Philosophy in the West: Men, Women, Religion, Science

By Eugene F. Bales

PHILOSOPHY IN THE WEST: MEN, WOMEN, RELIGION, SCIENCE

This single volume history of philosophy in the West is distinguished by its wide coverage of figures, by its inclusion of well over thirty women, and by its substantive discussion of the historical background of each epoch. Each chapter begins with an overview of the period and concludes with a lengthy bibliography of both primary and secondary texts. There is a useful glossary of terms at the end of the book. Philosophy in the West is intended as a general guide to those taking courses in the history of philosophy, humanities, and related areas. It will also be of interest to those in the fields of theology, philosophy, feminism, and historical studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 7, 2008
• ISBN: 9781462805235

Eugene F. Bales

Eugene Bales has been a successful teacher of philosophy and related fields for nearly thirty eight years and is presently the Academic Vice President of Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. He has presented and published papers on Plotinus and Heidegger, and is the author of A Ready Reference to Philosophy East and West (University Press of America, 1987), which was selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book of 1988-1989. In 1998 he received the Mortvedt Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award at Bethany College.

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Copyright © 2008 by Eugene F. Bales.

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Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

To my mother, Rosemary Dawes Bales

PREFACE

This book—Philosophy in the West: Men, Women, Religion, Science—has stemmed from a central conviction that histories of philosophy now in print promote contextless ideas and their march through history. Courses in the subject often aim to examine a handful of primary texts with little consideration about the larger society in which these texts have appeared. Furthermore, the range of ideas examined has been limited to the central concerns of ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics, with other areas subject to neglect. Another limitation is that the story of the history of philosophy told today reflects largely a view of male philosophers, who casually assume that there have not been any female philosophers until recent decades.

Consequently, the need for a history of philosophy that addresses historical context, political thought, the general development of the culture, and the participation of women in particular is very great. It is the purpose of Philosophy in the West: Men, Women, Religion, Science to address this need in a way that has not been done before.

What assumptions guide the author in this book? First, there is an avoidance of a title such as Western philosophy because the latter suggests a kind of essentialism—the view that there is some common or unchanging core to being Western, which in fact is far from the case. The title of the book locates philosophy more geographically than theoretically. This book is largely about European philosophy, but it includes influences from the Mediterranean area, traditionally considered outside the West—regions such as North Africa and the Middle East. It also includes some sources from the United States and other areas, to the extent that philosophy there has been influenced by the European traditions. The guiding assumption is a narrative one—what must be said to tell the story in a good way?

Second, this book is about the way in which religion and science helped to redefine and reconceptualize the boundaries of an enterprise that came to be known as philosophy. Philosophy is, like literature in general, distressingly difficult to encapsulate in any definition at all because the sheer range of its subject matter is bewildering. It includes an incredible range of literary forms; it touches on virtually every intellectual, practical subject whatever. Some want to say that philosophy is the search for truth, but even if one ignores the godlike assumptions in that phrase, it is clear that philosophy is hardly marked off from either science or religion by it. In short, pragmatism is warranted in discussing how these three things are related. This is not to say there are no differences between the three; differences abound, most especially with respect to the practical stances each involves. But there cannot be much sense in offering eternally true definitions of realities that have shifted relentlessly over the ages like the tectonic plates that move constantly beneath us. The movement at times is slow enough that one begins to casually believe there is no movement at all. But like the citizens of San Francisco in 1906, the devotees of philosophy, religion, and science have been occasionally shaken into a new intellectual reality as the old definitions seemed to crumble away. Intellectual destruction, deconstruction, and revolution have all been important elements in the story of philosophy in the West.

Third, this book, unlike many previous works on the subject, includes numerous women philosophers. If one consults most histories of philosophy, one will find few, if any, women listed, mentioned, or discussed. Yet Mary Ellen Waithe, the editor of the recent A History of Women Philosophers, could hardly confine her material to the four volumes that were ultimately published. The effort in Philosophy in the West has not been to repeat the work of her splendid scholarship, but rather to take advantage of it in constructing a wider framework for telling the story of philosophy in the West. This will demonstrate two important points: that women did engage men in intellectual conversations on many similar subjects through the ages and that women often philosophized about the significance of being female in a way that challenged traditional male and masculinist understandings. Again, it is not at all the point here to promulgate the view that there is some kind of essential feminist philosophy that runs all through these thinkers. Even the most cursory acquaintance with the history from Hildegard of Bingen to Hannah Arendt reveals as much variety as a similar history of male philosophers. Women had distinctive voices in intellectual discussions. In some cases, they were heard and respected in their own time; in other cases, largely ignored. But in almost all cases, they disappeared when it became fashionable to write a history of philosophy.

Philosophy in the West, then, is a story, a narrative, which focuses on how men and women have helped reshape the understandings of religion, science, and philosophy over a period of two thousand six hundred years. It is a narrative about the history of philosophical texts seen in relation to culture, political life, religion, and science.

The book consists of eleven chapters, with a twelfth postscript-chapter. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the historical overview of the period, an overview that focuses not only on social and political events, but also on religious and scientific developments of the era. Following that is a philosophical overview of the age. The reader is encouraged to refer back to this brief synopsis for orientation and clarification. Each chapter concludes with a brief essay that focuses the reader on the achievements of the period and the later developments made necessary because of unresolved issues. Following each chapter are references that list (a) secondary texts of interest, and (b) all the major primary texts of each philosopher discussed in the chapter.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A great many people have been of assistance to the author in working through various parts of this text. I owe them all a debt of gratitude for the time they spent in making recommendations for changes. Specific parts of chapters or individual chapters were read and critiqued by Dr. Jim Eiswert, associate professor of philosophy, Northwest Missouri State University; Dr. Andrew Sheppard, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty, Southwestern College; Dr. Lance Richey, associate professor of religious studies, Cardinal Stritch University; Dr. Isaac True, OSB, professor of philosophy, Conception Seminary College; Dr. Kelly McFall, associate professor of history and chair of the History Department, Newman University; Dr. Ron MacLennan, professor of religion, Bethany College; and Prof. Frank Shaw, professor of art, of Bethany College. All of these individuals have been friends and colleagues and were most generous with their time and assistance. Whatever errors and problems remain are entirely mine and not theirs.

