Casting Through Ancient Greece
Casting Through Ancient Greece
Greek Philosophy with Jack Visnjic
Are you ready to travel back in time and unravel the mysteries of ancient Greek philosophy with me, Mark Selleck, and our distinguished guest, Jack Visnjic, or as you might know him, Lantern Jack, is renowned for his profound knowledge in this philosophical domain. With a PhD in Ancient Philosophy from Princeton University, Jack brings an understanding that transcends time, illuminating the rich world of ancient Greek thinkers.
Our journey will transport you to the birthplace of philosophy, navigating through the socio-political intricacies of that era that birthed philosophical thought. We'll explore the groundbreaking ideas of pre-Socratic philosophers, before venturing into the epic intellectual realms of Socrates and Plato. Plato's revolutionary Theory of Forms and his famed allegory of the cave, which continue to evoke intrigue, will also take center stage. Our philosophical odyssey doesn't end there. The influence of the legendary Aristotle, his unique philosophical framework, and his invaluable contributions to science and logic will also be brought to light.
As we move forward in time, we'll examine the evolution of Greek philosophy, including the emergence of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and skepticism during the Hellenistic period. We'll delve deep into metaphysical concepts and the impact of this philosophy on modern ethical thinking. So, strap in for an enlightening journey through time and thought. Remember to stay connected and subscribe for more insightful episodes.
Hello everyone, I'm Mark Selick and welcome back to Castings for Ancient Greece for this interview episode with Jack Viznick, who will be helping introduce Ancient Greek Philosophy to us In this series. So far, we have not gone into much depth at all on Greek Philosophy. We have been focused on telling the story of Ancient Greece through the events and people. When it has been relevant, we have touched on small aspects of Philosophy, but not in any meaningful way. I must admit, I am a little out of my depth when it comes to the ins and outs of Greek Philosophy, with only a cursory understanding of the ideas. It's for this reason I decided to reach out to Jack Viznick, or better known online as Lantan Jack, to help us with our first look into this complex and fascinating subject. I did present Jack with an ambitious task, as I was attempting to get a good, comprehensive introduction to the world of Ancient Greek Philosophy, though I think we achieved what we set out to do no small task, given we could have spent an entire episode just talking about any one of the questions I brought up.
Speaker 2:Jack Viznick is the host behind the captivating podcast Ancient Greece Declussified. Popularly known as Lantan Jack, he is on a mission to break down the barriers surrounding the classics and make the wonders of Ancient Greece accessible to everyone. With a profound belief that knowledge about the ancient world should not be confined to academia, jack brings the richness of archaeology and modern scholarship to the ears of the average person. He believes that the classics should not be a privilege reserved for a select few, but a treasure trove of wisdom available to all. Lantan Jack holds a PhD in Ancient Philosophy from the prestigious Princeton University.
Speaker 2:His academic background adds depth and authority to his podcast, ensuring that the information shared is not only accessible but also reliable and up to date. This also, I believe, makes Jack a perfect guest on our episode today. Familiar with engaging outside academia, but also bringing the expertise he has gained there to present in an accessible way. When he is not unraveling the mysteries of the classical world, jack can be found immersed in the melodies of his favourite tunes or exploring the fascinating landscapes that history has left behind. So let's now get to our talk today, and I present to you my interview with Lantan Jack on Greek Philosophy. Hello everyone, and welcome back to this interview episode where today my guest is Lantan Jack. Thank you for coming on to talk to us today.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:Now in our series. So far we haven't really had an opportunity to Well, I haven't really delved too deeply into Greek philosophy and the ideas behind it. We have touched on a few areas, I think, when we talk about certain figures as we've gone in the narrative. So I thought it would be useful for us to get an introduction to Greek philosophy, some of the figures behind it, how it developed and some of the ideas that would develop over the generations to do with it. And so I decided to reach out to Jack, who's also a fellow podcaster and holds a PhD in ancient philosophy, and I thought he would be perfect to help us guide us through this world of philosophy. So greatly appreciate it, jack.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Mark. It's a daunting challenge, but I'm game, so let's have a go at it. No, worries.
Speaker 2:So I thought, before we get started, I like to ask my guests, in their own words, if they could tell us a bit about who they are and how they came to become interested in the ancient world.
Speaker 3:Ah, you want to dig deep. So my name is Jack. My listeners know me as Lantern Jack. Yeah, I have a PhD in ancient philosophy. I specifically wrote a thesis and then a book on Stoicism, so that's kind of later in the timeline we'll be talking about today.
Speaker 3:I guess I was just pulled into the classical world, partly by chance. I happened to go to one of the few universities in America where every student is required to read the classics of ancient Greek and Latin literature, and after a year of that I wanted to know more. So I tried to take some ancient Greek and then, when I learned more about the language itself, I got even more sucked in, and that allowed me to understand some of these texts better. And, long story short, I got pulled away from physics which is what I wanted to do originally into the classics, and I've been studying the classics ever since, and since the end of grad school I've been podcasting to share my you know like much like you do to share my love of the ancient world with a popular audience and try to, you know, help spread this amazing knowledge with the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting to see how different people get involved in the ancient world. Lots of different paths, but I think one of the common things I find is a lot of people will start reading classic texts and then just get sucked in and want to know more, find out more, delve deeper, and that was kind of my journey as well, except I started with Herodotus and I just peaked my interest from the get go. Now you said you're known as Lantan Jack, and see that on Twitter and on your website. Why, what Lantan Jack? Could you give us the story behind that?
Speaker 3:It's kind of a long story but I'll give a very brief summary of it, which is that I well, during grad school I kind of I had a crisis where I wanted to find my path in life, or be sure that I was in the right path, and I kind of took some time off at the recommendation of my advisor and I went on a on a very long hitchhiking trip and I was also well, people said I should, I should start blogging about my, my travels and my adventures. So I started to blog and Lantan Jack was the kind of moniker I picked for myself. It's got several meanings that occurred to me at the time. I mean, one is the obvious play on no Jack O'Lantern.
Speaker 3:The idea of carrying a lantern is is a very common archetypal image in in philosophy and wisdom traditions. Right, like you're kind of searching for answers and in particular I like the story of Diogenes the cynic, who was the kind of hobo philosopher and at the time I was a kind of hobo hitchhiker and Diogenes would. He was a kind of a performance artist and one of the provocative things he used to do is he used to walk around the central Agora of Athens with a lantern in the middle of the day under the blazing sun, like he was looking for something you know, amidst the crowd of people and they would say Diogenes, what, what on earth are you doing with lantern?
Speaker 3:Like the sun is out? And he would say I'm looking for a human being Now that you might be thinking, wait, what does that mean? Well, that's kind of the point. He wanted to kind of shock people. It makes more sense in Greek, where the word anthropos can. It can as a wide range of meanings. It's often translated as I'm looking for an honest human being, because the English is kind of awkward, but the way I saw it, I saw myself as looking for interesting human beings. I wanted to kind of find my path in life by seeing what interesting people were doing, and so I was. I saw myself as kind of, you know, in the footsteps of Diogenes, looking for interesting examples of how to live one's life.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was wondering if it had something to do with you know, lantern light search, search for something, search for meaning or search. Yeah, yeah, interesting, all right, yeah. So, jack, you mentioned obviously you're a podcaster as well, and I'm aware of your show, ancient Greece Declassified, and it seems you have, I guess, somewhat of a similar objective with your show, trying to make the ancient world accessible to everyone and present the history and the ideas. Could you tell us what you do in your podcast, what sort of focus you have?
