Early Greek Philosophy

"Because I think it gives you a very lucid, incisive, accessible way into the subject: it gives you quotes in translation very clearly marked out from Barnes’s commentary about them — indeed, clearly marked out from the rest of the later Greek material. It’s just a very easy book to navigate. Barnes is a great expert on Presocratic philosophy: he’s also written very scholarly tomes — highly recommended tomes — and I’ve given this, which is his Early Greek Philosophy , as a lively, clear, and sparkling introduction just to get people started. He’s a fine writer as well, so it’s a very good way in. If people enjoy it, then I would recommend that at some point in their studies they go on and read Barnes’s magnum opus on the subject, The Presocratic Philosophers , which is a tougher read but hugely worthwhile. Early Greek Philosophy doesn’t include the sophists — we’ll come on to the sophists in a bit and I’ve got a different book recommendation for that. So, it doesn’t contain all the early Greek philosophers that I would hope people would read, but it’s an excellent introduction. The sophists were itinerant professional teachers who travelled the Greek world, basically training rich young men, or more likely young men who had rich fathers, how to get on in public life. The training they gave — a sort of embryonic higher education training — would be largely based on philosophy and rhetoric: how to construct a good argument; the kind of material to put in your arguments and how to present them to make a persuasive case in the political assemblies or law courts, for instance. The assemblies and the law courts were where you needed to make your mark as a professional man. The sophists were the people who trained you how to do it. Now, again, some of them knew each other and some didn’t. They have a very bad press because Socrates and Plato didn’t think much of most of them. Plato does, though, take one or two of them seriously — figures such as Protagoras. But on the whole we’ve inherited a negative view of them. They’ve got a reputation, particularly with Socrates and Plato, for teaching people how to win at arguments rather than how to search for the truth. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Plato — following Socrates, as far as we know — keeps saying the true philosopher should search for the truth in collaboration with others, philosophy shouldn’t be this very aggressive, hostile, competitive business. The sophists are teaching you how to win, how to defeat your opponent — if necessary by making your weaker argument look like the stronger argument — hence our word ‘sophistry’ for specious, fallacious, tricksy, deceptive reasoning. There is an element of that — that is true. However, that’s not the whole story. Some of them, such as Gorgias and Protagoras, are very substantial thinkers: Gorgias and his work on what-is-not, on not-being, was and is highly influential, and Protagoras really challenges the traditional religious framework when he says that ‘Human is the measure of all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.’ This might mean that it’s up to human cultures to decide their own values and their own reality — which would be radical enough, but I think that it’s even more extreme — I think that Protagoras is claiming that it’s simply up to each individual to create and construct their own reality. A really radical position which swiftly leads to solipsism. They are very interesting and important thinkers, and actually Plato does treat Protagoras in particular with some respect, especially in the Theaetetus ."