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Christopher S. Celenza, "The Evolution of Western Thought: Volume 1, From the Ancient World to Late Antiquity" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Hello everyone. My name is Morteza Hajizadeh, your host from New Books Network, and today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Christopher Silenza again. I recorded a podcast with Dr. Christopher Falenza some three or four years ago, so please do check that previous podcast which was on Italian Renaissance and the Birth of Humanities. And today I'm here with Christopher again to talk about his latest book, which just came out a few months ago from Cambridge University Press. The book we're going to discuss is called the Evolution of Western Thought from Ancient World to late antiquity. And Dr. Christopher Salenza is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History and Classics at John Hopkins University. Chris, welcome to New Books Network.
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be with you.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
Well, you're quite well known in your field, but it's customary to ask our guests to introduce themselves. So I would appreciate if you could briefly introduce yourself and then more importantly, tell us about the idea of this book, how the idea of the book came to you and how it's different from probably other books on the same topic because there are many books on the Western intellectual history or the idea of Western thought. There are many, many books on that. So how do you this subject a little differently from existing literature?
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, thanks for asking. I mean, I think I can tell you that, you know, I've been working for the most part on the intellectual history of the Italian Renaissance for the last 20 or 30 years and love the subject and still consider that my main stomping grounds. And so this was a departure in some senses. And on the one hand I've taught these fields in the ancient world, but on the other hand, you know, it really is not my main bread and butter. And I'm well aware that I'm moving into a new field. And so as to me, you know, I am a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, split between the History department, the Classics department, although for the last five and a half years I've been dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. And so that gives me a little bit of a conspectus over all of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and indeed the humanities here. And to some extent it gives you a little bit of a different perspective on the national picture in the United States with the humanities too. And all of that went into the writing of the book, I think as to what's different about the book, what I hope is that this is on the one hand a new look at some older, well known authors. And there's a few things that characterize the approach I took to the book. The first was this notion of presenting the history of Western thought in conjunction with the idea of philosophy being about the search for a wise style of life. And I think, you know, sometimes when we think of philosophy, we think rightly of arguments, normally about verbal arguments and do they have coherence and are they linked to each other. And that's always been a very important part of philosophy, there's no doubt about it. But if you look back to the conditions of the, the pre modern world, and especially the pre printing world, you realize that there had to have been a lot of attention also to the communities in which philosophy and the search for wisdom was practiced. Meaning that if you're in the pre print world, it would be hard to imagine that your work, your written work, would be able to be reproduced thousands and thousands of times in exactly the same way. And so in some sense that got me thinking about, well, what was the relative weight of things in the past. The second thing is I think that in life in general, we do use what you might call exemplarity as a way of seeking out wisdom. That is to say, we look at other people, how they behave. We sometimes model ourselves on things we consider wise, we try to avoid things we consider unwise. I think in the actual practice of our lives we just sort of do this. And I do think that that in the ancient world especially that tendency was probably a little bit more a part of the history of philosophy than current day academic philosophy might allow us to believe. And this is not a critique of current academic philosophy, it's just to say that I think this is one, one new way of looking at it. Another thing that I think is different is it's not intending to be a full history of thinking in the ancient world. I focus on a concept that I call monumentality. That is to say, thinkers that kind of stand out a little bit or moments that stand out as ways of, you know, something that even someone new to the field could hinge onto, could fasten onto and then explore further on their Own. And then I guess a third thing I would say that I hope is a little bit different about the book is that if we think of philosophy as the search for a wise way of life, and we think of exemplarity as part of the history of philosophy, if we're thinking of the Western European Middle Ages, that is to say, the period after this book, Christianity becomes incredibly important. All of a sudden you have, you know, just as, let's say, Socrates became an exemplar for Plato of someone who lived well and died well. All of a sudden you have the life and passion story of Jesus Christ, which becomes much more