Speaker 3:Well, when I started, when I decided to start a podcast exploring the ancient Greek world I was I thought that trying to cast through Ancient Greece would be beyond my capabilities, just because, like, how do you present this material? I mean, I mean, I take off my hat to you for doing it the way you do it, but I wasn't sure how to organize all of Ancient Greek history in a kind of narrative framework. That is very easy to do with Rome, it's with Rome you have one city becomes one empire, and the Roman historians themselves crafted their history to follow like a linear story arc. With the Greeks we don't have that. We have hundreds of independent city states each doing their own crazy little thing. So I decided, instead of doing that, I thought what can I offer?
Speaker 3:And what I could offer is I knew a lot of really good scholars because I had spent so much time in academia. So I figured, okay, I'm just going to explore individual interesting topics with the best scholars, and that would be a way that I wouldn't have to follow any timeline and I could kind of do any interesting thing that came up. I could invite somebody on the show and discuss that. So I basically had interviews with leading scholars in the field, exploring various topics that were pertinent to our time and eventually, to the delight of some listeners and to the chagrin of other listeners, I kind of got drawn more to my own interest, which is ancient philosophy. So the past like 10 episodes are all about philosophy and some people say, bring back the history, which I will do. But yeah, it's a kind of potpourri of different topics and approaches and questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can sympathize a great deal with when trying to talk about ancient Greece. Where do you start? How do you present this? I think before I started the show I went through much of the same sort of problems how do I even start? How do I begin this? How am I going to unfold? And in the end I just picked a point and dove in and tried to make it work from there. And you are right, it's trying to, I guess when you try, I think I've focused mainly on Athens and Sparta for the main timeline, but then I often do some digressions where I'll then spend a few episodes trying to catch up some areas back to that same sort of point in time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think that is the best way to do it, because our main you have to talk about what we know, and Athens and Sparta are our main areas of knowledge, basically. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So very interesting to learn a bit about you and your show, but perhaps we should get into some philosophy and I think the best place to start is building some context to, I guess, the world that philosophy would begin in and perhaps give us a bit of an overview of how the world that Greek philosophy would arise in, because I understand it wouldn't exactly first show up on the Greek mainland.
Speaker 3:Right, and this is the million dollar question, right, like why did philosophy emerge in Greece at the time it did and where it did? And before I take a crack at answering this question, I just want to preface it by saying you ask five scholars, you're going to get five different answers. These are very hotly debated topics. I have my own views that are the result of many years of thinking and reading about this, but there is by no means any unanimous view of this. So the way I see this is that the emergence of philosophy in Greece is integrally related to the political and geographic situation and, as I think you covered earlier on in your podcast, the archaic. So, after the Bronze Age collapse, what we think of as the Dark Ages, and then the archaic period in ancient Greece, sees this huge explosion of a particular type of political community that did not exist in the Bronze Age and would never exist in such numbers again, and that's the polis, or the city state or, as Paul Cartlett just calls it, the citizen state. Basically, it's usually a coastal settlement. You have a harbor, you have a city, you have walls that protect the city and then you have an area around the city that includes farmland, but in the event of a siege you can retreat behind the walls, and as long as you have good walls and you have access to the sea, you'll be okay. Eventually, with the rise of siege engines and siege technology in the time of the Macedonian conquests, it no longer becomes possible to have a polis that can maintain its independence. And then in the Bronze Age it wasn't possible. It apparently was not possible to have such city states because of the economic conditions then, which we don't need to get into right now. But the point is that during this first millennium BC, let's say from 900 till 100 BC, that's this unique kind of Goldilocks moment in history where you could copy paste this polis template indefinitely. And so we get 1,500 such polis all around the Mediterranean coast and the Black Sea coast.
Speaker 3:And so, as scholars have long recognized, the sea is integral to the emergence of Greek philosophy.
Speaker 3:The sea is a connector of people and ideas and cultures, and we see philosophy emerge in the eastern part of the Mediterranean, at the interface between the new emerging Greek world and the older, much larger empires of the East, like Lydia, then Persia, egypt in the south, syria in the southeast.
Speaker 3:So this vibrant laboratory of new social experiments in where you have these thousands of polis each trying to come up with a political system that works, that's citizen based. So, instead of having kings, you have citizens that need social technologies that will enable them to make decisions together. That involves building assembly spaces where they can collect and be heard. It involves building theaters where they can exchange ideas, and it involves developing rhetoric so that you can convince people what is the right thing to do. It involves codifying logic so that you can actually decide what's a good idea, what's a bad idea. All these are social technologies that enable the citizen-centered political world of the Greeks. And then having access to the sea and to the ideas of the East is another crucial factor, and that's the kind of caudron that cooks up this new thing called Greek philosophy.
Speaker 2:And do you think? Obviously, after the Bronze Age there was the collapse in the Iron Age, or what some people call the Dark Ages, and it appears the Greek colonies that were set up on the Anatolian coast seem to have gone through a period of recovery before the Greek mainland, and is that perhaps why we see some of the ideas behind? Well, anyway, what's recorded in history, the ideas developed there first. Would that be a major player into why this would take place?
Speaker 3:I think that's right. I think that the city-states in the Eastern and Geyan were much more wealthy, actually, and economically vibrant than the Greek mainland earlier on, and so it stands to reason that that would be the center of activity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in my own mind, when you think about this, you kind of attach when you've got more success, more wealth, then it starts to develop. Certain people have more time to engage in other forms of activities that aren't just trying to keep the community alive, and perhaps that's where some of these ideas develop and they start to shift away from using the divine to explain everything that takes place in their communities.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, absolutely, and in fact, the current understanding is that money in the sense of, like gold and silver coins, was invented around this time in Anatolia and along the Greek city-states of that coast. So, for example, you know, miletus and Lesbos and Ephesus are places where you start to see the first proliferation of money, which is another indication that there's a lot of new things happening. There's a lot of wealth that can fund different activities, there's a lot of change going on, and so you have people who have time to devote to philosophy, and then you have these radical changes that call for new ways of thinking, and that seems to be the kind of magic formula.
Speaker 2:Yes, and it's very interesting. And obviously, as that develops and the Greek mainland then catches back up, these ideas start to filter back across the Aegean, like you're talking about, coastal areas are very connected. Trade and trade routes would see that these ideas would filter back.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's only when Athens I mean before Athens became an economic powerhouse, mainland Greece was not that wealthy and arguably that's why it couldn't fund all this artistic activity. But when, when Athens becomes the economic hub and all the people from all the different islands start coming to Athens because that's where the jobs are much like people from all over the world used to go to New York, now they all go to Dubai, right. If you're like an architect and you want to build something in Germany, well, there's not that much to build now, but there's tons of money in funding in Dubai, so you go to Dubai, right. And it was really when Athens became the economic hub and actually conquered a lot of the territories in the East that it became the center of intellectual activity. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And obviously I think obviously philosophy did was President Athens beforehand, but I guess Socrates becomes one of the most famous sort of points in Athens with philosophy. But before we get to him, could we maybe delve a bit into some of the philosophers that were developing in the East and some of the ideas that they were saying to put forward and delve into?
