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A New History of Western Philosophy

Summary

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Thoughts

Highlights

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Part One
Ancient Philosophy 🔗

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1
Beginnings: From Pythagoras to Plato 🔗

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The Four Causes 🔗

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Scientific inquiry, he believed, was above all inquiry into the causes of things; and there were four different kinds of cause: the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause. To give a crude illustration of what he had in mind: when Alfredo cooks a risotto, the material causes of the risotto are the ingredients that go into it, the efficient cause is the chef himself, the recipe is the formal cause, and the satisfaction of the clients of his restaurant is the final cause. 🔗

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Thales and his successors posed the following question: At a fundamental level is the world made out of water, or air, or fire, or earth, or a combination of some or all of these? 🔗

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The Pythagoreans were more interested in the numbers in the world’s recipe than in the ingredients themselves. They supposed, Aristotle says, that the elements of numbers were the elements of all things, and the whole of the heavens was a musical scale. 🔗

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The Milesians 🔗

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‘All things are full of gods’, and the other was ‘Water is the first principle of everything’. 🔗

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Plato, among others, tells the following tale:
Thales was studying the stars and gazing into the sky, when he fell into a well, and a jolly and witty Thracian servant girl made fun of him, saying that he was crazy to know about what was up in the heavens while he could not see what was in front of him beneath his feet. (Theaetetus 174a)
An unlikely story went around that he had met his death by just such a fall while stargazing. 🔗

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Like Thales he was credited with a number of original scientific achievements: the first map of the world, the first star chart, the first Greek sundial, and an indoor clock as well. He taught that the earth was cylindrical in shape, like a stumpy column no higher than a third of its diameter. Around the world were gigantic tyres full of fire; each tyre was punctured with a hole through which the fire could be seen from outside, and the holes were the sun and moon and stars. Blockages in the holes accounted for eclipses of the sun and phases of the moon. The celestial fire which is nowadays largely hidden was once a great ball of flame around the infant earth; when this ball exploded, the fragments grew tyres like bark around themselves. 🔗

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The fundamental principle of things, he said, must be boundless or undefined (apeiron). Anaximander’s Greek word is often rendered as ‘the Infinite’, but that makes it sound too grand. He may or may not have thought that his principle extended for ever in space; what we do know is that he thought it had no beginning and no end in time and that it did not belong to any particular kind or class of things. ‘Everlasting stuff’ is probably as close a paraphrase as we can get. Aristotle was later to refine the notion into his concept of prime matter. 🔗

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He saw the universe as a field of competing opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry. Sometimes one of a pair of opposites is dominant, sometimes the other: they encroach upon each other and then withdraw, and their interchange is governed by a principle of reciprocity. 🔗

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Like Thales, he thought that the earth must rest on something, but he proposed air, rather than water, for its cushion. The earth itself is flat, and so are the heavenly bodies. These, instead of rotating above and below us in the course of a day, circle horizontally around us like a bonnet rotating around a head (KRS 151–6). The rising and setting of the heavenly bodies is explained, apparently, by the tilting of the flat earth. 🔗

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Air is divine, and generates deities out of itself (KRS 144–6); air is our soul, and holds our bodies together (KRS 160). 🔗

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The Pythagoreans 🔗

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He is credited with inventing the word ‘philosopher’: instead of claiming to be a sage or wise man (sophos) he modestly said that he was only a lover of wisdom (philosophos) 🔗

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The Pythagoreans’ discovery that there was a relationship between musical intervals and numerical ratios led to the belief that the study of mathematics was the key to the understanding of the structure and order of the universe. Astronomy and harmony, they said, were sister sciences, one for the eyes and one for the ears (Plato, Rep. 530d). 🔗

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The dietary rules were connected with Pythagoras’ beliefs about the soul. It did not die with the body, he believed, but migrated elsewhere, perhaps into an animal body of a different kind.3 Some Pythagoreans extended this into belief in a three-thousand-year cosmic cycle: a human soul after death would enter, one after the other, every kind of land, sea, or air creature, and finally return into a human body for history to repeat itself (Herodotus 2. 123; KRS 285). 🔗

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Xenophanes 🔗

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The basic element, he maintained, was not water nor air, but earth, and the earth reaches down below us to infinity. ‘All things are from earth and in earth all things end’ (D.K. 21 B27) calls to mind Christian burial services and the Ash Wednesday exhortation ‘remember, man, thou art but dust and unto dust thou shalt return’. But Xenophanes elsewhere links water with earth as the original source of things, and indeed he believed that our earth must at one time have been covered by the sea. This is connected with the most interesting of his contributions to science: the observation of the fossil record. 🔗

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the sun, he maintained, was new every day. It came into existence each morning from a congregation of tiny sparks, and later vanished off into infinity. The appearance of circular movement is due simply to the great distance between the sun and ourselves. It follows from this theory that there are innumerable suns, just as there are innumerable days, because the world lasts for ever even though it passes through aqueous and terrestrial phases (KRS 175, 179). 🔗

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God did not tell us mortals all when time began
Only through long-time search does knowledge come to man. 🔗

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Heraclitus 🔗

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He was nicknamed ‘the Enigmatic One’ and ‘Heraclitus the Obscure’ 🔗

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Again like Xenophanes, Heraclitus believed that the sun was new every day (Aristotle, Mete. 2. 2355b13–14), and, like Anaximander, he thought the sun was constrained by a cosmic principle of reparation (KRS 226). The ephemeral theory of the sun is indeed in Heraclitus expanded into a doctrine of universal flux. Everything, he said, is in motion, and nothing stays still; the world is like a flowing stream. If we step into the same river twice, we cannot put our feet twice into the same water, since the water is not the same two moments together (KRS 214). That seems true enough, but on the face of it Heraclitus went too far when he said that we cannot even step twice into the same river (Plato, Cra. 402a). Taken literally, this seems false, unless we take the criterion of identity for a river to be the body of water it contains rather than the course it flows. Taken allegorically, it is presumably a claim that everything in the world is composed of constantly changing constituents: if this is what is meant, Aristotle said, the changes must be imperceptible ones (Ph. 8. 3. 253b9 ff.). Perhaps this is what is hinted at in Heraclitus’ aphorism that hidden harmony is better than manifest harmony—the harmony being the underlying rhythm of the universe in flux (KRS 207). Whatever Heraclitus meant by his dictum, it had a long history ahead of it in later Greek philosophy. 🔗

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Heraclitus once said that the world was an ever-living fire: sea and earth are the ashes of this perpetual bonfire. Fire is like gold: you can exchange gold for all kinds of goods, and fire can turn into any of the elements (KRS 217–19). This fiery world is the only world there is, not made by gods or men, but governed throughout by Logos. 🔗

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Humans fall into three classes, at various removes from the rational fire that governs the universe. A philosopher like Heraclitus is closest to the fiery Logos and receives most warmth from it; next, ordinary people when awake draw light from it when they use their own reasoning powers; finally, those who are asleep have the windows of their soul blocked up and keep contact with nature only through their breathing (S.E., M. 7. 129–30). 🔗

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What Hegel most admired in Heraclitus was his insistence on the coincidence of opposites, such as that the universe is both divisible and indivisible, generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal. 🔗

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Diogenes Laertius tells us that the sequence fire–air–water–earth is the road downward, and the sequence earth–water–air–fire is the road upward (D.L. 9. 9–11). These two roads can only be regarded as the same if they are seen as two stages on a continuous, everlasting, cosmic progress. Heraclitus did indeed believe that the cosmic fire went through stages of kindling and quenching (KRS 217). 🔗

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each cycle of kindling and quenching is an individual world that comes into and goes out of existence. 🔗

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‘All the laws of humans are nourished by a single law, the divine law’ 🔗

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Parmenides and the Eleatics 🔗

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Heraclitus was the proponent of the theory that everything was in motion, and Parmenides the proponent of the theory that nothing was in motion. 🔗

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Parmenides’ Way of Truth, thus riddlingly introduced, marks an epoch in philosophy. It is the founding charter of a new discipline: ontology or metaphysics, the science of Being. 🔗

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Being is everlastingly the same, and time is unreal because past, present, and future are all one. 🔗

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Melissus expounded the philosophy of Parmenides’ poem in plain prose, arguing that the universe was unlimited, unchangeable, immovable, indivisible, and homogeneous. He was remembered for drawing two consequences from this monistic view: (1) pain was unreal, because it implied (impossibly) a deficiency of being; (2) there was no such thing as a vacuum, since it would have to be a piece of Unbeing. Local motion was therefore impossible, for the bodies that occupy space have no room to move into (KRS 534). 🔗

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‘There is no motion, for whatever moves must reach the middle of its course before it reaches the end.’ 🔗

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‘The slower’, Zeno said, ‘will never be overtaken by the swifter, for the pursuer must first reach the point from which the fugitive departed, so that the slower must necessarily remain ahead.’ 🔗

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Zeno assume that distances and motions are infinitely divisible. 🔗

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Empedocles 🔗

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Thales had privileged water, Anaximenes air, Xenophanes earth, and Heraclitus fire. For Empedocles all four of these substances stood on equal terms as the fundamental ingredients, or ‘roots’ as he put it, of the universe. These roots had always existed, he maintained, but they mingle with each other in various proportions in such a way as to produce the familiar furniture of the world and also the denizens of the heavens. 🔗

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Empedocles assigns this role to Love and Strife: Love combines the elements, and Strife forces them apart. At one time the roots grow to be one out of many, at another time they split to be many out of one. These things, he said, never cease their continual interchange, now through love coming together into one, now carried apart from each other by Strife’s hatred 🔗

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Under the influence of Love the elements combine into a homogeneous, harmonious, and resplendent sphere, reminiscent of Parmenides’ universe. Under the influence of Strife the elements separate out, but when Love begins to regain the ground it had lost, all the different species of living beings appear (KRS 360). All compound beings, such as animals and birds and fish, are temporary creatures that come and go; only the elements are everlasting, and only the cosmic cycle goes on for ever. 🔗

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Darwin saluted him for ‘shadowing forth the principle of natural selection’. 🔗

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In his writing, Empedocles moves seamlessly between an austerely mechanistic mode and a mystically religious one. He sometimes uses divine names for his four elements (Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis) and identifies his Love with the goddess Aphrodite 🔗

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This heart will glow no more; thou art
A living man no more, Empedocles!
Nothing but a devouring flame of thought—
But a naked, eternally restless mind!
To the elements it came from
Everything will return
Our bodies to earth,
Our blood to water,
Heat to fire,
Breath to air.
They were well born, they will be well entomb’d—
But mind? 🔗

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Anaxagoras 🔗

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A woman called Pantheia, the story goes, given up for dead by the physicians, was miraculously restored to life by Empedocles. To celebrate, he offered a sacrificial banquet to eighty guests in a rich man’s house at the foot of Etna. When the other guests went to sleep, he heard his name called from heaven. He hastened to the summit of the volcano, and then, in Milton’s words,
                               to be deemed
A god, leaped fondly into Aetna flames.
(Paradise Lost iii. 470) 🔗

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Here is his account of the beginning of the universe: ‘All things were together, infinite in number and infinite in smallness; for the small too was infinite. While all things were together, nothing was recognizable because of its smallness. Everything lay under air and ether, both infinite’ 🔗

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our cosmos is just one of many which may, like ours, be inhabited by intelligent creatures. 🔗

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The Atomists 🔗

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The motion that sets in train the development of the universe is, according to Anaxagoras, the work of Mind. ‘All things were together: then Mind came and gave them order’ (D.L. 2. 6). Mind is infinite and separate, and has no part in the general commingling of elements; if it did, it would get drawn into the evolutionary process and could not control it. 🔗

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Democritus’ fundamental thesis is that matter is not infinitely divisible. 🔗

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If we take a chunk of any kind of stuff and divide it up as far as we can, we will have to come to a halt at tiny bodies which are indivisible. 🔗

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Atoms, Democritus believed, are too small to be detected by the senses; they are infinite in number and come in infinitely many varieties, and they have existed for ever. 🔗

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They come in different forms: they may differ in shape (as the letter A differs from the letter N), in order (as AN differs from NA), and in posture (as N differs from Z). Some of them are concave and some convex, and some are like hooks and some are like eyes. In their ceaseless motion they bang into each other and join up with each other (KRS 583). The middle-sized objects of everyday life are complexes of atoms thus united by random collisions, differing in kind on the basis of the differences between their constituent atoms (Aristotle, Metaph. A 4. 985b4–20; KRS 556). 🔗

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There are innumerable worlds, differing in size. 🔗

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For Democritus, atoms and the void are the only two realities: what we see as water or fire or plants or humans are only conglomerations of atoms in the void. The sensory qualities we see are unreal: they are due to convention. 🔗

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Sharp flavours, for instance, originated from atoms that were small, fine, angular, and jagged, while sweet tastes were produced by larger, rounder, smoother atoms. 🔗

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The Sophists 🔗

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Sophists were itinerant teachers who went from city to city offering expert instruction in various subjects. 🔗

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their roles encompassed those in modern society of tutors, consultants, barristers, public relations professionals, and media personalities. 🔗

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Protagoras seems to have been prepared to argue on either side of any question, and he boasted that he could always make the worse argument the better. 🔗

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Protagoras’ enemies liked telling the story of the time when he sued his pupil Eualthus for non-payment of fees. Eualthus had refused to pay up, saying he had not yet won a single case. ‘Well,’ said Protagoras, ‘if I win this case, you must pay up because the verdict was given for me; if you win it, you must still pay up, because then you will have won a case’ (D.L. 9. 56). 🔗

