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Essays in Ancient Philosophy

Michael Frede

“Michael Frede has established himself as a leading figure within the field of ancient philosophy. This book will confirm his reputation, but it will also do something else. It will bring his essays, which have not been widely disseminated, to the general attention of philosophers. The volume will enable them to see for themselves what many now may know only second hand: that Frede’s remarkable erudition allows his interpretive wit to serve even better his essentially philosophical motivation. These essays show historical writing in philosophy at its best. --Alexander Nehamas, University of Pennsylvania

History , Theory and Philosophy

$60.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-1275-8 416 pages, 5.75x9, 1987

Michael Frede was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University.

“[Frede’s work] is the vanguard of research and progressive though in the subject.” --Myles Burnyeat, Cambridge University

About This Book

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Forthcoming Volume

• The ‘Two Worlds Theory’ in the Philebus Gail Fine In this paper, I ask whether Plato endorses the ‘Two Worlds Theory’ in the Philebus . The issue is complicated in part because that theory has been formulated in different, not obviously equivalent, ways. Accordingly, I begin by distinguishing different versions of the view. I then explore the central passages in the Philebus , asking whether they endorse one or another version of the view.
• Fatalism and False Futures Jason Carter In De Interpretatione 9, Aristotle argues against the fatalist view that, if statements about future contingent singular events (e.g. ‘There will be a sea battle tomorrow’, ‘There will not be a sea battle tomorrow’) are already true or false, then the events to which those statements refer will necessarily occur or necessarily not occur. Scholars have generally held that, to refute this argument, Aristotle allows that future contingent statements are exempt from either the principle of bivalence, or the law of excluded middle. In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Aristotle’s refutation of fatalism. According to this interpretation, each member of a pair of contradictory future contingent statements, in virtue of expressing modal necessity, is simply false.
• For all p , it is impossible to believe that p and not-p .
• Therefore, it is impossible to believe that it is possible that there is a p such that p and not-p .
• Aristotle on Knowledge and the Knowable Jessica Moss Aristotle has a general concept of knowledge, which he labels gnôsis (in addition to his better-recognized various concepts of specialized kinds of knowledge, like epistêmê ). I show that we can learn a good deal about how he conceives gnôsis by looking at his treatment of the gnôrimon , knowable. There are two apparent obstacles to a unified account of the gnôrimon : first, Aristotle’s distinction between what is knowable by nature and knowable to us, and second his application of ‘ gnôrimon ’ both to propositions and to objects. I argue that these obstacles are merely apparent. Aristotle has a unified notion of the gnôrimon , namely as that with which we can be well-acquainted —either through familiarity or through insight and understanding. This strongly suggests that gnôsis is knowledge in the sense of good-acquaintance (roughly, connaissance ). Moreover, Aristotle does not have a separate notion of propositional or factual knowledge: all knowledge, propositional or not, is a matter of being well-acquainted with reality. On Aristotle’s view, all humans by nature desire to know not primarily because we want our beliefs to be certain or justified or reliably produced or the like, but because we want reality to be well-known to us, like a well-known person.
• Nicomachean Revision in the ‘Common Books’: the Case of NE VI. ( ≈ EE V.) 2 Samuel Baker We have good reason to believe that Nicomachean Ethics VI. 2 is a Nicomachean revision of an originally Eudemian text. Aristotle seems to have inserted lines 1139 a 31– b 11 by means of a marginal note, which the first editor then mistakenly added in the wrong place, and I propose that we move these lines so that they follow the word κοινωνεῖν at 1139 a 20. The suggested note appears to be Nicomachean for several reasons but most importantly because it contains a desire-based account of the practical intellect as teleologically oriented to action. The NE articulates consequences of this account regarding practical philosophy’s methodology and teleological orientation to action. The EE does not articulate such consequences, and instead seems to assume an object-based account of the practical intellect. Consequently, it would seem that, between the EE and the NE , Aristotle revised his conception of the practical intellect and consequently his conception of practical philosophy.
• Something Stoic in Plato’s Sophist Vanessa de Harven The Stoics have often been compared to the earthborn Giants in the Battle of Gods and Giants in Plato’s Sophist , but with diverging opinions about the lessons they drew in reaction to Plato. At issue are questions about what in the Sophist the Stoics were reacting to, how the Stoics are like and unlike the Giants, the status of being for the Stoics, and the extent to which they were Platonizing with their incorporeals. With these open questions in mind, I reexamine the Sophist from the Stoic perspective, finding eight distinct challenges that are likely to have been salient to the Stoics, and offer a new account of the Stoics as responding to these challenges with an innovative ontology that prises apart something from being to make room for what is not , and a sophisticated one-world metaphysics that grounds everything there is in two fundamental bodies.

