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ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: The Sophists - Socrates - Minor Socratic Schools The Cynic School - Antisthenes - The Cyrenaic School - Aristippus Unclassified: Isocrates |
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The causes which determined the above passage were many, and the most important of these were the following:
These facts determined a crisis in Greek life at the end of the fifth century before Christ. The exponents of this crisis were the Sophists, molders of thought who, distrusting the results of the preceding thinkers, intended to educate youth according to the new exigencies of the times. The Sophists centered their efforts on the problem of knowledge as well as on the problem of morality and justice. This is why Socrates rose against them and established once and for all the fact that true knowledge means knowing through concepts. Never, perhaps, had the human mind made a greater advance in the philosophical field than that which was achieved after Socrates had shown in what true knowledge consists. First, Plato developed the Socratic concept, and finally Aristotle systematized the entire body of Greek thought. The results obtained in this period were to influence all subsequent ages. The teaching of Socrates was to give rise to the Minor Socratic Schools, which in turn were to give origin to Stoicism and Epicureanism. The thought of Plato was revived in the later Academies, and in particular in the last important movement of Greek thought, Neo-Platonism. The philosophy of Aristotle was later enriched by Medieval thought, and is still accepted as the traditional philosophy or perennial philosophy even in this contemporary age. Elsewhere On the Internet
CARDINAL DOCTRINE OF THE SOPHISTS: The impossibility of any real or objective truth, morality, or religion. We cannot prove that anything is true or good. Hence, the best rule of life is to get as much pleasure and satisfaction as one can. The philosophers who first impersonate the new state of mind were called Sophists. The Sophists were teachers of various subjects, especially oratory, dialectic grammar, and logic, who came into prominence in the second half of the 5th century. They aimed to create in youth the ability to attain the offices of the state. They discussed problems of knowledge, ethics and right. They introduced the study of man, made philosophy practical, and taught for pay. Sophistic thinking started with the Heraclitean "flux": it maintained that all was fleeting and that no stable principles existed. Theory of Knowledge Sophists hold that knowledge is essentially empirical and relative to man. They asserted that each man has his own perceptions; that one man's perceptions are as good as another's; there is no truth binding on all alike. Protagoras, for instance, says that "man is the measure of all things," and here man means the individual in particular. Thus reality is reduced to the subjective experience of man. Hence, the philosopher Gorgias could conclude that nothing exists, nothing can be known, nothing can be taught. Ethics and Right The Sophists attacked belief in traditional morality and right. According to the Sophistic principle of knowledge that everything is relative to man, the principle of morality is what satisfies one's instinct and passions (Hedonism). Right is based on force; right is that which succeeds in imposing itself through force. Sophistic teaching, by battering all the orders of ethics and justice, opened up the way that made possible and justified the use of all deceptions and the most violent passions. The chief Sophists were Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias, Prodicus, and Zeno of Elea. Sophistry represents a peculiar type of mind which recurs in times of transition when old systems of thought, government, and religion have lost their authority. In The Radical Academy
Elsewhere On the Internet
a. Protagoras of Abdera Protagoras was born around 480 B.C. and died in 410 B.C. He was the first man to call himself a Sophist. A fellow countryman of Democritus, he recognized the Heraclitean flux and the sensualism of Democritus. Philosophy Protagoras proclaimed that the sensible world is a perpetual metamorphosis. The senses show things that pass away, hence they are receptive; they do not reveal the immutable and the universal. To know the truth, appeal must be made to reflection and reason. But no one knows anything but his own sensations, hence there is no truth for man except in what he perceives, feels, and experiences. The individual is therefore the measure of the true and the good. Man is the measure of all things. Elsewhere On the Internet