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The first is a rhetorical exercise defending Helen of Troy against those who slander her, arguing that she deserves no blame for running off with Paris and thus sparking off the Trojan war. ‘She did what she did either because of the whims of fortune, the decisions of the gods and the decrees of necessity, or because she was abducted by force, or persuaded by speech, or overwhelmed by love’ (DK 82 B11, 21–4). Gorgias goes through these alternatives in turn, arguing in each case that Helen should be held free from blame. No human can resist fate, and it is the abductor, not the abductee, who merits blame. Thus far, Gorgias has an easy task: but in order to show that Helen should not be blamed if she succumbed to persuasion, he has to engage in an unconvincing, though no doubt congenial, encomium on the powers of the spoken word: ‘it is a mighty overlord, insubstantial and imperceptible, but it can achieve divine effects’. In this case, too, it is the persuader, not the persuadee, who should be blamed. Finally, if Helen fell in love, she is blameless: for love is either a god who cannot be resisted or a mental illness which should excite our pity. This brief and witty piece is the ancestor of many a philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism, force majeure, incitement, and irresistible impulse. 🔗

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Gorgias’ work entitled On What is Not contained arguments for three sceptical conclusions: first, that there is nothing; secondly, that if there is anything it cannot be known; thirdly, that if anything can be known it cannot be communicated by one person to another. 🔗

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it is easier to dismiss a sophism than to diagnose its nature, and it is harder still to find its cure. 🔗

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Socrates 🔗

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Socrates left behind no writing, and there is hardly a single sentence ascribed to him that we can be sure was his own utterance 🔗

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‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. 🔗

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He was found guilty, albeit by a small majority, and condemned to death. After a delay in prison, due to a religious technicality, Socrates died in spring 399, accepting a poisonous cup of hemlock from the executioner. 🔗

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To those who recalled Aristophanes’ comedy, the events of 399 must have seemed a sorry case of life imitating art. 🔗

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‘never numb with cold, never hungry for breakfast, a spurner of wine and gluttony’ 🔗

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The Socrates of Xenophon 🔗

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If an object is useful, Socrates argues, it must be the product of design, not chance; but our sense-organs are eminently useful and delicately constructed. ‘Because our sight is delicate, it has been shuttered with eyelids which open when we need to use it, and close in sleep; so that not even the wind will damage it, eyelashes have been planted as a screen; and our foreheads have been fringed with eyebrows to prevent harm from the head’s own sweat’ 🔗

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It is arrogant to think that we humans are the only location of Mind (nous) in the universe. It is true that we cannot see the cosmic intelligence that governs the infinite multitudinous universe, but we cannot see the souls that control our own bodies either. Moreover, it is absurd to think that the cosmic powers that be have no concern for humans: they have favoured humans above all other animals by endowing them with erect posture, multi-purpose hands, articulate language, and all-year-round sex (Mem. 1. 4. 11–12). 🔗

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The Socrates of Plato 🔗

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Plato’s Theory of Ideas, and assigns the following role to Socrates: ‘Two things may fairly be attributed to Socrates: inductive arguments and general definitions; both are starting points of scientific knowledge. But he did not regard the universal or the definitions as separate entities, but [the Platonists] did, and called them Ideas of things.’ 🔗

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Socrates’ Own Philosophy 🔗

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When asked if there was anyone in Athens wiser than Socrates, the priestess replied in the negative. Socrates professed to be puzzled by this response, and began to question different classes of people who claimed to possess wisdom of various kinds. It soon became clear that politicians and poets possessed no genuine expertise at all, and that craftsmen who were genuine experts in a particular area would pretend to a universal wisdom to which they had no claim. Socrates concluded that the oracle was correct in that he alone realized that his own wisdom was worthless (23b). 🔗

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It was in matters of morality that it was most important to pursue genuine knowledge and to expose false pretensions. For according to Socrates virtue and moral knowledge were the same thing: no one who really knew what was the best thing to do could do otherwise, and all wrongdoing was the result of ignorance. 🔗

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So far from being an atheist, his whole life was dedicated to a divine mission, the campaign to expose false wisdom which was prompted by the Delphic oracle. What would really be a betrayal of God would be to desert his post through fear of death. 🔗

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‘Men of Athens, I honour 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’ 🔗

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Socrates’ method involves only the weaker claim that unless we have a general definition of a virtue we will not (a) be able to say whether the virtue universally has a particular property, such as being teachable, or being beneficial, or (b) be able to decide difficult borderline cases, such as whether a son’s prosecuting his father for the manslaughter of an accused murderer is or is not an act of piety. 🔗

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The other feature of Socrates’ method emphasized by Aristotle, namely the use of inductive arguments, does in fact presuppose that we can be sure of truths about individual cases while still lacking universal definitions. 🔗

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The two procedures identified by Aristotle are, in Socrates’ method, closely related to each other. The inductive argument from particular instances to general truths is a contribution to the universal definition, even though the contribution in these dialogues is forever incomplete, never leading to an exception-proof definition. In the absence of the universal definition of a virtue, the general truths are applied to help settle difficult borderline cases of practice, and to evaluate preliminary hypotheses about the virtue’s properties. Thus, in the Republic case, the induction is used to show that a good ruler is one who benefits his subjects, and therefore justice is not (as one of the characters in the dialogue maintains) simply whatever is to the advantage of those in power. 🔗

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Can virtue be taught? For if virtue is knowledge, then surely it must be teachable; and yet it is difficult to point to any successful teachers of virtue. 🔗

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From Socrates to Plato 🔗

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Virtue, and the knowledge of good and evil, which according to Socrates is identical with virtue, cannot be taught in the present life: it can only be recovered by recollection of another and better world. This is presented not as a particular thesis about virtue, but as a general thesis about knowledge. 🔗

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The Theory of Ideas 🔗

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For each thing that there is three things are necessary if we are to come by knowledge: first, the name, secondly, the definition, and thirdly, the image. Knowledge itself is a fourth thing, and there is a fifth thing that we have to postulate, which is that which is knowable and truly real. 🔗

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If I follow Plato, then, I will begin by distinguishing four things: the word ‘circle’, the definition of circle (a series of words), a diagram of a circle, and my concept of a circle. The importance of being clear about these four items is to distinguish them from, and contrast them with, a fifth thing, the most important of all, which he calls ‘the circle itself’. It is this that is one of the Ideas of which Plato’s celebrated theory treats. 🔗

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My subjective concept of the circle—my understanding of what ‘circle’ means—is not the same as the Idea of the circle, because the Idea is an objective reality that is not the property of any individual mind. But at least the concept in my mind is a concept of a perfect circle; it is not merely an imperfect approximation to a circle, as the ring on my finger is. 🔗

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We may state a number of Platonic theses about Ideas and their relations to ordinary things in the world.
(1) The Principle of Commonality. Wherever several things are F, this is because they participate in or imitate a single Idea of F (Phd. 100c; Men. 72c, 75a; Rep. 5. 476a10, 597c).
(2) The Principle of Separation. The Idea of F is distinct from all the things that are F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211b).
(3) The Principle of Self-Predication. The Idea of F is itself F (Hp. Ma. 292e; Prt. 230c–e; Prm. 132a–b).
(4) The Principle of Purity. The Idea of F is nothing but F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211e).
(5) The Principle of Uniqueness. Nothing but the Idea of F is really, truly, altogether F (Phd. 74d, Rep. 5. 479a–d).
(6) The Principle of Sublimity. Ideas are everlasting, they have no parts and undergo no change, and they are not perceptible to the senses (Phd. 78d; Smp. 211b). 🔗

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For instance, only the Idea of Beauty is really beautiful, because particular beautiful things are (a) beautiful in one respect but ugly in another (in figure, say, but not in complexion), or (b) beautiful at one time but not another (e.g. at age 20 but not at age 70), (c) beautiful by comparison with some things, but not with others (e.g. Helen may be beautiful by comparison with Medea, but not by comparison with Aphrodite), (d) beautiful in some surroundings but not in others (Smp. 211 a–e). 🔗

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The most sublime of all Ideas is the Idea of the Good, superior in rank and power to all else, from which everything that can be known derives its being (Rep. 509c). 🔗

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Predicates. In modern logic a sentence such as ‘Socrates is wise’ is considered as having a subject, ‘Socrates’, and a predicate, which consists of the remainder of the sentence, i.e. ‘. . . is wise’. 🔗

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Classes. Functions serve as principles according to which objects can be collected into classes: objects that satisfy the function x is human, for instance, can be grouped into the class of human beings. 🔗

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Paradigms. It has more than once been suggested that Platonic Ideas might be looked on as paradigms or standards: the relation between individuals and Ideas might be thought to be similar to that between metre-long objects and the Standard Metre by which the metre length was formerly defined. 🔗

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Concrete universals. Philosophers have sometimes toyed with the notion that in a sentence such as ‘Water is fluid’ the word ‘water’ is to be treated as the name of a single scattered object, the aqueous portion of the world, made up of puddles, rivers, lakes, and so on. 🔗

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Plato’s Republic 🔗

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Socrates now presents a blueprint for a city with three classes. Those among the soldiers best fitted to rule are selected by competition to form the upper class, called guardians; the remaining soldiers are described as auxiliaries, and the rest of the citizens belong to the class of farmers and artisans (2. 374d–376e). How are the working classes to be brought to accept the authority of the ruling classes? A myth must be propagated, a ‘noble falsehood’, to the effect that members of the three classes have different metals in their soul: gold, silver, and bronze respectively. Citizens in general are to remain in the class in which they were born, but Socrates allows a limited amount of social mobility (3. 414c–415c).
The rulers and auxiliaries are to receive an elaborate education in literature (based on a bowdlerized Homer), music (provided it is martial and edifying), and gymnastics (undertaken by both sexes in common) (2. 376e–3. 403b). Women as well as men are to be guardians and auxiliaries, but this involves severe restraints no less than privileges. Members of the upper classes are not allowed to marry; women are to be held in common and all sexual intercourse is to be public. Procreation is to be strictly regulated on eugenic grounds. Children are not to be allowed contact with their parents, but will be brought up in public creches. Guardians and auxiliaries may not own property or touch money; they will be given, free of charge, adequate but modest provisions, and they will live in common like soldiers in a camp (5. 451d–471c). 🔗

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There are five possible types of political constitution (8. 544e). The first and best constitution is called monarchy or aristocracy: if wisdom rules it does not matter whether it is incarnate in one or many rulers. There are four other inferior types of constitution: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism (8. 543c). 🔗

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So the aristocratic state is marked by the presence of all the virtues, the timocratic state by the absence of wisdom, the oligarchic state by the decay of fortitude, the democratic state by contempt for temperance, and the despotic state by the overturning of justice. 🔗

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The Laws and the Timaeus 🔗

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Like Athens, Magnesia is to have an assembly of adult male citizens, a Council, and a set of elected officials, to be called the Guardians of the Laws. Ordinary citizens will take part in the administration of the laws by sitting on enormous juries. Various appointments are made by lot, so as to ensure wide political participation. Private property is allowed, subject to a highly progressive wealth tax (5. 744b). Marriage, far from being abolished, is imposed by law, and bachelors over 35 have to pay severe annual fines (6. 774b). Finally, legislators must realize that even the best laws are constantly in need of reform (6. 769d).
On the other hand, Magnesia has several features reminiscent of the Republic. Supreme power in the state rests with a Nocturnal Council, which includes the wisest and most highly qualified officials, specially trained in mathematics, astronomy, theology, and law (though not, like the guardians of the Republic, metaphysics). Private citizens are not allowed to possess gold or silver coins, and the sale of houses is strictly forbidden (5. 740c, 742a). Severe censorship is imposed on both texts and music, and poets must be licensed (7. 801d–2a). Female sex police, with right of entry to households, oversee procreation and enforce eugenic standards (6. 784a–b). In divorce courts there must be as many women judges as men (9. 930a). Women are to join men at the communal meals, and they are to receive military training, and provide a home defence force (7. 814a). Education is of great importance for all classes, and is to be supervised by a powerful Minister of Education reporting direct to the Nocturnal Council (6. 765d). 🔗

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In civil matters the law goes into fine detail, laying down, for instance, the damages to be paid by a defendant who is shown to have enticed away bees from the plaintiff’s hive (9. 843e). Hunting is to be very severely restricted: the only form allowed is the hunting of four-legged animals, on horseback, with dogs (7. 824a). 🔗

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The Athenian says at one point that he would like to put into effect ‘A law to permit sexual intercourse only for its natural purpose, procreation, and to prohibit homosexual relations; to forbid the deliberate killing of a human offspring and the casting of seed on rocks and stone where it will never take root and fructify’ (8. 838e). 🔗

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Impiety arises, the Athenian says, when people do not believe that the gods exist, or believe that they exist but do not care for the human race. 🔗

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People ask, he says, whether the world has always existed or whether it had a beginning. The answer must be that it had a beginning, because it is visible, tangible, and corporeal, and nothing that is perceptible by the senses is eternal and changeless in the way that the objects of thought are (27d–28c). 🔗

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But the Demiurge differs from the creator of Judaeo-Christian tradition in several ways. First of all, he does not create the world from nothing: rather, he brings it into existence from a primordial chaos, and his creative freedom is limited by the necessary properties of the initial matter (48a). 🔗

