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The Greek Philosophers

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W. K. C.
Guthrie

The Greek Philosophers

From Thales to Aristotle

With a new foreword by James Warren

First published in 1950 by Methuen & Co.
Reprinted 1989, 1991, 1993 and 1997 by Routledge

First published in the Routledge Classics 2013
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©W. K. C. Guthrie 2013
Foreword © 2013 James Warren

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guthrie, W. K. C. (William Keith Chambers), 1906-1981.
The Greek philosophers from Thales to Aristotle / W.K.C. Guthrie ; with a new foreword
by James Warren.
p. cm. — (Routledge classics)
Includes index.
1. Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Philosophers, Ancient. I. Title.
B171.G8 2013
180–dc23

2012016304

ISBN: 978-0-415-52228-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-10568-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Joanna
by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

CONTENTS

FOREWORD TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS
EDITION BY JAMES WARREN

1 Greek ways of thinking

2 Matter and form (Ionians and Pythagoreans)

3 The problem of motion (Heraclitus, Parmenides and the pluralists)

4 The reaction towards humanism (the Sophists and Socrates)

5 Plato (i) The Doctrine of Ideas

6 Plato (ii) Ethical and theological answers to the Sophists

7 Aristotle (i) The Aristotelian universe

8 Aristotle (ii) Human beings

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

INDEX

FOREWORD

James Warren

The Greek Philosophers was published in 1950, two years before its author, W. K. C. Guthrie, was
elected the third Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. It
predates his monumental (and sadly unfinished) six-volume A History of Greek Philosophy by more
than a decade (those volumes were published between 1962 and 1981) but is always likely to be the
more widely read of the two. Few such books bear reading more than sixty years after their
publication, particularly those that deal with so wide a topic and manage to cover it with style and in
not many more than 150 pages. Nevertheless, despite the great flourishing of scholarship and the
appearance of many similar volumes on ancient philosophy since it was written, the pace and tone of
this book guarantee its continued interest. As its author points out at the outset, the intended audience
are ‘undergraduates … reading any subject other than classics’. And Guthrie writes throughout with
care and attention to such an audience, explaining to non-specialists what there is to be found in these
ancient authors and thinkers. The text skips along at a pace and never lets the complexity of the ideas
being discussed obstruct the principal aim of informing interested readers of what the Greek
philosophers were up to, in a manner which Guthrie thinks is free from the potentially distorting
effects of the intervening centuries of reception and discussion of their ideas. The aim is to instruct
and inform and the primary method of instruction is exposition via a story of development and, for the
most part, progress over the period between Thales and Aristotle.

Although he has in mind an audience unfamiliar with the texts in their original language, Guthrie
explains clearly and succinctly where necessary the importance of understanding the precise nuances
and connotations of the terms and concepts under scrutiny. Indeed, he is insistent throughout on
differences between his world and that of the Greek philosophers and on the importance of
understanding what he calls the ‘cultural soil’ of their ideas. His Greek philosophers, particularly the
early Greek philosophers, are a peculiar and unusual bunch. He sees them as great pioneers in
questions of science and philosophy but pioneers whose faltering steps should be understood in their
proper context.

We might, with some caveats, describe Guthrie’s approach as a combination of two principal
methods of philosophical historiography. On the one hand, he takes from Aristotle the outlines of the
history of Greek philosophy, building from Ionian natural philosophy through Socratic and sophistic
approaches to humanity and morals to the great systems of Plato and then Aristotle himself. (Guthrie’s
confidence in the Aristotelian account was not shaken by the attack launched on Aristotle’s value as a
witness to his predecessors by Harold Cherniss in two volumes published in 1935 and 1944.
Guthrie’s elegant retort in 1957 is a useful statement of his overall attitude to the question.) The
general story is one of gradual progress and improvement, with Aristotle finally harnessing the best of
natural philosophy with the importance of the metaphysics of form and teleology that was first seen by

Pythagoras and then refined by Plato himself, and combining this with a developed form of Socrates’
interest in ethics and Plato’s emphasis on the importance of political harmony.