Speaker 3:Sure. So the label that we use today is the pre-Socratic philosophers, which is, of course, a modern label. These thinkers, of course, did not know that there would ever be somebody named Socrates, and they didn't think of themselves as being the preparation for something else. They thought of themselves as being cutting edge new revolutionary thinkers right, which they were at the time. There's a big diversity of thought among the pre-Socratics, but there are some common revolutionary ideas that I guess motivate a lot of them. One is that there is a rash that everything has a rational explanation, or at least that we should strive, when we want to understand something, which is strive for a rational explanation as opposed to a religious or mythical explanation. Another common principle among most of them is that it was what we call the principle of sufficient reason, that nothing happens out of nothing, or that there has to be a cause for something to happen, or that everything has a cause, and that kind of plays into the other thing, that if everything has a cause and the human mind is capable of understanding causality and how one thing leads to another, then it stands to reason that we should be able to understand the causes of things and we should therefore be able to build rational explanations of why things happen the way they do.
Speaker 3:Then you get to the differences between these thinkers, and there's too many to enumerate right now, but I think they usually fall within two main camps.
Speaker 3:On the one hand we have the natural philosophers, the Fusikoi, in ancient Greek, and they are largely centered on the coast of what's now Turkey, so, like Miletus, is a big hub there, and they thought that they were very focused on the material world and they thought that the material world and the material of the world is the first place to look for causes.
Speaker 3:You want to understand the causes of things, you look at what makes up those things, and the other camp, the other big camp, is what we might call the Italian school, which is not one school, includes the Pythagoreans, and, by the way, pythagoras was from the east but he emigrated to southern Italy and then the Pythagoreans were centered in southern Italy for the next many, many centuries.
Speaker 3:You also have the Eliatics in southern Italy, based in the city state of Elea, and they are not so much concerned with the material world and since they think that a lot of the important causes of things are not material. So, for example, the Pythagoreans are really interested in math, and math is about things that are not material, but numbers. While not material, they are very real, in a sense at least according to the Pythagoreans and mathematics offers explanations about how the world functions, which again are not material. For example, music, the musical harmony, can be explained through mathematics. They're also more concerned about the soul, which again they see as immaterial, than are the natural philosophers in the east, so ideas like reincarnation play a role in their philosophies. So those are the kind of two camps.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I guess they both have the same goal in trying to rationalize the world beyond the divine. And what was, I guess, the common way of thinking before that? And is it fair to say that most of these philosophers that developed were from, I guess, a noble class or had some sort of wealth that enabled them to follow this path?
Speaker 3:I don't know. I mean, that's what they teach us. So the way that ancient philosophy has been presented and taught for a long time now is that, yeah, back then it was just aristocrats that had the leisure to do this kind of stuff. I think that undoubtedly is true to some extent, as it is true today. The question is, is it more true? Was it more true than it is now?
Speaker 3:And most people will say, yes, I'm a little bit of an iconoclast here. I mean, we don't really know that much about the aristocratic thinkers in terms of their bio, but there are famous examples of later philosophers that were poor, you know, like Diogenes the Seneca was. He lived in a barrel or lived in a big clay vessel. He was basically a homeless person. And the way that the Hanfis, the Stoic, used to dig trenches during the day to make enough money to then study philosophy at night. So I would say that, yes, philosophy always has been an elite pastime or discipline, whatever you want to call it. I think that back then, as today, there were people that were of very modest means who made their very important, indelible mark in that field.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's always, generally, an exception to the rule isn't there? And obviously if they become influential, then we hear about them, and potentially that's how they could, I guess, gain wealth as well. So what came first? You know, were they already rich and able to engage in these ideas, or were they from modest backgrounds and their impact in philosophy allowed them to, I guess, for less of a better word, you know, sort of rise up through the ranks of the classes or whatever else? Yeah, interesting, well, I guess. Yeah, so we've got a few few ideas that were developing early on, and then, as we spoke about, we have Socrates, who would develop in Athens, and so perhaps we could get a bit of a just a quick bio on who Socrates was, and then perhaps we can then delve into some of these ideas.
Speaker 3:Who Socrates was. He was an Athenian who grew up right after the Persian Wars, which is, I think, important information, because Athens was completely destroyed by the Persians and yet their population survived and then won the war, which, when you see this happen in history, like you know, whether it's Moscow after Napoleon or Athens after the Persians when they, when a people, win a war, but their entire infrastructure is destroyed, that actually creates a huge amount of of creativity is unleashed because you have to rebuild everything. You have to rebuild your temples, your houses, your schools, your banks, your shipyards, your vehicles, right. So imagine having to imagine having the positive morale of a victory combined with the need to build everything again. Right. That's the environment that Socrates grows up in. His father seems to have been an artisan he lived in, I think he was born in, the Kieramecos, which is the ceramics kind of neighborhood in Athens, which traditionally was a kind of dirty suburb where all the smoke from the kilns would was unpleasant to people. But, as often happens, you know how, like the artists or art artisan's neighborhood of a city often becomes like the trendy neighborhood over time. That kind of happened in Athens, so it became like a hipster neighborhood, let's say, if you want to be a bit anachronistic.
Speaker 3:And Socrates, according to the portrayals that we have was, was not a wealthy man. He walked around in simple clothes, barefoot, and devoted his life to philosophy. Some of the newer revisionist academic takes are that actually he was more wealthy than then, then played over Xenophon, wanted in readers to believe. So this goes back to your question about you know how elite were these people? His main contribution to ethics, according to Cicero, he made philosophy lower her gaze upon the human realm. So the the idea is that before Socrates, the philosophers were thinking about what is the cosmos made of? You know what's the material makeup of the world around us, where does the soul go after it dies? And you know what's what causes the motion of the heavenly bodies? And Socrates said I don't know. Lower your gaze to the human realm and know thyself. First and foremost, know what what a human is, know what a human community is, and that's the kind of area that you focus on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and he was always, I guess, in more casual circles. You always find his famous for always asking why and would infuriate people with that constant, I guess, rebuttal or question Exactly, and one of the.
Speaker 3:You know we have different accounts of Socrates. Plato and Xenophon are the most famous. Those are the ones that survived. But in antiquity there were at least 10 other people who wrote Socratic dialogue, so he became a kind of like fan fiction hero, as it were, and a lot of these accounts are not really historical. Like Plato, socrates is not the historical Socrates. Xenophon Socrates is not the historical Socrates. They all contain a lot of the truth, but also some embellishments. But one thing that seems to be common to all the portrayals is that Socrates was obsessed with definitions. So that's another thing that he introduces into ethical debates. He says you want to have a debate about what justice is or what friendship is or what the good life is. Well, let's start with definitions. How do you define a friend? How do you define courage? If we can't agree on those things, we're never going to make progress. Yep.