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Secondly, while the Mosaic creator infuses life into an inert world at a certain stage of its creation, in Plato both the ordered universe and the archetype on which it was patterned are themselves living beings. 🔗

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God created the soul of the world before he formed the world itself: this world-soul is poised between the world of being and the world of becoming (35a). He then fastened the world on to it. 🔗

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In contrast to those earlier philosophers who spoke of multiple worlds, Plato is very firm that our universe is the only one (31b). He follows Empedocles in regarding the world as made up of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and he follows Democritus in believing that the different qualities of the elements are due to the different shapes of the atoms that constitute them. 🔗

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Timaeus explains that there are four kinds of living creatures in the universe: gods, birds, animals, and fish. 🔗

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2
Schools of Thought: From Aristotle to Augustine 🔗

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Aristotle in the Academy 🔗

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The dead are more blessed and happier than the living, and have become greater and better. ‘It is best, for all men and women, not to be born; and next after that—the best option for humans—is, once born, to die as quickly as possible’ (fr. 44). To die is to return to one’s real home. 🔗

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It does not confer intelligibility on particulars, because immutable and everlasting forms cannot explain how particulars come into existence and undergo change. Moreover, they do not contribute anything either to the knowledge or to the being of other things (A 9. 991a8 ff.). All the theory does is to bring in new entities equal in number to the entities to be explained: as if one could solve a problem by doubling it (A 9. 990b3). 🔗

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Aristotle the Biologist 🔗

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those who have flat feet are likely to be rogues, and that those who have large and prominent ears have a tendency to irrelevant chatter (HA 1. 11. 492a1). 🔗

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The Lyceum and its Curriculum 🔗

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The Lyceum was not a private club like the Academy; many of the lectures given there were open to the general public without fee. 🔗

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Though he retained a lifelong interest in metaphysics, his mature philosophy constantly interlocks with empirical science, and his thinking takes on a biological cast. 🔗

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There are three kinds of sciences, Aristotle tells us in the Metaphysics (E 1. 1025b25): productive, practical, and theoretical sciences. Productive sciences are, naturally enough, sciences that have a product. They include engineering and architecture, with products like bridges and houses, but also disciplines such as strategy and rhetoric, where the product is something less concrete, such as victory on the battlefield or in the courts. Practical sciences are ones that guide behaviour, most notably ethics and politics. Theoretical sciences are those that have no product and no practical goal, but in which information and understanding is sought for its own sake. 🔗

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There are three theoretical sciences: physics, mathematics, and theology (Metaph. E 1. 1026a19). In this trilogy only mathematics is what it seems to be. ‘Physics’ means natural philosophy or the study of nature (physis). It is a much broader study than physics as understood nowadays, including chemistry and meteorology and even biology and psychology. ‘Theology’ is, for Aristotle, the study of entities above and superior to human beings, that is to say, the heavenly bodies as well as whatever divinities may inhabit the starry skies. His writings on this topic resemble a textbook of astronomy more than they resemble any discourse on natural religion. 🔗

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It simply means ‘after physics’ and refers to the works that were listed after his Physics. But he did in fact come to recognize the branch of philosophy we now call ‘metaphysics’: he called it ‘First Philosophy’ and he defined it as the discipline that studies Being as Being. 🔗

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Aristotle on Rhetoric and Poetry 🔗

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There are three bases of persuasion by the spoken word: the character of the speaker, the mood of the audience, and the argument (sound or spurious) of the speech itself. So the student of rhetoric must be able to reason logically, to evaluate character, and to understand the emotions (1. 2. 1358a1–1360b3). 🔗

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Emotions, he says, are feelings that alter people’s judgements, and they are accompanied by pain and pleasure. 🔗

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Material objects are imperfect copies of the truly real Ideas; artistic representations of material objects are therefore at two removes from reality, being imitations of imitations (597e). Drama corrupts by appealing to the lower parts of our nature, encouraging us to indulge in weeping and laughter (605d–6c). Dramatic poets must be kept away from the ideal city: they should be anointed with myrrh, crowned with laurel, and sent on their way (398b). 🔗

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Imitation, he says, so far from being the degrading activity that Plato describes, is something natural to humans from childhood. It is one of the features that makes men superior to animals, since it vastly increases their scope for learning. Secondly, representation brings a delight all of its own: we enjoy and admire paintings of objects which in themselves would annoy or disgust us (Po. 4. 1448b5–24). 🔗

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Pity and fear, the emotions to be purified, are most easily aroused, he says, if the tragedy exhibits people as the victims of hatred and murder where they could most expect to be loved and cherished. That is why so many tragedies concern feuds within a single family (14. 1453b1–21). 🔗

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Six things, Aristotle says, are necessary for a tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and melody (6. 1450a11 ff.). 🔗

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From what has been said it is clear that the poet’s job is to describe not something that has actually happened, but something that might well happen, that is to say something that is possible because it is necessary or likely. The difference between a historian and a poet is not a matter of prose v. verse—you might turn Herodotus into metre and it would still be history. It is rather in this matter of writing what happens rather than what might happen. For this reason poetry is more philosophical and more important than history; for poetry tells us of the universal, history tells us only of the particular. (9. 1451b5–9) 🔗

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Aristotle’s Ethical Treatises 🔗

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with some exaggeration one could say that Aristotle’s moral philosophy is Plato’s moral philosophy with the Theory of Ideas ripped out. 🔗

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In place of the Idea of the Good, Aristotle offers happiness (eudaimonia) as the supreme good with which ethics is concerned, for, like Plato, he sees an intimate connection between living virtuously and living happily. 🔗

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One class is that of the moral virtues, such as courage, temperance, and liberality, that constantly appeared in Plato’s ethical discussions. The other class is that of intellectual virtues: here Aristotle makes a much sharper distinction than Plato ever did between the intellectual virtue of wisdom, which governs ethical behaviour, and the intellectual virtue of understanding, which is expressed in scientific endeavour and contemplation. 🔗

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Aristotle’s Political Theory 🔗

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Aristotle’s final word here is that in spite of being mortal we must make ourselves immortal as far as we can. 🔗

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‘Man is a political animal’, we are told: humans are creatures of flesh and blood, rubbing shoulders with each other in cities and communities. 🔗

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Aristotle begins by saying that the state is the highest kind of community, aiming at the highest of goods. 🔗

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Someone who cannot live in a state is a beast; someone who has no need of a state must be a god. The foundation of the state was the greatest of benefactions, because only within a state can human beings fulfil their potential (1. 2. 1253a25–35). 🔗

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The government, that is to say the supreme authority in a state, must be in the hands of one, or of a few, or of the many. The rightful true forms of government, therefore, are ones where the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; governments that rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or the few, or the many, are perversions. Those who belong to a state, if they are truly to be called citizens, must share in its benefits. Government by a single person, if it aims at the common interest, we are accustomed to call ‘monarchy’; similar government by a minority we call ‘aristocracy’, either because the rulers are the best men, or because it aims at the best interests of the state and the community. When it is the majority that governs in the common interest we call it a ‘polity’, using a word which is also a generic term for a constitution . . . Of each of these forms of government there exists a perversion. The perversion of monarchy is tyranny; that of aristocracy is oligarchy; that of polity is democracy. For tyranny is a monarchy exercised solely for the benefit of the monarch, oligarchy has in view only the interests of the wealthy, and democracy the interests only of the poorer classes. None of these aims at the common good of all. (3. 6. 1279a26–b10) 🔗

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All constitutions, he tells us, have three elements: the deliberative, the official, and the judicial. 🔗

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Slavery is one example of a general truth, that from their birth some people are marked out for rule and others to be ruled (1. 3. 1253b20–3; 5. 1254b22–4). 🔗

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Our possessions, he says, have two uses, proper and improper. The proper use of a shoe, for instance, is to wear it: to exchange it for other goods or for money is an improper use (1. 9. 1257a9–10). 🔗

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Aristotle’s hierarchical preference places farmers at the top, bankers at the bottom, with merchants in between. 🔗

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Aristotle’s Cosmology 🔗

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He took over the four elements of Empedocles, earth, water, air, and fire, each characterized by the possession of a unique pair of the properties heat, cold, wetness, and dryness: earth being cold and dry, air being hot and wet, and so forth. Each element had its natural place in an ordered cosmos, and each element had an innate tendency to move towards this natural place. Thus, earthy solids naturally fell, while fire, unless prevented, rose ever higher. Each such motion was natural to its element; other motions were possible, but were ‘violent’. 🔗

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The earth was in the centre of the universe: around it a succession of concentric crystalline spheres carried the moon, the sun, and the planets in their journeys around the visible sky. The heavenly bodies were not compounds of the four terrestrial elements, but were made of a superior fifth element or quintessence. They had souls as well as bodies: living supernatural intellects, guiding their travels through the cosmos. These intellects were movers which were themselves in motion, and behind them, Aristotle argued, there must be a source of movement not itself in motion. The only way in which an unchanging, eternal mover could cause motion in other beings was by attracting them as an object of love, an attraction which they express by their perfect circular motion. It is thus that Dante, in the final lines of his Paradiso, finds his own will, like a smoothly rotating wheel, caught up in the love that moves the sun and all the other stars. 🔗

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Very often, the Problems ask ‘Why is such and such the case?’ when a more appropriate question would have been ‘Is such and such the case?’ For instance, Why do fishermen have red hair? (37. 2. 966b25). Why does a large choir keep time better than a small one? (19. 22. 919a36). 🔗

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The Legacy of Aristotle and Plato 🔗

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Plato, according to this tradition, was idealistic, utopian, other-worldly; Aristotle was realistic, utilitarian, commonsensical. 🔗

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Epicurus 🔗

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The aim of Epicurus’ philosophy is to make happiness possible by removing the fear of death, which is the greatest obstacle to tranquillity. Men struggle for wealth and power so as to postpone death; they throw themselves into frenzied activity so that they can forget its inevitability. It is religion that causes us to fear death, by holding out the prospect of suffering after death. But this is an illusion. The terrors held out by religion are fairy tales, which we must give up in favour of a scientific account of the world. 🔗

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Nothing comes into being from nothing: the basic units of the world are everlasting, unchanging, indivisible units or atoms. These, infinite in number, move about in the void, which is empty and infinite space: if there were no void, movement would be impossible. This motion had no beginning, and initially all atoms move downwards at constant and equal speed. From time to time, however, they swerve and collide, and it is from the collision of atoms that everything in heaven and earth has come into being. The swerve of the atoms allows scope for human freedom, even though their motions are blind and purposeless. Atoms have no properties other than shape, weight, and size. The properties of perceptible bodies are not illusions, but they are supervenient on the basic properties of atoms. There is an infinite number of worlds, some like and some unlike our own (Letter to Herodotus, D.L. 10. 38–45). 🔗

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Since we are free agents, thanks to the atomic swerve, we are masters of our own fate: the gods neither impose necessity nor interfere with our choices. 🔗

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Sense-impressions are never, in themselves, false, though we may make false judgements on the basis of genuine appearances. If appearances conflict (if, for instance, something looks smooth but feels rough) then the mind must give judgement between these competing witnesses. 🔗

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Though a theoretical hedonist, in practice he attached importance to a distinction he made between different types of pleasure. There is one kind of pleasure that is given by the satisfaction of our desires for food, drink, and sex, but it is an inferior kind of pleasure, because it is bound up with pain. The desire these pleasures satisfy is itself painful, and its satisfaction leads to a renewal of desire. The pleasures to be aimed at are quiet pleasures such as those of private friendship (Letter to Menoecus, D.L. 10. 27–32). 🔗

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Stoicism 🔗

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The founder of Stoicism was Zeno of Citium (334–262 BC). 🔗

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Cynicism was not a set of philosophical doctrines, but a way of life expressing contempt for wealth and disdain for conventional propriety. Its founder was Diogenes of Sinope, who lived like a dog (‘cynic’ means ‘dog-like’) in a tub for a kennel, wearing coarse clothes and subsisting on alms. 🔗

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After some years as a student of the Academy, he set up his own school in the Stoa Poikile. He instituted a systematic curriculum of philosophy, dividing it into three main disciplines, logic, ethics, and physics. Logic, said his followers, is the bones of philosophy, ethics the flesh, and physics the soul (D.L. 7. 37). 🔗

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Diogenes Laertius tells us, ‘Zeno says that the whole world and heaven are the substance of God’ (7. 148). God is an active principle, matter is an active principle; both of them are corporeal, and together they constitute an all-pervasive cosmic fire (LS 45G). 🔗

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He recommended community of wives, and thought that men and women should wear the same, revealing, clothing. Money should be abolished and there should be a single legal system for all mankind, who should be like a herd grazing together nurtured by a common law (LS 67A). 🔗

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The underlying Stoic conception of God is very different, however, from that of the biblical religions. God is not separate from the universe but is a material constituent of the cosmos. 🔗

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It is difficult to separate out precisely the contributions of the three early Stoics, since their works have all been lost. However, there is little doubt that Chrysippus deserves the main share of the credit for the significant advances in logic 🔗

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He accepted the Aristotelian distinction between matter and form, but as a good materialist he insisted that form too was bodily, namely pneuma. The human soul and mind are made out of this pneuma; so too is God, who is the soul of the cosmos, which, in its entirety, constitutes a rational animal. If God and the soul were not themselves bodily, Stoics argued, they would not be able to act on the material world. 🔗

