Malcolm Schofield.
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Gavagai: To begin with I would like to ask you if you consider yourself a philosopher or a historian of ancient philosophy. At the end of the day, is there any difference? Can anyone practice or do history of philosophy without herself being a philosopher?
Malcolm Schofield: Well, that’s a very good question and it’s been much discussed. It seems to me that history of philosophy can be done in different ways. The sort of history of philosophy that I do and I am interested in requires either to be a philosopher or to be very alert and experienced in tackling philosophical questions;also, being alert to when a question is a philosophical question and whether there is a philosophical difficulty or something philosophically interesting looming in one of the figures from the past that you are reading and thinking about. So that’s the sort of history of philosophy that I do, but there is valuable work that’s been done by scholars who look for example at the institutional history of Plato’s Academy. A lot of good work consists in, simply, sorting out who said what and when, and understanding the historical context that might explain why they were thinking and writing in that way. I mean, in other words, I don’t see philosophy as an activity that proceeds in a void. It is always located in a particular political, social and cultural context.
G: To follow up the previous question, I wanted to ask you… well, this is an open metaphilosophical question, but I would like your opinion on this: Who can be considered a philosopher nowadays and what are the essential qualities that she must possess?
MS: Well, another good question. Of course, the notion of philosophy is always a contested notion. Different traditions give you different kinds of answers. But for my money, the essential thing for philosophy is the search for truth, and the search for truth regardless of material considerations, regardless of utility, regardless of what the state might want. So, it’s a project of what Bernard Williams once called pure inquiry, if you like.
Another thing that I see as pretty important for philosophy is that it operates by means of argument. That doesn’t mean that arguments don’t have assumptions and premises and so on, that you can argue about and it’s very important to flush these out, if you are making an argument then you become aware of what you may, whether explicitly or often implicitly be assuming, but that process of arguing is also a process of questioning.
G: Of course. Although, I believe that, in a way, anyone can argue and find a good statement to support their thesis. But this generalizes the field of philosophy and we could assume that, for example, my parents could be philosophers, too, or even my grand-mother who is illiterate…
MS: Yes.
G: So, as a subquestion, I would like to ask you: Are there any philosophers outside the academia nowadays? Is it mandatory for a philosopher to be in a university, study the latest articles and have access to libraries, etc.? Or at the end of the day, can anyone be a philosopher?
MS: Well, I think that there are really two questions that I would like to address here.
One is that you started by saying that anybody can argue and that is perfectly true. Because anybody can present an argument that is concerned with what is true. So have I said anything that is special to philosophy? Because one might say: well, historians and scientists, they are also looking for the truth and they are using arguments of one kind or another, so what is special to philosophy?
Well, I think that what is special to philosophy is that it is asking foundational questions, if you like. It’s asking what is the fundamental nature of reality, what is the fundamental question of ethics, for example. So I think that’s the third thing that needs to be thrown in, that philosophy is concerned with foundational questions, whether that means that you have to have a foundational system of philosophy or whether you could have a more open ended sceptical system, like Wittgenstein or something, that’s a further question. I think that’s a further issue. But the questions themselves are foundational kind of questions. So that is one element in what you are asking. The other…
G: So you are saying that my grandmother can’t be a philosopher! (laughs)
MS: Haha, well I haven’t gone to that yet. I am saying that you made me see that I need to add a little bit more about the nature of philosophy. Not just that we are looking for truth, it’s not just that we are doing it by questioning and argument, it’s also that we are preoccupied with questions that are somehow fundamental. Now, we can argue about which questions are fundamental, that too is a philosophical argument.
But then, you asked the question: Can anybody do philosophy? Well, in principle, yes. I mean after all Socrates went around expecting anybody that he met to engage with him in philosophical debate. He didn’t always succeed; he didn’t often succeed, perhaps. So, can you do it outside of a university? Well, in principle, yes. There are many reflective people with whom one can have good discussions in these sorts of subjects but, of course, philosophy has a really long history. Western philosophy, eastern philosophy, they both have very long histories. And it’s very easy to reinvent the wheel. Therefore, I think that there is quite a lot of benefit to being within a group of people who are engaged in a common pursuit and are aware of what other people have said about these things. So I think that, if you like, that’s the justification for a university philosophy department, that it offers students the opportunity to join a shared conversation about these questions, that’s been actually going on for centuries. Because I think in all intellectual pursuits, you need cooperation and collaboration.
