Tuesday 8/27
Introduction
Synopsis
Today I discussed the mechanics of the course and attempted to get us started by framing the problems raised by the presocratic philosophers which proved such fertile ground for Plato and Aristotle.
As to mechanics, I decided to refine an approach I and the students developed recently in Contemporary Philosophy. The class was small, my involvement in discussion minimal. Instead of lecturing or even leading discussion, I grounded the discussions in a series of questions posed for each class meeting. Those questions would become the basis for discussion, but by no means hampered or limited our inquiry. Some of the discussions were outstanding, memorable in ways mere lectures really cannot hope to match. In this we carry on a tradition which–in the case of Ancient philosophy, certainly–has characterized inquiry for thousands of years: Small groups vigorously discussing, reading, interpreting, and collectively comprehending the text at hand.
The difference between then and now is that the essays will be assigned as our discussions warrant them. I'll take the best seven during the semester, add that total to the last (in-class) essay, and calculate your grade accordingly. I aim for 10 essays, but 12 would be better. The essays are short (2 pages at most for each essay) and assigned based on a question or prompt we see emerging from our discussions.
I will do what I can to facilitate discussion, but not dominate it. You must, however, be diligent about keeping up with the readings, noting puzzling passages or perplexing turns of argument for discussion.
Now as to framing the problems, permit me to quote the opening paragraph of Kaufmann and Baird's "Ancient Philosophy":
Something unusual happened in Greece and the Greek colonies of the Aegean Sea some 2,500 years ago. Whereas the previous great cultures of the Mediterranean had used mythological stores of the gods to explain the operations of the world and the self, some of the Greeks began to discover new ways of explaining things. Instead of reading their ideas into, or out of, ancient scriptures or poems, they began to use reason, contemplation, and sensory observation to make sense of reality.
To be sure, this is not to say the Greeks lacked such a religious tradition. Homer's Illiad and Odyssey are substantially stories about the interventions of gods in the oft-hapless lives of mortal men and women. Hesiod's Works and Days and Theogony catalog the important gods, their origins, and how they came to make the world as it is. As best we can tell, Homer and Hesiod were writing in approximately the 8th century BCE. Everything changed in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE.
Greek thinkers--we unfairly lump them altogether and call them "presocratics"--at this time began to eschew supernatural explanations in favor of natural explanations. This is an extraordinary break which arguably set western philosophy (and, with it, the very sciences it would eventually birth) on a unique trajectory. Roughly, the presocratics' novel idea is that the natural world is intelligible on its own terms, should we make the effort of applying our faculty of reason and our senses to understanding it. Speculation about divine agency may make us feel we have an explanation, but such explanations invariably beg the question: Having explained the natural world in terms of the supernatural world, we find we have the altogether more obscure puzzle of explaining the supernatural world. Best stick to the natural world to see what philosophical--really, rational, and today broadly deemed 'scientific'--inquiry yields. As Kirk, Raven, and Schofield put it in The Presocratic Philosophers:
...the transition from myths to philosophy, from muthos to logos as it is sometimes put, is far more radical than that involved in a simple process of de-personifying or de-mythologizing, understood either as a rejection of allegory or as a kind of decoding; or even than what might be involved (if the idea is not complete nonsense) in an almost mystical mutation of ways of thinking, of intellectual process itself. Rather, it entails, and is the product of, a change this is political, social and religious rather than sheerly intellectual, away from the closed traditional society (which in its archetypal form is an oral society in which the telling of tales is an important instrument of stability and analysis) and toward an open society in which the values of the past become relatively unimportant and radically fresh opinions can be formed both of the community itself and of its expanding environment.
It is that kind of change that took place in Greece between the ninth and the sixth centuries B.C.--a change complicated, to be sure, by the exceptional persistence of non-literacy there. The growth of the polis, the independent city-state, out of earlier aristocratic structures, together with the development of foreign contacts and a monetary system, transformed the Hesiodic view of society and made the old divine and heroic archetypes seem obsolete and, except when they were directly protected by religious cult, irrelevant. Much, no doubt, of the rational undertone of the Homeric tradition, as well as the classificatory craft of Hesiod, survived; but in the speculative and cosmopolitan societies of Ionia, not least in Miletus itself, they took on a sharper form and were applied, without too much distraction from myths and religion, to a broader and more objective model of the world.
All of this boils down, as I explained in class, to assuming naturalism: Explanations of natural phenomena are only in terms of natural phenomena. This is an important, even radical departure from the kind of supernatural explanation so typical in the rest of the world. (In fact, it is interesting to note that the pre-socratics are sometimes called 'proto-scientists', although I don't think this is quite fair to either science or the pre-socratics.)
Naturalism is an important shift, but there is yet another shift that proves to be crucial. As we will see next time, the Greeks embraced perplexity (aporia) in a way which is at once startling (for the time) and seminal (for the impact it had on the western philosophical/scientific tradition.) We will have much more to say about aporia next time as we explore the Apology. For now, suffice it to say that the ancient Greeks were unafraid of not understanding, of being, fundamentally, perplexed. It was for them an opportunity to think, to reason, to explore, and to discover. Let us take this as our ideal for this course.