widely shared, I would argue, across social class. Anything in the ancient world could have done. We have evidence that early Christians thought of Christianity as a philosophy. I point out in the book that, you know, there are depictions, early depictions, for example, in some of the catacombs of Jesus Christ wearing a special type of a garment that indicated a philosophical identity. And so as we went on, part of the thing I wanted to do, what I've noticed in the humanities in the United States is there's been a little bit of a fragmentation of how we teach this set of ongoing conversations that I think these monumental works represent. They're in conversation with each other, sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly. You know, St. Paul, for example, is an implicit, at least, conversation with the Platonic tradition and so on. And so the hope was that, you know, this idea of these getting people acquainted with these monumental works, showing that there was an ongoing conversation and showing that this period, this ancient period, does represent a kind of a foundation. That's the goal of the first volume.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
You've touched upon a lot of points, and when you were talking about. I actually have one question that I'm going to ask at the end of the interview, which is about all these different episodes and figures that you discuss in the book, all being connected and being continuous continuum rather than disjunct, separate figures in the history of Western thought. We'll come to that towards the end of the interview, maybe. And I must say, I think you described book fantastically because one of the things that I really enjoyed about reading your book was that you don't just describe the history of philosophy or the history of evolution of Western thought. You also kind of debunk a lot of myths. You try to undo a lot of misunderstanding that we tend to have. And one of them, as you just mentioned, was that philosophy that we nowadays tend to think of it as something highly specialized, technical, set of technical arguments, footnotes, academic Debates. But you do show that in the past, it was lived practice. It was. It was. It was. It was historians, you know, out there in the market among people, speaking to them. It was a part of their everyday life, let's say. And you also talked about religion, which is a topic of interest to me as well. And I'm keen to know. And you do focus on the topic of religion, philosophy in this book a lot as well. I'm keen to know this historical separation of. Because we tend to think of them separate. We have philosophy and religion. How do you think this separation has distorted our understanding of the past?
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
You know, it's interesting. No, it's a good question. And I think you can look at the question from a number of different ways. One. One way that I approach in the book is just how have we habitually thought of the history of the history of philosophy? And this is work that a number of scholars have done, you know, wonderful scholarship on. There's a series by a scholar named Santinello and others that examine the history of philosophy. One signal figure, an important figure who comes up is a historian of philosophy named Johann Jacob Brucker from the middle of the 18th century. He's writing in the 1740s. He's a Lutheran pastor from Augsburg, and he's quite brilliant. He writes something called the critical Historic Philosophy, the Historia Critica Philosophii. There's Latin versions and German versions. The Latin versions have much more diffusion. There's a second edition that is very, very heavily read in Italy and in other places. And he's very open in his introduction about what he thinks philosophy should be, how we should consider philosophy. And he says in this introduction, he says, well, you know, up until our day, the words philosophy and philosopher had been used much too promiscuously. You know, we use them to talk about literary figures, poets, things like that. We now have to restrict the usage and think about philosophy as sets of critical principles. And he uses an architectural metaphor. He says, this is like a foundation. And then what we do with these critical principles is we build on that foundation. And so when he says that, when he talks about what the historian of philosophy should do, he even uses a, you know, a more kind of physical metaphor. He says, we have to. We have to. We have to dig the system out. In other words, in any. Any set of writings that we have from the past, we have to find the principles that then create a system. And he actually says that in Latin. He says, totem, sustema etoendames. We have to dig the whole system out. Now, what's great about Brucker is he's open about all this. I mean, and all of us have the right and the responsibility to think of philosophy in different ways. We're allowed to do that. And so his way was actually quite highly influential. And even though he's writing in the 18th century, so it should go without saying that approaches to the history of philosophy have changed over time. But the one thing that that moment does, that I think is very important, that late 18th century, that 18th to early 19th century moments, say a half century does, is it solidifies a kind of a canon of who counts as a philosopher. In other words, if you didn't quite make it into counting as a philosopher, you wind up being omitted to a certain extent from the histories of philosophy after that. And I point out a couple of things on that front. One example, just to stay with, let's say with pagan