Introduction

This chapter covers a fascinating stretch in the history of ancient Greek philosophy, ranging from the dawn of the Roman empire in the first century BC until the Arab conquest of Alexandria in AD 640. It is well known that in this period most of the ancient legacy to Byzantine, mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy received its definitive shape. However, in the transmission of this legacy to later centuries much of the depth, detail and motivation of late ancient philosophy was lost. Only in recent decades has the period begun to receive the attention it deserves. Within the confines of the present chapter we shall bring together a selection of the first - often tentative – conclusions in this rapidly advancing area of ancient philosophy.

First a few words on labels and periods. There is some justice in speaking of late ancient philosophy as Imperial philosophy. Nearly all philosophers mentioned in this chapter lived and worked in the Roman empire (western, eastern, or both), and some of them even owed their position to emperors.

Introduction

The 'Hellenistic' age is a politically defined one, bounded at its beginning by the demise of Alexander the Great's empire (on his death in 323 BC) and at its end by Augustus' inauguration of the Roman empire, notionally in 27 BC. These three centuries were a time of major geo-political upheaval in the Greek-speaking world, due first to the growing power of eastern kingdoms and later to that of Rome.

In one way or another, philosophical developments kept pace with these political ones. At the start of the new age, Alexander’s death was almost immediately followed by that of Aristotle (322), who in earlier days had been his personal tutor. In Alexander’s later years, by contrast, he had been accompanied on his eastern campaign by Pyrrho, around twenty years Aristotle’s junior and the philosopher whose name was to become synonymous with scepticism (later known as#x2018;Pyrrhonism’). Pyrrho was as much the voice of the newly emerging age as Aristotle had been of the old.

Ancients and Moderns

While ancient philosophy continues to live on, and indeed to flourish, in the modern discipline of philosophy, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome have left very little discernible trace upon the religions of the modern world. It was only because, and only to the extent that, the pagan religions of Greek and Roman antiquity were radically transformed, almost beyond recognition, into the vast, eclectic world religion of Christianity, that anything of them at all managed to survive the fall of the classical world. The result is that, while the Christian Church shrewdly adapted its practices to the traditional conditions of the mass pagan world it found itself in and while the Christian Fathers elaborated a brilliant theoretical synthesis of certain elements of pagan intellectual culture with Judaeo-Christian theology, religion in the modern world is so different from what it was in antiquity that it requires considerable effort to appreciate ancient religiosity without a feeling of bewilderment, repulsion or superiority.

At the beginning of Book Gamma of his Metaphysics, Aristotle announces the existence of a peculiar branch of knowledge:

The science which considers everything which exists, insofar as it exists, Aristotle calls first philosophy. It is usually named metaphysics.

Introduction

It has been claimed, with some justification, that the 'legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy'. The Greeks, after all, not only defined the main areas of philosophical inquiry – metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics and so on – but also formulated the questions which that inquiry has always sought to answer. Yet it was in the period from the twelfth to the seventeenth century that Greek thinkers, together with their Roman interpreters and followers, exerted the most profound influence on later philosophy. During this long epoch, extending from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the start of the early modern era, everything which survives today of ancient philosophy, with the exception of a few works, was recovered after the losses incurred in the aftermath of the Roman empire's collapse. Moreover, continuing the work of the Church Fathers, vigorous efforts were made, at different times and with varying degrees of success, to bring the major schools of pagan philosophy into line with Christianity. Once restored and reconciled with Christian theology, ancient philosophical traditions supplied the framework within which the philosophers operated and the foundation on which they built their own systems.

Introduction. From fossils to Philosophy

Hippolytus, antipope in the early third century AD, has this to tell us in the course of the survey of pagan Greek philosophy he presents in the first book of his Refutation of all Heresies (exhibit A):

You might think that Xenophanes’ heresy was to have been someone who left God out of the creation story. But that does not seem to have been a point Hippolytus was wanting to make. What leaps out of his report is the picture it paints of Xenophanes as pioneer practitioner of the scientific method.

