'I and Thou'. Anthropology and the Presumption of Primitive Intellectual Error in Antiquity.

[This is a section from Thomas Yaeger’s book J. G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published by the Anshar Press in April 2016.]


4.1. The problem of the authentic Socrates may reside mainly with ourselves: we make a clear distinction between ethical issues and matters of ontology. A proper reading of Aristotles's Ethics however, shows quite clearly that ethical issues were not distinguished in this way by Plato's pupil. The anabasis of the soul described in that work implies at the least a metaphorical emulation of the condition of the divine*[37]. The whole universe is conceived by Aristotle as a moral hierarchy from insect to the Good, and we do well to recall the passage in the Timaeus where Plato speaks of a similar hierarchy, ascended and descended according to the moral worth of the individual in life:

...by virtue of necessity... their bodies are subject to influx and efflux, [and] these results would necessarily follow, - firstly sensation that is innate and common to all proceeding from violent effections; secondly, desire mingled with pleasure and pain; and besides these, fear and anger and all such emotions as are naturally allied thereto, and all such as are of a different and opposite character. And if they shall master these they will live justly, but if they are mastered unjustly. And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star, and shall gain a life that is blessed and congenial; but whoso has failed therein shall be changed into woman's nature at the second birth; and if, in that shape, he still refraineth not from wickedness he shall be changed every time, according to the nature of his wickedness, into some bestial form after the similitude of his own nature...*[38].

 4.2. It has been argued, essentially following the Frazerian model of antiquity, [Before Philosophy, Henri Frankfort, et al.] that, among ancient cultures the world was conceived as a place populated entirely by entities, so that relation with the things in the world was essentially understood in terms of "I" and "Thou": subject and object, whether animate or inanimate, were understood to belong to the same generic category. But this presumes - for reasons which seem quite sound to us - that in fact the subjective and objective worlds are generically different. Thus, it would seem that to parallel epistemological processes with ontological ones must be to make an error. The implication of this view is that, at best, the ancients failed to formalise the difference between the two realms, and, at worst, that such a distinction never occurred to them.

4.3. If it is true that the ancients never came to grips with the distinction between the realms of the subjective and the objective, and therefore the distinction between the animate and inanimate, then it must follow that the ancient perception of the nature of the world must have been altogether in error (to which Wittgenstein objected), and the earliest part of human history may be legitimately characterized, with Frazer, as a childhood. The supposed failure to distinguish between the processes of the subjective and objective realms means that we can read the past as a struggle for the acquisition of the skill to do so: all arguments form part of an unplanned sequence, a blind upward groping toward the light of understanding. Whereas if the yoking of the subjective and objective realms owes its origin to the reasoned idea of the final cause, the concept of a final completeness of the world in which everything has its place and function, then we cannot with confidence interpret dialectical arguments or the evidence of human activity in antiquity as part of a blind anabasis, an improvised ascent to a rational understanding. This for the simple reason that these arguments and actions took place within a context in which the basic rational frame was already taken for granted. The importance of this is hard to overstate.

4.4. For now, the attempt to disinter the evidence for the unwritten history of the final cause as an idea is close to impossible: for, though the idea of the final cause might be admitted in the writings of earlier authors (Herodotus, Histories, Bk. I.30-33, already quoted, much of Homer, etc.), it is not understood to be intimately bound up with the view of reality which emerges from the Platonic corpus. Hence, evidence of the earlier history of the idea of the final cause is not of itself evidence for Platonism as a body of work emerging from an older pattern of ideas. Instead, the final cause is treated by critics as a traditional element within a radical programme of inquiry. By contrast, I argue that the Platonic teaching was not an exploration of reality by means of dialectical enquiry involving the use of traditional elements; but that Plato crossed well-rehearsed territory, probably with arguments more or less of his own construction.

