famous of them in antiquity was his Republic. This combined Platonic utopianism with some cynic elements. Zeno rejected the conventional educational system, and thought it a waste of effort to build gymnasia, law courts, and temples. He recommended community of wives, and thought that men and women should wear the same, revealing, clothing. Money should be abolished and there should be a single legal system for all mankind, who should be like a herd grazing together nurtured by a common law (LS 67A). In spite of these communistic proposals, which many of his own later disciples found shocking, Zeno in his lifetime was held in honour by the Athenians, who gave him the freedom of the city. King Antigonus of Macedon invited him to become his personal philosopher, but Zeno pleaded old age and sent to court instead two of his brightest pupils.

Note: lived utopianism

Location 1918

Cleanthes was succeeded as head of the school by Chrysippus of Soli, who governed it from 232 to 206. Chrysippus had been Cleanthes’ pupil, but he seems to have had no great respect for his teacher. ‘You tell me your theorems’, he is said to have told him, ‘and I’ll supply them with proofs.’ He spent some time as a student at the Academy, inoculating himself against scepticism. He was the most intelligent and the most industrious of the Hellenistic Stoics. His literary output was prodigious: his housekeeper reported that he wrote at a rate of 500 lines a day, and he left 705 books behind. Nothing but fragments survive. But it is clear that it was he who rounded Stoicism into a system; it used to be said, ‘If there had been no Chrysippus, there had been no Stoa’ (D.L. 6. 183).

Note: prolific output

Location 1930

The fully developed Stoic physical system can be summarized as follows. Once upon a time, there was nothing but fire; gradually there emerged the other elements and the familiar furniture of the universe. Later, the world will return to fire in a universal conflagration, and then the whole cycle of its history will be repeated over and over again. All this happens in accordance with a system of laws which may be called ‘fate’ (because the laws admit of no exception), or ‘providence’ (because the laws were laid down by God for beneficent purposes). The divinely designed system is called Nature, and our aim in life should be to live in accord with Nature. Chrysippus was also the principal author of the Stoic ethical system, which is based on the principle of submission to Nature. Nothing can escape Nature’s laws, but despite the determinism of fate human beings are free and responsible. If the will obeys reason it will live in accordance with Nature. It is this voluntary acceptance of Nature’s laws that constitutes virtue, and virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness.15

Note: stoic detetminism as source of fortitude?

Location 1941

During the latter part of the third century Stoic doctrine came under attack from the Academy. The academic heirs of Plato began to take their inspiration from Plato’s questioning master, Socrates, and turned to a form of scepticism. The leader of the Academy from 273 to 242 was Arcesilaus, a pupil of Pyrrho of Elis, a man often regarded as the founder of philosophical scepticism. Pyrrho, an older contemporary of Epicurus, who had served as a soldier in Alexander’s army, taught that nothing could be known and, accordingly, wrote no books. It was Arcesilaus and another of Pyrrho’s pupils, Timon, who brought scepticism to Athens in the early years of the third century. Timon denied the possibility of finding any self-evident principles to serve as the foundation of sciences. In the absence of such axioms, all lines of reasoning must be circular or endless.

Note: montaigne esque; anti-aristotelean

Location 1954

In 155 Carneades was sent by Athens, along with a Stoic and a Peripatetic philosopher, on an embassy to Rome. During this embassy he displayed his rhetorical skill by arguing on successive days for and against justice. Cato the Roman Censor, who heard his performance, sent him packing as a subversive influence

Location 1963

Arcesilaus criticized the Stoics because they had claimed to found their search for truth upon mental impressions incapable of falsehood: there were, he argued, no such impressions. Carneades too attacked Stoic epistemology, and taught that probability, not unattainable truth, should be the guide to life. Though not himself an atheist, he ridiculed mercilessly both the traditional pantheon and Stoic pantheism. His arguments against the Stoic theory of divination were adopted and skilfully developed by Cicero.16

Location 1965

Lucretius was an adoring admirer of Epicurus, and the six books of the poem set out the Epicurean system in verse which, as Cicero observed, always displays great artistry and sometimes shows flashes of genius. Lucretius himself described his poetic skill as honey to disguise the wormwood of philosophy (1. 947). Parts of the poem were translated into English by John Dryden. Had he completed the task, his version would have been a worthy rival of Pope’s Essay on Man.

Location 1974

Even Epicurus had to die, though his genius shone so brightly in comparison with other thinkers that he reduced them to nothing just as the rising sun puts out the stars

Location 1994

Cicero wrote philosophy without profundity, but his arguments are often acute, his style is always elegant, and he is capable of great warmth. His essays on friendship and old age have been popular throughout the ages. His final work on moral philosophy, On Duties (de Officiis), was addressed to his son shortly after the assassination of Julius Caesar in March 44. It was, during various periods of history, regarded as an essential item in the education of a gentleman.

Note: find cicero essats [r]

Location 2020

The impact of his teaching on philosophy was, of course, delayed and indirect, and his own moral doctrine was not without precedent. He taught that we should not render evil for evil; but so had Plato’s Socrates. He urged his hearers to love their neighbours as themselves; but he was quoting the ancient Hebrew book of Leviticus. He told us that we must refrain not just from wrong deeds, but from wrong thoughts and desires; Aristotle too had said that the really virtuous person is one who never even wants to do wrong. Jesus taught his disciples to despise the pleasures and honours of the world; but so, in their different ways, did the Epicureans and the Stoics. Considered as a moral philosopher, Jesus was not a great innovator: but that, of course, was not at all how he and his disciples saw his role.

Note: jesus as synthesis

Location 2028

Like Heraclitus and other Greek and Jewish thinkers, Jesus predicted that there would be a divine judgement on the world, amid cosmic catastrophe. Unlike the Stoics, who placed the cosmic denouement in the indefinite and distant future, Jesus saw it as an imminent event, in which he would himself play a crucial role as the Messiah.

Note: heraclitus as source of judgment day

Location 2035

the time of Jesus’ crucifixion (c. AD 30) Jewish ideas were gaining a hearing in Rome. Since the Hebrew Scriptures had been translated into Greek in Alexandria in the time of the first Ptolemys, there had been a substantial Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora. In the first century AD the outstanding representative of Hellenistic Jewish culture was Philo, who led a delegation to the emperor Caligula in 40 to protest against the persecution of the Jews in Alexandria and the imposition of emperor-worship. He wrote a life of Moses and a series of commentaries on the Pentateuch designed to make the Hebrew Scriptures intelligible and palatable to those educated in Greek culture. In its early days Christianity spread through the empire via the Greek-speaking diaspora, but it soon came into contact with Gentile philosophy. St Paul, preaching the gospel in Athens, held a debate with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, and the sermon against idolatry placed in his mouth in the Acts of the Apostles is skilfully crafted, and shows an awareness of matters at issue between the philosophical sects. Taking his cue from the altar of the unknown God, Paul undertook to show the philosophers the god whom they worshipped in ignorance. [God] is not far from every one of us. For in him we live, and move, and have our being; as certain also of your own poets have said, for we are also his offspring. Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone,…

Note: paul as response to late hellenistic greeks

Location 2038

Seneca was the most significant philosopher of the first century. Born in Spain, at Cordoba, at the beginning of the Christian era, he was in 49 made tutor to the 12-year-old Nero. When Nero came to the throne in 54 he became a senior adviser, and guided the emperor through a period of comparatively good government, which came to an end in the year 59 when Nero murdered his own mother. Seneca lost all influence on Nero after 62 and gradually withdrew from public life.…

Note: socratic death

Location 2052

his reputation as a philosopher rests on his ten ethical dialogues, and his 124 moral epistles, mostly written during the period of his retirement. Seneca’s style is more exhortatory than argumentative; he prefers preaching to debate. He was not interested in logic, and he had a philistine attitude to the liberal arts: he compared a person over-learned in literature to a man with an over-furnished house (Ep. 88. 36). He had a certain interest in the physical sciences, and wrote a treatise On Natural Questions, but…

Note: socrates/seneca/montaigne

Location 2057

In the longest and best known of his dialogues, On Anger, he insists on the crucial difference between bodily turmoil on the one hand, and the false judgements which were the essential element from which we need purification. On this issue, earlier Stoics had not spoken with a single voice. ‘None of those things that strike the mind fortuitously should be called passions: they are not things the mind causes but things that happen to it. It is not passion to be affected by the appearances of things that present themselves; passion consists in surrendering oneself to them and following up this fortuitous impact’ (2. 3. 1). Weeping, turning pale, sudden intakes of breath, and sexual arousal are not passions, but mere bodily…

Location 2062

‘The human heart is never more divine than when it meditates on its own mortality, and realises that a human being is born in order to give up life, and that this body is not a home but a short-term hostelry which one must leave as soon…

Note: seneca on overcoming death

Location 2070

There are those who have given up some vices but not all—they are without avarice, but not without anger; without lust but not without ambition; and so on. Then there are those who have given up all passions but are not yet safe from relapse. The third class, the closest approximation to wisdom, consists of those who are…

