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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Metaphilosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
Philosophy as a Way of Life
This unique collection of essays on the late Pierre Hadot’s revolutionary methodological approach to studying and practicing philosophy explores Hadot’s primary conviction that philosophy itself goes beyond solving puzzles and analyzing abstract arguments. Hadot believed that philosophy is a key part of humanity’s search for happiness, that it can transform our perception of the world, and thus can alter our very mode of being. His argument that the goal of philosophy is to shift our focus away from our habitual obsession with individuality, and to embrace universality and objectivity, has resonated with thinkers across the Academy – and outside it.
Offering genuinely interdisciplinary analysis of Hadot’s work and philosophical practice, this volume includes papers written from a gamut of philosophical, historical, and geographical perspectives. Articles address issues in the history of philosophy from Pythagoras to Descartes, by way of Islamic thought, thus corresponding to Hadot’s view of the importance of philologically based analysis of ancient texts and historical contexts. Others study the presence of ideas related to, or influenced by, Hadot in contemporary thought, from Wittgenstein to Leonard Nelson, analytic philosophy, and French postmodernism. The result is a wide-ranging publication pointing to an additional “third way” alongside the traditional approaches of Continental and analytic philosophy, one that expands our horizons with secular spiritual exercises designed to enable us to be in a fuller, more authentic way.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Notes on Contributors
Foreword
Chapter 1: Introduction
The Life of Pierre Hadot
Memories
The Present Volume
Notes
Chapter 2: Ancient Philosophers
How Can We Identify Ancient Philosophers?
The DPhA as a Sample of Ancient Philosophical Society
Discarding Intruders
What is a Philosopher, After All?
Chronological Interval
How Can Philosophers Be Dated?
A Simplified Mediterranean Map
Some Known Artifacts
Available Parameters
Gender Study
So Many Schools
Leading Schools
Schools in History
Greek Philosophers Saved by Direct Transmission
Where Did They Come From?
Where Did They Study?
Where Did They Teach?
Teacher and Students
Teaching and Book Writing
Philosophers on Stone
Statues and Portraits
Sidelines
Philosophers and Politics
Conclusions
Notes
Chapter 3: Philosophy as a Way of Life
I
II
III
IV
Notes
Chapter 4: Charismatic Authority, Spiritual Guidance, and Way of Life in the Pythagorean Tradition
A Promising Field of Research: The Greco-Roman Tradition of “Guidance of the Soul”
Particularities of the Pythagorean Tradition: Variety, (Dis)Continuity, Source Problems
A Constant Factor: The Practice of the Pythagorean Way of Life as a Path Toward Spiritual Perfection
Pythagoras as “Guide in Education” and Beloved Master: The Testimony of Plato’s Republic
Ipse Dixit: The Charismatic Authority of Pythagoras and its Basis
In Search of the Master’s Authentic Words: The Primitive Catechism Contained in the Acousmata
A Set of Normative Prescriptions Intended to Inculcate a Disciplined Life Conduct56
A “Path Toward Perfection” Aiming at Personal Salvation
The “Communitarian” Dimension: The Pythagorean Sect as Locus for Education and Guidance
Toward a Rational Morality: The Avatars of Pythagorean Spiritual Guidance
A Digest of Spiritual Guidance in Verse Networked With Other Guidance Texts: The Pythagorean Golden Verses
Notes
Chapter 5: Alcibiades’ Love
Notes
Chapter 6: Stoics and Bodhisattvas
I
II
III
IV
Notes
Chapter 7: Philosophy as a Way of Life
Spiritual Exercises and the Aesthetic Analogy
Philosophy and Therapy
Plutarch and the Buddhists: Returning Oneself to the Present Moment
A Life Complete at Every Moment
Taming the self
Philosophy and the Ends of Life
Notes
Chapter 8: Approaching Islamic Philosophical Texts
Notes
Chapter 9: Philosophy and Self-improvement
Introduction: The Path of Modern Philosophy
Philosophy in Antiquity
A Medieval Shift?
Cartesian Continuities
The Scientific Turn
Notes
Chapter 10: Descartes’ Meditations: Practical Metaphysics
Form and Method
Universal Doubt as an Exercise of Thought
Cogito: “Noticing” One’s Own Thought
Attention and Knowledge of God
The Meditations as a Form of Life
Notes
Chapter 11: Leading a Philosophical Life in Dark Times
Nelson’s Philosophy as a Way of Life
Nelson’s Spiritual Exercises
Coda
Notes
Chapter 12: Philosophy as a Way of Life and Anti-philosophy
“Antiphilosophy”
Does Defining Philosophy as a Way of Life Mean Being an Antiphilosopher?
Antiphilosophy or Archphilosophy?
Notes
Chapter 13: Philosophy and Gestalt Psychotherapy
Introduction
Theory in Psychotherapy
The Origins of Gestalt Psychotherapy
The Central Theoretical Commitments of Gestalt Psychotherapy
Philosophical Reflection on Gestalt Psychotherapy
Note
Chapter 14: Wittgenstein’s Temple
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Notes
Chapter 15: Observations on Pierre Hadot’s Conception of Philosophy as a Way of Life
Introduction
The Philosophy of Martin O’Hagan
An Innocent in Vancouver: My Encounter with Analytic Philosophy
Hadot, Analytic Philosophy, and the Big Questions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Plates
This edition first published 2013 © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Philosophy as a way of life : ancients and moderns : essays in honor of Pierre Hadot / edited by Michael Chase, Stephen R.L.Clark, Michael McGhee. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-6161-9 (cloth) 1. Philosophy. 2. Philosophy–History. 3. Spiritual exercises–History. 4. Hadot, Pierre. 5. Hadot, Pierre. Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. I. Hadot, Pierre. II. Chase, Michael, 1959– editor of compilation. B53.P498 2013 190–dc23 2013012717
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: View from Glastonbury Tor © Guy Edwardes / Getty Images. Cover design by Cyan Design.
Notes on Contributors
Gwenaëlle Aubry
Former Student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm) and of Trinity College (Cambridge); Agrégée, docteur en philosophie. Researcher at the CNRS (UPR 76/Centre Jean Pépin). Research interests: Ancient Philosophy and its Contemporary Receptions. Major published work: Plotin. Traité 53 (I, 1). Introduction, traduction, commentaire et notes, Paris, Cerf, Collection “Les Ecrits de Plotin” 2004; Dieu sans la puissance. Dunamis et Energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin, Paris, Vrin, “Bibliothèque d’histoire de la philosophie” 2006; L’Excellence de la vie. Sur l’Ethique à Nicomaque et l’Ethique à Eudème d’Aristote, G. Romeyer Dherbey dir., G. Aubry éd., Paris, Vrin, “Bibliothèque d’histoire de la philosophie” 2002; Le moi et l’intériorité. Etudes réunies par G. Aubry et F. Ildefonse, Paris, Vrin, “Textes et Traditions” 2008.