Speaker 2:So were these the, I guess, fundamental ideas behind Socrates and what he was trying to get at.
Speaker 3:Yeah, according to what we can see from Plato and Xenophon's accounts of Socrates, he went around asking the questions that most Greeks cared about, like what is courage? You know, what is justice? What is a good form of government? These were the central questions of any, you know, democratic, citizen based community right. So he went around asking the hot questions of the day, but he forced people to discuss those questions in ways that were unfamiliar to them by insisting on definitions, insisting on logical argumentation, on refuting Right. One of the things that he would do is he would try to refute different positions, because the idea was there are many. You can come up with 10 explanations for you know why. You know why democracy is a good form of government or why it's a bad form of government. But the key is to try to refute all those explanations, and only if something stands the test that it's hard to refute, it's impossible to refute, then that is kind of that qualifies as a working model going forward.
Speaker 2:So I guess you're trying to fill all the holes in your argument to be able to arrive at a point where you can talk. What is, I guess I'm saying in quotation marks, the truth? Yeah, but obviously this must have been, I guess, very new to a very new way of thinking in Athens, since Socrates would be put on trial and controversial in what he was teaching to the young people of Athens.
Speaker 3:Let's not get into like why he was put on trial, because that's like a huge debate. You know, and a lot of people think it was basically who he was friends with you know more than what he was teaching. So I mean, you know he was close buddies with several of the 30 tyrants. You know the Aligarque regime that murdered many Athenians. So you know that's like a can of worms. You know, but?
Speaker 3:but it's definitely safe to say that his teaching or style of conversation did make people uncomfortable, because it was unusual, it was different and it had the you know the. He had the uncanny ability to show people that they don't really know what they think they know, which he thought was the key to philosophy. The key to philosophy, to pursuing wisdom, to loving wisdom, is to be happy when you realize you didn't know something, because that's the beginning of actually finding the truth about the matter. Yep.
Speaker 2:And obviously he was quite influential. I mean, his legacy comes all the way down to us today as well. But so how would his approach to philosophy influence later philosophers and how they would approach their own inquiry?
Speaker 3:Oh, it was a huge influence. I mean, you know, people say that all the philosophy is consistent footnotes to Plato. But you could, you could say that the method of philosophy is already there in in Socrates. I mean the, the idea that constructive dialogue and debate combined with an attention to definitions, the idea that that is the recipe for how you do philosophy. I mean, that hasn't changed, that's still how people teach philosophy in universities today. So Plato and and Aristotle greatly refined the toolkit of how to have a constructive conversation, which they call dialectic. By the way, dialectic is the art of proper, philosophically productive and constructive conversation. So Plato, you know, expanded that toolkit. Aristotle expanded that toolkit. But the basic premise there, that we can talk to each other, debate each other, test our definitions, refute each other's arguments, and that that's going to lead to the truth, that that's Socrates laid that out and that's still how people do philosophy today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. Well, so we've got Socrates, and I was going to point out here. We're going to sort of go through a few different figures and ideas and I guess it's fair to say we're just touching the surface. This is designed as more of a general introduction, just so everyone is listening. It may sound like we're perhaps jumping through these people quite quickly, but in reality we could devote an entire episode to just talking about Socrates and his influence on thought. We're doing our best to try and give a, I guess, an encompassing survey of Greek philosophy, but yeah, obviously the next one of our next most famous philosophers in Athens would be. You've already mentioned Plato, and he would, I guess, be the one of the main reasons that we know about Socrates as well and his ideas. Could you just give us a bit of a brief rundown on who Plato was, and then we'll get stuck into what he was trying to tell us?
Speaker 3:Yeah, plato was the kind of shining protege of Socrates. He was his most famous disciple. He was much more aristocratic. So, to go again back to this point, how elite was ancient philosophy the best? Well, I'm showing my own cards here.
Speaker 3:My personal favorite ancient philosopher, plato, did happen to be a very wealthy guy. He was born into an extremely prominent family in Athens. He was distantly related to Solon, I believe, and to various other important figures in the history of Athens. All this is to say that he would have had the best education available at the time, and he was actually, according to his own account in what's called the Seventh Letter, he was invited by his elite relatives to join the world of politics. Unfortunately, this happened during the Third Etyrinus, a brutal regime installed by the Spartans after the Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War.
Speaker 3:According to this actually new biography of Plato that I'm reading by Robin Waterfield, plato was probably too young to join the Third Etyrinus when they were being brutal. It's possible that just out of sheer luck, he was too young to join them so he didn't get sucked into that world, and then he saw the brutality of the regime and by the time he came of age and was actually qualified to enter the world of politics. He had become so disillusioned by politics, having seen all the crimes that people that he thought relatives had committed, that he decided to do philosophy instead or to not do politics. This is one of the central well, not central this is an important point that comes up in the Republic that most people that have a genuine talent for philosophy are kind of disillusioned by politics, and so they seek refuge from the public sphere in philosophy. So I think an important point is that at some point he meets Socrates.
Speaker 3:We don't know exactly when, and according to some accounts he wanted to be a tragedian, so he wanted to write theater plays, and when he met Socrates he burnt all of his rough drafts because he thought none of this is real knowledge. Socrates is the real deal. I'm going to become his disciple and that's an important story, because he seems to really have been a talented writer and a talented musician, and that's something that is important in understanding his philosophical work, because he's not just a great philosopher, he's an incredible writer. Whenever professors today try to teach just Athenian style, like what is the kind of most elegant way to write ancient Greek, plato is always the golden example, so he's kind of like the best writer and the best philosopher, and someone with really elegant poetic sensibilities as well, all in one person. So of all the disciples of Socrates, you can see why his writings were the best sellers, let's say. And so he's come down to us as the main writer of Socratic dialogues.
Speaker 2:And, as you said, he presents a lot of his ideas in dialogue form, where he has people having conversations and whatnot. What would be the main themes and concepts that would come out of these dialogues and how do they reflect his beliefs?
Speaker 3:Well, most scholars divide his works into three periods the early dialogues, the middle dialogues and the late dialogues. And the early dialogues are probably closest in substance to the actual conversations that Socrates was having. So they ask the hot topics of the day like what is friendship, what is justice, what is virtue, all that kind of stuff. And what's important in the early dialogues is not so much the answers to those questions but the method he's trying to lay down. He's trying to preserve the contribution of Socrates. How do we have these conversations in ways that allow us to make progress towards the truth? And also he showcases how this type of questioning tends to piss people off. Because if you're not used to this and you start talking to Socrates and then he shows that you don't know what you're talking about, your first reaction is to be angry. Right. But part of the point of these dialogues is to say look, don't be angry. This is actually the way that we do philosophy. We disprove each other's arguments, right? Then the middle period is more of a doctrine building period. So we get longer dialogues, most famously the Republic, and there it's not just about the Socratic questioning which may or may not lead to real answers. There we actually get answers In the Republic. We get a definition of justice, we get a prescription for an ideal society, we get a theory of the soul and the structure of the soul right, we get real doctrines.