Note: stages of virtue development

Location 2073

the distinction in Stoicism between doctrines and precepts. The doctrines provided the general philosophical framework; the precepts enabled the true concept of the highest good to find expression in specific prescriptions to individuals (Ep. 94. 2). This distinction enabled Stoics to counter the allegation that their system was too elevated to be of any practical use, and…

Note: theory vs. practice

Location 2076

in both ancient and modern times, have regarded Seneca as a hypocrite: a man who praised mercy but was implicated in a tyrant’s crimes; a man who preached the worthlessness of earthly goods but piled up a gigantic fortune. In his defence it can be said that he acted as a restraining influence on Nero, and that in his last years he sought genuine detachment from the world. He was under no illusion that he lived up to Stoic standards. ‘I am a long way, not only from perfection, but from being a halfway decent person,’ he wrote (Ep. 57. 3). Seneca was the founding father of the Imperial Stoa. Two other prominent members of the school show how wide was the appeal of Stoicism under the empire: the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics of the imperial…

Note: counter-culture to government backed

Location 2079

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus became emperor in 161 and spent much of his life defending the frontiers of the Roman Empire, now at its furthest extent. Though himself a Stoic, he founded chairs of philosophy at Athens for all of the major schools, Platonic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean. During his military campaigns he found time to make entries into a philosophical notebook, which has been known in modern times as the Meditations. It is a collection of aphorisms and discourses on themes such as the brevity of life, the need to work for the common good, the unity of mankind, and the corrupting nature of power. He sought to combine patriotism with a universalist viewpoint. ‘My city and country,’ he says, ‘so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; but so far as I am a man, it is the world.’ He hails the universe as ‘Dear City of Zeus’.

Location 2107

histrionic.

Location 2121

Clement of Alexandria published a set of Miscellanies (Stromateis), written in the style of table talk, in which he argued that the study of philosophy was not only permissible, but necessary, for the educated Christian. The Greek thinkers were pedagogues for the world’s adolescence, divinely appointed to bring it to Christ in its maturity. Clement enrolled Plato as an ally against dualist Christian heretics, he experimented with Aristotelian logic, and he praised the Stoic ideal of freedom from passion. In the manner of Philo, he explained away as allegorical aspects of the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, which repelled educated Greeks. In this he founded a tradition that was to have a long history in Alexandria.

Note: a book of essays? [e]

Location 2123

He believed, with Plato, that human souls existed before birth or conception. Formerly free spirits, human souls in their embodied state could use their free will to ascend, aided by the grace of Christ, to a heavenly destiny. In the end, he believed, all rational beings, sinners as well as saints, and devils as well as angels, would be saved and find blessedness. There would be a resurrection of the body which (according to some of our sources) he believed would take spherical form, since Plato had decreed that the sphere was the most perfect of all shapes.

Location 2131

Plutarch (c. 46–c. 120) was born in Boeotia and spent most of his life there, but he had studied at Athens and at least once gave lectures in Rome. He is best known as a historian for his parallel lives of twenty-three famous Greeks paired with twenty-three famous Romans, which in an Elizabethan translation by Sir Thomas North provided the plot and much of the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Roman plays. But he also wrote some sixty short treatises on popular philosophical topics, which were collected under the title Moralia. He was a Platonist and commented on the Timaeus. He wrote a number of polemical treatises against the Stoics and Epicureans which contributed to the decline of those systems: they bear parallel titles such as On the Contradictions of the Epicureans and On the Contradictions of the Stoics or On Free Will in Reply to Epicurus and On Free Will in Reply to the Stoics. One of the longest of his surviving essays bears the title That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible, and another is an attack on an otherwise unknown work by Colotes, one of Epicurus’ earliest disciples. Though his works are not often read by philosophers for their own sake, they have long been quarried by historians for the information they provide about their targets of attack.

Location 2140

Contemporary with the Christian Origen, and a fellow pupil of Ammonius Saccas, was the last great pagan philosopher, Plotinus (205–70).

Location 2158

The dominant place in Plotinus’ system is occupied by ‘the One’: the notion is derived, through Plato, from Parmenides, where Oneness is a key property of Being. The One is, in a mysterious way, identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good: it is the basis of all being and the standard of all value, but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness. Below this supreme and ineffable summit, the next places are occupied by Mind (the locus of Ideas) and Soul, which is the creator of time and space. Soul looks upward to Mind, but downward to Nature, which in turn creates the physical world. At the lowest level of all is bare matter, the outermost limit of reality. These levels of reality are not independent of each other. Each level depends for its existence and activity on the level above it. Everything has its place in a single downward progress of successive emanations from the One. This impressive and startling metaphysical system is presented by Plotinus not as a mystical revelation but on the basis of philosophical principles derived from Plato and Aristotle. It will be examined in detail in Chapter 9 below.

Location 2162

But it was Christians, not pagans, who transmitted Plotinus’ ideas to the post-classical world, and foremost among them was St Augustine of Hippo, who was to prove the most influential of all Christian philosophers.

Location 2172

Most of what we know of his early life comes from his own autobiography, the Confessions, a portrait, by a biographer nearly as gifted as Boswell, of a mind more capacious than Johnson’s.

Location 2175

For about ten years he was a follower of Manichaeism, a syncretic religion which taught that there were two worlds, one of spiritual goodness and light created by God, and one of fleshly darkness created by the devil.

Location 2178

For some time after his baptism Augustine remained under the philosophical influence of Plotinus. A set of dialogues on God and the human soul articulated a Christian Neoplatonism. Against the Academics set out a detailed line of argument against Academic Scepticism. In On Ideas he presented his own version of Plato’s Theory of Ideas: the Ideas have no extra-mental existence, but they exist, eternal and unchangeable, in the mind of God. He wrote On Free Choice on human freewill, choice, and the origin of evil, a text still used in a number of philosophy departments. He also wrote a donnish Platonic tract, the 83 Different Questions. He also wrote six books on music, and an energetic work On the Teacher, reflecting imaginatively on the nature and power of words.

Note: research Augusine's works [r]

Location 2184

He had a prodigious writing career ahead of him, including his masterpiece The City of God, but the year 391 marks an epoch. Up to this point Augustine showed himself the last fine flower of classical philosophy. From then onwards he writes not as the pupil of the pagan Plotinus, but as the father of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. We shall follow him into this creative phase in the next volume of this work. Augustine did not see himself, in his maturity, as a philosophical innovator. He saw his task as the expounding of a divine message that had come to him from Plato and Paul, men much greater than himself, and from Jesus, who was more than man. But the way in which succeeding generations have conceived and understood the teaching of Augustine’s masters has been in great part the fruit of Augustine’s own work. Of all the philosophers in the ancient world, only Aristotle had a greater influence on human thought.

Note: the city of god [r]

Location 2191

There were, however, many genuine obstacles that made medieval philosophy less accessible than the philosophy of any other age. We may identify three significant barriers that have to be surmounted if one is to come to grips with the thought of the philosophers of the Middle Ages: the linguistic, the professional, and the confessional or the parochial.

Note: It was written in dense Latin; in a professionalized university jargon; mostly placed into theology; where the individuals were often anonymously blending in with the institution and within theological lineages.

Location 5568

After his conversion to Christianity he developed, in a number of massive treatises, a synthesis of Jewish, Greek, and Christian ideas that was to provide the backdrop for the next millennium of Western philosophical thought.

Location 5646

He wrote a dialogue with himself in which the two characters are named Augustine and Reason.

Location 5652

Reason asks Augustine what he wishes to know. ‘I want to know God and the soul,’ Augustine replies. ‘Nothing more?’ ‘Nothing at all’ (S 1. 2. 7). Reason promises to make God appear as clearly to his mind as the sun does to his eyes. For this purpose the eyes of the soul must be cleansed of all desire for mortal things. Augustine in the dialogue renounces the pursuit of riches, honour, and sexual pleasure (this last renunciation vividly described).

Location 5653

After his baptism Augustine remained in Italy for a year and a half. In this period he wrote a further brief tract on the immortality of the soul,

Location 5659

The great majority of his works were written during this final period of his life. He was a copious writer, and has left behind some 5 million words. Much of his output consists of sermons, Bible commentaries, and controversial tracts about theology or Church discipline. He no longer wrote philosophical pieces comparable to those of the years of his conversion. But a number of his major works contain material of high philosophical

Location 5663

In 397 Augustine wrote a work entitled Confessions: a prayerful dialogue with God tracing the course of his life from childhood to conversion. It is not an autobiography of the normal kind, though it is the foundation specimen of the genre. Besides being the main source of our knowledge of Augustine’s pre-episcopal life, it contains many incidental philosophical reflections and concludes with a full-fledged monograph on the nature of time.1 Its enchanting style has always made it the most popular

Location 5666

The most massive and most laborious of Augustine’s works was The City of God, on which he worked from 413 to 426. Written at a time when the Roman Empire was under threat from successive barbarian invasions, it was the first great synthesis of classical and Christian thought. This is implicit in the very title of the work. The Christian gospels have much to say about the Kingdom of God; but for Greece and Rome the paradigm political institution was not the kingdom but the city. Even emperors liked to think of themselves as the first citizens of a city; and the philosophical emperor Marcus Aurelius thought the city we should love above all was the city of Zeus. The City of God sets Jesus, the crucified King of the Jews, at the apex of the idealized city-state of pagan philosophy.

