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Article

philosophy, history of  

Malcolm Schofield

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
The *sophists of the later 5th cent. bce were probably the first to trace affiliations between the ideas of philosophers and their poetic predecessors (*Hippias (2)), and to classify views on the number and nature of the basic realities (*Gorgias (1)). Both procedures are echoed in *Plato (1) (e.g. Cra. 402a–c, Soph. 242cff.), but it is *Aristotle whose respect for the beliefs of the wise makes their employment a principled ingredient in philosophical enquiry, e.g. in the introductions to the Physics (1. 2), De Anima (1. 2), and especially the Metaphysics (A. 3–6), where he identifies and criticizes the first anticipations by previous thinkers of each of his four causes. Aristotle also composed monographs on the philosophies of individual thinkers or schools (e.g. *Democritus, the Pythagoreans; see pythagoras(1)). It was left to his pupils to write systematic accounts of the growth of e.g. natural philosophy (*Theophrastus) and mathematics (*Eudemus), again focused on initial discoveries of key ideas.

Article

philosophy, modern reception of  

David K. Glidden

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
26 April 2019
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
  2. Reception

Ancient philosophy’s modern reception reflects methods of transmission and dissemination of ancient philosophic texts. Ancient Greco-Roman philosophy impacted modernity via six means of influence: printed books, libraries, critical scholarship, vernacular translations, eclectic borrowing, and thematic resonance.

The beginnings of the Italian and Northern European Renaissance awakened interest in ancient Greco-Roman authors. The increased wealth of a propertied class and the leisure time afforded by that prosperity stimulated literacy both for business and pleasure and provided fertile ground for philosophic reflection. The philosophical writings of antiquity were transformed as ancient authors became heralds and guides for the future, rather than relics of the past. All of the following modern philosophic discussions have classical roots: the concepts of virtue, human thriving, equality before the law, the centrality of hypothetical reasoning for scientific inquiry, the foundations of semiotics, the mathematically fathomable structures of physical reality, the existence of natural kinds and the identities they confer on particulars, as well as predicate and propositional logic and their impacts upon computing code. The ways we variously view reality and truth and how we gain confidence in fashioning a comforting reality owes everything to ancient insights. The same is true of the dichotomies that organize conceptual discrimination: being/nonbeing, permanence/impermanence, motion/rest—building blocks used in constructing varied understandings of the world, continually subject to revision and refinement. The impact of ancient philosophy on the modern era is broad and deep.

Article

philotimia  

David Whitehead

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

Philotimia, literally the love of honour (timē). The pursuit of honour(s), tangible or intangible, was a constant of élite behaviour throughout Graeco-Roman antiquity; all that changed was its context and the extent to which it was given unbridled expression or else harnessed to the needs of the community at large. Of the latter phenomenon classical Athens (see democracy, athenian) provides rich literary and epigraphic documentation, at city level and elsewhere; philotimia was good if its fruits brought communal benefit, and timē duly bestowed on the naturally competitive served as an object-lesson for all. See agōnes; euergetism.

Article

Plato, life and work, c. 429–347 BCE  

Julia Annas

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
Accounts of Plato’s life are elusive. We cannot use Plato’s life to contextualize his ideas because we have no firm grasp on the life. This suits Plato’s intent in using the dialogue form, in which he never appears as a participant. Influenced by Socrates, Plato never presents philosophical positions on his own authority but presents them as resulting from arguments and as being put forward for further argument. For Plato, it is only by philosophical engagement with an idea of his that you can come to accept it—if you do—in the right way, a way that eventually gives you knowledge of it.Plato descended from wealthy and influential Athenian families on both sides, his ancestors going back to Solon. His own family, like many, was divided by the disastrous political consequences of the Peloponnesian War. His stepfather Pyrilampes was a democrat and friend of Pericles (1), but two of his uncles, .

Article

Plato, knowledge and its objects  

Julia Annas

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
Plato’s interest in knowledge takes its start from Socrates’s concern to discover experts who understand their subject matter and can explain it. Throughout the dialogues it is developed in a variety of ways. The best known include: the idea in the Meno that understanding cannot be explained by our experience and so must be “recollected” by our soul before embodiment; the idea, developed in the Phaedo and Republic, that knowledge is a structured hierarchical whole, depending on the good; and the arguments about knowledge in these dialogues which lead to debates as to whether Plato does, or does not, hold that knowledge is only of Forms while our encounters with the world of our experience can produce only belief (the so-called two-worlds view).In the shorter, “Socratic” dialogues Socrates is constantly seeking wisdom (sophia), not distinguished from knowledge (episteme). Plato notably does not develop a technical vocabulary for talking about knowledge; sometimes his arguments require us to think in terms of .

