Do Western Academic Philosophy Departments Teach the History of Philosophy?

Greeks fighting in the service of the Assyrian Empire at the Siege of Lachish, 701 BCE

At first sight the title of this article may seem to be provocative, and even slightly daft. However if you study the history of philosophy, including those writers who wrote just before the close of the ancient world, if you are paying attention, you find that the detail of philosophy's course through history is not as it represented in post European Enlightenment writing. The way that history is discussed and understood, suits modern preconceptions. But those modern preconceptions make it almost impossible for us to understand thought in the ancient world, both in the classical period, and in more ancient times.

I've spent much of the past thirty years unpicking questions relating to what that history actually is, beyond the received view in the academy and beyond. The Greeks did not in fact pioneer philosophical thought, and were very far from doing this. Almost everything about the history of philosophy since the Enlightenment is based on the idea that the Greeks did pioneer philosophical thought. This is wrong, and demonstrably wrong.

That is the basis of my project. My intention is not however to just pull these false constructs down, but to also attempt an evidence-based reconstruction. This is skeletal in places, but there is a great deal which can be substantially reconstructed once modern preconceptions are shown to be inconsistent with the ancient evidence.

I've been attacking this idea from a number of different angles, mostly (but not entirely) focussing on the unwarrantable assumptions which are made by scholars about ancient evidence.There are many instances of this, which I've written about extensively. I've also attacked this idea from the point of view of what ancient writers actually said. These remarks are often disregarded, because they do not fit with the generally received view of the history of philosophy.  When read closely, it is often the case that a different picture of our intellectual past emerges.

This is the most recent overview of my project: An Appetite for Knowledge, which points to various articles on my blog, and chapters in my books.  A good place to start for those unfamiliar with my work.

In addition to this approach, I've been contrasting the cultural outputs of both Greece and Ancient Assyria for the purpose of showing that the Greeks borrowed much of their philosophical invention from Assyria and Babylonia, as well as Egypt. Clement of Alexandria listed ancient nations and cultural groups who practised philosophy, and attached the Greeks to the list explicitly as the last of the cultures who embraced philosophy. I sometimes create gazeteers on the basis of articles and chapters, and this is one of those: Transcendental Thought in Ancient Assyria Very few Assyriologists so far argue for the existence of a transcendentalist perspective in Assyria. But...

Between the late ninth and late seventh centuries BCE,  the State of Assyria is the best documented culture in antiquity. The records are voluminous, and many still wait for publication and close study. From what has been published however, the evidence is clear that the Assyrians embraced a transcendental understanding of the nature of the world. For those unfamiliar with the details of the cultural parallels between Greece and Assyria, this gazeteer is a good place to start.

I came to much of this work by studying writers from the third and fourth centuries CE, who are still poorly regarded, and generally ignored in the academic teaching of philosophy. That's our problem, not theirs.

Why did I undertake this project? Sometimes people take on strange tasks. The composer Arnold Schoenberg, once he emigrated to the USA, was asked by a journalist why he took up the unpopular cause of serialist composition. He answered along the lines of: 'someone had to do it. I thought it might as well be me'. My attitude is pretty much the same. I didn't need to do this, and could have chosen to do something else.  But the job needed to be done.

Thomas Yaeger, March 28, 2020.

Plato and Cosmic Mind

I was digging through my archives today, to find a draft paper I wrote some years ago. I found along the way this draft letter, intended for the attention of book publishers. I wrote this on the 10th of June 2012, when the completion of The Sacred History of Being was some way off (the end of 2014). However, this text does describe the final version of the book pretty well, and points to a significant issue in the modern interpretation of what Plato was saying. 

***

To: [as appropriate]

Dear [as appropriate]

For the past two hundred years or so, works exploring the earlier history of ideas in Europe and the Near east, have been happy to settle on a consensus. This consensus is that the articulate discussion of the idea of Being began with the Greeks – particularly in the writings of Plato. There are earlier references to Being, in the Bible and elsewhere, but these references are deemed not to be the product of the kind of intellectual clarity which Plato and the Academy brought to discussion of the subject. This earlier notion of Being is treated as the focus of belief and of worship, rather than as an articulate concept.

While this allows the Greeks to retain their status as the originators of philosophy, and the religions which grew up in the Near east to retain faith as their (modern) focus, the foundation of this distinction is false.