Location 5675

The Romans had long identified their senior gods—Jupiter, Juno, Venus, and the like—with the characters of the Homeric pantheon, such as Zeus, Hera, and Aphrodite. Augustine follows Plato and Cicero in denouncing as blasphemous the myths that represent such deities as engaged in arbitrary, cruel, and indecent behaviour.

Location 5696

Augustine does not regard the gods of pagan myth as complete fictions. On the contrary, he thinks that they are wicked spirits who take advantage of human superstition to divert to themselves worship that is due only to the one true God (DCD VII. 33). Several Platonists had spoken of a threefold classification of rational beings: gods, men, and daimones (demons). Gods dwelt in heaven, men on earth, and demons in the air between. Demons were like gods in being immortal, but like men in being subject to passions. Many demons are bad, but some are good, such as the daimon who was the familiar of Socrates.3 Good demons, these Platonists thought, could be of service as intermediaries between men and gods (DCD VIII. 14, IX. 8, X. 9). Augustine does not reject the idea that the air is full of demons, but he does not accept that any of them are good, still less that they can mediate between God and man. In many ways they are inferior to human beings. ‘They are utterly malevolent spirits, totally indifferent to justice, swollen with pride, green with envy, cunning in deception. They do indeed live in the air, suitably imprisoned there after having been cast down from the heights of the upper heaven because of their irreparable crime’ (DCD VIII. 22). In other words, Augustine identifies the Platonic daimones with the fallen angels whom most English readers first encounter in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was indeed Augustine who fastened onto the imagination of Christianity the story that before creating human beings of flesh and blood God created orders of wholly spiritual beings, some of whom took part in a pre-cosmic rebellion that led to their eternal damnation. Augustine admits that the Bible is uninformative about the early history of angels. Genesis does not mention them in the seven days of creation, and we have to turn to Psalms or Job to learn that angels are indeed God’s creatures. If we are to fit them into the Genesis story, we should conclude that they were created on the first day: on that day God created light and the angels as the first partakers of divine illumination (DCD XI. 9). On the same day, the Bible tells us, God divided the light from the darkness: and here Augustine sees divine foresight at work. ‘Only He could foresee, before it happened, that some angels would fall and be deprived of the light of truth and left for ever in the darkness of their pride’ (DCD XI. 19). ‘There are two societies of angels, contrasted and opposed: one good by nature and upright of will, one good by nature, but perverted of will. These are shown by more explicit testimonies elsewhere but indicated here in Genesis by the words “Light” and “Darkness” (DCD XI. 34). These two cohorts of angels are the origin of the two cities that are the ostensible theme of the entire work, even though their history is not taken up in detail until the twelfth book. There are good and bad angels, and good and bad humans: but we do not have to think that there are four…

Location 5712

Human beings stand in the middle between angels and dumb animals: they share intellect with angels, but they have bodies as the beasts do. However, in the original divine plan they would have had a greater kinship with the angels, because they would have been immortal. After a life of obedience to God they would have passed into fellowship with the angels without death intervening. It was because of Adam’s sin in Paradise that humans became mortal, subject to the bodily death that had always been natural for beasts. After the Fall death would be the common lot of all humans; but after death some, by God’s grace, would be rewarded by admission to the company of the good angels, while others would be punished by damnation alongside the evil angels—a second death more grievous than the first (DCD XIII. 12, XIV. 1).

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The contrast between the biblical and the Platonic conception of the human creature comes into sharp relief if we ask the question: Is death—the separation of soul and body—a good thing or a bad thing? For Genesis, death is an evil: it is a punishment for sin. In a world of innocence body and soul would remain forever united (DCD XIII. 6). For many Platonists, however, and for Plato himself in some of his writings, the soul is only happy when stripped of the body and naked before God (DCD XIII. 16 and 19; cf. Phaedo 108c; Phaedr. 248c). Again, it is a common Platonic theme that souls after death may be forced to return into bodies (other human bodies, perhaps, or even animal bodies) as a punishment for sins in their previous life. According to the prophets of the Old and New Testament, however, the souls of the virtuous will in the end return to their own bodies, and this reunion of body and soul will be a source of everlasting happiness (DCD XIII. 17 and 22, XXII. 19).

Note: Is Plato origin?

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The human body in Paradise had no disturbing emotions and no unruly desires. Adam and Eve lived without pain or fear, for they enjoyed perfect health and were never in physical danger; their bodies were incapable of injury, and childbirth, but for the Fall, would have been painless. They ate only what was necessary for the preservation of their bodies, and their sexual organs were under the entire control of cool reason, to be used only for procreation (DCD XIII. 23, XIV. 26). But though they lived without passion, they were not without love. ‘The couple, living in true and loyal partnership, shared an untroubled love for God and for each other. This was a source of immense joy, since the beloved one was always present for enjoyment’ (DCD XIV. 10).

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‘Though there are many great nations throughout the world living under different systems of religion and ethics, and diversified by language, arms, and dress, nonetheless it has come to pass that there are only two principal divisions of human society, which scripture allows us to call two cities’ (DCD XIV. 1). One city lives according to the flesh, another according to the spirit; one is created by self-love, the other by the love of God; one glories in itself, the other is given glory by God (DCD XIV. 280). One is predestined to join the Devil in final punishment which will destroy it as a city; the other is predestined to reign with God for ever and ever (DCD XV. 1 and 4).

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In Augustine’s narrative Jerusalem becomes the emblem of the City of God and Babylon becomes the emblem of the city of the world. Babylon was the city of confusion, where God had shattered the original unity of human language in order to frustrate the building of the tower of Babel (Gen. 11: 1–9). In the city of the world philosophers speak with as many different tongues as the builders of Babel. Some say there is only one world; some say there are many; some say this world is everlasting, others say that it will perish. Some say it is controlled by a divine mind, others that it is the plaything of chance. Some say the soul is immortal, others that it perishes with the body. Some place the supreme good in the soul, others in the body, others in external goods. Some say the senses are to be trusted, others that they are to be treated with contempt. In the secular city there is no authority to decide between these conflicting views: Babylon embraces all alike, without discrimination and without adjudication (DCD XVIII. 42). How different in the City of God, where all accept the authority of canonical Scripture!

Note: Democracy as sinful? [e]

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The ultimate good is that for which other things are desirable, while it is itself desirable for its own sake. Philosophers have sought to place the ultimate good in the present life: some hold that it is pleasure, some that it is virtue, some that it is tranquillity, others that it is in the enjoyment of the basic goods with which nature has endowed us. Many sects regard the ultimate good as constituted by one or other combination of these. But the City of God knows that eternal life is the supreme good, and eternal death the supreme evil, and that it is only by faith and grace that the supreme good can be achieved and the supreme evil avoided (DCD XIX. 1–4).

Note: Reinforces eternal life as goal of a human life

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Nor is the City of God to be identified with the Church on earth, even though in later ages Augustine’s book was sometimes taken to be a guide…

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Augustine combs the sayings of the prophets, the sermons of Jesus, the epistles of the Apostles, and the book of Revelation, for information about the future of the world. Between the resurrection of Jesus and the end of history there is a period of a thousand years as described in the book of Revelation (DCD XX. 1–6). During this period the saints are reigning with Christ. Their thousand-year reign evolves in two stages: during their lives on earth the saints are the dominant members of a Church that includes sinners, and after their death they are still in some mysterious way in communion with the Church that is the kingdom of God (DCD…

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Augustine tells us that the final drama, after the numbered years have passed, will play itself out in seven acts. First the prophet Elijah will come and convert the Jewish people to Christ (XX. 29). Secondly, Satan will be unloosed and for three and a half years Antichrist will persecute the faithful, using as his agents the nations of Gog and Magog. The saints will endure their sufferings until the onslaughts of Gog and Magog have burnt themselves out (DCD XX. 11–12. 19). Thirdly, Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead. Fourthly, in order to be judged, the souls of the dead will return from their resting place and be reunited with their bodies. Fifthly, the judgement will separate the virtuous from the vicious, with the saints assigned to eternal bliss and the wicked to eternal damnation (DCD XX. 22, 27). Sixthly, the present world will be destroyed in a cosmic conflagration, and a new heaven and a new earth will be created (DCD XX. 16–18). Seventhly, the…

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he singles out as the most difficult of all the idea that the wicked will suffer eternal bodily punishment. Bodies are surely consumed by fire, it is objected, and whatever can suffer pain must sooner or later suffer death. Augustine replies that salamanders thrive in fire, and Etna burns for ever. Souls no less…