Advisory Board

• Professor Rachel Barney University of Toronto
• Professor Gábor Betegh University of Cambridge
• Professor Susanne Bobzien All Souls College, Oxford
• Professor Victor Caston University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Professor Riccardo Chiaradonna Università degli Studi Roma Tre
• Professor Alan Code Stanford University
• Professor Brad Inwood Yale University
• Professor Gabriel Lear University of Chicago
• Professor A. A. Long University of California, Berkeley
• Professor Stephen Menn McGill University and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Professor Susan Sauvé Meyer University of Pennsylvania
• Professor Jessica Moss New York University
• Professor Martha Nussbaum University of Chicago
• Professor Marwan Rashed Université Paris-Sorbonne
• Professor David Sedley University of Cambridge
• Professor Richard Sorabji King’s College, University of London, and Wolfson College, Oxford
• Professor Raphael Woolf King’s College, University of London

Previous Volumes

• Essays in Ancient Philosophy

In this Book

• Michael Frede
• Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright
• pp. vii-viii
• Introduction: The Study of Ancient Philosophy
• pp. ix-xxviii
• 1. Observations on Perception in Plato's Later Dialogues
• 2. The Title, Unity, and Authenticity of the Aristotelian Categories
• 3. Categories in Aristotle
• 4. Individuals in Aristotle
• 5. Substance in Aristotle's Metaphysics
• 6. The Unity of General and Special Metaphysics: Aristotle's Conception of Metaphysics
• 7. Stoic vs. Aristotelian Syllogistic
• 8. The Original Notion of Cause
• pp. 125-150
• 9. Stoics and Skeptics on Clear and Distinct Impressions
• pp. 151-176
• 10. The Skeptic's Beliefs
• pp. 179-200
• 11. The Skeptic's Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge
• pp. 201-222
• 12. Philosophy and Medicine in Antiquity
• pp. 225-242
• 13. The Ancient Empiricists
• pp. 243-260
• 14. The Method of the So-Called Methodical School of Medicine
• pp. 261-278
• 15. On Galen's Epistemology
• pp. 279-298
• 16. Principles of Stoic Grammar
• pp. 301-337
• 17. The Origins of Traditional Grammar
• pp. 338-362
• pp. 363-374
• Index of Ancient Authors
• pp. 375-378
• Index of Subjects
• pp. 379-382
• About the Author

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Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility: Essays in Ancient Philosophy

2021, https://www.whsmith.co.uk/products/determinism-freedom-and-moral-responsibility-essays-in-ancient-philosophy/susanne-bobzien/hardback/9780198866732.html

Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility brings together nine substantial essays on determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility in antiquity by Susanne Bobzien. The essays present the main ancient theories on these subjects, ranging historically from Aristotle followed by the Epicureans, the early Stoics, several later Stoics, and up to Alexander of Aphrodisias in the third century ce. The author discusses questions about rational and autonomous human agency and their compatibility with a large range of important philosophical issues, including their compatibility with divine predetermination and other theological questions; with atomism and continuum theory and with the physical sciences more generally; with the determination of character and its development from childhood through nature and nurture; with epistemic features such as ignorance of circumstances; with theories of necessity, possibility and contingency; with external or internal preceding causes and impediments; and with folk theories of fatalism. Room is also given to the questions of how human autonomous agency is related to moral development, to virtue and wisdom, and to blame and praise. Historically unified, philosophically profound, and methodologically rigorous, Bobzien's essays show that in Classical and Hellenistic philosophy these topics were all debated without reference to freedom to do otherwise or to a free will, and that the latter two notions were fully developed only later. The volume will be of interest both to philosophers and to historians of philosophy, with more than half of the essays accessible to advanced undergraduates.