b. Gorgias of Leontinum Gorgias (picture) was born around 483 B.C., in Leontini in Sicily, and died in 375 B.C. He was a Rhetorician and orator and wrote a work called On Nature and Non-Being. Gorgias taught that nothing real exists, and even if it did we cannot know it. He asserts that no moral law can be proved, hence man has a perfect right to follow his own notions of good. (This low moral view results from his doctrine of knowledge.) In the dialogue entitled Gorgias, Plato argues with him that pleasure and worldly goods and the gratification of desires are not happiness. Next to Protagoras, Gorgias was the most important and respected sophist. Gorgias, as leader of an embassy which was sent by his native city to Athens in order to ask for help against Syracusan aggression, succeeded in persuading the Athenians who were deeply impressed by his powerful eloquence. Gorgias has often been mentioned as an example of longevity, and this has been attributed to his great egoism. He did not marry, and was always indifferent to both the sufferings and the happiness of other people. He developed rhetoric as an art whose possibilities are not restricted by anything least of all by philosophy. To prove this thesis, Gorgias proceeded from Empedocles' theory of perception. He wrote a treatise On Nature, a Technic of Rhetorics, and several eulogies. Only two small fragments, probably from the treatise On Nature, are extant. In The Radical Academy
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c. Hippias of Elis Hippias taught science among other things and appears in Plato's Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, and Protagoras. d. Prodicus of Ceos Prodicus was regarded as the best of the Sophists and held in high esteem by Socrates. His celebrated Hercules at the Crossroads is preserved in the Memorabilia of Xenophon. e. Zeno of Elea See The Pluralists for Zeno's life and thought. Elsewhere On the Internet
The positive contributions of the Sophists to the Perennial Philosophy Sophistic thought can be considered as a transition from the old cosmological concepts to the new ideas about man. One cannot deny the Sophists the merit of having recalled philosophy to an analysis of the subject; and though Sophism remained incipient, it would in the immediate process of time culminate in the high speculations of Plato and Aristotle. The Sophists were the first to show complete indifference to the problem of the world of matter and to center their efforts upon man. But man can be an object of study in his sense knowledge as well as in that more profound one of reason. The Sophists stopped at the first, at the immediacy of sense impressions. The analysis of reason was reserved to Socrates and his disciples. "Know Thyself" is the standard of his teaching. Socrates (picture)
was born around 470 B.C. in Athens, the son of
Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and Phaenarete, a
midwife, and died in 399 B.C. Our chief sources of
knowledge about Socrates are Xenophon's
Memorabilia, and Plato's Dialogues:
Symposium, Apology, Crito, and
Phaedo. Socrates, once a sculptor like his father, was attracted to the philosophy of the Sophists; his chief concern was to meet their challenge, and he resembled them so much that he was often mistaken for a Sophist. Socrates is said to be rather ugly of face, shabby in dress, frugal, but broadly tolerant. He was apparently indulgent, genial, witty, and good tempered. He was a master of himself, caring only for wisdom and the good. Philosophy Socrates, like the Sophists, was not concerned with cosmological questions, but concentrated his attention on man. But the man taken into consideration by Socrates is not the individual in particular; rather, he is the universal man in his subjective reason. In this universal man, Socrates discovered a knowledge whose characteristics are universality and necessity, i.e., concepts. The doctrine of Socrates can be summed up in two words: Concepts and ethics. Concepts For Socrates, the knowledge of which the Sophists speak is opinion. But in the rational part of every man there exists another knowledge, whose notions are common to all and hence enjoy universality and necessity; these are concepts. Perfect knowledge consists in understanding through concepts; in the search for concepts, Socrates used his own method, which is based on "maieutics," the art of bringing out concepts latent in the mind. Ethics Socrates did not surpass the prejudice of Greek intellectualism, which consisted in reducing evil to ignorance. Vice means error, and virtue means knowledge. Thus it is easy to see why Socrates, who intended to form a virtuous youth, restricted his teaching to the search for moral concepts. The Socratic Method Socrates sought to enlighten men by having them discover truths for themselves. He plied his individuals with skillful questions, beginning with simple interrogations and proceeding to the more difficult. He gradually compelled his hearers to admit they knew little, thus bringing them to recognize the truth. His dialectic method is called Socratic irony, or feigned ignorance. Its object was to make them think correctly, make them happy, and useful citizens. He probed his hearer, involving him in contradictions and