Michael Chase
After taking degrees in Philosophy and Classics at the University of Victoria, Canada, Michael Chase was awarded a Canadian government scholarship to study Neoplatonism under Pierre Hadot at the Section des Sciences Religieuses of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (Sorbonne), whence he received his PhD in 2000. Since 2001, he has worked at the French National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), where he is currently Researcher in ancient philosophy at the UPR 76/Centre Jean Pépin in Villejuif-Paris. In addition to English translations of half a dozen books by Pierre Hadot, he has published widely on Late Greek and Latin Neoplatonism, Patristics, Islamic, and Medieval thought.
John Cottingham
Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, University of London, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He is an authority on early-modern philosophy, especially Descartes, and has published widely on moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion. His recent titles include On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), The Spiritual Dimension (CUP 2005), Cartesian Reflections (OUP 2008), and Why Believe? (Continuum 2009). He is editor of the international philosophical journal Ratio.
Jonardon Ganeri
His work has focused on a retrieval of the Sanskrit philosophical tradition in relation to contemporary analytical philosophy, and he has done work in this vein on theories of self, concepts of rationality, and the philosophy of language, as well as on the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship with literature. He is Professor of Philosophy at both the University of Sussex and Monash University, a visiting scholar at Kyunghee University Seoul, and a visiting professor at JNU Delhi. His major recent publications include The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness and the First-Person Stance (OUP 2012), The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700CE (OUP 2011), and The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology (OUP 2012, 2nd edition).
Richard Goulet
Emeritus Research Fellow at French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, editor of the Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (sixth and final volume, for letters S–Z, to be published in 2013). Works on philosophical prosopography, late antique lives of philosophers, stoic philosophy; edited, translated or studied texts of Cleomedes, Diogenes Laertius, Eunapius, Macarius of Magnesia, and Porphyry.
Matthew T. Kapstein
Director of Tibetan Studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, and Numata Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Chicago. His publications include The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory (OUP 2000) and Reason’s Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought (Boston 2001).
Theodore Kobusch
Professor of Medieval Philosophy, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. His research interests lie in the history of philosophy, metaphysics, freedom of will, and personhood. Major published work: Die Philosophie des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters (2011).
Fernando Leal
Professor of Philosophy and Social Science at the University of Guadalajara (Mexico). He currently works on the interface between ethics, economics, and politics; on the history, philosophy, and methodology of the social and cognitive sciences; and on the application of linguistic theory to the study of neurodevelopmental disorders. He co-edited Person-Centred Ergonomics: The Brantonian View of Human Factors (Taylor & Francis 1993) and recently authored two books in Spanish: A Dialogue on the Good (2007) and Essays on the Relation Between Philosophy and the Sciences (2009).
Constantinos Macris
Researcher at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique–Laboratoire d’Études sur les Monothéismes), in Paris. He specializes in ancient Greek philosophy and its relation to religion, from the Presocratics to the late Platonists. After a doctoral dissertation on Iamblichus’ Pythagorean Way of Life (Paris 2004), he has published numerous articles and book chapters on Pythagoras and the Pythagorean tradition, focusing on their Neoplatonic reception. He is also the author of a commentary on Porphyry’s Life of Pythagoras (Athens 2001). Since 2004, he has been contributing to the Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques (ed. R. Goulet, Paris: CNRS Editions). Forthcoming book: Under the Shadow of Pythagoras: Contributions to an “Archaeology” of the Pythagorean Tradition (in French 2014). He is currently directing a program entitled “Revisiting Monotheisms,” and co-editing the Acts of an international research project on Ancient Mysticism: Greek, Jewish, and Christian (Paris: Champion 2013).
Michael McGhee
Formerly taught philosophy at the University of Liverpool and is now retired. He is the author of Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice (CUP 2000) and co-editor with John Cornwell of Philosophers and God: At The Frontiers of Faith and Reason (Continuum 2009). He has written articles in various journals in the areas of moral philosophy, esthetics, and philosophy of religion.
Paul O’Grady
Lecturer and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. He works on Epistemology, especially relativism and Philosophy of Religion, especially Aquinas. He has published Relativism (Acumen 2002), Philosophical Theology (Priory Institute 2008), edited The Consolations of Philosophy: Reflections in an Economic Downturn (Columba 2011) and is currently completing a book entitled Aquinas’s Philosophy of Religion. He is also a psychotherapist.
Sajjad H. Rizvi
Sajjad H. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the University of Exeter. He specializes in the history of philosophy, hermeneutics, and mysticism in the Islamic East, and has written extensively on philosophy in Safavid Iran and Mughal India. Having already published two books on Mulla Sadra (OUP 2007; Routledge 2009), he is currently working on his third book on the same author focusing on the account of the Soul (for Edinburgh University Press). His next projects include an intellectual history of Islamic philosophy in India (jointly with Asad Ahmed), and a history of apophatic discourses in Islamic thought (for Stanford University Press).
John H. Spencer
PhD on the Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Physics (University of Liverpool, 2008). Author of The Eternal Law: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Physics, and Ultimate Reality (2012), http://ParamMedia.com.
Richard Shusterman
Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University. His major authored books include Thinking through the Body (CUP 2012); Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (CUP 2008); Surface and Depth; Performing Live; Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life; and Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (now published in 15 languages).
Jan Zwicky
An independent scholar, living on Quadra Island, British Columbia. Her monographs include Lyric Philosophy (1992), Wisdom & Metaphor (2008), and Plato as Artist (2010). She has also published seven collections of poetry, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth (1998) and Forge (2011).