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Most people are concerned less about the physical mechanism than about the moral justification for eternal damnation. How can any crime in a brief life deserve a punishment that lasts for ever? Even in human jurisprudence, Augustine responds, there is no necessary temporal proportion between crime and punishment. A man may be flogged for hours to punish a…

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Step by step Augustine seeks to show not only that eternal punishment is possible and justified, but that it is extremely difficult to avoid it. A virtuous life is not enough, for the virtues of pagans without the true faith are only splendid vices. Being baptized is not enough, for the baptized may fall into heresy. Orthodox belief is not enough, for even the most staunch Catholics may fall into sin. Devotion to the sacraments is not enough: no one knows whether he is receiving them in such a spirit as to qualify for Jesus’ promises of eternal life (DCD XXI. 19–25). Philanthropy is not enough: Augustine devotes pages to explaining away the passage in St Matthew’s Gospel…

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How can human bodies, made of heavy elements, exist in the ethereal sublimity of heaven? No more problem, says Augustine, than birds flying in air or fire breaking out on earth. Will resurrected bodies all be male? No: women will keep their sex, though their organs will no longer serve for intercourse and childbirth, since in heaven there will no longer be marriage. Will resurrected bodies all have the same size and shape? No: everyone will be given the stature they had at maturity (if they died in old age) or the stature they would have had at maturity (if they died young). What of those who died as infants? They will reach maturity instantaneously on rising. All resurrected bodies will be perfect and beautiful: the resurrection will involve cosmetic surgery on a cosmic scale. Deformities and blemishes will be removed; amputated limbs will be restored to amputees. Shorn hair and nail clippings will return to form part of the body of their original owners, though not in the form of hair and nails. ‘Fat people and thin people need not fear that in that world they will be the kind of people that they would have preferred not to be while in this world’ (DCD XXII. 19).

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Suppose that a starving man relieves his hunger by cannibalism: to whose body, at the resurrection, will the digested human flesh belong? Augustine gives a carefully thought-out answer.

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But what will the blessed do with these splendid risen bodies? Augustine confesses, ‘to tell the truth, I do not know what will be the nature of their activity—or rather of their rest and leisure’.

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Augustine was one of the most interesting human beings ever to have written philosophy. He had a keen and lively analytic mind and at his best he wrote vividly, wittily, and movingly. Unlike the philosophers of the high Middle Ages, he takes pains to illustrate his philosophical points with concrete imagery, and the examples he gives are never stale and ossified as they too often are in the texts of the great scholastics. In the service of philosophy he can employ anecdote, epigram, and paradox, and he can detect deep philosophical problems beneath the smooth surface of language. He falls short of the very greatest rank in philosophy because he remains too much a rhetorician: to the end of his life he could never really tell the difference between genuine logical analysis and mere linguistic pirouette. But then once he was a bishop his aims were never purely philosophical: both rhetoric and logic were merely instruments for the spreading of Christ’s gospel.

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In the fifth century the Roman Empire experienced an age of foreign invasion (principally in the West) and of theological disputation (principally in the East). Augustine’s City of God had been occasioned by the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410; in 430, when he died in Hippo, the Vandals were at the gates of the city. Augustine’s death prevented him from accepting an invitation to attend a Church council in Ephesus. The Council had been called by the emperor Theodosius II because the patriarchates of Constantinople and Alexandria disagreed violently about how to formulate the doctrine of the divine sonship of the man Jesus Christ. In the course of the century the Goths and the Vandals were succeeded by an even more fearsome group of invaders, the Huns, under their king Attila. Attila conquered vast areas from China to the Rhine before being fought to a standstill in Gaul in 451 by a Roman general in alliance with a Gothic king. In the following year he invaded Italy, and Rome was saved from occupation only by the efforts of Pope Leo the Great, using a mixture of eloquence and bribery.

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The decisions of Chalcedon and first Ephesus henceforth provided the test of orthodoxy for the great majority of Christians, though in eastern parts of the empire substantial communities of Nestorian and monophysite Christians remained, some of which have survived to this day. In the history of thought the importance of these fifth-century councils is that they hammered out technical meanings for terms such as ‘nature’ and ‘person’ in a manner that influenced philosophy for centuries to come.

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Arianism took various forms, all of which denied that Jesus, the Son of God, shared the same essence or substance with God the Father. The most vigorous of the Gothic kings, Theodoric (reigned 493–526), established a tolerant regime in which Arians, Jews, and Orthodox Catholics lived together in tranquillity and in which art and culture thrived.

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Boethius, however, did not hold his honourable office for long, because he fell under suspicion of being implicated, as a Catholic, in treasonable correspondence urging the emperor Justin at Constantinople to invade Italy and end Arian rule. He was imprisoned in a tower in Pavia and condemned to death by the senate in Rome. It was while he was in prison, under sentence of death, that he wrote the work for which he is most remembered, On the Consolation of Philosophy. The work has been admired for its literary beauty as well as for its philosophical acumen; it has been translated many times into many languages, notably by King Alfred and by Chaucer. It contains a subtle discussion of the problems of relating human freedom to divine foreknowledge; but it is not quite the kind of work that might be expected from a devout Catholic facing possible martyrdom. It dwells on the comfort offered by pagan philosophy, but there is no reference to the consolations held out by the Christian religion. At the beginning of the work Boethius describes how he was visited in prison by a tall woman, elderly in years but fair in complexion, clothed in an exquisitely woven but sadly tattered garment: this was the Lady Philosophy. On her dress was woven a ladder, with the Greek letter P at its foot and the Greek letter TH at its head: these meant the Practical and Theoretical divisions of Philosophy and the ladder represented the steps between the two. The lady’s first act was to eject the muses of poetry, represented by Boethius’ bedside books; but she was herself willing to provide verses to console the afflicted prisoner. The five books of the Consolation consist of alternating passages of prose and poetry. The poems vary between sublimity and doggerel; it often takes a considerable effort to detect their relevance to the developing prose narrative.

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Lady Philosophy reminds him that he is not the first philosopher to suffer: Socrates suffered in Athens and Seneca in Rome. She herself has been subject to outrage: her dress is tattered because Epicureans and Stoics tried to kidnap her and tore her clothes, carrying off the torn-off shreds. She urges Boethius to remember that even if the wicked prosper, the world is subject not to random chance but to the governance of divine reason.

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A splendid household is a blessing to me only if my servants are honest, and their virtue belongs to them not me. Political power may end in murder or slavery; and even while it is possessed it is trivial. The inhabited world is only a quarter of our globe; our globe is minute in comparison with the celestial sphere; for a man to boast of his power is like a mouse crowing over other mice. The greatest of fame lasts only a few years that add up to zero in comparison with never-ending eternity. I cannot find happiness in wealth, power, or fame, but only in my most precious possession, myself. Boethius has no real ground of complaint against fortune: she has given him many good things and he must accept also the evil which she sends. Indeed, ill fortune is better for men than…

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happiness (beatitudo) is the good which, once achieved, leaves nothing further to be desired. It is the highest of all goods, containing all goods with itself; if any good was lacking to it, it could not be the highest good since there would be something left over to be desired. So happiness is a state which is made perfect by the accumulation of all the goods there are. (DCP 3. 2) Wealth, honour, power, glory do not fulfil these conditions, nor do the pleasures of the body. Some bodies are very beautiful, but if we had X-ray eyes we would find them disgusting. Marriage and its pleasures may be a fine thing, but children are little tormentors. We must cease to look to the things of this world for happiness. God, Lady Philosophy argues, is the best and most perfect of all good things; but the perfect good is true happiness; therefore, true happiness is to be found only in God. All the values that are sought separately by humans in their pursuit of mistaken forms of happiness—self-sufficiency, power, respect, pleasure—are found united in the single goodness of God. God’s perfection is extolled in the ninth poem of the third book, O qui perpetua: a hymn often admired by Christians, though almost all its…

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Philosophy draws arguments from Plato’s Gorgias to show that the prosperity of the wicked is only apparent. The will to do evil is itself a misfortune, and success in doing so is a worse disaster. Worse still is to go unpunished for one’s misdeeds. While a good man can aspire to divinity, a bad man turns into a beast: avarice makes you a wolf,…

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Providence is the divine reason that binds all things together, while fate is what organizes the motions of things scattered in place and time; the complicated arrangements of fate proceed from the simplicity of providence. We can see only the apparent disorder of the operation of fate; if we could see the overall scheme as designed by…

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Free choice, however, even if not random, is difficult to reconcile with the existence of a God who foresees everything that is to happen. ‘If God foresees all and cannot in any way be mistaken, then that must necessarily happen which in his providence he foresees will be.’ The reply offered is that God is outside time, and so it is a mistake to speak of providence as involving fore…

Note: An argument that depends on God making specific plans, rather than emergence

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to be hoped that Boethius found consolation in his philosophical writing, because he was brutally tortured, a cord being fastened round his head and tightened until his eyes started from their sockets. He was finally executed by being beaten with clubs. Many Christians regarded him as a martyr, and some churches venerated him as St Severinus. The humanist Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century called him ‘the last of the Romans, the first of the scholastics’,…

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The head of the Athens school in the previous century had been the industrious and erudite Proclus, who was said to have been capable of producing, each working day, five lectures and 700 lines of philosophical prose. Proclus wrote commentaries on several of Plato’s dialogues and an encyclopedic work on Plotinus’ Enneads. His Elements of Theology has served, even in modern times, as a convenient compendium of Neoplatonism.