Another great debt is owed to Leila Zakhirova, who ploughed through the entire text for its general readability and for the presence of demonically fuzzy formulations of ideas to which only philosophers are prone. Ms. Zakhirova had the benefit of being an unusually gifted philosophy undergraduate at Bethany College, and her encouragement and help was the acid test that, from the side of a college-age reader, it was ready for publication.

Much of the original draft of this book was made possible by a sabbatical granted by the Bethany College Board of Directors in the 2001-2002 academic year. The students of Bethany College nurtured my interest in creating this text. My wife, Deborah Bailey, endured many years of discussions about it and is still smiling.

It is my hope that this book will be helpful to those who enjoy reading a history of philosophy with a sense of historical roots and political and social context and a genuine curiosity about the role of women in it. If it accomplishes that, I will be entirely happy.

CHAPTER ONE

INTO THE WELL AND OUT OF THE CAVE: GREEK PHILOSOPHERS IN THE ERA OF THE CITY-STATE (600-320 BCE)

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE PERIOD

1. The Wider Context of Greek Thought

In the ancient world, long before the Greeks had invented the term philosopher (meaning one who loves wisdom) to refer to a specific kind of intellectual, the idea of wisdom or of a sage who possesses it already had wide currency. The Greeks may most appropriately be said to have invented a certain ideal of philosophy—an ideal wedded to a historical conversation on related themes and issues—but they most certainly did not invent the idea of wisdom itself. Egyptian civilization had, long before the Greeks, probed ideas about life after death, moral judgment of the dead, and even monotheism. There was an attempt in the mid-fifteenth century BCE to promote the idea that Amon-Re was the creator of all the other gods, implying an intellectual need to understand all things as created from one foundation. Under Pharaoh Akhenaten (d. 1362 BCE), the Egyptians took a giant step toward monotheism when Aten, a sun god, was proclaimed the sole deity. This was revolutionary and unpopular enough that the idea was abandoned almost right away. Belief in an ethical framework for life itself is central to the so-called Book of the Dead, assembled perhaps during the second millennium BCE, which strongly suggested that every individual will be judged in the afterlife in terms of a balance of good over evil deeds.

Unlike the Egyptians, Sumerian civilization, and its later Babylonian successor, remained strongly polytheistic, but wrestled with the question of immortality in various religious narratives and most famously in the Epic of Gilgamesh, dating from before the second millennium BCE. The pessimistic view of this civilization was that as much as humans might want immortality, the latter was reserved to the gods alone. The tension between what humans want and what their natures require was never resolved, but the Greeks would gradually come to explore this problem, especially in the thought of Plato.

Israelite religion embraced a very strong monotheism, putting it at odds with most of the other religions of that part of the world. Israelite literature such as the book of Job posed the question of the tension between the moral innocence of humans and the external evils that beset them. To this perspective, the Zoroastrian religion (the ancient Persian religion) at first, and later the Israelite religion as well, added the notion of a final moral judgment of all humans, preceded by the emergence of a special messiah who would bring all of time to fruition.

The contributions of this ancient world are diffuse and varied, but one might say that they included the notion that the universe could be understood either as product of a diversity of beings (polytheism) or as the product of one being (monotheism); that humans desired to live beyond death, might be judged by moral standards that transcend life, but remained on the other side of the line between mortals and immortals.

All of these civilizations developed a tradition of wisdom, some of which reached considerable intellectual sophistication. But these achievements did not reach what the Greeks created in philosophy, a kind of wisdom literature in which the question for the source of unity in the world and the nature of human beings became a topic for an ongoing discussion among individuals separated from each other over time. Other ancient Wisdom literature never achieves the historical character that Greek philosophy does. The Greek temper demanded conversation and speech, and Greek philosophy was invented when their intellectuals carried on as though time did not limit the community of thinkers.

2. The Preclassical Origins of Greek Civilization

There are two important, though very rough, dates to keep in mind when looking at the origins of Greek thought. The first is 1100 BCE when the residents of the northeast Mediterranean mainland, according to a now partly discredited theory, were forced to flee or immigrate in the face of the invading Dorians, a group of Aryan tribes related culturally and linguistically to both the later Romans and the earlier founders of the post-Harappan civilization in India (around 1500 BCE). This invasion was probably a complex of events—some internal, some external—whose precise nature is not yet understood, but which, in any event, brought in its wake a kind of artistic and cultural Dark Age, not to be lifted until new immigrants, living in the Greek colonies along the west coast of what is now Turkey, began to absorb the influence of Persian art and to develop a workable system of writing. The latter happened perhaps sometime in the eighth century BCE, which is the second important date to keep in mind. With the economic growth of colonies beyond the Greek mainland, there was both the wealth to afford books and the leisure and interest to write. One of the earliest things to be written down, sometime in the mid-ninth century or later, was the tale of the pre-Dorian Greeks and their war with Troy—which was, of course, Homer’s Iliad.

The Iliad is not a philosophical work, but its impact on thinkers—religious and philosophical—was very great, and so it is worth saying a few words about its content. On the surface, it is a war story, covering only a small amount of time in a long ten-year battle. Its subject is the heroism of Achilles in the face of his enemies. The world, as Achilles knows it, is a bleak one: people live and die, and their only claim to fame is the immortality that comes from doing great deeds. The gods can be the most implacable and uncaring of enemies: they stand in the way of human happiness as much as the Trojans against whom Achilles fights. It is the heroism of Achilles, his relentless obsession to exhibit the highest grade of courage, that makes him the model of the Nietzschean superman about whom more will be said later (see chap. 10). For the moment, however, there is one important feature of this worldview to note: morality and ethics are human creations and are not written into the structure of the world or the plan of a deity. While humans such as Achilles may cross the line of good moral sense at times, his offenses are no worse than those committed by the gods. Religion, in this case, is no consolation to the sinner, or support for the saint. Indeed, the moral saint is not at the center of Homer’s great epic at all. Achilles seeks to be great in battle, not good.

