Abstract
As with many other academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics and history, and unlike some others, for example, literary studies and drama, philosophy is one whose practitioners purport to be concerned with the discovery of truth and the advancement of knowledge. Unlike the other truth-seeking disciplines, however, philosophy is one whose practitioners have never ceased to be closely preoccupied with the remote history of their subject. However often, from time to time, philosophers may have declared themselves intent upon breaking free from the incubus of the past, resolving to start afresh, just as often others have claimed to have derived inspiration from, or have declared themselves invigorated by, a return to the writings of their predecessors. No philosophical writings have proved more inspirational for later generations than those from the period of classical antiquity in which the subject was born. For some latter-day philosophers, for example Martin Heidegger, it has been the fragments from one or more of the pre-Socratics which have proved to be of most inspiration — in Heidegger’s case, those attributed to Parmenides. More typically, it has been the writings of Plato and Aristotle which have proved of most inspiration to later generations.
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Notes
See E. Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1941), pp. 11–12.
Quoted in Gerson, God and Greek Philosophy, pp. 18 and 19.
Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.iv.18 and 13 in Xenophon, Memorabilia and Oeconomicus, trans. E. C. Marchant and O. J. Todd (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1923), pp. 61 and 63.
A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: a Study in the History of an Idea (New York: Harper, 1960), p. 31.
Ibid., p. 41.
For two clear and informative reviews of the literature on the subject, each favouring an opposite side of the issue, see J. P. Rowan, ‘Platonic and Christian Theism’ in God in Contemporary Thought: a Philosophical Perspective, ed. S. A. Matczak (New York: Learned Publications Inc., 1977), pp. 385–413; and K. F. Doherty, ‘God and the Good in Plato’, New Scholasticism, 30 (1956), 441–60. Rowan rejects whereas Doherty accepts the validity of the equation.
R. L. Nettleship, Lectures on the Republic of Plato (London, Toronto and New York: Macmillan, 1962). Nettleship writes of Plato that (pp. 232–3), Though he never hesitated to use the language of popular Greek theology to express philosophical ideas of his own, he often lets us know that this language did not and could not embody the truth as it is. The ‘form of the good’ in the Republic occupies the place in regard both to morals and science which the conception of God would occupy in a modern philosophy of morals and nature, if that philosophy considered the conception of God as essential to its system. Plato in the Republic does not call this principle God but form. He has assigned to a form or principle the position and function which might be assigned to God, but still speaks of it as a form or principle.
Rowan, ‘Platonic and Christian Theism’, writes (Ibid., pp. 402–3), Attempts to visualize the Good as Plato’s god … run into difficulties. The principal point at issue here is whether the Good can be considered to be a god at all in characteristically Platonic terms, and this it seems necessary to deny. In so far as it is taken to be an Idea or pure essence, … there appears to be no genuine grounds on which its divinity in any proper sense can be based…. Alike inasmuch as both are eternal, immutable, and self-subsistent, they differ in their essential constitution and in the kind of causality that each exercises - an Idea being an impersonal nature or essence, whose causal role is exemplary, and a god, a person, a soul endowed with intelligence, and a motive cause responsible for cosmic order and becoming.
R. M. Hare, Plato (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Hare writes (pp. 44–5), [W]hy the Good plays such an important part in Plato’s scheme was not explicitly stated in Plato’s surviving works, [and so] commentators have not always understood [why] … [t]he idea of any class of things (for example men) was thought by Plato as a perfect (that is, supremely) good specimen or paradigm of the class. … To know what Man is … to know … what it is to be a good or perfect man. Similarly to know what the Circle is, is to know what it is to be a good or perfect circle. … This knowledge of the Good will comprehend knowledge of the goodness or perfections of every kind of thing, and thus of their specific natures.
J. C. B. Gosling, Plato (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge, 1973). Gosling writes (p. 118) that ‘[t]he vision of how everything fits is the vision of the Form of the Good, a grasp of the breath-taking magnificence and ingenuity of the plan which inspires the philosopher with a sense of the nobility of his part in the divine work’.
Plato, Philebus, trans. J. C. B. Gosling (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 13.
Plato, Timaeus, 27 in Timaeus and Critias, trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid.
Ibid., 29.
Ibid.
Ibid.
F. M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: the Timaeus of Plato (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948), passim, pp. 34–8.
Ibid., pp. 40–41.
Ibid., pp. 39–40.
F. M. Cornford, Before and After Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), pp. 88–9.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., pp.103–6 passim.
Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1941), pp. 33–4.
J. Barnes, Aristotle (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. 155.
K. Armstrong, A History of God: from Abraham to the Present: the 4000 year quest for God (London: Mandarin), p. 60.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans W. D. Ross, from Aristotle’s Metaphysics from The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: University Press, 1928), vol. 8, 2nd edn, 980a. (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.)
Ibid., 981b28.
Ibid., 982a1–2.
Ibid., 982b10.
Ibid., 982b11–28.
Ibid., 983a6.
Ibid., 1025b1–2.
Ibid., 1026a10–16.
Ibid., 1026a 17–21.
Ibid., 1026a29–33.
Ibid., 1064a33–36.
Ibid., 1064a37–1064b6.
See ibid., 1069a30–1069b4.
See ibid., 1071a1.
The argument occurs in Aristotle, Physics, trans R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gayle, from Aristotle’s Philosophy of Nature in The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), vol. 2, 241b24–242a16. (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.)
The interpretation of Aristotle’s view of God which is advanced here, as well as the case on its behalf, is heavily indebted to Franz Brentano. See, especially, the Appendix, ‘Of the Activity, Especially the Creative Activity of Aristotle’s God’, in F. Brentano, The Psychology ofAristotle: in Particular His Doctrine of the Active Intellect (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 162–80. See also F. Brentano, Aristotle and His World View (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978).
Aristotle `De Caelo’, trans. J. L. Stocks, from Aristotle’s Philosophy ofNature from The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), vol. 2, 1.4.271a33. (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.)
Aristotle, `De Generatione et Corruptione’, trans. H. H. Joachim, from Aristotle’s Philosophy of Nature, from The Oxford Translation ofAristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), vol. 2, 2.1033b27. (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.)
Aristotle, ‘Ethica Nicomachea’, trans. W. D. Ross, from Aristotle’s Ethics from The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925), vol. 9, 1178b8–23. (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.)
See W. D. Ross, Aristotle: a Complete Exposition of his Works and Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), p. 179.
Aristotle ‘Politica’, trans B. Jowett, from Aristotle’s Politics and Economics from The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), vol. 10, 1, 2 1253a 31–2. (Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.)
Ibid., 1, 8, 1256b15–22.
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Conway, D. (2000). The Classical Conception of Philosophy. In: The Rediscovery of Wisdom. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597129_3
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