Book contents
1 - Parmenides and the birth of ancient idealism
from I - Ancient idealism
Summary
INTRODUCTION: ON THE VERY IDEA OF ANCIENT IDEALISM
At the end of the nineteenth century, Benjamin Jowett, Plato's translator and the teacher of many of British idealism's earlier leading lights, had no qualms about asserting, in the introduction to his translation of the Republic, that Plato “is the father of idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature” (1902: 105). In contemporary philosophy, however, the claim that there is such a thing as “ancient idealism” is controversial. This is because for many philosophers, G. E. Moore's claim that “modern idealism, if it asserts any general conclusion about the universe at all, asserts that it is spiritual” (1903: 433), for all its vagueness, remains an accurate account of idealism. Thus we find Moore's very loose “definition” repeated in Miles Burnyeat's influential paper “Idealism and Greek Philosophy”, which uses it to argue that idealism:
whether we mean by that Berkeley's own doctrine that esse est percipi or a more vaguely conceived thesis to the effect that every-thing is in some substantial sense mental or spiritual, is one of the very few major philosophical positions which did not receive its first formulation in antiquity.
(1982: 3–4)Rather than, with Moore, seeking to “refute” idealism as such, Burnyeat's contention, as Bernard Williams suggests, is that:
idealism and the historical consciousness are the only two really substantial respects in which later philosophy is removed from Greek philosophy, as opposed to its pursuing what are recognizably the same types of preoccupation as Greek philosophy pursued.
(2008: 6)- Type
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- Information
- IdealismThe History of a Philosophy, pp. 10 - 18Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2011