I understand ancient Greek philosophy really well. In case that has come up. I’m a PhD student in philosophy, and I’d be happy to talk about that as well.
Do you have a sense of how the proportion of philosophy varied with place and time, both the proportion written and the proportion surviving? My impression is that there was a lot more philosophy in Athens than in Alexandria.
I’m not sure I entirely understand the question. I’ll try to give a history in three stages
1) Roughly, the earliest stages of philosophy were mathematics, and attempts at reductive, systematic accounts of the natural world. This was going on pretty broadly, and only by virtue of some surviving doxographers do we have the impression that Greece was at the forefront of this practice (I’m thinking of the pre-Socratic greek philosophers, like Thales and Anaxagoras and Pythagoras). It was everywhere, and the Greeks weren’t particularly good at it. This got started with the Babylonians (very little survives), and when the Assyrian empire conquered Babylon (only to be culturally subjugated to it), they spread this practice throughout the Mediterranean and near-east. Genesis 1 is a good example of a text along these lines.
2) After the collapse of the Assyrians, locals on the frontiers of the former empire (like Greece and Israel) reasserted some intellectual control, often in the form of skeptical criticisms or radically new methodologies (like Parmenides very important arguments against the possibility of change, or the Pythagorean claim that everything is number). Socrates engaged in a version of this by eschewing questions of the cosmos and focusing on ethics and politics as independent topics. Then came Plato, and Aristotle, who between them got the western intellectual tradition going. I won’t go into how, for brevity’s sake.
3) After Plato and Aristotle, a flurry of philosophical activity overwhelmed the Mediterranean (including and especially in Alexandria), largely because of the conquests of Alexander and the active spread of Greek culture (a rehash of the thing with the Assyrians). This period is a lot like ours now: widespread interest in science, mathematics, ethics, political theory, etc. Many, many people were devoted to these things, and they produced more work in a given year during this period than every that had come before combined. But as a result of the sheer volume of this work, and as a result of the fact that it was built on the shoulders of Plato and Aristotle, very little of it really stands out. As a result, a lot was lost.
Before I expand on my question, let me ask what I really should have asked before: is there a place I can look up what survives, with a rough classification; or better, what is believed to have existed?
You seem to include all non-fiction in philosophy. Fine by me, but I just want to make it explicit.
What I meant by proportion was the balance between fiction and non-fiction. I don’t think I’ve heard of any Hellenistic fiction. Was it rarer than classical fiction? Was it less often preserved? Again because it was derivative?
But maybe we should distinguish science from philosophy. My understanding is that Hellenistic science was an awful lot better than classical science. Hipparchus was not lost because he was derivative of Aristotle, but, apparently, because Ptolemy was judged to supersede him, or at least be an adequate summary.
Well, with respect to mathematics at least one difference between the Greeks and everybody else, is that the Greeks provided proofs of the non-obvious results.
Yes, though that really got started with Euclid, who post-dates Aristotle. It’s with Plato and Aristotle that the Greeks really set them-selves apart. I don’t think we’d be reading any of the rest of it if it weren’t for them.
Euclid is merely the first whose work has survived to the modern day. If tradition is to be believed, Thales and Pythagoras provided proofs of non-intuitive results from intuitive one. Furthermore, Hippocrates of Chios wrote a systematic treatment starting with axioms. All three predated Plato.
That’s a good point about Hippocrates, I’d forgotten about him. Do you have a source handy on Thales and Pythagoras? I don’t doubt it, it’s just a gap I should fill. So far as I remember, a proof that the square root of two is irrational came out of the Pythagorean school, but that’s all I can think of. I hadn’t heard anything like that about Thales.
Do you feel overworked and desparate as a PhD student or is it basically fun? Have you published any articles yet or are you planning to? What are your career plans?
The desperation: This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there’s no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it’s easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction). It’s not rare that I doubt that anything I’m writing is valuable work. Since I’m at the (early) dissertation stage, these kinds of big picture worries play an important daily role.
The overwork: This is exacerbated by the fact that I have a family. I have much more to do than I can do, and I often have to cut something important. I grade papers on a 3 min per page clock, and that almost feels unethical. I just recently got a new dissertation advisor who wants to see work every two weeks.
The happy: I have a family! It makes this whole thing much, much easier. Most of my problem with being a grad student in the before time was terrible loneliness. Some people do well under those conditions, but I didn’t. Also, I do philosophy, which is like happiness distilled. When everyone is uploaded, and science is complete, and a billion years or so have gotten all the problems and needs and video games and recreational space travel out of our system, we’ll all settle into that activity that makes life most worth living: talking about the most serious things in the most serious way with our friends. That’s philosophy, and I’m very happy to be able to do it even if I don’t get a job out of it.
I haven’t published anything, but someone recently footnoted me in an important journal. Small victories. I have a paper I’d like to publish, but it’s a back-burner project. As to my career, I will take literally anything they can give me, so long as I can be around my family (my wife is a philosopher too, so we need to both get jobs somewhere close). Odds are long on this, so my work has to be good.
This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there’s no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it’s easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction).
I think you’re right that philosophy is particularly difficult in this respect. In many fields you can always go out, gather some data and use relatively standard methodologies to analyze your data and produce publishable work from it. This is certainly true in linguistics (go out and record some conversations or whatever) and philology (there are always more texts to edit, more stemmas to draw etc.). I get the impression that this is also more or less possible in sociology, psychology, biology and many other fields. But for pure philosophy, you can’t do much in the way of gathering novel data.
I understand ancient Greek philosophy really well. In case that has come up. I’m a PhD student in philosophy, and I’d be happy to talk about that as well.
What do you think of Epicurus? What do you think of Epicurean ethics?