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[37] interestingly, in defining the action of the gods as passive contemplation, Aristotle reproduces the extreme Parmenidean form of Plato's Ideal theory, in which the Form of the Good is unchanging and unchangeable. In Bk. X of the Ethics Aristotle characterizes the activity of the divine as contemplation. The gods are living beings from whom all forms of activity have been removed. "...if a being lives, and action cannot be ascribed to him,... what remains but contemplation? It follows, then, that the divine life, which surpasses all others in blessedness, consists of contemplation". (Nic. Eth. X. 8. 7., F. H. Peters trans.) [38] Tim. 42a-c

Cultural Continuity in the Ancient World, and Bernal's 'Black Athena'

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

This text, in its original manuscript form, was the second chapter (original title: 'The Construction of the Intellectual world of Antiquity') of the book The Shrine in the Sea. It dates from June 2004. It did not make it through to the text which was published in 2015 with the new title: The Sacred History of Being. I’ve re-edited and updated the text (May 2018). The text also contains a link to an analysis of the final volume of Black Athena, which takes a linguistic look at possible cultural connections between east and west. 

***

We have already come to terms with the idea that the world of ancient Greece, as it has been presented to us, is to a large extent the product of nearly two hundred years of industrious activity by scholars, and that the evidence for ancient Greece is not particularly well served by this construct.

In particular, philosophy in ancient Greece has been made into a wholly secular phenomenon, with no history in the religious life of the Greeks. The evidence does not bear this out: Harold Cherniss demolished the idea that Plato’s Academy was a teaching and research establishment along the lines of the modern university back in the 1930s, and there are a number of clues which suggest that philosophy has a strong connection with the religious life of Greece. 

Further, the ‘history’ of philosophy created by Aristotle in his Metaphysics is an entity which conforms in format to a number of his other works, in that he begins from ‘common opinion’ and leads his audience in the direction of  ‘true opinion’.  It may have been ‘common opinion’ in Athens that the presocratics and the sophists were pioneers of philosophy, but that is opinion, and not history. We have other materials to work with. This book puts Greek, Egyptian and Near Eastern materials together within a new hypothetical model of the intellectual model of antiquity.

It is a serious matter to claim that generations of scholars have not understood important aspects of the subject of their study, and that their methods of interpretation have been riven with systematic fault. This work has much to say about the modern intellectual world, since that is a major part of the problem in our understanding of the past, as well as the ancient mental world itself. In part, this is because the work is an attempt to develop a pattern of discourse suitable for the understanding of antiquity in the modern world. To achieve this, it is necessary to put our relationship with our past into a proper context. Otherwise it is impossible to understand either of these worlds. The enlightenment view of an ancient ‘urdummheit’ underpinning cultural production is here shifted out of place, so that it becomes an intermittent phenomenon in human cultural history rather than a certain continuum, and now capable of casting light on our own times.

The enlightenment agenda (and its products) has been subject to severe criticism since 1987, beginning with Martin Bernal. The community of ancient historians and classical scholars generally reacted with good grace to his pioneering and imperfectly researched analysis of two centuries of classical scholarship: Black Athena: the Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985. This was partly because some of the community was already uncomfortable with the history of their subject, and unhappy with the assumptions of cultural superiority (not just of the Greeks over the barbarians) which seemed to be implicit in the way classics operated as a subject.

The community of classicists and historians is one which is very dependent on peer approval and the ‘soundness’ of scholarship – of importance in any subject where – either through limited availability of evidence, or through the existence of discontinuities of evidence and interpretation – it is possible for an individual to wander off into territory of no value or credibility to the peer group. 

As a community therefore, the classicists and historians were happier for a scholar to provide the criticism from the outside. If the criticism was sound, its conclusions might be absorbed without the necessity of a reorganisation of the hierarchy of the subject (though this would remain a risk). If incorrect, it could be dismissed as an amateur effort. And even better, the analysis focussed on the now obvious faults in the study of classics and ancient history – the eurocentric racism, and the strange methodology which could promote the judgement and interpretative genius of the scholar above evidence itself. These were things which the classicists and historians would not defend at the time of the publication of Bernal’s book (1987) as they might have done as late as 1945.

On balance therefore, it could have been so much worse. Bernal’s attack was aimed at features of classical studies already overdue for serious overhaul, and several of his charges fell on receptive ground. Its agenda is essentially one which would have been familiar in a sociology department In the late 1960s. It was not written then because no-one within the subject was particularly interested in rocking their academic boat, and it took another twenty years for an interested and able outsider to come along and deliver what appeared to be the coup de grace to a number of the subject’s sacred cows.