Several other works dating to perhaps a hundred years after Homer’s Iliad are also of some interest for the history of Greek philosophy: Hesiod’s Works and Days and his Theogony. The former celebrates the heroism not of the soldier, but of the hardworking farmer. It advocates a conventional morality for life and, occasionally, criticizes the upper classes. The Theogony provides the first detailed account of the emergence of the Greek gods and goddesses, all of whom are said to arise out of Chaos at the beginning. The Greek gods and goddesses were strong individualists, even though devoted to their families and capable of occasional cooperation. While the gods do create a modicum of order, the order is less than complete, and no one can presume too much. But what is significant philosophically in Hesiod’s account is the desire to systematize the myths and stories into a more rational account.

The picture of life presented by these early poetic works is lively and inspiring, but also troubling and challenging. Some of the challenges have been mentioned: the weak basis for ethics, rooted ultimately in the amorality of the deities; the acceptance of chaos and the multiplicity of experiential elements against any unifying explanation of the world; and the inherently unbelievable nature of the stories about the gods and goddesses. It was in the face of these challenges that some Greek intellectuals—the first philosophers or lovers of wisdom—began to speculate in an entirely different vein.

3. A Brief History of the Classical Period (600-330 BCE)

As ancient Greece emerged out of the age of Homer and Hesiod by 600 BCE, it is important to recall that Greece was not one nation, but a far-flung group of fiercely independent city-states. Some of these cities were located on the mainland (Athens and Sparta notably), while others were colonies that had been founded in areas such as Ionia (now modern-day Turkey and bordering ancient Persia) and Magna Graecia (now southern Italy and bordering the ancient Romans and Etruscans to the north). Politically most of these cities were monarchies. In time, the interests of the people, as opposed to the nobility, led to the emergence of tyrants, who, while checking the power of the aristocracy, ruled more from a combination of personal and public interests.

Athens began the process of legal and political reforms of Solon in 594, who fostered the growing power of free citizens (only males) in a democracy (rule by the demes or townships) as an alternative to tyranny. Tyranny reemerged in Athens for a time, however; and in 534, one of the tyrants, Peisistratus, encouraged the growth of a religious cult of Dionysius (the god of wine) by sponsoring state-supported drama contests. Out of this came in short order the beginnings of Greek tragedies and comedies. The heart of this cult may be found in the chorus’s recitation of a vision of the god Dionysius (a vision acquired under the influence of wine), which in time came to be acted out with several performers. The evolution of this religious rite turned drama was toward more focus on the individual characters and toward secular events (such as the war with Persia). If the Greeks invented Western philosophy, they also invented Western theater, and the two were not unrelated as will be seen. For it is Greek comedy that first mentions the character of Socrates, and it is Greek drama that probably gave Plato the stimulus for his philosophical dialogues.

Athens’s rise to power among other city-states was in large part a function of conflict between Greek colonies in Ionia and the great power to the east—Persia. It was in fact the city of Miletus, the home birthplace of Greek philosophy, that led a rebellion against the Persians. The immediate result was disastrous: Miletus was destroyed in 494, and the event sent chills down the spines of all Greeks. It is worth noting that the philosophizing that had begun at Miletus did not end with the latter’s destruction. Like the appearance of a wide range of religious dissidents in the wake of Martin Luther’s protest in the sixteenth century, the end of Miletus triggered a proliferation of philosophical perspectives elsewhere, particularly in Magna Graecia (southern Italy).

In the years that followed the demise of Miletus, the various Greek city-states combined forces to wage war on the Persians, a struggle which seemed futile since the Persian army was enormous, and the Greeks were heavily outnumbered. A bit more than a decade later, Athens itself was destroyed by the Persians. Yet by 478, the Greeks had, much to everyone’s surprise, defeated the Persians and, for the time being, preserved the freedom of the city-states. In the years after this remarkable military triumph, the Athenians and the Spartans became, if anything, increasingly suspicious of one another, especially as Athens embarked on a plan to defend itself and other cities through the utilization of taxes for its own purposes. The culture of the two cities also could not have been more different: Athens was consumed with the need for democratic discussion of almost every important measure, while Sparta was organized along the lines of a military barracks. Athens was as famous for its public rhetoric as Sparta was for its military prowess.

Athens and Sparta spent much of the following century (until 404 BCE) involved in three distinct, long-running conflicts with one another, with periods of relative peace in between. The great Athenian general Pericles took office in 461, and Athens rose to become the single most important of all the city-states.

The emergence of philosophical activity in Athens came somewhat later, due in part to the utilization of the latter’s wealth for large building projects and its incessant need to talk everything through in the general democratic assembly. The money utilized for these projects came from the coffers of other city-states who paid well for the protection afforded them by Athens. The most famous result of the architectural and sculptural works financed in this manner were the stunning Akropolis built on a hilltop overlooking the city and, within that complex of buildings, one of the most impressive religious temples ever built—the Parthenon—containing within it a huge statue of Athena, patron of the city and goddess of wisdom. Sculptural projects at the Akropolis achieved a significant development toward three-dimensional realism (by comparison with the earlier Archaic style, which was more rigid), and a careful balance of formal and material concerns. Both the architecture and sculpture of the Athenians was intended as much for the human eye as for the gods, a fact significant for the emerging humanistic emphasis of Athenian philosophy. But this vast artistic program had another effect: it produced considerable wealth for those involved in the cutting of stone. It is not beside the point here to note that Athens’s first native philosopher of note—Socrates—came from a family of stonemasons, a fact which may have had something to do with his (and later Plato’s and Aristotle’s) preoccupation with the concepts of form and matter, so near and dear to all artists.

