Even our most fundamental ways of thinking have their own history, which does not mean they are contingent on, or relative to that history, but rather that how they are understood and what they mean has taken long centuries to unfold. A paradox, noted by Parmenides (one of the earliest Greek thinkers) is that everything genuinely historical also has about it a force of necessity: what has happened cannot “unhappen”, and often seems was always meant to happen in the way it did: only very rarely can the most fundamental ideas be undone.
Nevertheless the passage of time brings change even to the seemingly unchangeable, in ways that can surprise us. Plato held the disciplines of mathematics and geometry in opposition to each other, and Aristotle said they must not be mixed (because they represented different degrees of abstraction). In much modern thought, especially since Descartes and Galileo, geometry and mathematics are seen as aspects of the same thing, and conceived as a unity. Similarly, what we now call “gravity” was unknown to the ancient world, and yet the ancients built arcades and domes and bridges often at least as magnificently and with great technical skill, and often at the same scale as we can build today. The Roman basilica in London is thought to have been equal in size to Wren’s cathedral that now stands on the same site: the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, designed two thousand years ago, is still the largest of its kind and fully intact. Triangulation works as well for navigation in a finite cosmos as in an infinite universe, which still begs the questions why and how? How and in what ways would we identify the most originary ground or grounds of thinking?
This research stream seeks to open the question of what still presences, with what force, and how, from the “foundation” of the West until the present day, and what this means for our future.
Current Research Projects
Heidegger and Classical Thought
Martin Heidegger stands in a long line of German philosophers – Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche are the best known – for whom “philosophy” begins with Aristotle and Plato. The English-speaking tradition also reflects this view: to study “Classics” today at Oxford includes a great deal of (even contemporary) philosophy. This long-running research project examines how Heidegger connected ancient and contemporary thinking, especially his daring investigation into the thinkers who made Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought possible (Parmenides, Anaximander, Heraclitus). We show that Heidegger understood the most ancient questions also to be the most contemporary: truth, and how it is understood; “being”, through life itself; “history”, and what it is to be historical; time, as a cause of order and the “whence” as the horizon of understanding. Heidegger was not interested in a “Heideggerian” philosophy, but sought to show how our present thinking is founded in, and still speaks from, what the ancient Greeks had also thought.
Project Leads: Laurence Hemming & Aaron Turner
Whenever the question of the history of the West is posed, we are inevitably returned to the Greece of antiquity. The Greeks were not the earliest great civilisation, nor the most numerous, but they were decisive for who we are now. Our understanding of the world has been shaped by Greek poetry, Greek thought (and philosophy) and Greek mathematics and geometry. Any attempt to define modern democracy begins with the Greeks, with whom democracy began. The concept of modernity itself, of what it means to be modern, was since the Middle Ages and until the 20th Century determined in relation to ancient Greece. And yet we are not Greek, and much intervenes (in thought, in religion, in knowledge, in science) between then and now. Do we still stand in relation to the Greeks, and if we do, should this be so, and how? Is Greece an arbitrary point in an otherwise wider history, or do we experience the inheritance of Greece with any force of necessity? Do we need the Greeks to understand ourselves? Why would this be?
This research stream revives the question of ‘why Greece?’, not as an antiquarian exercise, nor as mere historiography, but as a way of asking “who are we?”, “from where have we come?”, “to where are we headed?”, and “who is this ‘we’ at all”?
Project Lead: Aaron Turner and Laurence Hemming