Speaker 3:And then in the late dialogues interestingly if Socrates had lowered the gaze of philosophy onto the human realm in the late dialogues Plato lifts that gaze back up to the cosmos and we get some cosmological investigations and theorizing. So, like the Tamaeus famously, is a cosmological work. It tries to explain how the universe came to be the way it is. But even when Plato goes back to the kind of tradition of the natural philosophers of the you know, the pre-Socratic period, he never loses sight of the human realm and the relevance to human affairs. So for him, the reason why you should want to know about the universe and how it works is because the human soul, being an integral part of the universe, is happiest when it is in harmony with the universe. So in order to align yourself with the natural order and to not waste time in life fighting against the inevitable and against things that are natural, you should understand what nature actually is and then live accordingly so that you're in harmony with how the world actually works.
Speaker 2:And I guess I just want to touch on one, I guess idea that comes from him and I guess is maybe one of his most famous into sort of general circles and that's his allegory of the cave. Could you give us a bit of? We'll discuss that allegory and its significance in his philosophy.
Speaker 3:Well here we could do a whole podcast about this. I mean, this is the most famous and possibly the most rich and multifaceted allegory in the history of Western philosophy. But the basic idea is that Plato wants he wants you to realize that there's more to the world than the physical world and that real knowledge actually does not involve the physical world. So remember how we talked about the two basic schools of pre-Socratic philosophy you have the naturalists or the natural philosophers that were interested in material causes, and then you had the Italian schools that were interested in like numbers and immaterial causes. Plato is arguably a synthesizer of those two. He wants to find a place for both of those types of inquiries, but perhaps he has a slight preference for the Italian style, and I think the reason is that he correctly, I think concluded that what we think of as scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge, is never 100% accurate. And this is not like controversial. I mean even a scientist. Today you talk to a physicist and they'll say, yeah, like, our theories are the best that we have right now, but there was a time when Newtonian physics was the best physics and now it's been superseded by Einstein's relativity and there might be a time when we have a new theory that will supplant relativity and quantum mechanics. So we're always reevaluating and improving our theories, and I think Plato saw that, even though they didn't have the same science back then. But he saw that empirical knowledge is there's always a margin of error. There's always a chance that you'll discover new data that will change your theory, whereas mathematical knowledge is perfect. There will never happen that the Pythagorean theorem ceases to be true. It's proved and that's the end of the story. And so I think he was really profoundly impressed by the Pythagoreans and the other Italian philosophers into thinking, wow, like there actually is 100% certain knowledge, but it's just not in the material realm. Now he then took that further and said well, what if all true knowledge is in this immaterial space? Right, the realm of the forms, that we get to the theory of the forms. What if? What if the true nature of justice is a form which only the minds I can see after many, many years of study, but it's not actually instantiated by any physical person or community? Right, like what if there's no such thing as a perfectly just or perfectly beautiful or perfectly harmonious city person or, you know, musical song, but there is such a thing as true justice and true beauty and true harmony, which can only be grasped by the mind, in the way that the mind can grasp mathematical principles. That's a kind of a proposal he makes. Okay, it's a theory. He's never 100% committed to this. Okay, he always, like in the dialogue called priminities, he shows counterarguments to this. So he's always open to the fact that this could be wrong. But he also wants to explore what it would mean if it's true. So the cave analogy tries to do that. So the cave analogy is what I would call an intuition pump.
Speaker 3:This is a term modern philosophers use. It's a metaphor or an analogy that helps you imagine, or helps you start to think, what that would mean, like if there was a realm of forms. And Plato says you know, we can all understand how, if you lived in a cave your whole life and you lived under artificial light, like a burning fire, and all you could see were shadows on the wall. No, I'm not going to get into the details here, but basically he asks you to imagine that you're kind of a prisoner in a cave, or chain or shackled, and you see the back end of the cave and you see basically shadows on the wall. Okay, and you see shadows of objects that exist in the real world, but they're not the real objects themselves, they're just shadows. Right? And if you were to be freed from your bondage and you turned around and you saw the objects in front of the fire that were casting the shadows on the wall, you realize? Well, at first you would think, you know, your eyes would be in pain from the very bright light and those more real objects would look less clear to you than the shadows on the wall. So you would actually think that those things are, are less real than the shadows, right? But we who are listening to this story know that actually the shadows are like the least real thing. The objects being held in front of the fire are a bit more real, but they're not that real either. And then the real stuff is like outside of the cave, right, if you were to actually emerge from the cave and see actual trees and actual animals and other people under the bright light of the sun, that's the kind of the highest level of reality in the material world.
Speaker 3:Okay, and he says think of like. Try to transpose that onto how your mind works. Imagine that the things that you think you know are actually shadows. They're like shadows. They're imperfect reflections of something else, okay, something more real that you don't have immediate access to. That he says.
Speaker 3:That might be how knowledge works. It might be that every time we see something beautiful, like a beautiful Apple, or a beautiful person, or a beautiful statue, or a beautiful house, a beautiful tree, a beautiful rock none of these things are the same in any real way, right, but but we recognize something in common to all those things. So what if they all kind of have a reflection of something that is beauty itself? And the fact that we recognize these reflections of beauty means that we actually have some kind of mental access to beauty itself, and that's the form of beauty. Now, again, it's. The theory of forms is a huge topic. The allegory of the cave is a huge topic, but I think that's the basic idea that it's meant to help you imagine why Plato or the some of the you know Italian philosophers, italian Greek philosophers, think that there's real objects of knowledge that are not material, but they're more perfect than our supposed knowledge of material things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I think, and obviously you see the cave allegory is thrown about on social media and that quite a bit where you know you are still left wondering what does this really mean? But I think you've done a good job in helping everyone break down what they're actually doing, right when they see these images online now. And obviously, like you say, you can do a whole episode around this. But I think what you've done is help introduce people to the main concepts and the ideas that it's presenting.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks, I mean, the thing is that there's many levels to the to the analogy. I mean what? One of the reasons it's such a good analogy is that it has a epistemological dimension. It's also like a knowledge based dimension. It has a political dimension because you know what happens to the guy who tries to free the people imprisoned in the cave and bring them to the light. Well, that guy becomes the target of the people that run the cave, right? So that's kind of an explanation for why Socrates was killed because he tried to bring people to the light and, you know, pissed off the authorities of knowledge in that society. There's a political dimension, there's a epistemological dimension, there's an ethical dimension. Right, there's many, many ways to interpret this analogy, but I think thinking about the theory of knowledge is the starting point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very good, and perhaps down the road, maybe we could have another chat one day where we could just focus on this allegory, since it is very fascinating, all right, so we nearly risk falling down a deep rabbit warren then. But I think we'll move on to Aristotle and just give it a different idea of Aristotle was, and then I guess we'll do much the same and look at some of the ideas that he would put forward.
Speaker 3:Well, aristotle was from the north of Greece, from a city state called Staghira, which is in the broader region of Macedonia, hence his connection to the court of Macedon. And he was the son of a doctor, and I think that that's important in understanding his philosophy because, in the same way that Plato was very much we didn't talk about this, but I think Plato was a mathematician at heart and all of his philosophy is done in the way that a mathematician looks at the world, whereas Aristotle is a doctor at heart and even though he's not a doctor, okay, but like son of a doctor, grew up thinking, grew up exposed to medicine and how doctors think of the world, and so everything is done through the approach of a doctor, like diagnose things right. Here are the various symptoms or signs of this and here are the various, in the same way that a doctor categorizes diseases and identify symptoms and causes. Like you can see that way of thinking in.