Article

Plato, soul and the cosmos, c. 429–347 BCE  

Julia Annas

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

Throughout his work, Plato explores various versions of the idea of a person's soul, as an entity distinct from the living embodied person, but attached to it by a relation which is inevitable but unfortunate. In the Phaedo several arguments for the soul's immortality show that Plato is dealing indiscriminately with a number of different understandings of what the soul is: the principle of life, the intellect, the personality. The latter two are the ideas most developed. Understanding the soul as the intellect encourages Plato to treat knowledge as something that transcends our embodied state; in the Meno learning a geometrical proof is taken to be the person's soul recollecting what it knew before birth. Understanding the soul as the personality prompts Plato to use myths of *transmigration of souls and afterlife rewards and punishments. In the middle dialogues these two ideas are united: the Phaedrus gives a vivid picture of souls caught on a wheel of ongoing rebirth, a cycle from which only philosophical understanding promises release.

Article

Plato, later problems and methods, c. 429–347 BCE  

Julia Annas

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
The later dialogues do not display the same literary concerns as the Socratic and middle ones, nor do they contain the same themes. Rather, Plato moves to engaging with the ideas of other philosophers, and his own earlier ones, in a way strikingly unlike his earlier way of doing philosophy by the use of dialogue. In the later works the dialogue form is often strained by the need for exposition. Some are heavy and pedagogical. However, dialogue is often used brilliantly for long stretches of argument, as in the Parmenides and Sophist.The Sophist presents, in a passage of challenging argument, Plato's solution to *Parmenides' challenge about the coherence of talking about not-being. The Timaeus takes up the challenge of cosmology, replying to earlier thinkers with different cosmological assumptions. More fanciful treatment of cosmology is found in the Statesman. The Cratylus discusses questions of language and etymology in a semi-playful but systematic way. The unfinished Critias and the Statesman take up questions of political theory, discussing them by means previously rejected, like fiction and accounts which take folk memory and myth seriously.

Article

Plato, ethical and political thought  

Christopher Bobonich

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
Plato’s dialogues are divided into Early, Middle, and Late. The early dialogues accept Psychological and Rational Eudaimonism. The four cardinal virtues form a whole identical with knowledge of what is overall best for the person and is sufficient for happiness.The middle dialogues hold that all knowledge requires knowledge of transcendental Forms. They also partition the soul which allows for the possibility of akratic action. (An agent acts akratically when she acts contrary to what she knows or believes is overall best for her.) Contemplating Forms becomes a major part of happiness. Plato still recognises inter-entailing four virtues including wisdom which requires knowledge. Since non-philosophers cannot attain knowledge, they lack genuine virtue and have seriously deficient lives. So long as they obey philosopher rulers, however, they are better off in Kallipolis (the Republic’s good city) than outside it.The late dialogues, the Politicus and the Laws, restrict citizenship to those capable of genuine virtue. The Laws’ city tries to develop genuine virtue in all citizens and provides for them a better education than that of the Republic’s auxiliaries.

Article

Platonism, Middle  

John Dillon

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
The Platonism of the period between *Antiochus (11) of Ascalon (d. c.68 bce) and *Plotinus (b. ce 205), characterized by a revulsion against the sceptical tendency of the New *Academy and by a gradual advance, with many individual variations, towards a comprehensive metaphysic, including many elements drawn from other schools. In *logic and ethics, especially, these philosophers oscillated between the poles of Aristotelianism (see aristotle) and *Stoicism, but in their metaphysics, after Antiochus, at least, they remained firmly transcendentalist, drawing varying degrees of inspiration from the Pythagorean tradition; see pythagoras(1). Chief figures (apart from Antiochus) are: *Albinus (1), *Alcinous (2), *Apuleius, *Atticus, *Eudorus, *Numenius, *Plutarch. The only surviving corpus of work is that of Plutarch, but there are useful summaries of Platonist doctrine by Alcinous and Apuleius. The Jewish philosopher *Philon (4), and the Christians *Clement of Alexandria and *Origen (1), are deeply influenced by contemporary Platonism, and are often good evidence for its doctrines.

