Dan Snow's History Hit - How and Why History: The Philosophers of Ancient Greece

Episode Date: August 25, 2020

From the 6th century BCE, philosophy was used to make sense of the world – including astronomy, mathematics, politics, ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics. But why did philosophy flourish in Greek culture? How were the great philosophers received in their own time? And how did it influence Islam, communism and even the theories of Sigmund Freud? Rob Weinberg puts the big questions about history’s biggest thinkers to Professor Angie Hobbs at the University of Sheffield.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

This podcast is another episode of How and Why History. It's our sister podcast. And this week we're looking into the philosophers of ancient Greece. We've done China, now we're doing Greece. Got it all covered here. We've got the brilliant Professor Angie Hobbs from the University of Sheffield. If you like this, please go and search for How and Why History wherever you get your podcasts. Please subscribe. There's a new episode every Tuesday and Friday. Coming up this Friday, we're looking at the history of the Boer War in South Africa if you like this one there are needless to say

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some other ancients got plato socrates aristotle and all their philosophical friends enjoy In our knowledge of the soul, we cannot but be satisfied that it has nothing but what is simple, unmixed, uncompounded and single, and therefore it cannot perish. Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution. It represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. Famous words of wisdom from the pens of Socrates and Aristotle, who were among the giants of classical Greek philosophy. From the 6th century BCE, philosophy was used to make sense of the world, including astronomy,

mathematics, politics, ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics. But why did philosophy flourish in Greek culture? How was it used to make sense of the world? How were the philosophers received in their own time? And how did it influence Islam, communism, and even the theories of Sigmund Freud? I'm Rob Weinberg, and to answer the big questions about history's biggest thinkers, I'm talking to Angie Hobbs, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. This is How and Why History. Angie, thanks for joining us. Thank you, wonderful to be here. When did ancient Greek philosophy arise? Well, I would say it started with Thales from Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor, who was born in 620 BCE. He argued,

amongst lots of other things, that the cosmos was all made of one basic stuff, water. So he was the first of what we now call the pre-Socratic philosophers, though of course they had no idea they were pre-Socratic at the time. Were the Greek philosophers as we know them original in their thinking or did they in turn draw on older wisdom, literature and mythologies? Well that's such an interesting question. Poets such as Homer and Hesiod way back in the 8th century BCE, they had certainly explored fundamental questions such as the nature of the cosmos and humanity's place in it. But what the first philosophers did, I would say, was aim for a grand unifying theory. We've seen Thales say that was water. And perhaps even more importantly, they employ rational methods of inductive and deductive argument.

So it's those two things, the grand unifying theory, but crucially the rational methods. That's what sets them apart and makes them a bit different. However, the early Greek philosophers themselves had really complicated relationships with the great poets such as Homer and Hesiod, for instance, to other pre-Socratics, Heraclitus and Xenophanes. They were very critical of the poets. They said they just didn't know what they were talking about. But a little bit later in our story, in the 4th century BC, Plato's stance was much more ambivalent because although in his work, The Republic, which describes an ideally just state, although there the poet Homer is reluctantly escorted to the border of the state, it's said that he just doesn't know enough about the things that really matter. Plato has a lifelong

relationship with the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer's great works, with their conceptions, for instance, of heroism within them. So complicated relationships that vary from philosopher to philosopher. Was philosophy used to make sense of the world as a rebellion against the more traditional religious explanations of existence being considered, say, the product of whims and actions of deities? Yeah, I really like that use of the word rebellion because I think that's really partly true. The pre-Socratic philosophers were, amongst many other things, trying to discover the one basic constituent or constituents of the cosmos. We've seen that it's water for Thales, it was air for Anaximenes, fire for Heraclitus, for instance. And they're trying to give natural explanations for things and events which previously would have been put down, as you say, to the whims of the gods. And this kind of line of thinking was taken to its extreme by the first proponents of atomic theory, who came up with this notion of indivisible atoms in the 5th century BC,