Athens’s democratic government also promoted its own kind of philosophical need: the need to use verbal argumentation to win over opponents in the popular assembly. The commitment to democracy of a nonrepresentative sort meant that everyone had to talk through everything of note. The need to improve public speech created an education industry, which was filled by traveling rhetoricians known later as Sophists. Most of these Sophists were not in fact native to Athens, so it is not entirely surprising that Athens’s own native son—Socrates—would, while adopting their means, thoroughly discredit their views.

The war between Athens and Sparta, the so-called Peloponnesian War, culminated in the defeat of Athens in 404 BCE and the temporary installation of a pro-Spartan government, with which both Socrates and his young student Plato had strong sympathies. The resumption of democratic government in Athens shortly after this resulted in the trial of Socrates on trumped-up charges. In the years after Socrates’ execution, Athens’s political importance declined, while its intellectual importance began to grow, largely because of the founding of rival schools—the first by Plato (the Academy in 387) and the second by Aristotle (the Lyceum in 335). Where the Sophists had earlier brought the teacher to the student, the students would now come to the teachers. And the subject matter went far beyond public speaking.

By the mid-fourth century BCE, Philip of Macedon to the north of the Greek mainland rose to power over the region and hired Aristotle as a tutor for Philip’s son Alexander (the Great). Alexander’s remarkable military expeditions to the far corners of the known world (from Africa to India) left many Greeks back home out in the cold, and Aristotle, determined to avoid the fate of Socrates, only barely escaped the displaced wrath of Athens on the closest thing to Alexander it could find. It was the death of Aristotle in 322, and the death of Alexander the Great in the preceding year (323), that conveniently marked an end to the era of Athenian philosophy as it marked also the end of the self-ruled Athenian city-state. With the reshaping of the political landscape in the late fourth century, intellectual life took off in other directions.

PHILOSOPHICAL OVERVIEW OF THE PERIOD

1. The Pre-Socratic Development of Greek Thought

While many today imagine that there is nothing important about Greek philosophy before Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, the truth is the community of intellectuals living in the colonies far from Athens in the century and a half before Socrates was of immense importance in shaping the kinds of questions that would be pursued down to the present day. We know very little of these latter thinkers except for a few sayings preserved in later writings, which have now been collected into one-volume editions for convenient reference. While little is left on paper, the scraps speak very loudly indeed.

In this early period, there were three distinct groups to be reckoned with. The first consisted of thinkers associated with the city of Miletus: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. The thinking of these three was provocative: they moved decisively away from the Homeric view of the gods as arbitrary masters of the cosmos and toward a view of the universe as governed by some kind of unifying rational principle. The Milesian spirit seems akin to modern science and its concern with the nature of the universe.

In the generation after Miletus was destroyed in 494 BCE by the Persians, intellectual activity shifted to other Greek colonies. A second group of thinkers arose who, while pursuing questions similar to those of the Milesians, gave a more religious, even mystical, flavor to philosophy. One important contributor was Heraclitus, who came from the town of Ephesus only a few miles away from Miletus. Heraclitus continued the cosmological speculation of the earlier Milesians, but became famous for his claim that everything is constantly changing, and for his oracular style, which was not easy to understand. In southern Italy, a philosopher named Pythagoras continued the Milesian question about the cosmos, but concluded to a religious and mystical vision of a universe generated from numbers and inhabited by souls seeking immortality in the heavens above. A third philosopher in Italy put forward a religious vision in poetic form, which claimed that change was not real at all. Parmenides’ perspective may have been odd, but he had the good luck to have had as a friend a student named Zeno who invented a series of clever mathematical puzzles, the point of which was to shore up Parmenides’ vision. And those clever puzzles about the impossibility of change set the parameters for the next generation of thinkers.

This third group of thinkers showed much more conceptual sophistication in its attempts to answer the dilemmas of Zeno by defending the reality of both change and permanence. Among this group are Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the founder of Greek atomism Democritus. Anaxagoras spent much of his life in Athens and was remembered by Socrates as the first Greek philosopher to at least ask about the nature of the human mind.

All three groups of thinkers were preoccupied with giving a unitary explanation of things. Their thought cannot be confined to simple categories such as scientist, religious reformer, or the like. They were all of these things and much more. They were also remarkably original and unafraid to explore the logic of their positions. Elements of their thought may seem naive today, but nothing obscures the greatness of the tradition they created.

2. The Sophists, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

As was seen earlier, the Athenian democracy involved direct and constant participation by all free citizens in the deliberations of the assembly. Those deliberations spurred the need of individuals to study the art of public speaking. To this end, a great need for teachers of rhetoric arose, and a number of traveling educators known as Sophists was the answer to this need.

The Sophists were well acquainted with the ideas of previous thinkers in the colonies. What they got from them was what many who undertake the study of philosophy for the first time often get: a general kind of skepticism about the possibility of knowing the truth of anything. The Sophists were not simplistic about their skepticism, which they could and did defend persuasively. But the defense of skepticism was not their most important contribution, at least not in their own viewpoint. For if one is to learn to speak effectively, it is important to be able to make a good argument in front of others. Knowing the truth, however, is much less important than getting one’s own truth before others in a persuasive way. The free assembly valued the opinions of all; truth was whatever opinion prevailed. To this end, the Sophists developed modes of argument and persuasion that have been the mainstay of the teaching of rhetoric and logic ever since.