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The fully developed Stoic physical system can be summarized as follows. Once upon a time, there was nothing but fire; gradually there emerged the other elements and the familiar furniture of the universe. Later, the world will return to fire in a universal conflagration, and then the whole cycle of its history will be repeated over and over again. All this happens in accordance with a system of laws which may be called ‘fate’ (because the laws admit of no exception), or ‘providence’ (because the laws were laid down by God for beneficent purposes). The divinely designed system is called Nature, and our aim in life should be to live in accord with Nature. 🔗

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Nothing can escape Nature’s laws, but despite the determinism of fate human beings are free and responsible. If the will obeys reason it will live in accordance with Nature. It is this voluntary acceptance of Nature’s laws that constitutes virtue, and virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness. 🔗

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The Stoics all agreed that because society is natural to human beings, a good man, in his aim to be in harmony with Nature, will play some part in society and cultivate social virtues. 🔗

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Scepticism in the Academy 🔗

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Pyrrho, an older contemporary of Epicurus, who had served as a soldier in Alexander’s army, taught that nothing could be known and, accordingly, wrote no books. It was Arcesilaus and another of Pyrrho’s pupils, Timon, who brought scepticism to Athens in the early years of the third century. Timon denied the possibility of finding any self-evident principles to serve as the foundation of sciences. In the absence of such axioms, all lines of reasoning must be circular or endless. 🔗

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Lucretius 🔗

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Arcesilaus criticized the Stoics because they had claimed to found their search for truth upon mental impressions incapable of falsehood: there were, he argued, no such impressions. Carneades too attacked Stoic epistemology, and taught that probability, not unattainable truth, should be the guide to life. Though not himself an atheist, he ridiculed mercilessly both the traditional pantheon and Stoic pantheism. 🔗

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In his first book Lucretius sets out Epicurean atomism: nature consists of simple bodies and empty void, bodies perceived by sense, and void established by reason. Bodies are made out of atoms as words are made out of letters: the words ‘ignis’ and ‘lignum’ are made up of almost the same letters, just as the things they signify, namely fire and wood, are made up of almost the same atoms (1. 911–14). 🔗

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He extols the Epicurean pursuit of simple pleasures and avoidance of unnecessary desires.
O wretched man! in what a mist of life
Enclosed with dangers and with noisy strife
He spends his little span; and overfeeds
His crammed desires, with more than nature needs!
For nature wisely stints our appetite
And craves no more than undisturbed delight;
Which minds unmixed with cares and fears obtain;
A soul serene, a body void of pain.
So little this corporeal frame requires,
So bounded are our natural desires,
That wanting all, and setting pain aside,
With bare privation sense is satisfied.
(2. 16–28) 🔗

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Lucretius describes the philosopher looking down, from the heights of virtue, on the petty struggles of mankind. He extols the Epicurean pursuit of simple pleasures and avoidance of unnecessary desires.
O wretched man! in what a mist of life
Enclosed with dangers and with noisy strife
He spends his little span; and overfeeds
His crammed desires, with more than nature needs!
For nature wisely stints our appetite
And craves no more than undisturbed delight;
Which minds unmixed with cares and fears obtain;
A soul serene, a body void of pain.
So little this corporeal frame requires,
So bounded are our natural desires,
That wanting all, and setting pain aside,
With bare privation sense is satisfied. 🔗

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Once we understand the material nature of the soul, we realize that fears of death are childish. A dead body cannot feel, and death leaves no self behind to suffer. It is those who survive who have the right to grieve. Give up fear of death 🔗

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Cicero 🔗

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In epistemology he favoured the moderate sceptical opinion that he had learnt from Philo: he presents the academic system and its variants in his Academica, which appeared in two different versions. In ethics he favoured the Stoic rather than the Epicurean tradition. He looked to moral philosophy for consolation and reassurance. 🔗

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Judaism and Christianity 🔗

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Considered as a moral philosopher, Jesus was not a great innovator: but that, of course, was not at all how he and his disciples saw his role. 🔗

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Like Heraclitus and other Greek and Jewish thinkers, Jesus predicted that there would be a divine judgement on the world, amid cosmic catastrophe. Unlike the Stoics, who placed the cosmic denouement in the indefinite and distant future, Jesus saw it as an imminent event, in which he would himself play a crucial role as the Messiah. 🔗

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The Imperial Stoa 🔗

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Seneca was a materialist, accepting the Stoic doctrine that the human mind was a material part of a material divine world-soul (Ep. 66. 12). But he often writes about the relation between soul and body in a manner that is distinctly otherworldly. ‘The human heart is never more divine than when it meditates on its own mortality, and realises that a human being is born in order to give up life, and that this body is not a home but a short-term hostelry which one must leave as soon as one sees one is becoming a burden on one’s host’ (120. 14). Seneca recognizes the difficulty of the Stoic path to virtue. He distinguishes between three stages in moral progress. There are those who have given up some vices but not all—they are without avarice, but not without anger; without lust but not without ambition; and so on. Then there are those who have given up all passions but are not yet safe from relapse. The third class, the closest approximation to wisdom, consists of those who are beyond relapsing, but have not yet acquired secure self-confidence in their virtue (Ep. 75. 8–14). 🔗

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Seneca was the founding father of the Imperial Stoa. Two other prominent members of the school show how wide was the appeal of Stoicism under the empire: the slave Epictetus and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. 🔗

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Rather than seek refuge in suicide, we should realize that none of the world’s evils can really harm us. To show this, Epictetus identifies the self with the moral will (prohairesis).
When the tyrant threatens and summons me, I answer, ‘Who is it that you are threatening?’ If he says, ‘I will put you in chains,’ I respond, ‘It is my hands and my feet he is threatening.’ If he says, ‘I will behead you,’ I respond, ‘It is my neck he is threatening.’ . . . So doesn’t he threaten you at all? No, not so long as I regard all this as nothing to me. But if I let myself fear any of these threats, then yes, he does threaten me. Who then is left for me to fear? A man who can master the things in my own power?—There is no such man. A man who can master the things that are not in my power?—Why should I trouble myself about him? (Disc. 1. 29) 🔗

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Marcus Aurelius Antoninus became emperor in 161 and spent much of his life defending the frontiers of the Roman Empire, now at its furthest extent. 🔗

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Meditations. It is a collection of aphorisms and discourses on themes such as the brevity of life, the need to work for the common good, the unity of mankind, and the corrupting nature of power. He sought to combine patriotism with a universalist viewpoint. ‘My city and country,’ he says, ‘so far as I am Antoninus, is Rome; but so far as I am a man, it is the world.’ He hails the universe as ‘Dear City of Zeus’. 🔗

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Early Christian Philosophy 🔗

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With Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism took its last bow, and Epicureanism was already in retirement. Among the schools of philosophy to whom the emperor assigned chairs in Athens, one was conspicuous by its absence: Christianity. Indeed, Marcus instituted a cruel persecution of Christians, and dismissed their martyrdoms as histrionic. 🔗

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Clement of Alexandria published a set of Miscellanies (Stromateis), written in the style of table talk, in which he argued that the study of philosophy was not only permissible, but necessary, for the educated Christian. 🔗

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The Revival of Platonism and Aristotelianism 🔗

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He believed, with Plato, that human souls existed before birth or conception. Formerly free spirits, human souls in their embodied state could use their free will to ascend, aided by the grace of Christ, to a heavenly destiny. In the end, he believed, all rational beings, sinners as well as saints, and devils as well as angels, would be saved and find blessedness. There would be a resurrection of the body which (according to some of our sources) he believed would take spherical form, since Plato had decreed that the sphere was the most perfect of all shapes. 🔗

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While Christian philosophy was in its infancy, and while Stoicism and Epicureanism were in decline, there had been a fertile revival of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. 🔗

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Plotinus and Augustine 🔗

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It was Plato, however, not Aristotle, who was to be the dominant philosophical influence during the twilight of classical antiquity. 🔗

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The dominant place in Plotinus’ system is occupied by ‘the One’: the notion is derived, through Plato, from Parmenides, where Oneness is a key property of Being. The One is, in a mysterious way, identical with the Platonic Idea of the Good: it is the basis of all being and the standard of all value, but it is itself beyond being and beyond goodness. Below this supreme and ineffable summit, the next places are occupied by Mind (the locus of Ideas) and Soul, which is the creator of time and space. Soul looks upward to Mind, but downward to Nature, which in turn creates the physical world. At the lowest level of all is bare matter, the outermost limit of reality.
These levels of reality are not independent of each other. Each level depends for its existence and activity on the level above it. Everything has its place in a single downward progress of successive emanations from the One. This impressive and startling metaphysical system is presented by Plotinus not as a mystical revelation but on the basis of philosophical principles derived from Plato and Aristotle. 🔗

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But it was Christians, not pagans, who transmitted Plotinus’ ideas to the post-classical world, and foremost among them was St Augustine of Hippo, who was to prove the most influential of all Christian philosophers. 🔗

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For about ten years he was a follower of Manichaeism, a syncretic religion which taught that there were two worlds, one of spiritual goodness and light created by God, and one of fleshly darkness created by the devil. The distaste for sex left a permanent mark on Augustine, though for several years in early manhood he lived with a mistress and had with her a son, Adeodatus. 🔗

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There he became friends with Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, a great champion of the claims of religion and morality against the ruthless secular power of the emperor Theodosius. The influence of Ambrose, and of his mother, Monica, turned Augustine in the direction of Christianity. After a period of hesitation he was baptized in 387. 🔗

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the year 391 marks an epoch. Up to this point Augustine showed himself the last fine flower of classical philosophy. From then onwards he writes not as the pupil of the pagan Plotinus, but as the father of the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. 🔗

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Augustine did not see himself, in his maturity, as a philosophical innovator. He saw his task as the expounding of a divine message that had come to him from Plato and Paul, men much greater than himself, and from Jesus, who was more than man. But the way in which succeeding generations have conceived and understood the teaching of Augustine’s masters has been in great part the fruit of Augustine’s own work. Of all the philosophers in the ancient world, only Aristotle had a greater influence on human thought. 🔗

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3
How to Argue: Logic 🔗

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Logic is the discipline that sorts out good arguments from bad arguments. 🔗

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Plato made important distinctions between parts of speech, distinctions that form part of the basis on which logic is built. In the Sophist he introduces a distinction between nouns and verbs, verbs being signs of actions, and names being signs of the agents of those actions. 🔗

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The splitting of sentences into smaller units—of which this is only one possible example—is an essential first step in the logical analysis of argument. 🔗

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Aristotle’s Syllogistic 🔗

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Every Greek is human.
Every human is mortal.
Therefore,
Every Greek is mortal. 🔗

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a syllogism is a discourse in which from certain things laid down something different follows of necessity (1. 1. 24b18). 🔗

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The example syllogism above contains three sentences in the indicative mood and each such sentence is called by Aristotle a proposition (protasis): a proposition is, roughly speaking, a sentence considered in respect of its logical features. The third of the propositions in the example—the one preceded by ‘therefore’—is called by Aristotle the conclusion of the syllogism. The other two propositions we may call premisses, though Aristotle does not have a consistent technical term to differentiate them. 🔗

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The propositions in the above example begin with the word ‘every’: such propositions are called by Aristotle universal propositions (katholou). They are not the only kind of universal propositions: equally universal is a proposition such as ‘No Greeks are horses’; but whereas the first kind of proposition was a universal affirmative (kataphatikos), the second is a universal negative (apophatikos). 🔗

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Contrasted with universal propositions there are particular propositions (en merei) such as ‘Some Greeks are bearded’ (a particular affirmative) or ‘Some Greeks are not bearded’ (a particular negative). In propositions of all these kinds, Aristotle says, something is predicated of something else: e.g. mortal is predicated of human in one case, and horse of Greek in another. The presence or absence of a negative sign determine whether these predications are affirmations or negations respectively (1. 1. 24b17). 🔗

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The items that enter into predications in propositions are called by Aristotle terms (horoi). It is a feature of terms, as conceived by Aristotle, that they can either figure as predicates themselves or have other terms predicated of them. Thus, in our first example, human is predicated of something in the first sentence and has something predicated of it in the second. 🔗

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Aristotle assigns the terms occurring in a syllogism three distinct roles. The term that is the predicate of the conclusion is the major term; the term of which the major is predicated in the conclusion is the minor term; and the term that appears in each of the premisses is the middle term (1. 4. 26a21–3).1 Thus, in the example given ‘mortal’ is the major term, ‘Greek’ the minor term, and ‘human’ the middle term. 🔗

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If A belongs to every B, and B belongs to every C, A belongs to every C. 🔗

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(By Aristotle’s preferred definition, the conclusion will always have the minor term as its subject and the major as its predicate.) 🔗

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In the first figure, for instance, we have, among many possibilities, the two following.
Every Greek is human. Some animals are dogs.
No human is immortal. Some dogs are white.
No Greek is immortal. Every animal is white. 🔗

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the first is a valid argument, the second is invalid, having true premisses and a false conclusion. 🔗

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There are three rules which apply to syllogisms in all figures:
(1) At least one premiss must be universal.
(2) At least one premiss must be affirmative.
(3) If either premiss is negative, the conclusion must be negative.
These rules are of universal application, but they take more specific form in relation to particular figures. The rules peculiar to the first figure are
(4) The major premiss (the one containing the major term) must be universal.
(5) The minor premiss (the one containing the minor term) must be affirmative. 🔗