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system is based on Plotinus’ trinity of One, Mind, and Soul, but he develops Plotinus’ ideas by a multiplication of triads, and a general theory of their operation (ET 25–39). Within each triad there is a developmental process. From the originating element of the triad there emerges a new element which shares its nature but which yet differs from it. This new element both resides in its origin, proceeds beyond it, and returns back towards it. This law of development governs a massive proliferation of triads. From the initial One there proceed a number of divine Units (henads) (ET 113–65). The Henads, collectively, beget the world of Mind, which is divided into the spheres of Being, Life, and Thought. In the next, lower, world, that of Soul, Proclus provides a habitation for the traditional gods of the pagan pantheon. The visible world we live in is the work of these divine souls, which guide it providentially.

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In fifth-century Alexandria, where there was a powerful Christian patriarch, it was more difficult than in Athens for pagan philosophy to flourish. Hypatia, a female Neoplatonist mathematician and astronomer, stands out in a man’s world of philosophy in the same way as Sappho stands out in a man’s world of poetry. While Augustine was writing The City of God in Hippo, Hypatia was torn to pieces in Alexandria by a fanatical Christian mob (AD 415).

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Justinian’s reign was not, however, as favourable to philosophy as it was to jurisprudence. The school of Athens continued the anti-Christian Neoplatonic tradition of Proclus, which brought it into imperial disfavour. Simplicius was one of the last group of scholars to adorn the school. He devoted great effort and erudition to the writing of commentaries on Aristotle, whose teachings he was anxious to reconcile with the thought of Plato as interpreted in late antiquity. Scholars of later generations are in his debt because in the course of this enterprise he quoted extensively from his predecessors as far back as the Presocratics, and is our source for many of their surviving fragments. Simplicius was still working there when, in the year 529, Justinian closed down the school because of its anti-Christian tendency. His edict, in the words of Gibbon, ‘imposed a perpetual silence on the schools of Athens and excited the grief and indignation of the few remaining votaries of Grecian science and superstition’ (Decline and Fall, ch. 40).

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Between 600 and 800 the former Roman Empire shrank to little more than Greece, the Balkans, and part of Asia Minor. Intellectual talent was expended mainly on theological disputation. The monophysite church to which John Philoponus belonged had been excluded from communion by the orthodox, who believed that Christ had not just one, but two, natures, human and divine. During the seventh century attempts were made by emperors and patriarchs to reunite the Christian communions by agreeing that even if Christ had two natures, nonetheless he had only one will; or that even if he had two wills, one human and one divine, these two were united in a single activity of willing, a single actuality, or energeia. Any concession of this kind was strongly resisted by a retired imperial officer called Maximus, who wrote copiously against ‘monothelitism’, the doctrine of the single will.

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Outside the Roman Empire the world was transformed beyond recognition. The life of the prophet Muhammad came to an end in 633, and within ten years of his death the religion of Islam had spread by conquest from its native Arabia throughout the neighbouring Persian Empire and the Roman provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In 698 the Muslims captured Carthage, and ten years later they were masters of all North Africa. In 711 they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, easily defeated the Gothic Christians, and flooded through Spain. Their advance into northern Europe was halted only in 732, when they were defeated at Poitiers by the Frankish leader Charles Martel.

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When Pope Leo III was driven out of Rome by a revolution, Charlemagne restored him to his see. In gratitude the Pope crowned him as Roman emperor in St Peter’s on Christmas Day 800—a date which, if not the most memorable in history, is at least the easiest to remember. Thus began the Holy Roman Empire, which at Charlemagne’s death in 814 included almost all the Christian inhabitants of continental western Europe.

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One of the most distinguished of these was Alcuin of York, who took a keen interest in Aristotle’s Categories. The logic textbook which he wrote, Dialectica, takes the form of a dialogue in which the pupil Charlemagne asks questions and the teacher Alcuin gives answers. Alcuin retired in the last years of his life to run a small school in the abbey of St Martin of Tours, of which he later became abbot. He spent his time, he told the emperor, dispensing to his pupils the honey of Scripture, the wine of classical literature, and the apples of grammar. To a privileged few he displayed the treasures of astronomy—Charlemagne’s favourite hobby.

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Once, commenting on a text on the borderline between grammar and logic, he wrote ‘no one enters heaven except through philosophy’.9

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Eriugena tells us that the most important distinction within nature is that between the things that are and the things that are not. It is disconcerting to be told that God is among the things that are not; however, Eriugena does not mean that there is no God, but rather that God does not fit into any of Aristotle’s ten categories of being (2. 15). God is above being, and what he is doing is something better than existing. One name that we can give to the ineffable and incomprehensible brilliance of the divine goodness is ‘Nothing’.10

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Had God not foreseen that Adam would fall, humans would not have been divided into male and female; they would have propagated as angels do. Their bodies would have been celestial and would have lacked metabolism. After the resurrection, our bodies will resume their sexless and ethereal form. When the world finally ends, place and time will disappear, and all creatures will find salvation in the nature that is uncreated and uncreating.

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He has a fanatical love of paradox: whenever he writes a sentence he can hardly bear not to follow it with its contradictory. He often displays great subtlety and ingenuity in showing that the two apparent contradictions can be interpreted in such a way as to reconcile them. But sometimes his wayward intellect leads him into sheer nonsense, as when he writes ‘In unity itself all numbers are at once together, and no number precedes or follows another, since all are one’ (3. 66).

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Eriugena constantly quotes the Bible, his system is closer to pagan Neoplatonism than to traditional Christian thought, and it is unsurprising that On the Division of Nature was eventually condemned by ecclesiastical authority. In 1225 Pope Honorius III ordered all surviving copies of the work to be sent to Rome to be burned. But legend was kind to his memory. The story was often told of Charles the Bald asking him, over dinner, what separates a Scot from a sot, and being given the answer ‘only this table’. And at one time the University of Oxford implausibly venerated him as its founder.

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They also made available to the Muslim world the scientific and medical works of Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates, and Galen. At the same time mathematical and astronomical works were translated from Indian sources. The ‘arabic’ numerals that we use today, which were enormously more convenient for arithmetical purposes than the Roman and Byzantine numerals that they superseded, were imported from India in the same period.

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Islamic theology (kalam) had already developed a rudimentary philosophical vocabulary and was initially—and subsequently—hostile to this foreign system of ideas (falsafa). For instance, the thinkers of kalam (known as Mutakallimun) deployed a series of proofs to show that the world had had a beginning in time; the new philosophers produced Aristotelian arguments to prove that it had always existed.12

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The greatest of all Muslim philosophers was Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (980–1037). He was a Persian, born near Bokhara (in present-day Uzbekistan), who was educated in Arabic and wrote most of his works in that language. He is reputed to have mastered logic, mathematics, physics, and medicine in his teens. He began to practise as a doctor when he was 16.

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Thus, he tells us, he had mastered all the sciences by the time he was 18. At the age of 20 he published an encyclopedia—the first of five in the course of his life, four in Arabic and one in Persian.

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Avicenna’s main philosophical encyclopedia was called in Arabic Kitab-al-Shifa, or ‘Book of Healing’. It is divided into four parts, of which the first three treat of logic, physics, and mathematics respectively. The second part includes a development of Aristotle’s De Anima. The fourth part, whose Arabic name means ‘Of Divine Things’, was known in the medieval West as his Metaphysics. When translated into Latin in Toledo around 1150 it had an enormous influence on the Latin philosophy of the Middle Ages. Avicenna said that he had read Aristotle’s metaphysics forty times and had learnt it by heart without understanding it—only when he came across a commentary by al-Farabi did he understand what was meant by the theory of being qua being.16 His own Metaphysics is much more than a commentary on Aristotle; it is a thoroughly thought-out original system. The book, in ten treatises, falls into two parts: the first five books treat of ontology, the science of being in general; the remaining books are devoted principally to natural theology. In the early books Avicenna deals with the notions of substance, matter and form, potentiality and actuality, and the problem of universals. In the later books he examines the nature of the first cause and the concept of necessary being, and the way in which creatures, human beings in particular, derive their being and nature from God.