Another feature of the Bernal analysis which would have been pleasing to the classicists and historians was that it did not succeed in moving very much around. Though it was concerned with this.  The lasting impression of his study is that the principal problem is the attitude of the classicists to their subject, rather the problem being a combination of attitude and what they had done – wilfully - to the accuracy of our understanding of the ancient world as a whole, through the evaluation and interpretation of evidence.

An exception to this was Bernal’s attempt to establish contact between Egypt and Greece in the 2^nd millennium B.C.E, based largely on a reified reading of Greek myths. In this he seems to have been following the lead of the poet Robert Graves, who read all sorts of myths in terms of charter documents and poetic accounts of actual political events. Additionally, Bernal suggested that a significant part of the Greek vocabulary could be shown to be related to the vocabulary of the ancient Egyptians.

Both of these attempts received serious and generally well-tempered criticism, even if the arguments have not been taken on board. What he was trying to do was to take ancient Greece out of its exalted orbit above all other civilizations, and root it in what he assumed to have been a cultural continuum around the Mediterranean sea from at least the mid-2^nd century B.C.E up until the classical period of Greece in the 5^th and 4^th centuries B.C.E. Bernal pointed to the evidence within the texts of the 1^st millennium which suggested cultural continuities with ancient Egypt – all dismissed by the classicists in favour of evidence in texts which could be interpreted as suggesting the opposite.

Bernal’s attempts to establish cultural continuity with the civilizations around the Mediterranean were hampered (the volume looking more closely at the linguistic affinities of Egypt and Greece did not appear until 2006) by the fact that myths are not simply encodings of historical and political change, and that the exchange of words between linguistic groups is, by itself, weak evidence for cultural continuity, though it can indicate significant  cultural connection.  He was correct to guess at the existence of the cultural continuity, I think, but ill-equipped to establish such a thing.

To do this requires moving things around – particularly the relationship of Greek philosophy to its patterns of religious belief and cult practice; and the relationship of Greek patterns of religious belief and cult practice to parallel ideas and activities in the Near East and Egypt. Currently, for classicists at least, the relationship between philosophy and Greek life and religious belief remains numinously and safely vague, despite two centuries of formal research activity in Europe. And the relationship between a philosophical theology and religious belief in the ancient Near East and in Egypt is presumed not to exist at all. This was a taller order than Bernal or anyone in his position could manage.

Inside Plato's Academy

[This is a full chapter from The Sacred History of Being, published in 2015 by the Anshar Press].

We do not have anything from ancient Greece which resembles a formal ontological argument. We might expect such an argument to be absent from the record owing to the polytheistic character of Greek religion. If that is, that we accept the notion that polytheism represents a state of cultural development which precedes the kind of intellectual precision which is necessary to undertake discussions about Being, the nature of existence, and the nature of reality.

Among the philosophical works which survive, there are of course arguments about the nature of Being, of existence, and explorations of the nature of reality. These arguments are almost always conducted in a way which avoids any association of these arguments with the gods and their natures, whether these be Greek or foreign. Thus Plato speaks of the ‘Good’, and does not discuss God or the gods in the context of Being. The ‘Good’ has however many of the properties and characteristics that later theologians would explicitly associate with God. And Plato had good reason for avoiding public discussion of the nature of the gods: we have already mentioned the likelihood that an esoteric and unwritten doctrine was taught in the Academy. The part-time priesthood of the Greeks jealously guarded their knowledge of the gods, and regarded public and critical discussion of the gods as a form of impiety, which was a charge which could bring the penalty of death. There were ways of dealing with the gods in discourse however, and Plato steered a fine line during his career. He was likely to have been a priest at Athens, which would mean that other members of the religious establishment would have known that he knew what he was talking about, and so he would have a certain dispensation to write, provided he observed the rules. 

Plato does explicitly talk about inner and outer knowledge, so his status as at least an initiate into the mysteries of religious doctrine will be taken for granted from here on. [1] It is likely therefore that an esoteric doctrine taught in the Academy would have been about the gods and the nature of Being. 

