By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 26 July 2026.
We spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves marginally more comfortable. The Stoics, Cynics, and Spartans believed that this pursuit of comfort could pose a trap. Their remedy was occasional voluntary hardship.
In the deep winter, Diogenes the Cynic (d. 323 BCE) would strip naked and embrace bronze statues. One day, upon seeing this, a Spartan asked him whether he was cold. When he said that he was not, the Spartan replied, ‘Well, then, what’s so impressive about what you’re doing?’
Like their predecessors the Cynics, and like the Spartans, the Stoics greatly valued hardship, albeit on a more modest or moderate scale. They believed that we should occasionally practise poverty or put ourselves through mild hardship, and this for several reasons:
First, to discover what we can do without, and reduce our fear of losing those things. In his Letters, Seneca advises Lucilius: ‘Set yourself a period of some days in which you will be content with very small amounts of food, and the cheapest kinds, and with coarse clothing, and say to yourself, ‘Is this what I was afraid of?’’
Second, to be reminded that simple things, such as bread and olive oil, or a good night’s sleep, can be just as enjoyable and profitable as any great banquet (if not more so), and thus that pleasure is both readily available and highly transferable.
Third, to better reflect upon our true goals, or to work towards them. ‘If you want to have time for your mind,’ says Seneca, ‘you must either be poor or resemble the poor… One cannot study without frugality, and frugality is just voluntary poverty.’
Here are six more advantages of self-imposed hardship, according to the Stoics:
To increase our appreciation and enjoyment of the things that we normally enjoy.
To break from our normal routine, and reinvigorate our minds while exercising our freedom.
To be prepared for future hardship, which, unless we are suddenly struck dead, is all but a certainty.
To be convinced that the greater part of our suffering lies not in fact but in our attitude towards it.
To practise self-discipline, or test our fortitude.
To empathise with less fortunate people, and people from the past.
In addition, self-imposed poverty and hardship can also have more mundane benefits, such as losing weight, saving time or money, and making yourself popular by seeming like one of the people.
Finally, all these motives are in themselves a source of pride and pleasure of a different kind. ‘Do not,’ says Marcus Aurelius, ‘lament misfortune. Instead, rejoice that you are the sort of man who can undergo misfortune without letting it upset you.’
Seneca does us the favour of putting self-imposed hardship into radical perspective when he says: ‘Armies have endured being deprived of everything for another person’s domination, so who will hesitate to put up with poverty when the aim is to liberate the mind from fits of madness?’
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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, an overview of Stoicism through its best stories.
Ever Met a Clever Fool? Why Intelligence Alone Is Not Enough
Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Every time I utter the word ‘wisdom’, someone giggles or sneers. Wisdom, more so even than expertise, does not sit comfortably in an egalitarian, anti-elitist society. In an age dominated by materialism and consumerism, science and technology, and specialisation and compartmentalisation, it is too loose, too grand, and too mysterious a concept. With our heads in our smartphones and tablets, in our bills and bank statements, we simply do not have the time or mental space for it—or even the idea of it.
But things were not always thus.
The word wisdom features 222 times in the Old Testament, which includes all of seven so-called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.
Here is Ecclesiastes 7:12:
For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.
The word philosophy literally means ‘the love of wisdom’, and wisdom is the overarching aim of philosophy—or, at least, ancient philosophy.
In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates tells the young Lysis that, without wisdom, he will be of no worth to anyone:
And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else, will love you.
The patron goddess of Athens, the city in which the Lysis is set, is none other than Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprang out from the skull of Zeus. Her symbol, and the symbol of wisdom, is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.
Indeed, wisdom derives from the Proto-Indo-European root weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin gouged out one of his eyes and offered it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of knowledge and wisdom, symbolically trading one mode of perception for another, higher one.
Is Wisdom the Same as Knowledge?
People often speak of ‘knowledge and wisdom’ as though they might be closely related or even the same thing. So one hypothesis is that wisdom is knowledge, or a great deal of knowledge. But if wisdom is knowledge, then it has to be a certain kind of knowledge, or else learning the telephone directory, or the names of all the rivers in the world, might count as wisdom.
Nor can it simply be scientific or technical knowledge, or else every contemporary person would be wiser than the wisest of ancient philosophers. Any twenty-first-century school-leaver would be wiser than a Seneca or Socrates.
Remember: the Delphic oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all people not because he knew everything, or even very much, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.
Still, there seems to be more to wisdom than mere ‘negative knowledge’, or else I could simply be super-sceptical about everything and count myself wise.
Or maybe wisdom consists in having high epistemic standards, that is, in having a high bar for believing something, and an even higher bar for calling that belief knowledge. But then we are back to a picture of wisdom as something like science…
So Is Wisdom Simply Correct Opinion?
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates notices that people of wisdom and virtue seem remarkably poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and throwing the javelin, yet no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, Pericles and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.
If wisdom cannot be taught, how, asks Meno, did good people come about? Socrates replies that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A person who has knowledge of the road to Larisa (a city-state in Thessaly) may make a good guide. But a person who has only correct opinion about the road, despite never having travelled it, might make an equally good guide.
Knowledge and correct opinion can therefore lead to the same destination.
Since wisdom cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge; and if it cannot be knowledge, it can only be correct opinion—which explains why paragons of wisdom such as Themistocles, Lysimachus, and Pericles were unable to impart their wisdom even unto their own sons.
Wise people, says Socrates, are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.
Or Is Wisdom the Same as Understanding?
Aristotle gives us another clue in the Metaphysics, when he says that wisdom is the understanding of causes. None of the five senses are regarded as wisdom because, although they provide the most authoritative knowledge of sensible particulars, they are unable to discern the more distant causes of anything.