Recent study of the pattern of religious practice in ancient Rome, and also in Assyria and Babylonia, shows that beyond a certain point, religion no longer resembles what we in the modern world understand to be religious. The work of the late historian Simon Price has shown that observance and ritual was of key importance in Roman religion, whereas belief in the gods was not. Similarly in Mesopotamia, belief in the gods was not a requirement in society, but the observance of ritual was important. Further, it is a commonplace among specialists in Mesopotamian civilization that the gods and their respective temples were often referenced in documents by numbers rather than by name.

The principal importance of observance and ritual in these and other cultures does not mean that there is no intellectual model standing behind observance and ritual. But it is not a model which depends on the existence of belief.

The importance of observance and ritual in the ancient world can be shown to follow from an articulate understanding of the idea of Being. An understanding which treats Being as a conjecture rather than any kind of certain knowledge.

My book is a study of the idea of Being, which extends the history of the idea into the middle of the second millennium BC, and shows that the articulate understanding of the concept was present in Mesopotamia as far back as the 14^th century BC.

The book discusses those aspects of Being which underpin observation and ritual. It identifies key texts in both pre-classical Greece and Mesopotamia which illustrate this concern with the aspects of Being. It also pursues the parallel between the restricted properties of Being which are the focus of the medieval Kabbalah and the sets of properties which were deemed to be appropriate to describe the head of the Babylonian pantheon.

The final part of the book explores the significance of the Assyrian Sacred Tree, and is an extended discussion of a 1993 paper by the Assyriologist Simo Parpola. This paper opened up the possibility that the sacred tree stood for the articulate concept of Being, and that the articulation of the idea was identical in most respects with the model of Being represented by the Kabbalah. The symbol of the tree is well known, and it can be traced in palace reliefs to the 14^th century BC, thus establishing an upper date for the concept of Being.

The book also reviews the views of Plato, who supplies us with some very old discussion about the nature of reality. There is a long-standing problem for scholars with Plato, in that he could not provide a logical argument for the reality of commerce between the world of Being, and the world of appearance. At least not in terms of likely explanation. But then he was clear that in speaking of the divine, that was not possible. At the upper end of the divided line (in the Republic), only conjecture is possible. So the discussion of the apparent world as a copy of the divine world is no more than a likely story. The real argument for the reality of commerce is not directly discussed. 

However it emerges from an analysis of the development of the modern ontological argument, which, by the time it is being discussed by Berkeley and Kant, results in the conclusion objective reality is an illusion (something Plato was insistent about). Berkeley’s solution to the question of the persistence of appearance beyond our perception, is that appearance is perceived by cosmic mind. Our perceptions are part of the perception of the cosmic mind.

The suggestion is made that this is the solution to the question of commerce with the divine (the transcendental) left unresolved by Plato. There is no copy of the divine world. All appearance represents slices through the nature of divinity. About which stories can be told.

The commerce with the divine world is achieved through those things which are common to the divine world and the world of appearance. These are (what we might call) transcendental intersubjectivities, which have already been identified as the property sets of Being, which are in common in both worlds.

***

The classicist Lewis Campbell made much the same suggestion in a footnote to his translation of Plato's Sophist in the 1860s. He was right. It appears however that, around 150 years later, many classicists would still rather not know what Plato was talking about. 

Current Books by Thomas Yaeger

'Understanding Ancient Thought' is now available (August 20 2017) from Itunes, Barnes & Noble, Blio, Inktera, Rakuten, Smashwords, and other major ebook retailers. 

'Understanding Ancient Thought' is the third of a quartet of books concerning the antiquity of philosophy, and its connection with divine cult in the ancient world. The fourth book of the quartet is expected to be available sometime in 2018. The title will be announced shortly. 

Purchasing and ereader options are  also available for the book at the foot of the chapter listing. 

A sample of the text is available from the library supplier Overdrive (below). You can't buy it directly from them (unless you are a library), so you need to go to one of the regular online bookstores such as Barnes and Noble, etc.   

A Mesopotamian Perspective on the Origins of Philosophy

(An extract from correspondence with the philosopher Adrian W. Moore, concerning The History of the Infinite).

From: Thomas Yaeger

Sent: 16 April 2017 18:46

To: Adrian W. Moore

Cc: Thomas Yaeger 

Subject: A History of the Infinite, and The Sacred History of Being

Dear Adrian,

I still haven't got round to writing a compact review of your radio series on 'The History of the Infinite', but I will get around to it eventually. In the meantime the ten episode summaries have been accessed 1266 times as of this afternoon, which is not bad for a blog page on such a specialised subject.

