Monte Johnson

The laughing philosopher, Democritus, and his counterpart, the weeping philosopher, Heraclitus, have had a pervasive influence on western philosophy and art in part because of the murky legend which juxtaposes them. In this chapter I enquire into the causes of their weeping and laughter, and speculate about how these reactions came to be attributed to the historical Heraclitus and Democritus, both of whom flourished in the fifth century BCE. The chapter is divided into three parts: in part 1, I introduce the evidence for the legend and show its prima facie incompatibility with positions securely attributable to Democritus. In part 2, I show how the legend can nevertheless be squared with the genuine maxims that originated in the writings of Democritus, and the philosophical content of the anecdote traced back to his own writing. In part 3, I show how the anecdote juxtaposing Democritus with Heraclitus was probably influenced by an account of melancholy attributable to Aristotle or Theophrastus.

I attribute an entire new chapter of material to the reconstruction of Aristotle’s Protrepticus: the large and continuous excerpts contained in Iamblichus’ On the Common Mathematical Sciences chapter xxvii. This material has never been attributed to the lost work before and expands the evidence base of the work by about 75 lines of Greek. I further show that the famous protreptic to the study of plants and animals in Aristotle’s On the Parts of Animals I.5 is a text re-use and adaptation, on Aristotle’s part, of material (originally about mathematics) from his earlier popular dialogue the Protrepticus. This helps explain the often noted point that this part of the PA is stylistically different from the rest of the work. More importantly, it provides further evidence for Aristotle’s method of writing (which has already been observed for the opening of the Metaphysics, which is also a re-use and adaptation from the earlier Protrepticus). Most importantly, it shows how Aristotle made a breakthrough in the history and philosophy of science by conceiving (for the first time) a method for the study of plants and animals (and thus establishing the scientific fields we know as botany, zoology, and in general biology).

We offer a survey of the Aristotle Corpus (the Organon or logical works; the physics or natural works, the Metaphysics, the practical works, and the productive works (Rhetoric and Poetics) and discuss “protreptic aspects” pertinent to each, including: (1) direct discussion of protreptic rhetoric by Aristotle in the Rhetoric and Topics; (2) indirect employment of protreptic rhetoric in other works (such as On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On the Parts of Animals), and (3) text re-uses or parallels to arguments in the lost Protrepticus, for example in the Metaphysics and Politics. We observe that Aristotle is generally reluctant to offer protreptic rhetoric in the Corpus, unless it is protreptic to some kind of specialized way of doing philosophy (such as psychology, biology, metaphysics, etc.); and in many cases he offers no protreptic whatsoever; interestingly, he avoids protreptic in cases where he seems to think that the matter has been sufficiently investigated, or at least exhorted to, for example logic (syllogistic) and meteorology.

Aristotle theorized about exhortative (“protreptic”) rhetoric in his treatise on the Art of Rhetoric, and he also authored a popular work (the Protrepticus) that exhorted the youth to do philosophy. Although the popular work has been lost, efforts to reconstruct it have met with some success, and it is possible to detect its influence on various works in the Aristotle Corpus that have survived. The 13 original essays in this volume examine protreptic aspects of Aristotle’s works, including the account in the Rhetoric, the adaptation of the Protrepticus in works such as On the Parts of Animals, the Metaphysics, and the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, protreptics offered to specialized fields (such as medicine, biology, theology, and legislation), and the deployment of protreptic themes and argumentative strategies, particularly in ethical works. The essays are: 1. Towards a Model of Protreptic Discourse: Aristotle’s Account in Rhetoric I.3-8 (Cristina Pepe) 2. Problemata XVIII.4-6 on the Status of Rhetoric (Robert Mayhew) 3. Aristotle’s Protreptic to Medicine in the Parva Naturalia (P.-M. Morel) 4. Aristotle’s Protreptic to the Study of Animals and Plants in On the Parts of Animals (Monte Ransome Johnson) 5. Protreptic Themes in Aristotle’s Biological Works (Sophia Connell) 6. Aristotle’s Protreptic to First Philosophy (Thomas Kjeller Johansen) 7. Theoria Accomplished: Protreptic Aspects of Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII (Fabienne Baghdassarian) 8. Protreptic Intentions in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Dorothea Frede) 9. Protreptic Strategies and Conditional Goods (Chris Bobonich) 10. Living with Philosophers in the Lyceum: Eudemian Ethics VII.12 (D. S. Hutchinson) 11. Philosophers Enjoy Life Most! Parallels between Aristotle’s Topics and the Protrepticus (Katerina Ierodiakonou) 12. Why Philosophers Truly Enjoy Living: Proper Pleasure in Aristotle’s Protrepticus and Nicomachean Ethics (Ronja Hildebrandt) 13. Protreptic to Legislating or What it Takes to Be a Good Legislator (Pavlos Kontos)