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Ibn Gabirol’s system is fundamentally Neoplatonic, but it contains one neo-Aristotelian element. All created substances, he maintained, whether corporeal or spiritual, whether earthly or heavenly, are composed of matter and form. There is spiritual matter as well as corporeal matter: the universe is a pyramid with the immaterial godhead at the summit and formless prime matter at the base. Since one can no longer equate ‘material’ with ‘bodily’ in his system, Ibn Gabirol has to introduce, like Avicenna, a form of corporeality to make bodies bodies. Ibn Gabirol’s universal hylomorphism was to have a considerable influence on thirteenth-century Latin Aristotelianism (PMA 359–67).

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Towards the end of the century the Persian philosopher and mystic al-Ghazali (1058–1111) wrote a work, Tahafut al-falasifa (‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’), in which he sought to show not only that Muslim philosophers, in particular Avicenna, were heretical to Islam, but also that they were fallible and incoherent by their own philosophical lights. His criticisms of Avicenna’s arguments for the existence of God and for the immortality of the soul were often well taken. But he is now best remembered because his Incoherence provoked a reply from a twelfth-century philosopher of greater weight, Averroes.

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that his philosophical fame principally rests.21 The Proslogion, a brief address to God in the style of Augustine’s Confessions, shares with that work an engaging literary charm that has made it an enduring classic of philosophical literature. Anselm, as said earlier, was distinguished both as a philosopher and as a theologian, and in his writing he does not make a sharp distinction between the two disciplines. When treating of God he does not make a systematic distinction, as later scholastics were to do, between natural theology (what can be discovered of God by unaided reason) and dogmatic theology (what can be learnt only from revelation).

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On the Fall of the Devil deals with one of the most excruciating versions of the problem of evil: how could initially good angels, supremely intelligent and with no carnal temptations, turn away from God, the only true source of happiness?

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Anselm did write one purely philosophical work. On the Grammarian reflects on the interface between grammar and logic, and on the relation between signifiers and signified. Against the background of Aristotle’s categories Anselm analysed the contrasts between nouns and adjectives, concrete and abstract terms, substances and qualities; and he related these contrasts to each other.

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Just before becoming archbishop, Anselm had become embroiled in a dispute with a pugnacious theologian, Roscelin of Compiégne (c.1050–1120). Roscelin is famous for his place in a quarrel that had a long history ahead of it: the debate over the nature of universals. In a sentence such as ‘Peter is human’ what does the universal term ‘human’ stand for? Philosophers down the ages came to be divided into realists, who thought that such a predicate stood for some extra-mental reality, and nominalists, who thought that no entity corresponded to such a word in the way that the man Peter corresponds to the name ‘Peter’. Roscelin is often treated in the history of philosophy as the founder of ‘nominalism’, but his views were in fact more extreme than those of most nominalists. He claimed not just that universal predicates were mere names, but that they were mere puffs of breath. If this theory is applied to the doctrine of the Trinity, it raises a problem. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each God. But if the predicate ‘God’ is a mere word, then the three persons of the Trinity have nothing in common. Anselm had Roscelin condemned at a council in 1092 on a charge of tritheism, the heresy that there are three separate Gods.

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The teacher there was William of Champeaux, who espoused a realist theory of universals at the opposite extreme from Roscelin’s nominalism. The universal nature of man, he maintained, is wholly present in each individual at one and the same time.

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While teaching there he lodged with one of the canons of the cathedral, Fulbert, and became tutor to his 16-year-old niece Héloïse. He became her lover, probably in 1116, and when she became pregnant married her secretly. Héloïse had been reluctant to marry, lest she interfere with Abelard’s career, and she retired to a convent shortly after the wedding and the birth of her son. Her outraged uncle Fulbert sent to her husband’s room by night a pair of thugs who castrated him. Abelard became a monk at St Denis, while Héloïse took the veil at the convent of Argenteuil. Abelard supported Héloïse out of his tutorial earnings and the pair renewed their relationship by means of edifying correspondence. One of Abelard’s longest letters, written some years later, is called History of my Calamities. It is the main source of our knowledge of his life up to this point, and is the liveliest piece of autobiography between Augustine’s Confessions and the diary of Samuel Pepys.

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Like Roscelin, Abelard got into trouble with the Church; his work was condemned as unsound by a synod at Soissons in 1121. He had to burn the treatise with his own hand and he was briefly imprisoned in a correctional monastery.

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One of Abelard’s works that had the greatest subsequent influence was his Sic et Non, which places in opposition to each other texts on the same topic by different scriptural or patristic authorities. This collection was not made with sceptical intent, in order to cast doubt on the authority of the sacred and ecclesiastical writers; rather, the paired texts were set out in a systematic pattern in order to stimulate his own, and others’, reflection on the points at issue. Later, in the heyday of medieval universities, a favourite teaching method was the academic disputation. A teacher would put up one of his pupils, a senior student, plus one or more juniors, to dispute an issue. The senior pupil would have the duty to defend some particular thesis—for instance, that the world was created in time; or, for that matter, that the world was not created in time. This thesis would be attacked, and the opposite thesis would be presented, by other pupils. The instructor would then settle the dispute, trying to bring out what was true in what had been said by the one and what was sound in the criticisms made by the others. Many of the most famous masterpieces of medieval philosophy—the great majority of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, for example—observe, on the written page, the pattern of these oral disputations. Abelard’s Sic et Non is the ancestor of these medieval disputations. The main textbook of medieval theology, Peter Lombard’s Sentences, bore a structure similar to Abelard’s work, and promoted the kind of debate standard in the schools. Thus it can be argued that it was ultimately due to Abelard that the structure of philosophical discussion took a form that was adversarial rather than inquisitorial, with pupils in the role of advocates and the teacher in the role of a judge. Though never himself more than a schoolmaster, Abelard imposed a style of thought on academic professors right up to the Renaissance.

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In the capital itself Peter Lombard, the bishop of Paris, wrote a work on the model of Abelard’s Sic et Non, called the Sentences. This was a compilation of authoritative passages drawn from the Old and New Testaments, Church councils, and Church Fathers, grouped topic by topic, for and against particular theological theses. This became a standard university textbook.

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Averroes (1126–98) was a judge, and the son and grandson of judges. He was also learned in medicine, and wrote a compendium for physicians called Kulliyat‘General Principles’. He entered the court of the sultan at Marrakesh; while there he caught sight of a star not visible in Spain, and this convinced him of the truth of Aristotle’s claim that the world was round. Back in Spain he was commissioned in 1168 by the caliph, Abu Yakub, to provide a summary of Aristotle’s works. In 1182 he was appointed court physician in addition to his judgeship, and he combined these offices with his Aristotelian scholarship until, in 1195, he fell into disfavour with the caliph al-Mansur. He was briefly placed under house arrest, and his books were burnt. He returned to Morocco and died at Marrakesh in 1198.

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In response to al-Ghazali’s Incoherence of the Philosophers he wrote a book called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, defending the right of human reason to investigate matters of theology. He also wrote a treatise, The Harmony of Philosophy and Religion. Is the study of philosophy, he asks, allowed or prohibited by Islamic law? His answer is that it is prohibited to the simple faithful, but for those with the appropriate intellectual powers, it is positively obligatory, provided they keep it to themselves and do not communicate it to others (HPR 65).

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He came to deny also Avicenna’s thesis that the agent intellect produced the natural forms of the visible world. Against al-Ghazali, Averroes insisted that there is genuine causation in the created cosmos: natural causes produce their own effects, and are not mere triggers for the exercise of divine omnipotence. But in the case of human intelligence he reduced the role of natural causation further even than Avicenna had done: he maintained that the passive intellect, no less than the active, was a single, superhuman, incorporeal substance

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Averroes’ most important contribution to the development of philosophy was the series of commentaries—thirty-eight in all—that he wrote on the works of Aristotle. These come in three sizes: short, intermediate, and long. For some of Aristotle’s works (e.g. De Anima and Metaphysics) all three commentaries are extant, for some two, and for some only one. Some of the commentaries survive in the original Arabic, some only in translations into Hebrew or Latin. The short commentaries, or ‘epitomes’, are essentially summaries or digests of the arguments of Aristotle and his successors. The long commentaries are dense works, quoting Aristotle in full and commenting on every sentence; the intermediate ones may be intended as more popular versions of these highly professional texts. Averroes knew the work of Plato, but he did not have the same admiration for him as he had for Aristotle, whose genius he regarded as the supreme expression of the human intellect. He did write a paraphrase of Plato’s Republic—perhaps as a faute de mieux for Aristotle’s Politics, which was then unavailable in Spain. He omitted some of the principal passages about Platonic Ideas, and he tweaked the book to make it closer to the Nicomachean Ethics. In general, he saw it as one of his tasks as a commentator to free Aristotle from Neoplatonic overlay, even though in fact he preserved more Platonic elements than he realized.

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his encyclopedic work was to prove the vehicle through which the interpretation of Aristotle was mediated to the Latin Middle Ages, and he set the agenda for some of the major thinkers of the thirteenth century. Dante gave him an honoured place in Limbo, and placed his Christian follower Siger of Brabant in heaven flanking St Thomas Aquinas. For Thomas himself, and for generations of Aristotelian scholars, Averroes was the Commentator.