Foreword
John H. Spencer
Philosophy, the love of wisdom, has many branches reaching out from its elusive primordial center, but these manifold paths may seem to be rather pointless mental excursions unless we simultaneously strive for self-knowledge and seek the best possible ways to live our lives. Unfortunately, suggesting that philosophical inquiry should be guided by an unwavering desire for wisdom, or that it could lead to profound self-transformation, is not likely to win one many friends at most academic conferences. Why has the profession of philosophy generally eschewed the idea of the philosophical life, and why has it become so far removed from its historical roots? The reasons are complex, but a brief and partial response would note that several influential analytic philosophers in the last century rejected deep metaphysical exploration and shunned ancient philosophy in general. With a misplaced desire to mimic their parochial and often distorted view of the sciences, they essentially restricted the aims of philosophy to mere linguistic or logical analysis. Such approaches to certain types of questions can be valuable, but they certainly do not apply to all areas of philosophical inquiry. Ironically, several of the greatest pioneering physicists in the last century were far more in tune with the ancients than many contemporary philosophers. For example, Einstein certainly knew the power of ancient thought: “in a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed” (1954, p. 274). He also offered these relevant remarks:
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the world of art and scientific endeavours, life would have seemed to me empty. The trite objects of human efforts – possessions, outward success, luxury – have always seemed to me contemptible (1954, p. 9).
Einstein held in contempt what our society teaches us to esteem, for superficial success and luxury are like shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave distracting us from our pursuit of truth, turning us away from our most significant goals. Instead, his real guiding principles, the highest ideals, were Truth, Beauty, and Kindness (or what he would also call the “morally good” (1954, p. 66)). Such metaphysical concepts would not be out of place for contemporary mathematical physicist Roger Penrose or for Werner Heisenberg, the formulator of the uncertainty principle in quantum theory. Heisenberg also stated repeatedly that modern physics had definitely decided in favor of Plato and Pythagoras over the materialism of Democritus. Through a deep personal experience, Heisenberg came to an intuitive and immediate understanding of Plato’s Timaeus, where we find abstract, nonphysical geometric forms and relationships at the foundation of physical reality. Indeed, several pioneering physicists have admitted the importance of intuition and imagination beyond discursive analysis, and even recognized the importance of the mystical, of some sort of direct experiential contact with ultimate reality (Spencer 2012). In contrast, many philosophers in the last century have ignored or belittled the Platonic tradition, and have fled from the sort of metaphysical notions that Einstein openly admitted were essential to his way of life.
During my time as a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, one of my former professors, Pierre Grimes, directed me to the writings of Pierre Hadot, whose ground-breaking work in the revival of the ancient ideal of the philosophical life inspired me in 2004 to create a “Philosophy as a Way of Life” conference. I asked my friend and fellow student John Adams to assist me, and with his tireless commitment and keen attention to detail the two of us discovered the joys and challenges of hosting a three-day international conference, bringing together thirty-nine speakers from around the world (Adams and Spencer 2007). One thing that we all learned from this experience is that regardless of the diversity of philosophical backgrounds – from Nietzsche to Neoplatonism – there are many graduate students who are seeking a philosophical life as an integral part of their academic studies. We were fortunate to have Michael McGhee and Michael Chase as part of our group of keynote speakers, and along with Stephen Clark they have prepared the present volume of papers, inspired in part by the success of our conference. Jennifer Bray and Jeff Dean at Wiley-Blackwell have also been very helpful throughout the long process of bringing this volume to fruition, and we should also thank the courageous student presenters who voiced their dissatisfaction with the status quo of academic philosophy.
Hadot (1995, p. 272) is generally correct that “ancient philosophy proposed to mankind an art of living,” whereas “modern philosophy appears above all as the construction of a technical jargon reserved for specialists.” It is my hope that the papers presented in this volume will help to bridge the gap between the importance of academic rigor and the necessity of experiencing and living what we teach.
1
Introduction
Michael Chase
The Life of Pierre Hadot
Pierre Hadot, Professor Emeritus of Hellenistic and Roman Thought at the Collège de France and Director of Studies at the Fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, died on the night of April 24–25, 2010, at the age of 88.
Born in Paris in 1922, Hadot was raised at Reims, where he received a strict Catholic education, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1944. But he soon became disenchanted with the Church, particularly after the conservative encyclical Humani Generis of August 12, 1950, and he left it in 1952 (Eros also played a role in this decision: Hadot married his first wife in 1953).
Now employed as a researcher at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), Hadot was free to devote himself to scholarship. He began with Latin Patristics, editing Ambrose of Milan and Marius Victorinus. This was the period, from the late 1950s to the 1960s, when, under the guidance of such experts as the Jesuit Paul Henry, he learned the strict discipline of philology, or the critical study and editing of ancient manuscripts, an approach that was to continue to exert a formative influence on his thought for the rest of his life. Also during this period, Hadot’s deep interest in mysticism led him to study Plotinus and, surprisingly enough, Wittgenstein, whose comments on “das Mystische” (Tractatus 6.522) led Hadot to study the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations and publish articles on them, thus becoming one of the first people in France to draw attention to Wittgenstein (reedited as Hadot 2004). Hadot wrote Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (Hadot 1993) in a month-long burst of inspiration in 1963, a lucid, sincere work that is still one of the best introductions to Plotinus. Hadot would continue to translate and comment upon Plotinus throughout the rest of his life, founding in particular Les Écrits de Plotin, a series, still in progress, that provides translations with extensive introductions to and commentaries on all the treatises of Plotinus’ Enneads, in chronological order.1 On a personal level, however, Hadot gradually became detached from Plotinus’ thought, feeling that Plotinian mysticism was too otherworldly and contemptuous of the body to be adequate for today’s needs. As he tells the story, when he emerged from the month-long seclusion he had imposed upon himself to write Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, he went to the corner bakery, and “seeing the ordinary folks all around me in the bakery, I […] had the impression of having lived a month in another world, completely foreign to our world, and worse than this – totally unreal and even unlivable” (Hadot 2011, p. 137).
Elected Director of Studies at the Fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1964, Hadot married his second wife, the historian of philosophy Ilsetraut Marten, in 1966. This marked another turning point in his intellectual development, for it was at least in part thanks to his wife’s interest in spiritual guidance in Antiquity that the focus of Hadot’s interests would gradually shift, over the following decade or so, from the complex and technical metaphysics of Porphyry and Marius Victorinus to a concern for the practical, ethical side of philosophy, and more precisely the development of his key concept of philosophy as a way of life.
At Hadot’s request, the title of his Chair at the EPHE Ve was soon changed from “Latin Patristics” to “Theologies and Mysticisms of Hellenistic Greece and the End of Antiquity.” In 1968, he published his thesis for the State doctorate, the massive Porphyre et Victorinus (Hadot 1968; 1971), in which he attributed a previously anonymous commentary on Plato’s Parmenides to Porphyry, the Neoplatonic student of Plotinus. This monument of erudition arguably remains, even today, the most complete exposition of Neoplatonic metaphysics.