In the first part of _De Partibus Animalium_ I.5, Aristotle encourages his audience to engage in a novel kind of philosophy: the scientific inquiry into animals and plants (hereafter: biology): “Since we have completed stating the way things appear to us about divine things, it remains to speak about animal nature, omitting nothing in our power”; “one should approach research about each of the animals without disgust, since in every one there is something natural and beautiful”. The kind of discourse here, to use Aristotle’s own terminology in the _Rhetoric_, is protreptic (“exhortation,” in Latin), that is, speech encouraging the audience to do something. What Aristotle is exhorting his readers to do, biology, is newly and originally conceived, but the literary technique employed– protreptic speech or argumentation– is one of the oldest and most traditional kinds of discourse, a genre for which Aristotle had already written a general account (in the _Rhetoric_) and a popular work, the lost dialogue _Protrepticus_, which was an exhortation to philosophy itself. I argue that Aristotle applied a general technique of rank-ordering skills and sciences in expounding the protreptic arguments of _De Partibus Animalium_ I.5: a technique explicitly discussed, and strongly paralleled, in both the earlier _Protrepticus_ and some of the most familiar works of the Aristotle Corpus. I will begin by introducing Aristotle’s discussion of comparing sciences in the _Rhetoric_ and _Topics_. Next, I will discuss parallel applications of this argumentative technique in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ I, _Metaphysics_ I, _Protrepticus_, and _De Anima_ I. Finally, I show how Aristotle deployed the technique in the first two protreptic arguments of _De Partibus Animalium_ I.5.

Biology and theology are interdependent theoretical sciences for Aristotle. In prominent discussions of the divine things (the stars and their unmoved movers) Aristotle appeals to the science of living things, and in prominent discussions of the nature of plants and animals Aristotle appeals to the nature of the divine. There is in fact a single continuous series of living things that includes gods, humans, animals, and plants, all of them in a way divine. Aristotle has this continuum of divine beings, and a theory of value that corresponds to it, in mind not only in key parts of his theology and biology, but also in his practical philosophy. Here I call attention to some important texts and attempt to offer a coherent account of them, without being able to enter into the usual interpretive disputes. I begin by clarifying the terms “theology” and “biology” and their place in Aristotle's division of philosophy. Next, I discuss how Aristotle’s theology is informed by his biology, and then how his biology is informed by his theology. I end by discussing some implications of the interdependence of biology and theology for Aristotle’s ethics and exhortation to philosophy.

Aristotle’s dialogue Protrepticus is not only his earliest work of ethics but also the root of all his subsequent investigations into ethics. Here we explore the various ways Aristotle retained in memory the contents of the Protrepticus and redeployed them in the Eudemian Ethics, including the common books. Since Aristotle himself does not explicitly acknowledge the foundational significance of the Protrepticus to his later works, our exploration must proceed on the basis of our knowledge of the earlier work, which can then related to comparable passages in the treatises. But the Protrepticus is a lost work, unlike the EE and the EN, in the sense that no medieval manuscripts of it have survived. And so it first needs to be reconstructed on the basis of the streams of reception that deposited information in surviving works by later ancient authors. We begin in part 1 by reviewing the surviving evidence of the Protrepticus before presenting our wider reconstruction and conception of the work as a dialogue in part 2. In part 3, we discuss ideas and arguments in the reconstructed dialogue that are retained and redeployed in the Eudemian Ethics, focussing on the account of intellectual virtues in EE v and the introduction and methodological framework in EE i-ii.1.