Article

Plotinus, Neoplatonist philosopher, 205–269/270 CE  

Erik Robertson Dodds and John Dillon

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 July 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
The main facts of his life are known from Porphyry's memoir (prefixed to editions of the Enneads). His birthplace, on which Porphyry is silent, is said by *Eunapius and the Suda to have been Lyco or Lycopolis in Egypt, but his name is Roman, while his native language was almost certainly Greek. He turned to philosophy in his 28th year and worked for the next eleven years under *Ammonius Saccas at *Alexandria (1) . In 242–3 he joined *Gordian III 's unsuccessful expedition against Persia, hoping for an opportunity to learn something of eastern thought. The attempt was abortive, and at the age of 40 he settled in Rome as a teacher of philosophy, and remained there until his last illness, when he retired to *Campania to die. At Rome he became the centre of an influential circle of intellectuals, which included men of the world and men of letters, besides professional philosophers like *Amelius and Porphyry.

Article

poetic unity, Greek  

Richard Hunter

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
05 April 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Philosophy
Greek discussion of unified organic form, as both a biological principle and a literary virtue, has been very influential in Western criticism. What survives before late antiquity of that Greek tradition as applied to literature is, however, relatively sparse; crucial above all are the Homeric poems and ancient discussion of them, together with some passages of Plato and Aristotle. The fact that the bulk of later surviving criticism derives from rhetorical teaching, heavily indebted to the Isocratean tradition, means that much greater prominence is given to the closely related ideas of variety (poikilia) and the avoidance of monotony over the course of a long work, and to the arrangement and ordering (taxis) of narrative than to “unity”; there is no standard term for “unity” in Greek criticism.Homer announces the subject of the Iliad as the wrath of Achilles, which wrought terrible destruction upon the Greeks, but, however dominant the story of the wrath and its consequences, the scope of the poem is clearly not limited to that subject. Reflection upon the Iliad stands at the beginning and the heart of ancient discussion of unity, and it is the Iliad that shows why “unity” and “variety” are entirely compatible in ancient criticism.

Article

poetry, philosophers on  

S. Halliwell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

The engagement of philosophers with poetry was a recurrent and vital feature of the intellectual culture of Graeco-Roman antiquity. By around 380 bce, *Plato (1) could already refer to “a long-standing quarrel between philosophy and poetry” ( Resp. 10.607b). Early Greek philosophy, while closely related to poetry (*Xenophanes, *Parmenides, and *Empedocles wrote in verse), set itself to contest and rival the claims of “wisdom,” sophia, made by and on behalf of poets. Xenophanes, repudiating anthropomorphic religion, cast ethical and theological aspersions on the myths of *Homer and *Hesiod (DK 21 B 11–12); Heraclitus expressed caustic doubts about the idea of poets as possessors of deep understanding (DK 22 B 40, 42, 56–57); Democritus, by contrast, despite his materialist physics, seems to have believed in poetic inspiration (DK B 17–18, 21). Philosophy and poetry could be considered competing sources of knowledge and insight. The stage was set for lasting debates about their relationship.

Article

Polemon (2), of Athens, Greek author, late 4th–early 3rd cent. BCE  

D. Sedley

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

Head of the *Academy314/313–270/269 bce. Primarily a moralist, he dismissed the purely theoretical side of philosophy as sterile. He formulated the ideal of ‘living according to nature’—later the official goal of *Stoicism, founded by his pupil *Zeno (2)—and maintained that virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness while accepting (unlike the Stoics) that there are bodily and external goods. He wrote prolifically.

Article

Polemon (3), of Ilium, Greek Stoic geographer, fl. 190 BCE  

Eric Herbert Warmington

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Ancient Geography
  2. Philosophy
Polemon (3), a Greek of *Ilium (fl. c.190 bce), Stoic geographer (see stoicism) who collected geographical, epigraphic, and artistic material in Greece, including especially dedications and monuments at *Delphi, Sparta, Athens. In another work Polemon attacked *Eratosthenes (Ath. 6. 234d; 10. 436d; 442e, etc. ). See epigraphy, greek.

