Ancient philosophy

Ancient philosophy

These are my personal notes from Part 1 of the book The History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling, and from episodes 1 to 6 and 10 to 15 of the podcast Philosophize This! by Stephen West.

I introduce each philosopher using the format Name (Year, Place – Description). Year refers to the year of birth (or an approximation, as some dates are uncertain), and Place refers to the current country of their city of birth. In the Description, I highlight either what I consider the philosopher’s main contribution or a memorable trait that helps me recall them easily.

Sometimes it's more helpful to group philosophers by schools of thought rather than detailing their individual contributions. In such cases, the format is School – Description [Name1 (Year1, Place1), Name2 (Year2, Place2), ...].

Philosophers before philosophy – The presocratics

• Thales of Miletus (624 BCE, Turkey – the beginning): First to use rational explanations that excluded the gods. The archê (the fundamental substance of all things) is water. The soul is the cause of motion.

• Anaximander (610 BCE, Turkey – first non-material reality): The archê is not a material substance, but the infinite. The infinite is the universal source of creation and destruction, and it restores natural laws when they are disrupted.

• Anaximenes (590 BCE, Turkey – first systematic theory): The archê is air, which gives shape to things by rarefying ("expanding") or condensing ("compressing").

• Pythagoras (570 BCE, Greece – a cult of mathematics and music): Everything can be understood through numbers. The purpose of life is to end the cycle of suffering and reincarnation in order to live freely and eternally in a blessed realm. Humans are partly evil, and the only way to purify oneself is to live a life of restraint and contemplation through mathematics, music, and astronomy. Understanding these three fields means understanding the eternal laws of the universe, and living in harmony with them is the closest we can get to immortality. Reaching conclusions through reason is superior to relying on the senses.

• Xenophanes (560 BCE, Turkey – religion as projection of human flaws): Rejected traditional religion and its anthropomorphic Olympian gods. Natural phenomena must be investigated and understood. Humans attribute to gods all the traits we’re ashamed of to feel better about ourselves. First to say that God is everything.

• Heraclitus (535 BCE, Turkey – the enigmatic): There is a cosmic law (logos) that governs everything. All is in a state of constant change: "you can’t step into the same river twice." The archê is fire.

• Parmenides (530 BCE, Italy – what is, is; and what is not, is not): Nothing can come from nothing, so change is impossible. The universe is an eternal whole—there is no empty space and all change is an illusion. Only what can be thought exists; the real is the same as the thinkable.

• Anaxagoras (500 BCE, Turkey – infinite elements): There are infinitely many fundamental elements ("seeds"), all present in everything; individual things differ only by the predominance (not absence) of some elements over others. The organizing principle of the universe is an immaterial, intelligent force that provides causal power ("power over") to the elements.

• Empedocles (495 BCE, Italy – a god among mortals): The archê consists of four eternal and immutable elements (air, fire, water, and earth), which combine in different proportions to form the world we see. Two fundamental forces—Love and Strife—are in cyclical conflict, creating change by uniting or separating the elements.

• Zeno of Elea (490 BCE, Italy – Achilles and the tortoise): Movement is an illusion—you cannot cross an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time. Appearance is not necessarily reality.

• Democritus (460 BCE, Greece – atomism): Everything is made of atoms (tiny, indivisible particles) and empty space. Atoms themselves do not change, but their configurations do, generating infinite instances of a single reality. The universe is deterministic: given the initial conditions of an atom and enough computational power, one could predict its entire future.

• The Sophists (masters of oratory and rhetoric) – [Protagoras (485 BCE, Greece), Gorgias (480 BCE, Italy), Prodicus (465 BCE, Greece), Hippias (443 BCE, Greece), Antiphon (480 BCE, Greece), Critias (460 BCE, Greece)]: Every argument has two sides, and neither is inherently more valid than the other. People can be persuaded to any extreme through rhetoric. It is the person holding a belief who gives it value—not the belief itself or the facts behind it: "man is the measure of all things." What is true or right for one person may not be for another—everything is subjective.

The holy trinity – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

• Socrates (470 BCE, Greece – method of refutation): Brought philosophy to the public by encouraging people to question their beliefs and guiding them toward truth: "Well, now that you know you don’t know what you’re talking about, we can start making progress." Philosophy is discussion, questioning, and argumentation. The only way to live a virtuous life is to know the true definitions of virtuous words—and reason is the only way to discover them. The pursuit of knowledge is life’s ultimate goal and the highest virtue; an unexamined life is not worth living.

• Plato (427 BCE, Greece – world of forms): Concepts like justice and beauty are not defined by perception, but are eternal, perfect, and immutable. The same is true for all physical objects. These perfect versions do not exist in our sensory world but in a separate realm of Forms. What we perceive are imperfect, ever-changing copies; only reason allows access to the true Forms. Before birth, our immortal souls reside in the world of Forms, and learning is the process of remembering them. In an ideal society, each person uses their natural talents to fulfill the role of one of three classes: producers, defenders, and rulers. The soul also has three parts: desire (seeks sex, money), spirit (seeks honor, fame), and reason (seeks knowledge). Rulers' decisions must be based on reason, so philosophers—those most virtuous and intelligent—should rule (aristocracy).