It was over this question of truth, especially truth in the ethical or moral realm, that one of these Sophists made a name for himself. While Socrates refused to call himself a Sophist, in many respects, his interests were quite similar to theirs, and many of his contemporaries undoubtedly understood him to be one of them. Socrates, in fact, was only interested in one fundamental question, and that was whether we know the nature of moral terms such as courage, holiness, temperance, and the like. His conclusion was that we did know what is true, even if we cannot always say what it is, and he was quite critical of other Sophists for having missed the boat. His student Plato developed a much broader account than Socrates’ and eventually returned to the questions of many previous pre-Socratic thinkers, weaving together a large number of ideas within a framework of a blended Pythagoreanism and Socratism.

Many years later, Plato’s student Aristotle performed the same kind of function with respect to Plato (as well as Socrates), thinking through the entire inheritance of Greek thought and arriving at a perspective that shows sensitivity to both the naturalistic concerns of the pre-Socratics, as well as the epistemological and ethical concerns of Socrates and Plato. Aristotle’s central insight came from his interest in biological organisms and understanding the nature of their motion. The result was, at least for Western civilization, the wonderful contrast between Plato the mystical rationalist and Aristotle the earthy empiricist captured so brilliantly in Raphael’s painting of The School of Athens in the early sixteenth century. As will be seen, this contrast is easily overstated and misleading, but as an initial interpretation, it may be illuminating.

THE NATURE OF NATURE

1. The Ionian or Milesian Philosophers

Three thinkers, half buried in myth and legend, inaugurate Western philosophy in the sixth century BCE: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. All three lived in the city of Miletus, which was located in what is now western Turkey. Miletus was an important and rising community at this time, and its intellectual life was certainly related to its economic and commercial significance. The Milesian philosophical tradition came to an end when Cyrus of Persia sacked Miletus in 494 BCE and made it a vassal of his own empire. But in its heyday, Milesian intellectuals seem to have had the intellectual world to themselves.

The first of these is Thales (fl. 585 BCE), about whom little is known with certainty. He was commonly thought to be the first sage or wise man of the Greek world. The only tidbit of information about him that even makes it possible to assign a time for his life is the fact that he successfully predicted what was probably a near total eclipse of the sun on May 28, 585 BCE. It seems likely that he was born in the seventh century BCE and died toward the middle of the sixth century BCE.

Thales was said to be of a Phoenician background, with ties to the seafaring merchant classes. It has been suggested that he was able to calculate the distance of ships at sea using perhaps a developed knowledge of the stars and an understanding of geometry. Indeed his knowledge of geometry was thought to be so vast that he was credited by the Greeks with having taught the Egyptians something about it, which, while possible, may have been a bit of an exaggeration.

Besides this interest in applied mathematics, Thales is known for his belief that the fundamental arche (principle,, fundamental reality) of all things is water. Arche means both the starting point or beginning, and originating cause. Water is thus the beginning of everything, including all the divergent nonwaterlike things that have appeared since the beginning. That water is the arche of all things is just the sort of thing one would expect a member of a seagoing family or nation to conclude. But Thales went further than simply offering this up as some kind of scientific explanation.

Water appears to be the source of all life and is itself constantly in motion. Now that which is in motion or causes motion is also commonly understood to be alive or to have soul (psyche). So Thales is said to have believed that all things, being made of water, are alive and have souls. This was apparent, Thales thought, in the phenomenon of the magnetic stone, which causes things to move and which must thus possess soul or life.

Closely related to this is Thales’ claim that all things are full of the gods. This was almost certainly because the divine was understood to be the arche of everything, especially the cause of life. Now if water is the arche, then water is divine. On this account, Thales believed that everything whatever was alive and that nothing could properly be called inanimate. One implication of this would seem to be that what is ultimately divine in the world, and even unifies it, is rather different from the divinities of Homer and Hesiod, all of whom were said to emanate from Chaos. Nothing could be further from their claim that reality is generated from Chaos than Thales’ claim that it is founded on principle (arche).

Implicit in the above is another claim: that an explanation of the universe or cosmos is simultaneously an explanation of life and divinity. In short, the parts of the known world—the world of mountains and oceans, the world of living organisms, the world of the sacred—were not separated into watertight compartments, but could all be understood together in some kind of unity. That was a brilliant assumption, perhaps much more important than Thales’ better- known claim that reality was water.

The Greeks circulated many legends about Thales’ impressive abilities. But there was at least one story, related by Plato, that may capture both his wisdom and his preoccupation with water. The story is that he was so engaged studying the stars above that he failed to watch where he was walking and fell into a well. Plato tells this story approvingly to indicate that philosophers are not interested in practical, everyday matters, such as where one is walking. The other side of that story, of course, is to be found with the servant girl who is reported to have laughed at what happens to absentminded intellectuals. The truth about philosophy lies perhaps between Plato and the girl.

Anaximander (b. c. 610 BCE) was a younger friend of Thales, though he probably died about the same time as Thales. Like Thales, Anaximander was reputed to be a man of practical scientific wisdom. He is credited for being the first to publish a geographical map of the earth. Like Thales, Anaximander had a strong interest in astronomy and either invented or, more likely, introduced the sundial. And one legend says that he saved the Spartans by successfully predicting an earthquake.

Anaximander’s philosophical proposal was that the arche of all things was the indefinite or boundless (the apeiron or infinite). It is rather clear that he was rejecting Thales’ belief about the fundamental role of water. Thales’ belief about water would imply that all the divergent things and qualities of the world emerge from what is in effect one of those very qualities (the nonfluid emerges from the fluid, if you will). But if one of these qualities was fundamental, it is not obvious how opposite qualities could be generated from it. So the arche, Anaximander reasoned, must be something with no internal qualitative boundaries, such as the boundary between what is water and what is not. That is, the arche is apeiron, literally that which has no boundaries.

If the arche is apeiron, then it is immortal as well because all of life (which is included among the opposites) emerges from the apeiron, and thus, the apeiron is the cause of life. Again, Anaximander, like Thales, concludes that the basic arche is divine because it is the cause of life and motion and everything. So Anaximander kept the equation of Thales:

arche of universe = cause of motion and life = divine in nature.

