Introducing Greek Philosophy lives up to its title.  It offers a very good explanation of the beginnings and developments in ancient Greek philosophy from which newcomers are sure to benefit.  The book is an expository work, not an anthology.  Unlike most introductory works in this area which are organized chronologically, dealing with one philosopher or group at a time as they appear in history, this book is organized topically.  That is, instead of devoting a chapter to each philosopher according to his year of birth, each chapter is organized around a specific issue or set of issues to which each philosopher’s contributions are examined.  Julia Annas’s Voices of Ancient Philosophy: an Introductory Reader is a topically organized anthology that might make a good pairing with Wright’s volume in an introductory course.

Wright’s plan for the book as she states it is to “explore six topics that started at a high level of debate with the Greeks and are of enduring interest–cosmology, religion, psychology, epistemology, politics and ethics–along with the literary forms in which they were expressed” (40).  According to Wright, these topics are chosen as especially relevant to philosophy today” (ix).  I believe she made good choices.

The 256-paged book is divided into eight chapters of approximately equal length, with the exception of the first (which is about twice as long as the others).  It includes a brief chronological list of names and dates, a map of the ancient Mediterranean area, a glossary of Greek philosophical terms, a list of relevant further reading, an index of passages, a good general index, and an interesting appendix that amounts to a bibliographic and biographic essay of sorts regarding the sources for Greek philosophy. 

Chapter One, “Mapping the Territory,” proceeds in a competent but fairly typical manner through a chronological outline of the influences and interrelationships among the main figures (Milesians, Plato, Aristotle, early Epicureans and Stoics) in the context of the emergence of philosophical thinking in the sixth to third centuries BCE.  Things get more interesting, at least for me, with the second chapter.

The back cover blurb of Introducing Greek Philosophy describes the author as a “professor of classics.”   The confirmation of this description is nowhere more evident than in Wright’s second chapter, “Language, Logic and Literary Form.”  This chapter consists of an analysis of the linguistic forms the Greek philosophers adopted in their writings, such as dialogue, narrative, myth, poems, letters, essays and hymns, as they made use of different types of media for new ways of thinking.  I must confess that I was a bit annoyed upon first reading through this chapter.  After all, the book’s title claims it to be an introduction to Greek philosophy, not to Greek literary forms or culture in general.  What does an analysis of literary form have to do with philosophy?  How does the dialogue form, for example, used by Plato influence in any way his arguments for his theory of Forms, or his arguments about justice in the Republic?  When I took a Plato course in a graduate philosophy program, we diagrammed arguments, not poems.  We were not concerned with literary form.  But my annoyance as it turns out is a result of my own ignorance.  Wright more or less anticipates my concern, or what might be more aptly described as my philosophical snobbery.

Wright points out that “individual philosophers chose and developed distinctive literary forms in both poetry and prose as appropriate to their ways of thinking” (41).  This is an insight that seems fundamental to those trained in classical studies that is often lost on more narrowly trained philosophers.  Wright’s rich explanatory context (virtually every chapter begins with Homer, Hesiod, or one of the playwrights, for example), can teach much to the student of ancient Greek philosophy.  For example, she taught me that the “language [emphasis in original] in which the dilemmas and puzzles are set out is a new form of Greek, with few verbs and a minimal vocabulary, but extensive use of grammatical particles to provide balance between alternatives and to emphasize the surprising conclusions” (46).  Prepared with these sorts of insights, a student new to ancient philosophy might be less prone to fits of exasperation upon first encountering original source material.  Wright deals with these sorts of concerns head-on when she says, regarding Plato scholarship, for example, “Some Platonic scholars are impatient with his literary bent and would prefer to ignore the details at the beginnings of the earlier dialogues and the final myths, and concentrate on the hard philosophy in between, but in Plato’s works the range of styles elaborates the philosophy and cannot be separated from it” (48).

Finally, we get from Wright’s discussion of literary form, particularly the form of myth, another example of a lesson of contemporary relevance. She says, “In the absence of evidence, demonstration and means of verification, the only way to deal with the topic is to resort to myth, and then to draw a moral from it for present behaviour” (55).  Clearly, this is a lesson that so many of our contemporary public intellectuals should learn as they too often blur the boundaries between scientific and faith-based claims in their policy pronouncements.

Chapter Three, “Cosmologies,” begins with brief, but helpful, discussion of Hesiod’s Theogony.  Chapter Four, “Pagan Monotheism” is a very interesting discussion that takes off from Herodotus’s claims against the Homeric gods.  This chapter includes sections entitled “Against Anthropomorphic Gods,” “Natural Theology,” “Cosmic Divinities,” “The God of Morality,” The Good as Divine,” “Creationism, Anti-Creationism and Atheism,” “The Unmoved Mover and Thinking About Thinking.”  This is an interesting and unusual chapter that should be helpful those trying to understand the religious perspective of the Greeks.  Chapter Five, “Souls and Selves” begins with Homer.  Chapter Six, “Believing, Doubting and Knowing,” begins with the story of Oedipus and includes a discussion of the sophists within the context of a discussion of relativism.  Chapter Seven, “Leadership, Law and the Origins of Political Theory” beings with the myth of Prometheus, Hesiod’s Works and Days, and a discussion of leadership in Homer.

Chapter Eight, “Ethics, Goodness and Happiness,” is another good example of a discussion with contemporary relevance.  Wright considers the old question, can virtue be taught?  She introduces the topic by asking, “what is responsible for a child’s unruly behaviour?  Is it bad parenting exacerbated by weak teaching, is it a question of getting into bad habits or keeping bad company, or does it just happen that there are black sheep in the most respectable families?  Meno has put his finger on problems that were as perplexing for the Greeks as they are for modern educationists” [all emphases in original] (176).  Or consider her parenthetical reflection on Empedocles’s beliefs about the body’s influence on thinking, “(The problem tackled here surfaces in modern theories of gene-determined behavior and methods of countering it)” (179).

The book ends with a brief “Epilogue,” a summary explanation of what happened next, the development of Hellenistic philosophy in the Roman world.  This chapter even includes a (gray tone) reproduction of Raphael’s painting, the School of Athens that helps illustrate Wright’s discussion of ancient influences in the Renaissance.

My only criticism of the book is a minor one.  Wright refers to Plato’s “great allegory of the cave” on occasion (see page 52, for example) without explaining its details or telling the reader where in the Platonic oeuvre it could be found.  He seems to presuppose the reader’s prior acquaintance with this text.  Only on page 148 do we finally get a description and an explanation of the allegory.  Simply referring to this later explanation when the allegory is first mentioned in the book would be helpful.

Introducing Greek Philosophy is a remarkably self-contained work that would be useful to students coming to ancient Greek philosophy for the first time.  It is well-written and thorough.  Its discussions are often nuanced in a way to make themselves relevant to contemporary intellectual concerns.  Its last chapter on ethics, goodness, and happiness is very good at explaining particularly the Epicurean and Stoic views of happiness and the good life.  These explanations and references to original sources could be quite useful to those among a wider audience looking for some relief from the stress of contemporary living and who could stand of bit of “bibliotherapy.” 

© 2010 Ben Mulvey

Ben Mulvey, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the College of Arts and Sciences of Nova Southeastern University.  He received his doctorate in philosophy from Michigan State University specializing in political theory and applied ethics.  He teaches philosophy at NSU and is a member of the board of advisors of the Florida Bioethics Network.