We do not know anything about the formal transmission of esoteric religious doctrine in Greece in classical times. It may not have been a terribly formal process in earlier times: in tribal societies in Africa, it used to begin as a matter of priests engaging in conversation with anyone who was interested in asking questions about tribal and religious lore. The answers were graded carefully, so that a casual question would receive a plausible answer, which however, did not really answer the question. In this way it would be possible to isolate future candidates for the priesthood; these would be the ones who would not be fobbed off with glib and superficial answers, and who were persistent in their questioning and interest. These candidates would then be instructed more privately, and be given more insight into the religious doctrines. Should they have the intelligence and critical ability to last the course, they would then begin the business of a formal initiation into the priesthood.

It is likely to have been the case that initiation into the priesthood in Greece followed a similarly informal process up until the foundation of the Academy. In Athens, the preliminary discussions may have taken place in the Athenian Agora. [2] Plato sometimes depicts Socrates as engaging in discussion in the Agora. The specific charge against Socrates by the magistracy was that he was corrupting the youth of Athens and that he did not believe in the gods of the state. [3] Plato depicts Socrates as speaking of God rather the gods, which was a dangerous thing to do, since it implied impiety toward the gods. When he referred to the gods it was often to indicate that he found them to be fictions. Socrates was engaging in informal discussion in the Agora in the same way an African priest might do in the context of a village, and he was talking to the young, as they would also do. He was not a fringe figure in Athenian society as he is sometimes represented – he served on the Boule (the Athenian Council), and fought in the army three times, however he later made himself into a nuisance and an embarrassment to the authorities through two things: he was careless about who he talked with, and he did not grade his answers in accord with the level of discussion. He may have become careless because of the judgement of the oracle at Delphi, which declared that he, Socrates, was the wisest of men.

In the Apology, Plato depicts that Socrates became the gadfly of the Athenians after his friend Chaerephon submitted a question to the Delphic oracle. He asked if there was anyone who was wiser than Socrates. The response of the oracle was that none was wiser. Since Socrates believed that he did not possess wisdom, he regarded the judgement as paradoxical: if he was the wisest of men, it must be because he had not pretentions to wisdom, unlike those who thought themselves wise. His fatal move was to begin to question those Athenians considered wise, perhaps to test the oracle’s judgement and to refute it. However Socrates came to the conclusion that those that he questioned were very far from wise, and in fact knew nothing at all. Attempting to show that the wise are void of wisdom is not at all the proper activity of someone genuinely interested in improving the level of intellectual culture around himself. Plato’s account of his mentor’s career is a warning, not a celebration.

We do not have much detail on how Plato’s students came to be enrolled at the Academy, but, we know that the Academy in later years was well-endowed with funds. It is likely that the sons of the great and the good in Athens were enrolled by their fathers, on deposit of a sum of money, in order to receive an education which was superior to what could be had elsewhere from itinerant teachers, and local priests. The formalization of an institution like the Academy was probably a response to the growth of Athens into a large city with around 50,000 male citizens with voting rights. The fabric of society required a body of priests to perform those operations necessary to the good functioning of ritual, the worship of the gods, and to deal with liturgical matters. Since this was a part-time activity, a priest might also be a magistrate, or hold some other official position. So those with means within the voting population would have an interest in being equipped to perform a variety of functions.

We can tell a certain amount about the discussion of Being in the Academy from the published works of Plato, and comments by Aristotle and others. The writings of Plato were written under the restrictive conditions already mentioned. We know that they discuss matters of interest to Plato (obviously), but that they are written in such a way as to avoid offending the laws of Athens and the sensitivities of Athenians. We also know that the published works refer to esoteric matters in various ways – by allusion, by the use of an alternative (and varying) terminology, through the use of myth, metonymous reference, and so on. The principal point of publishing these works,  can only be to provide an aide-memoire,  useful to the initiated. The works might also serve a secondary purpose of attracting interested students to the Academy. The obscurity of the treatment of some of the questions discussed would not be off-putting to these.

These texts, together with our knowledge of beliefs fundamental to philosophy in Greece (the teleological model of the world for instance), actual discussion of the idea of Being in Plato’s dialogues, together with our knowledge of the form of the ontological argument in the Middle Ages and beyond the European Renaissance, should be sufficient to allow at least a tentative reconstruction of the argument that might lie behind them.

