A.—PHILOSOPHERS

1. It is not very often that Plato allows himself to dwell upon the history of philosophy as it was before the rise of ethical and epistemological inquiry; but when he does, his guidance is simply invaluable. His artistic gift and his power of entering into the thoughts of other men enabled him to describe the views of early philosophers in a thoroughly objective manner, and he never, except in a playful and ironical way, sought to read unthought-of meanings into the words of his predecessors. Of special value for our purpose are his contrast between Empedokles and Herakleitos (Soph. 242 d), and his account of the relation between Zeno and Parmenides (Parm. 128 a).

See Zeller, “Plato’s Mittheilungen über frühere und gleichzeitige Philosophen” (Arch. v. pp. 165 sqq.); and Index, s.v. Plato.

2. As a rule, Aristotle’s statements about early philosophers are less historical than Plato’s. Not that he failed to understand the facts, but he nearly always discusses them from the point of view of his own system. He is convinced that his own philosophy accomplishes what all previous philosophers had aimed at, and their systems are therefore regarded as “lisping” attempts to formulate it (Met. Α, 10. 993 a 15). It is also to be noted that Aristotle regards some systems in a 420much more sympathetic way than others. He is distinctly unfair to the Eleatics, for instance.

It is often forgotten that Aristotle derived much of his information from Plato, and we must specially observe that he more than once takes Plato’s irony too literally.

See Emminger, Die Vorsokratischen Philosophen nach den Berichten des Aristoteles, 1878. Index, s.v. Aristotle.

3. The Stoics, and especially Chrysippos, paid great attention to early philosophy, but their way of regarding it was simply an exaggeration of Aristotle’s. They did not content themselves with criticising their predecessors from their own point of view; they seem really to have believed that the early poets and thinkers held views hardly distinguishable from theirs. The word συνοικειοῦν, which Cicero renders by accommodare, was used by Philodemos to denote this method of interpretation,[1030] which has had serious results upon our tradition, especially in the case of Herakleitos (p. 157).

4. The same remarks apply mutatis mutandis to the Skeptics. The interest of such a writer as Sextus Empiricus in early philosophy is to show that skepticism went back to an early date—as far as Xenophanes, in fact. But what he tells us is often of value; for he frequently quotes early views as to knowledge and sensation in support of his thesis.

5. Under this head we have chiefly to consider the commentators on Aristotle in so far as they are independent of the Theophrastean tradition. Their chief characteristic is what Simplicius calls εὐγνωμοσύνη, that is, a liberal spirit of interpretation, which makes all early philosophers agree with one another in upholding the doctrine of a Sensible and an 421Intelligible World. It is, however, to Simplicius more than any one else that we owe the preservation of the fragments. He had, of course, the library of the Academy at his disposal.