perplexities until his ignorance was acknowledged. The Death of Socrates Socrates' doctrine angered his Athenian contemporaries. They had imprisoned Anaxagoras and exiled Protagoras for atheism and skepticism, and now their fury fell on Socrates. He was given poison to drink ("hemlock") and the "death of Socrates" has become an historical event. Socrates' Influence After Socrates' death, his doctrine dominated Greek thought. His philosophy paved the way for Stoicism and Christianity -- in proclaiming his principle of universality, of Providence, and the brotherhood of man. Aristotle regarded Socrates to be the founder of Ethics because he took up the unfinished problem of the Skeptics and the Sophists. Upon the death of Socrates, a number of schools arose, each professing to expound his teaching. In The Radical Academy
The positive contributions of Socrates to the Perennial Philosophy Socrates moves on the same plane as the Sophists, i.e., the study of man, and raises the Delphic motto: "Know thyself" as the standard of his teaching. He does not stop at sensations, at opinative knowledge; his investigation tended to scrutinize the more intimate part of man, that by which man is man, his reason. It is in this intimacy of reason that he discovers a knowledge which has the characteristics of universality and necessity: the concept. Behold the great Socratic discovery through which philosophy finds its road and later arrives at the greater systems which the human mind has been able to construct. He concentrated all his attention on the search for moral concepts; he was convinced that the practice of morality must be preceded by a concept of justice, and was opposed to that destructive idea which was the basis of Sophistic teaching. For Socrates the concept is that of which all think when they speak of a thing. In the rational part of every man there exist some notions which are common to all and hence enjoy universality and necessity, and which form the substratum of true understanding and knowledge. True science consists in understanding through concepts. Everyone wishes to be happy. After the death of Socrates, his disciples opened schools with the intention of continuing the teaching of their master. But with the exception of Plato, who represents the Major School of Socrates, the others did not succeed in grasping the meaning of the Socratic concept. Hence these are called Minor Socratic Schools. a. The School of Megara This school was founded by Euclides, a disciple of Socrates and an Eleatic. Euclides used Socrates' conception of the Good to give more significant content to the Parmenidean ONE, because it gave universality and individuality and unchanging Being.
The Cynic School was opened by Antisthenes, who first was a disciple of Gorgias and then of Socrates. He taught in the Cynosarges of Athens, whence the name Cynic. Antisthenes taught that knowledge (cognition) could not pass beyond the data of the senses. and since every sensation is individual, he concluded that only the individual is real. Moreover, as every individual has his own essence and no other, Antisthenes inferred that error is impossible and finally every definition is impossible. What, then, were the concepts which Socrates has discussed? Simple the name of nouns. In a word, Antisthenes was an empiric nominalist. Of him it is related that in a debate with Plato about concepts, he said: "O Plato, I see the horse, but the horseness -- that I do not see." Plato answered: "You do not see the horseness because you have nothing but the eyes of the body." Ethics. Virtue is not a means to attaining good, but is the good itself. As virtue is the only good, so vice is the sole evil. But in what does virtue consist? In autarchy, i.e., in the possession of one's own reason, that which tells us that pleasures, riches, and everything which is called the civilization of a people is vice, because it is evil to feel the need of them. The Cynic, hence, went apart from society to live as a primitive man with few things, and these few supplied by nature itself. Between nature and society as we know it, with all the comforts of life, there is the same difference as between virtue and vice. To live according to nature understood thus -- such is the model of the Cynic's life. The most famous Cynic was Diogenes of Sinope. Cynicism is a reaction of the poorer classes against the aristocracy; the reaction was made in the name of nature. Son of a lower-class Athenian father and either a Thracian or Phrygian-slave mother, Antisthenes (picture) was the founder of the Cynic school of Greek philosophy. The name of his school was derived from the building in which he taught, the Cynosarges (dog's tomb), for Cynic philosophy bears no relation to the modern meaning of cynicism in which human values or moral scruples are held in contempt. He was originally a disciple of Gorgias, the sophist, who came to Athens in 427 B.C. Later he became one of the most faithful pupils of Socrates, trampling five miles each day to the city in order to listen to his master's words. He was present when Socrates drank the cup of hemlock. Antisthenes was opposed to Plato's doctrine of ideas and to Aristippus' philosophy of pleasure. He interpreted the teachings of Socrates as the doctrine of virtue which can be taught with disregard of feelings, independence of judgment, contempt for conventional opinions, and discrimination between social status, birth and wealth. Later Cynics, exaggerating Antisthenes' statements, were strongly opposed to Stoics and Epicureans. In The Radical Academy
