Ancient philosophy

« divine - were themselves an integral part of both physics and ethics, never a mere adjunct of philosophy.

Thedominant philosophical creeds of the Hellenistic age (officially 323-31 BC) were Stoicism (founded by Zeno of Citium ) and Epicureanism (founded by Epicurus ) (see Stoicism ; Epicureanism ).

Scepticism was also a powerful force, largely through the Academy (see Arcesilaus ; Carneades ), which in this period functioned as a critical rather than a doctrinal school, and also, starting from the last decades of the era, through Pyrrhonism (see Pyrrhonism ) 5 The imperial era The crucial watershed belongs, however, not at the very end of the Hellenistic age (31 BC, when the Roman empire officially begins), but half a century earlier in the 80s BC.

Political and military upheavals at Athensdrove most of the philosophers out of the city, to cultural havens such as Alexandria and Rome.

The philosophicalinstitutions of Athens never fully recovered, so that this decentralization amounted to a permanent redrawing ofphilosophical map.

(The chairs of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism which the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius (§1) established at Athens in AD 176 were a significant gesture, but did not fully restore Athens' former philosophical pre-eminence.) Philosophy was no longer, for most of its adherents, a living activitywithin the Athenian school founded by Plato, Aristotle, Zeno or Epicurus.

Instead it was a subject pursued in smallstudy groups led by professional teachers all over the Greco-Roman world.

To a large extent, it was felt that thehistory of philosophy had now come to an end, and that the job was to seek the correct interpretation of the‘ancients' by close study of their texts.

One symptom of this feeling is that doxography - the systematiccataloguing of philosophical and scientific opinions (see Doxography ) - concentrated largely on the period down to about 80 BC, as did the biographical history of philosophy written circa AD 300 by Diogenes Laertius .

Another such symptom is that a huge part of the philosophical activity of late antiquity went into the composition ofcommentaries on classic philosophical texts.

In this final phase of ancient philosophy, conveniently called ‘imperial'because it more or less coincides with the era of the Roman empire, the Hellenistic creeds were gradually eclipsedby the revival of doctrinal Platonism, based on the close study of Plato's texts, out of which it developed amassively elaborate metaphysical scheme.

Aristotle was usually regarded as an ally by these Platonists, and becametherefore himself the focus of many commentaries (see Platonism, Early and Middle ; Peripatetics ; Neoplatonism ; Aristotle Commentators ).

Despite its formal concern with recovering the wisdom of the ancients, however, this age produced many powerfully original thinkers, of whom the greatest is Plotinus .

6 Schools and movements The early Pythagoreans constituted the first philosophical group that can be called even approximately a ‘school'.

Theyacquired a reputation for secrecy, as well as for virtually religious devotion to the word of their founder Pythagoras . ‘He himself said it' (best known in its Latin form ‘ ipse dixit ') was alleged to be their watchword.

In some ways it is more accurate to consider them a sect than a school, and their beliefs and practices were certainly intimatelybound up in religious teachings about the soul's purification.

It is no longer accepted, as it long was, that theAthenian philosophical schools had the status of formal religious institutions for the worship of the muses.

Their legaland institutional standing is in fact quite obscure.

Both the Academy and the Lyceum were so named after publicgroves just outside the walls of Athens, in which their public activities were held.

The Stoics too got their namefrom the public portico, or ‘stoa', in which they met, alongside the Athenian agora.

Although these schoolsundoubtedly also conducted classes and discussions on private premises too, it was their public profile that wascrucial to their identity as schools.

In the last four centuries BC, prospective philosophy students flocked to Athensfrom all over the Greek world, and the high public visibility of the schools there was undoubtedly cultivated partlywith an eye to recruitment.

Only the Epicurean school kept its activities out of the public gaze, in line with Epicurus'policy of minimal civic involvement.

A school normally started as an informal grouping of philosophers with a sharedset of interests and commitments, under the nominal leadership of some individual, but without a strong party lineto which all members owed unquestioning allegiance.

In the first generation of the Academy, for example, many ofPlato's own leading colleagues dissented from his views on central issues.

The same openness is discernible in thefirst generations of the other schools, even (if to a much lesser extent) the Epicurean.

However, after the death ofthe founder the picture usually changed.

His word thereafter became largely beyond challenge, and further progresswas presented as the supplementation or reinterpretation of the founder's pronouncements, rather than as theirreplacement.

To this extent, the allegiance which in the long term bound a school together usually depended on avirtually religious reverence for the movement's foundational texts, which provided the framework within which itsdiscussions were conducted.

The resemblance to the structure of religious sects is no accident.

In later antiquity,philosophical and religious movements constituted in effect a single cultural phenomenon, and competed for thesame spiritual and intellectual high ground.

This includes Christianity, which became a serious rival to paganphilosophy (primarily Platonism) from the third century onwards, and eventually triumphed over it.

In seeking tounderstand such spiritual movements of late antiquity as Hermetism, Gnosticism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, Cynicism andeven Neoplatonism itself, and their concern with such values as asceticism, self-purificaton and self-divinization, itis inappropriate to insist on a sharp division between philosophy and religion (see Hermetism ; Gnosticism ; Neo- Pythagoreanism ; Cynics §4 ; Neoplatonism ).

‘Ancient philosophy' is traditionally understood as pagan and distinguished from the Christian Patristic philosophy of late antiquity (see Patristic philosophy ).

But it was possible to put pagan philosophy at the service of Judaism (see Philo of Alexandria ), or Christianity (see for example Clement of Alexandria ; Origen ; Augustine ; Boethius ; Philoponus ), and it was indeed largely in this latter capacity that the major systems of ancient philosophy eventually became incorporated into medieval philosophy and Renaissancephilosophy, which they proceeded to dominate (see Medieval philosophy ; Renaissance philosophy ).

This extensive overlap between philosophy and religion also reflects to some extent the pervasive influence of philosophy on theentire culture of the ancient world.

Rarely regarded as a detached academic discipline, philosophy frequently carriedhigh political prestige, and its modes of discourse came to infect disciplines as diverse as medicine, rhetoric,astrology, history, grammar and law.

The work of two of the greatest scientists of the ancient world, the doctorGalen and the astronomer Ptolemy , was deeply indebted to their respective philosophical backgrounds.

7 Survival A very substantial body of works by ancient philosophical writers has survived in manuscript.

These are somewhatweighted towards those philosophers - above all Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists - who were of mostimmediate interest to the Christian culture which preserved them throughout the Middle Ages, mainly in the. »