The Presocratic Philosophers by Jonathan Barnes: A Review

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What This Book Is

Jonathan Barnes, born in 1942, is one of the most formidable scholars of ancient philosophy of the past half century, an editor of the revised Oxford translation of Aristotle and the author of books on scepticism, on Aristotle, and on ancient logic. The Presocratic Philosophers appeared in two volumes in 1979 in Routledge's Arguments of the Philosophers series and was reissued in a revised single volume in 1982.

It covers the earliest Greek philosophers, from Thales in the sixth century BC through Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno, Melissus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the atomists Leucippus and Democritus, and the Sophists.

The series title is the giveaway. This is a book about arguments, and its governing question is not what these people believed but whether they had good reasons for believing it.

What Makes It Different

The dominant approach to early Greek thought for much of the twentieth century placed it in context: the transition from myth to reason, the influence of Near Eastern cosmology, the political conditions of the Ionian cities, the religious background of purification cults and mystery rites. That tradition produced excellent work and it treats the fragments as cultural documents.

Barnes does something else. He asks what claim is being made, what would support it, whether the support is adequate, and whether the conclusion follows. Then he answers.

The consequence is that his Presocratics are not primitive. They are colleagues, separated by two and a half thousand years, making moves that can be evaluated by the same standards you would apply to a paper written last month. Some of them turn out to be very good. Some turn out to have made mistakes that are identifiable and interesting.

This is more radical than it sounds. A great deal of writing about early philosophy is admiring in a way that never quite commits to whether the reasoning is sound, and the effect of that admiration is faintly patronising. Barnes does not do it.

What the Method Looks Like on the Page

In practice, a typical passage runs like this. Barnes quotes a fragment or a report. He identifies the conclusion being drawn. He sets out the premises required to reach it, numbered. He notes which of those premises are actually attested and which he has supplied to make the inference work. He then asks whether the argument is valid, and separately whether the premises are true, and separately again whether the philosopher could have had good grounds for the premises given what was available to know at the time.

The care about supplied premises is what makes this defensible. Barnes is not pretending Heraclitus wrote a numbered proof. He is saying that if the conclusion is to follow, something like this must be assumed, and here is what it would be, and here is whether that assumption is reasonable.

When the argument fails, he says so. When it succeeds, he says that too, and he is not stingy with praise. The tone throughout is that of someone reading a colleague's work closely because they think it deserves close reading.

Anaximander and the Argument From Indifference

The clearest illustration of what the method recovers is Anaximander on why the earth does not fall.

Earlier answers were physical. Thales said the earth floats on water. Anaximenes said it rides on air. Both replies invite the obvious follow-up, which is what holds up the water.

Anaximander said the earth stays where it is because it is at the centre, equally distant from everything, and there is no reason for it to move in one direction rather than another. Having no reason to go anywhere, it goes nowhere.

Barnes takes this seriously as a piece of reasoning, and he is right to. It is an application of what would later be called the principle of sufficient reason, arriving at a physical conclusion by pure inference, roughly two and a half millennia before anyone would have called it that. It also happens to be, in its structure, a better answer than the ones that followed it for a long time afterwards.

A contextual approach can tell you a great deal about Anaximander's Milesian setting and his apeiron, the boundless. Only the argumentative approach makes you sit up and notice that the man had done something genuinely difficult.

Parmenides Taken Straight

Parmenides is the test case for any book on this material, because he is the one most often handed over to mysticism.

He wrote in hexameter verse, framed as a revelation delivered by a goddess, and concluded that change and plurality are not real. That combination invites treatment as visionary poetry with philosophical decoration.

Barnes will have none of it. He reads the poem as a chain of deduction. What is not cannot be thought or spoken of, since to think is to think of something. Therefore we cannot coherently talk about what does not exist. Therefore coming to be, which requires a transition from not existing to existing, cannot be coherently described. From this he derives the signs: that what is must be ungenerated, imperishable, whole, unmoving and complete.