Speaker 3:Aristotle. At some point he comes to Athens, I think in his early 20s probably, he had heard that, you know, plato was a great philosopher and that Plato was looking for young talent. Plato actually, you know, traveled around quite a bit trying to recruit the best minds of the day to come to his Academy which he had founded, and to engage in all kinds of philosophical investigations. So Aristotle is part of that brain drain, let's say, and he spends 20 years in the Academy, so deeply, deeply influenced by Plato. But eventually Plato dies and does not appoint Aristotle as the successor, like as the new head of the Academy, which has baffled many people in history, like why wouldn't he choose his best student to run the Academy? Well, I think there's a lot of reasons. First of all, aristotle was not a citizen of Athens, so maybe he wasn't like, maybe there were legal obstacles for him to to be the next head of the Academy. Also, maybe Plato wanted Aristotle to do his own, his own thing. You know, like a, I think a good teacher would not want his best student to just follow his footsteps. He would want his best student to go do something even better, right? So it's possible that Plato just picked his nephew Spusippus, who maybe for financial and legal reasons, was best suited to run the Academy. Maybe, you know, plato thought OK, this guy is going to continue the Academy in its most you know, true form, and Aristotle will never be content with running somebody else's show, so he should go off and, you know, create his own thing, which he did, right. So Aristotle then leaves Athens. He spends quite a bit of time, you know many years, traveling. He spends part of that time in the court of Macedon tutoring Alexander famously, probably because his father had connections and possibly because, you know, philip had just heard that he was the best among the new generation of philosophers. He also spends quite a few, well, several years, maybe two or three years, on the island of Lesbos Doing biological investigations, and so he's often credited as being the inventor of modern science, because he spent like two years knee deep in water collecting all kinds of marine life. And the thing about Lesbos is that it has amazing natural harbors and a lot of shallow water, so tons of diversity of life all kinds of shellfish, octopus, squid, shrimp, fish, and then you know, all kinds of terrestrial animals like snails and you know, waterfowl, like just a huge diversity of life can be found on this island. And so he spent a few years studying all of this, dissecting, categorizing, you know, seeing what parts of these, what part of a snail does what you know and why. What are the functions of the various parts of the animals, how do you categorize different animals, how do you classify them under species and related species, genera, etc. So really I mean huge, huge step forward in the history of science.
Speaker 3:And then he comes back to Athens and he found his own school called the, the Lyceum or the peripatos, which just means the walk. It's possible that he just lectured by walking with his students, because he didn't have much property, at the beginning at least. And I guess, well, besides the biological work, which is about half of the surviving corpus, the other huge thing that he did which made him famous in the Middle Ages is he codified all of logic, what we call like, I guess, first order logic. But he, he studied the building blocks of arguments and he laid them all out and classified them and said, okay, these are like all of the possible types of arguments you can make and these are the all the types of valid arguments and these are the types of refutations and and here's how these you know arguments actually work and how they're built structurally.
Speaker 3:And he wrote five books on logic, which were then compiled into like one megabook called the organon, which means like the instrument, the instrument for philosophy. And then, throughout the Middle Ages, every wannabe philosopher had to learn this organon, because that was the starting. That was like the, the, the, the ultimate toolkit we talked about earlier. How Plato was, you know, expanding the toolkit of Socrates? Well, arguably, the, the perfection of the ancient Greek philosophical toolkit, is Aristotle's organon and that is what earned him the title the philosopher for most of the Middle Ages.
Speaker 2:I just want to pick out one sort of key, I guess, concept that he does, that Aristotle is famous for, and that's virtue ethics. Could you just give us a bit of a explain what virtue ethics is and what he's doing with that?
Speaker 3:Well, virtue ethics is actually a modern term and I'm not sure it distinguishes Aristotle so much as it distinguishes ancient Greek philosophy in general from modern philosophy. And the simplest way I've heard this explained was from my professor of undergrad philosophy, katya Fokht, who's a great scholar of ancient Greek philosophy. She said ancient philosophy, almost all of ancient philosophy, or almost all of ancient ethics, rather, was centered around the central question how can I be happy? Or perhaps how can I have a meaningful life? Because the Greek word eudaimonia is not really just happy, it's more of like you know, a fulfilled, flourishing, meaningful existence. Okay, so you have this eudaimonic, or flourishing, fulfilling, meaningful life, whereas modern ethics and by modern I mean like the past 1000 years revolves around the central question what should I do or what must I do? And so in recent decades there's been a movement I mean it's quite small but it's growing of scholars who think you know what the ancient Greek approach was better. We should go back to asking how can I have a flourishing, meaningful existence, instead of asking what should I do or what must I do. And Aristotle has been like the kind of key foundation of that new movement of virtue ethics, but he wasn't the only virtue ethicist, basically, is what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:And then just final point there, I mean you might hear this and say, well, that sounds kind of immoral, you know, like if you're just thinking about your own happiness instead of what you should do. It sounds like you're prioritizing your own egoistic aspirations as opposed to the good of other people, right, the good of society. But these you know academics today who espouse virtue ethics say no, that's not actually. That's not true, because it's not an egoistic conception of happiness. The idea of Eudaimonia is predicated on the idea of a flourishing community. This is actually, this is probably the central tenant of the Republic by Plato is that only in a flourishing and just and happy society can the individual reach the greatest flourishing. And so you don't lose the altruism and and concern for others when you shift towards a more virtue ethics approach. It's just a different way of approaching it and some people today again think that's a better way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I've read a little bit into it. I mean, again, I'm learning a lot from from our talk today, because it's not something I've dealt too deeply into. But I think from my understanding was on. This concept I saw explained as you had work, rest and leisure, and it was all about trying to reduce work and rest and devoting oneself to leisure. But leisure was described not so much. I guess how we would look at it today, where you're looking to fulfill your, your own desires and and whatnot, but it was engaging in something that was fulfilling, that would progress and in turn then give you happiness.
Speaker 3:Right, I mean, I have to see who who wrote that you just talked about. I mean, interestingly, the term school, which we associate with work and not with leisure, comes from the Greek word, which does mean leisure. So school or academic activity was originally conceived as what you do when you have time off of work real work, right. And both Plato and Aristotle thought that the Greeks, in general, the Greek philosophers, thought that, yes, having leisure was very, very crucial. They didn't think that you should only have leisure, right, like you have to be. You have to be a productive member of society to appreciate leisure, right, you can't just be like what do you call like a freeloader? What's the term for somebody who just lives off of the work of others, you know?
Speaker 3:But they thought that that business is the highest activity for a man. Right, like you should. You shouldn't be wasting your time in philosophy. You should be managing your 10 villas and your massive agricultural estates and your commercial activities and your politics, right? That's the highest level of activity, and if you're caught doing philosophy, that's kind of embarrassing.
