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The early development of philosophy is indeed remarkable. But why do we even care about the ancient history of the field? Why not just do philosophy, as philosophers say, and forget about the boring ancient history stuff? Philosophers can be averse to history, interested only in the timeless interplay of ideas and propositions. Often we will discuss ancient philosophy ahistorically in this book: just treat ancient theories and arguments as if their authors were our contemporaries. The fact that we can do that shows just how contemporary ancient theories can be. And it allows us to think through problems with our predecessors.

But the ancient philosophers are not our contemporaries, and we need to appreciate them not only as peers but as contributors to an ongoing conversation that started with them. While we can debate any point in the present, there are certain assumptions that change over time for broadly historical reasons: people tend to believe in certain things in one age that they reject in others, and to interpret their experience accordingly. Think for instance of supposing that the Earth is the center of the universe, and that slavery is an acceptable or inevitable social institution.

For a long time philosophers pretty much ignored history. History, Aristotle said, deals with particular truths, whereas philosophy deals with universal truths. So philosophy is rigorously scientific while history is merely factual. It took another philosopher to convince philosophers that history was important: G. W. F. Hegel in the early 1800s. He went so far as to see history as the key to understanding philosophy. According to him, history reveals the unfolding of Spirit in time. There is a kind of logical progression of ideas as Spirit discovers itself in historical events, which will lead inevitably to self‐consciousness and the realization of Freedom. If we take Hegel seriously, there is a kind of March of History that leads in a virtually predetermined dialectical path to perfect knowledge.

What Hegel offered was the idea that there is a barrier between one age and another. Someone in Era 1 will tend to believe and understand things differently from someone in Era 2 at a later time. This is an important point. We tend to believe a great many things because our culture accepts them; no one can challenge all his or her community’s received beliefs (though Descartes notoriously tried his best to do so). So it seems unfair to be unduly critical of someone for holding the beliefs of his community. For instance, Aristotle believed that the Earth was the center of the universe; that women were inferior to men; that some people were natural‐born slaves. We can, of course, revile Aristotle for these views; but it seems unfair to do so. This is not, of course, to endorse his erroneous views. It is to recognize that he is a child of his time. Now there were, in fact, individuals who had questioned each of these views, even before Aristotle. But they were voices crying in the wilderness, and everyday “experience” seemed to confirm conventional beliefs to Aristotle and most of his contemporaries. (Before you start feeling too self‐satisfied about being enlightened, remember that someday people will look down on us for being so backward as to believe what we now believe.)

Some historians and philosophers have gone so far as to say that we cannot in principle have the same thoughts as someone from another time.³ This kind of historical relativism seems too extreme. We can, and good historians do, form sympathetic pictures of past people and events. We can also, and good historians do, make cogent historical judgments about past people and events. That is, in light of a sympathetic reconstruction, we evaluate them on the basis of present‐day standards. So we can defend some of Aristotle’s views as products of his time and his society’s beliefs, while wishing that he had been, for instance, as forward‐looking in his social theory as he was in his metaphysical and biological theories. The first step embodies a temporal, the second an atemporal approach.⁴ We first need to appreciate a past figure like Aristotle in light of his own times – and that includes understanding what problems he was trying to answer, and why – and then we can evaluate him in relation to contemporary expectations and developments. To skip the first part is to be unfair to our ancient subjects; to skip the second part is to become a mere antiquarian rather than a philosopher or historian.

Part of the challenge – and the fun – of studying the history of philosophy is trying to recognize new developments that become turning points in the history. Philosophy breaks off from mythology, so it starts out with no technical concepts, no real theory, of its own. In fact, philosophers seem to take for granted features of their mythological background – that the world has a beginning in time, and that the Earth is flat, for instance. Each new conception of the world tentatively advances new concepts, some of which become part of the vocabulary and background of philosophy and science. But, by the same token, early philosophy lacks the conceptual sophistication that we take for granted today. We are used to distinguishing between mind and body; thing and property; language, metalanguage, and reality; logic and metaphysics, and so on. But the early thinkers make no such rigorous or formal distinctions. How then do we read them? Do we apply our concepts to understand their theories or not? If we follow the distinction between temporal and atemporal studies, we will try to make sense of them in terms of their own time and intellectual context first; then we will try to fit them into our conceptual scheme – tentatively and reflectively, if possible. We need to recognize when we are putting new wine into old bottles, and old wine into new bottles. We change bottles at our own risk, but ultimately, we need to make the attempt if we are ever to understand our intellectual predecessors and ever to learn from them.

