Adam Smith, in his very instructive examination of the ancient systems of Physics and Metaphysics, is too much inclined to criticise Plato and Aristotle as if they were the earliest theorisers, and as if they had no predecessors. George Grote (1865) Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates
The eminent scholar, Leo Catana, called my attention to the quoted passage which was previously unknown to me. George Grote was an important classicist, historian, and reformer who was in the orbit of Mill's circle but of independent cast of mind. David M. Levy routinely reminds me of the significance of Grote; so when I read Catana's note I felt a mixture of annoyance -- how could I (in an age of google) have missed that! -- and joy (because I think I can interpret what Grote has in mind and explain it). The reason for my annoyance is that one of the key rhetorical devices of my recent book on Smith is to draw on (previously ignored) nineteenth century discussions of Smith's metaphysics and epistemology in order to develop and reinforce my interpretations of Smith.
In the note, Grote is referring to one of the least studied essays of Adam Smith: the posthumously (1795) published "History of the Ancient Logics and Metaphysics. It appeared in Smith's Essays on Philosophical Subjects. It's a short essay and scholars often assume, I think, that it is unfinished. It is a kind of companion even appendix to a much better known (and easier digested) essay, The history of Astronomy.
Before I get to the details of Smith and Grote, it is worth being alert to the fact that Plato and Aristotle are not standardly treated as the founders of physics and metaphysics in Smith's age. For example, as I have noted before (here in light of James Ladyman, here in light of a debate between George Stigler and Paul Samuelson, and here in light of a famous myth about falling in a bog), Hume treats Thales as the founder of physics and metaphysics both in a his famous Introduction to the Treatise as well as in the Natural History of Religion. So, Smith is very familiar with a narrative in which there is a serious history of metaphysics and physics prior to Plato and Aristotle.
As an aside, in context, Grote is arguing against two (complementary) seductive (but false) narratives about Plato & Aristotle: one (quasi) Enlightenment narrative (in which Socrates and philosophy more generally risk popular opprobrium) projected back on the ancients which treats them as fighting the people's prejudices; the other (semi Heglian one) which sees them as de novo founders of a new kind of intellectual enterprise (when thought becomes self-conscious) which rejects the muddled and confused (poetic) ruminations of earlier generations. He treats Smith (who lived prior to Hegel) as falling victim to the second one. Grote wants to put Plato and Aristotle in a larger earlier intellectual context.* I don't want to claim that Grote was the first to practice the contextual history of philosophy in English (now associated with the Cambridge school ca 1969), but he was one of the first really able practitioners of it. To what degree he was indebted to various strands of historicism I leave for another time.
Already in his History of Astronomy, Smith debunks the idea of Thales as heroic founder of philosophy. Inspired by some remarks by Aristotle, Smith treats the later accounts by Plutarch and Apuleius of Thales’ astronomical discoveries as historical fictions, and presents Thales’ cosmology as an anthropocentric and “confused an account of things.” (Astronomy 4.5; see also Astronomy 3.6,) Smith treats his Ionian successors as confused. Grote pretty much agrees with Smith about Thales (and drawing on same kind of evidence). But he treats the Ionian philosophers with more respect than Smith.+One important reason for this, is that Grote has access to much better (mostly German scholarly) efforts at compiling pre-socratic philosophy.
I think Smith has an ulterior motive for the polemic against Thales. And the target is an idea promoted by Hume. In the Natural History of Religion, Hume basically treats Thales as a (proto-Spinozist) atheist. Hume can then go on to claim about his successors "it was pretty late too before these be thought themselves of having recourse to a mind or supreme intelligence, as the first cause of all." (N 4.10, Bea 47) For Hume it is important to claim that theism/deism is a late addition, corruption, of an otherwise noble enterprise. (The real target is of course, the influence of Christianity on metaphysics and physics.) That's not Smith's position:
As soon as the Universe was regarded as a complete machine, as a coherent system, governed by general laws, and directed to general ends, viz. its own preservation and prosperity, and that of all the species that are in it; the resemblance which it evidently bore to those machines which are produced by human art, necessarily impressed those sages with a belief, that in the original formation of the world there must have been employed an art resembling the human art, but as much superior to it, as the world is superior to the machines which that art produces. The unity of the system, which, according to this ancient philosophy, is most perfect, suggested the idea of the unity of that principle, by whose art it was formed; and thus, as ignorance begot superstition, science gave birth to the first theism that arose among those nations, who were not enlightened by divine Revelation.
Smith treats the invention/development of (philosophical) theism and the idea of a universe subject to general laws as mutually entailing. Rather than seeing theism as a corruption of science, he sees it as a consequence of science. To put this in social studies of science lingo: once the scientific object of study was conceived and stabilized as a law-governed machine,+ theism followed immediately: science gave birth to the first theism (without the need of revelation).** The point here is not to defend Christianity (or Plato) from Hume's criticism, but rather, I suspect, to claim that Hume is too optimistic about the nature of science.
*Grote treats dialectic as a new method introduced by Socrates, and (not unlike Hume) he thinks that Socrates is significant for turning the methods of natural philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and political/social matters.
**One may grant this sentence, but object that I have not shown the mutual entailing bit. That's true. But I have argued the case elsewhere (in my book), and in my blog posts on the Posidonian argument.
+It is very striking how Cartesian, Plato comes out sounding in Smith's hands.
++There is a further important point in that Grote is very eager to debunk Bacon's suggestion that Aristotle's success at courting political power eliminated the traces of his philosophical competitors. (Smith would have been familiar with Bacon's views, but I suspect he would have thought this a sign of philosophical acuity--about this some other.)
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