Leucippus and Democritus. And they claimed that everything is composed of atoms and void and is explicable in terms of the movements and the properties of the atoms and the way they collide and hook up and the way those objects then dissolve again and everything everything is material our souls are material the gods are material the gods are made up of atoms and void. So this is just extraordinary. And though they think there are gods, they think they have no interest in human affairs, they play no part in what goes on here. However, you could say, well, hang on a minute, haven't they just replaced the sort of chance whims of the gods with the determinism of their materialistic theory? of the gods with the determinism of their materialistic theory? Haven't they just given us a new set of problems? And I think Plato is interesting here because though Plato, he's very

religious, very deeply religious, and though his god and his gods, he uses both terms, though they're definitely not material, he always argues for personal human responsibility and agency. He always says that whether our lives and our afterlives go well or ill, that's up to us. It's up to us. It is not the whim of the gods. It's not chance. It's not determined. It's not fate. It's us, or at least our characters are our fate. What was it about the Greek culture that enabled philosophy to flourish in this way? I think I'd pick out three features. Firstly, the location of the Greek city-states in the eastern Mediterranean, a lot of them on the coast, and that allows, of course, for a lot of trade around the Mediterranean and beyond. So the Greeks were

coming into contact with a really rich diversity of cultures and they could see that there were other ways of living and thinking. And also as the Greek mainland was relatively poor in natural resources, I mean a lot of mountains, they often found it difficult to feed their own people. And so they established a lot of colonies. And again, this brings them into contact with a lot of other different cultures. And these colonies are along the coast of Asia Minor, right up to the Black Sea, southern Italy, Sicily. So they're really kind of spreading out. I'd also mentioned the democratic system of government in Athens, which allows for and indeed encourages up to a point free speech and the free exchange of

ideas in the 5th century BC. And Socrates himself says he couldn't have done the philosophy he did around the streets of Athens had he not lived in this democratic city-state. Though, of course, it only allowed free speech up to a point. It eventually put Socrates to death. Another really important issue, and Aristotle says that philosophy has its origins in our sense of wonder at the world and also in our ability to have the time to think about it and reflect on the wonders of the world. And Aristotle says it's no accident that pre-Socratic philosophy began at a time when the economic means of production and supply of basic material necessities meant that there were at least a privileged rich few who had enough leisure

time to put in the kind of thought needed to do philosophy. So that of course brings us to the uncomfortable truth that a lot of this early philosophical work depended on the work of servants and indeed on the work of slaves, an uncomfortable reality there. Were the philosophers treated as heretics in that they challenged the prevailing thinking about creation and existence? Well, yes. I mean, that's another really good question. Quite a few were. Socrates was, of course, put to death by the Athenian democracy in 399, allegedly for not believing in the city's gods and introducing new divine beings and corrupting the young, although there were almost certainly political motives as well. I mean, it was a very dangerous profession. And he wasn't the only one in the middle of the 5th century

BCE. A pre-Socratic philosopher, Anaxagoras, he tried to give natural explanations for the celestial bodies. But the celestial bodies, such as the moon and the sun, were regarded as divine at the time. So this was a risky thing to do. And he was put on trial for saying that the moon was simply a lump of rock which reflected the light of the sun. And according to the story, he was initially condemned to death in the middle of the 5th century BCE, but his friend, the very important politician Pericles, stepped in and persuaded the citizens to commute the sentence to exile. And he went off to the coast of Asia Minor and spent the rest of his life there. And a bit later, in the 5th century BCE, we have Protagoras, a sophist, a travelling teacher of rhetoric and philosophy

to rich young men. And he was certainly an agnostic, possibly a full atheist, and he really created a stir when he said that human is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of things that are not that they are not. I know God, humans decide everything. We are at the centre of everything. And again, the story goes that a lot of copies of his book on truth were collected up and burned in the centre of Athens and that he was banished from the city. So yeah, it was definitely dangerous. And a bit later in the 4th century BCE, in 323, Aristotle, towards the end of his life, felt it prudent to leave Athens and go and spend the last, it turned out just to be the last year of his life on the island of Euboea, Aristotle had connections with Macedonia. His father had been the doctor at the court of the Macedonian kings

and Macedonia not unsurprisingly became very unpopular in the Greek world because during the 4th century BCE it conquered the Greek city-states and took control. And when the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great, died in 323, there was this outpouring of anti-Macedonian feeling, and Aristotle felt it wise to beat a hasty retreat. So it was pretty dangerous. Aristotle himself is quoted of saying, I'm leaving Athens to prevent the Athenians committing a second crime against philosophy. And he's thinking particularly of having put Socrates to death there. And though the very first pre-Socratic philosopher Thales was not regarded as a heretic, he was regarded as extremely eccentric because he was always wandering around looking up at the heavens and sort of falling over and things.