Similarly, we suppose artists to be wiser than artisans because artists know the ‘why’ or cause, and can therefore teach, whereas artisans do not, and cannot.
In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things, which calls for more distant and elevated perspectives, and perhaps also the ability or willingness to shift between perspectives.
In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero cites as a paragon of wisdom the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who, upon being informed of the death of his son, simply said, “I knew that I begot a mortal.”
For Cicero, true sapience consists in preparing oneself for every eventuality, so as never to be taken—or overtaken—by surprise. And it is true that wisdom, the understanding of causes and connexions, has forever been associated with both insight and foresight.
What, Then, Is Wisdom?
Wisdom is not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.
When we take a few steps back, like when we stand under the shower or go on holiday, we begin to behold the bigger picture. In common parlance, ‘wisdom’ has two opposites: ‘foolishness’ and ‘folly’, which both derive from the Latin follis (‘bellows’, ‘bag’) and involve, respectively, lack and loss of perspective.
In cultivating a broader perspective, it helps, of course, to be knowledgeable, but it also helps to be intelligent, reflective, open-minded, and disinterested—which is why we often seek out and pay for independent advice.
Above all, it helps to be courageous, because the view from on high, though it can be exhilarating, and ultimately liberating, is at first terrifying—not least because it conflicts with so much that we have been taught or enculturated to think.
Courage, said Aristotle, is the first of the human qualities, because it is the one which underwrites all the others.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
The ancient Greek sophist Gorgias compared the power of words to the power of drugs. More than two thousand years later, his insight is as compelling as ever. Words can persuade and deceive, comfort and inspire, alter the course of a life—or even the march of history.
Gorgias (483—375 BCE) hailed from Leontini in Sicily. He studied the art of persuasion—or rhetoric—under Corax and Tisias in nearby Syracuse and was also acquainted with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. In 427, he led an embassy to Athens to forge a defensive alliance against an overbearing Syracuse.
If Athens gave birth to philosophy, Sicily gave birth to rhetoric. Gorgias inherited the techniques of Corax and Tisias, the nominal founders of rhetoric, but transformed them into something that could dazzle audiences.
Indeed, Gorgias was something of a showman. He delighted in making unconventional, counterintuitive, or absurd arguments appear the stronger, and spoke in a florid, rhyming style that hypnotised all those who heard him. When in the theatre at Athens, he would say, “Come, propose me a theme!” He took great pride in his ability to defend any position, on any subject, and founded the art of extempore (‘off the cuff’) oratory.
In the Rhetoric, Aristotle characterises Gorgias’ style of oratory as ‘ironic’—and Gorgias’ opinions, if he had any at all, are hard to decipher. Rather than any positive philosophy, he offered an agnostic art of persuasion which he held to be of the utmost value.
In Plato’s Philebus, the sophist Protarchus tells Socrates: “I have often heard Gorgias maintain, Socrates, that the art of persuasion far surpassed every other; this, as he says, is by far the best of them all, for to it all things submit, not by compulsion, but of their own free will.”
Of Gorgias’ works, two short display speeches survive, the Encomium of Helenand the Defence of Palamedes, along with a fragment of a funeral oration and two paraphrases of a lost treatise, On Non-Being.
Words as Magic
In the Encomium of Helen, Gorgias sets himself the unlikely task of praising Helen and exculpating her for leaving Sparta with Paris and sparking the Trojan War. Gorgias argues that Helen could have been persuaded to leave in one of four ways: by the gods; by physical force; by the power of love; by the power of speech. But whichever way it was, she herself would have been blameless.
In defending Helen, Gorgias compares the effect of speech on the soul to the effect of drugs on the body: ‘Just as different drugs draw forth different humours from the body—some putting a stop to disease, others to life—so too with words: some cause pain, others joy, some strike fear, some stir the audience to boldness, some benumb and bewitch the soul with evil persuasion.’
A doctor’s diagnosis, a judge’s verdict, a declaration of love, a political speech, a prayer, or a promise may consist of nothing more than words, yet each can change the course of a life—even the course of nations and the march of history.
Perhaps this is why so many ancient cultures regarded words as sacred. In the Vedas, speech is revered as a divine power, and even personified as the goddess Vac. A similar idea can be found in the Bible, at John 1:1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ In Genesis, God does not create the world with his hands, but by speech: ‘And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.’
As a psychiatrist, I am often reminded of Gorgias’ insight. Faced with a suicidal patient, everything may depend upon finding the right words at the right moment. A single sentence, if it is the right one, can alter a person’s entire outlook. Equally, a single sentence can break—or make—a career or a relationship.
The linguist may insist that ‘casting spells’ and ‘spelling words’ have different etymologies; the psychologist suspects that they spring from the same ancient intuition. If they had told us at school that we were learning magic, we would have paid a lot more attention.
Nothing Exists
In On Non-Being, Gorgias pushes his fascination with language to its absolute limit. Responding to the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides, who held that reality is one and accessible to reason, he parodies his arguments by turning each of them on its head: (1) nothing exists; (2) even if something did exist, nothing could be known about it; (3) even if something could be known, this knowledge could not be communicated to others; and (4) even if it could be communicated, it could not be understood. But as ever with Gorgias, it is far from clear whether these stood among his genuine opinions.
Gorgias spent much of his long life in Thessaly where he enjoyed the patronage of Aristippus of Larissa and Jason of Pherae. He taught Aristippus’ one-time beloved, the Meno who lent his name to Plato’s Meno, as well as the orator Isocrates, who came to rank among the Ten Attic Orators.