Do you have a sense of how the proportion of philosophy varied with place and time, both the proportion written and the proportion surviving? My impression is that there was a lot more philosophy in Athens than in Alexandria.
I’m not sure I entirely understand the question. I’ll try to give a history in three stages
1) Roughly, the earliest stages of philosophy were mathematics, and attempts at reductive, systematic accounts of the natural world. This was going on pretty broadly, and only by virtue of some surviving doxographers do we have the impression that Greece was at the forefront of this practice (I’m thinking of the pre-Socratic greek philosophers, like Thales and Anaxagoras and Pythagoras). It was everywhere, and the Greeks weren’t particularly good at it. This got started with the Babylonians (very little survives), and when the Assyrian empire conquered Babylon (only to be culturally subjugated to it), they spread this practice throughout the Mediterranean and near-east. Genesis 1 is a good example of a text along these lines.
2) After the collapse of the Assyrians, locals on the frontiers of the former empire (like Greece and Israel) reasserted some intellectual control, often in the form of skeptical criticisms or radically new methodologies (like Parmenides very important arguments against the possibility of change, or the Pythagorean claim that everything is number). Socrates engaged in a version of this by eschewing questions of the cosmos and focusing on ethics and politics as independent topics. Then came Plato, and Aristotle, who between them got the western intellectual tradition going. I won’t go into how, for brevity’s sake.
3) After Plato and Aristotle, a flurry of philosophical activity overwhelmed the Mediterranean (including and especially in Alexandria), largely because of the conquests of Alexander and the active spread of Greek culture (a rehash of the thing with the Assyrians). This period is a lot like ours now: widespread interest in science, mathematics, ethics, political theory, etc. Many, many people were devoted to these things, and they produced more work in a given year during this period than every that had come before combined. But as a result of the sheer volume of this work, and as a result of the fact that it was built on the shoulders of Plato and Aristotle, very little of it really stands out. As a result, a lot was lost.
Before I expand on my question, let me ask what I really should have asked before: is there a place I can look up what survives, with a rough classification; or better, what is believed to have existed?
You seem to include all non-fiction in philosophy. Fine by me, but I just want to make it explicit.
What I meant by proportion was the balance between fiction and non-fiction. I don’t think I’ve heard of any Hellenistic fiction. Was it rarer than classical fiction? Was it less often preserved? Again because it was derivative? But maybe we should distinguish science from philosophy. My understanding is that Hellenistic science was an awful lot better than classical science. Hipparchus was not lost because he was derivative of Aristotle, but, apparently, because Ptolemy was judged to supersede him, or at least be an adequate summary.
Ancient Greek novels
Well, with respect to mathematics at least one difference between the Greeks and everybody else, is that the Greeks provided proofs of the non-obvious results.
Yes, though that really got started with Euclid, who post-dates Aristotle. It’s with Plato and Aristotle that the Greeks really set them-selves apart. I don’t think we’d be reading any of the rest of it if it weren’t for them.
Euclid is merely the first whose work has survived to the modern day. If tradition is to be believed, Thales and Pythagoras provided proofs of non-intuitive results from intuitive one. Furthermore, Hippocrates of Chios wrote a systematic treatment starting with axioms. All three predated Plato.
That’s a good point about Hippocrates, I’d forgotten about him. Do you have a source handy on Thales and Pythagoras? I don’t doubt it, it’s just a gap I should fill. So far as I remember, a proof that the square root of two is irrational came out of the Pythagorean school, but that’s all I can think of. I hadn’t heard anything like that about Thales.
I linked to the relevant Wikipedia articles in my comment.
Ah, but note the ‘history’ section of the Thales article. It rather supports my picture, if it supports anything at all.
Why? If you mean that Thales learned the result from the Babylonians, the point is that he appears to have been the first to bother proving it.
Do you feel overworked and desparate as a PhD student or is it basically fun? Have you published any articles yet or are you planning to? What are your career plans?
I feel overworked, desperate, and very happy.
The desperation: This is a very hard field to work in, psychologically, because there’s no reliable process for producing valuable work (this might be true generally, but I get the sense that in the sciences it’s easier to get moving in a worthwhile direction). It’s not rare that I doubt that anything I’m writing is valuable work. Since I’m at the (early) dissertation stage, these kinds of big picture worries play an important daily role.
The overwork: This is exacerbated by the fact that I have a family. I have much more to do than I can do, and I often have to cut something important. I grade papers on a 3 min per page clock, and that almost feels unethical. I just recently got a new dissertation advisor who wants to see work every two weeks.
The happy: I have a family! It makes this whole thing much, much easier. Most of my problem with being a grad student in the before time was terrible loneliness. Some people do well under those conditions, but I didn’t. Also, I do philosophy, which is like happiness distilled. When everyone is uploaded, and science is complete, and a billion years or so have gotten all the problems and needs and video games and recreational space travel out of our system, we’ll all settle into that activity that makes life most worth living: talking about the most serious things in the most serious way with our friends. That’s philosophy, and I’m very happy to be able to do it even if I don’t get a job out of it.
I haven’t published anything, but someone recently footnoted me in an important journal. Small victories. I have a paper I’d like to publish, but it’s a back-burner project. As to my career, I will take literally anything they can give me, so long as I can be around my family (my wife is a philosopher too, so we need to both get jobs somewhere close). Odds are long on this, so my work has to be good.
I think you’re right that philosophy is particularly difficult in this respect. In many fields you can always go out, gather some data and use relatively standard methodologies to analyze your data and produce publishable work from it. This is certainly true in linguistics (go out and record some conversations or whatever) and philology (there are always more texts to edit, more stemmas to draw etc.). I get the impression that this is also more or less possible in sociology, psychology, biology and many other fields. But for pure philosophy, you can’t do much in the way of gathering novel data.
Interestingly, my field, mathematics, is similar to philosophy, probably for the same reason.