G: Of course. My next question has to do with what you previously mentioned that different traditions give different answers on what philosophy is. I wanted to ask your opinion on the chasm between Analytic and Continental philosophy. Do you believe that it still exists today? And, of course, if one’s tradition affects the way that she does history of philosophy or ancient philosophy?
MS: Well, I think that I am brought up in the Analytic tradition and that’s why I am much more knowledgeable and comfortable with that way of looking at things. I think that if you have been brought up in a tradition of philosophy which comes very much from Hegel and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger…
This means that you get a very different style of doing ancient philosophy. I mean, certainly in the UK, we have colleagues who are in that mode. There is a man called Andrew Benjamin at Warwick University, there’s also a youngish chap at Bristol University called Kurt Lampe, who runs a conference, this summer, on the approach to Ancient Stoicism, by scholars who work in the European Continental tradition. And then I have a former student of mine, Miriam Leonard, who is a Professor at University College London who is very much in this mode, too.
I think that, for them, the discourse that has been generated through the absorption of the ideas of the thinkers that I mentioned– Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche to some extent –, I mean there is a whole discourse that is elaborated, and therefore the way that they do ancient philosophy tends to take as its assumptions on what the right questions are and what is the right way to approach them, that shared discourse that is developed there. So I think that it is very different and it is also very difficult for the one tradition to talk to the other.
G: Like a different paradigm.
MS: Yes, exactly, a different paradigm.
G: Ok. Now, they say that Analytic philosophers aim more at the precision of their arguments. Do you think that this is true?
MS: Yes, I think that is true. Certainly, in the study of Ancient Greek philosophy over the last 25 years, people in the Analytic tradition have, at least many, often developed a wider approach, that is to say, one that sees for example literary style, literary components in the presentation of arguments and so on, as much more important than in the great era of ordinary language philosophy in the 1950s and 60s. So, it’s not just argument. If you study Plato, then you have to think about other things because it’s all there in Plato, myths and images. So you are not really doing your job as a historian of philosophy if you are unable to give an account of what philosophical value these modes of philosophizing might have.
G: You mentioned Plato. I want to ask you about the famous quote by Alfred North Whitehead, which says that the European Philosophical Tradition is just a series of footnotes to Plato. Do you think that…
MS: I think it’s more or less true. (both: laughing)
I think Plato, in a way, set the parameters. The idea that we have to follow reason, and that reason proceeds by rational argument. And that we are also concerned with foundations. I mean, all those things seem to me to still characterize philosophy and also, the sorts of subjects that he thought that belong to philosophy: Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, etc. The menu, if you like. It seems to me that they were all established by Plato and then, of course, also by Aristotle. But Aristotle was more of a systematizer of the basic Platonic conception of philosophy, I think. Although, how can anybody now count themselves as a Platonist? I mean nobody currently doing philosophy… well, there are always some people who count themselves as Platonists but not very many, but the framework in which we do philosophy is set by Plato.
G: Yes, I agree. Although, I don’t know anyone nowadays who considers herself a Platonist, other than maybe in the field of Philosophy of Mathematics.
MS: Oh, yes. But I think that quite a lot of philosophers think that Philosophy is essentially Socratic, if we can separate Plato from Socrates. Because I think that many philosophers think that Socrates found the basic way to do philosophy. Namely, taking these big questions and saying: “Well, what is your idea about them?” and then questioning it. That’s the basic method.
G: Well, we could say that it is Plato’s Socratic Method, since most of our understanding of Socrates comes from Plato’s texts.
MS: Yes, it is much more the way that Plato presents it. Yes, I think you can see Plato sort of developing that. Besides, Plato felt himself to be basically following Socrates.
G: Now, I want your perspective on something different. There are scholars who express the fear that study of ancient philosophy will eventually come to an end, probably in the next years, due to the fact that there is a finite number of ancient texts which are already translated and commented on in various ways. Do you believe that this can actually happen in the future? That ancient philosophy will cease to exist?
