Ancient Philosophy Read online

  Ancient Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction

  ‘This book, written by one of the best-known scholars in the subject, offers a fresh and original approach to introducing readers to ancient philosophy. . . . Annas explores six themes as a way of alerting modern readers to the interest and challenge of ancient philosophy. . . . the writing is lively and nontechnical, [and] Annas opens up a range of very important questions about ancient thought and about modern reception of antiquity.’ Christopher Gill, University of Exeter

  ‘A+ for Annas on Ancient Philosophy. This should be the first book any prospective student in philosophy reads. Annas’s renowned scholarship, combined with her engaging style, enable her to convey an astonishing amount about the ancient Greeks and still find room for many fascinating insights into how their thought relates to the way we think now and how it was interpreted in earlier centuries.’

  Rosalind Hursthouse, The Open University

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  VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in 13 languages worldwide.

  * * *

  Very Short Introductions available from Oxford Paperbacks:

  ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas

  THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair

  ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn

  ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes

  THE BIBLE John Riches

  BUDDHISM Damien Keown

  CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson

  DESCARTES Tom Sorell

  EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford

  HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood

  HINDUISM Kim Knott

  HISTORY John H. Arnold

  HUME A. J. Ayer

  ISLAM Malise Ruthven

  JUDAISM Norman Solomon

  THE KORAN Michael Cook

  LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler

  LOGIC Graham Priest

  MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner

  MARX Peter Singer

  MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths

  MUSIC Nicholas Cook

  NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew

  POLITICS Kenneth Minogue

  PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus

  ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway

  SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just

  SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce

  SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor

  STUART BRITAIN John Morrill

  THEOLOGY David F. Ford

  THE TUDORS John Guy

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan

  Forthcoming Very Short Introductions:

  ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia

  ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland

  BIOETHICS Helga Kuhse

  CHAOS Leonard Smith

  CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley

  COSMOLOGY Peter Coles

  ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta

  EMOTION Dylan Evans

  ETHICS Simon Blackburn

  THE EUROPEAN UNION John Pinder

  EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY Oliver Curry

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard

  FREE WILL Thomas Pink

  INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton

  INTELLIGENCE Ian Deary

  MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers

  OPERA Roger Parker

  PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig

  PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot

  Julia Annas

  ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

  A Very Short Introduction

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  Preface

  The prospect of writing a very short introduction to ancient philosophy has attracted and intrigued me for some time. I would like to thank Shelley Cox for her encouragement and comments, as well as Christopher Gill, Laura Owen, David Owen, and a reader for Oxford University Press. I would like to thank Cindy Holder for help with the proofs and index. Needless to say, the shortcomings rest with me. I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my friend Jean Hampton, who I hope would have enjoyed it.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1 Humans and beasts: understanding ourselves

  2 Why do we read Plato’s Republic?

  3 The happy life, ancient and modern

  4 Reason, knowledge and scepticism

  5 Logic and reality

  6 When did it all begin? (and what is it anyway?)

  Timeline

  Further Reading

  Notes

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1 Medea by Eugene Delacroix, 1838

  Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Photo: AKG London

  2 Medea by Frederick Sandys, 1886–8

  Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery/Bridgeman Art Library

  3 Papyrus fragment of Philodemus’ On Anger

  National Library, Naples. Photo: Professor Knut Kleve, University of Oslo

  4 The Choice of Heracles by Paolo de Matteis, 1712

  Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

  5 Socrates, British Museum

  © British Museum

  6 Aristotle

  Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

  Photo: AKG London

  7 Mosaic thought ro represent Anaximander

  Landesmuseum, Trier, Germany

  8 Philosophers discussing and arguing together

  National Museum of Archaeology, Naples. Photo: AKG London/Erich Lessing

  9 Philosopher next to a praying figure

  Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome. Photo: Hirmer Verlag GmbH

  Introduction

  A very short introduction should have modest aims. It is also, however, an opportunity to give the reader direct ways into the subj
ect, and lead him or her straight off to what is most important about the subject. In this book I have tried to engage the reader with ancient philosophy in the way that matters, as a tradition of discussion and engagement, a conversation which I hope will continue after the reader has finished this book.

