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.

Transcendental Reality in the Ancient World (Writing to Marie aux Bois)

Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2020 16:24:58 
To: Marie aux Bois
From Thomas Yaeger

Marie,

Re: the paper on the mathematics of the megalithic yard - there's been a lot of movement since I wrote it in the middle of February, and I will write several other articles on the back of it. One of the objections to the argument will be that arriving at Euler's number would have been impossibly complicated for them to do (quite apart from the general case I'm making as to the sense it made for them to want do this). But it isn't true that this is complicated to do, particularly if you work it out geometrically, and use the right kind of exponentiating series (i.e., ones which arrive at the limit of the series in the shortest number of steps). I've already drafted this one.

The argument of the article is fine I think, but at various points it trades on what I know, and what I've written about elsewhere. So I'm going to write another article which brings the relevant information together.

I can make a list of the most significant things in the article:

1. It brings together concepts which were present in Greek civilization and philosophy, as well as in Mesopotamia. So the same ideas are going on in their heads, even if on the face of things the cultures are quite different. For the neolithic case, they are writing in terms of number and geometry.

2 If this argument is sound, it pushes the development of sophisticated mathematical and geometric thought back to the middle to late 4th millennium (3500 -3200 BCE).

3. The argument shows that, on the basis of the mathematics and geometry in the stone circles, that the builders had the same general concept of the existence of a transcendent level of reality which we know for certain the Greeks had. Indeed, historians of ideas pick the Greeks as the originators of the idea of a transcendent level of reality, and behave as if all the other religions in the world did not, before this time.

4 This transcendent level of reality was in fact infinity itself. They came to this conclusion in the Neolithic on the same basis as the Greeks did much later. Which is that the version of reality we inhabit isn't reality at all, but a poor copy of it (I echo Plato's words here). This was established on purely logical grounds, and on the basis of puzzling things about the physical universe (why is there something rather than nothing? If reality itself is necessarily one, otherwise it breaches its nature, how is it possible that there is multiplicity?)

5. And how is it that there are irrational numbers? Again, historians of ideas argue that before the Greeks, and the Pythagoreans in particular, people had no knowledge or understanding of irrational numbers, and when the Pythagoreans discovered their existence, they tried to keep this secret. In fact *the entire basis of Pythagorean thought, both in Greece, and the protoPythagorean megalithic culture was based on the existence and significance of irrational numbers.* I've talked around this issue both in SHB, and in "Understanding Ancient Thought", firstly by discussion of how ancient people conceived that commerce between the Gods and Man was possible, and by discussion of the logical modality that Plato discusses in the "Timaeus", which is based on irrationals.

6. The esoteric core of ancient religion was often kept secret. We know this for sure about the Pythagoreans, the Spartans, the Athenians, and also the ancient Romans. Plus the Assyrians and Babylonians. Modern historians assume that a transcendentalism isn't involved, but rather a doctrine which serves societal and political functions. But what if the esoteric core is too difficult and too dangerous to  convey outside a tight circle of those who understand?

7. Plato discusses how the disagreements about the nature of reality in antiquity might be resolved, in more than one place in "The Sophist". The position  which must be accepted (he says) is that *Reality is both One and Many at the same time*. In other words, the esoteric core of religion, based on the consideration of natural puzzles and the reality of irrational numbers, is that transcendent reality is necessarily paradoxical in nature.

8. Hence the common representation of the transcendent reality as *the inversion of ours* (look up 'Seahenge'). It is the same as this one, but it has different properties. In that transcendent reality, all things are commensurate.

9. Finally, this argument offers the possibility of proving that  transcendental thought did exist at the close of the 4th millennium around a number of cultures. If transcendental thought about the nature of reality was expressed mathematically and geometrically, and  necessarily involved irrational numbers, we should be able to find such references to transcendentalism in many of the architectural and engineering achievements of the ancient world. These have been noticed already in a number of structures, long before I started pursuing this question, but (for example) the golden section, clearly present in a number of Egyptian structures, is written off as a coincidence, or as consequence of the way the structure was laid out in practical terms, and that the builders had no knowledge of  its presence, and did not think the proportion had any significance in itself.