MS: Well, no, I don’t believe that it is very likely for the following reason: I think there is reason to think that philosophy itself has an essential historical component that I think that there are very few… well, there are philosophers who don’t think that we have anything to learn or to use from philosophy’s past, who, for example, never read Kant, never read Descartes, never read Plato. But I don’t think that there are many philosophers who think that the philosophical heritage, the philosophical past, is irrelevant to philosophy and as long as people do think that there is an inevitable sort of historical dimension to philosophy, then people are going to be interested in reading Kant, Descartes and Plato. And there may be lots of scholarship on it and many people may have argued about it and so on, but I think philosophy renews itself every generation and even if they may be in the study of the ancients, even if in a sense repeating what is already been said, it will keep on happening.
G: Ok. Though, I think, it was Jonathan Barnes who said in an interview that a historian of ancient philosophy must write papers that are so up to date and so relevant to today’s research that they ought to be published in the famous journal Mind.
Do you think that this is actually possible? Can an ancient philosopher be that contemporary? That is to say, to write papers that are of interest to basically everyone in the…
MS: Ehm, well, journals like Mind and Philosophical Review, still publish articles in this field, I mean about Aristotle, Plato and so on. I just wrote, over Christmas, a 5000 page review article on M. M. McCabe’s collected volume Platonic Conversations, which is a very good book and the editor was very keen to have it.
G: Haha, wait a minute, 5000 words or pages?
MS: 5000 words. Did I say pages? (both: laughing)
Oh dear, now that would be terrible. Yes, 5000 words, it is sort of shortish article. I mean, Jonathan of course has extreme opinions about everything.
One comment that I read some years ago, that may be his, or maybe not, I can’t really remember who said it, is that this was the golden age for the study of ancient philosophy because, you know, 50 years ago, people who wrote about ancient philosophy, in general, didn’t know much philosophy, they weren’t philosophers enough. And, you know, the next generation, they didn’t know enough Greek, enough Ancient Greek, there were not good enough as pure scholars of Classical Greek, and I thought that was a very good point actually. So I am quite sure that if the study of ancient philosophy continues, it will be different in 30 years from how it is now. It will have different focuses and very different ways of doing it. But that is true in every discipline, I think.
G: I have a follow-up question on Ancient Greek language and how it relates to Greek students, but first, let me ask you a general question and maybe a tricky one, about your main research interest in ancient philosophy which I think it’s Ancient Political thought, Ancient Political philosophy. So, from all those years of research, what is the first thing that comes into your mind that you think that in a way it’s a bit silly that the civilized societies of today haven’t integrated it to their system? I don’t know, maybe a law, or a belief that the ancients had that we could adopt and probably adapt it, in our day and age?
MS: Well, I think what… certainly Plato and Aristotle, but also many ancient thinkers who thought about politics, their greatest preoccupation was: first of all, they really did think that we are social and political animals. That was the fundamental thing. Therefore, we naturally live in communities. So, the great challenge for us is to know how to live in communities, how to stop communities tearing themselves apart.
G: Hmm, the greatest challenge?
MS: Yes, that is the greatest challenge I think I saw. Of course, they were also preoccupied with war and what you think about war, but I think civil war, internal dissolution of a society, was one of the things that most preoccupied them. I think that this is something that, I don’t know whether it is a timeless truth but I certainly think that our modern politicians need to put that very high in the agenda, thinking about of what it is that could make their societies cohesive without going to some of the extremes, I mean without going to totalitarianism.
G: Yes, of course. So following up that question, I want a comment on another famous quote, this time by Karl Marx, who said that: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”.
Do you believe that philosophy can play a major role in changing our world? In changing today’s societies for the better? I don’t know, maybe, for example, by motivating our actions and our politics?
MS: I don’t think that philosophy can or should, have a substantive political agenda. I think the role of philosophy is to ask questions and to make and get people to be more reflective. Because I think that a society of citizens who don’t reflect on things enough, is very dangerous. And it is not really fulfilling the human spirit.
G: Yes, but in a way, we could also say that philosophy can be a little bit dangerous, if one asks the “wrong” questions.