In his autobiographical Antidosis, Isocrates tells us that Gorgias:
…spent his time in Thessaly when the Thessalians were the most prosperous people in Hellas; he lived a long life and devoted himself to the making of money; he had no fixed domicile in any city and therefore paid out nothing for public weal nor was he subject to any tax; moreover, he did not marry and beget children, but was free from this, the most unremitting and expensive of burdens…
Having no wife or children, Gorgias died at the grand old age of 108.
Plato’s attacks ensured that the Sophists would long be remembered as clever tricksters rather than serious thinkers. Yet Gorgias deserves a more generous hearing. More than two thousand years ago, he recognised something we are still apt to forget: words do not merely describe the world. They shape how we experience it.
Every day we persuade, comfort, deceive, negotiate, inspire, forgive, and fall in love with nothing more substantial than sounds carried through the air. That is the nearest thing to magic that human beings have ever possessed.
How the Son of a Court Physician Became the Most Influential Philosopher in History
In Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–1511), Plato holds his Timaeus and points towards the heavens; Aristotle holds his Ethics and gestures towards the world before him.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Few people have shaped the world as profoundly as Aristotle. Yet, for all his influence, surprisingly little is known about the man himself. As one historian remarked, all that can be said with certainty is that ‘the man was born, worked, and then died’. Even so, the surviving fragments reveal an extraordinary life, which transformed the son of a provincial court physician into the most influential philosopher in the West.
Aristotle was born in 384 BCE in Stageira, on the Chalcidice peninsula of north-eastern Greece. In 348, Philip II of Macedon occupied and destroyed the city, but then had it rebuilt and repopulated in honour of Aristotle, who had been his childhood friend and whom he had appointed to tutor his son, Alexander, the future King of the Oikouménē, or Known World.
The Stagirite’s father, Nicomachus, served as physician to Philip’s father, Amyntas III of Macedon, and descended, purportedly, from the god of medicine, Asclepius—as did his mother, Phæstis. With the healing arts running so thickly in his blood, Aristotle would have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. Certainly, his medical background, and the empiricism of physicians such as Hippocrates, informed his method and philosophy.
Aristotle had a brother and sister, and was probably the youngest of the three siblings. At about the age of thirteen, he lost both his parents and became the ward of Proxenus of Atarneus (in Æolis, Asia Minor), who rounded whatever medical training he had received from his late father. Proxenus married Aristotle’s sister, Arimneste. Together, they had a daughter, Hero, and a son, Nicanor. Hero in turn had a son, the historian Callisthenes of Olynthus, great nephew to Aristotle.
Plato’s Most Brilliant Student
In 367, Proxenus sent the seventeen-year-old Aristotle to study at Plato’s Academy, which had by then become a pre-eminent centre of learning. If Diogenes Laertius is to be believed, the grown-up Aristotle had small eyes and slender calves, dressed fashionably, and spoke with a lisp.
Aristotle remained at the Academy for nearly twenty years, only leaving after Plato’s death in 347. The reasons for his departure are unclear: he may have felt slighted at being passed over for the scholarchship of the Academy in favour of Plato’s nephew, Speussipus; or he may have fled, possibly even before Plato’s death, for fear of the growing anti-Macedonian feeling. In 351, the orator Demosthenes had delivered his First Philippic denouncing Philip II’s imperial ambitions, and in 348, the year before Plato’s death, Philip had razed Athenian ally Olynthus to the ground.
Twenty years at the Academy convinced Aristotle not only of philosophy’s power, but also of its limits. Where Plato sought truth by looking beyond the visible world, Aristotle increasingly sought it within it.
The Philosopher and the Tyrant
Then in his thirty-seventh year, Aristotle travelled with fellow Platonist Xenocrates of Chalcedon to Assos (in the Troad, Asia Minor) to join the court of Hermias of Atarneus, who had studied at the Academy. Aristotle may or may not have gone to Assos as an ambassador of Philip, who wished to have Hermias for an ally. In either case, it seems that he exerted a moderating influence on Hermias, who softened his harsh tyrannical rule—enabling him, in short succession, to win over neighbouring peoples and expand his territory.
In 344, Hermias was captured by a mercenary in the service of Artaxerxes III of Persia and tortured for information about the invasion plans of his ally Philip. But Hermias held his silence, his dying words being that he had done nothing shameful or unworthy of philosophy. Aristotle honoured the memory of his perfect friend with a statue at Delphi and a still extant hymn to virtue.
At around this time, he married Hermias’ niece and adoptive daughter, Pythias, who helped him in his work and bore him a daughter, also Pythias.
Paradise on Lesbos
After the death of Hermias, Aristotle and his student Tyrtamus crossed over to Lesbos to research the flora and fauna of the island and its remarkable lagoon, then known as the Pyrrha lagoon, now known as the Gulf of Kalloni.
Tyrtamus went down in history as Theophrastus [‘Divinely-speaking’], the nickname given to him by Aristotle. Supposedly, the more empirical Theophrastus concentrated on the flora while the more speculative Aristotle concentrated on the fauna, so that the one is remembered as the father of botany and the other as the father of zoology. In fact, Theophrastus also wrote on animals, and Aristotle on plants, but these works have been lost, as have almost all of Theophrastus’ wide-ranging works.
Aristotle was not simply doing biology for the sake of biology, but for the sake of philosophy. Like Plato, he was searching for universals, but this time from the ground up. ‘We should’ he said, ‘venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.’
Teaching Alexander
Aristotle spent no more than two years on Lesbos.