Two arguments in Eudemian Ethics 2 that are crucial to Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue as a mean state contain claims that Aristotle says are clear by induction. In these contexts, he explicitly appeals to examples coming from arts and sciences like gymnastic training and medicine for evidence. But Aristotle does not here, or elsewhere (at least in any extant work), including the parallel arguments in the Nicomachean Ethics, actually supply or discuss the evidence that makes these inductive arguments clear. Fortunately, strong support for them can be found in the Hippocratic Corpus, especially in On Ancient Medicine and On Regimen.

I argue that a circa first century B.C./A.D. anonymous epistolary comic novel depicting a fictional interaction between Hippocrates of Cos and Democritus of Abdera contains an insightful imitation of Democritus that can cast light on the historical Democritus’s thought, including his thought on the touchy subject of appropriate and inappropriate laughter. The only thing certain about Democritus’s view of laughter is that he denounced laughter at human misfortune as inappropriate. The later legend of him as laughing at everything and everyone indiscriminately is a later distortion of his view which the author of the comic novel seems concerned to counteract.

I present a developmental account of Aristotle’s concept of hê hylê (usually translated “the matter”), focused the earliest developments. I begin by analyzing fragments of some lost early works and a chapter of the Organon, texts which indicate that early in his career Aristotle had not yet begun to use he hylê in a technical sense. Next, I examine Physics II 3, a chapter in which Aristotle conceives of he hylê not as a kind of cause in its own right, but merely as an example of the so-called “out of which” cause : the material is the cause out of which an artifact is made. Next, I examine Physics II 7, a chapter in which Aristotle names "the material" as one of the four kinds of cause in its own right. But Aristotle’s model of "the material" remains the material out of which an artifact is made.

Archytas of Tarentum, a contemporary and associate of Plato, was a famous Pythagorean, mathematician, and statesman of Tarentum. Although his works are lost and most of the fragments attributed to him were composed in later eras, they nevertheless contain valuable information about his thought. In particular, the fragments of On Law and Justice are likely based on a work by the early Peripatetic biographer Aristoxenus of Tarentum. The fragments touch on key themes of early Greek ethics, including: written and unwritten laws; freedom and self-sufficiency; moderation of the emotions and cultivation of virtues; equality and the competence of the majority to participate in government; criticism of “rule by an individual”; a theory of the ideal “mixed constitution”; distributive and corrective justice and punishment, and of the rule of law. The fragments also contain one of the only positive accounts of democracy in ancient Greek philosophy.

Democritus of Abdera, best known as a cosmologist and the founder of atomism, wrote more on ethics than anyone before Plato. His work Peri euthumiês (On Contentment) was extremely influential on the later development of teleological and intellectualist ethics, eudaimonism, hedonism, therapeutic ethics, and positive psychology. The loss of his works, however, and the transmission of his fragments in collections of maxims (gnomai), has obscured the extent his contribution to the history of systematic ethics and influence on later philosophy, especially in the Hellenistic age. In this essay I review the evidence basis for Democritus’ ethics, discuss the rhetorical and logical aspects of his maxims, attempt to synthesize the fragments into an overall interpretation, and offer a summary some of the more influential aspects of his ethics.

Greco-Roman meteorology will be described in four overlapping developments. In the archaic period, astro-meteorological calendars were written down, and one appears in Hesiod’s Works and Days; such calendars or almanacs originated thousands of years earlier in Mesopotamia. In the second development, also in the archaic period, the pioneers of prose writing began writing speculative naturalistic explanations of meteorological phenomena: Anaximander, followed by Heraclitus, Anaxagoras, and others. When Aristotle in the fourth century BCE mentions the ‘inquiry that all our predecessors have been calling meteorology’ (338a26), he is referring to these writers. In the third development, the first two enterprises were combined: empirical data collection about meteorological phenomena began to be married to naturalistic theoretical explanation. This innovation was prompted by Democritus and synthesised in its most influential form by Aristotle. At this point more sophisticated techniques of both short-term weather forecasting and long-term speculation about global climate change were also developed. In the fourth development, the wider implications of the naturalistic explanation of meteorological phenomena were contested. The views of ‘meteorologists’ had been controversial since the archaic period because they were perceived, and sometimes intended, to displace the divine prerogatives and undermine traditional religion. These controversies intensified throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods.

