HISTORY OF
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

Introduction

Origin and Nature of Ancient Philosophy.

The Greek Philosophers. The Greeks were the first known genius in philosophy. At the beginning, between the 6th and 5th B.C., the term “philosophy” had a rather generic meaning. It meant the intellectual activity which gave rise to culture as a rhetorical and literary phenomenon. The specific meaning of philosophy which the Greeks bequeathed to posterity will be found later on, in the works of Plato and Aristotle.

For Plato, philosophy is the search for wisdom, a kind of knowledge, which in itself is unlimited and which corresponds to the infinite knowledge of God alone (cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 278). To man it pertains to seek that wisdom, to raise questions about the totality of reality and probe into its mysteries.

For Aristotle, too, philosophical knowledge was characterized by totality: it was an inquiry about the whole expanse of reality, without excluding any part of it. It was the total nature that differentiated philosophy from the particular sciences, which were limited to certain provinces of reality.

Along with this characteristic, there are two more to complete the Greek notion of  philosophy. The first refers to method. Philosophy is a purely rational explanation of the totality of reality; he inquires into its causes and principles—into its first causes and its ultimate principles since it is reality taken as a whole that constitutes the object of this study.

The last characteristic feature of Greek philosophy is its end. Philosophy has an exclusively speculative or contemplative end.

Philosophy is, therefore, a free science, inasmuch as it does not pursue any utilitarian end. It seeks no other goal but that knowledge for its own sake, and derives its stimulus from no other source but the natural desire of all men to know.

Geographical Origin of Philosophy.

Philosophy was born along the coast of Asia Minor, in the Greek colonies of Ionia. The first philosophers we know of—Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes—were from Miletus. It was Aristotle who left us the memory of these Ionian philosophers. It was also Aristotle who sought the first principle of all things. These philosophers sought the first cause or unifying principle of everything. Aristotle added that they were preceded in their search by poet-theologians like Homer, Hesiod and the Orphic poets, but the explanations of the poet-philosophers on the universe were of a mythodological nature, however. The philosophers were rational, by contrast.

Why Ionia? Perhaps, it was due to the climate of freedom, the good social, economic and political atmosphere, a thriving commerce ripe for artistic and scientific endeavors to flourish. Then, from Ionia, the geographic center of philosophy transferred to other Greek colonies and to Athens.

Division of Ancient Philosophy.

Greek philosophy was born in the 6th C. B.C., and came to a close in 529 A.D., the year the Emperor Justinian forbade the teaching of pagan authors. The span of its lifetime can be divided into the following periods:

a)	Pre-Socratic Period. During this period, philosophical thought revolved around the cosmological problem: “What is the principle of all things? “Where did the universe come from?”. Aristotle called the philosophers of this period the natural or physical philosophers. Included among them were the Ionians, Pythagoreans, the Eleatics and the Pluralists.
b)	Later on came the Sophists. With them, the problem of the cosmos recedes to the background, and gives way to man himself. Man now becomes the focus of attention. Socrates belongs to this period of humanism.
c)	Then, Plato and Aristotle took the foreground. Philosophy makes a significant progress, not only because of the depth of their thought, but also because of the breadth of their speculative inquiries. Thanks to Aristotle, branches of philosophy  took shape.
d)	Afterwards came the Hellenistic period. Three schools were born: Stoicism, Epicureanism and skepticism, along with a marked tendency to eclecticism (tendency to combine different positions).
e)	Finally, Neo-Platonism, which is the result of a confluence of various philosophies-Middle Platonism, neo- Pythagoreanism, and above all, the school of Alexandria, which had strong religious coloring.
f)	(Christian philosophy, which is not covered here, began during the closing stages of ancient philosophy).

Purpose and Benefits of our Study.

Philosophy is the search for truth, and the study of history will prove to be meaningful only if pursued in the same spirit. Our objective is to look for truths that remain valid to the present day. Merely to record what men said in the past without any reference to the truth may very well make us more erudite, but it can hardly contribute to genuine philosophical formation.

St. Thomas put it this way: “We do not study the history of philosophy to find out what men in the past thought, but rather to know how they arrived at the truth. “ Aristotle earlier said that philosophy is a collective endeavor in the search for the truth.

The purpose of the history of philosophy is to acquaint us with the thought of different philosophers in order to facilitate our own search for wisdom. It would be wrong to say that ancient philosophy is the summit of human thought and the source of solution to all philosophical problems. Neither should we say that the truth of a doctrine is valid only for the historical milieu in which it was born. This latter is called a historicist attitude. We should undertake this study of ancient philosophy with the desire to discover truths, which the passing of time will never invalidate.

PART A - THE PRE-SOCRATICS

Chapter 1 – The Ionians & Heraclitus

Before the physical philosophers came, there were the poet-theologians. They talked about the origin of the gods but also of the world. These poet-theologians differ from the physical philosophers, who  may also have talked about mythology. The difference was that the philosophers used rational discourse as the instrument to explain the nature of the world. Whereas the poets like Homer and Hesiod had a predominance of myth, the physical philosophers used reason predominantly. It is for the rational approach that the Ionians earned the title of philosophers.
The three Ionian philosophers were Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes.

1. Thales
He was born in Miletus. He began his philosophical career at the start of 6th BC. He is traditionally regarded as the first philosopher, and is often regard as the prototype of the wise man. Unfortunately, he did not put his thought into writing, and the little that we know of him comes from Aristotle. He taught two basic ideas: Water is the first principle and that everything else comes from water; the soul is the principle of movement.

Water is the first principle: all things consist of it, the substance that always remains, the sort of entity that is always conserved; it is the first from which all things come to be. And everything leads back to it. For this reason, he said, the earth rests on water. Why water? Perhaps because seeing that the nutriment of all things is moist. After all, seeds of all things have a moist nature. With this rational attempt to explain things, he broke away from the poet-theologians, who banked more on mythical explanations.

The soul as the principle of movement. The soul is a motive force. This vital force is divine in nature, and affects even inanimate things.

2. Anaximander
Born in Miletus in 611 BC, he was a disciple of Thales. He wrote On Nature. Like his master, he was interested in cosmology. He differed from his master in the choice of the first principle. For Anaximander, it was not water but the aperion, the infinite, the unlimited. Aperion means that which is devoid of limit, the infinite. It does not have a positive identity, unlike water, air or any one of the known elements. Since it is unlimited, it is unaffected by the limitations proper of earthly realities, such as death or corruption.

3. Anaximenes
Anaximenes was born at the beginning of the 6th C BC, and died towards the end of the same century. He is the third of the Miletian philosophers. The first principle of Anaximenes is also infinite, like that of Anaximander’s. For him, however, it is air, which has a definite nature. Air is infinite and encompasses all things. It is in constant movement. Why air? Probably, it is because we need air for respiration. And since he thought that the entire universe was composed of living beings it appeared logical to choose air as the first principle. It is air which, through a process called rarefaction, undergoes substantial change, transforming into fire and wind. On the contrary, if it thickens, it becomes water then earth, then the stones. All things come from these substances. The opposite of rarefaction is condensation.

4. Heraclitus
He was born in the middle of the 6th C. BC, and died around 480 B.C. He belonged to the aristocracy, and is from Miletus. He was regarded as a proud, conceited person, who despised people because of their blindness to the truth of his teachings. He criticized the doctrines of ancient poets (Homer deserves to be whipped) and philosophers (Pythagoras was an imposter). He wrote a book called On Nature.  His writings had an occult and encrypted character, for which he earned the epithet as “the obscure one” or “the dark one”.

Universal change

Heraclitus affirmed that everything is in constant flux; everything changes This doctrine of constant change was his contribution to the history of pre-Socratic thought. The problem of movement was already known before, but it was dealt with in an implicit way. For him, movement becomes the central theme and the point of departure of his philosophy.