MS: Well, yes, that is certainly what Plato thought, I mean, in the Republic he says that people shouldn’t be allowed to do dialectic until they are in middle age, because otherwise they become eristics, they become sceptics, undermining the society and so on. So, yes, that is a good point. But I think that there are many, many more things undermining society than philosophy these days.
G: Ok, let’s change subject. I would like your opinion on Greek universities and whether for example, they have provided you with good or let’s say decent students, to work with in a Masters Program or in a PhD?
MS: Oh yes, when I first started teaching, which is about 45 years ago now, teaching in the UK, we didn’t have many students from Greek Universities and many of them weren’t practically very good. Now, we have lots of Greek students in our UK universities, indeed. I think that students from Greece are probably the biggest proportion from all the foreign students that we have. Many of them are very good.
G: So, now I can ask the question that I said that I previously wanted: Do you believe that Greeks actually have an advantage over other ethnicities as far as it concerns to ancient philosophy and the relevance that modern Greek has to ancient Greek? Meaning that, it is supposed to be easier for Greek students to read the ancient texts. Have you noticed something like this, all these years?
MS: Ehm, I am not sure about that… Ι think I had 3 or 4 Doctoral students from Greece in my last 10 or so years of teaching and some of them had very good Greek, indeed. I should also say that when I retired and they pointed somebody to my post, they pointed a Greek scholar, a scholar from this country and her Greek is superb.
(while laughing) Now, whether it’s superb because she is Greek or just because she is good at languages and studied Ancient Greek very well, ehm, I am inclined to think that she is good at languages and studied Greek very well.
G: Just for the record, can you tell us her name?
MS: Yes, of course. Her name is Myrto Hatzimichali.
G: Ok, so my last question is a bit more practical: What advice would you give to a young student or scholar who is interested in Ancient Philosophy?
MS: Hmm, well, I think that the best thing, if they can, is to get themselves into a good university where philosophy is taken seriously and where they take the teaching of ancient philosophy seriously. I think that’s the best thing. I mean, there are also great books that you can read but philosophy is essentially… well, I have to be careful about using the word essentially… but I think that is a Socratic subject where a conversation and a dialogue is crucial.
G: Discussing with you, was a pleasure and an honor at the same time!
MS: Thank you! It was nice to meet you.
Malcolm Schofield: Well, that’s a very good question and it’s been much discussed. It seems to me that history of philosophy can be done in different ways. The sort of history of philosophy that I do and I am interested in requires either to be a philosopher or to be very alert and experienced in tackling philosophical questions;also, being alert to when a question is a philosophical question and whether there is a philosophical difficulty or something philosophically interesting looming in one of the figures from the past that you are reading and thinking about. So that’s the sort of history of philosophy that I do, but there is valuable work that’s been done by scholars who look for example at the institutional history of Plato’s Academy. A lot of good work consists in, simply, sorting out who said what and when, and understanding the historical context that might explain why they were thinking and writing in that way. I mean, in other words, I don’t see philosophy as an activity that proceeds in a void. It is always located in a particular political, social and cultural context.
G: To follow up the previous question, I wanted to ask you… well, this is an open metaphilosophical question, but I would like your opinion on this: Who can be considered a philosopher nowadays and what are the essential qualities that she must possess?
MS: Well, another good question. Of course, the notion of philosophy is always a contested notion. Different traditions give you different kinds of answers. But for my money, the essential thing for philosophy is the search for truth, and the search for truth regardless of material considerations, regardless of utility, regardless of what the state might want. So, it’s a project of what Bernard Williams once called pure inquiry, if you like.
Another thing that I see as pretty important for philosophy is that it operates by means of argument. That doesn’t mean that arguments don’t have assumptions and premises and so on, that you can argue about and it’s very important to flush these out, if you are making an argument then you become aware of what you may, whether explicitly or often implicitly be assuming, but that process of arguing is also a process of questioning.
G: Of course. Although, I believe that, in a way, anyone can argue and find a good statement to support their thesis. But this generalizes the field of philosophy and we could assume that, for example, my parents could be philosophers, too, or even my grand-mother who is illiterate…
MS: Yes.
G: So, as a subquestion, I would like to ask you: Are there any philosophers outside the academia nowadays? Is it mandatory for a philosopher to be in a university, study the latest articles and have access to libraries, etc.? Or at the end of the day, can anyone be a philosopher?
