In other words, he advocates learning by induction. Aristotle is often portrayed as disagreeing with his teacher, Plato. Virtue was gained by acting in accordance with nature and moderation. Skip to main content. Search for:. Key Points Socrates is best known for having pursued a probing question-and-answer style of examination on a number of topics, usually attempting to arrive at a defensible and attractive definition of a virtue.
In BCE, Socrates was charged for his philosophical inquiries, convicted, and sentenced to death. In his defining work, The Republic , Plato reaches the conclusion that a utopian city is likely impossible because philosophers would refuse to rule and the people would refuse to compel them to do so. Aristotle was a student of Plato, the tutor of Alexander the Great, and founder of the Lyceum and Peripatetic School of philosophy in Athens.
He wrote on a number of subjects, including logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, rhetoric, politics, and botany. Terms allegory of the cave A paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible, and the visible world is the least knowable and obscure.
Socrates A classical Greek Athenian philosopher credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy. Plato The student of Socrates and author of The Republic. Bust of Socrates, currently in the Louvre. As a result of showing so many people their own ignorance, or at least trying to, Socrates became unpopular 23a.
This unpopularity is eventually what killed him. Both Xenophon and Plato 40b claim that it was this daimon who prevented Socrates from making such a defense as would exonerate him. That is, the daimon did not dissuade Socrates from his sentence of death. At any rate, Xenophon has Socrates recognize his own unpopularity. Socrates practiced philosophy, in an effort to know himself, daily and even in the face of his own death. He and Crito first establish that doing wrong willingly is always bad, and this includes returning wrong for wrong 49b-c.
Then, personifying Athenian law, Socrates establishes that escaping prison would be wrong. In it, he famously claims that philosophy is practice for dying and death 64a.
Indeed, he spends his final hours with his friends discussing a very relevant and pressing philosophical issue, that is the immortality of the soul. Socrates is presented to us as a man who, even in his final hours, wanted nothing more than to pursue wisdom. Euthyphro, a priest, claims that what he is doing—prosecuting a wrongdoer—is pious. Socrates then uses his elenchos to show that Euthyphro does not actually know what piety is.
Socrates, we are told, continued this practice even in the final hours of his life. Plato B. He grew up in a time of upheaval in Athens, especially at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian war, when Athens was conquered by Sparta.
We cannot be sure when he met Socrates. Taylor 3. He also seems to have spent time with Cratylus, the Heraclitean, which probably had an impact primarily on his metaphysics and epistemology. At last I came to the conclusion that all existing states are badly governed and the condition of their laws practically incurable, without some miraculous remedy and the assistance of fortune; and I was forced to say, in praise of true philosophy , that from her height alone was it possible to discern what the nature of justice is, either in the state or in the individual, and that the ills of the human race would never end until either those who are sincerely and truly lovers of wisdom [that is, philosophers] come into political power, or the rulers of our cities, by the grace of God, learn true philosophy.
Letter VII. Plato saw any political regime without the aid of philosophy or fortune as fundamentally corrupt. This attitude, however, did not turn Plato entirely from politics. He visited Sicily three times, where two of these trips were failed attempts at trying to turn the tyrant Dionysius II to the life of philosophy.
He thus returned to Athens and focused his efforts on the philosophical education he had begun at his Academy Nails 5. Since Plato wrote dialogues, there is a fundamental difficulty with any effort to identify just what Plato himself thought.
Plato never appears in the dialogues as an interlocutor. If he was voicing any of his own thoughts, he did it through the mouthpiece of particular characters in the dialogues, each of which has a particular historical context. As John Cooper says,. Cooper xxii. Both of these words are rooted in verbs of seeing. Thus, the eidos of something is its look, shape, or form.
But, as many philosophers do, Plato manipulates this word and has it refer to immaterial entities. Why is it that one can recognize that a maple is a tree, an oak is a tree, and a Japanese fir is a tree?
What is it that unites all of our concepts of various trees under a unitary category of Tree? The forms can be interpreted not only as purely theoretical entities, but also as immaterial entities that give being to material entities. Each tree, for example, is what it is insofar as it participates in the form of Tree.
That is, if anything can be known, it is the forms. Since things in the world are changing and temporal, we cannot know them; therefore, forms are unchanging and eternal beings that give being to all changing and temporal beings in the world, if knowledge is to be certain and clear.