It was around this time that Pierre Hadot began to study and lecture on Marcus Aurelius – studies that would culminate in his edition of the Meditations,2 left unfinished at his death, and especially in his book The Inner Citadel (Hadot 1998). Under the influence of his wife Ilsetraut, who had written an important work on spiritual guidance in Seneca (Hadot 1969), Hadot now began to accord more and more importance to the idea of spiritual exercises, that is, philosophical practices intended to transform the practitioner’s way of looking at the world and consequently his or her way of being. Following Paul Rabbow, Hadot held that the famous Exercitia Spiritualia of Ignatius of Loyola, far from being exclusively Christian, were the direct heirs of pagan Greco-Roman practices. These exercises, involving not just the intellect or reason, but all of a human being’s faculties, including emotion and imagination, had the same goal as all ancient philosophy: reducing human suffering and increasing happiness, by teaching people to detach themselves from their particular, egocentric, individualistic viewpoints and become aware of their belonging, as integral component parts, to the Whole constituted by the entire cosmos. In its fully developed form, exemplified in such late Stoics as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this change from our particularistic perspective to the universal perspective of reason had three main aspects. First, by means of the discipline of thought, we are to strive for objectivity; since, as the Stoics believe, what causes human suffering is not so much things in the world, but our beliefs about those things, we are to try to perceive the world as it is in itself, without the subjective coloring we automatically tend to ascribe to everything we experience (“That’s lovely,” “that’s horrible,” “that’s ugly,” “that’s terrifying,” etc.). Second, in the discipline of desire, we are to attune our individual desires with the way the universe works, not merely accepting that things happen as they do, but actively willing for things to happen precisely the way they do happen. This attitude is, of course, the ancestor of Nietzsche’s “Yes” granted to the cosmos, a “yes” that immediately justifies the world’s existence.3 Finally, in the discipline of action, we are to try to ensure that all our actions are directed not just to our own immediate, short-term advantage, but to the interests of the human community as a whole.
Hadot finally came to believe that these spiritual attitudes – “spiritual” precisely because they are not merely intellectual, but involve the entire human organism, but one might with equal justification call them “existential” attitudes – and the practices or exercises that nourished, fortified, and developed them, were the key to understanding all of ancient philosophy. In a sense, the grandiose physical, metaphysical, and epistemological structures that separated the major philosophical schools of Antiquity – Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism4 – were mere superstructures, intended to justify the basic philosophical attitude. Hadot deduced this, among other considerations, from the fact that many of the spiritual exercises of the various schools were highly similar, despite all their ideological differences; thus, both Stoics and Epicureans recommended the exercise of living in the present.
Hadot first published the results of this new research in an article that appeared in the Annuaire de la Ve section in 1977: “Exercices spirituels.” This article formed the kernel of his book Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Hadot 1995), and was no doubt the work of Hadot’s that most impressed Michel Foucault to the extent that he invited Hadot to propose his candidacy for a Chair at the Collège de France, the most prestigious academic position in France. Hadot did so and was elected in 1982. Hadot’s view on philosophy as a way of life consisting of the practice of spiritual exercises was given a more complete narrative form in his Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (Hadot 2002).
Another aspect of his thought was more controversial: if philosophy was, throughout Antiquity, conceived as a way of life, in which not only those who published learned tomes were considered philosophers, but also, and often especially – one thinks of Socrates, who wrote nothing – those who lived in a philosophical way, then how and why did this situation cease? Hadot’s answer was twofold: on the one hand, Christianity, which had begun by adopting and integrating pagan spiritual exercises, ended up by relegating philosophy to the status of mere handmaid of theology. On the other, at around the same historical period of the Middle Ages, and not coincidentally, the phenomenon of the European University arose. Destined from the outset to be a kind of factory in which professional philosophers trained students to become professional philosophers in their turn, these new institutions led to a progressive confusion of two aspects that were, according to Hadot, carefully distinguished in Antiquity: doing philosophy and producing discourse about philosophy. Many modern thinkers, Hadot believed, have successfully resisted this confusion, but they were mostly (and this again is no coincidence) such extra-University thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. For the most part, and with notable exceptions (one thinks of Bergson), University philosophy instruction has concentrated almost exclusively on discourse about philosophy rather than on philosophy itself, conceived as a practice or living act. Indeed, one might add, extending Hadot’s analysis, that contemporary universities, whether in their “analytic” manifestation as the analysis of language and the manipulation of quasi-mathematical symbols, or in their “continental” guise as rhetorical display, irony, plays on words, and learned allusions, seem to share one basic characteristic: they are quite incomprehensible, and, therefore, unimportant to the man or woman on the street. Hadot’s work, written in a plain, clear style that lacks the rhetorical flourishes of a Derrida or a Foucault, represents a call for a radical democratization of philosophy. It talks about subjects that matter to people today from all walks of life, which is why it has appealed, arguably, less to professional philosophers than to ordinary working people, and to professionals working in disciplines other than philosophy.5
Pierre Hadot taught at the Collège until his retirement in 1992. In addition to Plotinus and Marcus, his teaching was increasingly devoted to the philosophy of nature, an interest he had picked up from Bergson that he had first set forth in a lecture at the Jungian-inspired Eranos meetings at Ascona, Switzerland in 1967 (Hadot 1968). Combined with his long-term love of Goethe (Hadot 2008), this research on the history of mankind’s relation to nature would finally culminate in The Veil of Isis (Le Voile d’Isis), a study of the origin and interpretations of Heraclitus’ saying “Nature loves to hide,” published a mere four years before his death (Hadot 2006). Here and in the preliminary studies leading up this work, Hadot distinguishes two main currents in the history of man’s attitude to nature: the “Promethean” approach, in which man tries to force nature to reveal her secrets in order better to exploit her, and the “Orphic” attitude, a philosophical or aesthetic approach in which one listens attentively to nature, recognizing the potential dangers of revealing all her Secrets.
