The Future of Scholarship in Ancient Greek Philosophy

My specialty is ancient Greek philosophy, but I’ve drifted away from the field in recent years and will probably never return. Recently, a friend told me about an article, written five years ago, talking about the decline in our field. See here. The author, Jonathan Barnes, is quite gloomy about the field’s prospects because (1) you need to know ancient Greek in order to do it well and the number of people who know Greek is declining, (2) the field has been invaded by postmodern nonsense, and (3) academia in general has been so bureaucratized that scholarship gets bogged down.

Regarding this last charge, he talks about a scholar who, applying for a grant, was asked to estimate how much electricity the project would require, as though this were a massive experiment in physics. He blames this on us Americans, though I’ve never heard anyone here talk about bureaucracy going as far as it seems to have gone in Europe.

Regarding the second charge, there’s not much one can do about the current fad, except (as I have been doing) calling these people not postmodernists, but “pre-Islamists.” By the way, for anyone reading this who doesn’t know a lot about philosophy, the point at issue here is whether scholarship in Greek philosophy will be done by those who use the methods of Continental philosophy or by those who use the methods of analytic philosophy. (See here and here.) Barnes prefers the latter methods, and so do I, but maybe they are the wrong methods to use, and if so, then using some other methods would be of value.

Finally, getting to the first point, I don’t know enough about enrollments in college classes on ancient Greek to know if the field will decline to the extent that, as Barnes says, “in a few decades, the study of Greek will match the study of Coptic or Akkadian.” But obviously those who are native speakers of modern Greek will still be in a position to learn ancient Greek fairly easily. On the other hand, it's true that non-European languages are beckoning our students these days, which wasn’t true when I was learning Greek. There are lots of young Americans learning Arabic (and putting their badly-done projects onto YouTube).

So what is Barne’s assessment for today and prognosis for the future?

Q: Where is ancient philosophy going now? – A. Downhill, and to the dogs.  Q: Where will it go in the future? – A: Further downhill, and right past the dogs. Q: What can be done? – A: Not much. Q: What will be done? – A: Nothing.

I have to say that I don’t have much sympathy for his gloom. I did my best to bring some excitement to the field, but was rebuffed at every turn. By excitement, what do I mean? Well, what excites the public about scholarship? It is discoveries: Buried treasure, sunken ships, or even sunken cities. Think about how much has been written about the sunken city of Atlantis (most of it nonsense, I’m afraid). It is also lost sonnets of Shakespeare or newly-discovered letters of Jane Austen or new theories about the Mona Lisa (most of which, my wife assures me, aren’t worth listening to). All of these discoveries are what stimulates the public’s appetite. They get people excited and interested in the past.

So when I sent off for publication an article entitled “A Lost Fragment of Empedocles,” I thought that even if the general public didn’t get excited about it, at least scholars would. But adhering to the idea that nobodies who went to ordinary Midwestern universities don’t deserve to get published, editors weren’t the least bit interested and trashed it (even though I had sent it off to a number of people ahead of time, one of whom, Gregory Vlastos, was one of the top people in the field). Eventually, it got published via the backdoor, but really, why should I care about a field that is filled with such snobs and dullards?

Ok, not many people have heard of Empedocles, but everyone has heard of Plato, and a few years later I realized that something big had happened in the last decades of his life, something that no one from antiquity talked about, but concerning which plenty of evidence still remains to show that it happened. This something was a great debate, a battle royal between Plato and another philosopher concerning the existence of forms. All right, I admit this was about metaphysics, which the general public is not much interested in, but again one would expect philosophers to eat this up. Many people, even those outside of Greek philosophy, are intrigued by Plato’s theory of forms, and one would think that hearing that he engaged in a long debate with another philosopher concerning their existence would inspire their interest, as well as a bunch of questions such as: Who was this other philosopher? Was it Aristotle? Who won the debate? If Plato won, why did it take him so long to win, and if the other philosopher won, then what factors led Plato to lose?

The other philosopher wasn’t Aristotle, but Speusippus, about whom we know little, but we do know that he rejected the existence of forms. I’m not going to go into all the reasons why I think Plato and Speusippus spent several decades debating their existence, but here are some of points to consider.

1. Philosophers are likely to engage in debate. When two philosophers lived in the same city at about the same time, we would expect them to have debated topics of interest to them. With Speusippus, we have a philosopher who not only lived at about the same time as Plato and who lived in the same city, but who was also a member of Plato’s Academy. And to top it all off, Speusippus was a member of Plato’s extended family. (He was Plato's nephew.) On a priori grounds alone, then, we ought to expect that Plato and Speusippus spent many occasions discussing the existence of forms. (For all I know, they did it at family picnics.) The only question would be whether this debate was the most important affair happening in Plato’s late period, as I believe, or if something else was, as everyone else believes.

2. Scholars are already inclined to say that Plato and Speusippus had debates about the nature of pleasure. If they disagreed on the forms, then it is likely that they had debates about that, too.