In other words, we cannot know something that is different from one moment to the next. The forms are therefore pure ideas that unify and stabilize the multiplicity of changing beings in the material world. The forms are the ultimate reality, and this is shown to us in the Allegory of the Cave.
We are to imagine a cave wherein lifelong prisoners dwell. These prisoners do not know that they are prisoners since they have been held captive their entire lives. They are shackled such that they are incapable of turning their heads. Behind them is a fire, and small puppets or trinkets of various things—horses, stones, people, and so forth—are being moved in front of the fire.
Shadows of these trinkets are cast onto a wall in front of the prisoners. The prisoners take this world of shadows to be reality since it is the only thing they ever see.
If, however, we suppose that one prisoner is unshackled and is forced to make his way out of the cave, we can see the process of education. At first, the prisoner sees the fire, which casts the shadows he formerly took to be reality.
He is then led out of the cave. After his eyes painfully adjust to the sunlight, he first sees only the shadows of things, and then the things themselves. After this, he realizes that it is the sun by which he sees the things, and which gives life to the things he sees.
The sun is here analogous to the form of the Good, which is what gives life to all beings and enables us most truly to know all beings. This dialogue shows us a young Socrates, whose understanding of the forms is being challenged by Parmenides. Parmenides first challenges the young Socrates about the scope of the forms.
It seems absurd, thinks Parmenides, to suppose stones, hair, or bits of dirt of their own form c-d. The forms are supposed to be unitary. The multiplicity of large material things, for example, participate in the one form of Largeness, which itself does not participate in anything else. In other words, is the form of Largeness itself large? If so, it would need to participate in another form of Largeness, which would itself need to participate in another form, and so forth.
In short, we can see that Plato is tentative about what is now considered his most important theory. Indeed, in his Seventh Letter , Plato says that talking about the forms at all is a difficult matter. The forms are beyond words or, at best, words can only approximately reveal the truth of the forms. Yet, Plato seems to take it on faith that, if there is knowledge to be had, there must be these unchanging, eternal beings. We can say that, for Plato, if there is to be knowledge, it must be of eternal, unchanging things.
The world is constantly in flux. It is therefore strange to say that one has knowledge of it, when one can also claim to have knowledge of, say, arithmetic or geometry, which are stable, unchanging things, according to Plato. Moreover, like Cratylus, we might wonder whether our ideas about the changing world are ever accurate at all. Our ideas, after all, tend to be much like a photograph of a world, but unlike the photograph, the world continues to change.
Thus, Plato reserves the forms as those things about which we can have true knowledge. How we get knowledge is difficult. How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?
If so, then it seems that one cannot even begin to ask about X. In other words, it seems that one must already know X in order to ask about it in the first place, but if one already knows X, then there is nothing to ask. The theory of recollection rests upon the assumption that the human soul is immortal.
At any rate, Socrates shows Meno how the human mind mysteriously, when led in the proper fashion, can arrive at knowledge on its own. This is recollection. Again, the forms are the most knowable beings and, so, presumably are those beings that we recollect in knowledge.
Plato offers another image of knowing in his Republic. True understanding noesis is of the forms. Below this, there is thought dianoia , through which we think about things like mathematics and geometry. Below this is belief pistis , where we can reason about things that we sense in our world. The lowest rung of the ladder is imagination eikasia , where our mind is occupied with mere shadows of the physical world de. In any case, real knowledge is knowledge of the forms, and is that for which the true philosopher strives, and the philosopher does this by living the life of the best part of the soul—reason.
Plato is famous for his theory of the tripartite soul psyche , the most thorough formulation of which is in the Republic. The soul is at least logically, if not also ontologically, divided into three parts: reason logos , spirit thumos , and appetite or desire epithumia. Reason is responsible for rational thought and will be in control of the most ordered soul.
Spirit is responsible for spirited emotions, like anger. Appetites are responsible not only for natural appetites such as hunger, thirst, and sex, but also for the desire of excess in each of these and other appetites.
Why are the three separate, according to Plato? The argument for the distinction between three parts of the soul rests upon the Principle of Contradiction. Just because, however, that person might desire a drink, it does not mean that she will drink at that time.
