One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy (review)

Book Reviews One and Many in Presocratic Philosophy. By Michael C. Stokes. (Published by the Center of Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C. Distributed by Harvard University Press, Cambridge , Mass., 1971. Pp. ix + 355. $12.00) This book is the first comprehensive study of the One-Many problem in Presocratic thought--a problem of central importance in the thought of most Presocratic thinkers as well as in subsequent Greek thought. The book contains extensive discussions of practically all the Presocratic thinkers---i.e., the Milesians, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Melissus, Zeno, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists. In fact, in most cases these extensive discussions consist of reinterpretations of the thought of the above thinkers that often disagree with the views held currently by most scholars. It is often hard to see how all these reinterpretations hang together. The numerous arguments and theses of the book seem often to lack a clear focus. Indeed, the book fails to give some kind of coherent account of Presocratic thought and its development. It would therefore be impossible to discuss critically or in detail the many arguments and theses advanced in this book. I will limit myself to examining in some detail Stokes' discussion of the Milesians, which I hope will give an idea of the type of arguments and interpretations Stokes advances, and to merely stating the main points of the rest of the chapters of the book. The central thesis of Stokes' study is that no one before Parmenides can be proved to have advanced the theory of the unity of reality (pp. 66, 249-252, and passim). In particular , the Milesians did not claim that reality (the many) is one, but rather that all things (the many) come from one, that they have a common origin (Water, or the Boundless, or Air). This clearly conflicts with Aristotle's and Theophrastus' testimonies, according to which the Milesians were claiming that the world consists of one stuff (or substrate), or of one arch,-----and thus that the world is a unity. It also conflicts with most of the current interpretations of Presocratic thought which follow Aristotle in the main lines. Hence the task the author undertakes in the chapter on the Milesians is to show that the Peripatetic testimony cannot always be trusted and that in this case it happens to be wrong; to show that the Milesians could not have advanced material monism; and to provide two more grounds in support of his thesis by (a) giving some pre-Peripatetic accounts of the Milesians that run counter to what the Peripatetics say, (b) explaining why the Peripatetics made the error of attributing material monism to the Milesians. Regarding Aristotle's testimony, Stokes, like most scholars, agrees on the whole with Cherniss' detailed examination of Aristotle's accounts of his predecessors and its conclusion that "Aristotle's philosophical purposes often led him to distort their actual views." Stokes claims that "it is not always reasonable to suppose that Aristotle had fuller evidence than we have," and that in the case of the Milesians his account of their thought is not correct (pp. 25-26). Regarding Theophrastus, Stokes claims that, although it is not true that he did nothing more than copy Aristotle, it does not follow that he did not make the same errors his master did. Indeed, Stokes insists, we should be careful in using Theophrastus as an independent witness on the Presocratics when "the philosophical presuppositions which helped to mislead Aristotle were shared by Theophrastus" (p. 27). All in all the Peripatetic testimony is, according to Stokes, wrong. The Peripatetics erred in attributing to the Milesians the view that there is one arch~ and that this arch~ constitutes (is) reality. In order, then, to give an account of Milesian thought and to see better why the Peripatetics cannot be correct--and thus carry out the tasks mentioned above--the author tries to answer the following three questions: (I) Did the word arch~ form part of the [248] BOOK REVIEWS 249 earliest philosophical vocabulary? (tI) If the Milesians did use the word, what are they most likely to have meant by it? (Ill) Whatever their vocabulary, what lay behind Aristotle 's ascription to...