Peter Adamson > Quotes

“Whereas Socrates would walk up to people in the marketplace and harass them by asking them to define virtue, Pythagoras and his young students in Croton supposedly observed a code of silence, to prevent their secret teachings from being divulged to the uninitiated.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Echoing al-Ghazālī’s opinion that Avicenna’s theories made him an apostate, Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ urged that the death sentence would be appropriate for anyone who refuses to give up on the study of logic and philosophy.”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World

“Ibn Taymiyya has been blamed, or praised, for launching an anti-rationalist traditionalism which inspires radical Islamists today.”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World

“Heraclitus, though, more or less wrote in fragments. His body of work is not unlike that of a comedian from the 1950s: it consists mostly of one-liners.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“God didn’t create man in His image, rather we create God in our image.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Parmenides was offering a rational deduction. He starts from a basic principle—that you can have “is,” but you can’t have “is not”—and then proceeds to explore the consequences, whatever they might be. Whatever we make of his argument, this is a real quantum leap in the history of philosophy. Parmenides is not just offering explanations of what he can see around him, though he goes on to do that in the way of opinion. Rather, he puts all his trust in reason itself, and trusts the power of argument more than he trusts the evidence of his own eyes and ears. This is not to say that Parmenides is the first Pre-Socratic to offer arguments. Already with Thales, I suggested that he may have had implicit arguments for his views on water and the claim that everything is full of gods. Nonetheless Parmenides does represent something new. He tries to settle an abstract philosophical issue—the nature of being itself—with an explicit and complex deductive argument.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“An amusing anti-astrological argument was offered by the early Academic skeptic Carneades: if time of birth determined one’s fate, then everyone who dies in a huge battle must have been born at the same time.”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds

“Philosophers have always loved mathematics. It’s not hard to see why: one of the things philosophers are most interested in is knowledge. We just saw one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Xenophanes, making a contrast between really having knowledge of the truth and having mere beliefs. And if you’re looking for a nice, solid example of knowledge, mathematics is just about the best example there is. You don’t merely believe that 2 + 2 = 4, you actually know it. Or at least, this is what most people think: that mathematics is a kind of gold standard against which other supposed examples of knowledge can be measured.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Xenophon’s Socrates appeals to the political interests of his audience in making this point: he says that choosing an ignorant man to be the leader of a city would be like choosing an ignorant man as one’s doctor. We don’t let untrained men experiment on our bodies, and neither should we let men without knowledge experiment on the body politic.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“But Parmenides and Heraclitus do agree about one thing: everyone else apart from them is completely confused, unaware of the nature of reality. Pre-Socratics were rarely short on self-confidence.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“what is this word “logos”? It’s a term that is always difficult to translate in Greek philosophical texts; in this case, it’s even harder. Basically logos means “word,” but it expands to mean many other things too, like “account” and “reason,” or even “proportion” or “measure.” It’s where we get all those English words that end in “-ology.” For example, “theology” is giving an “account,” a logos, of “god,” theos; “anthropology” is giving an “account,” a logos, of “man,” anthropos; and we just saw that bios means “life,” hence our word “biology.” So, quite an important word, and it’s here in Heraclitus that it first becomes really crucial in philosophical Greek.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“The humanists were never better students of Cicero than when they followed his lead by squinting hard enough to make an oligarchy look like a genuine republic.”
― Peter Adamson, Byzantine and Renaissance Philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 6

“Socrates was also seductive for these young men because they could admire his sort of virtue. His virtue was, in essence, independence and freedom. He was poor not because he had to be, but because he knew that an utterly destitute man can, paradoxically, be more self-sufficient than a man who has to worry about his wealth and hangers-on.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Surely I would be speaking the truth if I were to say, “This sentence I’m now uttering is in English,” and saying something false if I said, “This sentence I’m now uttering is in German.” So banning truth and falsehood in the case of self-referential statements looks not just arbitrary, but downright wrong.”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World

“Atoms can nowadays be split, with callous disregard for etymology.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“When I was finishing my studies in philosophy and preparing to apply for a job, I got some advice about what to say in the interviews.. I should expect to be asked why it is worth studying the history of philosophy at all. The right answer, I was told, is that we can mine the history of philosophy to discover arguments and positions that would speak to today’s concerns... So I prepared myself to say, preferably with a straight face, that contemporary philosophers of the 1990s could learn a thing or two from my doctoral dissertation.