“Everything changes, only becoming remains constant throughout”.  Plant an acorn and later you’ll have a towering oak tree. Change is going on as you read this sentence. We are always some seconds older. We are not exactly the same person as when we woke up this morning. Still less are we the same person as we were last year, and much less the person we were fifteen years ago. Even lifeless things left for years will crumble to dust. So, just as you can never step into the same river twice, all things are in a state of flux.

Fire as the first principle. Heraclitus profers his own solution to the question of the first principle. For him, it is fire. This world always was, is and will be, an ever-living fire. He chose fire as the material principle because it is fire which reflects constant change and harmony. It is fire which changes into the various forms of things.

Chapter 2  The Pythagoreans

Pythagoras and his  School

Pythagoras (572-497 BC) was born in Asia Minor, and came in contact with the Milesian philosophers. From there, however, he migrated to southern Italy, where he found a group of people who were inclined towards a religious way of life, and with them, he dedicated himself to the practice of good works and the pursuit of scholarship.

Unlike their Ionian predecessors, these philosophers sought the first principle of all things in a different order, that is, in mathematics. They made great discoveries in the field of arithmetic and geometry. The end of their effort was the attainment of a particular way of life, and it was a consequence of this ideal that they adopted the scientific vision of the universe that characterized their philosophy.

Number, the Principle of all things

Like the philosophy of its predecessors, Pythagorean philosophy clearly shows an interest in cosmology. They identified the unifying principle of all reality with number, and hence, for the first time, departed from the tradition of designating a material substance (water, the aperion, air, fire) as the first principle.

Their observation led them to discover clear mathematical patterns. Musical harmony, for example, could be reduced to a set of numerical relations. Natural phenomena followed an order, which could also be measured numerically, like the duration of the year, the seasons, the length of day, etc. Hence, they concluded that number and its elements constituted the principle of all things: number constituted the essence and substance of all that was real.

Sullivan wrote that Pythagoras discovered that numbers could be fitted into regular patterns. The series of whole numbers were made up of triangular numbers; the series of odd numbers fitted into square patterns (hence, the term square roots); even numbers make up oblong figures. These numbers are called figurate from the Greek which meant pattern or figure. Hence, today we talk of figuring out something. The Pythagoreans elaborated many of the theorems, which were later gathered and systematized by Euclid. Among them is the equation that the sum of the two squared sides of a right triangle is equal to the squared hypotenuse: the Pythagorean theorem.

For them, even reality is composed of an unlimited element and a limited element. Not only numbers have odd (limited) and even (unlimited) elements, but also reality is composed of these two contrary principles. Aristotle could not fail to stress this point, since for him substances are indeed composed of two principles: one unlimited (matter) and other limited (form).

The Pythagoreans associated the unlimited to imperfection and intelligibility. Therefore, they did not identify the unlimited with God (which is correct, because the infinite cannot be conceived in material terms).

Pythagoreans claim that each thing has its own harmony, and that the universe, as a whole, is governed by a law that unified all its elements. This is interesting because the world, in this case, is not governed by irrational forces: it has order, a harmonious order that can be reduced to numerical relations and rational laws, like the musical scale.

Man and the soul

Religion occupied a central place in Pythagoreanism, and actually influences its scientific teachings. It taught the immortality and transmigration of souls. Man and all living beings, in general, are a composite of body and soul. The soul existed before the body and it was through some primitive fault that souls are now jailed inside the body as punishment. A good moral life is the path towards liberation, which is achieved by dedication to intellectual activity.

Thus, they study music, arithmetic, and then, geometry. Therefore, it was religion that motivated their philosophical work. During their time, they still lacked the necessary concepts to explain the soul’s immortality, however, and the idea of the soul is still closely bound to materiality.

The brotherhood of the Pythagoreans, wrote Sullivan, came to an end because when they gained political power, they tried to impose dietary restrictions on the inhabitants (no eating of beans). The latter rebelled against them. Their semi-monastic centers were destroyed and the survivors were scattered.

Chapter 3  The Eleatics

They are called such because they come from Elea. Though their central problem is still on nature and its first principle, their solution to the philosophical problems were altogether original, and are considered a passage from cosmology to metaphysics. Parmenides, the most representative of the Eleatics, identified the concept of being as the first principle. He was followed by two famous disciples, Zeno and Melissus.

Sullivan said that  Parmenides wrote a philosophical poem which is divided into two parts. The first part gives us his doctrine; the second a summary of contemporary opinions which he dismisses as erroneous. The two parts correspond to what he calls the two paths: the way of truth and the way of error.
According to Parmenides, change is an illusion and there is no such thing, really, as change.

Yarza notes that if Heraclitus conceives reality as perpetual becoming, Parmenides sees it as immutable being; if Heraclitus is the philosopher of becoming, Parmenides is the philosopher of absolute stability. Despite the sharp contrast between these two positions, it is an oversimplification of ideas to say that the philosophy of Parmenides was the reaction to that of Heraclitus. We are not even sure whether they knew each other’s teachings.

Sullivan continues: According to Parmenides, change is just an illusion; there is no such thing, really, as change. We should try to get behind the appearances of things. The true reality of all things is not air, fire, or anything like that. The one thing we can say about all things in common is that they exist, that they are being. Being, not change or becoming, is the key to reality. If a thing is not a being it is a non-being, nothing. But change could come about only through a mixture of being with something else—with nothing, in other words. Change, therefore, is impossible. Different things are the same thing—being.  There is no real difference between a tree and a horse. Reality is One. All differences, including changes, are just appearances. Diversity is simply the deception of the senses.

Yarza concludes that the importance of Parmenides  lies in his having put being at the center of philosophical enquiry. This posed challenges for those who came afterwards. How do you account for the plurality of things and the reality of change in relation to his idea of being? For the Eleatics--Parmenides, Zeno and Melissus--only being  existed, and multiplicity was an illusion.

The Eleatics’ position do not tie up with common sense; neither did the positions of Heraclitus convince common sense. It is the problem of the one against the many, the same against difference, change against permanence, reality against appearances. One side emphasized the role of the senses. The other emphasized reason to the point of excluding the testimony of the senses. Given these problems, and the unanswerable arguments launched by both philosophical camps, men in those times came to feel that the search for truth was a hopeless one. This despair of truth led to the era of skepticism.

Chapter 4  The Pluralists

The pluralists were the last of the pre-Socratic philosophers. There are called such, pluralists, because they chose not one, but many elements, as their first principle. Their ideas were occasioned by the challenging proposal of Parmenides, who said the everything is being.

Torn between the proposal of an immutable reality (Parmenides’ idea) and the reality of change (Heraclitus’ idea), they introduced as the unifying principle of reality, the multiplicity. Multiplicity must be the ultimate reality. But to explain change, a cause must be discovered to explain the mobility of things.

A Pluralist: Empedocles (and the four elements)

Empedocles, one of the pluralists, believed that there is not just one principle, but many. He wanted to be able to explain the idea of immutable reality on the one hand, and the visible change that things undergo on the other. How can we explain the origin of things and the changes they undergo? The only solution is the idea that there are various combinations of different principles in the course of time.

There are four elements, which are substances that are ungenerated, incorruptible, and always remain the same. They constitute the origin of all things. Only these elements exist, according to him, and by combining themselves in different ways, they take on a variety of forms, each particular combination giving rise to a particular kind of change. For Empedocles, the four elements are fire, water, air and earth. This doctrine of Empedocles is the origin of the notion of an unchangeable material cause, irreducible to no other thing, and capable only of uniting or separating itself from other elements.

Love and Hate: two forces of change

What makes the four elements unite with or separate from each other? According to Empedocles, it is Hate and Love.