Related Papers

Jennifer Daigle

Aristotle says that we are responsible (αἴτιοι) for our voluntary actions and character. But there’s a question about whether he thinks we are morally responsible and, if so, what he thinks makes it such that we are. Interpretations of Aristotle on this question range from libertarian, according to which Aristotle considers us morally responsible in part because we have undetermined choices, to deflationary, according to which Aristotle has no theory of moral responsibility. Despite putative evidence to the contrary, neither interpretation captures Aristotle’s view on the matter, and their rejection paves the way for a compatibilist proposal, one that works both as an interpretation of Aristotle and as an independently attractive view. I detail this view and defend it against one prominent objection. INDEX WORDS: Aristotle, Character, Compatibilism, Incompatibilism, Moral responsibility, Voluntary action ARISTOTLE, DETERMINISM, AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem

Susanne Bobzien

ABSTRACT: In this paper I argue that the ‘discovery’ of the problem of causal determinism and freedom of decision in Greek philosophy is the result of a combination and mix-up of Aristotelian and Stoic thought in later antiquity; more precisely, a (mis-)interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of deliberate choice and action in the light of Stoic theory of determinism and moral responsibility. The (con-)fusion originates with the beginnings of Aristotle scholarship, at the latest in the early 2nd century AD. It undergoes several developments, absorbing Epictetan, Middle-Platonist, and Peripatetic ideas; and it leads eventually to a concept of freedom of decision and an exposition of the ‘free-will problem’ in Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On Fate and in the Mantissa ascribed to him.

The Journal of Ethics

Robert Kane

in Origeniana Nona: Origen and the Religious Practice of His Time ed. G. Heidl & R. Somos. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 228, Leuven: Peeters, 2009: 625-36.

István M Bugár

The Journal of Positive Psychology

Martin Seligman

Agency, the theme of my life’s work, consists of efficacy, future-minded optimism, and imagination. I here attempt to trace the history of agency in Western thought over the Greco-Roman epoch. The Iliad presents mortals without any agency, the gods having it all; whereas in the Odyssey, humans have considerable agency, and the gods less. Later, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics postulate full-blown human agency. The emphasis on will, responsibility, and choice continues through early Christianity and then is renounced by Augustine in the fourth century, CE, with human agency relegated to being grace, a gift from God. Human progress seems linked to these beliefs, with strong human agency beliefs linked to progress and weak human agency beliefs linked to stagnation.

Akinola Fagbemi

In this article problems associated with free will and determinism shall be considered, starting by explaining the terms involved, the difficulty (if there is one), and then trying to understand the proposed solutions. The importance of the topic is plain enough: it comes up often, in many contexts, and is one that people can easily understand the relevance of; which is only to say that it isn't just for the philosophers.

Maureen Sie

Women's Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy

Izabela Jurasz

The relationship between Bardaisan the Syriac (150–221) and Greek philosophy remains the object of several hypotheses. In the past, Bardaisan’s teaching has already been compared with Stoicism and Platonism. Some points in common with Aristotelianism have only been recently suggested by scholars. The present article provides an in-depth analysis of a doctrinal theme for which Bardaisan was well known in the Greek-speaking world: his anti-fatalist polemic deployed in the Book of the Laws of Countries. In this dialogue, in the course of which his disciples put forward various questions, Bardaisan’s answers show a certain resemblance to the theses of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ treatise On Fate, written against the determinism supported by the Stoics. A detailed analysis of the two texts reveals the extent of the similarities (and differences) between them, particularly in the approach to the notions of nature, freedom, and destiny or fate.

Samuel O'Femi Amoran

chikonde kasonde

Both Plato and Aristotle appear to have an unclear view of free will. Although Plato set conditions on the ability of choice, some may argue his belief in free will for the enlightened to be an example of libertarianism. He seemed to think it an ability of only a few individuals, those who had achieved inner justice. In fact, In Plato's Gorgias, he goes as far as to say that nobody does wrong willingly. This seems to indicate that Plato believed to act with poor intent is to act without intent at all, rather one who acts in such as way is a slave to their base desires, void of the enlightenment that spawns an individual's ability to choose.

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Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy II

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Table of contents

Introduction

Journal and Standard Reference Abbreviations

I. Pre-Socratics

John Ferguson

Xenophanes' Scepticism

James H. Lesher

Parmenides' Way of Truth and B16

Jackson P. Hershbell

"Nothing" as "Not-being": Some Literary Contexts that Bear on Plato

Alexander P. D. Mourelatos

Anaxagoras in Response to Parmenides

David J. Furley

Anaxagoras and Epicurus

Margaret E. Reesor

Form and Content in Gorgias' Helen and Palamedes : Phetoric, Philosophy, Inconsistency and Valid Argument in some Greek Thinkers