The Greek priestly lore did not enshrine the idea that the ‘existence’ of God, or the supremely perfect Being, was subject to proof. This would have been anathema to them, as it would also have been to other priestly groups around the Mediterranean, and across the ancient Near East, for the reason that the very concept of the divine is inevitably beyond the capacity of the human mind to understand, or to frame. It is possible to say something about the divine, but that is all. Saying that the supreme perfect Being has a property ‘perfection’ is fine, but the meaning of this perfection is strictly limited in its human understandability. To attribute the property of secular‘existence’ to this Being would have been regarded as absurd. Yet it would be granted that one could argue that, without the property of existence, the perfection, or the completeness of God, was compromised. But for it to be in the world of change and corruption would also be understood as compromising the perfection of the supreme Being. At least in terms of public discussion. [4]

Thus the Greek view of reality and the divine was that there was a paradox at the root of reality and the gods, and that it was not possible to define the nature of the divine without exposing that definition to contradiction. The corollary of this is that it is not possible to establish by logical argument the reality or otherwise of the divine. At one and the same time therefore the divine is arguably both real and unreal.

The great cultural advantage of this otherwise unfortunate position is that the enlightened enquirer into the nature of the divine is spared further pointless argument about the nature and the very existence of God. Both are conceivably true. But the true nature of the divine, being a paradox, rises beyond our capacity to argue about that nature. It remains a matter of conjecture.

Our human experience tells us we live in a world in which change is possible, and inevitable. The definition of the divine on the other hand, tells us, as we might (as priests) choose to believe for the purpose of logical consistency, that the divine reality beyond this illusion is a place of eternal invariance. This bipolar view brings its own problems. It suggests that at the apex of reality, it is not possible for the divine to act in any way, or to participate in the world of change. Again there is a difficulty if we hold that the greatest and most perfect Being can do nothing without contravening its essential nature. A whole range of properties would clearly be missing from the divine nature.

It would seem that the Greek solution to this problem was to argue, as Plato and the neoplatonists did, that the world of reality was in fact invariable, as the theory requires. And it did not at any time change. But a copy was made. As a copy it was less than perfect, and this imperfection created the possibility of change, action, and corruption. This copy is eternally partnered by the original, which stands behind it, unchanging and unchanged by anything which happens in the copy of the original divine model. As a copy it is the same, but as a copy it is different. 

An alert priest hearing this would have argued that one of the properties of the supremely perfect Being would be that he was one and not two. In the creation of a copy two things have happened: a conception has occurred, and an action has happened, breaching the invariability of the divine, and secondly, the divine is now two, not one.

This is a serious objection. In fact two, not one, would seem to be a fatal objection. Firstly the copy is a representation of the original, and not the original itself. The copy is imperfect, and through the act of representation, it has become different. The original continues complete in its original nature, with its original properties and characteristics. [5] Plato hints at territory beyond this contradiction, but does not venture into it overtly.

This is the key mystery of ancient thought. To understand the full significance of this problem, and its implications for ancient models of reality, we need to look closely, as they would, at what a copy of Being actually means. This is an issue which would have been key to the progress of priestly education, and would have been conducted entirely in private and never committed to writing. To say it was copied is at the least a way of speaking (a mere likelihood, as Plato would say), but the creation of any kind of copy unavoidably would make Being two rather than one. So there can be no copy, at least not in an objective sense. And if there is no objective copy, then the world which moves and which has existence, must be a subjective view of Being.

That is a strange idea. The implications are enormous, and not at all obvious. But it is obvious that many things must be framed differently from our current understanding if objective reality is a species of illusion.

Apart from anything else, if the world is a wholly subjective experience, occurring (if we dare to use that word) within Being itself, then the change and motion which is apparent to us, and which contradistinguishes the world of existence from Being, which is itself and only itself, must be illusory. The illusion may be convincing, but ultimately it remains as an illusion, however persuasive it is to us, that there is an objective reality which is subject to change and movement.

