What is Philosophy



What is Philosophy?

Myth and Philosophy

How was Greek philosophy different from what came before? Or was it different? Even though "philosophy" is a Greek word, from phileîn, "to love," and sophía, "wisdom," perhaps it was just a continuation of how people had always thought about things anyway.

So if Greek philosophy is to be thought of as different, there must be ways of specifiying that difference. Similarly, if Greek philosophy is to be compared with Indian and Chinese philosophy, there must be something that they have in common, and that can be mutually contrasted with pre-philosophical thought.

As it happens, Greek philosophy, and Indian and Chinese, were different from what came before; and we can specify what the differences were. Pre-philosophical thought can be characterized as "mythic" thought. There is a large and growing literature about mythology, but here all that is necessary are the points what will serve the purpose of distinguishing philosophical thought from the thought of people about things in earlier Middle Eastern civilizations (Egyptians, Babylonians, etc.).

With the identification of the characteristics of mythic forms of human thought, it becomes possible to identify the unique innovations of philosophy. Note that philosophic thought does not replace mythic thought but supplements it.

1) Myths are stories about persons, where persons may be gods, heroes, or ordinary people. Changed in Philosophy: Thales' proposed a theory of earthquakes, that they are just when a wave in the cosmic ocean rocks the earth, which floats like a plate on the ocean. This explanation eliminated the actions or intentions of the gods.

2) Mythic traditions are conservative. Innovation is slow, and radical departures from tradition rarely tolerated. Changed in Philosophy: Greek philosophy represented a burst of creativity.

3) Myths are self-justifying. The inspiration of the gods was enough to ensure their validity, and there was no other explanation for the creativity of poets, seers, and prophets than inspiration by the gods. Thus, myths are not argumentative. Changed in Philosophy: Parmenides, after the invocation of an unnamed goddess in his poem, The Way of Truth, offers substantive arguments for his views.

Why the Greeks?

If Greek philosophy was different from what came before, the next question would be, "Why the Greeks?" What was different about the Greeks that led to the origin of philosophy with them? Years ago, the simple answer might have been that the Greeks were "different," they just had some kind of special "genius" that enabled them to think about things in new and different ways. That kind of answer is unsatisfactory, not only because it doesn't really explain anything, but because it cannot then in turn explain why philosophy only occurred among some Greeks (e.g. Milesians, Athenians, etc.) and not among others (e.g. Spartans).

An explanation that is actually going to explain something about the origin of Greek philosophy must identify something that was different about what was happening to, or what was being done by, the particular Greeks who were responsible for that origin.

As it happens, there was something conspicuously different about the culture, the society, and the livelihood of Greek cities like Miletus and Athens in comparison to the dominant forms in traditional Middle Eastern civilizations, like Egypt and Babylonia, and in other Greeks cities, like Sparta, that were never venues of Greek philosophy. For one thing, those Greeks cities were wealthy, like Egypt and Babylon (and unlike Sparta), but they could not have been wealthy in the same way that Egypt and Babylon were wealthy. The strength of the ancient states rested mainly on agriculture.

Greek cities were not going to be wealthy in the same way, since Greece could not possibly be as agriculturally productive as Egypt or Mesopotamia. For one thing there was the climate.Greece has a "Mediterranean" climate: hot dry summers, and cool rainy winters Some areas get considerably more rain than Athens, but that is because of local mountains, which gets us to the next problem: the land itself. Greece is very mountainous. This does not make for good agriculture either

Cities like Miletus and Athens were thus wealthy off of something else: Trade (oil, wine).

However stark the contrast of this with a life of travel, business, discovery, and independence, trade alone will not explain the uniqueness of the Greek situation, for the Greeks were neither alone nor the first in their commercial profession. They had learned the basics, and much else (including their alphabet), from some of the most ancient traders: the Phoenicians.

Both the Greeks and the Phoenicians, in the course of their trade, founded colonies all over the Mediterranean. The map below illustrates this activity and its implied competition.

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But after all this, we may then ask, that if trade is to be associated with the origin of philosophy, why did not philosophy start with the Phoenicians? After a fashion, perhaps it did. The man credited with being the first Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus (c. 585), was said to have been of Phoenician ancestry. However, he was living in a Greek city; and even later philosophers who were certainly ethnic Phoenicians, like Zeno of Citium, moved to Greek cities to learn and practice philosophy.

The clue to what happened in the Greek cities may be found in something else that seems to be a unique characteristic of Greek history: the Phoenician cities all had traditional kings. But in Greece, the institution of kingship lost its traction. At Athens, the office of árchôn ("ruler" or "regent") pushed aside the authority of the king (who eventually became another elected árchôn). It was filled at first by hereditary nobles, then with the office opened (by Solon, c. 593) to qualification by wealth, rather than by noble birth. After some conflict and the rule of tyrants (especially Pisitratus), overthrown in 510, Cleisthenes led Athens into essentially pure democracy.