An appreciation of the "more philosophical" aspects of ancient medical writings casts considerable light on Aristotle's concept of nature, and how he understands nature to differ from art, on the one hand, and spontaneity or luck, on the other. The account of nature, and its comparison with art and spontaneity in Physics II is developed with continual reference to the medical art. The notion of spontaneous remission of disease (without the aid of the medical art) was a controversial subject in the medical literature, and Aristotle's aporia about the notion of spontaneous generation of natural things runs parallel to this controversy. Aristotle's account of spontaneous generation in the Metaphysics and in the Generation of Animals can also be profitably illuminated by looking at the comparison with medicine in detail. The result, hopefully, is a clearer and more consistent picture not only of Aristotle's concepts of nature, art, and spontaneity, but also of the influence of medical writings and concepts on his natural philosophy. Joel Mann has written a commentary on the essay.

Hynek Bartos does the field of ancient philosophy a great service by detailing the influence of early Greek thinkers (such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and Diogenes of Apollonia) on the Hippocratic work On Regimen, and by demonstrating that work’s innovative engagement with contemporary scientific and philosophical concepts as well as its direct influence on Plato and Aristotle. His study usefully counteracts the lamentable tendency among ancient philosophers to ignore or downplay the influence of medical literature on philosophy in general, and to heap scorn on this text in particular, which Kirk, Raven, and Schofield considered ‘an eclectic and very superficial quasi- philosophical treatise’ and Barnes famously called ‘a silly farrago of ill-digested Presocratic opinions’.

The concept of kosmos did not play the leading role in Aristotle’s physics that it did in Pythagorean, Atomistic, Platonic, or Stoic physics. Although Aristotle greatly influenced the history of cosmology, he does not himself recognize a science of cosmology, a science taking the kosmos itself as the object of study with its own phenomena to be explained and its own principles that explain them. The term kosmos played an important role in two aspects of his predecessor’s accounts that Aristotle rejected: first, cosmogeny and kosmopoiia, generation or creation of the kosmos; second, diakosmêsis, arranging of a plurality of kosmoi. Aristotle was extremely critical of accounts involving kosmopoiia and diakosmêsis and he developed general dialectical strategies against them. In emphatically distinguishing his view from all his predecessors (including Plato), he uses the terms ho ouranos (the heaven), to holon (the whole), and to pan (the totality) in preference to ho kosmos (the kosmos or world). There is usually no harm in speaking loosely of ‘Aristotle’s cosmology’ when referring to his concept of the order of nature and the ouranos. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s theoretical philosophy offers something very different from those of his predecessors for whom kosmos was a keyword.

This paper has three major aims. The first is to defend the hypothesis that Aristotle’s lost work Protrepticus was a dialogue. The second is to explore the genres of ancient apotreptics, speeches that argue against doing philosophy and show the need for protreptic responses; our exploration is guided by Aristotle’s own analysis of apotreptics as well as protreptics in his Rhetorica. The third aim is to restore to the evidence base of Aristotle’s Protrepticus an apotreptic speech that argues against doing Academic philosophy, evidence that was incorrectly excluded by Ingemar Düring in 1961.

We offer a sceptical examination of a thesis recently advanced in a monograph published by Princeton University Press, entitled Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia. In this dense and probing work, Christopher I. Beckwith, a professor of Central Eurasian studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, argues that Pyrrho of Elis adopted a form of early Buddhism during his years in Bactria and Gandhāra, and that early Pyrrhonism must be understood as a sect of early Buddhism. In making his case Beckwith claims that virtually all scholars of Greek, Indian, and Chinese philosophy have been operating under flawed assumptions and with flawed methodologies, and so have failed to notice obvious and undeniable correspondences between the philosophical views of the Buddha and of Pyrrho. In this study we take Beckwith’s proposal and challenge seriously, and we examine his textual basis and techniques of translation, his methods of examining passages, his construal of problems and his reconstruction of arguments. We find that his presuppositions are contentious and doubtful, his own methods are extremely flawed, and that he draws unreasonable conclusions. Although the result of our study is almost entirely negative, we think it illustrates some important general points about the methodology of comparative philosophy.