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The Cyrenaic School was founded at Cyrene, in those times an enchanting city of Libya, by Aristippus who, before becoming a disciple of Socrates, had heard the lectures of Protagoras. Cognition. For Aristippus only the subjective sensations are knowable; this implies that the field of knowledge is restricted to the cognition of one state after another which the subject notices in himself as sensations. Thus we are in pure sensism, according to which reality is but a succession of successive of subjective phenomena, with no relation whatsoever to any external object. For Aristippus no metaphysics is possible, since the subject remains closed up in sensations. Ethics. The Cyrenians, in opposition to the Cynics, affirm that virtue consists in pleasure, and vice in pain. In accordance with their logic, virtue is a pleasing sensation, vice a painful one. The Cyrenians had a theory of sensations: there are three species, pleasant, painful and indifferent. The wise man will seek to keep away the painful or reduce them to the least possible, while he will change the indifferent into pleasant sensations. In a word, virtue consists in procuring for oneself the greatest possible quantity of tender emotions. Hence it is not in the passive, pleasant sensation that virtue consists, but in a supreme effort to secure for oneself the maximum of pleasures. (This is called dynamic hedonism.) The wise man must preserve mastery over himself while yet living in the midst of pleasures. He must possess them and yet not be possessed by them, as Horace was to say later. In fine, the wise Cyrenian is the happy man who finds a limit only in reason. The followers of Aristippus developed this rational motive further than that of immediate sensible pleasure and finished by concluding with Theodore the Atheist that nothing exists except pleasure. Others, with Hegesias, the Persuader of death, came to the conclusion that a life is not worth living if it is devoid of pleasures. All the writings of Aristippus (picture) are lost, but if the ancient sources about him are not entirely misleading, he seems, of all the disciples of Socrates, to have been the least congenial with his teacher. The only Socratic point in Aristippus' doctrine was the praise of inner freedom and true independence. Unlike Socrates, he denied social responsibility, was indifferent to reason, and conceived of wisdom as that which is concerned with the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. He is said to have been the first disciple of Socrates to request fees for his lessons. When this action aroused Socrates' indignation, he offered his master part of his gain as a royalty. Aristippus was born in Cyrene, North Africa. Early in lief, he settled in Athens to study first with Protagoras and then with Socrates. The little that is known about him through anecdotes reveal him to have been wily, greedy, and ever eager to ridicule Plato. He also seems to have been optimistic, of a serene disposition, and kindly disposed to his fellowmen, except those whom he regarded as his competitors. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
IV. UNCLASSIFIED Isocrates (picture), who, despite his delicate health and many misfortunes, lived to be nearly a hundred years old, was considered by the Greeks to be not the most powerful but the most skilled of all orators. After political events had ruined him financially, he established himself as a dealer in speeches and pamphlets which he wrote and sold or prepared on order. He was acquainted with Socrates, though not his disciple. Isocrates attacked the Sophists, as Socrates did, but not for the same reasons. Occasionally, he also attacked, or counterattacked, Plato and Antisthenes. Isocrates frequently dealt with political questions. His standpoint was very close to that of Aristotle. Both of them condemned the policy which was inaugurated by Themistocles and developed by Pericles, namely, Athens' claim to naval supremacy which, as Isocrates saw it, would provoke an overwhelming alliance of other powers against Athens' ambitions. Isocrates steadily advocated peace among all Greek states. He declared that all Greeks were united, less by blood than by common education and ideals. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
To The Metaphysical Period - Page Two
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