Love brings things together, and therefore is at the origin of the generation of things. On the other hand, Hate is divisive and brings about corruption. Love and Hate are the two forces that are constantly at odds with each other. There is an alternation of the predominance of one force with the predominance of the other, and this gives rise to the cycles of generation and corruption present in the world.

Another Pluralist: Anaxagoras

Born near Miletus around the year 500 BC, his philosophy was similar to Empedocles: it is one more attempt to explain and reconcile the Eleatic principle (unity of reality) with the evidence of multiplicity. Anaxagoras also chose a manifold reality as first principle, hence, he is a pluralist philosopher. His first principle is that of a great mixture: an indeterminate mixture composed of an infinite number of substances (homeomeries), each one of them infinitely small in size. These small elements are qualitatively different from each other. Therefore, the principle of reality are not four elements, but infinitely many and qualitatively different from one another.

What explains change?

The answer is that different mixtures of these homeomeries give rise to different beings.

The Atomists

The atomist school represents another attempt to reconcile the unity of being (the idea of the Eleatics) with the multiplicity of the physical world. They say that everything is composed of atoms: they are indivisible (cannot be further divided), full, solid, compact, qualitatively identical with one another and unchangeable. They differ from the previous proposal in that Empedocles said that the elements are qualitatively different from one another. The Atomists say that they are the all the same. The Atomists say that these atoms interact with each other in a vacuum.

How are things different from each other?

For the atomists, the diversity of things is caused by the result of the movement of atoms in vacuum. The vacuum is a reality, which exists. Now when the atoms come together, they bring about generation; when they separate from one another, they bring about corruption. In reality, nothing is really corrupted since the component atoms are incorruptible. Neither is there generation, properly speaking. But what we have is the phenomena which is the result of the coming together or separation of atoms.

PART B - THE HUMANISTS

Chapter 1 – The Sophists

Sophism ushered in a new period in Greek philosophy in which man becomes the focus of philosophical discussions. For this reason, it was termed humanism. The two most popular sophists were Protagoras and Gorgias. It is important, however, to know the many cultural changes that occurred during that time.

Our geographical focus will now shift to the peninsula of Hellas (it is from this place that the term Hellenic comes from), especially the city of Athens. The philosophers who made this possible include the Sophists, Plato and Aristotle.

Historical Context: The Golden Age of Greece

Around the 5th century BC, Sparta and Athens, along with the other Greek city-states combined to repulse the mighty Persians. This was known as the Persian War. This victory propelled progress in different areas and led to a glory that would have no parallel in all history. There was progress in the arts, philosophy and rhetoric. Soon, Athens became the center of a naval and commercial empire, which was to bring her wealth and power.

Politically, Athens achieved a democratic form of government, which was unique in the ancient world. There was an atmosphere of freedom, no consideration for difference of class status,  and the promotion of justice. Masterpieces were produced during this period, which find no match: Homer in epic, Thucydides in History, Pindar in odes, etc.

Philosophical Movement: The Sophists

With the demand for professional training required in education people, the Sophists rose to the occasion. The Sophists demanded pay for their services and, therefore, catered to the well-to-do and the powerful. They specialized in the arts of eloquence and persuasion, as a preparation for careers in the law courts and on the public platform.

Protagoras

The most popular was Protagoras, a native of Thrace. He was born in 480 BC. He doesn’t share the bad reputation of later Sophists who didn’t care for truth and who were merely concerned with money. He was entrusted the task of helping draw up the constitution of a new colony.

Later, with the transition of government, he was expelled from Athens and one tradition has it that he drowned in the year 410 while crossing the sea on his way to Sicily.

Recall that the philosophers before Protagoras had conflicting positions regarding reality, conflicting ideas about the nature of truth. In the light of these oppositions and contradictions, Protagoras apparently despaired of the possibility of reaching the truth and declared that it is the private concern of each individual person.

Protagoras’ Relativism

Protagoras became famous for his saying:
“Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.” This statement was subject to many interpretations. It seemed to mean that no one really knows what is outside of himself. For each one, the appearance of things is different. Whatever appears to be the case for you is true even though to me it is false. Thus, everyone is always right; no one can ever be wrong. For him and the rest of the Sophists, then, there are no answers to our questions about reality. There is no truth apart form our private feelings about things, or if there is, it cannot be discovered.

Erroneous Moral Implications

In the realm of morals the denial of the possibility of knowing truth meant that the difference between good and evil cannot be discovered. It all depends on what you feel at the moment, on what is pleasant or unpleasant.

Similarly, in politics it is impossible to distinguish justice from injustice. The Sophist persuaded their students, then, that since one answer is as good as another, man should just focus on self-interest. They trained their students how to argue, regardless of the truthfulness of the position.

Protagoras and the Sophists used the art of antilogy. They would ask students to enumerate the contradictory arguments of a particular topic. They will identify the weakest argument and present it in such a way that it appeared most convincing than the contrary arguments.

This philosophy of Protagoras emptied truth and falsehood of their metaphysical grounds. He is good, however, in discovering what is evil and good in everything and in all circumstances. But his concept of good is whatever useful (utility) and convenient. Nothing, save utility, would distinguish good from evil.

In time, they contributed to the blurring of distinction between right and wrong in both private and public life. It also led to agnosticism: “As for the gods, it is impossible for me to affirm whether they exist or not”.

Gorgias

Along with Protagoras, he was among the most famous sophists. His philosophy is the opposite of the Eleatics (unicity of being in reality). It can be summarized in three theses:

First: nothing exists; Second: if anything existed, it cannot be known by man; Third: if it can be known, it cannot be transmitted and explained to others.

For Gorgias, we cannot even think of being. But if being were thinkable, it could not be communicated to others. Gorgias not only divorces thought from being, he also cuts the link between our words and the realities our words are meant to express. Words do not have any reference to what is real. Logically, what is important is just rhetoric. Although the words do not contain truth, it can be used to control minds and manipulate people. Despite this position, Gorgias still believed in the traditional norms of ethics. His disciples did not, and they used the principles of their master to go against ethical values. Rhetoric was for them a means to pursue political ambitions.

The Fall of Athens

Athens fell tragically, after a twenty-year war with Sparta (its former ally). It was a pointless war, but fed by self-seeking politicians. A disastrous plague hit Athens as well, contributing to their  total and ignominious defeat. They were occupied by the Spartans, and fell to the rule of thirty tyrants. This will be followed by a short resurgence of liberty and democracy, until they became part of the Macedonian Empire of Philip, and of his son, Alexander the Great.

Chapter 2 – Socrates

Among those who had foreseen the danger of collapse of the high civilization of Greece was Socrates (470-399 BC). For a generation, the Sophists taught the young men of Athens, as a consequence of their general denial of the possibility of knowing the truth, that not justice but the best arguments are the important thing in law courts; not what is right or wrong, but what is most persuasive is what counts on the political rostrum. To succeed, no matter by what means, is the single goal that counts.

Socrates saw in this doctrine the corruption of the people of Athens and the destruction of the state. He felt that there was really such things as justice and injustice, right and wrong, truth and falsity, that they were really important, and that they could be known. Socrates set himself against the Sophists, therefore, and sought to find the means of combating their error.

How was Socrates like?

As his portraits show, he was a very ugly man, with a snub nose and pop eyes. He walked in an awkward manner, according to Aristophanes, one of his disciples.

He was capable of great concentration, and was remembered getting lost in his deep thought for long periods. He was convinced that he had a sacred mission to bring truth to his fellow citizens. He felt that he could help save Athens from moral and political decadence if he were to succeed in showing that selfishness and dishonesty were, in the long run, self-defeating.
Ethics of Socrates & his Idea of the Soul

Socrates did not investigate on the nature of the universe. He was just following the tradition of the sophists who focused on man. Like them, he must have turned his back on natural philosophy because of the many contradictory views  that previous philosophers maintained on the subject. [But we also know that he was worried about the growing corruption of truth during his time].