The Platonic Corpus

From any perspective, Plato's dialogues are extraordinary. Others have tried to write philosophical dialogues, frequently in imitation of his. Indeed other associates of Socrates had already used the genre before Plato adopted it; bits and pieces, along with titles, remain. But the Platonic dialogues remain essentially sui generis, whether taken singly or as a whole. There are somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five genuine works which, while always returning to ethics and politics, between them cover a vast range of topics, and cover them in often startlingly different ways; always, however, using a cast of characters that excludes the author, even in disguise. A main feature is that they define - and would later be taken as having defined - what philosophy itself is, not just in terms of its subject matter but in terms of method and attitude or approach. This they do chiefly by exhibiting philosophy in action; or rather, typically, by exhibiting a philosopher - usually Socrates - going about his business, often in confrontation with others (teachers of rhetoric, sophists, politicians, poets) who dealt with the same subject-matter but in different, non-philosophical ways.

Life

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a wealthy native of Stagira, a Greek coastal city on the Chalcidice peninsula of Macedonia, not far from modern Thessaloniki. His father, who died in Aristotle's childhood, was physician to the Macedonian king. In 367 Aristotle was sent to Athens, at the age of seventeen, to complete his education at Plato's school, the Academy. Instead, he remained there until Plato's death in 347, studying, writing and lecturing over a wide range of philosophical subjects having roots in Plato's own work - the theory of rhetorical argument and persuasion, logical theory, ethics, and questions of metaphysics, among others. At Plato's death he, together with Xenocrates, another of the leading members of the school, left Athens for the north-western coast of Asia Minor, where the local ruler Hermias (whose daughter Aristotle married - later the mother of his two children) established them at the town of Assos. Aristotle continued his work there, and afterwards for a time at Mytilene on the nearby island of Lesbos, where he apparently first collaborated with the younger philosopher Theophrastus: it appears that his most important researches on sea animals date from this period. In 343 King Philip II of Macedon called him (accompanied by Theophrastus and others) to the royal court to become tutor to his son Alexander (‘the Great’).

Compare the following two questions, both of which greatly exercised ancient Greek and Roman thinkers:

1. 1 What is a good human life?

2. 2 Why isn't the earth falling?

They appear about as different as any two questions could be. The first is one that most of us continue to consider important today. The second is not a question we are likely even to think worth asking: however little physics we know, we know enough to realize that the question itself rests on false suppositions.

Despite this and other contrasts, those who manage to get inside the subject – Greek and Roman philosophy – to which this book aims to provide an entry route should find that the two questions come to exercise an equal fascination. They may even find that the two of them have more in common than at first appears, as I shall suggest below.

Most of the chapters published here originated at a conference held at the University of Toronto in September of 2000. At the original suggestion of Jon Miller, who was working at the time on the topic of Spinoza and the Stoics, the organizers invited a number of leading scholars working in either Hellenistic or early modern philosophy, and several whose work already spanned both periods, to explore various aspects of the relationship between these two periods. Some chose to deal with historical connections and the transmission of ideas between ancient and modern times, but most focused on the comparisons and contrasts between and among the ideas themselves. Jerome Schneewind and Myles Burnyeat drew the session to a close with a roundtable discussion suggesting provisional conclusions as well as future directions for work. From the outset, the organizers of the conference aimed at including a wide range of styles and methods in the history of philosophy, and that variety is evident in this collection. We would like to think that a project of this kind might encourage communication among those who work in different ways on the history of philosophy, as well as among those who work on different historical periods.

Diffusion and Diminution

Of all the ancient philosophies, Stoicism has probably had the most diffused but also the least explicit and adequately acknowledged influence on Western thought. No secular books were more widely read during the Renaissance than Cicero's On duties (De officiis), the Letters and Dialogues of Seneca, and the Manual of Epictetus. Thomas More's Utopians define virtue as “life in accordance with nature,” and this is characteristic of the way slogans and concepts of Stoic ethics were eclectically appropriated from about 1500 to 1750. Neo-Stoicism (capitalized) is a term often used to refer to currents of thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it is quite appropriate to such figures as Lipsius and du Vair. Yet in spite of the Stoic traces in Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Grotius, Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Kant (traces that modern scholars are increasingly detecting), Neo-Stoicism scarcely had an identifiable life comparable to Medieval Aristotelianism, Renaissance and later Scepticism, seventeenth-century Epicureanism, or Renaissance Platonism and the Cambridge Platonists. It was not determinate enough to mark a whole period or intellectual movement.