What happened in Greek cities politically and socially was extraordinary enough, but it is also our clue about the origin of philosophy. Although we can only imagine the nature of the causal connection, the correlation between philosophy and the cities of commercial wealth and political transformation is obvious. Greek philosophy began in Ionia (today on the west coast of Turkey), in the wealthiest and most active cities of their time in Greece. For some years Greek philosophy then seemed to circulate around the Greek colonial periphery, from Ionia (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximines, Heralcitus, Xenophanes), to Italy (Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno), Sicily (Empedocles), and the northern Aegean (Democritus, Protagoras), to Ionia again (Melissos). Then philosophy migrated from every direction to Athens itself, at the center, the wealthiest commercial power and the most famous democracy of the time.

Socrates, although uninterested in wealth himself, nevertheless was a creature of the marketplace, where there were always people to meet and where he could, in effect, bargain over definitions rather than over prices. Similarly, although Socrates avoided participation in democratic politics, it is hard to imagine his idiosyncratic individualism, and the uncompromising self-assertion of his defense speech, without either wealth or birth to justify his privileges, occurring in any other political context.

If a commercial democracy like Athens provided the social and intellectual context that fostered the development of philosophy, we might expect that philosophy would not occur in the kind of Greek city that was neither commercial nor democratic. As it happens, the great rival of Athens, Sparta, was just such a city.

A certain disdain for money would be characteristic of later Greek philosophy. Where Socrates was simply unconcerned with the ordinary commercial life of Athens, while he flourished right in the middle of it, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle had become actively hostile to it and removed their own activities to closed schools outside the walls of Athens. Only one great school of philosophy, Stoicism, remained in the marketplace, taking its name from the characteristic open-faced building, often called a "porch," a stoa, that was to be found there, and in one of which Zeno of Citium established himself. Plato distrusted commerce, detested democracy, and also came to believe that teaching philosophy to just anyone was dangerous.

Parmenides (born c. 515) is one of the most important Presocratic philosophers and represents a major turning point in the development of Greek thought. We can credit Parmenides with two major innovations:

A) Dialectic. To the Greeks, this simply meant logical argumentation. This represents a break with a characteristic of mythic thought that had persisted through the first Greek philosophers, that myth is self-justifying. As handed down to us, earlier philosophers, like Anaximander and Heracltius, simply assert what is true. They do not, to our knowledge, offer arguments. Where they begin to notice their own disagreements, there is not much they can say about each other except that they are right and the others are wrong.

Although Parmenides's poem, the Way of Truth, begins with the invocation of an unnamed goddess, in standard mythic form, the goddess provides arguments, rendering her own authority superfluous.

The meaning of the word "dialectic" (from which is derived "dialogue") now has drifted far from its original sense. Also, the etymology of the word is commonly misunderstood, as when people say that a "dialogue" involves two people because di- means "two." Well di- can mean two (from dis, "double"), but it does not in "dialectic" or "dialogue" since the element is dia- rather than di-. Dia is a Greek preposition that means "through." "Discourse," from Latin (discursus), would be the most appropriate translation of the Greek meaning.

B) Metaphysics. The meaning of the word "metaphysics" is also commonly misconstrued. On television or in New Age literature, one is liable to hear that the word "metaphysics" means "beyond" (meta) the "physical" (physics). Thus "metaphysics" would be about spiritual things, God, the soul, ghosts, etc. Unfortunately, the Greek preposition meta does not mean "beyond"; it means "after." This might be thought to amount to the same thing, but it doesn't, because of the actual origin of the word. Metaphysics was originally the title of a book, by Aristotle. It got that name by accident.

When Aristotle died (in 322), none of his mature thought had been published. All that remained of his teachings at his school, the Lyceum, were his lecture notes, sometimes even his students' lecture notes. Before long, his family and students decided that something should be done about that, and the material was gradually organized, divided, and published. The appropriate names for many of the books were obvious (On the Heavens, On the Soul, The Parts of Animals, etc.). After the Physics (physika, "natural things," from physis, "nature") was published, however, it was not obvious what to call the next book, since it had material about God and a number of other things in it. Rather than picking one topic, the book simply began to be called the "After the Physics" (Meta ta Physika). The name stuck. So the word "metaphysics" really doesn't mean anything etymologically. It would basically mean whatever was in Aristotle's Metaphysics.

What was basic in the Metaphysics was something for which a word did not exist in Greek philosophy. A modern word has been coined from Greek, however:  "Ontology", for the philosophical discipline that is the first and principle part of metaphysics. "Ontology" (ontologia) means "talking" (-logia) about "being" (ôn / onto-). This is literally what Parmenides did, as will be seen below -- to talk about Being. More generally, "ontology" is the theory about what is real. It is often said to be the study of "Being qua Being," or of what Aristotle called the ontôs ónta, the "beingly beings," or most real things. This is why the popular meaning of "metaphysics" is incorrect. Any theory that is an answer to the question, "What is real?" is an ontological, and so metaphysical, theory. That is true whether one answers "spirits" or even "matter." Materialism is just as much metaphysics as its denial. Indeed, in a Physics class, little attention is going to paid to the question, "What is real?"

Talking about Being, Parmenides founds abstract metaphysics. There are other disciplines that later (as in Aristotle) fall into metaphysics:  especially cosmology, the theory of the structure and history of the universe, natural theology, theories about God based on reason rather than revelation, and rational psychology, the rational metaphysics of the soul.

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