Retrieving the Ancients

Prologue viii Introduction 1 Two Reasons to Study Ancient Greek Philosophy 1 The Organization and Strategy of This Book 7 1 The Presocratics 11 Preliminaries 11 Before the Beginning: Hesiod 12 The Ionian Philosophers of the Sixth Century 18 a) The Beginning: Thales of Miletus 18 b) The First Debate: Anaximander v. Anaximenes 22 c) Sixth-Century Rationalism: Xenophanes and Pythagoras 26 d) The Crisis of Sixth-Century Philosophy 31 Heraclitus and Parmenides: Extreme Solutions 33 a) Heraclitus: Lover of Flux 33 b) Parmenides: Champion of Being 42 Fifth-Century Elementalism 51 a) Democritus: Atomic Theory 52 b) Empedocles: Evolution 61 c) Anaxagoras 65 2 The Sophists and Socrates 69 A New Beginning: The Sophists 69 Protagoras 71 Gorgias 79 Socrates 83 3 Plato 95 Preliminaries 95 Plato’s Critique of the Presocratics 98 Plato’s Critique of the Sophists 105 a) The “Self-Reference” Argument 106 b) The Reductio ad Absurdum 107 c) “What is it?” 112 d) “The Old Quarrel”: Philosophy v. Sophistry 119 Recollection 120 a) The Phaedo 120 b) The Meno 125 The Divided Line and the Form of the Good 132 a) The Divided Line 132 b) The Form of the Good 138 Eros 140 The Political Implications of the Forms 153 4 Aristotle 167 Preliminaries 167 Aristotle’s Conception of Nature 173 a) “By Nature” 173 b) Form and Matter 182 c) The Four Causes 186 Aristotle’s Psychology 194 Teleological Ethics 208 a) Moral Virtue 208 b) Intellectual Virtue 220 Natural Politics 224 a) The Political Animal 224 b) Best Life; Best City 231 Conclusion 235 Epilogue 241 Appendix 257 References 269 Index 275