Aristotle seems to have been acutely aware of the growing presence of
a purely grammatical approach in the newly popular schools of rhetoric.
Whereas Isocrates and his followers taught language merely as technique,
Aristotle was at pains to coordinate the basic categories of the newly emerging
systematic grammar with his philosophical categories. The recently distin-
guished parts of speech, nouns and adjectives, and the syntactical relations of
subject and predicate, are coordinated with his metaphysical distinctions:
substance and accident, species and genus, and thus with potency and act, and
with the universal metaphysics of causality. Aristotle’s corpus is not only
comprehensive but architectonic. It is an exemplar of the synthesizing mode at
its most impressive.
His strategy paid off, in both the short and the long run. Most of the rival
schools collapsed, leaving the Aristoteleans the field—but only part of it, owing
to the law of small numbers. His conceptual armory, forged in the most intense
period of intellectual maneuver that Western philosophy was to see for dozens
of generations, was to prove potent in battles far removed from Aristotle’s own
time. But the very process of reducing the number of schools transformed the
field on which the Peripatos stood, and shifted its own position away from
Aristotle’s hard-wrought synthesis.
The Hellenistic Realignment of Positions
Around 300 b.c.e. we note an abrupt shift in the entire field. As virtually all
of the older schools and lineages died out, two new major organizations were
founded out of their intellectual remains.^19 While the Epicureans and Stoics
made their appearance, the two remaining older schools, the Academics and
Peripetetics, shifted their own grounds in intellectual space: the Aristoteleans
to materialism and empirical science, the Academics to skepticism.
Epicurus took the atomism of the Abdera school and the hedonism of the
Cyrenaics to formulate a thoroughly materialist doctrine in theology, physics,
psychology, epistemology, and ethics, explicitly paralleling Aristotle’s in syn-
thetic style while rejecting it in substance (Rist, 1972: ix). The Epicurean school
simultaneously moved into the space left by the demise of the lifestyle move-
ments. This organization resembled a religious community (although pointedly
rejecting any connection with traditional deities), practicing a collective life
supported by the goods of its members, and centered on quasi-religious cere-
monies in honor of the founder (Frischer, 1982: 38–86). To take over the ideas
and practices of an existing intellectual faction is to risk losing one’s identity
in theirs; but to take over their ideas after they are dead is both safe and
profitable. Epicurus established his independent identity by attacking his De-
mocritean teacher Nausiphanes and criticizing the Abderan tradition to the
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^103