In 343, King Philip commissioned him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then around thirteen years old, promising in return to rebuild his native Stageira and repatriate its former citizens. In the Temple of the Nymphs at Mieza, near the Macedonian capital of Pela, Aristotle taught not only Alexander but also his close friend or lover Hephæstion, and two other future rulers, Ptolemy and Cassander.
It is said that Aristotle prepared for Alexander an annotated copy of the Iliad, which inspired the prince to model his life on that of the demy-divine Achilles. Even if the story is invented, Aristotle’s influence over Alexander is indicated by the crowd of zoologists and botanists that accompanied him on his Eastern conquests, and by the official chronicler of these conquests, who was none other than Aristotle’s great nephew, Callisthenes of Olynthus.
According to both Plutarch and Aulus Gellius, upon hearing that Aristotle had published some of his teachings, Alexander wrote to him from Asia:
Alexander to Aristotle, greeting. You have not done well to publish your books of oral doctrine; for what is there now that we excel others in, if those things which we have been instructed in be laid open to all? For my part, I assure you, I had rather excel others in the knowledge of what is excellent, than in the extent of my power and dominion. Farewell.
Later, as pharaoh in Egypt, Ptolemy built the Great Library of Alexandria, turning the city, which had been founded by Alexander, into a major centre of learning. Alexander, and Ptolemy after him, did much to disseminate Greek culture, so that three centuries later Greek seemed like the natural choice of language for the New Testament.
Aristotle’s Great Project: Organising All Human Knowledge
In around 339, Speussipus suffered a stroke and died, and Xenocrates became the third scholarch of the Academy, with Aristotle passed over for a second time. Among those who frequented the lectures of Xenocrates at the Academy were Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, and Epicurus of Samos, founder of the Epicurean school.
In 334, Aristotle, now returned to Athens, established his own school in a public exercise and training ground dedicated to the god Apollo Lyceus [‘Apollo the Wolf-god’], whence its name, the Lyceum. A temple had once stood on the expansive site, which in Aristotle’s time had different areas dedicated to different purposes. Both Socrates and Plato had spoken or taught there, to the extent that the Lyceum is the setting of Plato’s Euthydemus, which features Socrates and Cleinias, the grandson of Alcibiades, in conversation with Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, a pair of moronic brothers and sophists.
Aristotle taught in the morning, and in the afternoon would sometimes give a public lecture. He often did his thinking and teaching while walking along the Lyceum’s shaded paths, or peripatoi, so that his students, who doubled up as his colleagues and researchers, came to be known as the peripatetics.
Over the next twelve years, Aristotle wrote many of his works and collected the West’s first great library, including copies of the constitutions of 158 cities. He also developed the world’s first botanical garden and zoological park from the plant and animal specimens that Alexander kept returning from the East.
After the death of his wife Pythias, he became involved with Herpyllis of Stageira, who bore him a son whom he named Nicomachus after his father. To this son, he dedicated his major work of ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics. According to the Suda, he also had an eromenos [younger male lover], the historian Palæphatus of Abydus.
Aristotle’s school lived or limped on until 86 BCE, when Athens was sacked by Sulla, the only man in history to have occupied both Athens and Rome. According to Plutarch, Sulla felled the ancient planes of the Academy and Lyceum to build siege engines. In antiquity, the Lyceum had stood to the east of the city wall. In 1996, its remains were uncovered in a park behind the Hellenic Parliament, while clearing space for the new Museum of Modern Art.
Exile and Death
In the East, Callisthenes had become increasingly critical of Alexander’s adoption of Persian customs, especially those, such as proskynesis (falling down before the king and kissing the ground or his feet), which fed into his mounting megalomania.
When a former pupil implicated Callisthenes in a regicidal plot, Alexander left Aristotle’s great nephew to perish in prison. According to Diogenes Laertius, Callisthenes was ‘confined in an iron cage and carried about until he became infested with vermin through lack of proper attention; and finally he was thrown to a lion and so met his end.’ The death of his great nephew soured Aristotle’s relationship with Alexander, and prompted Theophrastus to write a treatise on grief, the now lost Callisthenes.
Even so, Aristotle’s long-time association with Alexander had led the Athenians to perceive him as Macedonian. After Alexander’s death in Babylon in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling in Athens flared up, and Demophilius and Eurymedon the Hierophant charged Aristotle with impiety, possibly for praying to his late friend Hermias rather than anything in the Physics or Metaphysics. Aristotle fled to the solitude, or loneliness, of his country house at Chalcis in Eubœa, an island off the Attic coast and the homeland of his mother’s family. Referencing the trial and execution of Socrates, he explained, ‘I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.’
In the event, Aristotle died within the year, in 322, aged sixty-two, possibly from an abdominal condition. Theophrastus, who was not Macedonian but Lesbian, had remained in Athens as scholarch of the peripatetic school. In his will, Aristotle named him as his successor and bequeathed him his works and library. On the family side, he left a furnished house, three female slaves, and a talent of silver to his wife or concubine Herpyllis, and appointed his nephew Nicanor as guardian to the still young Nicomachus. Nicomachus became a pupil of Theophrastus and, according to Aristippus, his eromenos. He died in battle while still young.
Theophrastus inherited not only Aristotle’s school but also the intellectual legacy of the man who, for centuries to come, would simply be known as ‘The Philosopher’.
In the early twentieth century, digs on Crete, led by Sir Arthur Evans, uncovered the remains of a complex civilization whose people Evans called the Minoans after the mythical King Minos. The Minoans flourished from around 3000 to 1500 BCE, and their society came to revolve around a series of palace complexes, the largest of which was at Knossos in the north of the island.