Speaker 3:Right and for for Plato and Aristotle and and then, the Hellenistic philosophers know like having having time that you carve out or you devote yourself to philosophical contemplation is like the pinnacle of what humans are actually meant to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it brings into that question is gaining wealth and property and all that actually going to lead to true happiness?
Speaker 3:And I guess this is something. Yeah, the answer is unanimously no on the front from the ancient Greek philosophers.
Speaker 2:And I mean we could discuss many of these ideas for much longer, but I think we'll move on to some of the Hellenistic schools. So this is the period after, I guess, the death of Alexander the great, and how would, what sort of schools would develop after, during, during this Hellenistic period?
Speaker 3:So, interestingly, aristotle dies within a year of Alexander, and so all of a sudden, the, the conqueror of the known world, and the kind of last great representative of classical philosophy, are gone, and so suddenly the world looks very different, because the polis is no longer a viable, independent, sovereign unit. You have these mega kingdoms that are the kind of the remnants of Alexander's conquest, right Like the empire breaks up into these huge kingdoms, you now have siege technology, so having a polis with a wall is no longer a viable option, and so most Greeks are no longer citizens of a polity in which they can rise and debate and, you know, speak in the assembly, but are rather subjects of larger states that where this the decisions are made for them. Many, many miles away from where they are, there's a king on a throne somewhere whom they'll probably never see, etc. And so the old type of ethics that Aristotle and Plato had created, which was all about the citizen, right, how can a citizen in a small polis, where the citizen has a voice, achieve Eudaimonia? That seemed to lose its relevance, and so it's not surprising, in hindsight, of course, that that new schools crop top immediately.
Speaker 3:One of them was the Stoics, or Stoicism, and the other was the Epicureans, and then later you have the skeptics. I mean, they all have a lot of similarities, right? They're all trying to trying to offer a recipe for a meaningful existence in a large, seemingly chaotic world. Okay, so in terms of like the practical advice, like if you were to ask an Epicurean or a Stoic or a skeptic for practical advice on some everyday thing, you'd probably get pretty similar advice, you know they would. They all recognize the same virtues. They all said you know, just follow nature. But they differed on some key doctrinal points. So, for example, the Epicureans thought that the universe is infinite and it's not guided by any God or deity. Okay, so they had a. Their conception was quite similar to the modern scientific view that the universe is this vast space of chaotic things happening, and it just so happens that on earth things came together in a way that allowed a complex life to form. But way out there might not be different, but there probably are other planets elsewhere that have similar life and there's probably other planets that are totally devoid of life and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:The Stoics thought, no, no, no, the universe is finite and it's governed by a rational, benevolent deity. Much more like the Christian view, let's say. Moreover, since the Epicureans thought that the universe is just a chaotic mess in which small pockets of order happen to emerge, there's no real reason why you should try to be in politics or make life better for the world. I mean, the world is like a big chaotic mess anyway. So you should just try to try to carve out your own little niche where you and your good friends can live a peaceful existence, like if Australia is going to hell with bad politicians. Don't try to run for office and change that. Move to some remote town where nobody bothers you, with all your good friends, and grow your own food and live there in peace.
Speaker 3:Right, and the Stoics say no, no, no, there actually is a benevolent deity that's running the whole show and we all have a kind of duty to do what we can, and even if we don't always succeed, we should still actually try to make our cooperative structures work better. So you should enter politics if you can and you should contribute to community projects and that kind of stuff. And the skeptics? Their main differences is that they believe that sure knowledge is impossible, that everything has some level of uncertainty in it, and there are various brands of skepticism, but some of them have been compared to Buddhism in the sense that, like you, obviously you do believe certain things, but you want to reach a kind of state of calm acceptance where, like you're not attached to anything too much because you realize that you don't really know anything 100%, and so it's kind of you want to just let go of your attachment to beliefs and just allow for the fact that there's uncertainty in everything you do.
Speaker 2:Alright, so I was going to then sort of shift and look at some of the core concepts that we find in ancient Greek philosophy. But I think we have covered quite a number of them, like ethics and virtue and how they were sort of approached. But there was one I just wanted to maybe get your thoughts on and that was metaphysics and some of the central questions behind that and how different philosophers would address that same question.
Speaker 3:Okay, metaphysics is another term, that's a modern term, right? Aristotle never used the term. He did write a book that we call the metaphysics, but he didn't call it that. He called it like. I mean, we don't know what he called it, but he mentions a few times in that work that what he's doing there is first philosophy. It just so happens that in the traditional ordering of his books that book was placed on the bookshelf after the physics book. His book called Fusica, and so it was then called the Metata Fusica, the book after the physics. It does not mean like you know, supernatural, right? It doesn't mean like the meta there does not mean that it's like beyond physics. It just it was just a random placement of the book after the physics book.
Speaker 3:So what is he doing in his book on the first philosophy, or the philosophy of first principles? Well, huge debate about that. It's probably above my pay grade. But you know, when you're doing philosophy as, as the early priest, the critics realized, there are things that seem to be very real in a sense, that are not material, right, like mathematical numbers, mathematical theorems, in Plato's case, the forms. So, from the earliest time of philosophical activity in ancient Greece and throughout the history of ancient philosophy, many thinkers believed that there were very real things that were not material, and they were very real objects of knowledge that were not material, and there were also important principles that we use when we think and acquire knowledge. And then what's also questions about well, what is more real? Like is this pen that I'm holding right now in my hand? Is this more real than the Pythagorean theorem? On the one hand, I can touch it.
Speaker 3:I can eat it. I mean that would be a bad idea, but I can. You know, I can do things with it. So it would seem to be more real than the Pythagorean theorem. But on the other hand, I could also. I could also melt this in a fire, whereas I can never melt the Pythagorean theorem. So maybe the Pythagorean theorem is more real than this pen, right? So? So metaphysics is kind of this big grab bag of all kinds of questions about things like first principles, immaterial entities, you know what really exists? What are the building blocks of human thought? Okay, like these kinds of abstract questions that are very important for a philosopher to figure out what he or she is actually doing when he or she is engaging in philosophy. Does that make any sense? Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay, I think it's. Yeah, it's a good just explanation to get our heads around what this idea actually is without sort of spending the next hour on it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I thought what we might do is. I know our time is starting to come to an end, but I thought I just wanted to touch one last main topic and then just ask you a couple of personal opinion questions on your side of things. Could we just cover political philosophy very quickly and I guess, such as like Plato and Aristotle, how they would contribute to this, the development of this sort of this type of philosophy?
Speaker 3:The shortest answer I can give you is that Plato and Aristotle lived at a time of the greatest political experimentation in history. So, going back to what we said earlier about how there were over a thousand ancient Greek polis scattered around the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, right, the fourth century BC is arguably the time when you have the most number of polis. You have a huge number of polis that are constantly being formed. So at any given decade there's like several new polis that are being formed and they need a new constitution and they need new laws, they need a new governmental structure, and this had been going on for centuries. So there has never been a greater need for constitutions than during the fourth and fifth centuries BC, ever in history. So it stands to reason that the art or science or craft call it what you will of creating blueprints for a cooperative society reached its, or one of its, high points in that era. So there was a huge need for professional writers and analyzers of constitutions at the time, and Plato and Aristotle were the creme de la creme of that moment, and not only while some of their students actually wrote actual constitutions for different states, they wrote the textbooks for constitution writers like throughout both Plato and Aristotle's writings will say so.
