How can we find out what Ancient Philosophers said?

Abstract

The question I will discuss in this paper is: what role does the philosophical assessment of a view play in deciding whether to attribute that view to some previous philosophers? My particular interest, on which I will concentrate exclusively in this paper, is in pre-Socratic philosophy. For it is with preSocratic philosophy, more than any other area, that we are faced with the problem of limited and incomplete textual evidence. As a result we have, at times, to go in for reconstruction, with the aim of coming up with an account of some pre-Socratic's thought which accommodates the evidence we do have, and presents as reasonable and interesting an account as possible. Such a project of reconstruction raises the questions I am interested in. How can any conclusions be established about what some pre-Socratic said on the basis of fragmentary and limited evidence? What is the role and status of the principle that, other things being equal, we should attribute the more cogent views and the more cogent arguments to a philosopher? Can we use that principle in order to reconstruct a pre-Socratic's thought from limited textual evidence, in order to 'fill in the gaps'? I should emphasise that I will not be discussing what is required for a full blown, or complete, historical understanding of some piece of pre-Socratic philosophy. It is doubtless true that such an understanding will require something over and above a statement of the piece of philosophy in question. Michael Frede, for example, has emphasised in a clear way the extent to which other histories (for example, of religious thought, social organisation or political belief) are important to rendering the thought of a philosopher intelligible to us.1 I am interested rather in what is involved in what is a necessary part of such an understanding, namely an awareness of what the piece of philosophy in question is.