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If we apply these rules we find that there are four, and only four, valid moods of syllogism in the first figure.
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In general, syllogisms in these figures can be transformed into first-figure syllogisms by a process he calls ‘conversion’ (antistrophe). 🔗

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and universal negative propositions, the order of the terms can be reversed without alteration of sense: Some S is P if and only if some P is S, and no S is P if and only if no P is S (1. 2. 25a5–10). (By contrast, ‘Every S is P’ may be true without ‘Every P is S’ being true.) 🔗

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syllogistic is only a fragment of logic. It deals only with inferences that depend on words like ‘all’ or ‘some’, which classify the premisses and conclusions of syllogisms, not with inferences that depend on words like ‘if’ and ‘then’, which, instead of attaching to nouns, link whole sentences. As we shall see, inferences such as ‘If it is not day, it is night; but it is not day; therefore it is night’ were formalized later in antiquity. 🔗

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Aristotle’s rules would not provide for assessing the validity of inferences containing premisses such as ‘Every boy loves some girl’ or ‘Nobody can avoid every mistake.’ It took more than twenty centuries before such inferences were satisfactorily formalized. 🔗

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The de Interpretatione and the Categories 🔗

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‘Every man is white’ and ‘No man is white’ can clearly not both be true together: Aristotle calls such propositions contraries (enantiai) (7. 17b4–15). They can, however, both be false, if, as is the case, some men are white and some men are not. 🔗

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‘Every man is white’ and ‘Some man is not white’, like the earlier pair, cannot be true together; but—on the assumption that there are such things as men—they cannot be false together. If one of them is true, the other is false; if one of them is false, the other is true. Aristotle calls such a pair contradictory (antikeimenai) (7. 17b16–18). 🔗

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‘Some man is white’ and ‘Some man is not white’ can be, and in fact are, both true together. Given that there are men, the propositions cannot, however, both be false together. 🔗

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It is a simple matter, for instance, to form the contradictory of ‘Socrates is white’: it is ‘Socrates is not white’ (7. 17b30). But to find a systematic treatment of singular propositions we must turn to the Categories. 🔗

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the Categories starts by dividing ‘things that are said’ into complex (kata symploken) and simple (aneu symplokes) (2. 1a16). An example of a complex saying is ‘A man is running’; simple sayings are the nouns and verbs that enter into such complexes: ‘man’, ‘ox’, ‘run’, ‘win’, and so on. Only complex sayings can be statements, true or false; simple sayings are neither true nor false. 🔗

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Each one signifies either substance (ousia), or how big, or what sort, or in relation to something, or where, or when, or posture, or wearing, or doing, or being acted on. To give a rough idea substance is e.g. human, horse; how big is e.g. four-feet, six-feet; what sort is e.g. white, literate; in relation to something is e.g. double, half, bigger than; where is e.g. in the Lyceum, in the forum; when is e.g. yesterday, tomorrow, last year; posture is e.g. is lying, is sitting; wearing is e.g. is shod, is armed; doing is e.g. cutting, burning; being acted on is e.g. being cut, being burnt. (4. 1b25–2a4) 🔗

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These ten things signified by simple sayings are the categories that give the treatise its name. Aristotle in this passage indicates the categories by a heterogeneous set of expressions: nouns (e.g. ‘substance’), verbs (e.g. ‘wearing’), and interrogatives (e.g. ‘where?’ or ‘how big?’). It became customary to refer to every category by a more or less abstract noun: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, posture, vesture, activity, passivity. 🔗

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One thing, at least, that he is doing is listing ten different kinds of expression that might appear in the predicate of a sentence about an individual subject. We might say of Socrates, for example, that he was a man, that he was five feet tall, that he was wise, that he was older than Plato, and that he lived in Athens in the fifth century BC. 🔗

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Aristotle is not only classifying expressions, pieces of language. He saw himself as making a classification of extra-linguistic entities, things signified as opposed to the signs that signify them. 🔗

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Substance—strictly so called, primarily and par excellence—is that which is neither said of a subject nor is in a subject, e.g. such-and-such a man, such-and-such a horse.
Second substances are the species and genera to which the primary substances belong. Thus, such-and-such a man belongs in the species human, and the genus of this species is animal; so both human and animal are called second substances. (5. 2a11–19) 🔗

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we shall easily be able to categorize the predicates in sentences such as ‘Socrates was potbellied’, ‘Socrates was wiser than Meletus’. But what are we to say about the ‘Socrates’ in such sentences? 🔗

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It is the man Socrates, not the word ‘Socrates’, that is the first substance. The substance that appeared first in the list of categories, it now emerges, was second substance: so the sentence ‘Socrates was human’ predicated a second substance (a species) of a first substance (an individual). 🔗

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When Aristotle in this passage contrasts a first substance with things that are in a subject, what he has in mind as being in a subject are the items signified by predicates in the other categories. Thus, if ‘Socrates is wise’ is true, then Socrates’ wisdom is one of the things that are in Socrates (cf. 2. 1a25). 🔗

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There are, for instance, two types of quantity (discrete and continuous) and four types of quality, which Aristotle illustrates with the following examples: virtue, healthiness, darkness, shape. 🔗

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if A and B are called by the same name with the same meaning, then A is synonymous with B; if A and B are called by the same name with a different meaning, then A is homonymous with B. 🔗

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His standard example of an analogical expression is ‘medical’: a medical man, a medical problem, and a medical instrument are not all medical in the same way. However, the use of the words in these different contexts is not a mere pun: medicine, the discipline that is practised by the medical man, provides a primary meaning from which the others are derived (EE 7. 2. 1236a15–22). 🔗

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Any sentence, Plato there insisted, must consist of at least one verb and one noun (262a–263b). 🔗

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The basic elements out of which it is constructed are terms: elements that are not heterogeneous like nouns and verbs, but that can occur indifferently, without change of meaning, either as subjects or as predicates. 🔗

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Aristotle on Time and Modality 🔗

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For Aristotle, a sentence or proposition such as ‘Theaetetus is sitting’ is significantly tensed, and is at some times true and at others false. 🔗

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Logicians in later ages regularly distinguished between propositions that can, and propositions that cannot, change their truth-value, calling the former contingent and the latter necessary propositions. 🔗

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Aristotle likes to bring out this difference by rewriting ‘A can be B’ as ‘It is possible for A to be B’, rewriting ‘A can be not B’ as ‘It is possible for A to be not B’, and rewriting ‘A cannot be B’ as ‘It is not possible for A to be B’ (Int. 12. 21a37–b24). This rewriting allows the negation sign to be unambiguously placed, and brings out the relationship between a modal proposition and its negation. 🔗

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The negation of ‘It is impossible for A to be B’ is not ‘It is impossible for A not to be B’ but ‘It is not impossible for A to be B’; the negation of ‘It is necessary for A to be B’ is not ‘It is necessary for A to be not B’ but ‘It is not necessary for A to be B’ (Int. 13. 22a2–10). 🔗

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What is necessary is what is not possible not to be, and what is possible is what is not necessary not to be. If it is necessary for A to be B, then it is not possible for A not to be B, and vice versa. Moreover, if something is necessary, then a fortiori it is possible, and if it is not possible, then a fortiori it is not necessary. 🔗

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In this other use, ‘It is possible that A is not B’ is not just consistent with ‘It is possible that A is B’ but actually follows from it (Int. 12. 21b35). In this use ‘possible’ would be equivalent to ‘neither necessary nor impossible’. 🔗

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Thus propositions can be divided into three classes: the necessary, the impossible, and between the two, the contingent (i.e. those that are neither necessary nor impossible). 🔗

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If it was always true to say it is or will be, then it is impossible for that not to be or to be going to be. But if it is impossible for something not to come about, then it cannot not come about. But if it cannot not come about, then it is necessary for it to come about. Therefore everything that is going to come about is, of necessity, to come about. (9. 18b11–25) 🔗

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if neither ‘There will be a sea-battle tomorrow’ nor ‘There will not be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is true today, then neither ‘There is a sea-battle today’ nor ‘There is not a sea-battle today’ will be true tomorrow. 🔗

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Stoic Logic 🔗

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For Diodorus Cronos a proposition is possible iff it either is or will be true, is impossible iff it is false and will never be true, and is necessary iff it is true and will never be false.10 Diodorus, like Aristotle, accepted that propositions were fundamentally tensed and could change their truth-values; but unlike Aristotle he does not need to make a sharp distinction between actuality and potentiality, since potentialities are defined in terms of actualities. Propositions, on Diodorus’ definitions, change not only their truth-values but also their modalities. ‘The Persian Empire has been destroyed’ was untrue but possible when Socrates was alive; after Alexander’s victories it was true and necessary (LS 38E). For Diodorus, as for Aristotle, a special necessity applies to the past. 🔗

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the Master Argument. 🔗

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Philo’s major contribution to logic was his definition of the conditional. ‘If p, then q’, he said, was false in the case in which p was true and q false, and true in the three other possible cases. 🔗

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where Aristotle’s variables stood in for terms, Stoic variables stood in for whole sentences, or rather for elements that are capable of being whole sentences. 🔗

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Consider a sentence such as ‘Dion is walking’, a proposition which may be true or false. Sextus Empiricus, discussing some such sentence, tells us this:
The Stoics said that three items are linked together, the signification, the signifier, and the topic (tunchanon). The signifier is a sound, such as ‘Dion’, the signification is the matter that is portrayed (deloumenon) by it. . . . and the topic is the external object such as Dion himself. Of these three items two, the sound and the topic, are material, but one is intangible, the matter signified, i.e. the lekton, which is what is true or false. (S.E., M 8. 11–12)
The lekton is what is said by the sentence, namely that Dion is walking. 🔗

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Several definitions of axioma are offered. ‘An axioma is what is true or false, a complete matter capable of assertion in and by itself.’ ‘An axioma is something which can be asserted or denied in and by itself, such as “it is day” or “Dion is walking”’ (D.L. 7. 65). 🔗

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a Stoic proposition is unlike an Aristotelian proposition in that it is not a sentence itself, but something abstract that is said by a sentence; and that it is unlike a proposition as discussed by modern logicians since it is something that can change its truth-value over time. 🔗

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A sound conditional is one that does not have a true antecedent and a false consequent. A conditional may have a true antecedent and a true consequent, e.g. ‘If it is day it is light’. It may have a false antecedent and a false consequent, e.g. ‘If the earth flies, the earth has wings’. It may have a true antecedent and a false consequent, e.g. ‘If the earth exists, the earth flies’. Or it may have a false antecedent and a true consequent, e.g. ‘If the earth flies, the earth exists’. Of these they say that only the one with the true antecedent and the false consequent is unsound, all the others are sound. (S.E., P. 2. 104–6) 🔗

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Chrysippus is reported as saying that in ‘If p then q’ the connective declared that q followed from p. This was glossed, by himself or by another Stoic, in the following way:
A conditional is true when the contradictory of its consequent conflicts with its antecedent. For instance, ‘If it is day, it is light’ is true because ‘It is not light’, the contradictory of the consequent, conflicts with ‘It is day’. A conditional is false when the contradictory of its consequent does not conflict with the antecedent, such as ‘If it is day, Dion is walking’ because ‘Not: Dion is walking’ does not conflict with ‘It is day’. (D.L. 7. 73) 🔗

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Inferences came in various forms, called ‘moods’. Chrysippus listed five basic forms of valid inference, or ‘indemonstrable moods’ (D.L. 7. 79). They may be set out as follows, using cardinal numbers rather than ordinals.
(A) If 1 then 2; but 1; therefore 2.
(B) If 1 then 2; but not 2; therefore not 1.
(C) Not both 1 and 2; but 1; therefore not 2.
(D) Either 1 or 2; but 1; therefore not 2.
(E) Either 1 or 2; but not 2; therefore 1. 🔗

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Thus, if we take
(F) If 1, then if 1 then 2; but 1; therefore 2,
we can show this is a valid inference schema by deriving from the two premisses in accordance with (A) ‘If 1 then 2’, and then using (A) once more to derive, from this conclusion and the second premiss ‘2’ (S.E., M 8. 234–6). 🔗

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4
Knowledge and its Limits: Epistemology 🔗

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epistemology: the inquiry into what can be known, and how we can know it. 🔗

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Presocratic Epistemology 🔗

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Sense-appearances lead only to belief, not to truth. ‘By convention sweet,’ he is quoted as saying, ‘by convention bitter; by convention hot, by convention cold; by convention colour, but in reality atoms and void’ (KRS 549). 🔗

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The sophist Protagoras took up a quite opposite position: he claimed that each of us is speaking the truth (Plato, Tht. 151e). ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ he famously said; ‘both of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not’ (KRS 551). Whatever appears true to a particular person is true for that person. All beliefs, therefore, are true: but they have only a relative truth. There is no such thing as the independent, objective truth that Democritus sought, and failed to find, in sense-appearance. 🔗

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Mortals who do not accept the way of truth, sunk in metaphysical error, know nothing at all. Deaf, dazed, and blind, they can be called ‘two-headed’ because of the internal inconsistencies of their beliefs (KRS 293). 🔗

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Protagoras denied that contradiction was possible (D.L. 9. 53). What is really accepted is not ‘p’ and ‘not-p’ but ‘ “p” is true for A’ and ‘ “not-p” is true for B’.
For Protagoras, all truth is relative, and not just truth about obviously subjective matters such as the feel of the wind. 🔗