In fact, it is conceivable that, for whatever reason, she will restrain herself from drinking at that time. Since the Principle of Contradiction entails that the same part of the soul cannot, at the same time and in the same respect, desire and not desire to drink, it must be some other part of the soul that helps reign in the desire b.
The rational part of the soul is responsible for keeping desires in check or, as in the case just mentioned, denying the fulfillment of desires when it is appropriate to do so. Why is the spirited part different from the appetitive part? To answer this question, Socrates relays a story he once heard about a man named Leontius. Despite his disgust issuing from the spirited part of the soul with his desire, Leontius reluctantly looked at the corpses. Socrates also cites examples when someone has done something, on account of appetite, for which he later reproaches himself.
The reproach is rooted in an alliance between reason and spirit. Reason, with the help of spirit, will rule in the best souls. Appetite, and perhaps to some degree spirit, will rule in a disordered soul.
The life of philosophy is a cultivation of reason and its rule. The soul is also immortal, and one the more famous arguments for the immortality of the soul comes from the Phaedo. This argument rests upon a theory of the relationship of opposites. Hot and cold, for example, are opposites, and there are processes of becoming between the two. Hot comes to be what it is from cold. Cold must also come to be what it is from the hot, otherwise all things would move only in one direction, so to speak, and everything would therefore be hot.
Life and death are also opposites. Living things come to be dead and death comes from life. But, since the processes between opposites cannot be a one-way affair, life must also come from death Phaedo 71c-e2.
The souls must always exist in order to be immortal. We can see here the influence of Pythagorean thought upon Plato since this also leaves room for the transmigration of souls. The disordered souls in which desire rules will return from death to life embodied as animals such as donkeys while unjust and ambitious souls will return as hawks 81ea3.
The best life is the life of philosophy, that is the life of loving and pursuing wisdom—a life spent engaging logos. The philosophical life is also the most excellent life since it is the touchstone of true virtue. Without wisdom, there is only a shadow or imitation of virtue, and such lives are still dominated by passion, desire, and emotions. On the other hand,. The soul of the philosopher achieves a calm from such emotions; it follows reason and ever stays with it contemplating the true, the divine, which is not the object of opinion.
Nurtured by this, it believes that one should live in this manner as long as one is alive and, after death, arrive at what is akin and of the same kind, and escape from human evils.
Phaedo 84a-b. The Republic begins with the question of what true justice is. Socrates proposes that he and his interlocutors, Glaucon and Adeimantus, might see justice more clearly in the individual if they take a look at justice writ large in a city, assuming that an individual is in some way analogous to a city ca. The guardians will rule, the auxiliaries will defend the city, and the craftspeople and farmers will produce goods and food for the city.
The guardians, as we learn in Book VI, will also be philosophers since only the wisest should rule. This tripartite city mirrors the tripartite soul. How is it that auxiliaries and craftspeople can be kept in their own proper position and be prevented from an ambitious quest for upward movement?
Maintaining social order depends not only upon wise ruling, but also upon the Noble Lie. The Noble Lie is a myth that the gods mixed in various metals with the members of the various social strata. The guardians were mixed with gold, the auxiliaries with silver, and the farmers and craftspeople with iron and bronze a-c. He even seems to recognize this at times. For example, the guardians must not only go through a rigorous training and education regimen, but they must also live a strictly communal life with one another, having no private property.
Adeimantus objects to this saying that the guardians will be unhappy. In anticipation that such a city is doomed to failure, Plato has it dissolve, but he merely cites discord among the rulers d and natural processes of becoming as the reasons for its devolution.
Not even a constitution such as this will last forever. Yet, it is possible that the lust for power is the cause of strife and discord among the leaders. In other words, perhaps not even the best sort of education and training can keep even the wisest of human rulers free from desire. Yet, just as he challenges his own metaphysical ideas, he also at times loosens up on his ethical and political ideals.
Socrates, to his own pleasure, rubs his legs after the shackles have been removed 60b , which implies that even philosophers enjoy bodily pleasures. Phaedo recounts how Socrates eased his pain on that particular day:. I happened to be sitting on his right by the couch on a low stool, so that he was sitting well above me. He stroked my head and pressed the hair on the back of my neck, for he was in the habit of playing with my hair at times.