His most important suggestion was that the arche could not be some particular empirical element such as water.

According to Anaximander, the empirical world as we know it is a combination or mixture of opposites, which emerge out of the undifferentiated (apeiron). There are essentially two sets of opposites—the hot and the cold, and the wet and the dry (earth, air, fire, and water conceived as qualities). It is the nature of each opposite to come into conflict with the other, such that one must conquer or exterminate the other. This is why water cannot be the fundamental arche, since it can be conquered by its opposite—the dry. Sometimes the conflict is a draw, and in that case, justice or balance reigns in the universe. (What does not happen, one should notice, is that one opposite becomes the other; rather both opposites come out of a primal reality, which has no qualities at all.)

Anaximander provides us with an elaborate theory of the genesis of the universe (cosmogenesis or cosmology). He suggests that the two sets of opposites exist like living seeds within the eternal apeiron. The opposites become detached from the nucleus of the apeiron and begin to form first just the hot and the cold; then, the dry within the hot and the wet within the cold becoming separated. According to this account, the hot became rotating wheels of fire in the sky, streaming through the holes in the sky (which thereby explained the stars). The earth itself is conceived as a great column (a wonderfully Greek idea!), about three times as wide as long, with everyone living on the top of the column. Anaximander took great interest in meteorological phenomena and attempted to offer specific explanations of many phenomena in terms of the wind and its motion and effect on other opposites. But perhaps most intriguing of all is his evolutionary theory. Anaximander suggested that all living creatures were born in moisture, in the sea, and that in time, they came forth to live on dry land, their hard shells being originally dried up by the action of the sun. Humans specifically evolved from fish when the latter came on land and subsequently dried up in the absence of the wet.

What is of interest in this account are not merely the curious specifics, but the framework of explanation: everything is to be understood in terms of the basic sets of opposites, which emerge out of the apeiron. The explanation of reality and all of its segments is unified by appeal to handful of basic concepts.

Anaximenes (fl. 550 BCE) was younger than Anaximander and probably did not outlive the destruction of Miletus in 494 BCE. Little else is known about his life. Anaximenes approached the question of the arche of the universe from a somewhat different angle. He had the thought that perhaps it was not so much conflict of qualities as processes of rarefaction and condensation could explain everything. If so, the fundamental arche could certainly be a qualitative substratum (thereby defending Thales in principle against Anaximander), and Anaximenes thought the best or most logical choice was air (thereby disagreeing with both of them). Anaximenes suggested that all natural processes could be a function of air if in fact everything else reduced to air particles either packed together tightly or spaced widely apart. Anaximenes even suggested, giving Anaximander his due, that air is indefinite (apeiron), since it appears empirically to lack a tangible quality. Further, air is precisely that which accounts for the life of things (when it leaves the body, the body dies) and is thus divine. In this respect, Anaximenes seems to have suggested that the gods are divine because they are condensations or rarefactions of air. This may be the first attempt in Greek thought to explain the gods, specifically by reference to the divinity of some philosophical principle of the universe.

It is well to point out at the conclusion of this section the way in which these three very early Milesian philosophers set the stage for the rest of the history of philosophy. On the surface, they offer three different explanations for what the universe is really made of: water, air, and the boundless. It is easy to dismiss all three from hindsight. But the genius of these thinkers is to be found not merely in what they thought the universe to consist, but in their implicit claim that there is one unified explanation for all of reality—physical, religious, and human. The progress of philosophy is not in the answers that it gives, but in its assumptions and in the questions it raises about them. The Milesians have the distinction of having begun a very long conversation about the nature of nature in Western history.

2. Post-Milesian Speculation on Change and Numbers

Greek philosophy could have come to an abrupt end with the destruction of Miletus in 494 BCE, but nothing like that happened. Almost immediately, intellectuals in other Greek colonies put forward their own vision of reality, taking up some of the perspectives of the Milesians, but advancing the discussion in new directions. A major focus in this next generation was on the question of change and permanence, but new ideas, including those of the self and the importance of mathematics, were put into circulation. Three figures are central in this stage: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides. Pythagoras founded a religious brotherhood that endured for several centuries; some of the very first women in the history of Western philosophy were among his disciples. Parmenides generated considerable intellectual interest among a number of other intellectuals. Though his vision was a religious one, later generations would often encounter him through the lens of his close and younger friend Zeno, whose paradoxes were among the intellectual marvels of ancient Greece. Heraclitus also wrapped himself in a religious and oracular style, but he established no school and seems to have been a determined individualist and elitist in his outlook.

Pythagoras (fl. c. 532 BCE) originally came from the island of Samos, but migrated to the polis of Croton in southern Italy, where he achieved considerable political power. The story is that he had some three hundred religious disciples in the city of Croton and that they virtually turned the city into a religious aristocracy. He was finally thrown out by the citizens and retired to a nearby city (Metapontium) where he died.

Details of Pythagoras’s teaching are wrapped in obscurity. That is because the cult group that surrounded him maintained a rule about secrecy for quite a long time, and it was not until much later (the time of Plato) that some portions of the doctrine had become common knowledge. Complicating matters considerably further was the long-standing Pythagorean tradition of attributing later discoveries by cult members to Pythagoras himself. The whole project of reconstituting the history of Pythagoreanism is a very complex matter and is still subject to much speculation. The discussion here will begin with those matters that are very likely to be attributed to Pythagoras himself and then deal with what are probably later doctrines of his followers attributed to the founder.

Religious Doctrines. Pythagoras’s teachings were both philosophical and religious or mystical. His religious teachings centered on purification of the soul in this life and a belief in reincarnation. He regarded the soul as immortal—a belief quite unlike the typical Greek’s, who was generally skeptical of any afterlife. The immortal human soul could and did transmigrate to other living things in the universe after it left the human body. After a period of three thousand years, the soul would enter again into a human body, and the purification process would begin again. If purification of the soul was achieved in this life, its final departure from the body at death would be final.