MS: Well, I think that there are really two questions that I would like to address here.
One is that you started by saying that anybody can argue and that is perfectly true. Because anybody can present an argument that is concerned with what is true. So have I said anything that is special to philosophy? Because one might say: well, historians and scientists, they are also looking for the truth and they are using arguments of one kind or another, so what is special to philosophy?
Well, I think that what is special to philosophy is that it is asking foundational questions, if you like. It’s asking what is the fundamental nature of reality, what is the fundamental question of ethics, for example. So I think that’s the third thing that needs to be thrown in, that philosophy is concerned with foundational questions, whether that means that you have to have a foundational system of philosophy or whether you could have a more open ended sceptical system, like Wittgenstein or something, that’s a further question. I think that’s a further issue. But the questions themselves are foundational kind of questions. So that is one element in what you are asking. The other…
G: So you are saying that my grandmother can’t be a philosopher! (laughs)
MS: Haha, well I haven’t gone to that yet. I am saying that you made me see that I need to add a little bit more about the nature of philosophy. Not just that we are looking for truth, it’s not just that we are doing it by questioning and argument, it’s also that we are preoccupied with questions that are somehow fundamental. Now, we can argue about which questions are fundamental, that too is a philosophical argument.
But then, you asked the question: Can anybody do philosophy? Well, in principle, yes. I mean after all Socrates went around expecting anybody that he met to engage with him in philosophical debate. He didn’t always succeed; he didn’t often succeed, perhaps. So, can you do it outside of a university? Well, in principle, yes. There are many reflective people with whom one can have good discussions in these sorts of subjects but, of course, philosophy has a really long history. Western philosophy, eastern philosophy, they both have very long histories. And it’s very easy to reinvent the wheel. Therefore, I think that there is quite a lot of benefit to being within a group of people who are engaged in a common pursuit and are aware of what other people have said about these things. So I think that, if you like, that’s the justification for a university philosophy department, that it offers students the opportunity to join a shared conversation about these questions, that’s been actually going on for centuries. Because I think in all intellectual pursuits, you need cooperation and collaboration.
G: Of course. My next question has to do with what you previously mentioned that different traditions give different answers on what philosophy is. I wanted to ask your opinion on the chasm between Analytic and Continental philosophy. Do you believe that it still exists today? And, of course, if one’s tradition affects the way that she does history of philosophy or ancient philosophy?
MS: Well, I think that I am brought up in the Analytic tradition and that’s why I am much more knowledgeable and comfortable with that way of looking at things. I think that if you have been brought up in a tradition of philosophy which comes very much from Hegel and Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger…
This means that you get a very different style of doing ancient philosophy. I mean, certainly in the UK, we have colleagues who are in that mode. There is a man called Andrew Benjamin at Warwick University, there’s also a youngish chap at Bristol University called Kurt Lampe, who runs a conference, this summer, on the approach to Ancient Stoicism, by scholars who work in the European Continental tradition. And then I have a former student of mine, Miriam Leonard, who is a Professor at University College London who is very much in this mode, too.
I think that, for them, the discourse that has been generated through the absorption of the ideas of the thinkers that I mentioned– Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche to some extent –, I mean there is a whole discourse that is elaborated, and therefore the way that they do ancient philosophy tends to take as its assumptions on what the right questions are and what is the right way to approach them, that shared discourse that is developed there. So I think that it is very different and it is also very difficult for the one tradition to talk to the other.
G: Like a different paradigm.
MS: Yes, exactly, a different paradigm.
G: Ok. Now, they say that Analytic philosophers aim more at the precision of their arguments. Do you think that this is true?
MS: Yes, I think that is true. Certainly, in the study of Ancient Greek philosophy over the last 25 years, people in the Analytic tradition have, at least many, often developed a wider approach, that is to say, one that sees for example literary style, literary components in the presentation of arguments and so on, as much more important than in the great era of ordinary language philosophy in the 1950s and 60s. So, it’s not just argument. If you study Plato, then you have to think about other things because it’s all there in Plato, myths and images. So you are not really doing your job as a historian of philosophy if you are unable to give an account of what philosophical value these modes of philosophizing might have.
