A History with a Declared Standpoint

Frederick Copleston, S.J., opens his history of philosophy by stating plainly what it is and whom it serves. His chief motive, the preface explains, was to supply Catholic ecclesiastical seminaries with a work more detailed and wider in scope than the textbooks then in use, one that would exhibit the logical development and interconnection of philosophical systems. He anticipates the raised eyebrow that the phrase “point of view” invites in a historian and meets it head on: no true historian can write without some standpoint, if only because he needs a principle of selection to govern his choice and arrangement of facts. A history written with no principle of selection would be a mere chronicle — a concatenation of opinions without understanding. From this Copleston draws his governing claim, that writing from the standpoint of the scholastic philosopher is an advantage rather than a disadvantage, provided one strives after objectivity and does not distort or suppress what the sources say. That combination — a confessed vantage held together with a pledge of fairness — is the methodological standard the volume sets for itself.

From the Ionians to the Twin Summits

The volume follows the classical map of Greek thought: the cradle of systematic philosophy in Ionia, the early cosmologists, the Pythagorean society, the pluralists and atomists, the Sophistic turn, and Socrates. But its center of gravity is the long, patient exposition of Plato and Aristotle, each given a book-length suite of chapters. Copleston reads Plato closely on the theory of Ideas and on the soul; his Aristotle is expounded with the care of a tradition that made act-and-potency its own — the notion by which Aristotle answers Parmenides, showing that a thing may be one way actually and another way potentially, so that becoming is neither sheer nothing nor being already actual. Copleston presents the two not as rivals between whom the reader must choose but as the twin sources a continuous tradition inherits and labors to develop. Here the preface’s key term returns: the philosophia perennis, which he does not dispute but expressly identifies with Thomism in a wide sense — and which, he insists, did not drop down from heaven but grew through Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine.

The Soul’s Stratifications

For this library the volume’s most durable sections are its psychologies. In the Republic Copleston finds the doctrine of the tripartite soul — reason, spirit, appetite — which he notes Plato is said to have borrowed from the Pythagoreans, and which he expounds with the dialogue’s political analogy kept intact. Aristotle’s treatment of the soul is set out through the same metaphysical instruments as the rest of the system, the graded powers understood by way of potentiality and act. The Stoics enter as moral psychologists: their analysis of the passions and the ideal of independence and self-sufficiency it underwrites is presented as the practical discipline it was. Read in sequence, these chapters compose a compact genealogy of the stratified psyche — an ancient architecture of parts and levels that later depth psychologies rework in their own material. That the genealogy arrives here with scholastic precision, rather than speculative flight, is what makes it usable for checking what the Greeks actually held.

Rome, Plotinus, and the Passage into Religion

The closing movement carries the story through the Hellenistic and Roman schools to its terminus in Plotinus. Copleston expounds Plotinian Neo-Platonism as the point at which speculation ceases to set itself up as the ultimate goal: with mystical experience regarded as the supreme attainment of the true philosopher, philosophy tends to pass into religion — or at least to point beyond itself. He observes that Greek thought shows this tendency at certain moments, most fully with Plotinus, and he records how the syncretistic character of Neo-Platonism made it available to later Christian thought. Whether this passage into religion should be judged a fulfillment or a sorry ending he treats with characteristic restraint; his own preface has already used precisely this disagreement — one historian dismissing Neo-Platonic metaphysics as a relapse into mysticism, another emphasizing its importance — as the illustration of how two conscientious historians, equally faithful to the facts, paint unmistakably different pictures.

As the foundation stone of the series, the volume sets a method its successors keep: the sources first, the standpoint declared, the judgment held until last. Those scholarly manners, as much as the erudition, make the volume usable as a working reference on this shelf.