Ethics or moral philosophy then became the exclusive theme of his teachings, following the sophists. The merit of Socrates precisely lies in his focus on the nature man. Man’s nature, for him, is determined by a soul. This principle is the cornerstone of his entire ethical philosophy.

Historians now regard him as the first philosopher to definitively place the soul at the center of the intellectual and moral life of man. This sheds light, too, on his personality. His only goal as an educator was to teach men how to know themselves and to discover the inestimable worth of their souls. Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone…are you not ashamed of heaping up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation and caring so little about wisdom and truth, and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all. His ideal shows his aversion for the sophists who cared little for the cultivation of the soul.

Virtue & Knowledge

Socrates’ idea of the soul gives us the key to understanding his idea of knowledge. For him, knowledge enables man to perfect his soul, to achieve his end and to attain happiness. This, too, revolutionized Greek ethics, which at that time gave absolute value to physical health, strength, riches, power and fame.

For Socrates, knowledge was the main source of virtue, just as ignorance was the source of every vice. But this knowledge is knowledge of what’s most important for man: what he is and what is good for him (what the soul is and what is good for the soul).

Aristotle later on was to disagree with Socrates on this point, for he felt that Socrates was not taking into account sufficiently the irrational elements in man—the instincts, feelings, and passions. What we want, Aristotle would say, is to be courageous, not to know what courage is. And it just doesn’t  square with the fact that when a man knows, for example, what justice is that he is therefore just.
It remains true, nevertheless, that with all the gaps and inadequacies, Socrates deserves the credit of raising the study of morals to a scientific level and, indirectly, through the investigating techniques he developed, of paving the way for the profound philosophic explorations of Plato and Aristotle. And what was his method of investigation?

The Socratic Method

1.	The use of question and answer

His method of teaching was an effort to reach the soul of his disciples by means of dialogue. Whereas the sophists delivered long speeches using all public speaking skills, his was always a dialogue. He would ask the student of his to discover the truth by way of a series of question and answer.

His starting point is always ignorance about something, and the dialogue is intended make the other aware of this, that one still falls short of knowing things. The end point of this dialogue is directed towards making all realize that we still know practically nothing. His famous line was: All I know is that I know nothing. It was a consequence of the conviction that all human wisdom is nothing compared to divine wisdom. Tradition has it that an oracle referred to him as the wisest man of Athens. He did not believe it at first, but after asking the people at that time about what they think and what they know, he arrived at the conclusion that the oracle was true.

Socrates was, in fact, the wisest man in Athens because he discovered that he was the only one who knew that he did not know anything.

2.	The use of irony

Irony is also a feature of his method, the destructive side of the technique, however, was to expose the ignorance of his interlocutor. But whereas this method led some people to be more humble, others felt humiliated when they realize that Socrates was asking but that he knew more about the subject that he was asking them about. Often, therefore, he ended up making new enemies for himself.

The Disciples of Socrates

Plato was the foremost disciple of Socrates. There were others who were later called the minor Socratics, including Euclid and Phaedo. Many of these disciples, in their turn, founded different schools of philosophy, each one interpreting the doctrine of the Master in his own way.
The Memorable Death of Socrates

For political reasons Socrates was brought to trial and was condemned to death. He had been too outspoken in his criticism of the follies and deception of the politicians. He never hesitated to remind his fellow citizens in Athens that part of their trouble was due to their own ignorance and selfishness.

They found a way to rebuke the one they regarded as an irritating troublemaker. Their accusation was that he did not believe in the gods of the city (the sin of impiety) and that he was corrupting the youth of Athens.  He was sentenced to death and was given a cup of poison to drink.

In his defense before he died he spoke and said that he must obey God rather than men: “for know that this is the command of God; and I believe that no greater good has ever happened in the state than my service to the God. For I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul… This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.”

Socrates affirmed his belief in a life after death, and then took leave of the unjust judges. “The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways—I to die, and you to live. Which is better only God knows.”

A month was to pass before the execution and part of the time was spent in conversation with his friends in his prison cell. He spoke about the immortality of the soul, and the blessing of death, which, for the true philosopher, represents the freeing from the shadow of unreality and the entrance into the realm where he can find wisdom in all her clarity and fullness.

Plato—his disciple—spoke of the last moments which his master bore with so much dignity and poise. The grief of Socrates’ friends and disciples echoed through the centuries and was immortalized in the account of Plato who wrote: “Such was the end of our friend, who, I may say, was the wisest and most just and the best of all men of his time whom I have known.”

Plato will reach a level of philosophy which will rise above that of his master…

Above, a portrait of Socrates, the humanist:  Plato’s beloved master and bereaved friend. 

Socrates in prison: talking to his friends about the soul, and life after death… before the deadly cup.

Socrates’ Idea of God 

Contrary to impiety, which was the accusation against Socrates, he truly believed in God. He had a lofty notion of the divinity which far surpassed the then existing idea of the Greeks, whose gods still had a lot of human characteristics. 

Like Anaxagoras before him, Socrates conceived of God as the Supreme Intelligence. God is the source of universal order and chief among the many gods which he no doubt believed in. His notion of God was very much in keeping with his ethical principles and his philosophy of man. This is clearly seen in the following words of Xenophontes which explain what we might call the Socratic proofs of God’s existence…

Socrates demonstrates that God exists

Don’t you think you have a share of intelligence? … And you still think that the intelligence is not to be found at all elsewhere? Don’t you see that your body contains a small portion of the earth, taken from the great mass of earth that we have around us; and that it also has some amount of water that everywhere exists? Don’t you realize that someone must have been responsible for the formation of your body, someone who took small amounts of the different elements from their super-abundant supply and joined them together in your constitution?

If no intelligence existed, how do you explain your possessing it—could you say it happened all by chance? How do you explain the wonderful order we observe among the different elements, infinite as they are in number and tremendously great in size? Can a non-intelligent force really be the source of all this?

Divine Voice that guides (daimonion)

Another feature of the religious life of Socrates was his belief in the presence of a divine voice in him that guided his actions. This sign, he said, which is a kind of voice, first began to come to me when I was a child; it always forbids but never commands me to do anything which I am going to do. 

For Socrates, it was a proof of the reality of divine providence.

PART C - PLATO

Chapter 1 – His Life & Works

Plato and his Story. 

Plato was the nickname of Aristocles. It meant “broadness” because he had broad shoulders. He was born in Athens in 427 BC. Coming form a noble family and with relatives occupying high government positions, he could have pursuid politics for his career. It was his long acquaintance with Socrates, however, and above all, the unjust execution of his master, that changed his entire life. He stayed in Athens in pursuit of philosophy and science. He also dedicated himself to the education of the youth. 

While remaining a philosopher, Plato kept a lively interest in politics, saying that politics finds in philosophy its best justification and guide. He spoke of the importance of philosophy in relation to politics in the following manner: “it is by this that men are enabled to see what justice in public and private life really is. Therefore, I said, there will be no cessation of evils for the sons of men, till either those who are pursuing a right and true philosophy receive sovereign power in the States, or those in power in the States, by some dispensation of providence become true philosophers.”

Plato went to Sicily and made the acquaintance of the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius I, the Old, who had him captured and sold as a slave. He was ransomed by a friend, Aniceris. He returned to Athens and founded a school of philosophy, the Academy, in 387. It was named after Academus, the owner of the garden where it was established. It will live an unbroken life of over nine hundred years. 

On his return to Syracuse, he served as adviser and guide to Dionysius II, son and successor of the tyrant, until he was again banished from the land. He went back to Athens and spent his life quietly teaching. He died in the year 347 BC, at the age of eighty.