Plato, with these dramatic details, is reminding us that even the philosopher is embodied and, at least to some extent, enjoys that embodiment, even though reason is to rule above all else. Aristotle B. He was the son of Nichomacus, the Macedonian court physician, which allowed for a lifelong connection with the court of Macedonia. After serving as tutor for the young Alexander later Alexander the Great , Aristotle returned to Athens and started his own school, the Lyceum.
Aristotle walked as he lectured, and his followers therefore later became known as the peripatetics , those who walked around as they learned.
When Alexander died in , and the pro-Macedonian government fell in Athens, a strong anti-Macedonian reaction occurred, and Aristotle was accused of impiety. He fled Athens to Chalcis, where he died a year later. Unlike Plato, Aristotle wrote treatises, and he was a prolific writer indeed.
He wrote several treatises on ethics, he wrote on politics, he first codified the rules of logic, he investigated nature and even the parts of animals, and his Metaphysics is in a significant way a theology. His thought, and particularly his physics, reigned supreme in the Western world for centuries after his death.
Aristotle used, and sometimes invented, technical vocabulary in nearly all facets of his philosophy. It is important to have an understanding of this vocabulary in order to understand his thought in general. Like Plato, Aristotle talked about forms, but not in the same way as his master. For Aristotle, forms without matter do not exist. I can contemplate the form of human being that is, what it means to be human , but this would be impossible if actual embodied human beings were non-existent.
Similarly, we cannot sense or make sense of unformed matter. There is no matter in itself. Matter is the potential to take shape through form. Form is thus both the physical shape, but also the idea by which we best know particular beings. Form is the actuality of matter, which is pure potentiality.
A thing is in potentiality when it is not yet what it can inherently or naturally become. An acorn is potentially an oak tree, but insofar as it is an acorn, it is not yet actually an oak tree.
When it is an oak tree, it will have reached its actuality—its continuing activity of being a tree. The form of oak tree, in this case, en-forms the wood, and gives it shape—makes it actuality a tree, and not just a heap of matter. When a being is in actuality, it has fulfilled its end, its telos. All beings by nature are telic beings.
The end or telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree. If it reaches this fulfillment it is in actuality, or entelecheia, which is a word that Aristotle coined, and is etymologically related to telos. It is the activity of being-its-own-end that is actuality. This is also the ergon, or function or work, of the oak tree. The best sort of oak tree—the healthiest, for example—best fulfills its work or function.
It does this in its activity, its energeia, of being. This activity or energeia is the en-working or being-at-work of the being. To know a thing thoroughly is to know its cause aitia , or what is responsible for making a being who or what it is. For instance, we might think of the causes of a house.
The material cause is the bricks, mortar, wood, and any other material that goes to make up the house. Yet, these materials could not come together as a house without the formal cause that gives shape to it. The efficient cause would be the builders of the house. The final cause that for which the house exists in the first place, namely shelter, comfort, warmth, and so forth.
We will see that the concept of causes, especially final cause, is very important for Aristotle, especially in his argument for the unmoved mover in the Physics. The soul is the actuality of a body. Alternatively, since matter is in potentiality, and form is actuality, the soul as form is the actuality of the body a Form and matter are never found separately from one another, although we can make a logical distinction between them.
For Aristotle, all living things are en-souled beings. Soul is the animating principle arche of any living being a self-nourishing, growing and decaying being. Thus, even plants are en-souled a Without soul, a body would not be alive, and a plant, for instance, would be a plant in name only.
There are three types of soul: nutritive, sensitive, and intellectual. Some beings have only one of these, or some mixture of them. If, however, a soul has the capacity for sensation, as animals do, then they also have a nutritive faculty b Likewise, for beings who have minds, they must also have the sensitive and nutritive faculties of soul.
A plant has only the nutritive faculty of soul, which is responsible for nourishment and reproduction. Animals have sense perception in varying degrees, and must also have the nutritive faculty, which allows them to survive. Human beings have intellect or mind nous in addition to the other faculties of the soul.
The soul is the source and cause of the body in three ways: the source of motion, the telos, and the being or essence of the body b The soul is that from which and ultimately for which the body does what it does, and this includes sensation. Sensation is the ability to receive the form of an object without receiving its matter, much as the wax receives the form of the signet ring without receiving the metal out of which the ring is made.