The other significant mode of analysis comes more from the anthropological approaches to the
ancient world that had made an impact at the time Guthrie was writing. (E. R. Dodds’ influential The
Greeks and the Irrational was first published one year later in 1951.) A large proportion of the book
is devoted to the philosophers before the great trio of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and much of that
section is interested in showing how the cosmological speculations of the early philosophers can be
understood in relation to the pre-philosophical past. While there is evident merit in insisting that the
early stages of philosophical inquiry took place in a world that was culturally and intellectually very
unlike our own, this approach also allows Guthrie a ready-made explanation for what he found to be
the otherwise peculiar and disappointing aspects of the philosophers he presents. For example,
Anaximander wins plaudits for his speculative cosmology and scientific advances – Guthrie is quite
happy to call Anaximander a scientist – but is nevertheless still unfortunately bound to a ‘primitive’
notion of the universe as being a living whole, a notion ‘to which anthropologists have found
parallels among savage people all over the world’ (29). Sometimes, his attitude to these Greek
philosophers is a curious mixture of admiration and condescension. They are regularly applauded for
making early steps away from a naïve or ‘primitive’ outlook but then marked down for being unable
entirely to shake off the shackles of their intellectual inheritance. Elsewhere, Guthrie is too quick to
find fault and his judgement is surely questionable. For example, he diagnoses what he thinks are the
‘tiresome’ arguments of the Eleatic philosopher Parmenides as stemming from an unfortunate logical
naivety to which even ‘the least philosophical of us’ would not be prone: ‘One idea which the Greeks
at this stage found it difficult to absorb was that a word might have more than one meaning. Their
difficulty no doubt had something to do with the proximity of the primitive magical stage at which a
word and its object formed a single unity’ (44). Current understandings of early Greek poetry and
even philosophers such as Heraclitus show quite clearly that Guthrie’s diagnosis is at best a
misunderstanding. Modern readers would perhaps do well to read such comments with a very critical
eye. In short, we should certainly recognise the importance of Guthrie’s clear and confident insistence
on the importance of cultural context, even if we might not accept his tendency to attribute anything he
finds mistaken or foolish to a legacy from ‘primitive’ thought, nor the manner in which he is inclined
to describe those traditional societies.

There are some heroes in Guthrie’s story. Pythagoras looms larger than he might in a more modern
account of the development of Greek philosophy, in part because Guthrie is relatively optimistic
about the amount that can securely be attributed to the earliest phases of the Pythagorean movement.
Pythagoras is a champion of and of form, a distinctive voice in the otherwise overwhelmingly
materialistic outlook of the Presocratic philosophers. Socrates is a humanist ahead of his time and a
defender of good sense in the face of ‘an atmosphere of scepticism’ encouraged by Presocratic
natural philosophy and peddled by the sophists who flocked to Athens and benefitted from the licence
generated by a buoyant and democratic Athens. And Plato – perhaps most surprising of all – is a
defender of ‘the idea of the city-state as an independent political, economic, and social unit’ (75) in
the face of Macedonian conquest and imperialism. Aristotle is, for Guthrie, ‘an Ionian with the blood
of scientists in his veins’ (113), a man of robust common sense and therefore averse to Plato’s flights
away from the everyday to a mysterious transcendent reality, but who nevertheless remained
committed to some of the central tenets of Platonism, principally teleology and the priority of form.
Guthrie even takes his picture of Aristotle the scientist so far as to claim that Aristotle turned to
practical philosophy in the Ethics and Politics only out of a sense of duty; he would, we are told,

much rather have remained with ‘the delights of the laboratory’, but even philosophers find their lives
affected by the governance of the society around them (142). This unusual emphasis aside, it is worth
remarking that the account of Aristotle in the final three chapters is a magnificent example of clarity
and concision; Guthrie manages in just over forty pages to cover all the major areas of Aristotle’s
thought with a confident authority. (Consider, for example, the account of Aristotle’s theory of
perception at 136–9: a topic that continues to generate a great deal of interpretative controversy.)

There are also some important omissions from the story. In a text of this kind it is perhaps
understandable that there are relatively few references to other scholars, besides courteous nods to
his senior Cambridge colleagues F. M. Cornford and R. Hackforth (both also Laurence Professors)
and relatively little sense of scholarly disagreement. But there are other choices worth emphasising.
There is little interest in the methodological questions that arise from the difficulties of interpreting
texts written in often oblique forms – verse, for example, or dialogues – or which survive only in
fragments or later reports. There is a brief note about the literary richness of the Platonic dialogues
(111–12) but for the most part these concerns are set aside in favour of the pace of exposition.
Guthrie also decides not to pursue the story of ancient philosophy beyond the time of Aristotle, on the
questionable grounds that the Hellenistic world was not, after all, purely Greek any more. Instead,
and perhaps reflecting concerns about his own age, Guthrie saw it as a world of individualism and
despair in the face of increasingly dominant international powers. A volume on Hellenistic
philosophy was apparently planned for inclusion in his later A History of Greek Philosophy but he
was unable to begin work on it before his death.