Memories
Having won a grant from the Canadian government to pursue my doctoral studies in Neoplatonism anywhere in the world, I followed an old teacher’s advice and contacted the author of the book on the subject that I most admired: Porphyre et Victorinus. I first met Pierre Hadot at a conference at Loches, France, in the summer of 1987, where he gave a memorable lecture on “The Sage and the World” (Hadot 1991). He was kind enough to read and comment on the M.A. thesis I had written on Porphyry and, while I could not officially enroll under his direction for my PhD since the Collège de France was not a degree-granting institution, I did enroll under his successor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Philippe Hoffmann. After attending Hadot’s lectures at the Collège for a couple of years, I persuaded him to allow me to translate some of his works into English, and this marked the beginning of a close friendship between Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot and my wife Isabel and myself. As I continued my studies, he continued to help me out with advice, books, and articles and, when times got rough, with a few hundred francs per month from his own pocket as well.
What I remember most about Pierre Hadot was his simplicity. Although he had reached the highest echelons of the hierarchical French academic scheme, he never let it go to his head: in his lectures he spoke clearly, without excess rhetorical flourish. When he wrote on the blackboard, he did so with complete grace and relaxation, and often with that self-deprecating laugh that was so characteristic of him. On one occasion, he invited Isabel and me to lunch, along with half a dozen others; we were to meet at his office at the Collège de France. We all showed up, and Hadot began to lead the whole bunch of us off to the restaurant. In the hallway, however, he came across a lost-looking young couple, obviously foreigners, and asked them if he could help them. They were looking for the cafeteria, they told him timidly, and Pierre Hadot, instead of merely giving them directions, insisted on accompanying this unknown couple all the way to the cafeteria, leaving his “invited” guests to twiddle their thumbs. Each individual, known or unknown, deserved respect and courtesy in the view of Pierre Hadot. Yet he also spent a good deal of his life as an administrator, particularly at the EPHE, where he showed himself to be a tough and uncompromising negotiator, especially when questions of principle were at stake.
Over the years, my wife and I enjoyed the Hadots’ hospitality on many occasions, often at their home in Limours, a suburb some 20 miles south of Paris, where he was very proud of his well-kept garden and loved to go for walks in the neighboring woods. When he was in Paris, we would often go for dinner to a Vietnamese restaurant on the Rue des Écoles, no longer extant, to which Michel Foucault had introduced him. He always encouraged us to have the deep-fried banana for dessert, mainly because, although he loved the dish, his delicate health and vigilant wife would not allow him to order it for himself, but he could always sneak a bite from someone else’s plate. In every circumstance, he was the same: simple, unpretentious, with a mischievous gleam in his eye. Seldom has a man worn his erudition more lightly. Seldom, as well, has a man practiced so well what he preached. Although he won numerous awards and distinctions,6 he never discussed them in any tone other than that of self-deprecating humor. He liked to tell of how Jacqueline de Romilly once telephoned him to let him know he had been nominated for the prestigious Grand Prix de Philosophie of the Académie Française: “We didn’t have anybody this year,” she allegedly told him, “and so we thought of you.” He also had great fun with the fact that two volumes of his articles were published by Les Belles Lettres in a collection entitled “l’âne d’or” – “The Golden Ass.”7 He claimed, with a characteristic twinkle in his eye, that he had posed for the fine portrait of the golden donkey that graced the cover of these books.
As a young philosophy student, I had often been disillusioned by finding that my philosophical heroes had feet of clay: although they wrote fine-sounding phrases in their books, they were often vain, disdainful, or otherwise unpleasant when one met them in person. Not so Pierre Hadot: like Plotinus he was always available to himself, but above all to others. For his eightieth birthday, Hadot reserved a restaurant near Limours for over a hundred guests, who were distributed at tables in groups of six to eight. As the meal progressed, Hadot made sure to come and sit for a while at each table, laughing and joking with everyone, making each guest feel as though he or she were truly special to him. Waiters and hostesses received, unfailingly, the same friendly, non-condescending treatment.
I last saw Pierre Hadot on April 12, 2010, when, despite his weakness, he made the trip from Limours to Paris to attend a celebration devoted to him at the library of the École Normale Supérieure. At age 88, he was extremely fragile, and his eyesight and hearing were failing rapidly. Yet he held out for 2 hours, answering questions from the audience – something he always disliked, convinced that he was not sufficiently eloquent in unrehearsed repartee – and seeming to regain strength as the evening progressed. At the end, he thanked the organizers and participants, emphasizing that what was important was that the event had been organized and carried out in an atmosphere of friendship and mutual respect. Soon afterward, he entered the hospital at Orsay and was diagnosed with pneumonia. He died less than two weeks after his appearance at the ENS accompanied, as he had been for 45 years, by his beloved Ilsetraut.
Needless to say, it is too soon to give a definitive evaluation of Hadot’s thought, and only the future will verify, or fail to verify, Roger-Pol Droit’s judgment on him: “discrete, almost self-effacing, this singular thinker might well be, in a sense, one of the influential men of our epoch.”8 What is certain is that he has trained a generation of students and scholars who continue his work, and that his writings, translated into many languages, have continued to inspire readers from throughout the world, many of whom wrote him to say in a variety of formulations: “You have changed my life.” Pierre Hadot was a man almost destitute of personal vanity, but if there was one thing he was proud of, it was not the multiple honors he received throughout his career, but the effect he had on the average reader.
The Present Volume
The idea for this volume arose in the course of discussions between Michael McGhee and me as a result of a conference on Philosophy as a Way of Life held at the University of Liverpool in November 2004. Initially, Michael McGhee was responsible for soliciting and editing the British contributions, and I for the North American and European ones. If this book has finally seen the light of day, it is due, above all, to the collaboration of Stephen Clark, who contributed his editorial expertise and efficiency to the project beginning in the spring of 2012.
The publication of this volume has, needless to say, taken much longer than initially foreseen, and I would like to thank the contributors and publisher for their patience. In the interim, some of the articles have appeared elsewhere in various forms.9 It is regrettable that Pierre Hadot did not live to see this publication. I believe, however, that in its breadth and variety, the present volume retains its value as a testimony to the importance of his notion of philosophy as a way of life.
Notes
1.Les écrits de Plotin publiés dans l’ordre chronologique, sous la dir. de P. Hadot, Paris: Éd. du Cerf (Coll. Textes). More than a dozen volumes have appeared in the series, two of them (Traité 38 [VI,7], 1988; Traité 50 [III,5], 1990) by Hadot himself.
2. Marc Aurèle, Écrits pour lui-même. Tome 1, Introduction générale. Livre I, éd. et tr. Pierre Hadot, avec la collab. de Concetta Luna. Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1998. (Collection des Universités de France).