Plato’s Philosophical Style

The strong influence exerted by Socrates on Plato is seen not only in Plato’s teachings but also in Plato’s manner of expounding them. The Dialogues are transcriptions, with a touch of his adaptations, of the dialogues that his master often engaged in. Socrates, in fact, is the protagonist of most of the Dialogues. As in ordinary conversations, he had recourse to metaphors, analogies, and even myths. He used them to clarify his teaching. He employed myths to help the human spirit to soar to heights hardly attainable by reason alone. Myths are, for Plato, the intuitive complement of rational arguments.

With time, Plato came to know other philosophers and matured his own thought. Along with ethics, he later ventured into cosmology and metaphysics. Gradually, his way of thinking took on a philosophy distinct from Socrates.

Plato’s Works: The Early Dialogues

The first dialogues of Plato are basically concerned with ethics. Written after the death of Socrates and before the year 390, they were also styled after the master. They dealt with virtues like justice and wisdom. He wrote that ignorance is the origin of evil actions and that genuine wisdom is absolutely needed in order to act correctly.  Wisdom is the virtue proper to the soul.

Another group of dialogues came later, but continued being focused on ethical themes. These works began, however, to show greater originality and further maturity.

Dialogues of his Mature Years

The second period of Plato is marked by a shift in topics, from ethics to a return to the old metaphysical problems of the pre-socratics. He realized that the question about man and his moral behavior could not be answered adequately without the recourse to metaphysics. 
Socrates had the novel idea of the soul but did not define its specific nature. Explanations regarding the soul’s immortality and superiority to the body were lacking in Socrates. Despite Socrates rich notion of God, there was no metaphysical explanation. 

It was Plato’s interest in philosophy of nature that brought him to discover the Ideas. This became the pivotal doctrine of his entire philosophy. He recasts the philosophical insights of Heraclitus and Parmenides from this new perspective. 

The maturity of his thoughts is seen in the way he dealt  with the problems occasioned by his doctrine of the Ideas.

This set of dialogues were written between years 387 and 367. The most important among them are The Republic, Banquet, Phaedo, and Phaedrus.

Dialogues of his Old Age

Written between 367 and 348 these dialogues bring up lengthy discussions on three questions: the metaphysical problem of the Ideas, cosmology and politics. The political problems were a continuation of inquiries earlier made in The Republic. In his other works, he tackles the question of the reality of the sensible world. He asked, “Should we, along with the Eleatics, affirm the unicity of being, and deny as a consequence the reality of the many? Or rather, should we accept the multiplicity of being and reject the doctrine of Parmenides?”

Chapter 2 – Metaphysics & Cosmology

Plato’s doctrine can be summarized in the ff:
(1)	Ideas are the principles of all things.
(2)	The sensible world participates in the Ideas.
(3)	Human souls fulfill themselves by the contemplation of the ideas.
(4)	Morality, education and politics consist in communicating this contemplation to others.

The Ideas and the World of Ideas (1)

For Plato, the doctrine of Ideas constitutes the center of his thought. He devoted his efforts into answering the questions tied up to this teaching of his. 

He affirms that there are two orders of reality—one which is sensible and material; another which is immaterial and invisible, and which can only be grasped by the intellect. 

Idea for him is truly real. It is not the concept or universal which he endows subsistence when he speaks of the Idea. The idea, for him, is what the mind looks at when it thinks. Without Ideas there would be no thought at all. It can be grasped by the intelligence but not produced by the intelligence. Ideas exist by themselves and in themselves. Moreover, 

Ideas are immutable unlike the ever-changing world of the sensible.

In saying this, he rejected the relativism of Protagoras, who made truth depend on the knowing subject. At the same time, he also rejected the relativism of the heraclitans, who affirmed that the nature of things was not stable, and therefore, not intelligible.

We see the influence of Parmenides in Plato’s doctrine of the Ideas: Ideas constitute the world of what is truly real, and this world is completely immutable. On the other hand, we also see the influence of Heraclitus when Plato speaks of the physical world as constantly changing. Plato’s teaching of the two separate worlds of the sensible and the intelligible is, therefore, a synthesis of the philosophies of Parmenides and Heraclitus.

Finally, Plato said that the Ideas are the cause of the sensible, or that the world of the sensible cannot be explained apart from the intelligible. 

[deTorre] Plato explains that when we see realities in the world, these realities are found in fragmentary form, i.e., piece by piece, not in their fullness. We don’t find beauty as such, but beautiful things; we neither find justice as such, but perceive just actions; we don’t find beauty as such, but beautiful things. These realities in the world are only fragmentary, therefore. They are like images, which have to have a corresponding model. The models of all things are the ideas or forms. The forms or ideas must exist by themselves in another world. 

The sensible world participate in the ideas (2) 

For everything that we can define (Socratic influence), there must exist an “idea” in that “world of ideas”. And these things we see around us participate in, or imitate the pure ideas. There seem to be two worlds: the world of things (sensible) and the world of ideas (intelligible); but the latter is the fundamental world according to Plato, while the other is only a “participation” or “imitation”.

Sensible realities were, for Plato, objects of opinion, not of true knowledge. They have being insofar as they participate in Ideas, and at the same time they are not because of their participation in matter.

Matter is characterized by indetermination and the absence of intelligibility, and sensible realities share in these characteristics because they are immersed in matter. Matter is described as the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and, in a way, of sensible things. By nature, it is an invisible and formless being which receives all things and in some mysterious way partake of the intelligible, and is most incomprehensible. Matter is never seen in its pure form. But the matter we see has already been given form by the Demiurge. The Demiurge is Plato’s god-creator, a being with intellect and will who shapes matter using the world of Ideas as his pattern. He therefore brings order and structure into what was previously chaotic and shapeless.

A summary of cosmology and the Demiurge: Plato’s cosmology involves the following principles…

There is a model (ideas), a reflection of the model (the sensible world), and a Demiurge who forms the sensible world using matter as his raw material. The Demiurge is the intelligent god who forms the sensible world on the basis of the Ideas and matter. His work is fruit of his desire to make all things good.

The Human Soul of man (3)

Plato, like Socrates, affirms that man is essentially his soul. Of the two principles of man, one (the soul) belongs to the level of the intelligible and the other (the body) to the level of the sensible; and the former is what essentially constitutes his nature.

Plato held that the true part of man is really his soul and that souls of men once enjoyed a kind of existence in which they were in direct contact with the Ideas. Then for some reason man fell from his high estate and, as punishment for some crime, the soul was condemned to exist as a prisoner in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul, Plato said. But even in his fallen state, man remembers what he once was in the world of ideas. 

What we call knowing is the remembering of what we once knew in our unencumbered state. This teaching of Plato is called the doctrine of Reminiscence. Our knowledge is hazy and confused because our remembrance of the Ideas is dulled and entangled in the images which pour through our senses from the changing world of bodies outside us. 

The soul when using the body as an instrument of perception, is then dragged by the body into the region of the changeable, hence the confusion of man. But when returning into herself she reflects, then she passes into the other world, of immortality, unchangeableness… And this state of the soul is called wisdom.

Plato says, then, that the soul is made for contemplation of the ideas, in which its happiness is found. He first proves the existence of the soul, and then its immortality. But goes even farther by proving the pre-existence of souls (an error). His error is in thinking of the soul as a complete substance, a being in itself, and the motor of the body: hence, the soul is using the body. (Aristotle, while realizing that the soul is the substantial form of the body, emphasizes the substantial union of the body and soul). Unlike Plato, Aristotle shows very clearly the unity of body and soul, and why the soul cannot exist before the body, as it is its substantial form. 

