- Classical Greek Philosophy
(By Julia Annas)Background: Philosophy in the Fifth Century
When Plato began to write, philosophy in Greece already had a long and striking history-a history
against which Plato himself in his early dialogues rebels. It is tempting for us to take Plato as marking a
fresh start in philosophy, and we are encouraged in this by the fact that his are the first complete works
that we can discuss philosophically without the preliminary labour of piecing out fragments and
disentangling later reports. But Plato's work as a whole is best seen against the background of the
philosophical tradition that he found; and this is even more true of Aristotle, who indeed largely charts
that tradition for us, and whose work is deeply marked by his continued engagement with, and responses
to, previous thinkers.
Plato's dialogues, written in the fourth century, are for the most part set dramatically in the fifth.
Socrates, whom they depict, was then doing philosophy in Athens, at the time when it had become the
intellectual centre of the Greek world, and philosophical activity had become exciting and diverse.
Philosophy in Greece had begun as cosmology, explanation of the universe in terms of unifying and
simplifying principles which render intelligible a wide variety of phenomena. By the fifth century we
find that this activity continues, but its status has changed. There are figures such as Diogenes of
Apollonia and Archelaus of Athens, who produce traditional cosmology after giving perfunctory
attention to newer metaphysical concerns; but they now represent only one option, one way of doing
philosophy in a world conscious of alternatives. The explanation of nature is on its way to becoming
only one part of philosophy.
We can see from Plato's Theaetetus I79 d- 180 c that in the fifth century philosophers were aware of
another tradition of philosophy also, a quite different one going back to Heraclitus. In that passage
Heraclitus' followers are berated as arrogant, uncooperative individualists: a recognition, though a
hostile one, of a tradition exalting self-understanding and the importance of turning inwards to seek it,
something each of us can only do in our own case. Heraclitus despises conventional ways of looking for
truth, including cosmology as done by others; by his pronouncements and his enigmatic style he tries to
prod each of us into a personal search for inner enlightenment, a search that will also lead to the
excellence (or 'virtue', arete) of sophro syne or soundness of mind, the state of the person whose clarity
about himself leads him to act appropriately towards others. According to Plato, Heraclitus' followers
degenerated into pretentious would-be gurus; none the less by Socrates' time thinkers had been
introduced to the idea that human excellence, intellectual and other, lies not in curious exploration of the
world around us but in a right use and ordering of our own rational faculties.
More striking and widespread than the effects of Heraclitus, in fifth-century philosophizing, were the