The Minoans grew rich from trade and acquired a hold on some of their neighbours, including perhaps on the city of Athens. According to myth, King Minos exacted out of Athens a nine-yearly tribute of seven boys and seven girls, to be thrown to the illegitimate son of Minos’ queen Pasiphae, the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, imprisoned in the labyrinth beneath the royal palace at Knossos.
But when the time came for the third tribute, Theseus, the founder-hero of Athens, took the place of one of the sacrificial boys in a daring bid to end this barbaric practice. Theseus killed the Minotaur with some help from Minos’ daughter Ariadne, who had given him a ball of red thread by which to retrace his steps out of the labyrinth. Theseus escaped with Ariadne but later abandoned her on the island of Naxos, to be wedded by the god Dionysus.
The myth of the Minotaur served in part to account for the shift in power from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, and, later, to Athens, and it is significant that Theseus also unified Attica under Athens, laying the foundation for the later Athenian Empire. The Mycenaeans flourished from around 1750 to 1050 BCE, with important centres, each built around a fortified palace, at Mycenae, Pylos, Thebes, and Athens, among others. They were dominated by a warrior aristocracy, and advanced by conquest rather than by trade as the Minoans had done. Their greatest achievement, sung by Homer, was the conquest of Troy in around 1250 BCE.
Towards the close of the Bronze Age, the Mycenaeans may have come under increasing pressure from the Dorians to the north. Whatever its cause, it took some three hundred years for Greece to recover from the demise of the Mycenaeans. During these Dark Ages, old trade links dissolved, the arts and crafts regressed, and famine set in. Many Greeks took to the seas in search of arable land, beginning a culture of colonization.
Looking to the upside, the disintegration of the rigid hereditary hierarchy of the Mycenaeans prepared the ground for a more open society, leading, in due course, to Athenian democracy. In particular, the loss of the Mycenaean king, or wanax, led to a loosening of the bond between myth and ritual so that myth became more detached and disinterested, paving the way for literature and philosophy.
The Mycenaean Linear B script, used for administration and mainly found in palace archives, fell into desuetude during the Dark Ages. Consisting of 87 syllabic and over 100 ideographic signs, Linear B derived from the as yet undeciphered Linear A, used by the non-Greek Minoans to record their mysterious language or languages.
By 770 BCE, close contact with the Phoenicians in the east led to the adoption of a phonetic system of language notation. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician abjad (an alphabet with only consonants), which had been developed for a semitic language, to include vowels, thereby creating the basis for our own modern alphabet.
Significantly, this phonetic script was no longer the preserve of an elite of priests and scribes, used to reaffirm royal power, but a common good, used, more and more, to argue and debate and question the status quo. Life in the emerging city-states [poleis] no longer centred on the royal acropolis, now turned over to the gods, but on the public square or agora, and the nearby law courts where large citizen juries listened to long, elaborate speeches and grew familiar with the concept of objective truth.
The Pre-Socratics and their significance
In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates numbers Thales of Miletus (c. 624-c. 548 BCE) among the Seven Sages of Greece. Thales held that the Earth floats on water, which is the primary substance from which all else is made. ‘Presumably’ says Aristotle, ‘he derived this assumption from seeing that the nutriment of everything is moist…’ Or perhaps he derived it from similar Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hebrew accounts of creation. But in a break with these traditions, he sought to explain the world without resorting to myths and gods, which is why he is often regarded as the first genuine philosopher, as well as the first genuine scientist. When Bertrand Russell (d. 1970) declared that ‘philosophy begins with Thales’, he was, in fact, merely agreeing with Aristotle.
Anaximander of Miletus (c. 610-546 BCE) took Thales as a model and starting point. Like Thales, he sought for the primary substance, or arkhē, which he identified not with water but with apeiron [‘the boundless’]. The Earth, he held, is a cylinder with a height of one-third of its diameter. Thales had claimed that the Earth floats upon water, without specifying what the water might rest upon. Anaximander got round this problem by positing that the cylinder need not be supported: because it is in the middle of everything, there is no reason for it to move in one direction over another. As far as we know, this is the oldest argument founded on the principle of sufficient reason, according to which every instance of change requires a reason or cause.
Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 586-c.526 BCE), a contemporary of Anaximander, rejected apeiron and replaced it with his own arkhē, aēr [air, but also mist and vapour]. The Earth is a flat disc that floats on a cushion of aēr. Anaximenes elaborated upon Thales and Anaximander by positing a mechanism, or two mechanisms, rarefaction and condensation, by which his arkhē might pass into and out of everything else. When aēr is rarefied, it becomes fire; when it is condensed, it becomes wind, then cloud, then water, then stones… To support this thesis, Anaximenes appealed to a simple experiment: when one exhales on one’s hand, the air is hot; but if one blows through pursed lips, the air becomes cold and dense. With his emphasis on change and its process, Anaximenes might be thought of as a forerunner of Heraclitus. The Milesian search for the basic material out of which all things are made may sound quaint and quixotic, until we remember that it is the same quest that our nuclear physicists are embarked upon—this time with the help of giant particle accelerators.