Also, since the soul is spiritual, it does not disintegrate or die when the body dies. The soul goes on living, since it is not material at all.

Another error of Plato is to think that everything has a soul, not only man. He held this belief from the Pythagoreans, very similar to Hindu beliefs: the reincarnation of souls, etc.

Chapter 3 – Politics & Ethics

Lastly, for Plato, morality, education and politics consist in communicating the contemplation of Ideas to others (4)

For Plato, God exists. God is the supreme soul or intelligence and the origin of all motion. But he also calls “gods” the other intelligences which are under that “supreme” one: these are the “intermediary beings” identified with the “celestial bodies”, which are also “animated” by superior souls. These celestial bodies are somehow related to our lives, hence the belief in astrology or horoscopes, in some beings up there in the sky who rule our lives. This is a form of the error of determinism.

By the contemplation of ideas, the soul resembles God more and more. In order to achieve this, man must be righteous in this life, and this is the beginning of that life of contemplation of the ideas, which we will receive after this one. And what about evil? Evil, he says, is the punishment for error, and consists in being “embodied” again, i.e., reincarnated.

The School of Athens - Raphael

Where is Reality?
Plato says: In the World of Ideas. 
Aristotle says: In the Sensible World.
PART D - ARISTOTLE

Chapter 1 – His Life & Works

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was known as the greatest of the pagan philosophers. Of an aristocratic family, he was born at  Stagira, a Greek colony. His father was a renowned physician from Thrace. He was orphaned at an early age. As a young man he was sent to Athens and enrolled in the Academy around the year 366. 

In 343, Aristotle was called by Philip, the Macedonian, to take care of the education of his son who came to be known as Alexander the Great. He stayed in Macedonia until Alexander ascended to the throne in 336. In 335, he returned to Athens and established a school, the Lyceum. The school was also known as Peripatos, the Greek word for “a stroll” or “a walk”, and the members were called Peripatetics, because Aristotle had the custom of giving his lessons while walking up and down the garden of the place. Later in his life, he was in exile in Chalcis, in northern Greece. He died there a year afterwards. 

Like Plato, he wrote in the form of dialogues, which were meant for reading by the general public. They were known as the popular or exoteric works. Most of them were lost. Only the prose treatises known as esoteric works—for those who have already gone through a thorough philosophical formation—have survived. Among them are Metaphysics or First Philosophy, Physics, Philosophy of Nature, Nicomachean and Ethics and Politics, which were ethical treatises, Poetics and the Rhetoric.

Chap. 2–Metaphysics & Cosmology

Without doubt, Aristotle was Plato’s most brilliant pupil. He did not oppose his master, but brought to fulfillment his teacher’s philosophy. He accepted the universals. He parted from his master, however, in the doctrine of two worlds. For Aristotle there is only one world, the world that we perceive through our senses. 

[Both Aristotle and Plato agree that there is a universal (which is something stable). Aristotle, however, finds the universal in particular things, and calls it the essence of things, while Plato finds that the universal exists apart from particular things, and is related to them as their prototype or exemplar.

For Plato Ideas cause things, they exist in a separate world. For Aristotle, essence can only be found in sensible reality, it does not have a world of its own. For him, therefore, philosophic method implies the ascent from the study of particular phenomena to the knowledge of essences. 

To illustrate this further, Aristotle agreed with Plato, for instance, that there is only one whiteness, one treeness, one justice, one triangularity. They are not, however, in a world by themselves. Whiteness is in all white things, treeness in all trees, justice in all just actions. Instead of calling them ideas Aristotle called them forms. 

Where do I begin? How do we proceed?

[RS] In our study of Aristotle, what order should we follow? The most basic would be to ask how we would know, or how we could arrive at the knowledge of such. But to start with an intuition like that of Plato would be hard to prove. So he proposed to start with what we can observe, that is, with sensible reality. Hence we can start with this process of knowing. 

Thus, before we delve into Metaphysics and Physics, we could start first with Logic/our Way of Knowing and begin with sense experience. But Aristotle further says that the sensible would have to also be caused by a transcendent principle, the cause of sensible reality. For him, there is a first principle, the cause of all causes, the unmoved mover or prime mover (primum movens immobile). Causality, then, is also one of the elementary principles. But aside from causality, we have to also look at the basic composition of beings: how they are.

In the metaphysical order, the highest composition of being is actuality (entelecheia) and potentiality (dynamis). The former is perfection, realization, fullness of being; the latter imperfection, incompleteness, perfectibility. Actuality and potentiality are found in all beings, with the exception of the Supreme Cause, in which there is no imperfection, and, therefore, no potentiality but pure actuality (Actus Purus).

So how do we proceed? Beginning with observable, we have to start with the most basic: that they are, hence the importance of Metaphysics and the study of the most basic concept of being. In Metaphysics, we will also observe that there is motion or change, hence, and this will require the study of something passes from potentiality to actuality (act and potency) which underlies all change or motion. 

The Knowing and Sense Experience

Aristotle approaches the problems of philosophy with a scientific frame of mind. He makes experience to be the true source of all our knowledge, intellectual, as well as sensible. "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses" is a fundamental principle with him. All knowledge begins with sense-experience, which of course has for its object the concrete, particular, changeable phenomenon.

But though intellectual knowledge begins with sense-experience, it does not end there, for it has for its object the abstract, universal, immutable essence. This theory of cognition is, so far, summed up in the principles: Intellectual knowledge is essentially dependent on sense-knowledge, and intellectual knowledge is, nevertheless, superior to sense-knowledge.
How, then, does the mind pass from the lower knowledge to the higher? Aristotle's answer is, that the mind discovers the intelligible in the sense-perceived. The mind does not, as Plato imagined, bring out of a previous existence the recollection of certain ideas, of which it is reminded at sight of the phenomenon.

Aristotle's theory, therefore, is that the universal does not exist apart from the particular, as Plato taught, but in particular things. The universal as such, in its full-blown intelligibility, is the work of the mind, and exists in the mind alone though it has a foundation in the potentially universal essence which exists independently of the mind and outside the mind.

The Concepts of Form and Matter

All things around us are made up of two principles. First, there is form—that which makes them what they are; it gives things their basic way of being: manness, treeness, and so on. Manness doesn’t exist by itself though. But there are individual men—Socrates, Plato, Zeno. 

Now form alone is not enough to explain the actually existing individual men, trees, and so on. There must also be something that limits them, which ties them down to this particular way of being to this particular way of being, and not any other, to this particular time and place, to this quantity. There must be, in short, a second basic principle in things, a principle of limitation, a principle which limits form restricts it, so to speak, makes it individual, quantified, existing in a definite time and place. To this principle Aristotle gave the name matter. 

Given these two principles he was able to account for the stability and permanence of things through the principle of form. Say, once you know what the form of triangle is (triangleness), you have something fixed that the intellect will always recognize regardless of variations of things that have the form of a triangle, regardless of time and place, etc. But outside the intellect, this form (a triangular form) never exists except in concrete or particular examples of triagles. So form is a principle which is imperfect and needs to be completed by a second principle—the principle of matter. Neither exists by itself. The principle of matter is what accounts for particularity, individuality (this triangle, that triangle), imperfection, change.

[de Torre] Bodies are, therefore, composed of two principles: matter which is the principle of undifferentiation and form, which is the principle of differentiation. The Greek for matter or common stuff is hyle, and morphe for form: hence, hylomorphism or matter-and-form doctrine. This is a great achievement in natural philosophy which proved to be very useful for Christian philosophy.

Act and Potency

Aristotle extended the notions by which he explained the composition of bodies to cover the whole range of reality—incorporeal as well as corporeal. 