Here is an example. Modern philosophy (1600s to 1800s) is haunted by the Mind‐Body Problem that goes back to René Descartes: how does mind interact with body, and how does it know body? There is no such burning problem in the ancient world, though ancient theories do explore the relationship between mind and body. Anaxagoras is the first philosopher strongly to distinguish mind (Nous) from body; he says that a cosmic mind started a cosmic whirlpool that produced the world as we know it. He makes mind radically different from matter in some ways, for instance saying that every stuff is mixed with every other stuff, except for mind, which is pure and unmixed. Is he then a dualist, saying that mind and matter are utterly different? Not exactly. He does assign to mind physical properties such as location, and says mind is found in some things, especially living things. Plato for his part distinguishes between an immortal soul and a changeable body. He comes close to being a dualist, but he seems not to have a notion of persistent matter that could contrast in a strong sense with soul. Aristotle identifies mind as a function of soul, and locates soul in body, to which it is related as form to matter. But his own theory is complex and subtle enough that it is hard to characterize in contemporary terms, and indeed, different interpreters have attributed to him almost every theory of mind known to contemporary philosophy. So it turns out to be very difficult to answer what should be a straightforward question of classification about ancient theories of mind. This is not to say there are no answers to the questions, but only that the answers are not obvious or easy to come by. In fact, I will later argue that the ancients had a better take on the relation between mind and body than the moderns, and one which precluded much of the often barren debate and futile theory of the moderns.

One more historical issue is the matter of large‐scale historical developments. In his influential book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1996) argued that science does not progress in a linear fashion. Scientists follow paradigms, examples of scientific method that provide models for research. As long as the paradigm serves to solve scientific problems, a period of “normal science” continues. But eventually scientists run into problems that they cannot solve within the current framework. A period of “crisis” ensues which leads to a “scientific revolution,” in which a new paradigm emerges to inform normal science. Although Kuhn meant for this scheme to apply only to science, it seems to offer interesting parallels for the history of philosophy also. (Indeed, it is a kind of Hegelian scheme of eras of cultural unity punctuated by revolutionary episodes of change to a new era – though Kuhn does not explicitly draw on Hegel.)

There are times when philosophical discourse undergoes a radical change. One of the most celebrated changes of this sort is embodied in the life and thought of Socrates (as we shall see). Before him philosophy was largely carried out in didactic cosmological speculations (by thinkers who are now called, significantly, “pre‐Socratics”); after him in dialogues centering on ethical issues. Whatever the precise reasons for them, revolutions in thought are often recognizable in retrospect as turning points in the development of thought. There is a kind of disconnect (which Kuhn calls “incommensurability”) between practitioners of one kind of philosophy and those of another. Kuhn appeals to a political model of revolution carried out between advocates of a new ideology opposing the old establishment; communication between them may consist of propaganda and protests and rock‐throwing rather than rational debate. However that may be, it will be useful to keep an eye out for major shifts in philosophical theory from one era to another. As in politics and even science, the story of philosophy is not a simple stepwise progression from one idea to the next.

And this brings us to a final observation. There is always a temptation to see one idea as leading inevitably to the next, one theory to its successor, in a kind of “dialectical” progression, like that of a developing conversation. We find this pattern promoted already in Aristotle, who thinks that, “led on by the truth itself,” philosophy progressed from discovering one kind of cause to another (of his four causes).⁵ Hegel sees the progress of cultural and political history as embodying a logical dialectic, from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. This kind of March of History story would turn history into a science, as Hegel believed it would, and make all developments rational and inevitable. But alas, the course of history seems a good deal messier than the Aristotles and Hegels of the world recognize. In particular, the history of philosophy has its own contingencies that are neither predictable nor fully explainable.

Yet a good historical account makes sense of the developments of philosophy in such a way that the later events are seen as reactions to the earlier ones, and some kind of at least relative progress is perceivable from the earlier to the later theories. And that progress results largely from a kind of internal dialectic or conversation, rather than from external economic, political, or social factors. In ancient philosophy we shall see a rapid conceptual development from primitive, almost mythological ideas, to sophisticated theories, some of which have never been surpassed in their power and elegance. In what follows, we will trace the broad development of theories, focusing at various points on interesting problems and arguments that made the ancient conversation so rich and fruitful, and so philosophically interesting. And we will see that philosophy is at some level an ongoing conversation in which new theories grow out of attempts to solve old problems in new ways. However timeless our contemporary theories may seem, they always arrive schlepping baggage from the past, and depart leaving new baggage for the future.