Gordon Clark: Ancient Philosophy (A History of Philosophy)

In 1941, Gordon Clark wrote part one of a three part book called A History of Philosophy, published by F. S. Crofts and Company. Clark's contribution, the first part of the book, was on ancient philosophy. One may read the entirety of a searchable version of the book and Clark's contribution to it here. Below, I've transcribed the introduction to his contribution, one which is missing in the 1997 TrinityFoundation republication, Ancient Philosophy:

Part One

Ancient Philosophy

600 B.C.- A.D. 500

Introduction

Philosophy originated in the ancient world among the Greek people. Unquestionably they were far superior to other ancient races in those intellectual traits which philosophical reflection presupposes—curiosity, free imagination, freshness of outlook upon life, intellectual ambition, and broad and comprehensive vision. After two centuries of remarkable development, their philosophy reached its highest points in the fourth century. And long after the states of Greece had lost their political independence—first to the Macedonian empire and later to the empire of Rome—Greek philosophical “wisdom” dominated the thought of the Mediterranean world. Ancient philosophy becomes, therefore, almost synonymous with Greek philosophy.

Plato (427-347 B.C.) is the earliest Greek philosopher whose extensive writings have been preserved down to our own day in anything even approximating their entirety. But Plato’s thought was shaped and informed by a philosophical tradition which reached back two centuries. From these pre-Platonic centuries very scant literary records remain. More or less extensive quotations from the earlier philosophers have been preserved by later writers. The interpretation of these fragments will probably always remain uncertain in many details. But from these fragments, together with the second-hand accounts given of their authors by writers of a later age, critical scholarship can reconstruct with a fair degree of accuracy, it seems, the main outlines of philosophical history during those two centuries of original and important speculation, the fifth and sixth centuries.

In approaching the study of Greek philosophy, one needs to bear in mind two facts: (1) that the ancient Greek world was not restricted geographically to the Greek peninsula proper, and (2) that ancient Greece never became a nation, in the proper sense of that term. Politically the Greeks never united into a single state; Greece consisted of numerous politically independent and autonomous city-states: Thebes, Sparta, Corinth, Elis, Athens, and others. A great common danger, like the Persian invasion in the early fifth century, might draw them together into concerted action for a time; but characteristically they were more often engaged in endless dissensions and warfare among themselves. The unity of the ancient Greek world was not, then, political, but rather racial and cultural: common language, common religion, and common traditions. In the sixth century B.C. Greece extended far beyond the Greek peninsula; it included to the westward the island of Sicily and a considerable part of southern Italy, and to the eastward the numerous islands of the Aegean and a broad strip of the coast of Asia Minor. It was in these outlying parts of Greece, where in the earlier times culture was furthest advanced, that Greek philosophy was born.