Greek Philosophers

When we think of Ancient Greece, one of the many images conjured up in our minds, alongside Shiny Marble Temples and Spearboys with dust brooms on their heads, is the whole idea of Philosophy. Dudes with beards walkin’ around, talking about this and that, pointing in thematically appropriate directions, and giving Classical Athens the reputation for being “The Smart Place”.

                    Philosophy is known for being equal parts Pretentious and Needlessly Confusing, and that’s definitely true, especially after Descartes shows up, but there is one thing that Philosophy is not, and that is some boring. So, to get acquainted with some of the more eccentric characters in the Greek Philosophical Pantheon, Let’s do some History.

                    The first thing to know about classical Philosophy is that their definition of the word is a lot broader than how we consider it today. That word means “Love of Knowledge” and essentially applied to any deep analytical thought on a subject. So in addition to Moral Philosophy, which is what we’d probably think of nowadays, there was also Natural Philosophy, which we’d more colloquially describe as “Science”.

                 Early Grekbois were curious about the natural world and wanted to figure out how it worked. 

The (perhaps earliest-known) Philosopher Thales of Miletus was interested by the movements of the heavens, and wanted to know the cause and the substance of the world around him, to understand why things are things and aren’t other things. Thales thought that everything originated from water, but other thinkers took a different approach.

             Our favorite math boy Pythagoras is credited, slightly dubiously, because citations in the archaic period are jank city, with describing the physical world through a numerical and ratio based system. His main example was musical harmonics, where the length of a lute string determines its sound.

           There were still a few conceptual wrinkles to iron out with things like atomic weight and whether or not all atoms were the same and it was just the way they were arranged that made the different types of matter, but the point here is our boy was on the ball. For this, we have to thank our uncomfortably influential friend Aristotle.

              In the decades since Democritus was up and about, Aristotle had studied at Plato’s Academy in Athens, later founded his own philosophy school, and went on to tutor Alexander the not especially studious.

                       Anyway, Aristotle was critical of Democritus and his Atomist theory, arguing that the way substance changes over time is incongruous with a model of fixed and identical particles.
This is a case where you can see the logic Aristotle is working with, but he is nonetheless wrong, which makes sense, because Aristotle is usually wrong.

               Most of Aristotle’s descriptions of the natural world are some variety of incorrect. Just looking past the blatant sexism, his understanding of motion and forces is wrong, his astronomy is wrong, lots of his biology is busted, and it wouldn’t be that bad, except, he was so convinced that his observations were right that everybody else just kinda went with it.

                     So his physics weren’t seriously challenged until Galileo’s experiments in the 1600s. So for bordering on 2,000 straight years, Aristotle was the untouched authority, and science was constantly suffering for it.

         It wasn’t until the 1800s that we finally figured out atoms are in fact A Thing, and that Democritus was on the money some 2,300 years ahead of schedule. But maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on Aristotle, because it might not actually be his words we’re reading.

             According to acclaimed Roman author Cicero, Aristotle’s prose was like a flowing river of gold.

If you’ve actually read Aristotle, you’ll know it’s very much not. It’s far more likely that the works attributed to him are really glorified lecture-notes, from his students at the Academy, which explains why they read like sandpaper. So, egg on Aristotle’s face for looking silly because of the classical world’s catastrophic loss of literature! But let’s jump back a generation to look at Aristotle’s teacher Plato.

             Unlike his famous student, Plato was Athenian born and raised, growing up smack in the middle of the Peloponnesian. So his educational career was juxtaposed with the constant background radiation of a Spartan army camping just outside the city walls.

          Among Socrates’ noteworthy character traits is a general neglect of manners and a total apathy for writing anything down. Plato, by contrast, couldn’t stand to let a good idea go to waste, so he compiled everything into a series of Dialogues.

                   Early dialogues recounted famous Socratic misadventures, like the time he told the Athenian Assembly exactly where they could shove their opinions about him, but eventually Plato used the character of Socrates as the default protagonist for his own Philosophical investigations. His given name was possibly Aristocles, allegedly getting the nickname "platus" meaning “broad”, because of his wrestling coach.