Mind nous , as it was for Anaxagoras, is unmixed a Just as senses receive, via the sense organ, the form of things, but not the matter, mind receives the intelligible forms of things, without receiving the things themselves. More precisely, mind, which is nothing before it thinks and is therefore itself when active, is isomorphic with what it thinks a To know something is most properly to know its form, and mind in some way becomes the form of what it thinks. Just how this happens is unclear.
So, mind is not a thing, but is only the activity of thinking, and is particularly whatever it thinks at any given time. This work is an inquiry into the best life for human beings to live. The life of human flourishing or happiness eudaimonia is the best life. The dream describes the divine order which not only rewards humans for just service to their city VI.
What fame can you achieve in what men say, or what glory can you achieve that is worth seeking? As Jed W. Probably begun after De re publica , it was likewise written in the years immediately before 51 BCE, and similarly survives only in piecemeal and fragmentary form. Such iniquitous laws as those passed by tyrants are not just I. As these prescriptions, and the circumstances of their writing a temporary retreat from active politics , suggest, Cicero had a complex attitude to the Greek dilemma posing the lives of philosophy and of politics as opposed alternatives.
He saw philosophy as a source of insight and perspective relevant to politics, but after his early studies, devoted himself to it primarily when temporarily debarred from more active pursuits.
One might say that philosophy became, beyond its intrinsic value, a form of alternative public service when the forum was too dangerous for him to enter here following the reflection along these lines offered by Baraz This dictum of A. Long holds true not only in the sense that for Cicero, as for Plato and Aristotle, ethics was inseparable from politics. Book I treats what is virtuous, or honestas ; Book II treats what is advantageous, or utilitas ; and Book III considers cases to show that any apparent conflict is illusory.
The most difficult case to resolve according to the overall argument of the book is that of advantage when understood as political ambition, driven by greatness of spirit. Similar casuistry enables Cicero to resolve in accordance with his thesis a range of common cases where advantage might be sought at the expense of justice in administering the estate of an orphan, for example, a common duty of eminent Romans.
As in Plato, a redefinition of the virtues plays a crucial role in the overall argument for the benefits of justice. For Cicero, the virtues are Romanized as officia , understood not only as duties in the abstract but rather as obligations of role or relationship, each attaching to someone in virtue of a distinct persona whether as father, consul, neighbor, and so on, or simply as a human being.
Four principal virtues are identified: wisdom; justice, resting on fides good faith and credit and respect for property; greatness of spirit; and decorum. Strikingly, whereas tyrannicide might appear to be a difficult case for such an ethical code to confront, Cicero presents it — writing later in the year that Caesar was assassinated—as the straightforwardly ethically correct choice.
Cicero couches his case in Stoic terms of naturalness and fellowship Dyck , ad loc. His pivotal move is to deny that tyrants are party to the otherwise universal nature of human fellowship. In this period, Stoicism continued to exercise an important hold, drawing in part on the Hellenistic genre of advice to kings; Platonism too, and forms of Pythagoreanism, regained much sway.
Moreover, a number of Stoic-minded writers and orators played their parts in Roman political life, some fashioning the life of a philosopher itself into a distinctive form of what might be called non-political politics Trapp In this article, I cannot explore the full ramifications of these philosophical developments under the Empire, in writers in Greek as well as in Latin, and influencing not only pagan but also Jewish and Christian thinkers.
The article also leaves aside the many and varied important contributions to political thought in Rome and its possessions made not by philosophers but by historians, including Livy, Sallust, Diodorus Siculus, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Again, for an overview that seeks to integrate political and historical developments with political theorizing, see J. If Cicero as a new man made senator had to contend with the competitive pressures of republican politics, Seneca c.
For Seneca, Stoic philosophy of which he was an avowed exponent, though other philosophical influences can also be found in his ideas , can be best squared with politics if the ruler is supremely virtuous: in that case, the Stoic wise man is the king or prince. Like Cicero, Seneca wrote essays in natural as well as political philosophy, including for example a significant analysis of the give and take of benefits or reciprocal gifts and favors in political life De beneficiis , recently translated afresh by Griffin and Inwood, , and even a De officiis which is lost.