Barnes reconstructs each step, identifies where the argument turns on an ambiguity in the Greek verb to be, and assesses whether the conclusion survives once the ambiguity is separated out. This is exactly the treatment the argument deserves and it is a great deal more respectful than admiring the poem's atmosphere.

The point generalises. The most demanding Presocratic material, including much of Heraclitus, has been absorbed into contemplative and esoteric reading traditions where its arguments are treated as pointers rather than as claims. Both readings are possible. Only one of them tells you whether the man was right.

Zeno's Paradoxes

If you buy this book for one thing, buy it for the treatment of Zeno, where the analytic approach does work nothing else can do.

Zeno's paradoxes are arguments. Achilles cannot catch the tortoise because he must first reach where it was, by which time it has moved. The arrow in flight, at every instant, occupies a space equal to itself and is therefore at rest. A body must traverse half a distance before the whole, and half of that before the half, so motion cannot begin.

The popular treatment says the calculus solved these by showing an infinite series can have a finite sum. Barnes shows that this answers some versions and not others, and, more usefully, he shows precisely which premise each solution has to deny and what that denial commits you to. The arrow paradox in particular is not disposed of by summing a series, because it concerns what is true at an instant, and instants have no duration in which motion could occur.

This is philosophy done properly on material that is usually handled as a party trick, and it is the section most likely to convert a sceptical reader to the whole approach.

The Atomists

Leucippus and Democritus proposed that everything is composed of indivisible bodies moving in void, and that all apparent qualities arise from the arrangement and motion of those bodies.

The temptation is to congratulate them for anticipating modern physics, and Barnes resists it firmly, which is the right call. Their atoms are not our atoms, their reasons for positing them were not empirical in our sense, and the resemblance is largely verbal.

What he does instead is show why they proposed it, which is far more interesting. Atomism is a response to Parmenides. If Parmenides has shown that what is cannot come to be or perish, but the world plainly changes, then the way out is to accept the Parmenidean requirement for the fundamental things while explaining change as rearrangement. Atoms are ungenerated, imperishable and unchanging, exactly as Parmenides demanded; what changes is only how they are put together.

Seen that way, atomism is not a lucky guess about physics. It is a precisely engineered solution to a logical problem, and the argumentative approach is what makes that visible.

Barnes also takes seriously Democritus's own worry, preserved in a fragment, in which the senses complain to the intellect that it is overthrowing them with evidence borrowed from them. That is a sharp epistemological objection and it is still live.

The Sophists Get a Hearing

The Sophists have been in disgrace since Plato, who had reasons of his own, and the word sophistry carries the verdict.

Barnes gives them the same treatment as everyone else, which turns out to be a rehabilitation. Protagoras's claim that man is the measure of all things is examined as a thesis about relativism with identifiable strengths and a specific self-referential problem. Gorgias's argument that nothing exists, that if anything existed it could not be known, and that if it could be known it could not be communicated, is set out as a chain of reasoning rather than dismissed as showmanship.

Whether Gorgias meant it is a real question and Barnes discusses it. What he refuses to do is decide the philosophical merits on the basis of Plato's opinion of the man's motives.

The Anachronism Objection

The criticism of Barnes is serious and any honest review has to make it properly.

These writers did not produce arguments in the form Barnes reconstructs. Parmenides wrote hexameter verse framed as divine revelation. Heraclitus wrote aphorisms of studied obscurity and deposited his book in a temple. Empedocles wrote poems that mix physics with an account of the soul's exile and purification. Pythagoras founded something closer to a religious order than a school.

None of them had a concept of a formal argument. Logic as a discipline begins with Aristotle, after all of them. To rebuild their words as premise-and-conclusion structures is to impose a technology they did not have, and there is a real risk of finding arguments that were never made and grading them against standards nobody could have been aiming at.

There is a further loss. Strip the religious, political and poetic context out of Empedocles and you lose the fact that his physics and his doctrine of the fallen daimon are one work by one man. The contextual scholars are not being sentimental when they insist on this. They are pointing at something that was there.