Pythagoras left quite a number of rather strange (because unexplained) rules and prohibitions. These rules fall into five main categories: (1) common sense ethical injunctions (be religious, don’t party too much, etc.), (2) primitive folk taboos (never step over a crossbar), (3) ritual purity rules (don’t cut your fingernails at a sacrifice), (4) rules for the performance of magic, and (5) rules advocating respect for all living things and abstinence from killing.

The Discovery of Mathematical Order. If these religious doctrines were all there was to his intellectual thought, Pythagoras would hardly be of interest to philosophy. But in fact, Pythagoras seems to have given some decidedly original turns to his thinking about the assumptions of the mystery religion he founded. Specifically, Pythagoras believed that purification of the soul could be achieved by contemplation of the orderly cosmos. The nature of that order intrigued Pythagoras, and it seems that the answer to the question about the nature of its order came to him through what may have been originally an independent discovery. Pythagoras, it seems, was the first to discover that the musical scale was in fact based on numbers and arithmetical proportion, the major intervals between notes being expressible in arithmetical terms. This discovery most likely led Pythagoras to the notion that perhaps the foundation of sound itself in the physical world implied that the latter’s orderliness was a function of arithmetical order or numbers. The key to this conclusion may well have been the idea that the movements of the stars and heavenly bodies occurred in proportioned ways, such that there is a harmony of the spheres. If the spheres were arithmetically harmonious, then perhaps the order of the entire universe was arithmetical.

(It is to be noted that Pythagoras also certainly invented the geometrical theorem attributed to him: a2 = b2 + c2, where a = the hypotenuse of a right triangle, and b and c equal the other two sides. There is a legend that he sacrificed oxen with this discovery, but that seems most unlikely, given his other beliefs.)

Now where there is order, there is limit, but the limited presupposes the unlimited. The ultimate truth about the universe can be described in terms of this dualism between the Limited and the Unlimited. The limited is that which is proportionate; the unlimited is that which stands outside the proportionate. The sound of a musical instrument is founded on proportion and thus Limited, but it presupposes a medium in which sound can be heard, and this medium is the nonproportionate or Unlimited.

The soul’s focus on the proportional nature of the limited is the key to achieving purification from the body. By implication, the soul that is steeped in the unlimited and its lack of arithmetical proportion is still tied to the body and to the cycles of reincarnation. Contemplation of the arithmetical nature of the universe is thus the path to cosmic happiness and the avoidance of future reincarnation.

Later Pythagoreanism. After Pythagoras’s death, his followers divided into two camps: the Mathematicians, who concentrated on science, and the Acousmatics, who concerned themselves with the mystical side of his doctrine.

The development of Pythagoreanism filled out these doctrines and elaborated them into something of a philosophical system. First of all, Pythagoras’s basic view of the universe—that all things are bound together in unity—was, to some extent, reexplained with reference to an ultimate dualism between opposite principles (it is a distinct possibility that Pythagoras’s basic emphasis was originally on the unity of all things and that he was more of a monist than a dualist). The two most basic opposite principles were those of Limited, which is equated with unity, rest, goodness, and the male nature, and the Unlimited, which is equated with plurality, motion, evil, and the female nature. Even more significant was the equation of the Odd number in arithmetic with the Limited, and the Even numbers with the Unlimited. The attempt to identify the odd and even in arithmetic with the limited and unlimited in harmonic theory and geometry was an attempt to equate arithmetic and geometry. It is interesting as an attempt, but quite unconvincing from a logical point of view.

This equation of arithmetic and geometry led the Pythagoreans to think of numbers as spatially extended, which was accomplished by identifying the point of geometry with the unit of arithmetic. With this curious move, the universe could be described not only geometrically, but also and simultaneously arithmetically. A number was to be understood as an arithmetical unit with spatial extension, rather like a physical atom. Everything in the universe was made of such numbers, and thus everything was a product of mathematical order. This included not only physical objects, but also even such abstract phenomena as opportunity, justice, or marriage.

The theory of the origin of the universe is rather unclear. It appears that the first arithmetical unit or number to come into existence did so when the male principle of the Limited implanted a seed in the surrounding Unlimited. This seed grew by inhaling the surrounding Unlimited. But inhaled into the seed was the void, space, whose function was to divide the unit into two; with more inhalation, the process of division increased. From the one comes two; from two, four, and from four, ten, and the millions to follow. In all this, the number 10 came to have a special significance for the Pythagoreans, ten being the number they swore oaths upon. (10 = the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4). In effect, then, the theory of the genesis of the cosmos is simultaneously a theory about the generation of the series of all possible numbers.

Pythagoras’s views had considerable influence on Greek physicians (health was understood as a harmony of the bodily humors), Greek music, and, of course, philosophy. Probably the most significant of those influenced by him were Socrates (the doctrine of the immortal soul) and Plato (the mathematical view of the universe). Pythagoras’s philosophy, more or less, became synonymous with the cause of a mathematical interpretation of the physical universe. It survived for many centuries, achieving perhaps its greatest triumph in being a direct inspiration of Nicolas Copernicus.

A number of connections between Pythagoreanism and non-Western religions and philosophies have been noted. There is a long-standing legend about Pythagoras visiting Zoroaster, the Persian dualist. Pythagorean beliefs in the immortality of the soul certainly have much in common with various Hindu beliefs, though no direct connection seems likely. Further, there is a remarkable resemblance between Pythagoreanism and the Chinese school of Yin-Yang philosophy, which also emphasized a table of opposites, with the assumption of a mathematical nature of the universe. But again, it is likely that there is no connection.

Pythagoreanism was the expressed philosophy of a large group of women over a number of centuries. While only fragments survive of their writings, it seems clear that many of them were particularly concerned about the application of the theory to the situation of women. Three women, from among many others, are singled out for discussion here in order to give a sense of their concerns.

