Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 012 - Malcolm Schofield on the Presocratics.txt

 Hi, and welcome to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today I have another guest to interview, and we're going to be talking about the pre-Socratics. My guest this week is Professor Malcolm Schofield of Cambridge University. Hi, Malcolm. Thank you for coming. Pleasure. So, we've already covered a lot of the pre-Socratics, or really all the pre-Socratics, in previous episodes, so this episode is just kind of to wrap things up. And I thought I might start by asking you a little bit about the very first pre-Socratics, the myelisions. So, one question that arises here, I suppose, is what do the myelisions all have in common? So if we think about Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, do you think that there's one feature or several features which binds them together and makes them a kind of school of pre-Socratic philosophy? Well, I think there are two or three features that unite them. Perhaps start with Thales and Anaximander. One thing that is reported about Thales is that he was an enormously inventive, practical person. And he's supposed, for example, to have used elementary mathematics, elementary geometry, to make calculations, and indeed to have accurately more or less predicted an eclipse. Anaximander, likewise, seems to have been keen on inventing gadgets, and he too is interested in the mathematical. He's said to have been the first Greek ever to draw a map of the world. It seems to have been a primitive map constructed with compasses. So the world is round, or the earth is round, and the Mediterranean's at the center, and you've got Europe above and Africa below, and Asia on the right, at least so it seems. So that's one thing. They were people who had, if you like, a sort of technological cast of mind. One thing that seems to be true of them is that they were trying to generate an explanation of how the physical cosmos is the way it is that was couched entirely in naturalistic terms. The whole array of gods and goddesses, the fates, the mythology of the underworld, and so forth that you find in the epic poets Homer and Hesiod, and you find in them as a framework for explanation of why the cosmos is. That's all gone. And would you say that that's what really differentiates the pre-Socratic philosophers from other cultural productions, as it were, that happened before the pre-Socratics and during the pre-Socratics' own lifetimes, that they were more naturalistic? Well, of course, in their own lifetime we have very little other contemporary Greek material. There is the material from the Near East and from Egypt and so forth, and yes, what we have of Babylonian Egyptian narratives are much more, if you like, theistic, explicitly theistic. Not that Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes didn't believe in deities. They clearly did, but their deities are more like, to use a much later phrase, the god of other philosophers than the traditional pantheon or the traditional polytheism that you find throughout the Mediterranean and Near East in this period. And it's really Xenophanes who really brings that point across most clearly. Yes, Xenophanes is a fascinating character. He's also someone who works on what is now the eastern seaboard of Turkey, as they all did. His home city, Colophon, was only a few kilometers away from Miletus, where the Milesians worked. And he stands in a very interesting relationship to the Milesians. He was clearly knowledgeable about natural philosophy. Indeed, some of the most interesting things we know about physical speculation from this period is Xenophanes. For example, he seems to have been aware of what fossil evidence might be. The shellfish. The shellfish, yes. The bay leaf. And to construct on that the theory about the way that the earth is gradually drying out. And that maps on to some concerns that are documented for Anaximander. And he certainly has physical explanations of why the earth is as it is, why the heavens are as they are, and so on. In some ways it doesn't seem as sophisticated as we can document for the Milesians. And there's a question as to whether there was an element of satire in it. Xenophanes said, well, everything's made of clouds. And that is not unlike the physical explanations in terms of heat and moisture and so forth that the Milesians invoked. But you can't help suspecting that he perhaps had his tongue in his cheek a bit. But Xenophanes is interesting because he is explicitly concerned with theology. And indeed he seems to operate in a different mode from the Milesians. Those of the Milesians who wrote anything, and it seems almost certain that Anaximander and Anaximenes did write books. They wrote their books as narratives in prose of how the world began and how it developed. In Xenophanes' case he writes verse. In fact he's a poetic performer who travels, as he says, the Greek world. Indeed after his early years he seems to have moved to the west of Greece to south Italy mainly. To perform at banquets, is it right? To perform at banquets. And indeed we have some of the poems he wrote about what a proper banquet should be like and what the right religious ritual should be, what the right songs you could sing are. And he seems to be very much against elaborate meat sacrifices and songs of gods and giants battling against each other. But he has, very interestingly, a critique of traditional theology. Homer and Hesiod are accused of anthropomorphism and indeed of attributing to gods the worst features of humankind. And he develops this critique by a sort