Arthur W. H. Adkins

Socrates and Prodicus in the Clouds

Z. Philip Ambrose

The Socratic Problem: Some Second Thoughts

Eric A. Havelock

Doctrine and Dramatic Dates of Plato's Dialogues

Robert S. Brumbaugh

The Tragic and Comic Poet of the Symposium

Diskin Clay

Charmides' First Definition: Sophrosyne as Quietness

L. A. Kosman

The Arguments in the Phaedo Concerning the Thesis That the Soul Is a Harmonia

C. C. W. Taylor

The Form of the Good in Plato's Republic

Gerasimos Santas

Logos in the Theaetetus and the Sophist

Edward M. Galligan

Episteme and Doxa : Some Reflections on Eleatic and Heraclitean Themes in Plato

Robert G. Turnbull

III. Aristotle

On the Antecedents of Aristotle's Bipartite Psychology

William W. Fortenbaugh

Heart and Soul in Aristotle

Theodore Tracy

Eidos as Norm in Aristotle's Biology

Anthony Preus

Intellectualism in Aristotle

Aristotle's Analysis of Change and Plato's Theory of Transcendent Ideas

Chung-Hwan Chen

The Fifth Element in Aristotle's De Philosophia : A Critical Reexamination

David E. Hahm

IV. Post-Aristotelian Philosophy

Problems in Epicurean Physics

David Konstan

Zeno and Stoic Consistency

John M. Rist

The Stoic Conception of Fate

Josiah B. Gould

Plotinus and Paranormal Phenomena

Richard T. Wallis

Metriopatheia and Apatheia : Some Reflections on a Controversy in Later Greek Ethics

John M. Dillon

Description

Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Volume Two, reflects the refinements in scholarship and philosophical analysis that have impacted classical philosophy in recent years. It is a selection of the best papers presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy during the last decade. The papers presented indicate a shift in accent from a predominant preference for the application of linguistic methods in the study of texts to a more intensified concern for contextual examinations of philosophical concepts. The works of both younger scholars and senior authors show a more liberal, yet controlled, use of historical and cultural elements in interpretation. The papers also reflect advances in scholarship in adjacent fields of Greek studies.

From pre-Socratic to post-Aristotelian philosophers, the papers in this volume are intended to stimulate interest in the major accomplishments of classical philosophers. This work augments its companion volume Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy.

John P. Anton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida. Anthony Preus is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

"The essays are a genuine contribution to the field. They provide a number of fresh insights and uniformly have something intellectually important to say. " — Dr. Aldo Tassi, Loyola College in Maryland

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Essays in Philosophy: Ancient First Edition

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• ISBN-10 1587312263
• ISBN-13 978-1587312267
• Edition First Edition
• Publisher St. Augustines Press
• Publication date April 25, 2013
• Language English
• Dimensions 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
• Print length 464 pages
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

From the back cover.

This collection testifies to the remarkable range of Stanley Rosen’s learning and reflection in the history of philosophy, both ancient and modern. The publication of these essays, with all their speculative depth and richness, is truly a great philosophical benefit. It will throw new light on Rosen’s thinking on many topics in metaphysics and political philosophy and on his readings of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kojève, Strauss, and other figures. – Richard Velkley, Tulane University

To say that Stanley Rosen is “one of kind” does not begin to do justice to his originality, or to the unique place in American letters that he has carved out for himself. His writing - erudite, witty and passionate - is also philosophically explosive and always alive with the cadence of energetic speech.  This collection of his essays on ancient and modern philosophy is a valuable and often provocative selection of many of his most engaging essays. – Robert Pippin, University of Chicago  

About the Author

Stanley Rosen, Prof. Emer. in Philosophy from Boston University, is a heralded author of numerous works in ancient and medieval philosophy. Other works of Stanley Rosen published by St. Augustine’s Press: Plato’s Symposium, Plato’s Sophist, Plato’s Statesman, The Ancients and the Moderns, Nihilism, G.W.F. Hegel, The Limits of Analysis, The Question of Being , and Metaphysics in Ordinary Language .

Martin Black completed his Ph.D. on Plato’s depiction of the Socratic turn under the supervision of Stanley Rosen at Boston University in 2009. He has published articles on Plato’s Symposium , the crisis of modernity, and self-knowledge, and is preparing a manuscript on the Socratic turn and a translation of several Platonic dialogues. He teaches ancient and medieval philosophy and the ancient Greek language and literature at Suffolk University.  

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ St. Augustines Press; First Edition (April 25, 2013)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1587312263
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1587312267
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.66 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.5 x 9 inches
• #5,245 in History of Philosophy
• #7,123 in Ancient Greek & Roman Philosophy
• #299,263 in Unknown

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The Eclipse That Ended a War and Shook the Gods Forever

Thales, a Greek philosopher 2,600 years ago, is celebrated for predicting a famous solar eclipse and founding what came to be known as science.