An objective world which is essentially an illusion, subject as it is to change and movement, which are unreal, is one which offends most human understanding, now as then. But, if Being is one, and therefore we are not separated from it except in terms of a subjective perception of its attributes and its reality, then the perception of the illusion of change and movement is necessarily a property of Being itself. That is to say that there is no objective reality which we are observing from the outside, so that we might frame our world as a poor copy of Being which stands alone, but rather that Being enshrines the illusory world of existence as an aspect of itself, and, from a particular point of view, this illusion can be understood as a copy of Being.

The result of the essential subjectivity of Being is a paradox. It is what it is, yet there is an alternative form of reality (existence) associated with it. Being is complete in itself, as Plato described the Living Animal in the pages of the Timaeus. It wants for nothing. Yet it can contain within its nature the appearance of fullness and privation, motion and change, and all the other opposites which are part of the world of existence. It is likely that it contains more opposites than those of which we can be aware. Though itself it is not a plenitude, which would imply the reality of the opposite, it has the capacity to represent plenitude within itself. It is this representation of plenitude which gives the illusion of the world of opposites reality. Out of this potential plenitude, the world of appearance can come into existence.

This is the highest level of understanding which was available to the priestly classes around the Mediterranean, and the principal secret obscured from the multitude. Many other things were held from them, but this one was, by its very strangeness and improbability, relatively easy to withhold. There could be many mysteries, but this one, as well as being hard to fathom, is equally hard to approach.

This idea, that the world is apprehended subjectively, and framed by us in the mind, is not however unknown to historians of philosophy, and to modern philosophers. We have seen in an earlier chapter that something like it was discussed by Bishop Berkeley in the late seventeenth century, and by Kant later on, and it has, in a mutated form, been part of philosophical discussion in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first century.

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[1] In Plato’s Alcibiades, he uses the expression ta esô meaning "the inner things", and in the Theaetetus he uses ta exô meaning "the outside things". Aristotle referred to his own work in this way too. The students of Pythagoras were also divided into two groups, according to their proximity to the core of the Pythagorean doctrine.

[2] We know that the Stoics used the Stoa Poikilos, a colonnade in the Agora, for the teaching of their doctrine.

[3] See Plato’s Apology.

[4] As we shall see it was understood to be possible that things in the world could have at least a temporary divinity, in which case they also have a temporary existence.

[5] This is a complex point, which is difficult to hold in the mind. Clearly the One, the supremely perfect Being is also potentially a multitude, in that it gives rise, through a subtle process, to the many. So at its root this is a paradoxical doctrine. But this is not the end of the matter. By using both epistemological argument and also argument about the nature of the divine, and braiding them together, we find that as long as we are still able to discuss and conceive of the divine or the One, we fall far short of an understanding of reality. The famous early nineteenth century Platonist Thomas Taylor goes as far as to say that even the One itself does not stand alone, but that at the root of reality stands a wholly ineffable principle, dangerous to ‘idiotical ears.’ Though the style of English is difficult, I’ve included Taylor’s discussion of this in the appendices.

Egypt in the Shadows

An interesting response from a doctoral student (Benjamin Murphy, studying philosophical theology, Oxford) on the question of whether or not the Greeks were the first to practice philosophy, or whether philosophy was first practiced by the Ancient Egyptians, and also in ancient India. The response, which appeared originally on the Quora site,  reveals a great deal about the presumptions western scholars bring to bear on such questions.

He begins by referencing Frederick Copleston on the question. Frederick Copleston wrote a voluminous History of Philosophy, the first volume of which was published in 1944. As he says, it was one of the most widely used histories of philosophy for decades. There was, and still is, nothing quite as comprehensive available to scholars, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is perhaps its nearest rival. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is short in comparison, and in some cases covers important subjects rather crudely, and with much important detail missing. All three are focussed on Western philosophy, and aren’t much concerned to establish connections with bodies of thought elsewhere.