Guthrie conceived of the study of ancient philosophy as a branch of Classics and there is little
evidence in this book that a modern philosopher should have any more interest in his Greek
predecessors than a modern biologist would in the early pioneers in his particular field. Certainly,
there is much less emphasis on the intricacies of argument and the cut and thrust of dialectical thinking
than can be found in modern books and journal articles on ancient philosophical texts. And we might
also note little interest on Guthrie’s part in certain Platonic dialogues – Parmenides, Sophist,
Theaetetus – that lend themselves more readily to such analytical styles of philosophical engagement.
The Greek philosophers are to his mind not so much philosophers with whom we might now begin a
fruitful conversation but are rather important historical figures whose writings are to be understood
and placed each in their proper place in relation to one another. The job at hand is to understand and
appreciate the Greek philosophers’ views in their own historical and cultural context.

Some further reading:

H. Cherniss, Aristotle’s Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (1935); Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato
and the Academy (1944), Johns Hopkins Press.

E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), University of California Press.
W. K. C. Guthrie, ‘Aristotle as a Historian of Philosophy: Some Preliminaries’, Journal of Hellenic

Studies 77 (1957), 35–41.
— — A History of Greek Philosophy Volume I: The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans

(1962); Volume II: The Presocratic Tradition from Parmenides to Democritus (1965); Volume
III: The Fifth-Century Enlightenment – Part 1: The Sophists; Part 2: Socrates (1971); A

History of Greek Philosophy Volume IV: Plato – the Man and his Dialogues: Earlier Period
(1975); A History of Greek Philosophy Volume V: The Later Plato and the Academy (1978); A
History of Greek Philosophy Volume VI: Aristotle: An Encounter (1981), Cambridge University
Press.

G. E. R. Lloyd, ‘William Keith Chambers Guthrie, 1906–1981’, Proceedings of the British Academy
68 (1983), 561–77.

James Warren is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and
Director of Studies in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College.

1
GREEK WAYS OF THINKING

To indicate the scope and aim of the following pages it will be best to say at once that they are based
on a short course of lectures designed for an audience of undergraduates who were reading any
subject other than Classics. It was assumed that those who were listening knew no Greek, but that an
interest in some other subject, such as English, History or Mathematics (for there was at least one
mathematician among them), or perhaps nothing more than general reading, had given them the
impression that Greek ideas were at the bottom of much in later European thought and consequently a
desire to know more exactly what these Greek ideas had been in the first place. They had, one might
suppose, encountered them already, but in a series of distorting mirrors, according as this or that
writer in England, Germany or elsewhere had used them for his own purposes and tinged them with
the quality of his own mind and age, or, it may be, was unconsciously influenced by them in the
formulation of his views. Some had read works of Plato and Aristotle in translation, and must have
found parts of them puzzling because they arose out of the intellectual climate of the fourth century B.C.
in Greece, whereas their readers had been led back to them from the climate of a later age and a
different country.

Acting on these assumptions I tried, and shall now try for any readers who may be in a similar
position, to give some account of Greek philosophy from its beginnings, to explain Plato and Aristotle
in the light of their predecessors rather than their successors, and to convey some idea of the
characteristic features of the Greek way of thinking and outlook on the world.1 I shall make little or
no reference to their influence on thinkers of later Europe or of our own country. This is not due only
to the limitations imposed by my own ignorance, but also to a belief that it will be more enjoyable
and profitable for a reader to detect such influence and draw comparisons for himself, out of his own
reading and sphere of interests. My object will be, by talking about the Greeks for themselves and for
their own sake, to give the material for such comparison and a solid basis on which it may rest. A
certain work on Existentialism shows, so I have read, a ‘genealogical tree’ of the existentialist
philosophy. At its root is placed Socrates, apparently on the ground that he was the author of the
saying ‘Know thyself’. Apart from the question whether Socrates meant by these words anything like
what the twentieth-century Existentialist means, this ignores the fact that the saying was not the
invention of Socrates but a proverbial piece of Greek wisdom whose author, if one must attribute it to
someone, can only be said to have been the god Apollo. At any rate it was known to Socrates, and
every other Greek, as one of the age-old precepts which were inscribed on the walls of Apollo’s
temple at Delphi. That it belonged to the teaching of Apolline religion is not unimportant, and the
example, though small, will serve to illustrate the sort of distortion which even a brief outline of
ancient thought may help to prevent.

