The reader's guide to the Encyclopaedia Britannica

by Inc. Encyclopaedia Britannica

Breaking the Ground

The father of Greek philosophy and indeed of European thought was Thales of Miletus (Vol. 26, p. 720), who founded the Ionian School (Vol. 14, p. 731) at the end of the 7th century B.C. He first, as far as we know, sought to go behind the infinite multiplicity of phenomena in the hope of finding an all embracing infinite unity. This unity he decided was water. Heraclitus (Vol. 13, p. 309), the “dark philosopher,” nicknamed from his aristocratic prejudices “he who rails at the people,” later selected fire. The never ending fight between advocates of the “One” and the “Many” had therefore begun. Sophistry (see Sophists, Vol. 25, p. 418) has now an unpleasant connotation, inherited from the undisciplined reasonings of the schools of which Protagoras (Vol. 22, p. 464), Gorgias (Vol. 12, p. 257), Parmenides of Elea (Vol. 20, p. 851), and Zeno, also of Elea (Vol. 28, p. 970), were leaders. The “science of the regulative laws of thought” had not yet been developed and fallacies were the rule rather than the exception. Protagoras, the first of the Sophists, in his celebrated essay on Truth, said that “Man is the measure of all things, of what is, that it is, and what is not, that it is not.” In other words, there is no such thing as objective truth. After nineteen-hundred years we are still seeking the answer to Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” Gorgias, in his equally famous work on Nature or on the Nonent (notbeing) maintained that “(a) nothing is, (b) that, if anything is, it cannot be known, (c) that, if anything is and can be known, it cannot be expressed in speech.” The paradoxes with which Zeno, the pupil and friend of Parmenides, adorned his arguments are proverbial. Who has not heard of Achilles and the tortoise? And it is a little curious that in quite modern times his sophisms have, after centuries of scornful neglect, been reinstated and made the basis of a mathematical renaissance by the German professor Weierstrass, who shows that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow, as Zeno paradoxically contended, is truly at rest at every moment of its flight (Vol. 28, p. 971).

The Socratic Schools

The teaching of Socrates (Vol. 25, p. 331) was oral, and his philosophy is handed down to us in the refined and elaborated system which Plato (Vol. 21, p. 808) developed in his dialogues. The “One” and the “Many” were united in the philosophy of Plato. To him we owe a debt which is simply incalculable, for, as is shown in the Britannica, “to whatever system of modern thought the student is inclined he will find his account in returning to this wellspring of European thought, in which all previous movements are absorbed, and from which all subsequent lines of reflection may be said to diverge.” The germs of all ideas, even of most Christian ones, are, as Jowett remarked, to be found in Plato. The teaching of Socrates bore fruit in strangely divers forms. Plato, his legitimate successor, and the expounder of his philosophy, has been referred to, but there were other very different developments. The Cynics (Vol. 7, p. 691), of whom Diogenes (Vol. 8, p. 281) is the notorious prototype, uncouthly preached the asceticism which was to become so fashionable in a later era; but, their central doctrine, “let man gain wisdom—or buy a rope,” contains more than a germ of truth. The Cyrenaics (Vol. 7, p. 703), under Aristippus (Vol. 2, p. 497), starting from the two Socratic principles of virtue and happiness, differed from the Cynics in emphasizing the second. The Megarians (Vol. 18, p. 77), the “friends of ideas,” as Plato called them, united the Socratic principles of virtue (as the source of knowledge) with the Eleatic doctrine (Vol. 9, p. 168) of the “One” as opposed to the “Many.” Their strength lay in the intellectual pre-eminence of their members, not so much in the doctrine, or combination of doctrines, which they inculcated.

Aristotle

Plato had done much, he had laid the foundation of modern thought; it remained to classify it and to systematize it. This task was reserved for Aristotle (Vol. 2, p. 501), one of the greatest geniuses of any age. He invented the sciences of logic, ethics, aesthetics, and psychology, as separate sciences. He was at once a student, a reader, a lecturer, a writer, and a book collector. He was the first man whom we know to have collected books, and he was employed at one time by the kings of Egypt as consulting librarian. His system of aesthetics still remains the best foundation of the critic’s training. The fundamental difference between Aristotle and Plato is that Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, and Aristotelianism one of individual substances. As Professor Case puts it in the Britannica: “Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world.” His inquiries, therefore, pre-eminently implied that “transvaluation of all values,” of which Nietzsche was to boast more than two thousand years later. A contemporary of Aristotle, whose philosophy occupies a somewhat independent position, is Epicurus (Vol. 9, p. 683). His advice to a young disciple was to “steer clear of culture.” His system, in fact, led him to go back from words to realities in order to find in nature a more enduring and a wider foundation for ethical doctrine; “to give up reasonings, and get at feelings, to test conceptions and arguments by a final reference to the only touchstone of truth—the senses.” A famous Roman who subscribed to the doctrines of Epicurus was the poet-philosopher-scientist, Lucretius (Vol. 17, p. 107), whose theories in his poem De Rerum Natura so curiously anticipated much of modern physics and psychology.

The Last Greek Schools

Two schools remain to be considered before the Greek philosophy can be dismissed: the Stoics (Vol. 25, p. 942) and the Neoplatonists (see Neoplatonism, Vol. 19, p. 372). The Stoics caught the practical spirit of the age which had been evoked by Aristotle and provided a popular philosophy to meet individual needs. They showed kinship with the Cynics, but under the inspiration of their founder, Zeno of Citium, they avoided the excesses of that school, and formulated a system which fired the imagination of the time and finally bequeathed to Rome the guiding principles which were to raise her to greatness. Zeno is regarded as the best exponent of anarchistic philosophy in ancient Greece, and he and his philosophers opposed the conception of a free community without government to the state-Utopia of Plato; see Anarchism (Vol. 1, p. 915). Of Neoplatonism Adolph Harnack says in the Britannica (Vol. 19, p. 372):

Judged from the standpoint of empirical science, philosophy passed its meridian in Plato and Aristotle, declined in the postAristotelian systems, and set in the darkness of Neoplatonism. But, from the religious and moral point of view, it must be admitted that the ethical “mood” which Neoplatonism endeavored to create and maintain is the highest and purest ever reached by antiquity.

The most famous exponents of this system were Plotinus (Vol. 21, p. 849), an introspective mystic, and Porphyry (Vol. 22, p. 103), who edited Plotinus’s works and wrote his biography. Neoplatonism, coming as it did early in our era, formed a link between the pagan philosophy of ancient Greece and Christianity.