Murphy tells us that Copleston ‘…considers the claim that Greek philosophy was derived from Egyptian, Indian or Chinese Philosophy and rejects it.’ He gives some reasons for Copleston’s rejection of the notion that Greek philosophy owed something to other cultures:

Copleston explains that the idea that Greek philosophy was derived from Egyptian philosophy originated in Alexandria during the Hellenistic era. (As I’m sure you know, Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle, Aristotle taught Alexander the Great whose conquests inaugurated the Hellenistic era, and who founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt). As Copleston also points out, Philo, a Jewish writer who lived in Alexandria during the Hellenistic era claimed philosophy was a Jewish invention, because Moses was a philosopher, and the Torah is a work of philosophy. In other words, when the prestige of Greek philosophy was established, people from other cultures liked to claim “Of course, we invented that first”, and they could point to old writings and say “See, that is philosophy.” But of course, the Torah isn’t philosophy. 

The argument that Greek philosophy was a phenomenon which owed something to Egyptian philosophy, and perhaps Moses, is an old one, and it is true that there was a great deal of competitiveness between cultures during the Hellenistic era. The Babylonian priest of Bel, Berossus, wrote an extensive work, the Babyloniaka, in order to show the antiquity of Babylonian civilisation by means of a kinglist stretching back many thousands of years, and quoted stories to illustrate the sophistication of that civilisation.

Among these stories we find a description of the Babylonian myth of the Creation, and an account of how man came to acquire useful knowledge from a Divine sage (apkallum). Unfortunately the Babyloniaka has been lost for at least fifteen hundred years, possibly more, but the Christian scholar Eusebius made extensive excerpts from it. The general accuracy of the account of Eusebius is confirmed by the fact that we now have access to original Mesopotamian cuneiform texts which describe the Babylonian creation.

The Egyptian scholar Manetho also produced a chronology of Ancient Egypt during the same period, which covered a notional timescale of 432 thousand years, and the thirty dynasties he describes, which (apart from the earliest, which are regarded as entirely mythical) now form the basis of the chronology used by Egyptologists. Again, Manetho’s chronology has come down to us largely via the pages of Eusebius. This list of dynasties, at least in its later phases, also bears some relationship to the chronology as represented in papyri and inscriptions found in Egypt. The Persian invaders in the 5^th century (including Darius) are represented as pharaohs by Manetho, and also by the Egyptian records which survive.

In addition, Plato tells us in the Timaeus that his ancestor Solon visited Egypt, and spoke with Egyptian priests, who told him that the Greeks were very young, and did not possess knowledge ‘hoary with age’. Herodotus mentions that the names of some of the Greek gods came from Egypt. The philosopher Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, refers explicitly to Egyptian philosophy in his Busiris. Pythagoras travelled around the Levant and the Ancient Near East collecting knowledge from priests and philosophers, including those in Egypt. Plato himself in his Protagoras describes philosophy as a very old practice, and tell us that it was practised in Sparta and in Crete - both territories which received an influx of people from north Africa and Egypt in the middle to late 2^nd millennium BCE.  

But intense cultural competitiveness is insufficient to explain the persistence of the idea that the Egyptians were philosophers. Copleston had not studied Egypt, and pulled this idea out of the air. 

Many Greek words have plausible etymologies from Egyptian. Some of the concepts used by Aristotle in his philosophical writing were known to Egyptians nine hundred years before his time, such as the idea of completion (it is connected with the idea of birth in Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten, which dates to the fourteenth century BCE).

As for the claim that the Jews practiced philosophy, this cannot be written off as an empty claim by Philo Judaeus. There is abundant evidence for the existence of philosophical thought among the Jews in the books of the Old Testament.  Yahweh is described as ‘the first and last, and beside me there is no God’. His name (minus the vowels) is a variant of the verb ‘to be’, which suggests that his isolation is due to the fact that he was understood to be Being itself. In the third chapter of Malachi, Yahweh says ‘I do not change’, which is a characterisation of the nature of Being which would have been familiar to philosophers and sages around the Mediterranean and the Near East. It is an explicitly philosophical description of Being itself, since Being cannot be what it is, if it is subject to change.

