Stop me if you’ve heard this one . . . “Philosophy began with the ancient Greeks.”
Actually, let’s stop and talk about this.
Let’s dig into deeper truths buried in history and beneath revisionist history. Bigger picture — let’s save learning in general and philosophy in particular.
About Those Greeks
Were there philosophers in Ancient Greece? Yes, of course. Were they influential? Sure, but more importantly, to whom and why? Most importantly, what place in today’s philosophy curriculum should the Ancient Greek philosophers have?
Everyone has heard of Socrates and Plato, and most have heard of Aristotle. They are notable philosophers. But the oft-told narrative that these three philosophers are the most important in history is problematic. Alfred North Whitehead claimed that all the rest of philosophy has been footnotes to Plato. That statement is a good sounding meme, and that’s what it has become — a meme repeated without adequate reflection.
Introductory philosophy textbooks love the Plato meme and lazily portray him and his teacher Socrates as the archetypes of philosophy.
The Ancient Greek meme so dominates our culture that the term “philosophy” conjures up for many a bearded man in a himation. Never mind that no one has dressed like that for over 2,000 years.
Early in my teaching career, I fell in line with the meme, teaching a week of the pre-Socratics, then a week of Plato, and a week of Aristotle. That’s fairly typical for Introduction to Philosophy courses and textbooks. That means that over one-fifth of a college course is spent on the Ancient Greeks. That means not having time to teach about more recent philosophers, including vital current topics.
In some quarters, the emphasis on the Ancient Greeks is even greater. A few months ago, a textbook publisher asked me to give a technical review of a proposed Introduction to Philosophy textbook. Over one-third of the book was devoted to the Ancient Greeks. I’ve known multiple lecturers who spent over half of their courses on Socrates and Plato. Recently, a trade journal touted a philosophy course designed for prison inmates, saying the course covered Socrates and Plato. No other philosophers were mentioned.
On the one hand, philosophy is best understood as a very long conversation, and that conversation began among the Ancient Greeks. On the other hand, the fact that Plato and Aristotle were the first to address themes that have appeared again and again in philosophy is different from the question of whether their philosophies are relevant to us today. The conversation started but didn’t end with them.
Science courses don’t talk much about Ancient Greek proto-science except as an interesting curiosity. Why do philosophy courses spend so much time on Ancient Greek philosophy? Why are some even obsessed with it? Some have argued that the old Greeks are easier for students to understand. I’ve found the opposite to be true because those old Greeks thought so radically different than anyone in the past few centuries. It is difficult for anyone today to relate to Plato’s worldview, for example.
Why the Clinging to the Past?
Backward looking goes way back in philosophy. Here’s a very brief history lesson.
After the decline of the Roman Empire, scholarship and culture ruefully looked back to a past they deemed better than the era in which they lived. Rulers of both secular and religious institutions aspired to recreate the glory of Rome.
One result of this mindset of deferring to the past was that old manuscripts were venerated and their words had to be treated as authoritative. In post-Roman Europe, the remaining bastions of learning were Christian monasteries from Ireland in the far west to Persia in the east where the monks kept libraries of ancient scrolls of Greek, Roman, and Christian scholars. Despite the problematic differences and even contradictions among these manuscripts, philosophers felt duty-bound to resolve the contradictions out of respect for the old masters. It was devotion to the level of fetishism.
Another problem was that the monks had little to draw on. Most works of Greek philosophy did not survive into the era of the Roman Empire, at least for most of Europe in which Latin was the language of scholarship.
Western Europe’s knowledge of Aristotle’s vast oeuvre included only his works on logic and instructions on reasoning, producing a very incomplete view of Aristotle. The one book of Plato that survived in Latin translation also gave a biased picture. Timaeus told the story of a divine Craftsman who created the world and gave it some order and goodness, but ended up with a flawed physical world.
One of the great ironies of history is that the rest of Ancient Greek learning, in particular, the rest of Aristotle that included his works on natural philosophy, was saved only because it was kept alive by Islamic culture, and filtered into Christian Europe only in the 1200s. I wrote about that in more detail here.
With the newly discovered works of Aristotle, Christian scholars felt duty-bound to now reconcile these ideas with what they already had. What they developed was the discipline of philosophy known as Scholasticism — understanding the nature of God and creation by using Aristotle’s rigid rules of intellectual reasoning. The Scholastics based all of philosophy on the old books and innovative thinking was met with suspicion.
The problem as William of Ockham saw it was that the Scholastics focused on the old books and made no further inquiries or observations. They assumed that through logical thinking alone they could know enough about the world and everything in it. As William said, logic tells us nothing about the world; we learn by observation and experience.
Early modern philosophy, which emerged in the 1600s, was a reaction against Scholasticism. These new philosophers saw themselves as rising above the medieval era and its obsession with Aristotle. They took some inspiration from William and a great deal more from the wave of cultural and political changes of the Renaissance.
Motivated more by self-interest than accuracy, writers in the 1600s crafted a new narrative. They were the “moderns” who were putting aside the “medieval age.” The word medieval literally means “of the Middle Ages” — implying a period between the ancient past and the present. Other writers were even more dismissive, labeling the medieval period the Dark Ages.
The moderns may have dismissed the scholars of the so-called Middle Ages, but accompanying their derision was a renewed admiration for the Ancient Greeks. The new focus included the ideas recovered from Islam — Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the proto-science of other Greek scholars. As modern science emerged, the new scientists understandably drew more from Ancient Greek scholars than medieval scholars — more on the distant past than the more recent past.
Where Ancient Greek Philosophy Belongs in Today’s Curriculum
But that was then. This is now. Those who taught philosophy in the 1600s had good reasons to teach their students about the Ancient Greek philosophers. At that time, the ideas of Plato and Aristotle were the most relevant for philosophical discussion.
But quite a few philosophers have advanced the field since the 1600s. Actually, a LOT of philosophers and a LOT of new ideas have emerged since the 1600s. Those philosophers and their perspectives and ideas have contributed to how our society is today. What’s more, the progressive evolution of philosophy means that the closer a philosopher is to us in time, the more likely their ideas are relevant to us today.
The notion that Plato or Aristotle are the main or even only philosophers we should teach today is a poor pedagogy. I learned that the hard way. In my courses, I now reduce coverage of the Ancient Greeks to only a brief 13-minute video lecture, the positive effects on my students are significant. They get the important influences of Plato and Aristotle on early modern philosophy and can then dive in to more relatable ideas. Their engagement with the course increases dramatically.
Shifting time and attention away from the Ancient Greek philosophers meant more time and attention for recent and current philosophers late in the course. It also meant that my students didn’t have to stumble over the Ancients right out of the gate. Too many students found little to relate to — with Plato in particular — and it took a few weeks to win these students back to the idea that philosophy was useful to them in their daily lives.
Both in my roles as a teacher and a writer, I have had numerous people tell me that they took one of those philosophy courses that fixated on the Ancient Greeks and that turned them off of philosophy. That’s sad. Philosophy is alive, but there is a fetish for the ancient dead that stifles learning.
Obviously, if you get a kick out of the Ancient Greeks, by all means, revel in that. But let’s be honest that those philosophers are better suited for advanced courses. More importantly, spending large amounts of time on the Ancients while spending little to no time on philosophies of the last 100 years is disrespectful to philosophy and to students. We need to speak to people alive today, not to Ancient Greeks.
Let’s live in today, aware of our past but not fetishizing any of it.
To perhaps add a dose of irony, I stumbled upon this short lecture that I recorded seven years ago. It was the first video lecture I created for my online university course. Not great quality but gets the point across more clearly than many other videos do.