History of Philosophy: Western Philosophy III
By Raphael - Stitched together from vatican.va, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4406048
After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE until the Romans conquer Greece at the Battle of Actium, Hellenistic philosophy held sway in Ancient Greece and the Hellenized area around the Mediterranean, with Alexander's reign having in many ways, formed a Greek identity rather than one based on the city-state one is from. There are three primary schools of philosophy that were dominant during this time, the Epicurians, the Stoics, and the Skeptics. These did not fully replace the prior schools of thought, but emerged in conversation with them.
Pyrrho of Elis, who traveled with Alexander the Great to India and was influenced by Buddhist teachings, and taught that it is 'opinions about non-evident matters (i.e., dogma [any belief held definitively without the possibility of reform]) that prevent one from attaining eudaimonia [the state or condition of good spirits; happiness; welfare]' and suspension of judgment about those non-evident matters is how one can reach a state of equanimity and therefore eudaimonia. Epicurus who lived from 341 BCE to 270 BCE was one of his students in Athens. He, like Pyrrho, was an atomist, holding that the universe is composed of indivisible components, and a materialist, holding that matter is the fundamental substance in nature and everything else derives from matter. Because of these convictions, he was skeptical of superstition and divine intervention, originally rising against Platonism with it's metaphysical ideals, then becoming antagonistic to Stoicism. In the simplest formulation, it is a hedonistic philosophy, with pleasure being the sole goal, but that pleasure is more focused on the absence of pain and fear being the greatest pleasure, which is at odds with the general understanding of hedonism. Epicureans hold that sensations could not deceive and are therefore the primary criterion of truth, and that when there is an error, the error arises from our judgment about the input rather than the input itself and these judgments are affected by our preconceptions. Unlike Plato, who held we had to know what we were learning to know that we have learned it, Epicurians held that preconceptions provide an individual pre-knowledge required for learning, or that knowing what a horse is helps us understand more concepts that relate to horses in a type of scaffolding. As to ethics, Epicurus 'advocated living in such a way as to derive the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one's lifetime, yet doing so moderately in order to avoid the suffering incurred by overindulgence of such pleasure', while 'actively recommend[ing] against passionate love and believed it best to avoid marriage altogether' though sex was 'natural but not necessary, desire that should generally be avoided', as should politics as it could cause a 'lust for power or a desire for fame'. He also 'sought to eliminate the fear of the gods and of death, seeing those two fears as chief causes of strife in life'. He stated that pleasure 'is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul'. Epicureans do not believe in the immortality of the soul, as evident in the 'Epicurean Epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo ("I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.")'.
Founded by Zeno of Citium, who lived from about 334-262 BCE, Stoicism came from the Cynic tradition and held that 'the universe operated according to reason, or logos, providing a unified account of the world, constructed from ideals of rational discourse, monistic physics, and naturalistic ethics'. Stoicism was first called Zenonism, but 'this name was soon dropped, probably because the Stoics did not consider their founders to be perfectly wise and to avoid the risk of the philosophy becoming a cult of personality', so they took their name from the Stoa Poikile, the 'painted porch' of the north side of the Agora where they gathered. Logical thought was foundational to achieve a life worth living, or a happy life, holding that '[l]ogic helps a person see what is the case, reason effectively about practical affairs, stand his or her ground amid confusion, differentiate the certain from the probable, and so forth'.
Logic needed to be studied alongside language, grammar, rhetoric, and epistemology [the study of the nature, origin, and limits of knowledge]. Logic can be broken down into a unit called 'assertible' or 'axiomata' that can be either true or false and is affirmed or denied, for example, 'it is night' is an assertible that can be either 'true or false depending on when it was expressed'. These can be compounded with 'ifā¦then', 'eitherā¦or', 'not both', 'bothā¦and', which are known as logical connectives, with various names, such as conditional (ifā¦then), conjunctional (and), disjunctional (eitherā¦or), pseudo-conditional (sinceā¦), causal (becauseā¦), and comparative (more likelyā¦than). These can be combined into arguments, such as 'if it is day, it is light; it is day; therefore it is light' and 'it is either day or night; it is not day; therefore, it is night'.
The Stoics viewed the Universe as a 'material reasoning substance (logos), which was divided into two classes: the active and the passive' with the passive being matter and the active being 'an intelligent aether or primordial fire, which acts on the passive matter, the logos or anima mundi [the world soul] pervading and animating the entire Universe', and that the Universe cycled through creation and destruction ad infinitum. Stoic ethics followed from Aristotle's ethics, that virtue is the path to well-being, and the 'four cardinal virtues in everyday life ā prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice ā as well as living in accordance with nature' were key to reaching eudaimonia. Externalities, such as wealth, pleasure, and health, are indifferent, having value only as 'material for virtue to act upon', and that seeking virtue will make a person more resilient, and that a person's actions indicated what their philosophy was more clearly than their words. They viewed that 'virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature', and overcoming destructive emotions so that they could 'be free from anger, envy, and jealousy' was as important as it showed self-control. Passion was viewed as 'a disturbing and misleading force in the mind which occurs because of a failure to reason correctly' and can be divided into four main categories, distress, which is 'an irrational contraction, or a fresh opinion that something bad is present, at which people think it right to be depressed', fear, which is 'an irrational aversion, or avoidance of an expected danger', lust, 'an irrational desire, or pursuit of an expected good but in reality bad', and delight, 'an irrational swelling, or fresh opinion that something good is present at which people think it right to be elated'. These can be viewed as a 2x2 grid of good or evil and present or future with many other subdivisions under them. They viewed a wise person as someone who was free of these passions and were clear headed, able to experience 'good feelings', which fall 'under the headings of joy (chara), wish (boulesis), and caution (eulabeia)', which include enjoyment, good spirits, good intent, welcoming, love, reverence, and moral shame. If a person 'fell victim to severe pain or diseases', suicide was considered permissible, but was else wise 'a rejection of one's social duty'.
When Arcesilaus, who lived from about 316-241 BCE, became head of the Platonic Academy in about 266 BCE, he adopted skepticism as its 'central tenet', which made it 'nearly the same as Pyrrhonism' and diverged after Arcesilaus, becoming what is known as the 'New Academy'. Academic skeptics 'did not doubt the existence of truth; they just doubted that humans had the capacities for obtaining it', based on Socrates' discussion that said 'knowledge is not accessible to mortals'. They were critical of other schools of philosophy, especially the Stoics. They accepted that there were 'some vestiges of a moral law within, at best merely a plausible guide, the possession of which, however, formed the real distinction between the sage and the fool'. A 2nd century Roman Historian Aulus Gellius, described the difference between the Pyrrhonists and the Academics skeptics as 'the Academics apprehend (in some sense) the very fact that nothing can be apprehended, and they determine (in some sense) that nothing can be determined, whereas the Pyrrhonists assert that not even that seems to be true, since nothing seems to be true'.