What we don’t have from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Hebrew Kingdoms is recorded philosophical discussions which closely parallel the writings of Greek philosophers. There is nothing strange in that. What is strange is that we have philosophical arguments from Greece, since both Plato and Aristotle distinguished two forms of teaching: exoteric and esoteric. The exoteric teaching was suitable for anyone to hear, but the esoteric teaching was of a different nature, and was restricted to those who were capable of understanding it. Which means that they were discussing matters relating to the gods, and to divine things. So in the versions of these discussions which were circulated, there is often elision, obfuscation, misdirection, and alternative terminology. Plato does not refer to the ‘one true thing’ as god, but as ‘the good’, for this reason. Arguments which are not resolved in the course of discussion, are deemed to ‘necessarily’ be the case, for otherwise communion with the gods would be impossible, or motion would be impossible, etc. The genealogy of the gods is not discussed, as too complicated a matter, and those who claim to have divine ancestors (says Plato), should know the truth of the matter better than anyone else.

In the 2nd century CE, the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria wrote:

Philosophy, then, with all its blessed advantages to man, flourished long ages ago among the barbarians, diffusing its light among the gentiles, and eventually penetrated into Greece. Its hierophants were the prophets among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans among the Assyrians, the Druids among the Galatians, the Sramanas of the Bactrians, and the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi among the Persians….  and among the Indians the Gymnosophists, and other philosophers of barbarous nations.

— Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.15.71 (ed. Colon. 1688 p. 305, A, B).

Alexander himself consulted the Gymosophists when he arrived in India, and we have what purports to be some of their conversation together in Plutarch’s life of Alexander. The idea that only the Greeks practiced philosophy was not what he had been taught by Aristotle. Aristotle argued that philosophy began when there existed a leisured class with time to think and conjecture (by which he probably had in mind the fully professional class of priests in Egypt). Diogenes Laertius also mentioned that there was a school of thought in existence which argued that philosophy originated outside Greece. 

One of the comments by Caleb Beers following the article,  articulates the important question:

…. define “philosophy.” Are alchemical texts philosophy? Is divination (an attempt at?) philosophy? Is a discourse on mystical states philosophy? Is mythology philosophy? You can argue that there are philosophical dimensions to all of these things. The Bhagavad Ghita certainly waxes philosophical, and some sections are oddly reminiscent of Parmenides (or Parmenides is reminiscent of the Ghita).

Is there nothing philosophical in this passage from a hymn to the Sun-God from Egypt?

Grant that I may come into the everlasting heaven and the mountain where thy favoured ones dwell. Let me join myself to those who are holy and perfect in the divine Underworld, and let me appear with them to behold thy beauties at eventide. I lift my hands to thee in adoration when thou the living one dost sets. Thou art the Eternal Creator and art adored at thy setting in heaven.

[From the Papyrus of Ani *1]

It is a passage which expresses a desire for union with the divine, the creator of the world. Union with what is holy and perfect. And expresses adoration for what is beautiful in heaven when it (the living one) meets the limit of what it is. Is that not something like Plsto's conception when he talks about the philosopher ascending to the Good via the Forms?

Murphy in fact redefines what he will accept as philosophy, in a manner reminiscent of James Frazer: he embraces what is practical and useful. Which is not how philosophy was understood in antiquity. Ironically the possibility of an Egyptian contribution to the development of philosophy is sometimes dismissed by modern scholars because they consider that Egyptians dealt in concrete practicalities and useful things, and were simply not capable of abstract thought. 

He says:

...Greece is the starting point for what would become a strictly logical philosophy based on reasoning and empiricism. There’s some stuff about gods and afterlives in Plato, of course, but by the time you get to Aristotle, you find elaborate theories on the external world using what is not yet a rigorously scientific method but still draws on observation of the world around us to draw general conceptual conclusions using reasoning.

He concludes
:

...Greece is credited - rightfully, in my opinion - with giving birth to the philosophy that would later become science. That, I think, is what ultimately makes us defer to the Greeks.

1. The Papyrus of Ani is a papyrus manuscript created c. 1250 BCE.  Egyptians compiled an individualized book for certain people upon their death, called the 'Book of Going Forth by Day', containing declarations and spells to help the deceased in the afterlife. The Papyrus of Ani is the manuscript compiled for the Theban scribe Ani.

This papyrus was (shockingly) stolen from an Egyptian government storeroom in 1888 by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, which theft he describes in By Nile and Tigris, for the collection of the British Museum. Before he shipped the manuscript to England, Budge cut the seventy-eight foot scroll into thirty-seven sheets of nearly equal size, damaging its integrity.