I'm genuinely curious - why pre-Aristotelians and not pre-Socratic? Wouldn't they have similar problems as terms?
ingirumimus
joined 1 year ago
That last point is definitely something I worry about a lot, and I've always thought this Brecht poem phrased it well:
It is true: I work for a living But, believe me, that is a coincidence. Nothing That I do gives me the right to eat my fill. By chance I have been spared. (If my luck does not hold, I am lost.)
They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad to be among the haves! But how can I eat and drink When I take what I eat from the starving And those who thirst do not have my glass of water? And yet I eat and drink.
unfortunately I do not have any actual answers for this lol
I always thought that pre-Socratic wasn't really a temporal boundary (after all, Aristotle and Plato were alive at the same time, so pre-Aristotelian also doesn't work in that regard), but rather one of method. My understanding was that most pre-Socratic (sorry) philosophers were essentially speculative, whereas Socrates (or Plato's Socrates) was the first to establish the need for a far more rigorous approach, which all subsequent philosophy is indebted to. So the division, while obviously still artificial, is useful in defining certain trends in philosophy. In any case, Plato (or the Neoplatonists for that matter) is hardly the one to blame for Christianity getting co-opted, that's almost entirely on Paul and Constantine