Credit... John P. Dessereau

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By William J. Broad

William J. Broad studied the history of science in graduate school and still follows it for the light it casts on modern developments. This article is part of The Times’s coverage of the April 8 eclipse , the last time a total solar eclipse will be visible in most of North America for 20 years.

• Published April 6, 2024 Updated April 7, 2024

In the spring of 585 B.C. in the Eastern Mediterranean, the moon came out of nowhere to hide the face of the sun, turning day into night.

Back then, solar eclipses were cloaked in scary uncertainty. But a Greek philosopher was said to have predicted the sun’s disappearance. His name was Thales. He lived on the Anatolian coast — now in Turkey but then a cradle of early Greek civilization — and was said to have acquired his unusual power by abandoning the gods.

The eclipse had an immediate worldly impact. The kingdoms of the Medes and Lydian had waged a brutal war for years. But the eclipse was interpreted as a very bad omen, and the armies quickly laid down their arms. The terms of peace included the marriage of the daughter of the king of Lydia to the son of the Median king.

The impiety of Thales had a more enduring impact, his reputation soaring over the ages. Herodotus told of his foretelling. Aristotle called Thales the first person to fathom nature. The classical age of Greece honored him as the foremost of its seven wise men.

Today, the tale illustrates the awe of the ancients at the sun’s disappearance and their great surprise that a philosopher knew it beforehand.

The episode also marks a turning point. For ages, eclipses of the sun were feared as portents of calamity. Kings trembled. Then, roughly 2,600 years ago, Thales led a philosophical charge that replaced superstition with rational eclipse prediction.

Today astronomers can determine — to the second — when the sun on April 8 will disappear across North America. Weather permitting, it’s expected to be the most-viewed astronomical event in American history, astonishing millions of sky watchers.

“Everywhere you look, from modern times back, everyone wanted predictions” of what the heavens would hold, said Mathieu Ossendrijver , an Assyriologist at the Free University of Berlin. He said Babylonian kings “were scared to death by eclipses.” In response, the rulers scanned the sky in efforts to anticipate bad omens, placate the gods and “strengthen their legitimacy.”

By all accounts, Thales initiated the rationalist view. He’s often considered the world’s first scientist — the founder of a radical new way of thinking.

Patricia F. O’Grady, in her 2002 book on the Greek philosopher, called Thales “brilliant, veracious, and courageously speculative.” She described his great accomplishment as seeing that the fraught world of human experience results not from the whims of the gods but “nature itself,” initiating civilization’s hunt for its secrets.

Long before Thales, the ancient landscape bore hints of successful eclipse prediction. Modern experts say that Stonehenge — one of the world’s most famous prehistoric sites, its construction begun some 5,000 years ago — may have been able to warn of lunar and solar eclipses.

While the ancient Chinese and Mayans noted the dates of eclipses, few early cultures learned how to predict the disappearances.

The first clear evidence of success comes from Babylonia — an empire of ancient Mesopotamia in which court astronomers made nightly observations of the moon and planets, typically in relation to gods and magic, astrology and number mysticism.

Starting around 750 B.C. , Babylonian clay tablets bear eclipse reports. From ages of eclipse tallies, the Babylonians were able to discern patterns of heavenly cycles and eclipse seasons. Court officials could then warn of godly displeasure and try to avoid the punishments, such as a king’s fall.

The most extreme measure was to employ a scapegoat. The substitute king performed all the usual rites and duties — including those of marriage. The substitute king and queen were then killed as a sacrifice to the gods, the true king having been hidden until the danger passed.

Initially, the Babylonians focused on recording and predicting eclipses of the moon, not the sun. The different sizes of eclipse shadows let them observe a greater number of lunar disappearances.

The Earth’s shadow is so large that, during a lunar eclipse, it blocks sunlight from an immense region of outer space, making the moon’s disappearance and reappearance visible to everyone on the planet’s night side. The size difference is reversed in a solar eclipse. The moon’s relatively small shadow makes observation of the totality — the sun’s complete vanishing — quite limited in geographic scope. In April, the totality path over North America will vary in width between 108 and 122 miles.

Ages ago, the same geometry ruled. So the Babylonians, by reason of opportunity, focused on the moon. Eventually, they noticed that lunar eclipses tend to repeat themselves every 6,585 days — or roughly every 18 years. That led to breakthroughs in foreseeing lunar eclipse probabilities despite their knowing little of the cosmic realities behind the disappearances.