The approach which I have suggested should have the advantage of showing up certain important
differences between the Greek ways of thought and our own, which tend to be obscured when (for
example) Greek atomic science or Plato’s theory of the State are uprooted from their natural soil in
the earlier and contemporary Greek world and regarded in isolation as the forerunners of modern

atomic physics or political theory. For all the immense debt which Europe, and with Europe England,
owe to Greek culture, the Greeks remain in many respects a remarkably foreign people, and to get
inside their minds requires a real effort, for it means unthinking much that has become part and parcel
of our mental equipment so that we carry it about with us unquestioningly and for the most part
unconsciously. In the great days of Victorian scholarship, when the Classics were regarded as
furnishing models, not only intellectual but moral, for the English gentleman to follow, there was
perhaps a tendency to overemphasize similarities and lose sight of differences. The scholarship of our
own day, in many respects inferior, has this advantage, that it is based both on a more intensive study
of Greek habits of thought and linguistic usage and on a more extensive acquaintance with the mental
equipment of earlier peoples both in Greece and elsewhere. Thanks in part to the progress of
anthropology, and to the work of classical scholars acute enough to see the relevance to their studies
of some of the anthropologists’ results, we can claim without arrogance to be in a better position to
appreciate the hidden foundations of Greek thought, the presuppositions which they accepted tacitly
as we today accept the established rules of logic or the fact of the earth’s rotation.

And here it must be said frankly, though with no wish to dwell on a difficulty at the outset, that to
understand Greek ways of thinking without some knowledge of the Greek language is not easy.
Language and thought are inextricably interwoven, and interact on one another. Words have a history
and associations, which for those who use them contribute an important part of the meaning, not least
because their effect is unconsciously felt rather than intellectually apprehended. Even in
contemporary languages, beyond a few words for material objects, it is practically impossible to
translate a word so as to give exactly the same impression to a foreigner as is given by the original to
those who hear it in their own country. With the Greeks, these difficulties are greatly increased by the
lapse of time and difference of cultural environment, which when two modern European nations are in
question is so largely shared between them. When we have to rely on single-word English
equivalents like ‘justice’ or ‘virtue’ without an acquaintance with the various usages of their Greek
counterparts in different contexts, we not only lose a great deal of the content of the Greek words but
import our own English associations which are often quite foreign to the intention of the Greek. It will
therefore be necessary sometimes to introduce Greek terms, and explain as clearly as possible how
they were used. If this should have the effect of enticing some to learn Greek, or refurbish any Greek
which may have been learned at school and dropped in favour of other things, that will be all to the
good. But the present account will continue on the assumption that any Greek word used needs to be
explained.

Before going further, a few examples would perhaps be helpful to bring out my meaning when I say
that if we want to understand an ancient Greek thinker like Plato it is important to know something of
the history, affinities and usage of at any rate the most important of the terms which he employs, rather
than resting content with loose English equivalents like ‘justice’, ‘virtue’, and ‘god’, which are all
that we find in most translations. I cannot begin better than by a quotation from Cornford’s preface to
his own translation of the Republic :

Many key-words, such as ‘music’, ‘gymnastic’, ‘virtue’, ‘philosophy’, have shifted their meaning or acquired false associations for
English ears. One who opened Jowett’s version at random and lighted on the statement (at 549 b) that the best guardian for a
man’s ‘virtue’ is ‘philosophy tempered with music’, might run away with the idea that, in to avoid irregular relations with
women, he had better play the violin in the intervals of studying metaphysics. There may be some truth in this; but only after
reading widely in other parts of the book would he discover that it was not quite what Plato meant by describing logos, combined
with musik e, as the only sure safeguard of arete.

Let us take three terms which will be generally agreed to stand for concepts fundamental in the

writings of any moral or metaphysical philosopher in which they occur – the words which we
translate respectively as ‘justice’, ‘virtue’, and ‘god’.

The word translated ‘justice’ is dike, from which comes an adjective dikaios, ‘just’, and from that
again a longer form of the noun, dikaiosyne, ‘the state of being dikaios’ . The last word is the one
generally used by Plato in the famous discussion of the nature of ‘justice’ in the Republic.