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Protagoras denied that contradiction was possible (D.L. 9. 53). What is really accepted is not ‘p’ and ‘not-p’ but ‘ “p” is true for A’ and ‘ “not-p” is true for B’.
For Protagoras, all truth is relative, and not just truth about obviously subjective matters such as the feel of the wind. 🔗

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Democritus himself, however, was in no strong position to reject scepticism. He claimed that there were two kinds of knowledge, one through the senses and one through the intellect. Only intellectual knowledge is legitimate knowledge; the five senses deliver only a bastard version (S.E., M. 7. 130–9). There is, however, a problem: the intellectual knowledge expressed in the atomic theory is based in part on empirical evidence: and this comes from the cheating senses. 🔗

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The sophist Gorgias, on the other hand, offered an argument to show that knowledge of reality was impossible. It went like this. If objects of thought (ta phronoumena) are not real (onta), then what is real is not an object of thought. But objects of thought are not real; for if any of them are, all of them are, just as they are thought. But just because someone thinks of a man flying or chariots running on the sea, that does not mean that there is a flying man or chariots running on the sea. Hence it is not the case that what is thought of is real; and therefore what is real is not an object of thought (DK 82 B3). 🔗

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Socrates, Knowledge, and Ignorance 🔗

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Knowledge of the essence of something is clearly a very special kind of knowledge: and ever since Plato’s Socrates it has been for many philosophers a paradigm of knowledge. 🔗

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Knowledge in the Theaetetus 🔗

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The final argument by which Socrates leads Theaetetus to abandon the proposal that knowledge is perception is this. The objects of the senses are delivered to us through different channels: we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. Colours are not the same as sounds; we cannot hear colours and we cannot see sounds. But what of the judgement ‘Colours are not the same as sounds’? Where does that piece of knowledge come from? It cannot come from the eyes, since they cannot see sounds; it cannot come from the ears, since they cannot hear colours. Moreover, there are no organs for detecting sameness, in the way that there are organs for seeing and hearing. It is the soul itself that contemplates the common terms that apply to the deliverances of all of the senses (184b–185d). 🔗

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There are cases where people have true thoughts, and form true opinions, without having actual knowledge. If a jury is persuaded by a clever attorney to bring in a certain verdict, then if the verdict accords with the facts, the jurors will have formed a true opinion. But do their true thoughts amount to knowledge? Not really, says Socrates: only an eyewitness is in a position really to know what happened in a case of alleged assault or robbery. So knowledge cannot be defined as true thought. 🔗

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Knowledge and Ideas 🔗

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To know what X is to be able to analyse it into its elements. Thus one can exhibit knowledge of a word by spelling it out in letters. If that is what knowledge is, then knowledge of reality must be exhibited in analysing it into the ultimate elements of which it is composed. But the analogy with spelling places us in a difficulty. The word ‘Socrates’ can be analysed into its elements, such as the letter S. But the letter S cannot be further analysed; unlike the word ‘Socrates’, the letter S has no spelling. So if knowledge involves analysis, the ultimate, unanalysable elements of the universe cannot be known. And if the elements of a complex cannot be known, how can the complex itself be known? 🔗

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The Ideas are relevant in the Republic because Plato is committed to the thesis that only the Ideas really are: that is to say, everything other than an Idea is what it is only in a qualified sense. Beautiful things other than the Idea of Beauty, for instance, are beautiful only at one time and not another, or beautiful only in one part and not in another. Nothing except the Idea of Beauty is just beautiful, period (Smp. 211a). 🔗

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If knowledge must be knowledge of what is, and only an Idea utterly is, then knowledge must be knowledge of Ideas. If there is anything at the opposite pole from an Idea, something that utterly is not, that is totally unknowable. But most things that are F are partly F and partly not F, F in one respect and not in another. They are set in between what is utterly F and what is utterly not F. These are the objects of doxa. 🔗

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But in the Republic the difference between knowledge and belief is a difference between objects: between what is known and what is thought of. This point is made quite explicitly. Knowledge and thought, Plato says, are powers (dynameis), just as sight and hearing are powers. Powers do not have colours or shapes by which we can tell one from another. ‘In the case of a power I look only at what it is concerned with and what it does to it, and by reference to that I call each the power it is’ (477d). Sight is a power to discriminate colour, and hearing a power to discriminate sound: it is the difference between the objects, colour and sound, that distinguishes these two powers from each other. Similarly, Plato proposes, the difference between knowledge and belief is to be determined by noting the differences between the two kinds of object with which they deal (478b6 ff.). 🔗

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Doxa, or thought, has the visible world as its realm, but it comes in two different forms that have different objects. One form is imagination (eikasia), whose objects are shadows and reflections; another form is belief (pistis), whose objects are the living creatures about us and the works of nature or of human hands. 🔗

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The realm of gnosis, of knowledge, is likewise divided into two. Knowledge par excellence is noesis, or understanding, whose object is the Ideas that are the province of the philosopher. But there is also another kind of knowledge, typical of the mathematician, to which Plato gives the name dianoia (509c5 ff.). The abstract objects of the mathematician share with the Ideas the characteristic of eternity and unchangeability: they belong to the world of being, not of becoming. But they also share a characteristic with ordinary terrestrial objects, namely they are multiple and not single. The geometer’s circles, unlike the Ideal Circle, can intersect with each other; and the arithmetician’s twos, unlike the one and only Idea of Two, can be added to each other to make four (cf. 525c–526a). 🔗

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Philosophical method is called by Plato ‘dialectic’; and dialectic, he says, ‘treats its assumptions, not as first principles, but literally as hypotheses, like stepping stones or starting points on a journey up to an unhypothetical first principle’. Having grasped this principle, dialectic ‘goes into reverse, and, keeping hold of what follows from the principle, finally comes down to a conclusion’ (511b). 🔗

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the dialectician operates as follows. He takes a hypothesis, a questionable assumption, and tries to show that it leads to a contradiction. When he reaches a contradiction, he abandons the hypothesis and goes on to test the other premisses used to derive the contradiction, and so on until he reaches a premiss that is unquestionable. 🔗

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Aristotle on Science and Illusion 🔗

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(1) Sense says that p.
(2) Sense says that not -p.
(3) What Sense says is true.
(4) Not both p and not -p.
This is an inconsistent quartet: any three of the propositions can be used to prove the falsity of the fourth. 🔗

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Wherever we have an apparent case of Sense saying that p, and Sense saying that not -p, we really have a case of one sense S1 saying that p, and another sense S2 saying that not -p. Not all that the senses tell us is true, and if S1 and S2 tell us different stories we can give reasons for making a choice between them. 🔗

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Aristotle offers a number of criteria for ranking sense-appearances when it is necessary to choose between them, the most important of which is that a sense has priority when it is judging its proper object. 🔗

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The proper object of each sense is defined in the de Anima (2. 6. 418a12) as being that which cannot be perceived by another sense, and that about which it is impossible to be deceived: colour is the proper object of sight, sound of hearing, and flavour of taste. Aristotle’s first point is clear enough: we cannot taste a colour, hear a flavour, or see a sound. 🔗

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Statements such as ‘That is red’ made on the basis of visual experience are not incorrigible. What is special about them is that they can be corrected only by a further use of the same sense. 🔗

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each sense is the final judge in the case of its proper object, though it has to get into the right condition and position to judge. Where S1 and S2 tells us different things about sensory properties, S1 is to be preferred over S2 if S1 is the proper sense, and S2 is the alien sense, for the property in question. Between two verdicts of the proper sense, we are to choose the one delivered in optimum conditions: near, not far; healthy, not ill; awake not asleep; and so on. 🔗

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He insists that our knowledge depends on the senses both for the concepts we employ and for the unproved premisses from which we start. We form concepts thus: first there is sensation and then there is memory; memories build up into experience and out of individual experience we form a universal concept, which is the basis of both practical skill (techne) and theoretical knowledge (episteme) (APo. 19. 100a3). 🔗

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Science begins, but does not end, with experience, and, like Plato, Aristotle has an elaborate classification of cognitive and intellectual states. Both philosophers regard moral virtue and intellectual excellence as two species of a particular genus; but whereas Plato (no doubt under the influence of Socrates) tended to treat virtue as if it was a special kind of science, Aristotle treats science as a special kind of virtue. 🔗

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The nature of the arete of anything depends upon its ergon, that is to say its job or characteristic output. The ergon of the mind and all its faculties is the production of true and false judgements (NE 6. 2. 1139a29). 🔗

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The intellectual aretai, then, are excellences that make an intellectual part of the soul come out with truth. There are five states of mind that have this effect—techne, episteme, phronesis, sophia, nous— which we may translate as skill, science, wisdom, understanding, and insight (3. 1139b16–17). 🔗

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Skill and wisdom are both forms of practical knowledge: knowledge of what to do and how to bring things about. Skills, such as architecture or medicine, are exercised in the production (poiesis) of something other than their exercise, whether their output is concrete, like a house, or abstract, like health. Wisdom, on the other hand, is concerned with human activity (praxis) itself rather than with its output: it is defined as a ratiocinative excellence that ascertains the truth concerning what is good and bad for human beings (4. 1140b5, b21). 🔗

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It is characteristic of the wise man to deliberate well about goods attainable by action: he is not concerned with things that cannot be other than they are (7. 1141b9–13). Thus wisdom differs from science and understanding, which are concerned with unchanging and eternal matters. The rational part of the soul is divided into two parts: the logistikon that deliberates and the epistemonikon that is concerned with the eternal truths. Each of these parts has its proper arete: wisdom for the former and understanding for the latter. 🔗

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Sophia, Aristotle tells us, has as its subject matter divine, honourable, and useless things: it is what was practised by famous philosophers such as Thales and Anaxagoras. What nous is, is not immediately clear: it is a word often used for the whole human intellectual apparatus, for the cognitive as opposed to the affective part of the mind (cf. 1. 1139a17, 2. 1139b5). Here, however, it appears to mean insight into the first principles of theoretical science: the understanding of unproven necessary truths which is the basis of episteme (6. 1140b31–41a9). It is this which, in conjunction with episteme, constitutes sophia, the highest human intellectual achievement. 🔗

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‘It is necessary for demonstrative knowledge to depend on things that are true and primitive and immediate and better known than the conclusion, to which they must also be prior and of which they must be explanatory’ (APo. 1. 2. 70a20–2). A body of scientific knowledge is built up out of demonstrations. A demonstration is a particular kind of syllogism: one whose premisses can be traced back to principles that are true, necessary, universal, and immediately intuited. These first, self-evident principles are related to the conclusions of science as axioms to theorems. 🔗

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Aristotle’s treatises are themselves expository, not methodological 🔗

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Epicurean Epistemology 🔗

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According to Epicurus the three criteria of truth are sensations, concepts (prolepseis), and feelings. 🔗

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Epicureans go further than Aristotle in claiming a sense cannot even correct its own impressions: each impression is of equal reliability and hence whatever appears to a sense at any time is true (Lucretius 4. 497–9; D.L. 10. 31). 🔗

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I would not say that sight is deceived when from a great distance it sees a tower as small and round, and from nearby as large and square. Rather, it is quite correct. When what is perceived appears small and so-shaped, it really is small and shaped like that, because the edges of the images have been rubbed off as a result of their journey through the air. And when it appears big and of a different shape, once again it really is big and of that shape. But the two are not the same. (M. 7. 208) 🔗

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We must distinguish sharply between a sense-impression (phantastike epibole) and an accompanying, but distinct, belief (D.L. 10. 51). 🔗

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A concept is a general notion of what kind of thing is signified by such a word (which may, of course, be expressed in a sentence of paraphrase, such as ‘A cow is an animal of such-and-such a kind’). The ‘pro’ in ‘prolepsis’ is meant to indicate that a concept of X is not a set of information about X derived from experience, but rather a template by which we recognize in advance whether an individual presented in experience is or is not an X. Concepts are not things that have to be proved: they are themselves employed in any proof (D.L. 10. 33, 38). 🔗

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Sensations and concepts, for Epicurus, are both ‘evident’ (so too are feelings, but they will be considered in a different context). It is on these evident elements that we must base our beliefs in what is not evident. 🔗

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Conjectures and theories are false if the senses bear witness against them (D.L. 10. 50–1). A conjecture is true if it is confirmed by the senses; a theory is true if it is not impugned by the senses (S.E., M. 213). 🔗

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Stoic Epistemology 🔗

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When a man is born, his mind is like a blank sheet of paper, and as he develops towards the use of reason, concepts are written on the page. The earliest concepts come from the senses: individual experiences leave behind memory, and memory builds up experience. Some concepts are acquired from teaching or devised for a purpose; others arise naturally and spontaneously, and it is these that deserve the name ‘prolepsis’ (LS 39E). 🔗

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In addition to the two states of knowledge (episteme) and belief (doxa) that had been contrasted since Plato, they introduced a third state, cognition (katalepsis).5 The Stoics, Sextus Empiricus tells us,
say there are three things connected to each other, knowledge and belief and located between them cognition. Knowledge is cognition that is sound and firm and unchangeable by argument; belief is weak and false assent, and cognition is in between the two: it is assent to a cognitive appearance. (M 7. 150–1) 🔗

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Cognition is between knowledge and belief in that, unlike belief, it is never false, and unlike knowledge, it does not involve the resolution never to change one’s mind. 🔗