3. At the beginning of this period, Plato wrote a dialogue called the Parmenides in which he subjected his own theory of forms to some criticisms. Why? It is generally agreed that Plato didn’t tell us. I say the opposite. Plato told us, or at least gave us a big hint, at 135a3-4:

And the result of hearing these objections is that the hearer is perplexed and concludes that the forms don’t exist.

This statement occurs right after all the objections have been presented, so it is the right place to look for an explanation. What does it say? It says that nearly everyone who hears these objections concludes that the forms don’t exist. This is why Plato published these objections, because nearly everyone now accepted them and rejected the forms, so he had to mention them. They aren’t exercises for the reader or self-criticism that led him to revise his theory. They were objections from others. As the subsequent lines show, Plato thought they were wrong in believing the objections to be valid.

4. Scholars take an odd view of why Speusippus rejected the forms. They decide that his one and only argument against them was that he had pointed out to Plato that the method of division ought not to work on entities that are indivisible. But why assume that he had only one argument against the forms? And why would anyone who rejected the forms refuse to use the objections found in the Parmenides, especially the infamous Third Man argument (see here)? Imagine an atheist who rejected the argument from evil; it would be like rejecting the best arrow in the quiver. But if Speusippus used the Third Man against Plato, then a great deal of current thinking about Plato’s late period needs to be re-thought.

5. In his last work, the Laws, Plato acknowledged that his attempts to create a philosopher king hadn’t succeeded. Everyone assumes that this refers to his disastrous attempt to get the tyrant in Syracuse to become a philosopher. They are forgetting that Plato had two ways of creating a philosopher king: turning kings into philosophers and turning philosophers into kings. Sure, the first method didn’t work, but he still had the second. I argue that he didn’t have the second method either, because all his best students had abandoned the forms, and believing in forms was required under his conception of a philosopher.

6. If we assume that Plato and Speusippus were debating, we can make sense of that strange Platonic phenomenon, the unwritten doctrines. See here. These doctrines were developed as part of the debate.

7. Reading Aristotle is at times like entering a room where you’ve missed the introduction to a philosophy lecture. In passage after passage Aristotle tells us about the views of two and sometimes three different parties, which the ancients identified as Plato, Speusippus, and Xenocrates (who seemed to be trying to work out a middle position between the other two). All we are missing here is an introductory statement from Aristotle telling us that Plato and Speusippus were engaged in a big debate. With such a statement, these passages make more sense.

There's a lot more evidence, but this should suffice for the open-minded.

So, who won the debate? Neither. Plato was a brilliant metaphysician, but his system was flawed. As Aristotle observed, his forms were subject to the Third Man argument. On the other hand, Aristotle compared Speusippus’ system to a badly-constructed tragedy. The real winner, then, was Aristotle, for the fact that these two older philosophers had argued to a standstill in their debate meant that he could jump into the gap and make a name for himself.

If this debate occurred, then it was the biggest philosophical episode in the ancient world, which means that it ought to interest most philosophers. And if it didn’t occur, then at least scholars would have fun ripping my thesis to shreds as an exercise in, as John Stuart Mill would say, coming to have a “clearer perception and livelier impression of truth.”

And if they aren’t interested in that, then why bother with this field?

Comments

[James Drake]

I'm no expert but it seems to me that there's considerable interest in ancient philosophy. For instance, Anthony Flew, world-class atheist, changed his mind and became a theist after coming to have a better understanding of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

Also, Feser's The Last Superstition was highly praised in one of those review journals for librarians, and it depends very much on ancient Greek metaphysics, as well as the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

[John Pepple]

I think there's some interest, though my impression is that there's more interest in the medieval world or ancient Egypt. And the interest comes and goes, too. With Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there was a bit of a revival, but that was decades ago.

But even if there was a lot of interest, academics would be snobbish about these outsiders. Academics in medieval studies seem to have a different attitude completely, for their main conference (in Kalamazoo) attracts all kinds of people who aren't academics, and none of the academics seems too bothered by this.

By the way, I think it's Antony and not Anthony Flew.

[lee faber]

A medievalist here; have you written this up or published this already, or what?

[John Pepple]

My article on Empedocles was eventually published in the Journal of Value Inquiry for 1996. The rest I self-published. I put an article on Plato and Speusippus on the Internet:

http://personal.kenyon.edu/pepplej/

And I self-published a book:

http://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Debates-Hidden-Ancient-Philosophy/dp/1420889737/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1300962170&sr=1-1

One scholar (Andreas Graeser) who saw the article and liked it wrote a review of the book. The review was in German, but I don't know if it ever got published because the journal was some obscure German journal that I don't have access to and which didn't seem to have a presence on the Internet.

Since you're a medievalist, do you go to Kalamazoo? My wife is a medievalist, and her career was basically made at that conference. She was allowed to run her own sessions, even though she was a nobody. A book publisher (Brill) then offered her an opportunity to do an edited volume, which made her name.

I don't know of any other academic conference that is so egalitarian.

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