In recent decades, ancient Stoicism has become a mainstream scholarly interest. Not coincidentally, this revival is echoed in work by such well-known thinkers as Foucault, MacIntyre, and Taylor, and we now have Becker's intriguing book, A New Stoicism, which offers itself as the kind of ethical theory that a modern Stoic could and should defend. But Stoicism as systematic philosophy has hardly been refashioned at any time.

Introduction

In “Idealism and Greek Philosophy,” Myles Burnyeat asks two questions:

1. How did it come about that philosophy accepted the idea that truth can be obtained without going outside subjective experience?

2. When and why did philosophers first lay claim to knowledge of their own subjective states?

Burnyeat argues that “it is Descartes who holds the answers to [these two] questions.” The ancients, he alleges, do not view the subjective as a realm about which there are truths. Correspondingly, neither do they view it as a realm about which there is or might be knowledge; for knowledge (both in fact and according to the ancients) implies truth. Nor, Burnyeat argues, do the ancients view the subjective as a realm about which there are or could be beliefs. As he puts it in “Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism?”:

In Meditation Two, by contrast, Descartes “discovers … the truth of statements describing the subjective states involved in the process of doubt itself”; “[s]ubjective truth has arrived to stay, constituting one's own experience as an object for description like any other.”

While all of Hume's readers agree that he is a sceptic – he calls himself a “true” sceptic in the “Conclusion” to Book I of the Treatise and a “mitigated” sceptic in the final Section of the first Enquiry – there is almost no agreement on what this kind of scepticism amounts to. I will limit my contribution to this controversy here to an examination of Hume's first engagement with scepticism, his exploration in “Of scepticism with regard to reason” (T.I.iv. 1; hereafter SwR) of the argument that we should not accept the verdicts of our reasoning; I reconstruct this sceptical argument in Section 1. What Hume wants us to learn from this exploration has also been the focus of much debate amongst his recent readers. There are three main interpretive positions, none of which to me seems satisfactory, but each of which I will suggest contains a germ of truth.

First, some have suggested that Hume's argument against our believing the verdicts of our reasoning is meant to be entirely ad hominem. For, after he has presented it, he says:

The Reception of Epicureanism Amongst the Moderns

The Epicurean system of natural philosophy and ethics presented a major attraction for seventeenth century philosophers, for whom it offered a powerful alternative to Christian Aristotelianism and the theory of man's corrupted and sinful nature. On the natural philosophy side, it furnished the underlying system – corpuscularianism – of the moderns, or, in seventeenth century terms, the “innovators.” On the ethical side, the revival of the Epicurean doctrine of pleasure is evident in seventeenth century moral philosophy, in which references to happiness, joy, and pleasure begin to take on a more positive tone, though they are constrained by the doubt that a secular morality is possible and by worries over concupiscence. It would be a worthwhile project to trace the reaction to and reinterpretation of each of the major Epicurean doctrines, including the ideational nature of God and the evolution of the functional animal in early modern philosophy. Meanwhile, the efforts of an idealistic, and somewhat authoritarian philosopher, Leibniz, to come to terms with ambient Epicureanism will serve to illustrate this mixed, but, on the whole, highly positive reception.

Assimilating is always a more dangerous philosophical and intellectual strategy than distinguishing. Qualifications are needed, and the chapter will supply them in due course. But I suspect that the Epicureanism of the moderns has been underestimated for two reasons that do not amount to justifications.

In considering the ways in which early modern philosophers used Hellenistic philosophy, the concept of appropriation is particularly useful. Rather than being the disembodied transmission and reception of ideas, the metaphor of appropriation gives agency to individual thinkers, and enables us to understand them in their own particular historical and intellectual contexts. Ideas do not influence subsequent ideas, nor do they develop by their own intrinsic power. Rather, particular individuals in real historical contexts deploy and develop earlier ideas to solve problems of their own. Thinking in terms of appropriation leads us to think about the historical agents as well as the content of their ideas. We must consider why particular figures were attracted to one tradition or another; how the way they asked their questions affected the use of the ideas they borrowed; and what role their own presuppositions played in their use of the appropriated ideas and texts.

Early modern philosophers often appropriated ideas from ancient philosophy and used them to solve new problems in new contexts. Looking back to classical times, philosophers considered an array of texts that had been deemed canonical, in terms of which they could develop their own positions. In part, this approach was an outgrowth of Renaissance humanism, which was devoted – among other things – to the recovery of ancient sources.