Now the original meaning of dike may have been literally a way or path. Whether or not that is its
etymological origin, its earliest significance in Greek literature is certainly no more than the way in
which a certain class of people usually behaves, or the normal course of nature. There is no
implication that it is the right way, nor does the word contain any suggestion of obligation. In the
Odyssey, when Penelope is reminding the servants what a good master Odysseus was, she says that
he never did or said anything that was cruel or overweening, nor did he have favourites, ‘as is the
dike of lords’ – i.e. it is the way they are wont to behave. When Eumaeus the swineherd entertains his
master unawares, he apologizes for the simplicity of his fare by saying: ‘What I offer is little, though
willingly given, for that is the dike of serfs like myself, who go ever in fear.’ It is, he means, the
normal thing, what is to be expected. Describing a disease, the medical writer Hippocrates says,
‘Death does not follow these symptoms in the course of dike’ , meaning simply, ‘does not normally
follow’.1

It was easy for such a word to slip from this purely non-moral sense of what was to be expected in
the normal course of events, and to take on something of the flavour which we imply when we speak
of ‘what is expected of a man’, i.e. that he will act decently, pay his debts and so forth. This transition
came about early, and in the poetry of Aeschylus, a century before Plato, Dike is already personified
as the majestic spirit of righteousness seated on a throne by the side of Zeus. Yet it is impossible that
the earlier meaning of the word should have ceased to colour the minds of the men who used it, and
who as children had learned to read from the pages of Homer. Indeed a kind of petrified relic
remained throughout in the use of the accusative, diken, as a preposition to mean ‘like’ or ‘after the
manner of’.

At the conclusion of the attempts to define ‘justice’ in the Republic, after several definitions have
been rejected which more or less correspond to our notions of what we mean by the word, the one
which is finally accepted is this: justice, dikaiosyne, the state of the man who follows dike, is no
more than ‘minding your own business’, doing the thing, or following the way, which is properly your
own, and not mixing yourself up in the ways of other people and trying to do their jobs for them. Does
it sometimes seem to us rather a mouselike result to be born of such mountains of discussion? If so, it
may make it a little more interesting to reflect that what Plato has done is to reject the meanings of the
word which were current in his own day, and with a possibly unconscious historical sense to go back
to the original meaning of the word. It was rooted in the class-distinctions of the old Homeric
aristocracy, where right action was summed up in a man’s knowing his proper place and sticking to it,
and to Plato, who was founding a new aristocracy, class-distinctions – based this time on a clearly
thought-out division of functions determined by psychological considerations, but class-distinctions
nevertheless – were the mainstay of the state.

Our second example is the word generally rendered ‘virtue’. This is arete. It is used in the plural
as well as the singular, and the first thing to grasp about it is that, as Aristotle said, it is a relative
term, not one used absolutely as the English ‘virtue’ is. Arete meant being good at something, and it
was natural for a Greek on hearing the word to ask: ‘The arete of what or whom?’ It is commonly
followed by a dependent genitive or a limiting adjective. (I make no apology for introducing these
grammatical terms, for the point I want to bring home is that grammar and thought, language and

philosophy, are inextricably intertwined, and that, while it is only too easy to dismiss something as ‘a
purely linguistic matter’, there can in fact be no such thing as a divorce between the expression of a
thought and its content.) Arete then is a word which by itself is incomplete. There is the arete of
wrestlers, riders, generals, shoemakers, slaves. There is political arete, domestic arete, military
arete. It meant in fact ‘efficiency’. In the fifth century B.C. a class of itinerant teachers arose, the
Sophists, who claimed to impart arete, especially that of the politician and the public speaker. This
did not mean that their teaching was primarily ethical, though the more conservative of them certainly
included morality in their conception of political virtue. What they wished to emphasize was its
practical and immediately useful nature. Arete was vocational, and the correspondence course in
business efficiency, had it existed in ancient Greece, would undoubtedly have had the word arete
prominently displayed in its advertisements.

It could of course be used by itself when there was no doubt of the meaning. So used it would be
understood to stand for the kind of excellence most prized by a particular community. Thus among
Homer’s warrior-chiefs it stood for valour. Its use by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had an element of
novelty. They qualified it by the adjective anthropine, ‘human’, thus giving it a general sense – the
excellence of a man as such, efficiency in living – and surprised people by suggesting that they did not
know what this was, but that it was something which must be searched for. The search meant – note
the legacy of arete as a word of practical import – the discovery of the function – ergon, the work or
job – of man. Just as a soldier, a politician and a shoemaker have a certain function, so, they argued,
there must be a general function which we all have to perform in virtue of our common humanity. Find
that out, and you will know in what human excellence or arete consists. This generalization, …