3 Greek Thought

The Greeks and in particular the Athenians are credited with the flowering of philosophy in the West. Part of this had to do with the environmental conditions of Greece: an arid land which bore mostly olives and vines. However, these could be converted into oil and wine to be traded for other goods across the Mediterranean and later across the ocean towards India. They created colonies throughout Asia Minor, Italy and the northern coastline of Africa. In fact, the first Greek natural philosopher (or as we would understand it: scientist), Thales, lived not in Greece, but in Asia Minor (modern day Türkiye). The interactions with other cultures challenged the prevailing norms of the day and numerous philosophers arose throughout the Hellenistic world. The most influential of these was the Socrates.

Socrates asked questions. In fact, he was famous for putting down the proud and boastful Athenian gentry with his wit. However, he was not humiliating them for no reason, but asking them inquiring as to whether they were as wise as they claimed. He developed the Socratic Method which is a form of argumentative dialogue between individuals. It searches for commonly held truths and scrutinizes them for consistency. Through such refutations and logical analyses, it is assumed that a truth will emerge. We don’t know anything about Socrates with any certainty as he never wrote anything down. However, he influenced many Athenians including a youth named Plato. But not everyone was impressed and eventually, some aristocratic youths brought a lawsuit against him for blaspheming against the gods of the city and corrupting the youth. Instead of pleading for his life in from of his fellow citizens (as was often the case back then), Socrates gave a resounding defence (apologia) of his life and philosophical inquiries. He was condemned to death by drinking hemlock. His friends tried to bribe the guards and smuggle him away into exile, but Socrates refused and bravely met his undeserved end by drinking the poison.

Plato (429-347 BCE) came from a family of high status in ancient Athens. He was deeply moved by the life and death of Socrates and dedicated his life to immortalising his teacher. Some of his early dialogues chronicle events in Socrates’ life. Socrates is a character in all of Plato’s dialogues. But in many, the figure of Socrates is employed as a voice for Plato’s own views. Unlike Socrates, Plato offers very developed and carefully reasoned views about a great many things. Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology are best summarized by his device of the divided line. The vertical line between the columns below distinguishes reality and knowledge. It is divided into levels that identify what in reality corresponds with specific modes of thought.

Here we have a hierarchy of Modes of Thought, or types of mental representational states, with the highest being knowledge of the forms and the lowest being imaging (in the literal sense of forming images in the mind). Corresponding to these degrees of knowledge we have degrees of reality. The less real includes the physical world, and even less real, our representations of it in art. The more real we encounter as we inquire into the universal natures of the various kinds of things and processes, we encounter. According to Plato, the only objects of knowledge are the forms which are abstract entities.

In saying that the forms are abstract, we are saying that while they do exist, they do not exist in space and time. They are ideals in the sense that a form, say the form of horse-ness, is the template or paradigm of being a horse. All the physical horses partake of the form of horse-ness, but exemplify it only to partial and varying degrees of perfection. No actual triangular object is perfectly triangular, for instance. But all actual triangles have something in common, triangularity. The form of triangularity is free from all of the imperfections of the various actual instances of being triangular. We get the idea of something being more or less perfectly triangular. For various triangles to come closer to perfection than others suggests that there is some ideal standard of “perfectly triangularity.” This for Plato, is the form of triangularity. Plato also takes moral standards like justice and aesthetic standards like beauty to admit of such degrees of perfection. Beautiful physical things all partake of the form of beauty to some degree or another. But all are imperfect in varying degrees and ways. Knowledge of the nature of the forms is a grasp of the universal essential natures of things. It is the intellectual perception of what various things, like horses or people, have in common that makes them things of a kind. Plato accepts Socrates’ view that to know the good is to do the good. So, his notion of epistemic excellence in seeking knowledge of the forms will be a central component of his conception of moral virtue.

Plato’s most illustrious student, Aristotle, is a towering figure in the history of philosophy and science. Aristotle made substantive contributions to just about every philosophical and scientific issue known in the ancient Greek world. Aristotle was the first to develop a formal system of logic. The study of critical thinking is dependent on understanding logical argumentation. Logic involves analysing arguments and deciding on their correctness. Another definition of critical thinking could be logically correct thinking (Wisdom, 2015).

As the son of a physician, Aristotle pursued a life-long interest in biology. His physics was the standard view through Europe’s Middle Ages. Though a student of Plato, but he rejected Plato’s other-worldly theory of forms in favour of the view that things are a composite of substance and form. Contemporary discussions of the good life still routinely take Aristotle’s ethics as their starting point. Here I will offer the briefest sketch of Aristotle’s logic:

Aristotle’s system of logic was not only the first developed in the West, it was considered complete. Beyond this, Aristotle proves a number of interesting things about his system of syllogistic logic and he offers an analysis of syllogisms involving claims about what is necessarily the case as well. No less an authority than Immanuel Kant, one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 18th century, pronounced Aristotle’s logic complete and final. It is only within the past century or so that logic has developed substantially beyond Aristotle’s.

While we’ve mostly talked about Plato and Aristotle, Greek philosophical traditions evolved over the centuries giving birth to numerous traditions such as the cynics, the stoics and the Neo-Platonists. They spread through Alexander the Great’s empire and went on to be a part of the Roman world eventually influencing middle-eastern religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. These ideas even spread as far east as India where they met another ancient civilization with its own philosophical tradition.