A History of Philosophy, Vol. I: Greece and Rome

Summary

Frederick Copleston published Greece and Rome in London in 1946 as the opening volume of a history he had begun as lectures for Jesuit students at Heythrop. It runs from Thales of Miletus, early in the sixth century BC, to the last Neoplatonists of the pagan schools, and it sets the pattern of the whole series: a long biographical and textual approach to each thinker, a patient restatement of his arguments, and a short estimate at the end. The Pre-Socratics come first, presented as men asking what the one abiding stuff of a changing world might be. Thales answers water, Anaximander the boundless, Anaximenes air; the Pythagoreans turn to number and the purification of the soul; Heraclitus makes strife and the Logos the law of perpetual flux, while Parmenides denies that change is thinkable at all and Zeno defends him with paradoxes of motion. Empedocles, Anaxagoras and the atomists try to reconcile the two positions. Copleston then shows the turn toward man in the Sophists, the relativism attributed to Protagoras, and Socrates, whose search for definitions of courage, piety and justice he treats as the hinge of the story. Plato and Aristotle receive the bulk of the book. The Plato section moves from the Divided Line and the Cave to the Forms, the immortality and parts of the soul, the ideal city, the craftsman-god of the Timaeus and Plato's suspicion of imitative art. The Aristotle section covers logic and the syllogism, substance, the four causes, act and potency, the Unmoved Mover, the soul as form of the body, happiness and the mean, the polis and the Poetics, and then sets the two masters side by side. A final part follows philosophy after Alexander: the Stoic and Epicurean schools as guides to tranquil living, the Sceptical Academy, the Roman Stoics Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Philo's reading of Scripture through Greek categories, and Plotinus's ascent from the many to the One. Copleston treats this late material as the place where Greek reason moves closest to religion. His own position is visible but contained. He writes as a Thomist who thinks Greek philosophy prepared ground the Church Fathers later cultivated, and he says so in his evaluative passages, especially on Aristotle's God and on Plotinus. The expository chapters, however, can be read by anyone who wants an accurate map of what the Greeks argued. Contemporary reviewers welcomed the learning; some found the scholastic asides intrusive. Copleston himself later regarded this first volume as the weakest of the series. For a classical school the volume is a reference shelf for the ancient half of the curriculum. A student about to read the Republic or the Nicomachean Ethics can read the matching chapters first to learn the shape of the argument, then return afterwards to test Copleston's account against the text. Because the book remains under copyright, this library offers only a description, a guide and a purchase link.

Top Lessons

• Change, permanence and the first philosophers

  The Pre-Socratic chapters show that Western philosophy started from a puzzle about the world, not about ourselves: how can things change and still be the same things? Students who follow Heraclitus and Parmenides learn that a question can be more lasting than any of its answers, and that Plato and Aristotle can only be understood as replies to it.

• Socrates and the discipline of definition

  Copleston places Socrates at the hinge of the book because he insisted that a person who cannot say what courage or piety is may not really possess it. The lesson for a classroom is practical: careful definition is a moral act, since loose words let us excuse ourselves.

• Weighing Plato against Aristotle

  The comparison chapter at the end of the Aristotle section asks students to hold two great systems in mind at once. Plato looks upward to Forms that exist apart; Aristotle finds form in the things themselves. Testing Copleston's comparison against the Republic and the Ethics trains students to judge a secondary source rather than simply trust it.

• Philosophy as a way of life after Alexander

  The Hellenistic chapters show schools offering peace of mind to people living in large empires rather than small cities. Stoics sought it in accepting providence and governing the will, Epicureans in quiet pleasure and freedom from fear of the gods. Their claims can be weighed against the apostolic preaching that met both schools in Athens.

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Medical Lens

This is a history of philosophy, not of medicine, but several of its chapters bear on how the ancients understood soul and body. Early Greek cosmology overlapped with medical theory: Empedocles was remembered as a healer, and the Pythagorean circle produced physicians who speculated about health as balance. The chapters on Plato's psychology and Aristotle's De Anima describe the two classic Greek accounts of how soul relates to body, which later shaped medieval and early modern medicine. The Hellenistic chapters show schools presenting philosophy itself as a cure for disturbance of mind; the Stoic view of the passions as false judgments is sometimes compared with cognitive therapy, a modern parallel rather than an ancient claim.

• Part I, chapters on the Pythagoreans and Empedocles

  Early theories of the soul, purification and the balance of opposing elements, where medicine and cosmology were not yet separate disciplines.

• Part III, chapter on Plato's psychology

  The tripartite soul of reason, spirit and appetite and the arguments for immortality, relevant to ancient ideas of inner conflict.

• Part IV, chapter on Aristotle's philosophy of nature and psychology

  The soul as the form of a living body and the faculties of nutrition, sensation and intellect.

• Part V, chapters on the Stoics and Epicurus

  Philosophy offered as therapy for fear, grief and disordered passion, including the Epicurean argument against fearing death.