Theano of Crotona (fl. c. 525 BCE), the wife of Pythagoras, was the reputed author of a work entitled On Piety. In a fragment from this work, Theano defends her husband and his followers from the charge that material objects are generated from number. She argues instead that Pythagoras claimed only that all things come to be in accordance with number. She defends immortality of the soul on the grounds that the final harmony of the universe demands some kind of retribution for evildoers in this life. Punishment here is conceived in terms of reincarnation, rather than a place of fire. She also advocates women as the bearers of the virtue of temperance within the household. This is emphasized because of the need to create domestic harmony to serve as a basis for harmony in the state and the larger cosmos.

Aesara of Lucania (sometime between 425 BCE and AD 100) was the author of a work entitled On Human Nature. In a surviving fragment, she argues that human nature provides a standard of law and justice for both the home and the city. Justice is the orderly arrangement of the soul. The soul is well ordered when its threefold structure is understood. There is the mind (nous) that brings about judgment, spiritedness (thumosis) that is the origin of strength, and desire that gives rise to love. When these three are well ordered to one another, then there are proportion and justice in the soul. What is well ordered here is understood in terms of appropriate relations, not relations of authoritarian imposition. While she does emphasize the hierarchical nature of this tripartite structure, she is also insistent on balance in the overall result.

Phintys of Sparta (fl. early fourth century BCE) was probably a contemporary of Plato and wrote On the Moderation of Women; several fragments of which survive. She argues that a thing which possesses something to an excellent degree is superior to others of the same kind. Further, each thing has an excellence that characterizes its very excellence. Thus, a horse has its own kind of excellence. And by implication, so do men and women. Some excellences are peculiar or specific to one gender or another. Thus men are good in military and political matters, while women are good for domestic work. But some excellences are possessed by both men and women; among these are courage, justice, and wisdom. In the end, even these common excellences are affected by contemporary and unequal gender arrangements, and so Phintys focuses on moderation as the specific excellence of a woman in her own society. Moderation of a married woman is then discussed with respect to marriage, the body, public appearances, and the performance of religious rites. The emphasis is on Pythagorean concerns for order, harmony, and justice in the home.

Heraclitus (fl. c. 480 BCE) is known to have been from one of the oldest, most respected families in the city of Ephesus, which was just thirty miles north of Miletus. It is probable that his philosophy was written down in the form of a book perhaps by 480 BCE. His style of philosophizing was oracular—short, pithy sayings often difficult to interpret. Only the elite could interpret them because the rabble understood nothing. Heraclitus did not go out of his way to make himself clear; indeed he became known as the Riddler or the Dark because of his unusual written style.

The Self and the Logos. Heraclitus makes it known that he regarded himself as far above the ordinary rabble; he was an aristocrat through and through. And he regards his own search for knowledge as just the opposite (if anything ) of the earlier Milesians. For while they searched the skies for the arche of all things, Heraclitus tells us that he searched himself. Heraclitus similarly opposed the preoccupation of the Pythagoreans to search into everything. Those who search into everything, he thought, will never learn the fundamental principles of things; they will become lost in a plethora of minor matters. He is the first to make the self the starting point of philosophizing.

But what did Heraclitus find in the self? He found paradoxically the Logos which, he says, is common to all. By common to all he means not only common to all humans, but also common to the entire world as well. While Logos is common to all, most humans have only their private understanding; that is, they fail to recognize what is common to all, or even that there really is something common to all.

What is Logos? The fundamental sense of the word is of something unifying the many. The word itself had as its root significance the coming together of language into units of meaning: conversation; by analogy, reason; by analogy again, measure or proportion, principle, law or rule. Heraclitus almost certainly plays on most of these senses in his various oracular statements. Overall, Logos seems to be understood as the unifying principle or arche of the universe, an intelligence directing the universe, imposing unity and order on all things, and accounting for the capacity of human reason to know the order of things. Logos within us is intelligence. Heraclitus understood this intelligence in virtually materialistic terms as fire. But his reason for saying this was to distinguish intelligence from more obviously physical substances whose nature lacked the usual properties of fire, being more cold than hot. Indeed, too much cooling down in the human body produces ignorance, the world of sleep and dreams, and, ultimately, death. This is also why Heraclitus can urge people not to drink too much. Nothing must quench the fire of the inner Logos.

Universal Strife and the Opposites. Like the earlier Ionians, Heraclitus regarded the natural world as one of unceasing change. But the change that takes place does so in a certain lawlike way. Specifically, the law of the universe is a warfare between opposites. Being would cease if this warfare ceased. Every motion or change in the universe can be understood in terms of this warlike play of opposites. But something must unify these opposites; some kind of peace must constantly make this warfare possible. The fundamental unifying sameness is the identity of all things in the Logos. That Heraclitus thought this was perhaps because it seemed to him that if B could emerge out of A, and then A again out of B, it could only be because A and B were, in essence, the same.

This sense of universal warfare or strife between opposites may well have been inspired by Anaximander. But Heraclitus’s target of criticism was almost certainly the Pythagoreans, whose view that everything is basically harmonious and peaceful is utterly opposed to his insistence that everything is in conflict.

All things change from one opposite to another. This doctrine of constant change is what Heraclitus is noted for. One of the most reliably authentic sayings of Heraclitus, and the one for which he is most famous, is ‘You cannot step twice into the same river." However, it must be pointed out that Heraclitus’s emphasis on constant change is balanced with his other claim that all change is lawlike and orderly because all is Logos fundamentally. The law of constant change is simply that of the warfare of opposites.

Logos is said to be everlasting or eternal. The changes of the universe, involving constant transformations of fire, would seem also to be eternal. Some have thought they found in Heraclitus a doctrine about periodic cosmic conflagrations, but there is much dispute about this. Similarly, some have thought they have found a doctrine of the soul’s immortality, but this can only be speculative. It is true that one of the fragments, in exploring the identity of soul and Logos, suggests