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In his lifetime his fame was due principally to his rabbinic studies: he wrote a digest of the Torah, and drew up a definitive list of divine commandments (totalling not ten, but 613). But his lasting influence worldwide has been due to a book he wrote in Arabic late in life, the Guide of the Perplexed. This was designed to reconcile the apparent contradictions between philosophy and religion, which troubled educated believers. Biblical teaching and philosophical learning complement each other, he maintained; true knowledge of philosophy is necessary if one is to have full understanding of the Bible. Where the two appear to contradict each other, difficulties can be resolved by an allegorical interpretation of the sacred text.

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Maimonides’ project for reconciling philosophy and religion depends on his heavily agnostic view of the nature of theology. We cannot say anything positive about God, since he has nothing in common with people like us: lacking matter and totally actual, immune from change and devoid of qualities, God is infinitely distant from creatures. He is a simple unity, and does not have distinct attributes such as justice and wisdom. When we attach predicates to the divine name, as when we say ‘God is wise’, we are really saying what God is not: we mean that God is not foolish. To seek to praise God by attaching laudatory human epithets to his name is like praising for his silver collection a monarch whose treasury is all gold.

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We have no way of describing God, Maimonides maintained, except through negation. If we are not to fall into idolatry, we must explain as metaphor or allegory every anthropomorphic text in the Bible.

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As a believer in the Jewish doctrine that the world was created in time, Maimonides rejected Aristotle’s conception of an eternal universe, and offered criticisms of philosophical arguments to show that time could have no beginning. But he did not believe that unaided reason could establish the truth of creation. Human beings cannot deduce the origin of the world from the world as it now is, any more than a man who had never met a female could work out how humans come into existence. Maimonides rejected Aristotle’s view that the world consisted of fixed and necessary species. It is disgraceful to think, he says, that God could not lengthen the wing of a fly. On the other hand, we should not think that God’s governance of the universe is concerned with every individual event in the world: his providence concerns human beings individually, but it concerns other creatures only in general. Divine providence watches only over the individuals belonging to the human species, and in this species alone all the circumstances of the individuals and the good and evil that befall them are consequent upon their deserts. But regarding all the other animals and, all the more, the plants and other things, my opinion is that of Aristotle. For I do not at all believe that this particular leaf has fallen because of a providence watching over it; nor that this spider has devoured this fly because God has now decreed and willed something concerning individuals. . . . For all this is in my opinion due to pure chance, just as Aristotle holds. (Guide, 3. 17)

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Maimonides’ intention was orthodox and indeed devout. The aim of life, he insists, is to know, love, and imitate God. The prophet can learn more swiftly than the philosopher what little there is to be known about God. Knowledge should lead to love—a love that is expressed in the passionless imitation of divine action to be found in the lives of biblical prophets and lawgivers.

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In the second half of the century important philosophical texts were translated from the Arabic: works of al-Kindi, al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Gabirol, and substantial portions of Avicenna’s great Kitab-al-Shifa. A number of other treatises also circulated in translation, often Neoplatonic works, under the name of Aristotle. Most important for the future history of Latin Aristotelianism was the translation of the major commentaries of Averroes into Latin, a gigantic task undertaken by Michael Scot from about 1220.

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from the earliest decades of the century the influence of Aristotle was the dominant stimulus to the development of philosophy.

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Bologna and Salerno have claims to be the oldest universities in Europe. Bologna celebrated its nine-hundredth anniversary in 1988 and Salerno was a flourishing institution in the mid-twelfth century. But Bologna had no permanent university buildings until 1565 and Salerno’s academic glory quickly faded; more-over, both were specialized schools, concentrating on law and medicine respectively. It was at Paris and Oxford that the institution really took…

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university is, in essentials, a thirteenth-century innovation, if by ‘university’ we mean a corporation of people engaged professionally, full-time, in the teaching and expansion of a corpus of knowledge in various subjects, handing it on to their pupils, with an agreed syllabus, agreed methods of teaching, and agreed professional standards. Universities and parliaments came into existence…

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typical medieval university consisted of four faculties: the universal undergraduate faculty of arts, and the three higher faculties, linked to professions, of theology, law, and medicine. Students in the faculties learnt both by listening to lectures from their seniors and, as they progressed, by giving lectures to their juniors. A teacher licensed in one university could teach in any…

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in 1210 an edict at the University of Paris forbade any lectures on Aristotle’s natural philosophy and ordered his texts to be burnt. But though reinforced by papal bulls, the condemnation seems to have quickly become a dead letter, and by 1255 not only Aristotle’s physics, but his metaphysics and ethics, and indeed all his known works, became compulsory parts of the syllabus. In theology the text on which lectures were based, in addition to the Bible, was the…

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For the intellectual life of the age, the foundation of the religious orders of mendicant friars, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, was no less important than the creation of the universities. St Francis of Assisi secured papal approval in 1210 for the rule he had laid down for his small community of poor, wandering preachers. St Dominic, a tireless fighter for orthodoxy, founded convents of nuns to pray and friars to preach against heresy: his order was approved by the Pope in 1216. Like the Franciscans (‘Friars Minor’, ‘Grey Friars’), the Dominicans (‘Friars Preachers’, ‘Black Friars’) were to live on alms, but at the outset their ethos was less romantic and more scholarly than that of the Franciscans. However, after the first generation of wholly other-worldly friars, the Franciscans became just as successful…

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the great philosophers in the high Middle Ages is largely drawn from these two orders. Five of the most distinguished thinkers are St Albert, St Thomas Aquinas, St Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. Of these the first two are Dominicans and the last three Franciscans. Only in the fourteenth century, with John Wyclif, do we meet a philosopher of comparable talent who was a member of the secular (parish) clergy rather than a friar. Wyclif’s eventual lapse from orthodoxy made him, in the minds of…

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The three innovating impulses of the thirteenth century—the reception of Aristotle, the development of the universities, and the influence of the mendicant orders—can all be seen at work in the career of a remarkable Englishman, Robert Grosseteste (1170?—1253), who became bishop of Lincoln in 1235. He studied at Oxford and was one of the first chancellors of that university. From 1225 to 1230 he taught in the Oxford schools. In 1230 he moved to the newly founded Franciscan house and was lecturer there for five years before his appointment to the episcopate. Besides writing a number of original philosophical and scientific works, he composed the first…

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in the opinion of many scholars he holds a more important place in the history of science than in the history of philosophy. In working on the Analytics he became aware of difficulties with the Aristotelian concept of science as a corpus of demonstrated necessary truths. Among Aristotle’s favourite topics are eclipses of the moon. How can there be necessary truths about them, since they are comparatively rare events? Grosseteste replies that the necessary truths are of a conditional form—if the sun and the earth are in such-and-such positions, then there will be an eclipse. More importantly, he suggests that some of these conditional truths are established by experiment, not by deduction. You observe that eating the root of a certain type of convolvulus is followed by the passing of red bile. To establish with certainty that this plant really is a purgative, you have to feed it repeatedly to patients while screening out other possible purgatives (CPA 214–15, 252–71). On the basis of this and other passages, Grosseteste has been hailed as the father of experimental science in western Europe. Undoubtedly he had considerable scientific curiosity, which he displays in discussing phenomena that occur in Aristotle’s text only as…

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Medieval legend, indeed, credited him with magical powers, such as making a robot that could answer difficult questions, and riding a horse to Rome in a single night. Both the medieval gossip and the modern plaudits seem exaggerated. In his overall view of the nature of human scientific endeavour, as laid out in his commentary on the…

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The close interweaving of science and metaphysics is displayed clearly in one of Grosseteste’s most original contributions, his theory of light, expounded in the Hexaemeron and also in a separate treatise, On Light. Light, he maintained, was the first corporeal form to be created: it unites with prime matter to form a simple dimensionless substance. In the first moment of time this simple substance spread instantaneously to the furthest bounds of the universe, creating tridimensionality. From the outermost sphere, the firmament, it returned inward, creating one after the other nine celestial spheres, of which the ninth is the sphere of the moon. From this sphere light travelled earthward, and produced four terrestrial spheres of fire, air, water, and earth as it moved to our world, where it produced the four familiar elements. So far we have a physical theory; but Grosseteste at once moves into theology. Light is the natural essence that most closely imitates the divine nature: like God it can create, unaided, from within itself; like God it can fill the universe from a single point (Hex. 8. 4. 7). Of all creatures it is the closest to being pure form and pure act (Hex. 11. 2. 4). Indeed God himself is eternal light, and the angels are incorporeal lights; God is a universal form of everything, not by uniting with matter, but as the exemplar of all forms. It is only by the light of God, the supreme Truth, that the human intellect can attain to truth of any kind.