However, he had the last laugh because his meteorological studies enabled him to predict there was going to be a bumper olive harvest. And he bought up all the local olive presses at a discount. And then when there was a bumper olive harvest, he rented them out at a very high price and he made a packet. So being a philosopher at this time, it could be very dangerous and it was certainly regarded as weird. You've mentioned Socrates and Plato and Aristotle. Who were they exactly? Socrates was born in Athens in 470. He came from a modest background. His father was a stonemason and his mother a midwife, and supported by his wealthy friends such as Plato, he spent his days going round Athens engaging in debate, anybody willing to

listen, and quite a few who weren't that willing. And he wanted to debate the nature of such virtues as courage, justice, piety, and fundamentally ask how we should live as human beings and what sort of people we should be. All his work was oral. He refused to write anything down because he said he didn't know anything and he didn't have the authority to write. And as we've heard, he was put to death in 399.

And it was because he was influenced by these and similar reasons that Socrates neither looked out for anybody to plead for him when he was accused, nor begged any favour from his judges, but maintained a manly freedom, which was the effect not of pride, but of the true greatness of his soul. And on the last day of his life, he held a long discourse on this subject.

And a few days before, when he might have been easily freed from his confinement, he refused to be so. And when he had almost actually hold of that deadly cup, he spoke with the air of a man not forced to die, but ascending into heaven. Now, Plato was born into an aristocratic Athenian family, probably in 428 or 427. And as a young man, he was an associate and a friend of Socrates. Socrates was his mentor. And when Socrates was put to death, he was so aghast, he left Athens for 10 years and went travelling very extensively,

but then came back and set up the Academy, the Western world's first sort of higher education teaching and research institute. And Aristotle, born in northern Greece in 384, he came to study with Plato in Athens when he was 17 or 18, and he stayed there studying with Plato until Plato's death in 347. Aristotle then went travelling himself for a few years, came back to Athens and set up his own research institute, the Lyceum. So three extraordinary figures who all, you know, there is this line, they influence each other.

Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. How foundational were their ideas to what followed? What did they do exactly to change thinking? Let's concentrate on the ethical change because I think that's absolutely fundamental. on the ethical change, because I think that's absolutely fundamental. Socrates was said later by the Roman thinker and politician Cicero that he brought philosophy down from the heavens. So the pre-Socratic philosophers we've been looking at, they were interested in lots of

things, but they were really interested in cosmology, metaphysics, and Socrates is interested in ethics. As we've seen, how should I live? What sort of person should I be? And his answer is a really, really important one. He says we want to live flourishing lives and be flourishing human beings. And this, he says, is the same as living a virtuous life and being a virtuous human being. Why does he think that? Because it's not immediately obvious to us. He says, well, the most important thing about you is your soul. It's even more important than your body. And crucially, you're the only person who can harm your soul. Other people can kill or damage your body. They can take away your material possessions, but nobody else can harm your soul. You're the only person who can do that by your own wrongdoing.

So he then says this extraordinary thing. He says nobody does wrong willingly because why would you? Why would you do wrong willingly if you knew it was going to harm you more than it could possibly harm anybody else? And then he says, it is not the part of a good person ever to return wrong for wrong. Don't ever return wrong for wrong. Because again, you would be harming yourself more than you could ever harm anybody else. Now, that's an extraordinary thing to say in the 5th century BCE at a time when it was very much help your friends and harm your enemies, the old code of revenge. So it's absolutely a really

pivotal moment in lots of ways it prefigures the Sermon on the Mount and that crucial link between flourishing and virtue is what Plato and Aristotle both pick up and Plato says, yeah, the flourishing and virtue is what Plato and Aristotle both pick up. And Plato says, yeah, the flourishing life is the virtuous life. And the way he gets to that conclusion is through his analysis of the human psyche, the human soul, which he says has three basic constituent parts, reason, which loves truth and reality, a spirited element, which loves success and victory, and the appetites which love food and drink and sex and so on. And he says that your virtue and your flourishing as a human being consist in the right relations between these parts with reason and control and the kind of harmony that results from that. And Aristotle takes this idea in a similar direction, slightly different. He also says that your flourishing and your virtue depend on your inner state of your psyche. It's to do with actualising or realising your potential, your faculties as a human being, whether they're intellectual or emotional, physical, you need to actualize them as virtuously as possible and that