  Because I have focused on important and revealing features of ancient philosophy, I have not tried to work through a standard chronological account of the tradition. Not only does the very short nature of this book make that a bad idea (since the tradition is too rich to cram into a very short account), but there is no shortage of books available that will help the beginner deepen his or her interest in ancient philosophy. The list of Further Reading indicates good places to start; beginners have never been better served with reference books, translations and companions than they are today.

  I start by introducing the reader, in Chapter 1 (‘Humans and beasts: understanding ourselves’) to an issue in ancient philosophy, about understanding the conflict of reason and emotion within ourselves, an issue which is readily understandable and one that a modern reader can engage with before knowing much about the background of the theories involved. I am hoping to get across the centrality to the ancient tradition of argument, and also of practical engagement with issues important to our lives. In the second chapter (‘Why do we read Plato’s Republic?’) I focus, by contrast, on factors that distance us from the ancient philosophical writers. One is the literal distance of time and the loss of much evidence. Another is the influence of other factors, which we should be aware of, which make our concern with the ancients a selective and changeable one, so that a text like Plato’s Republic is read very differently at different times. Both the immediacy and the distance are things we should be aware of. In Chapters 3 and 4 (‘The happy life, ancient and modern’ and ‘Reason, knowledge and scepticism’) I show how we can understand and engage with the ancient variety of views on ethics and on knowledge – how we can come to engage with the ancients in a respectful but critical way, both disagreeing with them and learning from them. Chapter 5 (‘Logic and reality’) takes up the rest of the ancient philosophy syllabus, focusing on one particular metaphysical debate, namely whether there are purposes in nature or not, and if so what they are. Chapter 6 (‘When did it all begin, and what it is anyway?’) raises the issue of what, if anything, unites the ancient philosophical tradition. This is a question better asked at the end than at the beginning of an account of it, since I hope that the reader will agree that the main lines of what I say have emerged from the previous chapters. (And if she disagrees, this will, I hope, be in the spirit of the debates which have been covered.)

  However, if you are quite new to the subject you might appreciate a quick chronological sketch of the tradition you are being so briefly introduced to, so one follows. There is also a timeline placing the major figures in ancient philosophy, not all of whom can be adequately dealt with in this book, though many are discussed in the text and the text-boxes.

  Ancient philosophy is traditionally held to begin in the sixth century BC, in the Greek cities of coastal Asia Minor. A large number of philosophers are generally grouped as ‘Presocratics’; their activities cover the sixth and fifth centuries. Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes are early cosmologists, giving ambitious accounts of the world as a whole. Pythagoras began a tradition emphasizing mysticism and authority. Heraclitus produced notoriously obscure aphorisms. Xenophanes begins a long concern with knowledge and its grounds.

  Parmenides and Zeno became famous for arguments which apparently cannot be refuted but which reach conclusions impossible to accept. These arguments provoke a crisis in philosophical accounts of the world; responses to it can be found in the cosmologies of Anaxagoras, Empedocles and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.

  In the second half of the fifth century, intellectuals called sophists developed some philosophical skills, particularly in argument, and philosophical interests, particularly in ethical and social thought. The best known are Protagoras, Hippias, Gorgias and Prodicus.

  Some of these people are not strictly Presocratics, since their lives overlapped with that of Socrates, but Socrates is generally held to mark a turning-point in ancient philosophy. He wrote nothing, but greatly influenced a number of followers, including Aristippus, a founder of hedonism, the idea that our aim should be pleasure, and Antisthenes, a founder of Cynicism, the idea that our needs should be as minimal as possible. Socrates’ emphasis on questioning and argument made him the key symbolic figure of the Philosopher to the ancient world.

  Socrates’ most famous follower is Plato, the best-known ancient philosopher, who wrote a number of philosophical dialogues famous for their literary skill. Plato founded the first philosophical school, and he and his most famous pupil, Aristotle, dominate the philosophy of the fourth century. Both left extensive works – Plato in finished form, Aristotle in the form of lecture and research notes.