of counterfactual line of thought. He says if lions could draw their gods then they would draw lion-faced gods, just as the Ethiopians draw the devised gods who have black faces and snub-nosed. That issue about the kind of text that they produce of books as opposed to poetry brings me to something else I was going to ask you, which is, do you think we can say very much about who the pre-Socratics thought they were talking to? I mean, Xenophanes may have been performing at banquets at least some of the time, but for example Heraclitus or even the poem of Parmenides, or for that matter the Milesians, do you think there's any sign that could tell us who they were talking to and who they expected to be able to read their books? Or do we just have to guess about that? Well, like so much to do with the pre-Socratics it is mostly guesswork, I think. There is quite a lot of reason to think that Thales in particular was a public figure. I mean, he's supposed to have generated ideas for a conference of all the Greek states on the eastern seaboard to make common cause together against the Persian overlord. To Woodrow Wilson of pre-Socratic philosophy. You could say so, yes. And so I think that Thales had a public role and I'm quite sure that he would talk authoritatively to anybody who wanted to listen to him. So I don't think we have to think that he was writing only for a small coterie of intellectuals. An axiomander is harder to say, but Greek cities weren't very big places and so I think that even though there seemed to have been a kind of school developed of Miletus, we mustn't think of it as a university, I think. We must think much more in terms of public intellectuals. And that means that actually the pre-Socratics may have been operating in a mode maybe more like Socrates, actually speaking to people in the marketplace as it were, and maybe some of Heraclitus's riddles or aphorisms were actually presented to people in that kind of more oral context. It's hard to think that Heraclitus wasn't primarily someone who was operating through oral discourse, not primarily on papal papyrus or whatever it was. I mean, clearly there was a book, but his thoughts do seem phrased in the kind of way that oral utterances are phrased. And similarly, well, anybody who writes a poem, you have to assume that they're writing it for delivery, even Parmenides, I think. So even Parmenides would have been performing the way of truth? Well, again, Parmenides is, I mean, the evidence about Parmenides and his pupil, sidekick Zeno, in Aelia in South Italy, being public figures is quite good. And so I think that the Parmenides poem must be a distillation of his teaching. But it's hard to think that he simply retired to his study alone one day after not talking to anybody for years, writing it down, and then shutting the book and leaving it somewhere and going off somewhere else. It's not really credible, I think. And in fact, in Plato's Parmenides, it looks like the dialogue begins just as Zeno has finished reciting from his book, doesn't it? And so I read you that, and what the book is about. That's right. I mean, it's a narrative that can't possibly literally be true, but what it testifies to is the kind of way in which ideas were spread. People would come and read from their books. And of course, Parmenides is a nice example for us of a philosopher who seems actually to have had disciples. So there's Zeno, obviously, and there's also Melissa's, and the two of them seem to have been extending Parmenides' philosophy or defending it in some way. That's right. I mean, it's quite hard to understand the relationship of Zeno and Melissa's philosophically, that's to say, to Parmenides. And Zeno is often portrayed as a sort of sophist. And Melissa's, there's been some interesting work recently that suggests that maybe Melissa's, some of his arguments are designed to provoke rather than to, as a word, communicate metaphysical truths that we were simply meant to take on board and accept. And whether that's true or not, with respect to Zeno and Melissa's, it's very hard to think of them as, except as operating in a milieu in which people were arguing with each other all the time. And they were sort of adopting a Parmenides-type position. Is that the idea? That's right. That's right. And I mean, it's, and the thought is, if this is the right way to think of them, trying to provoke others to thought in what you might describe as a Socratic sort of way. That's interesting because when I interviewed Emma McCabe in a previous episode about Heraclitus, this is exactly what she said about him, that a lot of these aphorisms, which seem almost like jokes or one-liners, are actually implicit invitations to engage in some kind of dialogue with him. Well, that is absolutely right. I mean, take a famous fragment of Heraclitus, which I'm actually going to, I think, make the opening sally when I give the presidential lecture to the Hellenic Society next summer. The saying goes like this, I own, I own means something like human life is a child. Playing around, playing drafts, a child is the kingdom. Now what on earth he meant, who knows? But it was for sure that he meant us to puzzle about it. It's supposed to be provocative, and it is. It certainly is. So if we can go back to the philosophers who come in the wake of Parmenides, do you think it would be too simplistic to see the generation or two now leading up to the time of Socrates, so not really pre-Socratics anymore, but even Socrates' contemporaries, do you think it would be too simplistic to think of them as just different attempts to find a way to defend pluralism