distrust of intellectual positions should be a lived commitment, thus giving rise
to Cynicism. We should also include Isocrates, another pupil of Socrates (and
of the Sophist and rhetorician Gorgias), who repudiated philosophy entirely
and set up a fee-taking educational system based on rhetoric alone. Isocrates
is a Sophist gone respectable; for him arguing is just a technique, with no claims
for or against truth or political significance per se.
For those followers who stayed within philosophy, Socrates’ position can
be regarded as upping the ante in the relativistic position; instead of the “naive
dialectic” of the Sophists, Socrates and such followers as Euclides of Megara
and Plato were now explicitly conscious of dialectic argument about the
dialectic itself. It would be wrong to conclude that the intellectual field was
completely taken over by dialectic and its higher forms, epistemology and value
theory. Socrates’ most important contemporary was Democritus, who pro-
duced the most comprehensive ontology yet, and on the materialist side.
Structurally, Democritus and Socrates divide the field between rival ways of
doing philosophy: the one a systematizer of prior ontological reflection (in-
cluding apparently a good deal of mathematics from the Pythagoreans and
elsewhere); the other an aggressive progenitor of a method for opening up new
intellectual problems.
How Long Do Organized Schools Last?
What follows is obvious: we should look at the social conditions surrounding
Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps at the founding of the Epicurean and Stoic
schools, the twilight generation in which classic philosophy begins to fade.
Thereafter, for readers schooled in the Western philosophical tradition, it is
tempting to tune out until philosophy reawakens a millennium or more later.
Plato and Aristotle are the great classics, and the maneuvers of the myriad
schools which accompanied them, virtually down to the end of Greco-Roman
antiquity, are historical marginalia.
The process of constituting a “classic” cannot be understood in this way.
It was rather remote posterity that elevated Plato and Aristotle to the virtual
exclusion of all others. Their elevation seems particularly fickle if we focus on
their doctrines rather than merely their names. Aristotle’s school moved away
from his position virtually from the time of his death, and then in a few
generations the school itself collapsed; thereafter, throughout antiquity and
much of the Islamic and early Christian Middle Ages, “Aristotelean” philoso-
phy was seen very piecemeal, distorted into a kind of Idealism. It was only
with Averroës and his influence in Christendom around 1250 that Aristotle
became “The Philosopher” familiar from our education. “Plato” was more
continuously a famous name, but his Academy shifted the contents taught
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^89