I
planned to enroll
at a nearby international school to study epic literature and ancient Greek
philosophy, but the plan fell through and here I am, stuck at home. However,
the good thing about home is that it’s virtually a library. We own multiple
Christian philosophy books, such as Colin Brown’s Philosophy, and I bought (the seventh edition of) Socrates to Sartre and Beyond: A History of
Philosophy by Samuel Enoch Stumpf and James Fieser for 75 pesos at a
clearance sale (anywhere else it would have cost about ten times as much).
These will my primary “textbooks” for the semester, because home schoolers have
a knack for being autodidactic. My blogging on Greek philosophy is my “papers.”
The bulk of what I’ll be writing will be taken from Socrates to Sartre and Beyond, because it is a much more
comprehensive volume than Brown’s and includes the pre-Socratic philosophers,
albeit its comments on these are not as extensive as those on Plato and
Aristotle.
Opening
Questions
Stumpf
and Fieser (hereafter Stumpf-Fieser) say that “[t]he story of Western
philosophy in a series of Greek islands and colonies during the sixth century
BCE…. Some original thinkers were driven by very specific puzzles, most
notably, ‘what are things really like?’ and ‘how can we explain the process of
change in things?’ The solutions they gave to these puzzles were shortly
thereafter dubbed ‘philosophy’—the love of wisdom.”[1]
Presupposed in the first question was the notion that there is a duality
between appearance and reality. The second was perhaps motivated by a desire to
come to grips with the painful process of transformation. Stumpf-Fieser
continue: “These facts [i.e. birth,
death, growth, and decay] raised sweeping questions of how things and people
come into existence, can be different at different times, and pass out of
existence only to be followed by other things and persons.”[2]
Some of the conclusions that these early philosophers came to were unhelpful,
but these failures “are not as important as the fact that they focused upon
these specific questions [italics in
the original].”[3]
Ionia
The seaport
town of Miletus lay in western Ionia in Anatolia (Asia Minor) across Athens,
and the first Greek philosophers are called Milesians or Ionians. Commerce and
cosmopolitan ideas flowed through the streets of Miletus, and the city was considered
the greatest and wealthiest of Greek cities mid-sixth century B.C. The leisure
time made possible by this wealth was favorable for an environment of artistic
activity and intellectual inquiry. [4]
Ionia
had produced the great poet Homer about a century before the first Greek
philosophers. Homer’s epics included stories of gods who were very human-like,
immoderate, proud, and insubordinate (the last two characteristics are lumped
up in the Greek term ὕβρις
[hubris])—gods
who weren’t morally upright: they were simply stronger than humans and demanded
obedience. Hinted at in Homer’s narratives is a sense of natural order: “fate,”
to which even gods are subject; but the Iliad
and Odyssey both are saturated in
human-ness—gods are impulsive, like their human counterparts, and natural laws
do not hold sway over physical processes. A contemporary of Homer, Hesiod,
sought to alter these ideas by attributing moral consistency to the gods. The
gods, especially Zeus, retained control of nature in Hesiod’s reformulation,
but there is now a moral order aimed at the good of people, contra Homer’s view of the gods’
whimsicality. [5]
The
universe being a moral order, Stumpf-Fieser posit that “it is a short step to
say, without any reference to gods,
that there is an impersonal force controlling the structure of the universe and
regulating its process of changes.”[6]
Here
enter the great Ionian philosophers Thales (c.
585 B.C.), Anaximender (c. 610-546
B.C.), and Anaximenes (6th century B.C.). Stepping out beyond Homer’s
and Hesiod’s mythologies, these men employed independent thought in order to
philosophize and asked the questions about the nature of things and of change,
and by doing so espoused a proto-scientific, as opposed to a myth-oriented, method.
“[Greek philosophy] was not a matter only of seeing or believing, but of thinking, and philosophy meant thinking
about basic questions with an attitude of genuine and free inquiry.”[7]
[1] Nobody
ever reads these, but for style points: Samuel Enoch Stumpf, James Fieser, Socrates
to Sartre and Beyond: A History of Philosophy, Seventh Edition, p. 5 (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2003)
[2] Ibid., pp. 5-6
[3] Ibid.,
p. 6
[4] Ibid., p. 6, Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miletus
[5] Stumpf, Fieser, Socrates to Sartre, p. 6
[6] Ibid., p. 6
[7] Ibid., p. 6
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