When we were corresponding last autumn about the series, I didn't say much about myself. I have a background in philosophy, classics, and also ancient Near Eastern History. I studied mainly at UCL and SOAS. I was particularly interested in your series in order to understand how the question of the infinite in history is currently being handled by academia. The series gave me an excellent overview of that, for which thanks.

However, there are real problems with the current and conventional view of how the infinite was understood by ancient civilizations, the cultural function it served, its geographic spread, and who adopted it first. It doesn't look problematic from the point of view of those academics who specialise in ancient Greece and classical civilization, because they have grown up with the idea that the business of dealing with abstractions in a philosophical way is firmly established as a Greek phenomenon, and an incontrovertible fact.

Most of the evidence to the contrary never passes before the eyes of classicists and specialists in ancient philosophy, precisely because they are specialists in their subject. The evidence is elsewhere. In addition, we select the evidence which is available, in order to provide support for the current model of how the practice of philosophy started, how ideas of infinity and Being came to be discussed, and not to undermine that view. This process has been going on since the Enlightenment.

Since I studied Mesopotamian history, culture and thought, I have a different perspective. I spent quite a few years in careful study, and came to the conclusion that the origin of philosophy is not down to some autocthonous burst of intellectual genius in ancient Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries, B.C.E, but is the result of the development of patterns of though associated with divine cult around the Mediterranean during the 1st and 2nd millennia B.C.E.

So you have looked at the history of the infinite from the point of view of the established history of philosophy. I have looked at the history of the infinite from the point of view of other cultures around the Mediterranean, principally the Assyrian and Babylonian oikumene, and Israel. As a consequence, our pictures of the cultural history of the idea of infinity are radically different.

It is true that we have no formal discussion of philosophy from Mesopotamia as we find in the pages of Plato and Aristotle, but we know that the ideas of infinity and Being were present because so much information survives about Mesopotamian culture in the form of historical records, ritual texts, liturgies for their festivals, their art, iconography, sculpture, etc. And their extensive literature. These things give us many clues as to the meaning and purpose of divine cult in Mesopotamia. The questions and conjectures that underpin divine cult are philosophical ones about the nature of the infinite, the nature of reality itself, and of Being. 

In fact, it is philosophy in Greece which seems oddly isolated, as not being closely associated with Greek religious practice, and with the other phenomena which form part of their extensive cultural life – divination, augury, magic, sacrifice, the worship of divine images and statues, and the rituals of everyday life.

This isolation of philosophy in Greece from Greek cultic life is more apparent than real however. For 150 years in the 1st Millennium B.C.E. (7th and 8th centuries), Assyria is the best documented civilization in antiquity. Many things survive from there which do not survive elsewhere, such as rituals for the inauguration of divine images. We have none from Greece. Close comparison of these ritual texts with Plato’s discussion of the Forms, spread across several of his dialogues, shows that he is talking about a widely-spread philosophical rationale for divine cult, and in fact the theory and practice of idolatry. The parallels are very striking. 

I’ve written a book on the subject – The Sacred History of Being (2015). This looks at why we frame our intellectual history the way we do, and sketches out an alternative construction of that history.  I would be happy to send this to you, if you would be interested in an alternative view of the history of the infinite, which explores the idea in its original cultural context.

Currently it is available as an eBook, and can be read using Adobe Digital Editions (freely downloadable from Adobe’s website) which is available for a wide range of hardware platforms. It is around 3.5 mb in size, and travels well as an email attachment.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

At 10:52 17/04/2017, you wrote:

Dear Thomas,

Many thanks for your message.  Yes, I would be very interested in receiving a copy of your book, and I thank you in anticipation.

Best wishes,

Adrian Moore

Episodes of my BBC Radio 4 series A History of the Infinite can be heard at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wr1lz

Dear Adrian,

Ok then. The ePub format file is attached.

I would recommend reading the chapters in sequence on the first reading, since many of the chapters supply information which is useful for understanding subsequent chapters. As you will see from the chapter list, much of the Mesopotamian discussion is in part three.

The main purpose of the book is to bring to the attention of specialists in western philosophy, classics, and ancient history, the presence of  ideas in Assyria and Babylon which show strong parallels with those present in Greece. So the reader is at no point hit with a wall of cuneiform script. Or indeed, any at all. The quality of the writing has already been commended - I worked hard to make the text readable.

Take your time - you have other things to do, and I can wait until you are ready to respond. Thanks for your interest.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger.

***

[Evading the Infinite, the chapter published in 'Man and the Divine',  a critical review of both Moore's BBC series on Radio 4, and his argument,  is available at: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2017/10/obscured-by-clouds-critical-review-of.html]

Page updated October 5, 2018.