[de Torre] There are things which are capable of becoming other things: this table has the capacity of being made into a chair, but not that of being made into a man. Things have real capacities, really rooted in their being. Potency is indeed something real, though not actual. We call potency or potentiality that which can be something but is not yet; and we call act that which is already. The passage from the potency to the corresponding act is called motion or change. 

Potency - Motion - Act

[cf. de Torre] The concepts of motion and act are directly evident to the intelligence and need no demonstration. Aristotle defined motion as the act of being in potency in so far as it is still in potency. [Change or motion is the actualization of of the potential as such]. When we observe motion, we know that it is in act. Every reality is in act, something that is there. But motion is not perfect act, because if it were perfect it would no longer be motion. Act, in which there is no more motion, is more perfect. Motion is in still in transition. Change or motion, therefore, is something in between—an incomplete act. 

It is from motion that we extract the first meaning of potency and act. Motion could be varied: local motion in terms of place; increase or decrease in quantity; alteration in terms of quantity; generation or corruption (in terms of motion from one substance to another). Aside from motion, knowledge enhances our notion of potency and act: from not knowing to knowing (not being a doctor to now being a doctor); from habitual knowledge to actual consideration (e.g., non-practicing medical doctor to practicing medical doctor).

Now all finite beings are perfectible, they can always become better. As long as they have a potency they can actualize it. And consequently, their being can increase, just as by knowing more, we can increase in being in an immaterial way. The same happens with our willing: by acquiring virtues, our being and new actualities increase. If a being has no further possibilities in its make-up, then we say that is pure act, exhausting the full actuality of being. Everything else that is not pure act is composed of act and potency. [Only God is pure act; His being is perfect; His manner of being is identified with his act of being].

Chapter 3 – Man, Ethics & Politics

The Theme of Man

With the way he explained the process of knowing which involves the senses and the intellect, Aristotle gives a picture of man different from that of Plato. For Plato, the real man is the soul, and the body is a prison house which darkens and deadens the soul. But Aristotle, holding that all knowledge has its origin in the senses, had to hold that that the body was just as much a part of man as the soul. Just as in all other bodies, there is in man a union of two principles, of form and matter. The soul of man is his form and that the form exists limited, individuated. The limitation of man is having a body, but man would not be man if he did not exist having this body and existing in time and in a specific place. 

Plato held the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls and held, therefore, that the soul is immortal. Aristotle rejected the doctrine of pre-existence and ignored the problem of the soul’s immortality. His little treatment in this matter is ambiguous and inconclusive.

The Theme of Ethics: Virtue & Happiness

The starting-point of ethical inquiry is the question: In what does happiness consist? Aristotle answers that man's happiness is determined by the end or purpose of his existence, or in other words, that his happiness consists in the "good proper to his rational nature". For man's prerogative is reason. His happiness, therefore, must consist in living conformably to reason, that is, in living a life of virtue. Virtue is the perfection of reason, and is naturally twofold, according as we consider reason in relation to the lower powers (moral virtue) or in relation to itself (intellectual, or theoretical, virtue). 

Recall that Socrates had made knowledge the equivalent of virtue. Aristotle, however emphasizes the fact that to know is not the same as to do. In the realm of acting, the fact of free will makes possible for us to choose in contradiction to what we know is right. He stressed, therefore, the importance of developing the virtues in man for the strengthening of the will and for the control of the animal appetites.

A fundamental question that dominates ethics:
What is the good?

Like all movement human actions also have an end, this end is what constitutes the good. Man acts for the good. Happiness is the attainment of the good. The true human good consists in the contemplative activity of the intelligence, to contemplate God as the Supreme Being. This is wisdom.

Politics: Friendship and Sociability

An important constituent of happiness, according to Aristotle, is friendship, the bond between the individual and the social aggregation, between man and the State.

Man is essentially, or by nature, a "social animal", that is to say, he cannot attain complete happiness except in social and political dependence on his fellow man. This is the starting point of political science.

Aristotle also held that the State is not absolute, as Plato taught, and that there is no ideal State. The best form of government is that which best suits the character of the people.

PART  E  -  HELLENISM

Hellenism refers to the cultural phenomenon brought about by a political event. Within a short span of time, Alexander the Great had succeeded in building an immense empire. In order to unite the conquered peoples, he undertook to spread Greek culture throughout his domains. But he died shortly after, in 323 AD. His generals, in the dismemberment of the empire, managed to put into effect his plan to a certain degree. This was the origin of the numerous cities which became the center of political economic and cultural life: Pergamon, Ephesus, Antioch, Rhodes, Alexandria, etc. Athens lost its hold, but the Greek tongue had become the universal language. It lost its original purity, and koine, which was the popular version became the medium of culture and instruction.

From 197 BC onwards, Rome grew in power within the ancient empire until they took over Alexandria. Hellenic culture passed on to Rome, surviving until the decadence of the Roman empire in the 4th C.

Christianity was born and grew within this context and permeated the every fiber of society.
There came a general loss of interest in public affairs, but wise men still had a strong hold on the minds of people, with every door of important cities open to who are willing to teach them something. Enormous libraries were in vogue, like the one in Alexandria, which was burned later by the Arab general Omar in 600 AD. 

Philosophy took a new turn, with people losing the love for wisdom for wisdom’s sake; all they care for was how to be happy and live accordingly. Philosophy focused on ethics, with the influence of Socrates still felt, thanks to lesser disciples of his. Pre-Socratic physics, too, started replacing the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. People denied even explicitly the anything beyond the sensible. Materialism followed. There was a deterioration of depth in speculation and more focus on resolving existential problems. 

The three main Hellenistic philosophies were Epicurianism, stoicism and skepticism. The schools of Plato will get more and more adulterated until this genuine thought is replaced by skepticism. The same was the fate of the Lyceum since no disciple of Aristotle kept the speculative standards of the master. Naturalism and later materialism took their toll.

Chapter 1 – Epicureanism

Epicurus founded a new philosophical movement  which occupied a prominent place during the Hellenistic period. He was born in Samos in 341 AD. He died in the year 270 but his doctrine survived until the 4th C. He was a prolific writer but only three letters of his reached us. 

His philosophy is eminently practical; it purports to reveal the secret of happiness. He rejected any kind of theoretical knowledge in general. He only accepted what is compatible with a purely materialistic view of life. Only material things existed for him. Happiness is seen in terms of pleasure. Ethics was no longer for public life as Aristotle envisioned it, but for the individual, independent of the city or other social institutions. For only the individual is the subject of happiness.

The criteria of knowledge or canons for him can be summed up into three: validity of sensations, the importance of prenotions, and the feelings of pain and pleasure.
Every sensation is always valid and there is no possibility of error in sensation.

The second criterion of truth are the remembrance of a repetition of the same sensible perceptions. These are the mental representation of things or prenotions that are stored in our memory. Man can make use of them when the object is physically absent. They are made the basis of all rational activity. One can anticipate through them. 
Lastly, Epicurus assigns to the sentiments of pleasure and pain a function superior to all other sensations because it is through them that we determine how we ought to act. Whatever is pleasurable is good; whatever produces pain is evil. It is a hedonistic philosophy.

This is why we say that pleasure is the principle and end of a happy life. We know the pleasure is the first good that is in agreement with our nature. All our acts of choosing and rejecting have their origin in pleasure. It is what we refer to as a norm when we judge concerning what is good. 

The supreme good that man can enjoy is the tranquility of soul that comes from the absence of suffering and worry. Thus, man must remove all kinds of fear and superstition. The first of fears is fear of death. Death is the total absence of existence, not losing existence only, nor a passage to another life. It is the remedy to sickness. Why? Because when we die, there will be no more sensations. It will suppress our desire for immortality. 