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A cognitive appearance, we are told, is ‘that which arises from what is and is stamped and impressed exactly in accordance with what is’ (D.L. 7. 46; Cicero, Acad. 2. 77). 🔗

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The Stoics did indeed classify impressions in terms of their persuasiveness into four classes:
(1) Persuasive; e.g. ‘It is day’, ‘I am talking’.
(2) Unpersuasive; e.g. ‘If it is dark, it is day’.
(3) Persuasive and unpersuasive; e.g. philosophical paradoxes.
(4) Neither persuasive nor unpersuasive; e.g. ‘The number of all the stars is odd’. 🔗

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Academic Scepticism 🔗

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There is no true impression arising from sensation that cannot be paired with another impression, indistinguishable from it, which is non-cognitive. But if two impressions are indistinguishable, it cannot be the case that one of them is cognitive and the other not. Therefore no impression, even if true, is cognitive. To illustrate this argument, consider the case of identical twins, Publius Geminus and Quintus Geminus. If someone looking at Publius thinks he is looking at Quintus, he has an impression that corresponds in every detail to the one he would have if he were in fact looking at Quintus. Hence, his impression is not a cognitive one: it does not answer to the final clause of Zeno’s definition: ‘of such a kind as could not arise from what is not’ (Cicero, Acad. 2. 83–5). 🔗

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A sceptic may simply be someone who denies the possibility of genuine knowledge (in some, or all, areas of inquiry). Such a sceptic need have no objection to the holding of beliefs on various topics, provided that the person holding them does not claim that those beliefs have the status of knowledge. 🔗

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A more radical sceptic, however, may question not only the possibility of knowledge but also the propriety of belief. He may recommend abstinence from not only the resolute assent characteristic of certainty, but also the tentative assent characteristic of opinion. 🔗

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if the sceptic suspends judgement, how can he live a normal life. How can he get into a bath if, for all he knows, it is a chasm? The answer is that he does not judge, rashly, that it really is a bath; but he is swept along by his bath-entering impulse. In non-philosophical discussions a wise man may even follow his impulses so far as to give the answers ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to questions. 🔗

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Pyrrhonian Scepticism 🔗

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The study of ancient epistemology can teach us much about the nature of knowledge and the limits of scepticism. Several insights became part of the patrimony of all future philosophy: knowledge can only be of what is true; knowledge is only knowledge if it can appeal implicitly or explicitly to some kind of support, whether from experience, reasoning, or some other source; and one who claims knowledge must be resolute, excluding the possibility of being rightly converted, at a later stage, to a different view. 🔗

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The first fallacy is this. ‘Whatever is knowledge must be true’ may be interpreted in two ways.
(1) Necessarily, if p is known, p is true or
(2) If p is known, p is necessarily true.
(1) is true but (2) is false. It is a necessary truth that if I know you are sitting down, then you are sitting down; but if I know you are sitting down it is not a necessary truth that you are sitting down; you may get up at any moment. 🔗

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This Hellenistic fallacy is just the mirror image of the classical fallacy. Let F stand for some faculty. Then it is true that
It is impossible, if F knows that p, that F has gone wrong.
But that is not the same as, nor is it true that,
If F knows that p, then it was impossible for F to go wrong. 🔗

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5
How Things Happen: Physics 🔗

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There are two kinds of quantities, he tells us, discrete and continuous. A discrete quantity would be, for example, an army of a thousand men (cf. Metaph. Δ 13. 1020a7); as examples of continuous quantities, we are given lines, surfaces, bodies, time, and place (Cat. 6. 4b20 f.). 🔗

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The Continuum 🔗

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Aristotle introduces three terms to indicate different relationships between quantified items: they may be successive (ephexes), adjacent (hama), or continuous (syneches). Two items are successive if between them there is nothing of the same kind as themselves. Thus, two islands in an archipelago are successive if there is only sea between them; two days are successive if there is no day, but only night, between them. Two items are adjacent, Aristotle says, if they have two boundaries in contact with each other, and they are continuous if there is only a single common boundary between them (231a18–25). He uses these definitions to base an argument that a continuum cannot be composed of indivisible atoms. 🔗

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A line, for instance, cannot be composed of points that lack magnitude. Since a point has no parts, it cannot have a boundary distinct from itself: two points therefore cannot be either adjacent or continuous. If you say that the boundary of a point is identical with the point itself, then two points that were continuous would be one and the same point. Nor can points be successive to each other: between any two points on a continuous line we can always find other points on the same line (231a29–b15). 🔗

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Similar reasoning, Aristotle says, applies to spatial magnitude, to time, and to motion: all three are continua of the same kind. Time cannot be composed of indivisible moments, because between any two moments there is always a period of time; and an atom of motion would in fact have to be a moment of rest. 🔗

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‘We call a quantity whatever is divisible into two or more constituent parts of which each is of a kind to be a single individual entity.’ 🔗

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Points or moments, therefore, which were indivisible would lack magnitude, and zero magnitude, however often repeated, could never add up to any magnitude. By another route, therefore, we reach the conclusion that a continuous quantity is not composed of indivisible items. If a magnitude can only be divided into other magnitudes, and every magnitude must be divisible, it follows that every magnitude is infinitely divisible. 🔗

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Matter cannot consist of mere geometrical points, not even of an infinite number of them, so we have to conclude that divisibility comes to an end, and the smallest possible fragments must be bodies with sizes and shapes (1. 2. 316’14–317’3). 🔗

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‘Divisible to infinity’, he insists, means ‘unendingly divisible’, not ‘divisible into infinitely many parts’. 🔗

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It is sufficient to point out (as he does; GC 1. 2. 317a8) that there is a difference between saying that whatever is continuous can be divided at any point and saying that whatever is continuous can be divided at every point. 🔗

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Aristotle on Place 🔗

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for Aristotle a thing is not only in the place defined by its immediate container, but also in whatever contains that container. Thus, just as a child may write out his address as 1 High Street, Oxford, England, Europe, The Earth, The Universe, so Aristotle says, ‘You are now in the universe because you are in the atmosphere and the atmosphere is in the universe; and you are in the atmosphere because you are on the earth, and you are on the earth because you are in your own particular place.’ The universe is the place that is common to everything. 🔗

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‘The universe is not anywhere; for whatever is somewhere must not only exist itself, but also have something alongside it in which it is and which contains it. But there is nothing outside the entire universe’ (Ph. 4. 5. 212b14–17). And if the universe is not in place, it cannot move from place to place. 🔗

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Newtonian space would exist whether or not the material universe had been created. For Aristotle, if there were no bodies there would be no place; there can, however, be a vacuum, a place empty of bodies, but only if the place is bounded by actual bodies (4. 1. 208b26). 🔗

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In an ordered cosmos, Aristotle believed, each of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, had a natural place, which exercised a causal influence: air and fire were by nature carried upward, water and earth were carried downward. Each such motion was natural to its element; other motions were possible, but were ‘violent’. 🔗

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Aristotle on Motion 🔗

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‘Motion’ (kinesis) was for him a broad term, including changes in several different categories, such as growth in size or change in colour (Ph. 3. 1. 200b32). Movement from place to place, however, local motion, provides a paradigm which can be used to expound his theory. 🔗

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‘Motion’, he says, ‘is the actuality of what is in potentiality, in so far as it is in potentiality.’ 🔗

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While at A, the body has in fact two different potentialities: a potentiality to be at B, and a potentiality to move to B. Aristotle illustrates the point with other examples of kinesis: the gradual heating of a body, the carving of a statue, the healing of a patient, the building of a house (3. 1. 201a10–15). 🔗

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motion is an incomplete or imperfect actuality of an imperfect potentiality (3. 2. 201b31). Being at B would be the perfect actuality; moving to B is the imperfect actuality. The potentiality for being at B is the perfect potentiality; the potentiality for moving to B is the imperfect potentiality. 🔗

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At any point at which X is moving, there will be an earlier point at which it was already moving (cf. Ph. 6. 5. 236b33–5). It follows that there is no such thing as a first instant of motion. 🔗

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). Kinesis, as has been said, includes not only motion but many different kinds of change and production: Aristotle gives as examples learning something, building a particular house, walking to a particular place. As examples of energeiai he gives seeing, knowing, and being happy. 🔗

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Verbs of the first kind signify activities that are imperfect in the following sense: if I am ping, then I have not yet pd (if I am still building this house, I have not yet built it, and so on). 🔗

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Energeiai such as knowing are states. Besides states such as knowledge, there are secondary energeiai, or actualities that are the exercise of such states. Thus, we have a triadic sequence: I learn Greek, I know Greek, I speak Greek. Secondary actualities have some of the features of motions and some of the features of activities: speaking Greek is not an imperfect process towards a terminus, in the way that learning Greek is; on the other hand it can be interrupted in a way that knowing Greek cannot. 🔗

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Aristotle on Time 🔗

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Time, in its turn, derives its continuity from the continuity of motion (Ph. 4. 11. 219a10–14). Thus Aristotle’s account of time is parasitic on his account of motion: his formal definition, indeed, is this: time is the number of motion in respect of before and after (4. 11. 219b1). 🔗

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where there was no motion there was no time (4. 11. 219a1). Not that time is identical with motion: motions are motions of particular things, and different kinds of changes are motions of different kinds, but time is universal and uniform. Motions, again, may be faster or slower; not so time. Indeed it is by the time they take that the speed of motions is determined (4. 10. 218b9; 14. 223b4). Nonetheless, Aristotle says, ‘we perceive motion and time together’ (4. 11. 219a4). 🔗

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It is the before and after in motion that provides the earlier and later in time. Thus temporal order is, on Aristotle’s view, derived from the ultimately spatial ordering of stretches of motion. 🔗

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We say ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ with reference to distance from the now; and the now is the boundary between the past and the future. . . But ‘earlier’ is used in opposite ways in respect to past time and future time: in the past we call earlier that which is further from the now, and later that which is nearer to the now; in the future we call earlier that which is nearer to the now, and later that which is further away. (Ph. 4. 14. 223a5–14) 🔗

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Instants are the boundaries of periods, and future periods are bounded by future instants, and past intervals by past instants. But present periods are bounded not by present instants, but by two instants, one of which is past and the other future. There is no instantaneous present. 🔗

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the correct conclusion to draw from this argument is not that nothing can be moving at a moment, but that nothing can be moving for a single moment only. 🔗

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Aristotle on Causation and Change 🔗

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Aristotle distinguishes four types of cause, or explanation. First, he says, there is that of which and out of which a thing is made, such as the bronze of a statue and the letters of a syllable. This is called the material cause. Secondly, he says, there is the form and pattern of a thing, which may be expressed in its definition: his example is that the proportion of the length of two strings in a lyre is the cause of one note being an octave away from the other. The third type of cause is the origin of a change or state of rest in something; Aristotle’s followers often called it the ‘efficient cause’. Aristotle gives as examples a person reaching a decision, a father who begets a child, a sculptor carving a statue, a doctor healing a patient, and in general anyone who makes a thing or changes a thing. The fourth and last type of cause is the end or goal, that for the sake of which something is done; it is the type of explanation we give if someone asks us why we are taking a walk, and we reply ‘In order to keep healthy’. This last kind of cause became known as the ‘final cause’. 🔗

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The ultimate answer to a ‘why’ may take us, in the case of unchanging things like mathematics, to the ‘what’ (to the definition of straight, or commensurable, or the like); or it may take us to the originating change (why did they go to war? because there had been a raid), or to the purpose (so as to come into power) or, in the case of things that come into being, to the matter. (Ph. 2. 7. 198a14–21)
Here we meet the same four items, but in the order: formal, efficient, final, material. 🔗

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Matter, in the most proper sense of the term, is to be identified with the underlying subject which is receptive of coming-to-be and passing away. (GC 1. 4. 319b8–320a2) 🔗

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His ultimate matter (he sometimes calls it prime matter) is not in and of itself of any kind. It is not in and of itself any particular size, because it can grow or shrink; it is not in and of itself water, and it is not in and of itself steam, because it is each of these in turn. 🔗

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The Stoics on Causality 🔗

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The Stoics’ standard analysis of causation was of the following form: A brings it about that B is F. A, the cause, must be a body, and so must B; but the effect, B’s being F, is not a body but an abstract entity, a lekton. This is explained by Sextus:
The Stoics say that every cause is a body that becomes for another body a cause of something non-bodily. For instance a scalpel, which is a body, becomes for the flesh, another body, a cause of the non-bodily predicate being cut. Again a fire, which is a body, becomes for the wood, another body, a cause of the non-bodily predicate being burnt. (M. 9. 211)
While A and B are both material entities, the Stoics used the term ‘matter’ specially to refer to B, the passive element in causation (Seneca, Ep. 65. 2 LS 55E). So in Stoic causation we have a triad of cause, matter, and effect. 🔗

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The recognition of joint and auxiliary causes was important, because it shows that it can often be misleading to speak of the cause of a particular state or event. Causes form not a chain, but a network. 🔗

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For the Stoics it is not only changes and beginnings of existence that need causes: there are also sustaining causes (aitiai synektikai) that bring it about that things continue in existence. Bodies of all kinds, for instance, are held together by an active and tenuous fluid called pneuma, literally ‘breath’, which is responsible for the cohesion of the universe. Living bodies are kept alive by the soul, which is their sustaining cause. It is characteristic of such causes that if they cease to operate, their effects cease to obtain. 🔗

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an antecedent cause brings it about that an object possesses an internal feature that is itself a sustaining cause simultaneous with the effect to be explained. 🔗

