COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OBJECTIVES
The project of this course is to get as much of a comprehensive grasp on the history of ancient Greek philosophy as we can. Here are some oversimplified accounts that may help get you thinking about the project.
1. The Status Quo Philosopher’s History
The mainstream philosophical account begins with the so-called “Presocratics” and Thales of Miletus, the canonical first Presocratic philosopher. Thales’ successors, thinkers like Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras, practice their philosophy in a virtually unchallenged fashion until Parmenides comes along and harnesses the power of the new technology of “argument” to more or less destroy philosophy as it had been practiced. All is not lost, however—Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and the Atomists (i.e. Leucippus and Democritus) reposition the investigation and successfully revive philosophy. Around this time, Socrates also begins his philosophical project, and Plato, one of his later students, carries on his work. Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, moves the project forward and concludes the history of Greek philosophy proper.
In sum, then, in this history we have the following philosophical “moments”:
- The Presocratics (Preparmenidean, Parmenides, and Postparmenidean philosophers)
- Socrates
- Plato (Socrates’ student)
- Aristotle (Plato’s student)
2. The Expanded Classicist’s History
This history starts by construing Homer and Hesiod as proto-political and proto-natural philosophers. The field of influence here is much larger than in the Presocratic orientation. The Presocratics are certainly important, but so are:
- The logographers, such as the first historian Hecataeus of Miletus and his immediate successors
- The archaic elegists: Mimnermus, Xenophanes, Panyassis, Theognis, and Archilochus
- Poet-legislators like Solon and “popular” poets such as Pindar
- Political figures: Cleisthenes and Pericles
- The tragedians: Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides
- The “father of history,” Herodotus, and his counterpart Thucydides
- The sophists, Protagoras being widely considered to be the first sophist or at least the first to call himself a sophist
- The medical or Hippocratic writers
In my assessment, the expanded history is necessary if we want to understand two things: 1) the historical transition to Socrates, who is primarily interested, not in the physics of the Presocratics, but in political matters, and 2) the broad scope of Plato’s philosophy as well as the political emphasis at work across his entire corpus.
3. The Philosophical History
The focus of this course will be on the status quo history. In particular, we will be addressing the following philosophical units of analysis:
- Metaphysics/ontology: the study of reality—what kinds of things exist; what is real?
- Epistemology: the study of knowledge—what is knowledge and how can we get it?
- Ethics: the study of value—what is the good life and how can we get it; what is right and wrong, and how we should treat others?
The goal of the course is to track these units of analysis from Thales through Aristotle, though your final essay will focus on only one of the above.
CLASS FORMAT
Here are a few ways to get us thinking about how this class will be along pedagogical lines (“pedagogy” is a word for the roles of teachers and students in an educational setting).
1. Real Dialogue
As a teacher, I am committed to “real dialogue” in the classroom. Real dialogue has four prominent features:
- No party to the discussion knows beforehand where the discussion will lead, not even me, the teacher. More precisely, as a teacher, I am not guiding students to a precise and predetermined conclusion or set of conclusions.
- All parties to the discussion will learn, even me, the teacher.
- All participants will learn from each other. Everyone is a knower and has something to contribute.
- All parties to the discussion have equal ownership of the knowledge we create in class discussion because all parties share in the work to create that knowledge. Moreover, and most importantly, all have a say about what knowledge is created and what sorts of knowledge are needed most.
2. Real Research
This class is an instance of “real research,” and this goes hand and hand with real dialogue. In this humanities-style research project, there is at most a general orientation made explicit at the outset—i.e. we, as researchers, do not know the precise details of where the project will end up. The only way to figure out the shape of the project is to read the readings and to talk to people about the readings, and sooner or later a comprehensive account of the history of Greek philosophy will simply occur to us. The research trajectory of this course, then, is one of refining our thought and refining our thought over and over again until we reach something solid through writing a comprehensive essay. The comprehensive essay, then, is where much of the learning happens and in one final moment of composition.
3. Philosophy as the March to Understanding
When I do philosophy, my goal is understanding. In tangible form, understanding is the enduring emotional and mental consequence of 1) repeatedly reading about and discussing multiple perspectives on a topic and 2) recording the account that emerges from all this reading and discussion in a piece of writing. I emphasize that writing is essential to understanding, and in an almost magical way even. We cannot simply read and discuss. We must also write about the things we read and discuss in order to achieve understanding of them.
4. “Philosophy Student Book Club”
The feeling of this march to understanding, at least within class discussion, will hopefully be like what a student once described as “the philosophy student book club.” In short, we read things and talk about what claims in the text stand out for us. Class time may often be somewhat more structured than this student comment might suggest, but the point is about how class discussion feels—it is relaxed, though it can certainly at times be a “tense among friends” exchange of ideas.