“They could predict them very well,” said John M. Steele , a historian of ancient sciences at Brown University and a contributor to a recent book , “Eclipse and Revelation.”

This was the world into which Thales was born. He grew up in Miletus, a Greek city on Anatolia’s west coast. It was a sea power . The city’s fleets established wide trade routes and a large number of colonies that paid tribute, making Miletus wealthy and a star of early Greek civilization before Athens rose to prominence.

Thales was said to have come from one of the distinguished families of Miletus, to have traveled to Egypt and possibly Babylonia , and to have studied the stars. Plato told how Thales had once tumbled down a well while examining the night sky. A maidservant, he reported, teased the thinker for being so eager to know the heavens that he ignored what lay at his feet.

It was Herodotus who, in “The Histories,” told of Thales’s predicting the solar eclipse that ended the war. He said the ancient philosopher had anticipated the date of the sun’s disappearance to “within the year” of the actual event — a far cry from today’s precision.

Modern experts, starting in 1864, nonetheless cast doubt on the ancient claim. Many saw it as apocryphal. In 1957, Otto Neugebauer, a historian of science, called it “very doubtful.”

In recent years, the claim has received new support. The updates rest on knowledge of the kind of observational cycles that Babylon pioneered. The patterns are seen as letting Thales make solar predictions that — if not a sure thing — could nevertheless succeed from time to time.

If Stonehenge might do it occasionally, why not Thales?

Mark Littmann, an astronomer, and Fred Espenak , a retired NASA astrophysicist who specializes in eclipses, argue in their book , “Totality,” that the date of the war eclipse was relatively easy to predict, but not its exact location. As a result, they write , Thales “could have warned of the possibility of a solar eclipse.”

Leo Dubal, a retired Swiss physicist who studies artifacts from the ancient past and recently wrote about Thales, agreed. The Greek philosopher could have known the date with great certainty while being unsure about the places where the eclipse might be visible, such as at the war’s front lines.

In an interview and a recent essay , Dr. Dubal argued that generations of historians have confused the philosopher’s informed hunch with the precision of a modern prediction. He said Thales had gotten it exactly right — just as the ancient Greeks declared.

“He was lucky,” Dr. Dubal said, calling such happenstance a regular part of the discovery process in scientific investigation.

Over the ages, Greek astronomers learned more about the Babylonian cycles and used that knowledge as a basis for advancing their own work. What was marginal in the days of Thales became more reliable — including foreknowledge of solar eclipses.

The Antikythera mechanism, a stunningly complex mechanical device, is a testament to the Greek progress. It was made four centuries after Thales, in the second century B.C., and was found off a Greek isle in 1900. Its dozens of gears and dials let it predict many cosmic events, including solar eclipse dates — though not, as usual, their narrow totality paths.

For ages, even into the Renaissance, astronomers kept upgrading their eclipse predictions based on what the Babylonians had pioneered. The 18-year cycle, Dr. Steele of Brown University said, “had a really long history because it worked.”

Then came a revolution. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus put the sun — not Earth — at the center of planetary motions. His breakthrough in cosmic geometry led to detailed studies of eclipse mechanics.

The superstar was Isaac Newton — the towering genius who in 1687 unlocked the universe with his law of gravitational attraction. His breakthrough made it possible to predict the exact paths of not only comets and planets but the sun, the moon and the Earth. As a result, eclipse forecasts soared in precision.

Newton’s good friend, Edmond Halley, who lent his name to a bright comet, put the new powers on public display. In 1714, he published a map showing the predicted path of a solar eclipse across England in the next year.

Halley asked observers to determine the totality’s actual scope. Scholars call it history’s first wide study of a solar eclipse. In accuracy, his predictions outdid those of the Astronomer Royal, who advised Britain’s monarch y on astronomical matters.

Today’s specialists, using Newton’s laws and banks of powerful computers, can predict the movements of stars for millions of years in advance.

But closer to home, they have difficulty making eclipse predictions over such long periods of time. That’s because the Earth, the moon and the sun lie in relative proximity and thus exert comparatively strong gravitational tugs on one another that change subtly in strength over the eons, slightly altering planetary spins and positions.

Despite such complications, “it’s possible to predict eclipse dates more than 10,000 years into the future,” Dr. Espenak, the former NASA expert, said in an interview.

He created the space agency’s web pages that list solar eclipses to come — including some nearly four millenniums from now.

