- Early Greek Philosophy
(By Martin West)In the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. the Greeks appear as a lively and talented people, active in trade
and exploration, endowed with no little skill and individuality in the visual arts, rich in heroic legend,
and above all remarkable for a poetry in which a wide range of human experience and feeling was given
highly articulate expression. If they had achieved nothing more than that, they would still claim our
attention as the most interesting and sympathetic of ancient peoples. In fact they went on to add
immensely to that claim. They added to it in many fields: art, literature, mathematics, astronomy,
medicine, government, to name half a dozen. But the most significant single addition was perhaps
philosophy. Its origins and development make an essential strand in the cultural history of the sixth and
fifth centuries.
As in dealing with other aspects of archaic and classical Greek culture, it is important to remember that
different towns and regions had their own traditions, and that initiatives taken in one did not necessarily
affect others quickly or at all. We must not assume that each philosopher's pronouncements were public
knowledge, from one end of the Greek world to the other, as soon as he made them, or that divergent
pronouncements by subsequent philosophers were necessarily made in reaction or modification. Early
Greek philosophy was not a single vessel which a succession of pilots briefly commanded and tried to
steer towards an agreed destination, one tacking one way, the next altering course in the light of his own
perceptions. It was more like a flotilla of small craft whose navigators did not all start from the same
point or at the same time, nor all aim for the same goal; some went in groups, some were influenced by
the movements of others, some travelled out of sight of each other. We run them together as
'philosophers', but they had no generic name for themselves. Philosophy is of course a Greek word - it
meant originally something like 'devotion to uncommon knowledge' - but it did not acquire a specialized
sense or wide currency until the time of Plato. It is not easy to draw a line between 'philosophers' and
others. There were some for whom a philosophical theory, original or borrowed, served as a basis or
buttress for something else - a religious or moral diatribe, a dissertation on some aspect of medicine, or
an essay on the development of civilization. Some such writers are traditionally included among the
philosophers while others are excluded. There were others again, especially poets, who made use of
philosophical arguments or theses on occasion but in whose work this was no more than a minor element.
Some examples will help to make clear the variety of the subject. The first 'school' that we can identify
is constituted by three sixth-century thinkers from Miletus, one of the principal Ionian towns on the
coast of Asia Minor: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Thales left no writings to posterity, though
Aristotle, who regarded him as the first real philosopher, knew of certain doctrines which were ascribed
to him. Presumably he expounded his ideas orally to those of his fellow citizens who were interested in
hearing them, and certain of them were recorded as his by some early Ionian writer. In subsequent
decades Anaximander and Anaximenes likewise gave discourses (Anaximander is said to have worn
splendid clothes, as did later sophists and rhapsodes), and their books, which were among the earliest