3. Nietzsche, Posthumous Fragments, end 1866-Spring 1887, 7, [38], cited in Hadot (1995, p. 277).
4. I leave out Cynicism and Skepticism, partly, because it is debatable whether they were actually “schools” as opposed to philosophical tendencies and, partly because, unlike the other schools they refrained from metaphysical speculation.
5. As of 2006, Hadot’s works had been cited by researchers working in management studies, economics, the study of Chinese thought, education, sociology, political science, and women’s studies, to name but a few.
6. 1969: Prix Saintour décerné par l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres; 1969: Prix Desrousseaux décerné par l’Association pour l’encouragement des Études Grecques; 1972: elected Corresponding Member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur of Mainz; 1979: Silver medal, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; 1985: Docteur honoris causa de l’Université de Neuchâtel; 1990: Prix Dagnan-Bouveret de l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques; 1992: Prix d’Académie (Fondation Le Métais-Larivière Fils), Académie Française; 1999: Grand Prix de Philosophie de l’Académie Française; 2000: elected Corresponding Member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften at Munich; 2002: Docteur honoris causa de l’Université de Laval (Québec).
7.Études de philosophie ancienne, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998. (L’âne d’or; 8); Plotin. Porphyre. Études néoplatoniciennes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999. (L’âne d’or; 10). These works contain some of Hadot’s more technical works on the history of Greek and Latin philosophy, but also some of his early studies on the philosophy of nature. There is material for many more such volumes, among the 100 or so articles Hadot penned throughout his career.
8. “Pierre Hadot, 86 ans de sagesse,” Le Point. Débats, 17/04/2008, accessed at http://www.lepoint.fr/actualites-chroniques/2008-04-18/pierre-hadot-86-ans-de-sagesse/989/0/238823.
9. The present introduction is based on the obituary of Pierre Hadot which I contributed to the Harvard University Press Blog in 2010 (http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2010/04/pierre-hadot-part-1.html). A version of my later contribution to the volume was published in Adams and Spencer (2007, pp. 5–17). A French version of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s contribution appeared in Davidson and Worms (2010); see also Rizvi (2012) and Ganeri (2010) for earlier versions of their essays. Constraints on the volume’s size mean that some papers originally intended for the volume, by Philippe Vallat, David Cooper, Stephen R. L. Clark, and Catalin Partenie, have been omitted. Cooper’s essay on Beauty is to be found at Cooper (2012).
2
Ancient Philosophers
A First Statistical Survey
Richard Goulet
Until recently, ancient philosophy was studied by genuine philosophers concerned with the history of ideas, or by philologists trying to provide editions and translations of documents handed down by the manuscript tradition. Philosophy as a social movement in the ancient world, the daily professional activity of the well-established figure of the philosopher, or the impact of philosophical ideas on the Greek and Roman societies have not produced an extensive literature. While some intuitive convictions are commonly held on these matters, no general inquiry has ever been carried out, and no statistical value of any kind is currently available. Asking specialists how many philosophers are known through our documents would probably produce very disparate answers. Standard books on the history of philosophy would suggest a few hundred, some more specialized dictionaries or encyclopedias perhaps some six or seven hundred, but our own accounts have identified nearly 3000 names, not all of whom are necessarily full-fledged philosophers, but at least important witnesses of ancient philosophical tradition.
The present paper is a first attempt at gathering statistics about the philosophical “population” of Antiquity. This is a risky undertaking, for many reasons that will be enumerated later on. Yet these charts and graphs may provide precious information about the historical and social impact of ancient philosophy, and of the “ways of life” promoted by the various schools.
How Can We Identify Ancient Philosophers?
Finding all the known philosophers and entering them into a database for statistical purposes may seem unrealistic. The Dictionary of Ancient Philosophers (DPhA) (Goulet 1989–) published since 1989 with the help of near two hundred international specialists provides at least the most elaborate list of philosophers from the Presocratics to the Neoplatonists of the sixth century ce. About 80% of the entries have already been published in the first five volumes and a supplement, letters S–Z being still in preparation, but the complete list includes near 3000 names, many of these being known only by inscriptions, papyri, or later literary mentions. From the outset of the project in the early 1980s, a large number of parameters, such as date, school, sex, places of origin and education, masters and students, were systematically gathered in the database, so that a minimal statistical survey may now be undertaken.
The final written entries of this dictionary will surely modify some details of the currently available information, and a definitive report is planned to accompany or be included in the last volume, to be published in the next two years, but an initial attempt may be welcome, if only to clarify some procedures and draw a general sketch.
The DPhA as a Sample of Ancient Philosophical Society
Of course, the 3000 entries of the DPhA do not represent the actual “population” of ancient philosophers. They offer no more than a “sample” for our enquiry, most probably a rather small sample of all persons in the ancient world who termed themselves “philosopher,” or philosopher of any single school. This sample cannot verify overly rigid norms. It is simply a list of those philosophers who have left some literary, historical, or archaeological trace. The average teacher of philosophy and the crowd of their students in the ancient world had probably a very slight chance to escape complete obscurity. And even for less obscure figures, we are not sure that all of them were correctly registered through our examination of the documents. Many names were discovered after the corresponding volume had been published, and had to be dealt with in supplementary volumes. But on the whole such new discoveries remain scarce.
Discarding Intruders
We must be aware that the DPhA was not meant to be a short list of cross-verified philosophers. It includes some names that were judged to be important witnesses of ancient philosophical tradition, a status which may apply to persons hostile to philosophers, to Christian authors of apologies directed against philosophers, or to major documentary sources like Diogenes Laertius. Some entries are dedicated to anonymous or pseudepigraphical texts, rather than to historical persons. A special case is offered by a few probably fictitious names of philosophers appearing in authors like Lucian, or by persons termed “philosophers” in more or less ancient tradition, but whose status as philosophers the author of the article rejects. These entries may be useful to complete our information about ancient philosophy, but they are out of place in our sample and must be discarded. One may still hesitate with regard to the fictitious names, because the author’s attempt at depicting a typical, even if ridiculous, situation may testify to actual social and contemporaneous figures, if not individuals. Our choice has been to eliminate all these names.