After the downfall of Miletus in 494 BCE, the epicentre of philosophy shifted westwards, away from Ionia and towards Athens and the cities of Italy. At the age of 40, Pythagoras of Samos (c. 560-c. 495 BCE), a contemporary of Anaximander and Anaximenes, left Samos for Croton in southern Italy, where he established a philosophically minded religious community. Music played an important role in Pythagoras’ community. Pythagoreans recited poetry, sang hymns to Apollo, and played on the lyre to cure illnesses of body and soul. One day, or so the story goes, Pythagoras passed by some blacksmiths at work, and found that their hammering produced especially pleasing sounds. He then noticed that their anvils were simple ratios of one another, one being half the size of the first, another twice the size, and so on. This insight led to his ‘harmony of the spheres’, according to which the movements of the heavenly bodies are in a mathematical relationship akin to that between musical notes, and, together, amount to a grand cosmic symphony. Some two thousand years later, the astronomer Johannes Kepler (d. 1630) held that, though inaudible, this ‘music of the spheres’ might nonetheless be heard by the soul. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that Plato’s teachings owed much to those of the Pythagoreans; so much, in fact, that Bertrand Russell upheld not Plato but Pythagoras as the most influential of all philosophers. Pythagoras’ influence is perhaps most evident in Plato’s emphasis on mathematics, and, more generally, reason and abstract thought, as a secure basis for the practice of philosophy.
Xenophanes (c. 570-c. 478 BCE) came from Colophon in Ionia, but left in his mid-twenties and ‘tossed about the Greek Land’ for 67 years—as he himself tells us in one of his 45 surviving fragments. He clearly knew of Pythagoras, whom he discusses in Fragment 7. Xenophanes criticized the likes of Homer and Hesiod for anthropomorphizing the gods (conceiving of them in human form) and portraying them as immoral or amoral. But far from being an atheist, he instead suggested that there is ‘one god, the greatest among gods and men, neither in form like unto mortals nor in thought’. He held that the primary substance is earth, while also acknowledging the importance of water to life. From the existence of inland fossils, he inferred that the earth had at one time been covered by the sea. Despite pronouncing himself on the weightiest matters, he warned that secure knowledge is impossible: ‘There never was or will be a man who has certain knowledge about the gods and about all the things I speak of. Even if he should chance to say the complete truth, yet he himself knows not that it is so.’ This subtle and original distinction between knowledge and true belief is further developed by Plato in the Theaetetus. Another skeptical (or proto-skeptical) point made by Xenophanes is that our perceptions and beliefs are relative and context-dependent: ‘If god had not made brown honey, men would think figs far sweeter than they do.’
Parmenides of Elea (c. 515-c. 440 BCE) in southern Italy may have been acquainted with Xenophanes, whose work he knew. In contrast to his contemporary Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE), who held that everything is in a state of flux (as epitomised by his saying that you cannot step twice into the same river), Parmenides argued that nothing ever changes. He wrote a poem, On Nature, which begins with a proem in which the narrator (presumably himself) ascends to the abode of an unnamed goddess.
To her guest, the goddess reveals the nature of reality, or ‘Way of Truth’—which I shall paraphrase for you:
What is, is, and it is impossible for it not to be. And what is not is not, and it is impossible for it to be. One cannot conceive of what is not, because one cannot think or speak about nothing. Conversely, if one can think or speak about something, then that thing must be, ‘for thought and being are the same.’ It being possible to think about reality, reality must be—and if it is, it cannot not be. Something cannot come into being, or pass out of being, because something cannot come into being from nothing, or pass from something into nothing. Thus, if something comes into being, it does so not from nothing but from something—so that it does not really come into being at all. From this, it follows that there can be no becoming and thus no real change, even though sense experience tells us otherwise. Motion is impossible because it would require moving into a void, that is, moving into nothing, which does not exist. If motion and change are impossible, the universe must consist of a single, undifferentiated, and indivisible unity—which Parmenides called, ‘the One’.
To bolster the philosophy of Parmenides, his follower and lover Zeno of Elea produced a set of paradoxical arguments such as ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ designed to undermine ordinary beliefs about motion, space, time, and plurality. Aristotle outlines ‘Achilles and the Tortoise’ in the Physics: ‘In a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.’
What is new and revolutionary about ‘the Way of Truth’ is that it consists in a long chain of strictdeductive argumentation from premises that are taken to be necessary truths. The conclusion, startling though it is, seems to follow necessarily from the premises, posing a serious challenge to anyone defending a different or commonsense position. Two thousand years later, Descartes would embark on a similar project in search of truths deemed to be incontrovertible.
The pre-Socratics conceived of the universe as an ordered whole. They attempted to explain its fundamental features without resorting to myths and gods. Instead of accounting for the here and now by the supposed beginning, they accounted for the supposed beginning by the here and now. In so doing, they gave rise to the very idea of philosophy and science, and, more pertinently for us, to the rules or principles of reasoning on which they rely. Reason, after all, is the understanding of causes, which is why it is called ‘reason’. What may have come as a surprise to them, especially after Parmenides, is that reason could conflict with ordinary sense experience—perhaps more so even than mythology and religion.
Other scientific or academic attitudes adopted by the Pre-Socratics include conceiving of the world as intelligible; searching for knowledge for its own sake; asking bold questions without fear or favour; developing and manipulating abstract concepts; and privileging elegant and economical explanations.
At the same time, many pre-Socratics, such as Pythagoras and Empedocles, retained something of a mystical streak. Like the mythologists of old, they were more interested in cosmogony than in uncovering the laws of nature, that is, more interested in grand narratives than in formulating empirically verifiable hypotheses. Although familiar with the work of their forebears and contemporaries—and, it seems, highly driven by it—they did not rigorously critique one another in the way that Aristotle would do in writing a whole book on (or against) Democritus.
The Sophists
Now down from the ivory towers and back to the budding assemblies and law courts. The sophistic movement, which revolved around Golden Age Athens (480-404 BCE), owed to a concatenation of unusual social and political circumstances, not least: a renewed sense of self-confidence and optimism fuelled by the improbable repulsion of two Persian invasions; the great wealth flowing in from the maritime empire that had grown out of an anti-Persian defensive alliance; and an extreme participatory democracy in which the power to speak was the power to lead. Political power, however, was a double-edged sword, since prominent citizens were vulnerable to vexatious lawsuits—and, rather than hiring a lawyer, had to mount their own defence.