G: You mentioned Plato. I want to ask you about the famous quote by Alfred North Whitehead, which says that the European Philosophical Tradition is just a series of footnotes to Plato. Do you think that…
MS: I think it’s more or less true. (both: laughing)
I think Plato, in a way, set the parameters. The idea that we have to follow reason, and that reason proceeds by rational argument. And that we are also concerned with foundations. I mean, all those things seem to me to still characterize philosophy and also, the sorts of subjects that he thought that belong to philosophy: Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics, Epistemology, etc. The menu, if you like. It seems to me that they were all established by Plato and then, of course, also by Aristotle. But Aristotle was more of a systematizer of the basic Platonic conception of philosophy, I think. Although, how can anybody now count themselves as a Platonist? I mean nobody currently doing philosophy… well, there are always some people who count themselves as Platonists but not very many, but the framework in which we do philosophy is set by Plato.
G: Yes, I agree. Although, I don’t know anyone nowadays who considers herself a Platonist, other than maybe in the field of Philosophy of Mathematics.
MS: Oh, yes. But I think that quite a lot of philosophers think that Philosophy is essentially Socratic, if we can separate Plato from Socrates. Because I think that many philosophers think that Socrates found the basic way to do philosophy. Namely, taking these big questions and saying: “Well, what is your idea about them?” and then questioning it. That’s the basic method.
G: Well, we could say that it is Plato’s Socratic Method, since most of our understanding of Socrates comes from Plato’s texts.
MS: Yes, it is much more the way that Plato presents it. Yes, I think you can see Plato sort of developing that. Besides, Plato felt himself to be basically following Socrates.
G: Now, I want your perspective on something different. There are scholars who express the fear that study of ancient philosophy will eventually come to an end, probably in the next years, due to the fact that there is a finite number of ancient texts which are already translated and commented on in various ways. Do you believe that this can actually happen in the future? That ancient philosophy will cease to exist?
MS: Well, no, I don’t believe that it is very likely for the following reason: I think there is reason to think that philosophy itself has an essential historical component that I think that there are very few… well, there are philosophers who don’t think that we have anything to learn or to use from philosophy’s past, who, for example, never read Kant, never read Descartes, never read Plato. But I don’t think that there are many philosophers who think that the philosophical heritage, the philosophical past, is irrelevant to philosophy and as long as people do think that there is an inevitable sort of historical dimension to philosophy, then people are going to be interested in reading Kant, Descartes and Plato. And there may be lots of scholarship on it and many people may have argued about it and so on, but I think philosophy renews itself every generation and even if they may be in the study of the ancients, even if in a sense repeating what is already been said, it will keep on happening.
G: Ok. Though, I think, it was Jonathan Barnes who said in an interview that a historian of ancient philosophy must write papers that are so up to date and so relevant to today’s research that they ought to be published in the famous journal Mind.
Do you think that this is actually possible? Can an ancient philosopher be that contemporary? That is to say, to write papers that are of interest to basically everyone in the…
MS: Ehm, well, journals like Mind and Philosophical Review, still publish articles in this field, I mean about Aristotle, Plato and so on. I just wrote, over Christmas, a 5000 page review article on M. M. McCabe’s collected volume Platonic Conversations, which is a very good book and the editor was very keen to have it.
G: Haha, wait a minute, 5000 words or pages?
MS: 5000 words. Did I say pages? (both: laughing)
Oh dear, now that would be terrible. Yes, 5000 words, it is sort of shortish article. I mean, Jonathan of course has extreme opinions about everything.
One comment that I read some years ago, that may be his, or maybe not, I can’t really remember who said it, is that this was the golden age for the study of ancient philosophy because, you know, 50 years ago, people who wrote about ancient philosophy, in general, didn’t know much philosophy, they weren’t philosophers enough. And, you know, the next generation, they didn’t know enough Greek, enough Ancient Greek, there were not good enough as pure scholars of Classical Greek, and I thought that was a very good point actually. So I am quite sure that if the study of ancient philosophy continues, it will be different in 30 years from how it is now. It will have different focuses and very different ways of doing it. But that is true in every discipline, I think.