So, if you’re enthusiastic about the April 8 totality, you might consider what’s in store for whoever is living in what we today call Madagascar on Aug. 12, 5814. According to Dr. Espenak, that date will feature the phenomenon of day turning into night and back again into day — a spectacle of nature, not of malevolent gods.

Perhaps it’s worth a moment of contemplation because, if for no other reason, it represents yet another testament to the wisdom of Thales.

William J. Broad is a science journalist and senior writer. He joined The Times in 1983, and has shared two Pulitzer Prizes with his colleagues, as well as an Emmy Award and a DuPont Award. More about William J. Broad

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Essays in Ancient Epistemology

Professor Emerita of Philosophy

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This volume brings together thirteen of my essays on ancient epistemology, published between 2000 and 2020, along with a new, synoptic introduction. The essays focus on Plato, Aristotle, and the Pyrrhonian sceptics, though some attention is also given to the Cyrenaics and Descartes. Some essays compare these philosophers to one another, and/or to more recent discussions of these topics. One central theme is cognitive conditions and their contents. For example, is epistêmê knowledge as it is conceived of nowadays? Are doxa and dogma belief as it is conceived of nowadays? I also ask whether Plato and/or Aristotle is committed to the Two Worlds Theory; and whether Pyrrhonian skeptics take anything to be subjective and whether they are external world skeptics.

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In a time of information overload, enigmatic philosopher Byung-Chul Han seeks the re-enchantment of the world

PhD candidate in literary studies, The University of Western Australia

Disclosure statement

Heather Blakey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Western Australia provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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Byung-Chul Han is the enigmatic philosopher and author of The Burnout Society and Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power . In his latest book The Crisis of Narration , he argues that despite the “present hype around narratives, we live in a post-narrative time”.

The Crisis of Narration – Byung-Chul Han, translated by Daniel Steuer (Polity)

Narrative, Han suggests, is under threat. It is being consumed and reshaped by capitalism and neoliberalism. Environments where narratives once offered meaning and stability have been filled with information – a serialised, de-narrativised form of communication.

Information, according to Han, provides stimuli rather than orientation and meaning. Information’s tendency to count, measure and define has permeated the self and society. Its mission to eradicate uncertainty reaches into health, education, Netflix recommendations, human rights and beyond. Han writes that this information does not offer understanding, but a “thick forest” where “we risk losing ourselves”.

What Han suggests we lose in the noisy forest of information is the space to “open up perspectives on a new order of things”. We become blind to “other forms of life” and “other perceptions and realities”.

He attributes the narrative crisis to the almost sublime dominance of information in our world. What I find hopeful, however, is his evident view in this book that we must narrate. That narration in its genuine form is one of the most powerful things we can do, and may well be the pathway to the re-enchantment of Han’s “post-narrative” world.

Narrative communities

The Crisis of Narration is a valuable confrontation with the question of what “narrative” actually is, and what it does in contemporary contexts.

Narrative is such a foundational way of understanding and organising the world that the meaning of the word feels intuitive. But narrative is also a term that can be mobilised in the service of corporate agendas. At times, it is dressed as something apolitical, something solely to entertain, something distinct from social and cultural relations.

We are bombarded with narratives that propose to make sense of the world for us. They are used to package and sell everything from venture capital and beauty brands to literary festivals, washing machines and socks. At the same time, the word narrative applies to our richest creative endeavours. It extends to ancient oral storytelling traditions sustained across time and space.

These various “narratives” are not alike. Han contends that genuine narratives inscribe the world with meaning in a “close network of relations”, where “nothing remains isolated” and “everything remains meaningful”.

His provocation is that narratives used to “validate the interests of corporate entities and demand our submission” – usually by exploiting individualistic ideologies and appealing to the idea of self-expression – are not really narratives at all. They are, rather, something he calls “storyselling”.

Han makes a multifaceted case for the distinct ways “narrative” stands apart from “storyselling”. But the example I find most resonant is his emphasis on narrative’s capacity to produce community. Narrative communities, he suggests, only form when narration “feeds off experience” and the role of the “careful listener” is as significant as the narrator.

Narrative communities have an intimacy and sympathy that relies on a willingness to experience difference. They make an allowance for uncertainty, from which new ideas are generated in a dialogue with the experiences of the past.

Storyselling, unlike narration, attempts to eradicate uncertainty. It is thus “incapable of designing substantially different forms of life”. It cannot perform narration’s important task of imagining the future.