In this climate, the ability to speak became paramount, and the sophists—essentially teachers of rhetoric—converged upon Athens to deliver public lectures and private classes, typically to young aristoi with worldly ambitions. Other Greek poleis, especially in Sicily and Italy, also called upon their services, so that the chief sophists were continually on tour. When in Athens, they would often reside at the house of a patron such as the magnate Callias, at whose house Plato’s Protagoras is set, or the politician Callicles, at whose house Plato’s Gorgias is set. According to Plato, Callias owned ‘the greatest and most glorious house in Athens’ [Protagoras 337d] and ‘spent a world of money on the sophists’ [Apology20a].
In the Protagoras, Plato intimates that Protagoras invented the role of the professional sophist. Protagoras gravitated towards Athens and so impressed Pericles that, in 444, Pericles invited him to draft the constitution of Thurri, his experimental panhellenic colony on the Tarantine Gulf—settled, among others, by the historian Herodotus and the orator Lysias. Protagoras is perhaps best remembered for his maxim that ‘man is the measure of all things’, attacked in Plato’s Theaetetus on the grounds that, if true, nothing could be inherently true or false, or right or wrong—not even the maxim itself. According to Protagoras, the value of an opinion lies not in its truth but in its usefulness to the person who holds it, a slippery position that could readily be seized upon by scoundrels in search of self-justification.
Protagoras is also remembered for the outré opening of his lost work, About the Gods:
About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life.
Protagoras charged extortionate fees for his services. According to Aulus Gellius, he once took on a pupil, Euathlus, on the understanding that he would be paid once Euathlus had won his first court case. However, Euathlus never won a case, and after a time Protagoras sued him for non-payment. Protagoras argued that if he won the case he would be paid, and if Euathlus won the case, he would still be paid, because Euathlus would then have won a case. Euathlus, having assimilated the methods of his master, retorted that if he won the case he would not have to pay, and if Protagoras won the case, he still would not have to pay, because he still would not have won a case! This so-called Paradox of the Court, and the concomitant Counterdilemma of Euathlus, is also told of Corax [‘Crow’] of Syracuse and his student Tisias, the nominal founders or inventors of rhetoric. One version ends with the judge throwing them both out of the court with the words, Kakou korakos kakon ōon [‘A bad egg from a bad crow’].
Sophistês [‘expert’] derives from sophos [‘wise’], and originally designated one who is learnt or skilled in a particular art or craft. But the term began to acquire derogatory connotations even before Plato, who held most sophists in contempt. The comedian Aristophanes had assimilated Socrates with the sophists, leading, ultimately, to the charges of impiety levied against the philosopher. To rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates, Plato laboured the contrast between Socrates and the sophists, whom he portrayed as venal and amoral and nothing like his poor and pious teacher. As a result, ‘sophistry’ has come to mean something like, ‘the self-interested use of clever but deceptive arguments.’ In an attempt to demarcate and elevate philosophy as a discipline, Plato also sought to undermine poets and orators and all those with a rival but less rigorous claim to the truth.
To be fair to Plato, it does seem that many sophists had a strong and potentially self-serving skeptical streak. Although they did raise many profound questions, they seemed more interested in expediency than in knowledge per se—their primary purpose being to create effective public speakers and enrich themselves in the process, without due regard for the consequences of creating a cohort of venal and amoral leaders. Their habit of undermining the traditional gods turned many conservatives and ordinary people against them, and, ultimately, against Socrates, who was condemned by (false) association.
Socrates and Plato
According to Plato, Socrates had an impetuous friend called Chaerephon, who one day went to Delphi and asked the oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The oracle replied that there was no one wiser. Knowing only that he knew nothing, Socrates was perplexed. To discover the meaning of the oracle, he questioned several supposedly wise men—first the politicians, then the poets, and then the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’
Socrates was the wisest of men not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew what he did not know—or, more subtly, because he knew the limits of the little that he did know. In contrast to the pre-Socratics and especially to the sophists, he seldom claimed to have any positive knowledge; whenever he did, it was always because he had learnt it from somebody else, or because he had been ‘divinely inspired’.
The ever-elusive Plato might also have intended the oracle story as an origin myth for the Socratic method, or method of elenchus, which consists in questioning one or more people about an ethical concept such as justice or virtue with the covert aim of exposing a contradiction in their initial (and often cherished) assumptions and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly precise or refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding and that we know much less than we thought we did. With our dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgement, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we did not first become angry and resentful.
To have our understanding of a moral concept undermined is also to have our values undermined, and, with that, our sense of self. To manage their anger and other feelings, and to keep them talking, Socrates often flattered his interlocutors while himself playing the fool. In the Orator, Cicero esteems that, ‘for irony and dissimulation, [Socrates] far excelled all other men in the wit and genius which he displayed.’ Simon Blackburn in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Socratic irony with brio as ‘Socrates’ irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them.’
Although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he independently originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. But it remains that while the sophists tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance.
Behind the Socratic method, that is, the method of elenchus as perfected by Socrates, lies the search for rigorous definitions—because it helps, if one is to pronounce on something, to know exactly what that something is. For instance, in Plato’s Meno, Socrates tasks the aristocrat Meno with defining virtue; in the Laches, he tasks the general Laches with defining courage; and in the Euthyphro, he tasks the priest-prophet Euthyphro with defining piety. That Meno, who is philosophically trained, struggles to understand what Socrates is asking of him suggests that this search for rigorous definitions is something original and radical. For Socrates, it is not enough simply to define a concept in terms of itself or related concepts, or by a list of its instances, or according to convention or popular opinion (‘piety is what the gods all love’). Instead, a rigorous definition is one which, by picking out the essence of a concept, applies to all its instances and none more. For example, Meno’s definition of virtue as ‘the ability to rule over people’ is both too narrow for excluding children and slaves (who might also be virtuous), and too broad for including those who rule unjustly (and who are therefore not virtuous).