Even without these adventitious entries, verifying the philosophical claims of the remaining entries is not always easy. The status of philosopher is given in our sources to mythological or legendary figures like Musaeus or Abaris, to astrologers, alchemists, magicians, physicians, and scientists of many kinds, to statesmen and generals having attended the class of a philosopher for a while, or having welcomed a philosopher in their entourage, to monks and bishops having led a Christian life conceived as philosophical, and so on. Such names must in general be excluded from our corpus of philosophers, but sometimes only an in-depth study can tell us if the person has some claim to be included in our inquiry. In any case, in the current version of our statistics, the benefit of doubt must be extended to those whose status as philosopher has not yet been rejected.
For the present survey, we have identified 2463 historical persons as philosophers, out of the 2997 names available in our listings.
What is a Philosopher, After All?
Faced by all these pseudo-philosophers, one may ask on what basis have we selected the philosophers of our corpus? The main criterion was for a person to have been described as a philosopher or a philosopher of some philosophical school in ancient sources, to have produced or have been said to have produced philosophical treatises, to have expressed unmistakably philosophical ideas, or to have taught philosophy to some disciple(s). Having followed the teaching of a philosopher was not generally taken as a sure indication that philosophy was the actual content of this teaching.
Such an intellectual was a well-identified figure in ancient society, if only by his cloak. His special status might even be confirmed by laws ensuring – or not, according to the taste of the reigning emperor – immunities from civic charges. Even without official tenure, any philosopher was allowed to gather disciples and give them lessons at home or in public areas.
When we come to Christian philosophers, they could be intellectuals or theologians who wanted to develop a religious version of traditional philosophy. At other times, the term seems to mean no more than “monk,” a status that was considered as the Christian counterpart of the ascetic, if not Cynic, philosopher in ancient society.
At some later date in Byzantium, the word “philosopher” came to be used to designate almost any kind of intellectual, especially if he had written something.
Chronological Interval
The chronological interval for this inquiry has been set according to the original scope of the DPhA, and extends from the sixth century bc to the end of the sixth century ad.
How Can Philosophers Be Dated?
Our chronological information about ancient philosophers varies a great deal in precision. For some, like Plotinus, we have an exact year of birth, death, and even of important moments of their life. Most of the time, we can locate a philosopher within a century. Sometimes, our documentation allows a very rough dating: the Hellenistic period, Roman imperial period, late Empire, and so on. In many cases, we have no idea of the date, or just a relative date ante quem provided by the date of our source of information. Since our chronological system offers only centuries from −6 to +6, we had to leave all these philosophers of indeterminate date in the limbo of a totally indefinite dating, and two general chronological forks: the Hellenistic period and the Imperial period.
Another problem was raised by philosophers whose lives and activities span two centuries. In such cases, the century matching the longer period of activity for this philosopher was retained and, when no such information was available, the more ancient of the two centuries. This is pure convention, but does not necessarily jeopardize the quality of the statistics.
A Simplified Mediterranean Map
Another simplification was needed for geographical localization. Registering the cities of origin or activity would result in with hundreds of different places. Therefore, all localities were reduced to a few general geographical regions: Greece, Asia Minor (including Rhodes, Crete, and all the islands of the Aegean sea), East (including Mesopotamia), Egypt, Africa (except Egypt), Italy, West (except Italy) and other countries (for instance Thrace). Most of the time, Greece could be restricted to Athens, Egypt to Alexandria, and Italy to Rome, but it seemed difficult to maintain coherent geographical divisions with both regions and cities.
Some Known Artifacts
A last caveat must be added. We know numerous philosophers through a few lists of names miraculously saved by the tradition. For instance, a few hundred ancient Pythagoreans from the sixth to fourth century bc are listed in Iamblichus’ De vita pythagorica. In the histograms, the huge column that stands up for this group of philosophers tends to flatten all the other values and equalize most of the differences in values between the other groups. We must use similar lists for Stoics in the third century bc, or Academic philosophers in the second century bc. But we should resist the temptation to set aside such data or to correct the scores they give, because this exceptional information is probably much closer to the real figures than is the scant information we can grasp for the other periods or other schools. Once again, these statistics reflect our knowledge of ancient philosophers, rather than historical or social reality, and the general impression that they give is more valuable than every single detail.
Another problem is raised by the overly large amount of undocumented data. We simply do not know the date, school, or place of origin of many philosophers. These values appear in the chart in N/A (not available) columns or lines. But the graphs would be less significant if these were included in the data, and all the others would be flattened out as a result. It seemed better to keep the N/A data outside the graphs.
Available Parameters
Each contributor to the DPhA was expected to incorporate in his article some objective particulars: name, date, gender, place or origin, formation, activity, school, teachers, students, books written, political or civic activity, iconography, and so on. This common material, that remains incomplete for the philosophers still to be studied in the two last volumes, and had to be completed by other encyclopedic entries available, forms the basis of the current statistical inquiry. The actual entries of the database could not be displayed in the present paper. A list may be consulted at http://upr_76.vjf.cnrs.fr/DPHA/DPhA_Main.html (Goulet 2012) and I can mail to any interested scholar an updated list of all the names taken into account or rejected in my statistics. But enough with preliminaries, let us look at a few charts.
Gender Study
Chart 2.1 and Graph 2.1 are dedicated to women philosophers. There are 85 of them, out of a total number of 2463 philosophers. That makes 3.45%. For 21 women (24.7%), we do not know to which school they belong, and for one of them, we have no chronological information. There are 21 listed as Pythagoreans, many of them known through Iamblichus’ catalogue; 13 are related to the Platonic or Neoplatonic tradition, and 15 are Epicureans.
Chart 2.1 Women philosophers by schools and centuries
Graph 2.1 Women philosophers by schools and centuries
Very few of these women were real philosophy teachers or writers, as was Hypatia in Alexandria. Treatises were attributed to the Cynic Hipparchia. Some of these ladies were members of Epicurus’ Garden, others were Roman matrons, wives or daughters of Stoic opponents to the imperial authorities, or Roman well-born ladies welcoming a philosopher like Plotinus in their home. In Plato’s Academy, two women attended the lectures, but they came dressed in men’s clothing. The 20 women philosophers that we can locate in the fourth century bc show at least that women were typical figures of the Athenian schools. When a woman is honored as a philosopher in an Imperial inscription, it is more difficult to know if the word refers to a simple quality of life, or celebrates some teaching activity or high-level education.