against Parmenides? So you've got the atomists, you've got Anaxagoras, you've got Empedocles, and they all have multiple principles, either an infinity of atoms or four elements or whatever it might be, a mixture of all things with each other. Are these all just different ways to outwit Parmenides and avoid his kind of total monism? Well I think we probably have to tell a slightly different story with respect to each of them, because I think one thing that our conversation has been bringing out is what an extraordinary diversity of views and approaches to abstract thought these thinkers engage in, we find in these thinkers. And so I think there's something broadly correct in the suggestion that, well they used to be called the post-Parmenidean pluralists rather alliteratively, and post-Parmenidean encapsulated the idea that you've just articulated, that in one way or another they're trying to save pluralism from Parmenidean monism and the arguments that Parmenides deployed. But I do think there are differences, if we take, and one of the differences is actually the evidence. The evidence we have for the atomists is in some ways a lot more plentiful than for the others, but it's also more indirect. And in other words we have very few fragments of the physical system of Eucapus and Democritus. And the reports that we have by later writers about the atomists are absolutely explicit that they were offering in a way a version of Parmenideanism. They were saying well Parmenides is absolutely right, that reality is single and it's homogeneous and it's full of, that reality is a full reality, there are no gaps in it. The only variation they really make is to say but there is not being as well, which they then talk of as void, the empty. And from that they can generate their whole theory. They're not actually in the sources represented so much as pluralists, as dualists. Dualists who say there has to be both reality, if you like, and unreality. And it's through a complex interchange between these that you get the diversity that we find in the sensible world. And then atomism could almost just be Parmenidean philosophy where you disagree with Zeno and say that it is possible for being to be separated from other beings so that one atom is separate from another atom by non-being. That's right. And you get an atomistic universe. But they're very keen to insist that the reality that's, as it were, divorced from reality in this way is a single reality. That's the sense in which the sources represent them as dualists rather than a dualism between being and non-being rather than pluralists. It's interesting, isn't it, that the way we periodize this period, because we call them all pre-Socratics, as if the really fundamental thing that happens in Greek philosophy is Socrates coming along and changing the game somehow. We could maybe talk instead about pre-Parmenideans and post-Parmenideans. But is there any sense in which it's legitimate to think of Socrates as having changed philosophies so that all the pre-Socratics in some sense form a single tradition which Socrates brings to an end, maybe by being more interested in ethics than natural philosophy, for example? Well, I think that these very sharp divisions are always a bit dangerous because it's quite clear that somebody like Heraclitus had a strong ethical strain in his teaching. And even Democritus has ethical practices. But Democritus, that relates to another of your points, namely that Democritus is actually quite a bit younger than Socrates. He's probably 30 years younger than Socrates. Would be surprised to be told he was a pre-Socratic. That's right. So yes, I think Socrates, well, famously Cicero said Socrates called philosophy down from the heavens and brought it into our homes. That's true in a couple of ways, I think. One is the focus on ethics, but also, if you like, the focus on homeliness. Because I think what's absolutely different about Socrates from any of these previous people is the way that Socrates' conversations seem to begin with the purely everyday. I mean, the Republic, for example, the beginning of the Republic famously begins with a conversation between him and the old man Cephalus. And it's a polite conversation. He asks questions that we don't ordinarily ask in polite conversations. Oh well, how's the sex life, old boy? And Cephalus says, well, I'm rather glad not to have got any of that. And how are you feeling about the prospect of death? Well, he's not afraid of death because he says, I've paid my debts and I've always told the truth. And Socrates then engineers that into a conversation about justice. So is that what you think living a just life means that you won't be subject to post-mortem punishment adds up to? Now, I don't think there is any sense with any of the previous people that we've been talking about that there was this kind of ordinary life dimension to philosophy as they saw it. And this was something that later writers about Socrates emphasized. You find this in Xenophon, for example, you find it in Plutarch, but they emphasize this, if you like, demotic side to Socrates' way of doing philosophy. All comers, any subject whatsoever can be turned into a philosophical subject. Well thank you very much, Malcolm, for coming and bringing the free Socratics into the homes of the listeners. Next week I'll be talking about the Hippocratic Corpus and in a few weeks we'll be getting to Socrates himself. But for now I'll just thank Malcolm one more time. Well thank you, I've enjoyed it very much. And I hope you'll listen next week again to the history of philosophy without any gaps. Thank you.