  The ‘Hellenistic’ period (traditionally from 323 BC, the death of Alexander the Great, to the end of the Roman republic at the end of the first century BC) is marked by the emergence of two new philosophical schools, those of Epicurus and the Stoics, and also of philosophical movements which were not institutionalized as schools, such as the Cynics, and Pyrrho, the first sceptic. Plato’s school practised a form of scepticism in this period, and several mixed or hybrid schools try to bring together the insights of different schools of thought.

  During the first century BC to the second century AD, the early Roman empire, the existing schools continue, and philosophy flourishes. No new major schools emerge, but there is renewed interest in Pythagoras, and also in studying Plato’s ideas positively and systematically.

  Late antiquity sees the emergence, in the second to third centuries, of an original new school, that of Plotinus, which revives some of Plato’s ideas and is called ‘Neoplatonism’). As Christianity becomes the official religion of the Roman empire, which divides into an eastern and a western part, the dominant world-view becomes Platonism, and this is the tradition most influential on Christianity. The first major western Christian thinker, Augustine, is influenced by Platonism, but has already lost touch with the major traditions of ancient philosophical thinking.

  Chapter 1

  Humans and beasts: understanding ourselves

  Medea’s revenge

  Medea, daughter of the King of Colchis, has betrayed her country and family out of love for the Greek adventurer Jason, who has brought her back to Greece. Now they have fallen on hard times, and to mend his fortunes Jason has left Medea and their two sons and is to marry the daughter of the King of Corinth. He does not understand the depth of her outrage; her sacrifice and devotion mean little to him. Medea realizes that there is only one way to bring home to Jason what he has done, what kind of commitment he has discounted. The only way to hurt him as much as he has hurt her is to kill their sons, depriving him of any descendants and leaving his life empty. But can she do this? They are her children too.

  In Euripides’ famous play, produced at Athens in the fifth century BC, Medea resolves to kill her sons, then goes back on her resolve when she sees them. Sending them away, she steels herself to do the deed, and speaks words which were to become famous:

  I know that what I am about to do is bad, but anger is master of my plans, which is the source of the greatest troubles for humankind.

  She recognizes two things going on in her: her plans and her anger or thumos. She also recognizes that her anger is ‘master of’ the plans she has rationally deliberated on carrying out.

  What is going on here? We may think that nothing is going on that a philosopher needs to concern herself with; we simply have something which happens every day, though usually not in such spectacular ways. I think it better for me to do A than B, but am led by anger, or some other emotion, to do B instead.

  But how do we understand what is going on? How can I genuinely think that A is the better thing to do, if I end up doing B? How can anger, or any oth
er emotion or feeling, get someone to go against what they have deliberately resolved on doing? Until we have some systematic way of understanding this, we and the way we act are mysterious to ourselves. Many people, of course, do remain this way, with many of the sources of their actions and their patterns of behaviour opaque to themselves. But the society in which Euripides’ play was produced and continued to be a classic fostered a kind of thinking, the kind we call philosophical thinking. This kind of reflective, probing thinking regarded Medea’s situation as calling for explanation and understanding in terms that they, and we so many years later, can readily recognize as philosophical.

  As already indicated, the question of what, if anything, distinguishes ancient philosophy and its methods will emerge by the end of the book; here we will focus on an issue where we can readily understand what ancient philosophers are doing.

  The Stoics: the soul as a unity

  Are there really two distinct things operating in Medea, her plans and her furious anger? How do they relate to Medea herself, who is so lucidly aware of what is going on? One school of ancient philosophers, the Stoics, developed a distinctive view of Medea as part of their ethics and psychology. They think that the idea that there are really two distinct forces or motives at work in Medea is an illusion. What matters in this situation is always Medea herself, the person, and it is wrong to think in terms of different parts of her. After all, she is quite clear about how her thoughts are going. First she resolves to do one thing, then to do another – but these are both her resolves, decisions that she comes to as a result of giving weight to resentment on the one hand or love on the other.