Sophia Macdonald - Greek Philosophy--Simple Guides

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Cover image: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco by Raphael, 151011, in the Palace of the Vatican.

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The Greek World at the Time of Aristotle

Why should we be interested in ancient Greek philosophy? What is its relevance to us today? Indeed, why should we be interested in philosophy at all?

If we are interested in why our world is the way it is, in the nature of good and evil even in the nature of the universe itself we should be interested in philosophy in its broadest sense. Democracy, atoms, censorship, utopia the Greeks thought about these things and many more, and their opinions have often proved prescient. Cynicism and Stoicism were Greek philosophical schools whose names have passed into common parlance to describe familiar human attitudes or attributes. What the Greeks called philosophy embraced what we would now call science as well as what we call ethics and political theory.

We should also be interested in philosophy if we are interested in history, for the two are closely intertwined. The great British philosopher Bertrand Russell taught that To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy. Philosophies emerge from their particular societies, but, conversely, they feed back into those societies (even if in a very diluted form) and do much to determine their development. In particular, as we shall see later in this book, moral or ethical concepts cannot be understood without knowledge of the society that generated them.

People have always been curious about the world they live in. The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians were making discoveries about mathematics and astronomy centuries before the first Greek thinkers we know of. Both the Chinese and the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica had developed systems of numbering and dating and made astronomical observations by the sixth to fifth centuries BCE . But it was with the Greeks that there began a shift from practical observation and recording to putting forward explanations for astronomical and physical phenomena deduced through reasoning.

The Greek word philosophia, from which the word philosophy is derived, literally means love of wisdom. That may sound easy and uncontroversial, but it is not: philosophers themselves have come up with many definitions, frequently contradictory, and as we shall see in this book, even the first philosophers of ancient Greece disagreed about what philosophy was and who was the best kind of person to be a philosopher. In the words of Plato in his dialogue Phaedo, For every philosopher there is an equal and opposite philosopher. Yet, for a useful working definition, we might suggest that philosophy seeks to make sense of the world or the universe through reasoning and to arrive at a systematic and coherent world view.

In the 1940s, Russell called philosophy something intermediate between theology and science a No Mans Land, exposed to attack from both sides, a discipline which asks even if it cannot answer such questions as:

Does the world consist of both mind and matter, and, if so, what part is mind and what part is matter?

For that matter, what is mind?

Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards any goal or with any purpose?

Are there such things as laws of nature, and what are they?

What is knowledge?

What are good and evil? Are there universal definitions of them, or only subjective or relative ones?

Philosophy today deals with abstract concepts goodness, evil, justice, freedom, love, knowledge, and the like but we also encounter these concepts all the time in our everyday lives. Should I smack my child? Is theft ever justified? What are the pros and cons of the death penalty? Are sex and violence in entertainment a bad influence? How democratic is Western democracy? These are all questions that have no immediate, factual, right answer, but which are relevant and can be explored by argument that is, by the practical exercise of philosophy.

Perhaps it is the act of questioning and arguing that is the most common feature of definitions of philosophy. Philosophy does not take things at face value, and in particular, it does not accept dogma but rather subjects it to interrogation. In fact, philosophy can subvert established beliefs and behaviours by asking uncomfortable or forbidden questions. Whereas religion and law are based on authorities that are not meant to be questioned (for example, scriptures/holy writs, legal codes), a defining feature of philosophy is that it seeks to justify or refute statements by analysis of ideas, by reasoning, and by presenting arguments for its conclusions.

Philosophy and science are nowadays separate disciplines, each with many subcategories, but in ancient Greece natural philosophers studied mathematics, physics, logic, cosmology, biology and medicine, as well as politics, ethics, aesthetics, even literary criticism. A standard Greek definition of what a philosopher sought what philosophia was was knowledge of things human and things divine; for the philosopher Heraclitus, around 500 BCE , philosophical men must be versed in very many things. By the time of Aristotle, philosophy was regularly being classified into a number of disciplines, including:

logic (from logos, literally meaning a word or thought, but by extension reason, from legein, to say, tell, or explain): language, meaning, the study of thought and argument;

ethics (from ethos, custom, and by extension moral character): the study of moral and political concepts, but also including what we would think of as sociology;

physics (from physis, nature): the study of the phenomena of the natural world, including speculation about the physical origins and evolution of the universe;

metaphysics: this refers to a set of ultimate questions about the nature of being, which preoccupied the Greek philosophers greatly from very early on but which did not acquire the name of metaphysics until centuries later. Aristotle called his own enquiries into this field First Philosophy.