• Aristotle (384 BCE, Greece – everything in due measure): To know something is to understand all its causes, which are four: material (what it’s made of), formal (its structure), efficient (what created or changed it), and final (its purpose). Individual things are not imperfect copies of immutable Forms; rather, form is a property of matter. Since causal chains cannot regress infinitely, there must be a first cause that causes itself: this is a mind called God. Knowledge alone is not enough; it must be put into practice through virtuous habits: "we are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." Virtue lies in the mean between deficiency and excess. Just as Socrates said an unexamined life is not worth living, Aristotle adds that an unplanned life is not worth examining—you can’t analyze without a goal. If one hasn’t yet developed virtuous habits to identify worthy goals, one should imitate those who have. The ultimate goal of life is to achieve happiness (or flourishing, well-being, etc., depending on the translation), and while the path may differ from person to person, we all ultimately seek the same thing. True happiness is achieved by living according to the final cause of human beings: to live in accordance with reason, which is what makes us human. Still, one must consider that luck plays a role in enabling or hindering the pursuit of happiness, and total suspension of judgment is not possible. The best state is one that provides its citizens with opportunities to exercise their intellect (leisure) without relying on material wealth or status symbols.

Choose your own path to ataraxia – Schools of thought

• Cynicism (rejection of conventions) – [Antisthenes (445 BCE, Greece), Diogenes (412 BCE, Greece), Crates of Thebes (368 BCE, Greece)]: Actions should follow the laws of virtue, regardless of whether they align with the city’s laws. We must free ourselves from conventions and desires to live a simple and natural life.

• Epicureanism (pleasure as absence of pain) – [Epicurus (341 BCE, Greece)]: Nature is made of indivisible atoms, but not minimal ones—they are composed of a fundamental unit of matter (which cannot exist by itself). The world is entirely material, and the properties of things we perceive result from atomic configurations and their interaction with our sensory organs. When we die, the random collection of atoms that make us up disperses: "death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensations, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us." Dying may be painful, but death itself cannot be, since there is no perception. The goal of life is pleasure—defined in its purest form as the absence of pain. When we desire something, it’s because we feel a lack—that lack is a form of pain. The state of tranquility (ataraxia) is also a form of pleasure, and the highest kind: "no pleasure is bad in itself, but the things that produce pleasure can lead to much greater problems than the pleasures themselves."

• Stoicism (accept the inevitable and face adversity) – [Zeno of Citium (334 BCE, Cyprus), Cleanthes (331 BCE, Turkey), Chrysippus (281 BCE, Turkey), Seneca (4 BCE, Italy), Epictetus (55, Turkey), Marcus Aurelius (121, Italy)]: The archê is matter, indestructible and eternal. But there’s another fundamental principle: logos (reason, fate, God) pervades the universe, organizing it in a deterministic, infinite cycle of creation and destruction. Some things are necessarily beyond our control, but happiness is within reach: we can choose to be indifferent to the inevitable and thus be free. We must rationally govern our emotions through self-control, since it is our attitudes that make life good or bad. The best path is to remain calm at all times and adjust our worldview to develop more realistic expectations.

• Skepticism (nothing can be assured) – [Pyrrho of Elis (360 BCE, Greece), Timon (320 BCE, Greece), Arcesilaus (315 BCE, Greece), Carneades (214 BCE, Libya)]: One must always suspend judgment because there is no criterion of truth capable of guaranteeing anything completely: things appear differently to different people, times, and conditions, so no appearance can definitively represent how something truly is. One should not hold beliefs, should not be committed, and should not be firm. Reality is unstable and indeterminate, and it is conventions and habits that form the basis of all human behavior. Things that seem bad are not always bad, because adversity is what prepares us to face future challenges in life. Putting skeptical thought into practice means being committed to inquiry and acting according to the beliefs that seem most reasonable—without claiming that they are actually true.

• Neoplatonism (three-level fountain) – [Plotinus (205, Egypt), Porphyry (233, Lebanon), Iamblichus (245, Syria), Proclus (412, Turkey)]: There is a hierarchical chain of existence that begins with the ultimate cause of the universe: the One, a unique mind that is beyond all description. From the One arises the world of Forms, the place where our souls dwell (and thus, our essence). By contemplating the Forms, our souls eventually create the physical world, where matter resides. We are souls trapped in a body located in a lower world, so evil arises from focusing on things that lie beneath the chain of existence—that is, material things. The purpose of a virtuous life is to return to unity with the One, and the best way to achieve this is through philosophical contemplation and rejecting material temptations.