way you will flourish. What all three are doing, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, is looking inward and saying how we live and whether our lives go well or ill depends on our inner state of our psyche, the inner state of our soul. It's up to us. It's our responsibility. It's not just about what acts we do. It's about your inner state as the doer of those acts, as an agent, as we put it. And that is a really, really key turn in Western thought. So there's talk there of the soul, but did the Greek philosophers go beyond metaphysics to subjects such as law or politics? Yes. So metaphysics, the study of reality, that led them to epistemology, the study of knowledge. How do we know things? How do we know that we know them?

They were really interested in that. As we've seen, they're hugely interested in ethics. How should we live? What sort of people should we be? And that led them to political theory. Well, how can we best live together? What kind of ways of organising society are going to be best? We've seen how interested Plato and Aristotle are in psychology. What's the state of our inner psyche, our inner personality, our soul? And incidentally, that doesn't necessarily mean belief in an immortal soul. Plato does believe that our souls are immortal, or at least the rational bit of them is. Aristotle doesn't. Aristotle doesn't think we have an immortal soul, but he does have theories of the psyche, our life force, if you like. So psychology, that gets them into psychology, of course. And they're also enormously interested in theories about what beauty is.

Why do we find some things beautiful? How does beauty relate to goodness? So that gets them into aesthetics. So really everything. So that gets them into aesthetics. So really everything. And one of the reasons I so love out by subsequent scientific discovery is there anything that they got badly wrong well yes certainly the early atomists leucippus and democritus they've definitely been borne out by modern science and it is just extraordinary that they came up with a notion of indivisible, unchanging minima of atoms without a laboratory. Just extraordinary. And by the way, Democritus believed that there were other worlds. He believed in a multiverse. So it's going to be interesting to see what happens there in the future, whether that's borne out. Certainly not everything is true. For instance, in Aristotle, and he trained as a biologist, not surprising,

his father was a doctor. And though a lot of his biological researches in the Eastern Mediterranean have actually been shown to be quite surprisingly accurate, for instance, the work he did on the octopus, there were lots of things that we would not agree with now. For instance, he thought that species were fixed and unchanging. So what would Aristotle have made of the theories of Darwin if he had known about that and evolution? That's a really interesting debate. Could Aristotle's theories cope with evolution? There's quite a lot of discussion of that, and it's possible he could could have incorporated it but definitely work would need to be done by him there and Aristotle also thinks that human societies are formed from two natural relationships one between man and woman for reproduction of

children and two I regret to say but the relationship between what he calls the natural master and the natural slave. So I think we would certainly say he got that massively, massively wrong. Did the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman world mean that Judaic, Christian and even Islamic slants were given to what were essentially Greek ideas? And to what extent did the early Islamic philosophy or medieval scholasticism, or indeed the Renaissance and the Enlightenment owe to Greek philosophy? Oh, now, this is an area that completely fascinates me, and I'm doing more and more work in it. I would actually start by emphasising immediately what Greek philosophy owes to Islamic

philosophers before we get on to the other way around. So the Islamic philosophers who translated Greek philosophical works into Arabic and wrote commentaries on them, if it hadn't been for this work, Greek philosophy might well not have survived throughout the early Middle Ages. So without the work of such luminaries as Al-Kindi writing in the 9th century CE, Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, and Ibn Rushd, who's also known as Averroes, these great Islamic philosophers and thinkers, we just probably wouldn't have a lot of the Greek texts. Yes, several of these Islamic philosophers and scholars did attempt to reconcile Greek thought with the Quran. Ibn Sina, he was a keen Platonist and particularly Neo-Platonist.