G: I have a follow-up question on Ancient Greek language and how it relates to Greek students, but first, let me ask you a general question and maybe a tricky one, about your main research interest in ancient philosophy which I think it’s Ancient Political thought, Ancient Political philosophy. So, from all those years of research, what is the first thing that comes into your mind that you think that in a way it’s a bit silly that the civilized societies of today haven’t integrated it to their system? I don’t know, maybe a law, or a belief that the ancients had that we could adopt and probably adapt it, in our day and age?
MS: Well, I think what… certainly Plato and Aristotle, but also many ancient thinkers who thought about politics, their greatest preoccupation was: first of all, they really did think that we are social and political animals. That was the fundamental thing. Therefore, we naturally live in communities. So, the great challenge for us is to know how to live in communities, how to stop communities tearing themselves apart.
G: Hmm, the greatest challenge?
MS: Yes, that is the greatest challenge I think I saw. Of course, they were also preoccupied with war and what you think about war, but I think civil war, internal dissolution of a society, was one of the things that most preoccupied them. I think that this is something that, I don’t know whether it is a timeless truth but I certainly think that our modern politicians need to put that very high in the agenda, thinking about of what it is that could make their societies cohesive without going to some of the extremes, I mean without going to totalitarianism.
G: Yes, of course. So following up that question, I want a comment on another famous quote, this time by Karl Marx, who said that: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”.
Do you believe that philosophy can play a major role in changing our world? In changing today’s societies for the better? I don’t know, maybe, for example, by motivating our actions and our politics?
MS: I don’t think that philosophy can or should, have a substantive political agenda. I think the role of philosophy is to ask questions and to make and get people to be more reflective. Because I think that a society of citizens who don’t reflect on things enough, is very dangerous. And it is not really fulfilling the human spirit.
G: Yes, but in a way, we could also say that philosophy can be a little bit dangerous, if one asks the “wrong” questions.
MS: Well, yes, that is certainly what Plato thought, I mean, in the Republic he says that people shouldn’t be allowed to do dialectic until they are in middle age, because otherwise they become eristics, they become sceptics, undermining the society and so on. So, yes, that is a good point. But I think that there are many, many more things undermining society than philosophy these days.
G: Ok, let’s change subject. I would like your opinion on Greek universities and whether for example, they have provided you with good or let’s say decent students, to work with in a Masters Program or in a PhD?
MS: Oh yes, when I first started teaching, which is about 45 years ago now, teaching in the UK, we didn’t have many students from Greek Universities and many of them weren’t practically very good. Now, we have lots of Greek students in our UK universities, indeed. I think that students from Greece are probably the biggest proportion from all the foreign students that we have. Many of them are very good.
G: So, now I can ask the question that I said that I previously wanted: Do you believe that Greeks actually have an advantage over other ethnicities as far as it concerns to ancient philosophy and the relevance that modern Greek has to ancient Greek? Meaning that, it is supposed to be easier for Greek students to read the ancient texts. Have you noticed something like this, all these years?
MS: Ehm, I am not sure about that… Ι think I had 3 or 4 Doctoral students from Greece in my last 10 or so years of teaching and some of them had very good Greek, indeed. I should also say that when I retired and they pointed somebody to my post, they pointed a Greek scholar, a scholar from this country and her Greek is superb.
(while laughing) Now, whether it’s superb because she is Greek or just because she is good at languages and studied Ancient Greek very well, ehm, I am inclined to think that she is good at languages and studied Greek very well.
G: Just for the record, can you tell us her name?
MS: Yes, of course. Her name is Myrto Hatzimichali.
G: Ok, so my last question is a bit more practical: What advice would you give to a young student or scholar who is interested in Ancient Philosophy?
MS: Hmm, well, I think that the best thing, if they can, is to get themselves into a good university where philosophy is taken seriously and where they take the teaching of ancient philosophy seriously. I think that’s the best thing. I mean, there are also great books that you can read but philosophy is essentially… well, I have to be careful about using the word essentially… but I think that is a Socratic subject where a conversation and a dialogue is crucial.
G: Discussing with you, was a pleasure and an honor at the same time!
MS: Thank you! It was nice to meet you.