Barnes's reply, which he makes explicitly, is that these people were reasoning, that reasoning can be assessed, and that refusing to assess it in favour of appreciating its cultural setting is condescension dressed as respect. Taking an argument seriously enough to say that it fails treats its author as a thinker. Admiring it as an expression of the archaic Greek mind does not.

Both positions are defensible and the honest conclusion is that you need both books on the shelf. Barnes will tell you whether the reasoning holds. He will not tell you what it was like to be the person doing it.

The Problem With the Evidence Itself

Underneath both approaches sits a difficulty that applies to everything written about these thinkers.

Almost no complete work by any of them survives. What we have are quotations preserved by later writers, some of them many centuries later. Aristotle is a major source and he read his predecessors as anticipations of his own scheme. Simplicius, writing in the sixth century AD, preserved a great deal and had his own commitments. Some quotations are paraphrase presented as citation. Some were preserved specifically in order to be refuted.

The standard numbering comes from Diels and Kranz, whose Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker organised the material into testimonia and verbatim fragments and imposed a structure that scholars used for a century. The nine-volume Loeb Early Greek Philosophy, edited by André Laks and Glenn Most and published in 2016, reorganises the whole corpus on different principles and is now the fullest modern presentation.

The consequence for Barnes is direct. When he formalises an argument, the text he is formalising has often already been reconstructed by editors from hostile witnesses. The layers of interpretation are deeper than the numbered premises make them look, and readers should hold that in view.

The Word Presocratic Is Wrong

It is worth knowing why the standard term is a problem, because the reason is instructive.

Democritus was younger than Socrates and outlived him. Several of the Sophists were his contemporaries and appear as characters in Plato's dialogues. Calling them all pre-Socratic groups a diverse set of thinkers by the fact of not being one particular Athenian.

The label encodes a story in which early Greek thought was preparatory, a run-up to the moment philosophy turned to ethics in Athens and became itself. That story comes largely from Aristotle and from the tradition that followed him, and it flattens people working on cosmology, mathematics, medicine, religion and language into precursors.

Many scholars now write early Greek philosophy instead, which is why the Laks and Most Loeb uses that title. The change is small and the correction behind it is not.

Which Books to Own Alongside

Kirk, Raven and Schofield is the sourcebook. Greek text, translation, and commentary, second edition 1983. If you are going to work with this material at all you need it, and it is the book Barnes assumes you have.

Barnes's own Early Greek Philosophy in Penguin Classics is a translated selection with introductions, and it is by far the easiest way in. If you have never read a fragment, start there rather than with the analytical volume.

Laks and Most in the Loeb, nine volumes from 2016, is the fullest modern edition, with Greek and English facing, reorganised and renumbered. It is an investment and it is the current state of the field.

W. K. C. Guthrie's A History of Greek Philosophy, volumes one and two, gives the older contextual treatment at length and is the best counterweight to Barnes's method.

Our own pieces on the Pythagorean fragments, on Heraclitus and the logos, and on Pythagoras cover the same ground from the reception side, which is where most readers first meet these names.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you have encountered the Presocratics through esoteric or contemplative writing and want to know whether the arguments hold up. A great deal of what circulates about Heraclitus, Pythagoras and Empedocles in that literature is downstream of Neoplatonic readings, and Barnes is the cleanest available corrective.

Read it if you like watching a first-rate mind work carefully on difficult material. The prose is dry, precise and occasionally very funny.

Read it if you want the earliest philosophy to be philosophy rather than heritage.

Do not read it first. Read the fragments themselves, in Barnes's Penguin or in Kirk, Raven and Schofield, and form your own impression before someone hands you a numbered reconstruction. Do not read it expecting the religious and mystical dimension of these thinkers to be honoured, because it is largely set aside. And do not read it as the last word, because the field has moved since 1982 and the contextual scholars have a case that this book does not answer.

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