Epicurean ethics also sees happiness in the absence of sorrow. Pleasure means the absence of sorrow. Only sorrow can jeopardize human happiness. He would show that pleasure was within the reach of everyone.
Neither should one fear the gods, since they are indifferent to—oblivious of—our affairs. Since people had need of practical wisdom of that time of void, many accepted this teaching despite the theoretical shortcomings. 

Chapter 2 – The Stoicism

The new philosophical masters no longer rose from Athens as before. This was the case with Epicurus and the same is true with Zenon, the founder of Stoicism who was born in Cyprus around the year 333 BC. He died around the year 262 in Athens, where he established his school. Crisippus was the one who systematized Stoic doctrine, however. 

Zenon began his work as a teacher carrying out his activities beside the porticoe or stoa. Hence, his school came to be known as the school of the stoa. Stoicism, which was mainly concerned with ethics, would last for five centuries, from 3rd C BC to the 2nd C AD. It engaged in fierce polemics with the mechanicist materialism of Epicurus and the hedonist-inspired morals of the cyrenaic school.

Above all, stoicism is a way of life designed to attain the supreme good of happiness, now conceived in terms of impassibility and imperturbability. Stoic imperturbability is not that of Epicurus. It means, rather, the practice of virtue. Virtue consists in wisdom, but not wisdom conceived in terms of speculative knowledge or contemplation, but as the dominion of reason over human life. Stoicism is a hybrid philosophy, incorporating the influence of Aristotle in logic and the physics of Heraclitus. It is still materialistic in nature although characterized as well by an element of rationalism.

What is happiness for the stoic? It is a consequence of living according to nature. It is not living according to what the Epicureans say, which is to live according to pleasure, for this would put man in the same level as the animals. What is proper to man is his rational soul, his logos, which forms part of the divine logos; therefore, happiness or the end of human life, consists in following the dictates of reason.

Consequently, living according to nature means living according to reason and living according to virtue. Virtue is the perfection of reason. And virtue, understood as the perfect actuality of reason, means happiness. All virtues constitute a single virtue. 

Happiness does not depend on concupiscence, pleasure and on any other thing considered as good. The stoics repudiate every kind of passion or emotion as the origin of all evils. The wise man should eliminate from himself any passion or movement which might perturb his soul. This is how he will come to attain the proverbial stoic apathy. 

Observation/analysis: Based on the above data, Stoicism is, therefore, characterized by excessive intellectualism which offers an erroneous view of human nature. On the pretext of finding happiness in the rule of reason it misconstrues the important role played by the volitional and non-rational aspects of human nature in the life of man. 

But the stoics had a notion of law which surpasses that of Plato and Aristotle. Since the stoics identified reason with God, they taught the doctrine of the eternal and universal law, a law common to all men, or the natural law. 

Chapter 3 – Skepticism

A certain skepticism was already appeared in the pre-Socratic days. Now it resurfaced with Pyrrho.
Pyrrho was born in Elida towards the year 365 AD and died, more or less, around the year 270 AD. Whereas he did not found a school, he had a powerful personality whose novel lifestyle was taken as a model by those who listened to his teachings.

Like the Epicureans and the stoics, he wanted to give a solution to the problems of life, convinced that the attainment of happiness is possible. Unlike these philosophers, however, Pyrrho’s solution does not rest on any truth or certitude, but on the contrary, on the absence of truth.

Pyrrho’s doctrine goes beyond the sophists who said that nothing can be known with certainty. The sophists fell into relativism and said that man determines the truth according to his knowledge, which in turn is based on the senses that are constantly subject to changes. Recall that Protagoras, the sophist, was famous for his words Man is the measure of all things… Those ideas lead to moral relativism. Now Pyrrho, the skeptic, rejects even the possibility of having any such criterion of knowing the truth. What there is in reality are appearances. Things can be contradictory: there is no difference between one thing and another; things cannot be measured, nor can they be distinguished from one another; neither our sensations nor our opinions can be true or false. Therefore, we should not have any opinion about anything, and it is not necessary to give our consent. We should not feel disturbed about anything because things are and are not.

There are two man implications of the above attitude: one is aphasia and the other is ataraxia. Aphasia means that one has (1) to abstain from making any judgment, and as a consequence, have nothing but (2) indifference towards everything.  This is ataraxia. This is what happiness consists in.

Observation/analysis: This thesis, of course, has its inconsistencies and it will not hold, as is the case with all who maintain relativism. If nothing is true, then not even this thesis of Pyrrho—according to which truth does not exist—can be held as true.

The other skeptic was Carneades (219-129 AD), who rejected the dogmatism of the stoics. Like Pyrrho, he held that there was no criterion of truth whatsoever. His conclusion was the same: to suspend all judgment. However, since we have to live, and in order to be happy, the practical criterion of action should be probability. Theoretically, one should withhold assent and suspend judgment.  But for practical necessities, human behavior can be based on the subjective possibility of choosing from a number of alternatives, since we cannot base it on any objective criterion of truth.

Chapter 4 – Neo-Platonism

The hope of finding the true meaning of life and the means to attain happiness and salvation were always in the intellectual climate of all periods. Interest for speculative problems declined and resurfaced. 

From the 1st to the 2nd c AD, the names of Aristotle and especially of Plato were once again heard in scholarly circles. And as the end of skepticism was drawing closer, a new school of thought emerged in Alexandria: neo-Platonism. As with Aristotelianism, it recognized the existence of transcendent principles. It helped redirect the direction of philosophy towards religion. Neo-Platonism was the last great synthesis of thoughts in the Greek world.

The new theme that this school brought to light was that of the First principle, studied in itself and in its relation to the world. Philosophy becomes theology, and thus will be of great interest to the first Christians.

Philo of Alexandria: Born in 1 BC of a wealthy Jewish family, Philo grew up in the Graeco-Roman world in Egypt. He was a believing Jew of the diaspora (Jews living outside of Palestine). 

His intellectual achievement was a novel phenomenon since it was inspired by a desire to harmonize religion (he knew the Old Testament) and philosophy. The importance of his works is the rediscovery of transcendent dimension of reality, so dear to Plato, and the affirmation of the existence of suprasensible realitites. Among these is the existence of the absolutely simple and incorruptible God. He pointed to the many attributes of God: his ineffability, his absolute transcendence, his incomprehensibility. 

He argued that the term which expresses God’s nature in comprehensive way is through his name: I am Who Am. Athough he did not draw all the consequences from this, it will be Scholasticism, and particularly St. Thomas, who will elaborate on this doctrine. It was clear for Philo, however, that God is the Being who makes it possible for all other things to exist. Philo also took the credit of introducing, for the first time in the history of philosophy, the biblical notion of creation. Everything in the world has been created by God. 

The other neo-Platonist was Plotinus (232-270 AD). His main objective is to teach men the path that leads to intimate union with God. But this spiritual aspiration rests on a philosophical interpretation of reality. He talked about the absolute transcendence of the First Principle. The notion of emanation is central to his philosophy: Everything, including the sensible world, emanates from the One, and everything should return to the One. 

Aside from these two, others who founded schools includes Porphyry and Proclus. After them, no other philosopher of merit followed among the neo-Platonists. Soon, neo-Platonism began its gradual decline along with the pagan philosophy of Greece until it eventually disappeared. In the year 529, Justinian banned all pagans from holding any public office, including that of teaching. This year is generally considered as the close of the period of ancient philosophy. This paved the way, however, to the spread of Christianity which provided the pagan world with the true answer to the search for wisdom and moral renewal, that the Greek philosophers failed to bring to a successful conclusion.

Sources:

Ignatius Yarza, History of Ancient Philosophy, Sinag-tala publishers, Manila 1994.

Joseph de Torre, Christian Philosophy, Sinag-tala, Manila 1980.

Daniel Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy: The Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition, Tan Books, Illinois 1992.