We know the measures the Egyptians used. Scope I think for a nifty little computer programme to number crunch all of these, to look for the presence of Euler's number, and other irrationals.

Best, Thomas

The paper 'The Mathematical Origins of the Meglalithic Yard' is at: https://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html

Meaning and Function in the British Neolithic (Writing to Paul Devereux)

Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2020 20:23
To: PAUL DEVEREUX 
From: Thomas Yaeger 
Subject: The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard

Dear Paul,

Hi. You might be interested in the following blogpost, which looks at why the supposed 'megalithic yard' has the dimensions it has. It takes an entirely different approach to both Thom's surveys and Ruggles later efforts (not statistical analysis, which doesn't do much except expose the general parameters of something which might exist), and which avoids (to a large extent at least), the risk of selection bias. These seem to be the main complaints.

What I've done is to take an entirely new approach, which looks at the megalithic yard as something which serves a function in the context of megalithic structures, and which has a strict mathematical relation to what we already know about these structures (the focus on whole numbers, the use of pythagorean triangles in their construction, and the fact that they are often deformed in various ways, in order to achieve commensuration between the sides of the triangles and the circumference of the circles).

There is a view of reality buried in pythagoreanism, which emerges from the mathematics. This is true both for the later Pythagoreanism of the sixth century BCE, and for the earlier proto-pythagoreanism, since the mathematics are the same, and the interests in the mathematics are essentially the same. That's where the megalithic yard comes from, and I describe this in the post.

I'm afraid the text is as dense as in the paper I submitted to 'Time and Mind' a couple of years ago (it is a tricky subject), but I've kept the necessary mathematics to the bare minimum. It is just under 5k words, so you will need about an hour to digest it.

....

The post is 'The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard', and is at: https://t.co/BiLRKVq5O1

Hope you are well!

Best regards, Thomas Yaeger

Answers to Questions (Writing to Euan MacKie)

(Photo by Simon Ledingham, May 2005)

Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2020 20:35

To: Euan.MacKie
From: Thomas Yaeger
Subject: The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard

Euan,

Hi. You might be interested in looking at this article, 'The Mathematical Origins of the Megalithic Yard'  http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-mathematical-origins-of-megalithic.html  

Which I think may be the definitive answer to a number of questions about the construction and purpose of megalithic circles. Obviously this article is subject to criticism, which is fine, and I would be grateful for any comments you may care to make. 

I got to this point over seven years of rumination, and several articles on the Neolithic and patterns of thought in the Neolithic, in so far as they might be inferred from both the archaeological remains, and what ancient writers said about Britain before the Romans arrived.

I was given a classical education at school in Edinburgh (minus Greek literature), and a wider education at UCL later, where I studied Rome, Greece, and the Greek language. As well as Mesopotamia, Egypt and other cultures. My particular interest has always been Greek philosophy. Eventually I found my way back to an interest in British prehistory. I was struck by some of the things which Alexander Thom found through a phenomenological analysis, about the mindset of the Neolithic architects, because they echoed ideas which are commonplace in later Greek philosophy (the importance of the idea that reality itself is necessarily unchanging, meaning the idea of the 'One'; and of Totality, and the importance of commensurate values, and the significance of the fact that commensurate values are sometimes lacking in the physical world, etc.). I've written extensively about the Pythagoreanism of the 1st millennium BCE. Much of which came from the ANE, during Pythagoras's travels. Mainly, but not exclusively from Egypt. It is a technical substrate of Egyptian religion, which Pythagoras imported into his view of the world, after (reputedly, according to the neoplatonists) twenty years of study in Egypt. Meaning that the pythagorean perspective is older than Pythagoras himself, and possibly of immense age.

What we have in the stone circles of the British Isles, is just such a technical substrate of ancient religion, written in mathematics and geometry. Personally, I think most religions got started this way, though we are a long way off from being able to say this for sure. It is not however an argument that is considered at all at the moment in archaeological circles. I think it should be considered, even if only to finally eliminate it for rational consideration.

[Other materials relevant to this article can be found by using the search box on my blog ["neolithic" will pick most of them up].

Best wishes, Thomas