             Indeed, the paragon of western Philosophy was also a competition wrestler, and, if his nickname is anything to go by, quite possibly jacked.Which really adds a new dimension to his character. It’s all fun and games poking holes in your opponent’s logic until the man suplexes you in the middle of the symposium.

               But beyond being a bibliophile and a tank, Plato was also a nerd, so he founded a school on his family estate just outside Athens to teach the kiddos how to pursue objective truth. Well, at first it was more of a “Club For Smartbois” than a formal school.

            Eventually, the Academy became the go to place to gather and talk philosophical shop, and it set the model for organized Philosophy training, as students like Aristotle went out to found their own schools in Athens and beyond. But not all the thinkers in Greece were fans of Plato’s obsession with universal truth.

                 For anyone trying to make it in the cutthroat landscape of democratic politics, persuasive argumentation skills were a Must, and for that, Philosophical academies were useless, so many turned to private tutors instead.

             These legions of “Sophists”, as they were called, charged exorbitant amounts of money with the promise to turn even the dullest of tacks into machines of political rhetoric.
The problem for the Sophists is that sometimes their students used their newfangled rhetorical weapons for evil, by persuading polis assemblies to, say, exterminate the entire city of Mytilene for refusing to ally with Athens, which reflected pretty poorly on their teacher.

The typical line of defense to that accusation was that Rhetoric was simply a tool, and however a student used it was of no consequence to the instructor.

         But of the many Sophists who found themselves in the hotseat for playing Oratorical Arms Dealer, nobody stands out quite like Gorgias.

Our sources for Gorgias are almost more iffy than what we have on other ancient Greek thinkers.

         After being banished from his native Sicily, he wandered mainland Greece doing the usual Sophist fare, and developed a reputation for being able to argue any position on any subject. Gorgias didn’t care for objective truth; to him, everything was just a matter of opinion, and that was always bendable. Famously, he published an entire essay in defense of Helen.

       So naturally, Gorgias found it appropriate to argue that the business with Paris wasn’t her fault, with one reason including “Paris convinced Helen to come with him using rhetoric, and effective persuasion can convince anybody of anything, so it’s not Helen’s fault”.

       So Gorgias clearly understood his brand.
He was also known to skulk around the Olympic games giving speeches and challenging anybody
to debate him. And given one of his treatises is called “On Non-Existence” we can imagine Gorgias is the kind of guy to argue with his landlord that “well, you see, the world around us is transient and ethereal.

Without a fixed foundation, there really is no objective truth, and concepts like honor or value don’t have tangible meaning. 

           He was banished from his hometown of Sinope for allegedly sabotaging the city’s currency, so he traveled to Athens and stepped up his game by sabotaging every single social interaction for the rest of this life. He thought it was critical to be honest and hide nothing so he lived out of a barrel and peed in the street.

                  There’s much more to his bodily bluntness than is appropriate to relay here, but suffice to say Diogenes has several illustrative stories to his name. He thought the Sophists were all liars and the Philosophers were too pretentious, and took immense pleasure in poking holes in their logic.

       According to Platonic Academics, the definition of Human was “featherless biped”. In that instance, he wasn’t strictly wrong, because morphological taxonomy is flimsy.

           Diogenes even maintained his complete social indifference when literally captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Corinth, and also later on when meeting Alexander the Big-Deal-King-Guy, who was then partway through his quest to conquer the everything.

                     Alex wanted to meet this mega troll philosopher he’d heard so much about, and was deeply satisfied for Diogenes to acknowledge his presence merely by asking him to scoot to the left and quit blocking the sun. It’s truly astounding that, despite every attempt to break convention and be as crude as possible, people really liked having Diogenes around.

So ultimately, although Philosophy has a reputation for being dense and inaccessible.
The key takeaway here is that all of these big, complex ideas come from people, who are fallible and prone to doofy nonsense.
For every Plato’s Republic there’s an equal and opposite Diogenes Peeing at a Banquet.