Ibn Rushd was a devoted Aristotelian. They really tried to see if they could merge Islamic thought with ancient Greek thought in different ways. And these Islamic thinkers in turn influenced the great 12th century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who also discovered Greek thought through his reading of the work of the Islamic philosophers. And Maimonides tries to bring the whole lot together, Judaism, Islam, and Aristotle and Plato in one enormous sort of wonderful melting pot. Maimonides said that we can't live our lives fully as human beings without some Aristotelian logic. There are also a lot of Christian writers in the early and later Middle Ages who incorporated a lot of Greek philosophy into their thinking, such as Augustine, who was very keen on Plato. In the 8th century CE,

John of Climacus wrote The Divine Ascent, which owes a huge amount to Plato as well, and to Plato's theory of divine erotic love in the Symposium. You've got Aquinas later on in the Middle Ages who's a committed Aristotelian. He tries to incorporate Aristotle into his Catholicism. And then later on at the end of the 15th century CE, you've got the Florentine thinker, philosopher, doctor, magician, Ficino, who again tries to work Platonism and Neoplatonism into his version of Christianity. So massive, massive sort of cross-fertilization. And then later on in the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, the third US president, he called himself an Epicurean. Epicurus and his Epicurean school, they were a little later than Plato and Aristotle. They were part of the Hellenistic schools of philosophy

in ancient Greece. And Epicurus had argued that the good life is the pleasant life and the pleasant life is one that is free from care and he devotes his work to trying to help free us from the fear of death, for instance, or the fear of pain and so on. And so you've got these figures throughout Western history absolutely kind of committed to various schools of ancient Greek thought. So really, really fascinating. I mean, in fact, going back a little bit to the early Middle Ages, there were very interesting debates between some of the early Christian thinkers and the Greek philosophers about all sorts of issues. There's a very interesting correspondence between the Greek philosopher Oregon and the Christian Clement of Alexandria

about Jesus and whether Jesus can be said to be a hero on an ancient Greek sort of heroic model, or is it kind of new heroic figure, or is that somehow sacrilegious to say that? So just a fascinating period. And I just so wish we could go back to that open mindedness and willingness to debate with people whose religions and philosophies are different from our own. We've got a lot to learn. Are there ideas still in place today that you think we can trace directly back to the Greek philosophers? Oh, yes. I mean, for instance, in the 19th century, we have Freud, who was a passionate Platonist, even tried to translate bits of Plato called Plato Divine. And Freud himself says that his theory of the libido owes a lot to Plato's theory of erotic

energy, eros. And Freud says his notion of sublimation, of the redirection of erotic energy onto different objects, again owes a lot to Plato's notion of the rechanneling of erotic energy in such dialogues as the Symposium and the Republic. So Freud's psychology enormously influenced by Plato. Marx read a lot of Plato. We know that Plato's Republic has been called the founder of both communism and fascism. Both are slight exaggerations, but there's something to be said for both theories. Certainly the picture of the ideally just state that is described in the Republic as totalitarian, that's true. So Marxist communism, we feel, is influenced by Plato. Right now, I'm fascinated by the way that politicians

are at least talking about notions of well-being a lot more than they were 10, 15 years ago. They might not always put their words into practice, but we're getting a lot more talk about well-being, thriving, flourishing. Conditions need to be in place for individuals and communities to thrive. And specifically, the modern interest in mindfulness and in cognitive behavioural therapy, both those movements owe a lot to another Hellenistic philosophy called Stoicism. And both those movements, Epicureanism and Stoicism, are about the therapy of desire, about trying bigger picture in which things might be OK if only you could see the bigger picture? If you can't change something that's making you unhappy, can you change your attitude towards it? I think there's a lot of good stuff in the modern Stoic movement.

I think there are some dangers, too. There can always be the danger with with stoicism of making us too quick to think that a certain political situation can't be changed. Some things probably should make us angry and we should be trying to change them. So I would say if you want to be a modern stoic, don't give up the fight too soon to make a better world. However, it is definitely helpful to try to change your attitude towards things that you can't change, like the fact that you're going to die.

In fact, what we haven't discussed so far is the enormous effect on ancient Greek philosophy on not just religion, both Judaic and Christian and Islamic in the medieval periods, in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but also now. medieval periods in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but also now. For instance, Platonic theories are still really influential in Greek Orthodox religion. And recent Greek Orthodox thinkers such as Christos Yiannaras and John Ware are hugely influenced by Plato and particularly his theory of the rechanneling of erotic energy away from this world towards the divine so yeah absolutely it lives on the more we find out about this the more we understand it the more tools we're going to have in our toolbox to help us cope with what i'm sure we can all agree is some really challenging conditions right now professor angela Hobbs, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

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