Read more: Tourists in our own reality: Susan Sontag's Photography at 50

Disenchantment

In his chapter The Disenchantment of the World, Han builds on Susan Sontag’s essay At the Same Time . He writes that “narrative is a play of light and shadow, of the visible and the invisible, of nearness and distance”. This capacity for uncertainty is what enchants the world with meaning.

Han interprets the narrative zeitgeist through the writings of Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan and other icons of European philosophy, paying particular attention to the work of Walter Benjamin . He is drawing on Benjamin when he suggests the space for uncertainty and dialogue in narrative communities is being driven away by the stimuli of information, which he calls “the rustling in the leaves”.

Quoting Benjamin, Han writes that an enchanted world is one we’ve invested with “the ability to look back at us”. Another way of phrasing this is that narrative allows space for the other to express something we don’t quite understand, without the obligation to explain itself for our consumption.

The observable symptom Han attributes to the “information society” is transparency, which destroys the tension of genuine narratives. Narrative operates in the space of potential between certainty and uncertainty. By contrast, the information society disenchants the world by dissolving it into data. When the world is experienced through information, it loses the “distance and expanse” required for generative uncertainty and narrative community.

Han writes that “reality’s gaze is the gaze by which the other addresses us”. He incriminates smartphones as culprits for the disenchantment of the world, because they screen us from reality’s gaze. Their touch screens deprive the world of its otherness, rendering it something that is unable to face us. Instead, the object world becomes consumable; it becomes information.

Read more: Walter Benjamin's Illuminations: the remarkably prescient work of an intellectual truth-seeker

The forest and the trees

There are some aspects of Han’s argument that invite further consideration. One is his persistent appeal to the “we” and “us” of society.

For Han, the figure of “phono sapiens” – humans merged with phones – is emblematic of “the information society”. But to me this oversimplifies the relationship between narration, storyselling, environment and technology. Han seems to be addressing everyone holding a smartphone, but not the global network of mining operations, factories, exchange, exploitation and extraction that makes such an object possible.

In the alienated society Han describes, there can be no “we” without addressing the stratification of power. It is necessary to consider who are the beneficiaries of the forest of information, and who are the ones trapped in it. Han’s engagement with European philosophy of the 20th century is thoughtful and generative, but I noted an absence of queer, Indigenous and diasporic writers who have more recently considered some of the issues he raises.

To me, any project that seeks to address the legacies of narrative communities and the question of their preservation requires an acknowledgement of Indigenous knowledge practices. Many Indigenous narrative communities navigate the “information society” with a view to preserving and sustaining the kind of dialogue between past, present and future Han insists “we” are losing.

Re-enchantment

The problems of narrative dispossession and dispersion are real. They manifest in conversations with almost every person I know. Yet I am not convinced we are “post-narrative”, as Han claims at the start of the book.

Part of the joy of reading Han’s work, however, is that he usually ends his arguments with concepts that allow for counter-narratives, even if he does not explicitly outline what those counter-narratives should look like.

The Crisis of Narration accepts and welcomes reality looking back at it. It wants the “lingering gaze” of its readers. After reading Han’s book, I mused on the question of how reality’s gaze might be re-enchanted – not through the absence of the screen, but despite it.

Earlier this year in Mexico City, artist Chavis Marmol dropped a nine-tonne replica of the colossal head carvings of the Olmec, the first known Mesoamerican civilisation, onto a blue Tesla 3. The Olmec head landed a year after Tesla announced plans to build a huge factory in northern Mexico.

Marmol’s Olmec head is striking in the directness of its gaze. Tesla and the company’s owner Elon Musk represent the extractive corporate oligarchism that benefits from the narrative crisis and the forest of information that Han addresses.

Yet this power is demonstrated to be amusingly vulnerable to the narrative weight of the Olmec head. To imagine the Olmec head crushing the Tesla, Marmol had to look back and listen to the Olmec heads of the past. He had to consider the narrative they embody in the light of his own experience.

Together, Marmol and the Olmec head create a narrative community. They ask us to listen with them. In Marmol’s narrative, Tesla’s storyselling is flimsy and unsustainable under the weight of the Indigenous narrative of the land and its people.

Marmol communicates this narrative with a single image. He says to Musk: “Look what I can do to your lousy car with this wonderful head”.

In The Crisis of Narration, Han says to his readers that the greatest threat to capitalist storyselling is the formation of genuine narrative communities. I would add that the formation of these resistant narrative communities is necessarily pluralistic. They form online and across material spaces organically.

Contemporary narrative communities can still speak and listen, even with smartphone in hand.

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