own theory is complex and subtle enough that it is hard to characterize in contemporary terms, and indeed, different interpreters have attributed to him almost every theory of mind known to contemporary philosophy. So it turns out to be very difficult to answer what should be a straightforward question of classification about ancient theories of mind. This is not to say there are no answers to the questions, but only that the answers are not obvious or easy to come by. In fact, I will later argue that the ancients had a better take on the relation between mind and body than the moderns, and one which precluded much of the often barren debate and futile theory of the moderns.
One more historical issue is the matter of large‐scale historical developments. In his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1996) argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion. Scientists follow paradigms, examples of scientific method that provide models for research. As long as the paradigm serves to solve scientific problems, a period of “normal science” continues. But eventually scientists run into problems that they cannot solve within the current framework. A period of “crisis” ensues which leads to a “scientific revolution,” in which a new paradigm emerges to inform normal science. Although Kuhn meant for this scheme to apply only to science, it seems to offer interesting parallels for the history of philosophy also. (Indeed, it is a kind of Hegelian scheme of eras of cultural unity punctuated by revolutionary episodes of change to a new era – though Kuhn does not explicitly draw on Hegel.)
There are times when philosophical discourse undergoes a radical change. One of the most celebrated changes of this sort is embodied in the life and thought of Socrates (as we shall see). Before him philosophy was largely carried out in didactic cosmological speculations (by thinkers who are now called, significantly, “pre‐Socratics”); after him in dialogues centering on ethical issues. Whatever the precise reasons for them, revolutions in thought are often recognizable in retrospect as turning points in the development of thought. There is a kind of disconnect (which Kuhn calls “incommensurability”) between practitioners of one kind of philosophy and those of another. Kuhn appeals to a political model of revolution carried out between advocates of a new ideology opposing the old establishment; communication between them may consist of propaganda and protests and rock‐throwing rather than rational debate. However that may be, it will be useful to keep an eye out for major shifts in philosophical theory from one era to another. As in politics and even science, the story of philosophy is not a simple stepwise progression from one idea to the next.
And this brings us to a final observation. There is always a temptation to see one idea as leading inevitably to the next, one theory to its successor, in a kind of “dialectical” progression, like that of a developing conversation. We find this pattern promoted already in Aristotle, who thinks that, “led on by the truth itself,” philosophy progressed from discovering one kind of cause to another (of his four causes).5 Hegel sees the progress of cultural and political history as embodying a logical dialectic, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. This kind of March of History story would turn history into a science, as Hegel believed it would, and make all developments rational and inevitable. But alas, the course of history seems a good deal messier than the Aristotles and Hegels of the world recognize. In particular, the history of philosophy has its own contingencies that are neither predictable nor fully explainable.
Yet a good historical account makes sense of the developments of philosophy in such a way that the later events are seen as reactions to the earlier ones, and some kind of at least relative progress is perceivable from the earlier to the later theories. And that progress results largely from a kind of internal dialectic or conversation, rather than from external economic, political, or social factors. In ancient philosophy we shall see a rapid conceptual development from primitive, almost mythological ideas, to sophisticated theories, some of which have never been surpassed in their power and elegance. In what follows, we will trace the broad development of theories, focusing at various points on interesting problems and arguments that made the ancient conversation so rich and fruitful, and so philosophically interesting. And we will see that philosophy is at some level an ongoing conversation in which new theories grow out of attempts to solve old problems in new ways. However timeless our contemporary theories may seem, they always arrive schlepping baggage from the past, and depart leaving new baggage for the future.
1.3 Overview
Here then is a preview of the stages of development of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy as we will discuss it, with some of the important ideas that arise.
First of all the Greeks, like peoples of all cultures at the same time, had traditional tales about the origins of the universe and the gods who peopled it, along with the rise of the human race (Chapter 2). In the sixth century BC, in the city of Miletus on the Aegean coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), some thinkers proposed a naturalistic account of the origins of things. While this account assumed some of the features of the world accepted by tradition (the Earth was understood to be a flat disk surrounded by water, for instance), it explained the world as the product of natural processes rather than divine births and supernatural interventions. These thinkers did not, so far as we know, have any special name for what they were doing, but in time it came to be known as philosophy, and the early thinkers were designated (in modern times) as Presocratic philosophers (philosophers before Socrates), who marked a turning‐point in thought. In the earliest models of speculation, the world was thought to be composed of basic or elemental stuffs that turned into each other. In one version, fire was the rarest kind of matter, that, when it was condensed, turned into air; when air was condensed, it turned into wind; when wind was condensed, it turned into cloud; when cloud was condensed, it turned into water; when water was condensed, it turned into earth; when earth was condensed it turned into stones. And this process could be reversed, so that denser materials would be transformed into lighter materials by rarefaction. The earliest philosophers tended to pick one of their stuffs as the original stuff from which all the others derived; for instance, Thales chose water, Anaximenes air. This picture of reality allowed philosophers to propose cosmological theories, in which the world as we know it arose out of the transformations of matter, which, when they became stabilized, constituted the present world, with its ecology. For instance, water evaporates from the sea, condenses into clouds, and rains onto the Earth. From the natural world arose plants and animals, and eventually human beings, who developed cultures and technologies that allowed them to thrive. So the product of this thinking is a kind of scientific philosophy with a speculative chemistry, cosmology, biology, and anthropology – that in some crude way anticipate modern scientific theories.
This model was challenged by Heraclitus, who pointed out through his paradoxical utterances that on this model all the stuffs were equal and interchangeable. If this was so, there could be no original stuff, but only the eternal process of change. What was ultimate then, was not the stuffs, each of which was a temporary state of affairs, but the pattern of change itself.
Subsequently, Parmenides, writing a philosophical poem in the early fifth century BC, probably in reaction to Heraclitus’s criticisms which stress the ephemeral character of stuffs, argued against the possibility of change, and against the notion that things could change their characters. His theory seemed to be that reality consisted of one unchanging being. It is possible, however, that he argued for a weaker thesis that whatever existed had to have an unchanging nature. At the end of his poem, Parmenides presented a cosmology of his own in which two distinct stuffs, which he calls Light and Night, a rare and a dense substance, respectively, mixed in different proportions to produce all the objects we are acquainted with. On the one hand, Parmenides implied that this cosmology is unknowable; on the other hand, he offered it as superior to all others. Whether he meant it to be a refutation of any possible cosmology or a model for how speculative cosmology might be done, his successors seem to have taken it in the latter sense. In fact Parmenides offered some brilliant observations on astronomy as part of his cosmology, that turned out to be right and ultimately revolutionized the study of astronomy.
Parmenides’s theory offered the model of permanent