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Albert the Great, the first German philosopher. In his work, however, science occupies a more substantial proportion. Born in Swabia in the first years of the thirteenth century, Albert studied arts in Padua and became a Dominican in 1223. He taught theology at Paris from 1245 to 1248, having among his pupils the young Thomas Aquinas, whom he took with him to Cologne in 1248 to establish a new house of studies. Thenceforth Cologne was his principal base until his death in 1280, though he moved around as provincial of the German Dominicans (1254–7), bishop of Ratisbon (1260–2), and preacher of St Louis IX’s crusade.

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the first of the scholastics to give a wholehearted welcome to the newly translated works of Aristotle. After commenting, as a theologian, on Lombard’s Sentences, he wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics, De Anima, and Metaphysics—lengthy paraphrases in the manner of Avicenna, rather than line-byline exegesis in the style of Averroes. He was the author of the first Latin commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. Albert was a copious writer and the critical edition of his works is still in progress; the previous complete edition extended to thirty-eight volumes. He read widely in Greek, Arabic, and Jewish authors, and acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of previous learning. His mind was capacious rather than precise, and—despite…

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He wrote treatises on vegetables, plants, and animals, and a geographical text entitled On the Nature of Places. His enthusiasm for scientific inquiry, uncommon among his peers, led to his acquiring—like Grosseteste—a posthumous reputation as an alchemist and magician. A number of spurious and curious works were…

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In his writings Bonaventure, unusually for the Latin Middle Ages, presents himself explicitly as a Platonist. Aristotle’s criticisms of Plato’s Theory of Ideas, he believes, are quite easily refuted. From the initial error of rejecting the Ideas there follow all the other erroneous theses of Aristotelianism: that there is no providence, that the world is eternal, that there is only a single intellect, that there is no personal immortality, and therefore no heaven and no hell (CH, vision III. 7). Bonaventure did not, however, believe that Ideas existed outside the divine mind; they were ‘eternal reasons’, exemplars on which creaturely existence was patterned. These, and not the material objects in the natural world, are the primary objects of human knowledge.

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There are four different lights that illumine the soul. The first, inferior, light consists in mechanical skill. This appears to be ‘light’ only in metaphor. Next, there is the light of sense-perception: and here we go beyond metaphor. Each sense is a recipient of light at a different degree of intensity: sight takes it in pure, hearing takes it in mixed with air, taste takes it in mixed with fluid, and so on. Thirdly, there is the light that guides us in the search of intellectual truth: this light illumines the three domains of philosophy: logic, physics, and ethics. Finally, the supreme light enables the mind to understand saving truth: this is the light of Scripture. Like Augustine, Bonaventure is fond of number symbolism, and he points out that if one counts each branch of philosophy as a separate light, then the number of these lights adds up to six, which corresponds to the six days of creation. ‘There are in this life six illuminations, and each has its twilight, for all science will be destroyed: for that reason too there follows a seventh day of rest, a day which knows no evening, the illumination of glory’ (PMA 461–7).

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Since each human person has an individual intellectual capacity, each of us is personally immortal and will be held responsible after our death for our deeds in this life. Bonaventure accepted Aristotelian hylomorphism and accepted that the human soul was the form of the human body. He uses this as an argument against Arabic monopsychism: ‘since human bodies are distinct, the rational souls that inform those bodies will also be distinct’ (Brev. 2. 9). Unlike Aristotle, however, and like Ibn Gabirol, he applies the structure of hylomorphism to the soul itself. Everything other than God, he maintained, is composed of matter and form; even angelic spirits who lack bodies contain ‘spiritual matter’. Because Bonaventure accepted that the soul contained matter, he was able to reconcile the survival of individual disembodied souls with the commonly accepted thesis that matter was the principle of individuation.

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Thomas Aquinas was born into the feudal nobility of Italy at Roccasecca, probably in 1225. As a 5-year-old he was sent by his father to be brought up by the Benedictine monks of the great abbey of Monte Cassino.

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After a period at home he studied the liberal arts at the newly founded University of Naples. Here he was introduced to Aristotelian logic and…

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Thomas became a Dominican friar, to the irritation of his family, who had hoped he would follow the more socially acceptable vocation of a Benedictine monk. He hoped to escape from family pressure by migrating to Paris, but was kidnapped on the way and kept under house arrest for more than a year in one or other family castle. He employed his time in prison…

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Aquino family failed to dent his resolve to be a friar. An attempt to seduce him by placing a prostitute in his cell only reinforced his determination to live a life of chastity: henceforth, his…

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he continued his journey to Paris. There he became a student of Albert the Great. The family made one more attempt to set him on a career path of their choice: they procured an offer from the Pope to allow him to be abbot of Monte Cassino while remaining a Dominican. Thomas refused and…

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his taciturnity and corpulence earned him the nickname ‘the dumb ox’. Albert quickly appreciated his astonishing talents, and predicted that the dumb ox would…

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1252 Aquinas moved to Paris and began studying for the mastership in theology. As a bachelor he lectured on the Bible and on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. His commentary on the Sentences is the first of his major surviving works, and already displays his original genius. In the same period he wrote a pamphlet on Aristotelian metaphysics, much influenced by Avicenna, with the title De Ente et Essentia (‘On Being and Essence’), which was…

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Friars were unpopular with the traditional clergy, and the university had tried to suppress one of their chairs in 1252. In the ensuing controversy many professors went on strike, and Aquinas’ first lectures as bachelor were given as a blackleg. But the chair survived, and Aquinas was appointed to it shortly after becoming master. At the time of his inaugural lecture…

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Aquinas remained in Paris for three years, lecturing on the book of Isaiah and the…

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it was his duty to oversee the formal disputations of the bachelors, and we possess the text of the disputations over which he presided, called, after the topic of the first of them, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate (‘Disputed Questions on Truth’). In fact they range over many different topics: truth and the knowledge of truth in God, angels, and men; providence and predestination; grace and justification; reason, conscience, and free will; emotion, trances, prophecy, education, and many other topics. The collection consists of 253 individual disputations,…

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‘Are there real worms in hell?’

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Whatever the truth of this story, the book differs from St Thomas’ other major treatises in taking its initial stand (throughout the first three of its four books) not on Christian doctrine, but on philosophical premisses that could be accepted by Jewish and Muslim thinkers versed in Aristotelian philosophy. Thomas explains his method thus: Muslims and pagans do not agree with us in accepting the authority of any Scripture we might use in refuting them, in the way in which we can dispute against Jews by appeal to the Old Testament and against heretics by appeal to the New. These people accept neither. Hence we must have recourse to natural reason, to which all men are forced to assent. (ScG 1. 2) Thus, the text is not a work of revealed theology, but of natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy.

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Summa contra Gentiles is a treatise, not a record of disputations; it is in four books of a hundred or so chapters each, amounting in total to some 300,000 words. The first book is about the nature of God, in so far as this is held to be knowable by reason unaided by revelation. The second concerns the created world and its production by God. The third expounds the way in which rational creatures are to find their happiness in God, and thus ranges widely over ethical matters. The fourth is devoted to specifically Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the final resurrection of the saints through the power of Christ. In the first three books Aquinas is scrupulous to use biblical or ecclesiastical texts only as illustrations, never as premisses from which the arguments start.

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On Evil (1266–7)

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The Summa Theologiae is an immense work, of over 2 million words, divided into three parts; most of the first was probably written at Sta Sabina. In style, it falls between the Summa contra Gentiles and the Disputed Questions: it is not a record of live scholastic disputation, but it is, like a disputation, divided into questions and articles, not into chapters. However, the multiple arguments for and against a particular thesis that introduce a genuine disputation are replaced by an introductory set (usually a triad) of difficulties against the position that Aquinas intends to take up in the body of the article. This initial section is the Videtur quod non (‘It seems not’). These objections are followed by a single consideration on the other side—usually the citation of an authoritative text—beginning with the words ‘Sed contra’ (‘On the other hand’). After this, in the main body of the article, Aquinas sets out his own position with the reasons that support it. Each article then concludes with the solution of the difficulties set out in the introductory objections. The method, while initially puzzling to a modern reader, provides a powerful intellectual discipline to prevent a philosopher from taking things for granted. By adopting it, St Thomas imposed on himself the question ‘Whom have I got to convince of what, and what are the strongest things that can be said on the other side?’

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on the other hand, St Ambrose, in his book on Faith, says this: ‘The Holy Spirit makes his gifts to individuals as he wills, in accordance with the choice of his free will, and not in observance of any necessity.’

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In its own fashion, the Summa Theologiae is a masterpiece of philosophical writing. Once one has become accustomed to the syntax of medieval Latin and the technicalities of scholastic jargon one finds the style smooth, lucid, civil, and judicious. The work is almost entirely free from rhetoric, and Thomas never lets his own ego obtrude.

Note: Rhetoric and ego as damaging to truth? [e]

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The section on human nature (qq. 75–102) is, for a modern reader, the most rewarding part of the book.3 It is fuller and more systematic than the corresponding section in the second book of the earlier work, and it is less heavily loaded with criticisms of Arabian exegesis of Aristotle’s psychology.

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