Like Cicero, he wrote important collections of letters and where Cicero wrote poetry, Seneca also wrote plays. Indeed, Seneca asserts that those who are curable will generally strive subsequently to become worthy of the clemency shown to them by the prince 2. In good Stoic fashion, Seneca finally shows that the virtue of clemency is both valuable in itself and also beneficial.
It sustains the rule of a prince by inspiring love in his subjects 1. And conversely, whereas misericordia wallows in a wrongful and inefficient emotional pity for the treatment that justice would prescribe of the criminal 2.
It is worth noting finally that, while Seneca specifies that clemency should also extend to slaves, his cosmopolitanism stopped short of advocating their manumission or the abolition of slavery Griffin — Seneca did not limit himself to the political function of advising rulers. Instead, he conceived the role of philosophy as benefiting people generally, in the widest sense of a cosmopolitan ethics and even politics.
Should such an ordinary regime turn lethal, the philosopher remains a citizen of the cosmic commonwealth, and so his serenity can and should remain intact. That fate befell Seneca himself in 65 CE, when Nero accused him of conspiring in a planned assassination of the emperor and ordered him to commit suicide. No tyranny can so enslave us as to take away this freedom: a freedom to act based on the inner liberation of realizing that death and other worldly losses are in fact indifferent and irrelevant to happiness Inwood —9.
Seneca was far from the only Stoic politically active in his day or in successive generations. On the varieties of Stoicism under the principate, see the classic study of Brunt , originally published in Yet these later Stoics made rather few detailed contributions to political philosophy, even if their fundamental analysis of living according to nature and reason, as further developed by figures ranging from the once-enslaved Epictetus to the emperor Marcus Aurelius, remained an important touchstone for thinking about politics.
While the men of affairs in the Roman Senate and imperial court turned often though not exclusively to Stoicism, in the Greek centers of philosophy and among provincial Greek men of affairs Platonism remained an important framework for thinking about both ethics and politics, as did a related if somewhat shadowy form of Pythagoreanism which can be seen as a continuation of the genre of Hellenistic kingship treatises Centrone The most important contributions made to political thought by the Platonist philosopher of the second-century AD, Plutarch c.
Plutarch also made important contributions to political philosophy in the many essays collected in his volumes of Moralia. Plutarch was a committed but in some ways revisionist Platonist. His attitude to public life was more Roman than Platonic befitting the role in public affairs that he played in his own city : the political life was for him unproblematically noble, not inferior to the life of philosophy. Similarly, he revised the strict Platonic dictum that philosophers must rule by allowing that philosophers might rule merely in the sense of advising rulers, not of being rulers themselves.
And he considered philosophy to be more of a character-building study than a source of knowledge of exact or politically relevant knowledge. Where statesmen were educated in philosophy, as for example in the Lives of Pericles, Cicero, Brutus, and Cato Minor, he treats this as valuable mainly because of the virtue—in particular, moderation and self-restraint—which it imparts to them Van Raalte The study of philosophy serves as a sort of inoculation against greed and immoderate ambition.
But it need not impart any particular substantive knowledge to the statesman so competing philosophies could all be useful in shaping virtue: Anaxagaorean influence on Pericles, an eclectic mixture of Stoicism, Academic skepticism, and Platonism on Cicero; Stoicism on the younger Cato. Indeed, excessively rigid adherence to a philosophy could be deleterious, making a statesman rigid and inflexible. He treated the exemplary Greek or Roman statesman as inherently and ideally a kind of monarchical figure, even when functioning within a democratic or republican environment.
Thus for all his admiration for Greek statesmen of the classical age, and his profound later influence on republican sentiments in Europe, Plutarch preferred monarchy as the best constitution and believed that he was following his master Plato in so doing. For the other forms of government in a certain sense, although controlled by the statesman, control him, and although carried along by him, carry him along, since he has no firmly established strength to oppose those from whom his strength is derived… Peri mon.
Later Platonic philosophers, known as Neoplatonists see the entry on Plotinus , also focused primarily on ethics in the context of cosmology and theology, stressing the ascent of the soul to a disembodied pure understanding of the One. On a continuum of political rule stretching from the sheer domination of some over others on one extreme, to a vision of collaborative deliberation among equals for the sake of the good life on the other, many ancient Greek and Roman political philosophers clearly staked out the latter ground.