So Many Schools
Chart 2.2 lists all the ancient philosophers by school and by century. The schools are intended here as original antique affiliations, and not as modern philosophical classifications. For instance, many historians of philosophy would populate the heading “eclectics” with several names, but we know of only one ancient philosopher who applied to himself such a name (Potamon of Alexandria). There are some 33 different schools, some of which are alternative names (Peripatetics/Aristotelians), but others may reflect some major change in the definition of the school (it has been shown that “Academic” and “Platonist” probably refer to different historical realities). Many of these schools disappeared rapidly, merged with others or changed their name; for instance, according to Diogenes Laertius, the Eliacs were named Eretriacs after Menedemus.
Chart 2.2 Philosophers by schools and centuries
Leading Schools
A more compact chart (Chart 2.3) that reduces these 33 schools to some eight major affiliations is more convenient for our examination. First of all, we must take into account the fact that we do not know in the case of 711 philosophers (28.86%), to which school they adhere, if they did at all. That may mean that for every period the title of “philosopher” could stand by itself. This is conspicuous in many inscriptions of later times, where a philosopher is honored as such, without any reference to a special school. The sector graph Graph 2.2 shows that if we leave aside the Pythagoreans (13.03%) whose importance decreased rapidly following the fourth century bc, a broad majority of philosophers belonged to the four most important schools:
Chart 2.3 Philosophers by schools and centuries (simplified version)
Graph 2.2 Philosophers by schools (simplified version)
These four schools amount to 45.02% of the whole corpus (and 63.29% of the restricted corpus of philosophers whose school is identified).
Schools in History
If we look at the chronological distribution (Graph 2.3), without regard for the single schools, and if we remember the excessive importance in our charts of the Pythagoreans of the fifth century bc, we can say that the scores remain rather even through the larger part of Antiquity, at least until the second century ad. The four last centuries give a clear impression of some decadence in philosophical study or activity.
Graph 2.3 Philosophers by centuries
The following graph (Graph 2.4a) gives some more details. The supremacy of the four major schools is clear, and would be more evident if the Pythagorean tower of the fifth century bc did not flatten all the other values. Since Iamblichus does not provide any date for his long list of ancient Pythagoreans, a small improvement to our graph would be to distribute half of the Pythagoreans of the fifth century to the sixth century and to the fourth century (Graph 2.4b).
Graph 2.4 a Philosophers by schools and centuries (simplified version)
Graph 2.4 b Philosophers by schools and centuries (simplified version)
For the pre-Christian era (from the fourth century to the first century bc), we can gather the following cumulative scores:
If we add the scores for the two following centuries, we can sum up the values for the Golden Age of these traditional schools:
Total: 826 philosophers (33.53% of the whole corpus and 47.14% of the restricted corpus of philosophers whose school is identified).
Over the last four centuries, by contrast, the scores are far lower:
Total: 197 philosophers (7.99% of the whole corpus and 11.24% of the restricted corpus of philosophers whose school is identified).
Socratics reached high scores from the fifth to third centuries bc (92 philosophers). Cynics offer rather even values throughout their history, with an otherwise attested break in the second century bc.
One can see immediately from these scores, also reflected on our graph, that by the end of Antiquity, only one school, the (Neo-)Platonic school, survived, having absorbed in the meantime a large amount of Aristotelian doctrines.
Another way of displaying the same data (Graphs 2.5: stack column chart, and 2.6: 100% stacked column chart) shows more clearly the same progressive decline of all the philosophical schools save the (Neo-)Platonic one, and also the proportional increasing number of philosophers known without any specified affiliation. For the last three centuries, the “non-affiliated” or independent philosophers exceed half of the total population of philosophers. The lack of documentation may partly explain this phenomenon, but other explanations are possible: it may have been useless to specify the school one was part of in a context where almost all philosophers were Platonists (which is the case for all the philosophers whose life is related by Eunapius, for instance), and there may have been more and more philosophers, like Themistius’ father or Hypatia, teaching the doctrine of different schools without committing themselves to any single specific school, if any still existed outside the Platonic school.
Graph 2.5 Philosophers by schools and centuries – stacked column chart
Greek Philosophers Saved by Direct Transmission
This conclusion confirms the result of a distinct statistical inquiry, published elsewhere, on the texts that have been preserved until today by direct transmission.1 Using information provided by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) canon of texts, we can say that Greek philosophical texts written before the seventh century and saved by direct transmission (excluding the miraculous preservation of papyri, or texts known through quotations in later authors) amount to some 10 million words (10,755,159), which represents some 30,000 pages of plain text in the format of CAG. The relevant authors are listed in Charts 2.4a and b.2
Chart 2.4a Word count for philosophical authors saved in direct transmission
It is easy to see that Plato, Aristotle, and their numerous commentators, most of them Neoplatonists, represent the largest part of our corpus. There may be only some 4% of texts outside this Platonic–Aristotelian mainstream. This is shown on the sector graph (Graph 2.7) matching these figures. If this corpus originally had come from the collections of some library or many libraries, we would expect to find some texts of the ancient Stoa or from the Garden of Epicurus. Perhaps one could still read texts from the Presocratics or the Socratics. In fact, all these philosophical traditions have totally disappeared, and all we now have of them are fragments from papyri or later quotations. It is clear that chance, even if it played a role in the conservation or destruction of any single document, cannot explain the overall statistical values of the graphic. Schools, and more exactly the Neoplatonic school, played an important role in selecting ancient philosophical texts for preservation.
Graph 2.6 Philosophers by schools and centuries – 100% stacked column chart
Graph 2.7 Philosophical texts saved by direct transmission
The role played by the late Neoplatonic school in textual transmission is in line with the conclusions of our Graphs 2.4a or 2.4b.
Where Did They Come From?
The geographical parameters (Chart 2.5; Graphs 2.8, 2.9, and 2.10) are less often documented in the DPhA entries. The place of origin of our philosophers remains unknown in 35.4% of the cases. Asia Minor is the greatest provider of philosophers (505/20.5%), followed by Italy (365/14.81%, with a huge number of ancient Pythagoreans: the usual tower), Greece (340/13.80%), and the East (120/4.87%). Chart 2.6 and Graph 2.11 suggest that no region supports any special school, and that each one provides philosophers to each of the major schools. From a different perspective, it seems that philosophers of all the major schools could come from any geographical region. This conclusion by itself testifies to the fact that philosophy was a widespread phenomenon throughout ancient society, and at every period.
Chart 2.4bTLG authors or texts included in the secondary lists
Other PlatonistsAlcinoos, Albinus, Theon of Smyrna, Longinus, Anatolius, Julian, Salustius, SynesiusOther commentators on Aristotle or Theophrastus
