"Created especially for students, this series of introductory books on the schools of ancient philosophy offers a clear yet rigorous presentation of core ideas. Designed to lay the foundation for a thorough understanding of their subjects, these fresh and engaging books are compact and reasonably priced, with illustrative texts in translation."

Warren's book is the second in a series of ten books planned under the general heading of "Ancient Philosophies". Stoicism by John Sellars was the first and eight other scholars are at work on upcoming volumes on related topics. Together the ten will be a useful and necessary addition to college and university libraries and to students and faculty in philosophy departments.

The book comes with a rich array of material including an introductory listing of the ancient texts used and a review of the standard abbreviations for citation. A chronology of dates for many of the philosophers covered in the book follows and indicates the tentativeness of the information available to the scholar today. A map of the ancient Mediterranean, a guide to further reading, copious notes, bibliography, and index of passages and topics round out the material in the book.

As Warren points out in the introduction, "The term "Presocratic" is a modern classification not found in the ancient sources themselves and, although it is still commonly used, some scholars have argued that it ought to be allowed to fall into disuse." Nevertheless it does stake out a particular set of questions and responses by thinkers and writers of the time from roughly 600 BCE to the classical period of Greek cultural development. This cradle of Western intellectual achievement produces many of the ideas and puzzles we still wrestle with 2600 years later. The Presocratics then are a part of the rich achievements of the various city states on mainland Greece, the islands, and the coast of Asia Minor who thought of themselves as having a shared Hellenic (or Greek) tradition, in contrast to other people around them, in a period lasting roughly four and half centuries, that is, from the time of Homer (c. 750 BCE) to the deaths of Alexander the Great (323 BCE) and Aristotle (322 BCE).  During this period the cultural developments in literature, art, philosophy, history, politics, architecture, and science were without parallel, and they later exerted a decisive and lasting influence upon the development of Western civilization. 

One needs at this point also to clarify the term Greeks, because to newcomers it probably suggests a good deal more cultural and political unity than, in fact, prevailed.  During this period there were hundreds of fiercely independent Greek city states distributed on mainland Greece, on the islands, and on the coast of Asia Minor (to mention the most important geographical areas). They were all quite small, and they possessed relatively little overall unity.  What these city states shared was a common language (although with significantly different dialects), a common religious and cultural tradition, a few shared festivals and religious councils, and (what is probably most important) a sense of their difference from other cultures around them (the "barbarians," so called because their language sounded like incomprehensible gibberish "bar-bar-bar"). 

The most optimistic vision of Greek religion, at least before Plato, is our first surviving complete tragedy: Aeschylus' Oresteia (458 BC), which offers us the vision of an enormously attractive possibility: a harmoniously working fusion of divine and human justice.  The trilogy opens with a community in crisis.  Its traditional understanding of justice is failing, since it seems to lead to an unending sequence of revenge killings which threaten the survival of the state.  By the end of the trilogy, the gods have, in effect, transferred some responsibilities for justice onto the human community and have reconciled the divine forces of blood revenge with the human powers of rational persuasion.  Hence, there exists here (in this aesthetic vision) a happy fusion of divine and human power, under which the state will thrive. The most pessimistic of all Greek plays is the last surviving tragedy, Euripides' Bacchae (404 BC), which exposes the divine forces as mindlessly irrational, absurdly cruel, and fatally destructive to the human community and which explodes any notion that a harmonious reconciliation between the human powers of reason and the divine force is possible.

Thales is, according to many, the first philosopher. In his account of his predecessors' searches for "causes and principles" of the natural world and natural phenomena, Aristotle says that Thales of Miletus (a city in Ionia, on the west coast of what is now Turkey) was the first to engage in such inquiry. He like his fellow Milesians is principally interested in the question "of what is the original material principle out of which all things in the universe are made or from which all things originate." (3) Turning away from Homer and the multiplication of gods as explanations for what is, these early thinkers instead started to think that paying attention to natural instead of supernatural causes might prove more accurate. The questions that the early Greek philosophers asked, the sorts of answers that they gave, and the views that they had of their own inquiries were the foundation for the development of philosophy as it came to be defined in the work of Plato and Aristotle and their successors. Perhaps the fundamental characteristic is the commitment to explain the world of nature in terms of its own inherent principles by employing pure thought and developing argument as a way toward truth.

Warren makes it clear that our understanding of the Presocratics is complicated by the incomplete nature of the evidence. Most of them wrote at least one "book" (short pieces of prose writing, it seems, or, in some cases, poems of not great length), but no complete work survives. Instead, we are dependent on later philosophers, historians, and compilers of collections of ancient wisdom for disconnected quotations and reports about their views. Often these sources had direct access to the works of the Presocratics, but the line is sometimes indirect and often depends on the work of Aristotle, Theophrastus, and other ancient philosophers who we assume did have access. As a result an important aspect of Warren's work is to present a balanced view of the reconstructed work of the subjects in order to give us a historically responsible understanding of these early Greek thinkers. He achieves this goal admirably.

After establishing what we know and how we know about his subjects and their work, Warren presents chapters on the key thinkers: Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Leucippus. Each chapter provides biographical information, an indication of the probable interest and contribution of the subject, a careful analysis of the arguments presented and an attempt at plugging the subject into the overall development of the ongoing discussion about the nature of things. As Warren reminds us in his closing paragraph:

Even in its classical phase, Greek philosophy did not leave these earlier philosophers behind … Much of the work of Plato and Aristotle can be read as an ongoing critical engagement with the likes of Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus and Leucippus. And after Aristotle, these early philosophers continued to play an important role in the development of the Hellenistic philosophies, from the Stoics' interest in Heraclitus to the Epicureans' difficult relationship with their atomist predecessors, to the skeptical schools' revisiting of the ideas of Xenophanes, Parmenides and others. The early Greek philosophers continued to influence ideas throughout antiquity and beyond. (181)

Zeno's paradoxes, for example, discussed thoroughly in chapter six, are still puzzling and fun to teach. They never fail to engage students in discussion and can serve as an introduction to a method of doing philosophy.

Warren's book will certainly be a useful complement to courses in ancient philosophy and the history of ideas.

© 2007 Bob Lane

Bob Lane is a retired professor of English and Philosophy who is currently an Honourary Research Associate in Philosophy at Malaspina University-College in British Columbia, Canada.

Categories: Philosophical