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Chrysippus was famous for using the illustration of a garden roller or a child’s spinning top. The top will not move unless the child strikes it: but once struck it will continue to spin ‘of its own force and nature’ (Cicero, Fat. 43). The crack of the whip is an antecedent cause, but the top’s internal force is the principal cause. Likewise the roller, once pushed, will continue to roll of its own accord. This illustration was used in an attempt to reconcile the Stoic theory of causality with the possibility of human responsibility. 🔗

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The Stoics believed not just in universal causation, that is to say, the thesis that everything has a cause; they believed also in universal causal determinism, that is to say, that everything has a cause by which it was determined. 🔗

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They claim not just that every beginning of existence has a cause, but that everything that happens has a cause. Further they claim that every cause is a necessitating cause: given the cause, the effect cannot but happen. They maintain not just universal causation, but universal determinism. 🔗

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Consider the propositions
(1) If I call the doctor, I will recover.
(2) If I do not call the doctor, I will recover.
If I am fated to recover, then the consequent of each of these propositions is true; and if we interpret each of the propositions truth-functionally, in the manner of Philo, each of them will on that supposition be true. In that sense it will be true that whether or not I call the doctor I will recover. But as these propositions are normally used in guiding behaviour, they must be understood not simply truth-functionally, but also as supporting the corresponding counterfactuals
(3) If I called the doctor, I would recover.
(4) If I did not call the doctor, I would recover.
But a Stoic has no reason to accept (4). 🔗

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Determinism and Freedom 🔗

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‘If something could be brought about without an antecedent cause, it would be false that everything happens through fate; but if it is probable that there is an antecedent cause for whatever happens, what possible reason is there for denying that all things happen through fate?’ (Cicero, Fat. 43). 🔗

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Many philosophers in later ages have claimed that if a human agent is responsible for an action X, it must have been possible for her, at the moment of action, both to do and not to do X. Such freedom of alternative choice was later given the technical name of ‘liberty of indifference’. Chrysippus is not claiming that liberty of indifference is compatible with fate: he is interested rather in what later philosophers called ‘liberty of spontaneity’. An agent enjoys liberty of spontaneity if he does X because he wants to do X. Chrysippus’ humans do enjoy liberty of spontaneity, because they do X because they assent to X, and they assent to X because of their own nature and character. The responsibility that he defends is the autonomy of the agent to act unforced by external causes and stimuli. 🔗

Liberty of spontaneity

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6
What There Is: Metaphysics 🔗

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Carneades denies that voluntary actions have an external antecedent cause; Chrysippus affirms that they have, but appears here to deny that they are necessitated by it. 🔗

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The central topic of metaphysics is ontology: the study of Being. 🔗

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For Parmenides, Being is not just that which exists, but that of which any sentence containing ‘is’ is true. Equally, being is not just existing (being, period) but being anything whatever: being hot or being cold, being earth or being water, and so on. Thus interpreted, Being is a realm both richer and more puzzling than the totality of existents. 🔗

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Parmenides’ Ontology 🔗

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What you can call and think must Being be
For Being can, and nothing cannot, be. 🔗

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Never shall this prevail, that Unbeing is;
Rein in your mind from any thought like this. 🔗

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Unbeing you won’t grasp—it can’t be done—
Nor utter; being thought and being are one. 🔗

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A person who first runs fast and then runs slowly is running all the time. Similarly, for Parmenides, stuff which is first water and then air goes on be-ing all the time. Change is never from not-being to being, or vice versa; the most there can ever be is variation of being. 🔗

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From the principle ‘Nothing can come from nothing’ many philosophers of different persuasions have drawn the conclusion that the world must always have existed. 🔗

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Being is not only everlasting, it is not subject to change (‘four-square, unmoved’) or even to the passage of time (it is all now, and has no past or future). What could differentiate past from present and future? If it is no kind of being, then time is unreal; if it is some kind of being, then it is all part of Being. Past, present, and future are all one Being. 🔗

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To think a thing’s to think it is, no less.
Apart from Being, whate’er we may express
Thought does not reach. Naught is or will be
Beyond Being’s bounds, since Destiny’s decree
Fetters it whole and still. All things are names
Which the credulity of mortals frames—
Birth and destruction, being all or none,
Changes of place, and colours come and gone.
But since a bound is set embracing all
Its shape’s well rounded like a perfect ball. 🔗

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If this is the nature of Being, uniform, unchanging, immobile, and timeless, what are we to make of the multiplicity of changing properties that we normally attribute to items in the world on the basis of sense-experience? These, for Parmenides, belong to the Way of Seeming. If we want to follow the Way of Truth, we must keep our minds fixed on Being. 🔗

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If you step into a river, you cannot put your feet twice into the same water. Getting rather carried away by his metaphor, Heraclitus went on to say—if Plato reports him honestly—that you cannot step twice into the same river (Cra. 402a). However that may be, he seems undoubtedly to have claimed that all things are in motion all of the time (Aristotle, Ph. 8. 3. 253b9). If we do not notice this, it is because of the defects of our senses. For Heraclitus, then, it is change that is the Way of Truth, and stability that is the Way of Seeming. 🔗

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Plato’s Ideas and their Troubles 🔗

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the Ideas, as represented in the early middle dialogues, belong in an eternal world that is as unchanging as the Being revealed by Parmenides’ way of Truth. The entities that inhabit the empirical world, on the other hand, are in a Heraclitean flux, constantly flitting between being and non-being. Plato is not, however, even-handed between the two protagonists: the Parmenidean world is far superior to the Heraclitean one; the unchanging world of Ideas is more real, and contains more truth, than the flickering world of experience. Only intellectual insight into Ideas gives knowledge; the senses can provide nothing better than true belief. 🔗

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Being is undifferentiated and single, whereas there are many different Ideas in some kind of relation to each other. They appear to be hierarchically ordered, under the Idea of Good, which appears to trump any notion of Being (Rep. 6. 509b). No doubt the other Ideas owe it to the Idea of Good that they are Ideas at all: a bed is a Perfect or Ideal Bed because it participates in Perfection and is the best possible bed. 🔗

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(1) The Principle of Commonality. Wherever several things are F, this is because they participate in or imitate a single Idea of F (Rep. 5. 476a).
(2) The Principle of Separation. The Idea of F is distinct from all the things that are F (Phd. 74c).
(3) The Principle of Self-Predication. The Idea of F is itself F.
(4) The Principle of Purity. The Idea of F is nothing but F (Phd. 74c).
(5) The Principle of Uniqueness. Nothing but the Idea of F is really, truly, altogether F (Phd. 74d; Rep. 5. 479a—d).
(6) The Principle of Sublimity. Ideas are everlasting, they have no parts and undergo no change, and they are not perceptible to the senses (Phd. 78d). 🔗

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In order to resolve some of the problems about Ideas, Plato introduces a distinction between two types of predication. Using a terminology which belongs to a later period, we can say that he makes a distinction between predication per se and predication per accidens. The difference between the two can be brought out thus: S is P per se if being P is part of what it is to be S. Thus, an oak is a tree per se. (If we allow improper as well as proper parts of what it is to be S, then an oak is oak per se.) S is P per accidens, on the other hand, if S is as a matter of fact P, but it is no part of being S to be P. Thus, if oaks are as a matter of fact plentiful in a certain area, ‘plentiful’ is predicated only per accidens.2 🔗

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Finally, we can revisit the notion of participation. A major difficulty in understanding how many things can share in a single Idea was that this seemed to divide an Idea into parts. We can now say that a Form is one per se if it is part of what it is to be a Form that it should be single and unique: otherwise it will not achieve the purpose for which it was invented, to mark what is common to things bearing the same name. But if there are many individuals instantiating the Form, then it will be many per accidens. 🔗

A big challenge in figuring out how different things can all share the same idea is that it might seem like we’re breaking that idea into smaller pieces. Now we can say that a Form (or idea) is always one and unique because that’s what makes it a Form in the first place. If it weren’t unique, it wouldn’t do its job of helping us understand what is similar about things that have the same name. However, if there are many individual things that show this Form, then we can say that they are many in a different way.

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What the pursuit of a definition by division will reveal, if it is carried out in a serious manner, is a tree structure in which species will appear under genera, and narrower genera under broader genera: human under animal, animal under living being, and so on. This tree structure is related to the predication per se which we found an important feature of the Parmenides. For anything that appears above F in a genus—species tree structure will be something that is predicated per se. Thus, being an animal is part of what it is to be human; being a living thing is part of what it is to be an animal. 🔗

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But in addition to Being four other forms—motion, rest, sameness, and difference—are considered and their interrelations explored. 🔗

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The non-beautiful differs from the beautiful and the unjust differs from the just; but the non-beautiful and the unjust are no less real than the beautiful and the just (257e—258a). If we lump together all the things that are non-something, or unsomething, then we get the category of non-being, which is just as real as the category of Being. So we have blown open the prison into which Parmenides had confined us (258c). 🔗

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Aristotelian Forms 🔗

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The difference between Aristotelian forms and Platonic Forms is that for Aristotle forms are not separate (chorista): any form is the form of some actual individual. 🔗

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‘The question that was asked of old, and is asked now, and always will be asked and always will be a problem is “what is Being?” And this is the question; “what is substance?’” (Z 1. 1028b2–4). 🔗

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Are there separate substances of any kind, distinct from those we can perceive with our senses? (Z 3. 1028b8–32). 🔗

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Essence and Quiddity 🔗

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‘Substance’, he says, has four principal meanings: the quiddity, the universal, the genus, and the subject. 🔗

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The subject (to hypokeimenon) turns out to be the same as the first substance of the Categories: it is that of which everything is predicated and which is itself predicated of nothing. Such first substances, we are told, are composites of matter and form; in the way that a statue is related to its bronze and its shape (1029a3–5) 🔗

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In treating of quiddity Aristotle makes use of a distinction he drew in his lexicon in Metaphysics D (1017a7) between being per se (kath’auto) and being per accidens (kata sumbebekos). 🔗

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Aristotle uses his definition in defining quiddity: a quiddity is what a thing is said to be per se. You may be a scholar, but you are not a scholar per se as you are a person per se (Z 4. 1029b15). ‘The scholar Theophrastus’ names a per accidens being. However, ‘the man Theophrastus’ names a per se being, and ‘Theophrastus is a man’ is a per se predication. Being a man is the quiddity or essence of Theophrastus. 🔗

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Aristotle next asks: what is the relation between a thing and its quiddity? His answer is that they are identical: and this takes us by surprise, since a thing is surely concrete and a quiddity is surely abstract. His initial justification of his surprising claim is that a thing is surely the same substance as itself, and a thing’s quiddity is called its substance. 🔗

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‘It is clear then that for things that are primary and spoken of per se the thing and its essence are one and the same’ (Z 6. 1032a8). 🔗

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What this seems to mean is this. In a sentence such as ‘Socrates is wise’ the word ‘wise’ signifies an accident, the wisdom of Socrates, which is distinct from Socrates. But in ‘Socrates is human’ the word ‘human’ does not signify anything distinct from Socrates himself. We need to distinguish between Socrates and his wisdom because they have two different histories: as Socrates gets older, Socrates’ wisdom may increase or perhaps evaporate. But Socrates and his humanity do not have two different histories: to be Socrates is to be human, and if Socrates ceases to be a human being he ceases to exist. 🔗

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What comes into existence must always be divisible, and there must be two identifiable components, one matter and the other form. . . . it is clear from what has been said that the part which is called form or substance does not come into existence; what comes into existence is the composite entity which bears its name. (Z 8. 1033b16–19) 🔗

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He goes on to draw an anti-Platonic conclusion: if everyday enmattered forms do not come into existence at all, there is no need to invoke separate, Ideal, Forms to explain how forms come into existence (Z 8. 1033b26).
We do not even need to invoke Forms to explain how an individual substance gets its form. Human beings derive their form not from an Ideal Human, but from their parents (Z 8. 1033b32). The father (plus the mother, though Aristotle was ignorant of this) is responsible for introducing form into the appropriate matter. ‘The final product, a form of such-and-such a kind in this flesh and these bones, is Callias or Socrates. What makes them distinct is their matter, which is distinct; but they are the same in form (for that is not subdivided)’ (Z 8. 1034a8). 🔗

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Definitions have parts, and the substances they define also have parts: Aristotle takes a chapter to explain that if A is a part of X this does not always mean that the definition of A has to be part of the definition of X. (You don’t have to mention an acute angle in defining a right angle; just the reverse, in fact; F 11. 1035b6.) The definition has to mention parts of the form, but not parts of the matter. Parts of the form are to be identified by the method of definition by division, into genus and species, that we met in Plato’s later dialogues. 🔗

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We can now see why it is misguided to ask whether Socrates’ body is part of his quiddity. Body and soul are parts of Socrates (parts of a rather special kind, as will be explained in the next chapter). Being rational and being animal are parts of the quiddity of Socrates, and being animal includes having a body (an organic body of a particular kind). But having a body is not at all the same as a body. To ask whether Socrates’ body is part of his quiddity is to fall into the confusion of concrete and abstract of which we were earlier tempted to accuse Aristotle himself. On the other hand, we must say something similar about soul. The soul cannot simply be identified with the quiddity, as Aristotle sometimes incautiously suggests: to be human is to have a soul of an appropriate kind incarnate in an organic body. 🔗

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Being and Existence 🔗
Causation and Determinism 🔗