In my heart, I never really believed that this is the only, or even the best, rationale for studying the history of philosophy. Certainly, historical texts have contributed to contemporary debates.. Others seem almost to transcend the time they were written… But to me, much of the fascination of the historical figures is how far they were from our ways of thinking, rather than how up-to-date we can make them seem... I find it fascinating that long-dead philosophers assumed certain things to be obviously true which now seem obviously false, and that they built elaborate systems on these exotic foundations. To be useful, historical ideas don’t always need to fit neatly into our ways of thinking. They can shake us out of those ways of thinking, helping us to see that our own assumptions are a product of a specific time and place.”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World

“In what may be the first joke in the history of philosophy, albeit a joke with a serious message, Xenophanes sarcastically remarks that if cattle or horses could depict the gods, they would show them looking like cattle or horses (§169).”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“The best any of us can do is to find the most plausible and appropriate beliefs. But that doesn’t stop Xenophanes from being pretty tough on people who fall short of these most plausible and appropriate beliefs, especially on a topic as important as the divine. We don’t know, maybe, that God thinks and can shake all things by thinking, but we should believe it. Whereas we sure as heck shouldn’t believe that God commits adultery.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“life of pure speculation was not Thales’ style anyway, or so it would seem. He was no detached contemplator, more of an all-purpose wise man. In fact he was named as one of the so-called “Seven Sages” of the early period of Greece.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Greek philosophers, however, took a considerably more critical approach to religion than anything we can find in medieval Europe. And none more so than Xenophanes.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“If you think about it, nearly all argumentative discussion works like this: a topic for debate is identified, and the parties to the discussion try to find some point of agreement as a basis for further argument. If no point of agreement is found, then no argument is possible. Arguing without agreed premises isn’t rational disputation, it’s just posturing and shouting—I refer you to the political debating shows one sees on television nowadays.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Naṣr al-Dīn is sitting by a river and sees a traveler arrive at the far shore. The traveler looks around, and then calls out, “How do I get across?” “What do you mean?” asks Naṣr al-Dīn. “You’re already across!”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World

“Empedocles informs us, modestly enough, that he is a god, who is decorated with wreaths wherever he goes, worshipped by the people, who beg him to bestow prophecy and healing upon them”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“As already suggested by Aristotle (Politics 1252a–53a), philosophy’s contribution to our practical affairs is divided into three parts, concerning the individual, the household, and the city. Thus, the title Ethics (Akhlāq)—a more literal translation would be Character Traits—really only applies to the first major section of the work, on individual action.”
― Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World

“Different waters flow over those who step into the same rivers”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“After all, these philosophers lived in a time before electricity, and hence before light pollution. If you walked outside at night, even within the walls of a big city like Athens, you would see a stunning night sky, with more stars than most Europeans ever get to see nowadays. If anything in the world of the ancient Greeks cried out for explanation, it was the heavens.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“The Gorgias presented by Plato would agree with this. He tells Socrates that if a doctor and a rhetorician debate in front of an audience about how best to cure a patient, the audience will agree with the rhetorician and not the doctor (456b–c). He gives examples to prove his point: for instance, it was the great orator Pericles who persuaded the Athenians to build a defensive wall, not a bunch of stonemasons, who are experts in wall-building (455e).”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“imagine instead that you’re a fifth-century AD student of philosophy. You have come to the great center of learning that is the city of Alexandria in Egypt. (Don’t forget to visit the lighthouse, I hear it’s wonderful.) You already have a good education under your belt—you are literate, and have studied some rhetoric—and now you are going to try to master philosophy. What’s the first thing you will study? Of course it will be Aristotle. In late antiquity even Platonists introduced their students to philosophy through Aristotle, saving Plato’s texts for more advanced research.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“Socrates is without doubt the most influential and famous philosopher who never wrote anything.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy

“The place he’s most associated with is therefore not Samos but Croton, a city in southern Italy (§§269–70). In fact ancient authors liked to give him credit for founding a distinctive philosophical tradition, the so-called “Italian school” of philosophy.”
― Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy