Saint-Louis University - Bruxelles
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FILO1219 - History of Antiquity philosophy


[A. • 60 Th. • 6 ECTS - credits]


Lecturer : Klimis Sophie
Language of instruction : French.
Learning outcomes : The Greeks are the "nuisance" constantly imitated and reinvented by subsequent philosophers. By limiting ourselves to the twentieth century alone, we could for example mention the importance of the study of the pre-Socratics for the last Heidegger, Hannah Arendt's reworking of the Aristotelian distinction between "active life" and "contemplative life", the rebirth with Perelman of the theory of argumentation from a rereading of Aristotle's Rhetoric, the constant rereading of poets, historians and Greek philosophers throughout the works of Foucault, from his analysis of "the Greek use of pleasures" to the "government of self and others", until today where Alain Badiou asserts his Platonism and proposes a "hyper-translation" of the Republic.
But it is mostly to the rereading of the Greeks by Cornelius Castoriadis that we will pay attention, by studying what he calls “the Greek creation”, i.e. the joint invention of democracy (understood as a project of social autonomy) and philosophy (understood as unlimited questioning), in the period included between Homer and the end of the 5th century. We will thus consider the two major figures of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, as they emerged “after” this intense period of political and philosophical creation, and as their whole work has to be approached according to this.
The aim of the course is thus to introduce the students to a dialogue with the entire Greek thought, not in a fixed perspective of “history for antiquaries” such as Nietzsche had already denounced, but in the sense that trying to understand the Greeks, is trying to understand how the forms of thinking have been established in the West, of which we are still reliant on nowadays and which we are required to continue to develop.
Prerequisites : The knowledge of ancient Greek is an asset but not a requirement. The specificity of Greek conceptuality and the singular use of the Greek language by each philosopher (creation of neologisms, exploitation of every forms of the verb "to be", semantic and syntactic polysemies, etc.) will be presented by the professor to make sure these notions are clearly understood by everybody.
Course contents : The course is composed of six major parts:
During the first term, we will start by studying the poetic texts that constitute the fundamental references of Greek culture: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, as well as Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod. If Socrates of the Republic calls Homer the "educator of the whole of Greece" and so vigorously fights the representation of gods and heroes of epic poetry, it is because Homer provides the entire Greek world, at least until the 5th century, with the frame of its values, its representation of what makes the essence of the human being, the cosmos, the gods, justice and the common world.
We will also study tragic texts such as Prometheus bound by Aeschylus or Antigone by Sophocles, taking into account the importance of tragedy in the self-institution of the Athenian democratic city, and the importance of the criticism that Plato addresses to it (remembering the, at first, incredible affirmation according to which it is the exclusion of tragic and comic poets that justifies that the ideal city of the Republic is "the best possible"). Finally, we will base ourselves, among others, on Thucydides to understand history, the functioning and the political institutions of the democratic city of Athens, which will be indispensable to understand the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.
The second part of the course will be devoted to Greek thinkers of the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, called "pre-Socratic thinkers"(II). We will start with analysing the development of this "category" in the 19th century, where Socrates arises as the pivot of ancient philosophy history. We will also see why the term "philosopher", derived from Pythagoreanism, is rejected by some "pre-Socratics", such as Heraclitus, who prefers the designation "wise men".
Then, we will study the different currents of thought included under the term "pre-Socratics": the cosmologies proposed by the thinkers of the Milesian School (Tales, Anaximander, Anaximenes), the status of fire - logos, One - All in the excerpts of Heraclitus, the poem by Parmenides, which institutes the logical principle of identity and proposes a new cosmology, the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, etc. We will finally study these strange "pre-Socratics" contemporary of Socrates: the Sophists. We will focus on Protagoras, whose thought reveals the deep values of Athenian democracy.
Finally, the third part of the course will be devoted to Plato's dialogues (III) and it is in this context that we will consider Socrates as a "conceptual character" (using an expression borrowed from Gilles Deleuze), by confronting him with the enigma of the "historical" Socrates. We will study the specificity of the choice of the dialogue-form, which "shows the thought at work" according to an expression of Cornelius Castoriadis, by showing how the creation of a form of orality specific to writing counterbalances Plato's theory of "oral and esoteric doctrines", developed by contemporary interpreters, known as of the Tubingen School.
Through the analysis of excerpts of several dialogues, we will study the central themes of the Platonic thought: the invention of the "philosophical difference" in regards to politicians, sophists, rhetoricians and poets; the issues of soul, justice, Eros, virtue, etc.
We will also study the creation of thought specific to Plato: the institution of the dialectic method, the main Genres of the Sophist; Ideas considered as "figures of the thinkable". Finally, we will see how Platonic philosophy is indeed, according to the description of Alain Badiou, the constitution of a philosophical scene that succeeds in making heterogeneous registers of politics, mathematics, poetry and love compossible.
In the second term, we will focus first on Aristotle's thought (IV). He is indeed the inventor of philosophy as we still practice it today, implementing a form of argumentation that does not resort to myth as Plato did. Philosophy as Aristotle conceives it uses a diaporematic method, which, starting from a state of the question, extracts the "aporias" and tries to find solutions to them. Aristotle is also the one who instituted a clear delimitation of the different "regions of being", of which he began to identify specific principles.
We will therefore particularly focus on the study of "becoming" such at it is thematised in Physics, at the intersection of ontology, ousiology and theology in Metaphysics, and on the specificity of theorisation of the "human things" in ethico-political treaties. We will pay special attention to theorisation of Aristotle's human language, from the study of its anatomic conditions in biological treaties, to the differentiation between apophantic, rhetoric and poetic languages.
The fifth part of the course (V) will study the main currents of Hellenistic philosophy, i.e. stoicism, Epicureanism and scepticism. We will study these three currents from a theoretical point of view (logic, physics, ethics) but also as life practices, "spiritual exercises" whose importance has been highlighted by Pierre Hadot. We will finish our overview of ancient philosophy with Plotinus, thinker of the third century after Jesus Christ, founder of neo-Platonism (VI).
Mode of delivery : The course is a lecture that includes at the end of the course a moment of dialogue, to ask questions and exchange ideas.
Assessment methods and criteria : Oral examination at the end of the year according to the terms agreed with the students.
Recommended or required reading : A selected and commented bibliography for each part of the course will be handed out in class.
Other information : - Selected and commented bibliography for each part of the course;
- Authors' texts.