Article

political theory  

Martha C. Nussbaum

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
Greek and Roman authors reflected constantly about justice, good government, the nature of law. Epic, tragedy, comedy, history, and oratory are rich in political thought, frequently intensely interacting with the thought of the philosophers. To single out the philosophers, as must be done here, is potentially distorting.Greek and Roman political theory is distinctive in its focus on the *soul. All the major thinkers hold that one cannot reflect well about political institutions without reflecting, first, about human flourishing, and about the psychological structures that facilitate or impede it. Their thought about virtue, education, and the passions is integral to their political theory, since they hold, for the most part, that a just city (*polis) can only be achieved by the formation of balanced and virtuous individuals—although they also hold that institutions shape the passions of individuals and their possibilities for flourishing.The 5th cent. bce in Athens saw a flowering of political theory and a turning of philosophy from cosmology to human concerns.

Article

Polyaenus (1), of Lampascus, Epicurean disciple, d. before 217 BCE  

William David Ross and Dirk Obbink

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

The παιδαγωγός, ‘chaperon’ of the celebrated Epicurean Pythocles, and one of the chief original disciples of *Epicurus, who turned Polyaenus' attention from mathematics to philosophy. Epicurus addressed him in well-known letters (Sen. Ep. 18. 9: Epicurus told Polyaenus that less than an obol a day was necessary to live, though *Metrodorus (3), who had not progressed so far in philosophy might require a whole obol) and life was memorialized in the literature of the school, including Epicurus' own works.

Article

Polyeidus (2), 'the Sophist', Greek author  

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

Greek author known only from *Aristotle (Poet. 16, 17), who refers to the recognition scene in his Iphigeneia (if that was the title).

Article

Polystratus, 1st half of the 3rd cent. BCE  

William David Ross and Dirk Obbink

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy

One of the original adherents of *Epicurus and founders of Epicureanism, followed *Hermarchus (successor of Epicurus) as head of the school. Like *Aristotle, he wrote a protreptic treatise On Philosophy (though not apparently directed against Aristotle). One of his books (on the methodology of inference from commonly held beliefs) is remarkably preserved as part of the philosophical library from *Herculaneum. Polystratus follows *Colotes in his attack on Sceptical philosophers (see sceptics) who denied the certainty of knowledge derived from sensation (Polystr. De contemptu col. 24. 2–7 Indelli μάχεσθαι τοῖς φανεροῖς; cf. Colotes' characterization of *Arcesilaus (1) at Plut. Adv. Col. 1123a: μάχεται τοῖς ἐναργέσιν, ‘he is in conflict with plain facts’).

Article

Porphyry, 234–c. 305 CE  

Andrew Smith

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Philosophy
He was born probably at Tyre; originally bore the Syrian name Malchus; studied under *Cassius Longinus at Athens; became a devoted disciple of *Plotinus with whom he studied in Rome (263–268 ce). His varied writings (sixty-nine titles can be listed with reasonable certainty) may be put into the following categories.1. Commentaries and introductions to *Aristotle: only the influential Isagogē and the shorter commentary on the Categories survive. There are fragments of a larger commentary on the Categories and of commentaries on De interpretatione, Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics.2. Commentaries on *Plato (1): extensive fragments of a Timaeus commentary, evidence for commentaries (or at least treatment of select topics) on Cratylus, Parmenides, Phaedo, Philebus, Republic, and Sophist.3. Our edition of Plotinus' Enneads arranged into sets of nine treatises; also a lost commentary on the Enneads.4. Historical work includes scholarly research on chronology which may have formed a separate work (Chronica) or part of his Against the Christians and a history of philosophy down to Plato, from which the extant Life of Pythagoras (see pythagoras(1)) is an excerpt.

Article

Porphyry, music theory  

Andrew Barker

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Science, Technology, and Medicine
  2. Philosophy

Like many philosophers and Christian fathers, Porphyry was suspicious of real *music but not of musical theory. The introduction to his incomplete Commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics explains why he chose to work on *Ptolemy rather than other theorists, but not why he thought any treatise in this science worth his attention. Having accused Ptolemy of borrowing heavily from unacknowledged sources, he names many earlier writers in the course of his work and quotes lavishly from their writings, so preserving much important material (selections translated in A. Barker, Greek Musical Writings 2 (1989)). His commentary is the platform for significant ideas of his own, especially in epistemology and on issues related to *Aristotle's theory of the categories.