When seeking to define something, Socrates sometimes turns to the method of collection and division. In Plato’s Phaedrus, he responds to an orator’s speech on love with two speeches of his own. In his first speech, he debases love by claiming that it is a form of madness. But in his second, more considered, speech, he praises love for being ‘the highest form of madness’. Later in the dialogue, he points out that rhetoric has the most power with abstract notions such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’ that mean different things to different people and even to the same person from moment to moment. For this reason, in his second speech, he began by distinguishing between human and divine madness, and the four forms of divine madness (prophecy, mystic rites, poetry, and love). This, he says, involved collecting all the various forms of madness, and then dividing them up again ‘according to the natural formation’.
Occasionally, Socrates proceeded instead by the maieutic method, which is often confused with the method of elenchus. But whereas the Socratic method aims at aporia [suspension of belief], the maieutic method aims more properly at hypothesis generation and testing.
In Plato’s Theaetetus, the young Theaetetus contrasts his ease in defining mathematical terms with his difficulty in defining knowledge. He confesses that he has long pondered the problem of knowledge and suffers from his lack of an adequate solution. Socrates responds, ‘These are the pangs of labour, my dear Theaetetus; you have something within you which you are bringing forth.’ Socrates goes on to compare himself to a midwife [maia—hence, ‘maieutic method’] who works with men rather than women, and the soul rather than the body. Just as the midwife is beyond bearing age, so he too is barren—not of children, but of wisdom. All he can do is bring forth the wisdom of others and thoroughly examine it.
Once he understands what Socrates is asking of him, Theaetetus offers three definitions of knowledge (knowledge as perception, knowledge as true belief, and knowledge as true belief with an account, i.e. justified true belief), each of which is rejected, or falsified, by Socrates. So although the Theaetetus ends in aporia, it is more of an exploratory dialogue than a classic aporetic one. It is no coincidence that Theaetetus is a model of humility and perplexity: because he begins in aporia, or adogmatism, he is an ideal candidate for the more positive, collaborative maieutic method.
Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of [these kinds of contradiction]; by the Gods I am! And I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.
I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.
Aristotle
When, in 366, Plato returned from his second trip to Syracuse, he would have found a bright new face at the Academy. The young Aristotle began in Plato’s fold, even writing dialogues in the manner of Plato, but later diverged from him and founded his own school, the Lyceum.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle privileged observation over speculation. Like modern scientists, he began with a systematic gathering of data, from which he attempted to infer explanations and make predictions. He carried out dissections and even rudimentary experiments such as cutting out the heart of a turtle to discover that it could still move its limbs for a surprisingly long time. However, he did not carry out anything like modern case-control studies, and relied uncritically on the lay testimony of beekeepers, fishermen, travellers, and the like. This lack of rigour led to some embarrassing errors, such as the claim that lions copulate back-to-back, while bears adopt the missionary position and hedgehogs stand on their hind legs to face each other. Or the claim that the female of several species has fewer teeth than the male. Among these species, he included humans, when he could simply have looked into his wife or daughter’s mouth.
Aristotle referred to the branches of learning as ‘sciences’, and divided them into three groups: practical sciences, productive sciences, and theoretical sciences.
Practical sciences are concerned with right action and beautiful behaviour both at the level of the individual, as in ethics, and at the level of the community, as in politics.
Productive sciences are concerned with products or outcomes, and include, among many others, agriculture, architecture, ship-building, medicine, music, and rhetoric.
Theoretical sciences are concerned with knowledge for its own sake, and comprise both natural sciences and non-empirical forms of knowledge such as mathematic and metaphysics.
Logic, that is, the branch of learning that is concerned with the principles of intellectual inquiry, does not fit into this tripartite division of the sciences, but underpins them all, and stands alone and apart under the heading of Organon [‘Tool’].
Aristotle’s logic, or ‘analytics’ as he called it, is the first ever systematic study of human reasoning, and the second ever formal system after the Astadhyayi [Sanskrit grammar] of Panini. At the end of Sophistical Refutations (the sixth and last book of the Organon), Aristotle himself says that, in most cases, discoveries lean upon the achievements of others, but in this case, ‘Nothing existed at all… we had absolutely nothing else of an earlier date to mention, but were kept at work for a long time in experimental researches.’ More than two thousand years later, no less an authority than Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) deemed Aristotle’s logic to be complete and unsurpassed.
In fact, Chrysippus (d. c. 206 BCE), the third scholarch of the Stoic school, had developed a more sophisticated system of propositional logic. In the third century CE, Diogenes Laertius wrote that Chrysippus was so renowned for dialectic [reasoned argument] that ‘most people thought, if the gods took to dialectic, they would adopt no other system than that of Chrysippus.’ However, Stoic logic came to be lost—along with the more than seven hundred works of Chrysippus (who might otherwise have been a household name)—while Aristotle’s deductive or syllogistic logic came to dominate.Because logic seemed capable of uncovering the hidden truths of nature, the Aristotelian system was heavily taken up in the monasteries and madrasas. In Islamic scholarship, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics came to be appended to the Organon, and it is true that the works lie on a spectrum: whereas the Organon is about uncovering the truth, the Rhetoric and Poetics are about instilling it in less philosophical types.
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