The very idea of the city and the civic bond as rooted in justice was common ground across much of the spectrum of ancient political philosophy. Even the Epicureans saw society as rooted in justice, although understanding justice in turn as rooted in utility. The nostalgic view of ancient political philosophy as predicated on widely shared conceptions of human nature and the human good, before the splintering and fracturing of modernity, is an oversimplification.
It is true that those ancient visions of politics which rooted themselves in a commitment to ethical cultivation and the common good did not have to contend with the absolutist claims of rival versions of monotheistic religions.
But the ancients did have to answer various forms of relativism, immoralism, and skepticism, contending with rival philosophical schools which disagreed profoundly with one another. If some of them chose to see politics as a domain of common benefit and a space for the cultivation of virtue, this was not because it had not occurred to them that it could be thought of otherwise, but in part because they had developed powerful philosophical systems to support this view. The experience and practices of the Greek poleis the plural of polis and the Roman res publica played important roles in shaping these approaches.
Plato and Aristotle can in many ways be seen as defending some fundamental tenets of Greek ethics such as the value of justice , but doing so by means of advancing revisionist philosophical doctrines and distancing themselves from the ways in which those tenets were interpreted by the democratic institutions of their day.
The range of ethical and political views which they, along with their Hellenistic successors, laid out, continue to define many of the fundamental choices for modern philosophy, despite the many important innovations in institutional form and intellectual approach which have been made since. Many of those innovations, indeed, came in response to a revival of the ancient skeptical and relativist challenges: challenges already known from their evolution within ancient political philosophy itself.
Fuller bibliographies for most of the works and authors discussed can be found in the related articles listed below. The Oxford Classical Text series has been used for citation of most classical texts.
Kranz eds. Sedley eds. The list below is arranged roughly chronologically in relation to the Greek or Latin texts that are translated in each case. There are useful series of Cambridge Companions , Cambridge Histories , and Blackwell Companions , among other such series, to various authors, texts, and schools, some of which are cited above.
An authoritative source of important articles is H. Temporini ed. The Scope of Ancient Political Philosophy 2. Politics and Philosophy in Ancient Greece 2. Socrates and Plato 3. Aristotle 4. Hellenistic Philosophies and Politics 5.
The Roman Republic and Cicero 6. Political Philosophy in the Roman Empire 7. Instead it is right that such a person should rule without the term limits that political office would ordinarily require: If, however, there be some one person, or more than one, although not enough to make up the full complement of a state, whose excellence is so pre-eminent that the excellence or the political capacity of all the rest admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded as part of a state; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is reckoned only as the equal of those who are so far inferior to him in excellence and in political capacity.
Hellenistic Philosophies and Politics Important developments in political thinking and practice took place under the Hellenistic kingdoms that supplanted Macedon in its suzerainty over the formerly independent Greek city-states. The Roman Republic and Cicero While the founders of the city of Rome were said to be the legendary twins Romulus and Remus, Romans would come to identify the origins of their distinctive liberty in the killing of a tyrannical king, generally dated in BCE, by the ancestor of the Junius Brutus who would eventually kill Julius Caesar.
Conclusion On a continuum of political rule stretching from the sheer domination of some over others on one extreme, to a vision of collaborative deliberation among equals for the sake of the good life on the other, many ancient Greek and Roman political philosophers clearly staked out the latter ground. Primary Literature The Oxford Classical Text series has been used for citation of most classical texts. Translations used The list below is arranged roughly chronologically in relation to the Greek or Latin texts that are translated in each case.
Gagarin, M. Woodruff, eds. Taylor, C. Cooper, J. Hutchinson assoc. Reeve, C. Barnes, J. Everson, S. Long, A. Sedley, eds. Griffin, M. Atkins, eds. Zetzel, J. Inwood, B. Braund, S. Inwood eds. King, C. Irvine ed. Dobbin, R.
Farqharson, A. The Post-Socratic philosophers established four schools of philosophy: Cynicism, Skepticism , Epicureanism, and Stoicism. The Post-Socratic philosophers focused their attention on the individual rather than on communal issues such as politics. Modern philosophers and educators still employ the patterns of thinking and exploration established by ancient Greek philosophers, such as the application of logic to questions of thought and engaging in debate to better convey philosophical ideas.
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