Speaker 3:The lawgiver should always keep in mind blah, blah, blah. Well, who is that addressed to? That's addressed to professional constitution crafters, right? So they're kind of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's politics are, in a sense, an attempt to make a textbook for actual lawgivers to go out and use these principles to create constitutions. And after the Macedonians and the Romans conquer everything, the need for constitutions drops to zero. And it does not emerge until the modern period with, arguably, with the Italian Renaissance states and then with America and the modern European democracies. So, arguably, for the past several thousand years, plato and Aristotle were the pinnacle of political theory because they lived in a time that that demanded such a theory more than any other time. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I think we've covered a good deal of ground to give us a bit of an overview of Greek philosophy, but before we do finish up, I just want to ask you a couple of little questions, on your side personally, so, when it comes to Greek philosophers whose ideas resonate with you personally, Well, my homeboy is Plato, Okay, but I like a lot of them.
Speaker 3:I mean, I can't think of one I don't like. They're also different and they all offer such diverse and interesting ideas. So if I had to take only one book of philosophy on a deserted island, I would take the Republic, because it's like an encyclopedia of philosophy. But I mean, this is why I like ancient Greece and I suspect it's partly why you like ancient Greece that you have such colorful characters, right, like you don't find such colorful characters in Rome, okay, I'm sorry, I apologize to the Roman history buffs out there, but you just don't find it.
Speaker 3:Okay, you don't find a guy living in a barrel in a marketplace doing philosophy, you know. You don't find a guy who jumps in a volcano to prove he's a God, like empedically is the pre-socratic philosopher. Fine, maybe it's stupid, but it's definitely unique, you know. So you just have these. Really you don't find, you know, like Epictetus, right, the slave who devotes his life to philosophy and then ends up teaching the richest people in the empire. Yeah, he was a Roman subject, but he was in the tradition of Greek philosophy. So it's just a Greek philosophy is a portal to not just great ideas, but in a colorful cast of characters.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm assuming the same thing. That's what initially drew me into ancient Greece was Herodotus and all the colorful stories, even though you know you know probably not true, but yeah, and even doubt some of them into the healthy houses. But it's just the ideas and the like you did say. It's a colorful fear in the way he presents things as well.
Speaker 3:It's very interesting. They're not true in the literal sense, but he might argue, and one might argue, that they contain deeper truths than any literal story can offer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what I found with Herodotus. I even find that it's more than just what we would consider to be a traditional history. That seems to be much more to it? Yeah, all right. Well, so in studying Greek philosophy, how's this influenced your own thought?
Speaker 3:Tremendously, I mean. I mean, all the important life decisions I've made have been influenced by Greek philosophy. I always have those questions, you know, like what is that? What would virtue call for here? What would, what would lead to a more meaningful life, right?
Speaker 3:Well, perhaps most of all is, is the is being free from the lure of money. You know, I mean I am very lucky that I haven't gone hungry in my life, except except during self-imposed exercises. But you know, I, like most people in the Western world, you know I have a level of comfort that was unheard of in most of history. So I'm very lucky to be able to not really, you know, have a tremendous need for money. But all around me, society teaches people that money is the most important thing, right? And when I talk to people who I'm just meeting and they're like what do you do for a living, I'm like oh, I'm, you know, I do philosophy. They're like well, what, like? How are you going to make money with that? So I think that Greek philosophy, if, if nothing else, I think like the most important obvious practical benefit it can offer, like a young mind today, is that money is not the key to happiness.
Speaker 3:You know, I mean, I think that's that in itself makes it worthwhile, and once you, once you free yourself from the obsession with money that our society tries to force upon us, it, I think, it opens up your mind, yeah.
Speaker 2:And, I guess, somewhat of a loaded question. I knew it was going to have some sort of influence because it is. Philosophy is a big toolkit of ideas that you can delve into, and when you've got access to that then you can start assessing many things in your life through different lenses as well, absolutely, yeah. Oh, thank you, jack, for coming on to do this interview today where we can just get a bit of a survey of Greek philosophy in the ancient Greek world. I know it was kind of a big ask to try and cram so many ideas and figures and all these different themes into one one sort of talk, but I think we've covered everything I had sort of set out there. Yeah, I greatly appreciate you coming on to do that for us and I hope one day we could perhaps have another chat where we could delve into specific ideas a bit deeper.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks a lot, mark, for your excellent questions, and so this was a lot of fun, and I'd be happy to come back anytime, Don't worry.
Speaker 2:And before we do sign off, could you just tell everyone where they can find you on social media and website and on that type of thing?
Speaker 3:Sure. So the podcast is Ancient Greece Declassified, which lives at greaspodcastcom, and my handle on Twitter, or now X, and Instagram, which I'm rarely on same with Facebook, is at Grease Podcast. And I'm also on YouTube, where my channel is called Lantern Jack, which you can find at youtubecom slash Lantern Jack.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I definitely highly recommend everyone to jump over there and check it out. So much on Jack's episodes. You'll get a deeper dive on some of the things that we've spoken about today as well. So, yeah, thank you, jack, and very much appreciate you. Thank you, I hope you all enjoyed my talk with Jack today. As you can see, we're able to cover a whole range of areas around Greek philosophy. However, as you can see, there is room for much more to delve into around the different aspects of Greek philosophy. Currently, I'm particularly interested in learning more about Plato and especially the different angles that can be taken with the cave allegory. I will have to get stuck into some reading on some of Plato's works that I have sitting on my bookshelf. If there were any areas that you were particularly interested in and want to know more about, please send me a message, as I would like in the future to get Jack back on, but make our next talk a little more focused. I would also highly recommend checking out Jack's podcast Ancient Grease to classified, as you will find much more around the ideas in Greek philosophy, where he also interviews other experts in the field.
Speaker 2:Next episode's release will be returning to the main series with the release of Episode 80. Here we'll be moving into the fourth year of the Peloponnesian War, where yet another crisis would present itself to Athens. This one, like the plague, would be an internal crisis, but it would be within the Athenian Empire, with Revolt presenting itself. This Revolt would come from the island of Lesbos, an island who had not yet been incorporated harshly into the empire, but still had a sense of autonomy. However, the wealth and supply of ships that could be lost if Lesbos did break away was too great of a cost given the state of the Athenian treasury at this stage. So Athens would need to take action to ensure the island would remain a member within the empire.
Speaker 2:Thank you, everyone, for your continued support, and a big shout out to all those who have found some value in the series and have been supporting me on Patreon and other various ways. Your contribution has truly helped me grow the series. If you've also found some value in the show and wish to support the series, you can head to wwwCastingThrankAncientGreasecom and click on the Support the Series button, where you can discover many ways to extend your support to helping the series grow. Be sure to stay connected and update on what's happening in the series and join me over on Facebook or Instagram at CastingThrankAncientGrease, or on Twitter at CastingGrease, and be sure to subscribe to the series over at the CastingThrankAncientGrease website. I hope you can join me next time when we continue the narrative in the series.