philosophers in antiquity, let's think about the philosophical movement, Neoplatonism. So the most important figure there is Plotinus. He's from Lycopolis, Egypt. He moves to Rome, teaches philosophy in Greek. He's from the third century. And on the one hand, nobody could be considered more of a philosopher than Plotinus. And if you extract principles from his writing, you can find something that would seem to Brucker like a system of philosophy. But if you look at what Plotinus was trying to do, it's very clear that he was doing all of this to try to get to what he called the one which is the supreme intellect, the supreme principle beyond intellect, beyond thinking, beyond thought. Something like God. Right. In other words, even Plotinus was doing his philosophical work in the service of something else, in the service of something that is, for the most part, religious. So there's a kind of a gap in traditional histories of philosophy when we get to late antiquity, especially in Plotinus followers. And Morteza, here's another interesting thing. We have a biography of Plotinus, this third century figure, by his student Porphyry. And what Porphyry says is, Porphyry says, well, you know, Plotinus didn't really write much until I came along, Porphyry, I encouraged him to write. And even when he did write, he didn't really pay attention to his spelling. He wasn't always the best writer, you know. And it's interesting because again, no one could have been considered more of a philosopher than Plotinus. So the key really there to me is just as an example, is that this is someone Plotinus was for whom clearly the community he gathered around him was at least as important as, let's say, the independent arguments that might have the thousand year life after him. Right. Number one. And number two, the other thing was that the enterprise of philosophy was quite important for him and that was, and it was about something. And it was about again raising yourself up out of this earthly condition and you know, unifying yourself to again what he called the One. And we might think of as, as God in some way or another. So it was in service of religion. So in that sense I think there's often been this way in the post enlightenment era to try to separate philosophy and religion. Whereas I think certainly for the pre modern west. And again, Plotinus is not even a Christian, right. He's actually in a sense anti Christian even there though it's in the service of religion. So that's what I'd say. In others, I think there's a long history, long historiography, there are a long history of the history of philosophy and, and there's any number of examples I think that are like that, that if you, if you look at them just slightly differently from the way we might be accustomed to coming from the academic, philosophical perspective, the things that people are doing start to seem just, they just look different.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
I know that I'm jumping terribly ahead, okay. But I was really interested in the example you mentioned here and I'm keen to know even if this was this so called separation or between philosophy and religion, if this was also the case maybe with later philosophers such as, you know, Saint Aquinas or Saint Augustine. I know that it's, they're, they're in the middle, some of them are in the Middle Ages and it's not really code. But I'm keen to know your thoughts on that.
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
So I think on the one hand we have the words, right? So, so people will use the word philosophy in different ways. So, so at one point, just to give you an example, somebody whom Augustine, whom you just mentioned, Love, St. Paul, uses the word philosophy in a negative way. He, you know, he says in one of his letters, you know, don't be like philosophers who prattle on vainly, this kind of thing. So it's kind of a signifier there for just empty words. And yet if we think of philosophy more broadly, less as just what the word is and more about what the thing is, the search for human wisdom, you know, then, then all of a sudden the picture starts to look different. And so there's Augustine, let's say, and there's a question for Augustine. I think that he, he is clearly, without any doubt, in my view, very much a part of his late ancient Mediterranean world. He's a searcher. He's looking for the right kind of identity, spiritual identity for himself. And he tells us all about this in his confessions, where he talks about, you know, trying on different philosophies for size. He talks about studying for a while the system of the Manichaeans, you know, who believed in two universal principles, one good, one evil, who were kind of at war in the world that comes to seem empty to him. Augustine then says, well, then I studied the Platonists, and clearly they were the, they were quite close to what I was thinking because they did posit that there was one God and, and so on. But then, then he says, but ultimately I didn't find one thing there. And he says what he didn't find is he uses the Latin word caritas, charity, what we often translate today as love. And it's one of these three Pauline virtues of faith, hope and love. And it's a kind of love that's other directed. And so for Augustine, you know what, what this comes to mean is he couldn't find that until and unless he embraced Christianity, because Christ's life to him seemed the ultimate act of this sort of love, right? This is someone who is God on the one hand, who voluntarily chooses to come down into the embodiment of a human being and take on the weight of humanity's sinfulness for redemption. And so for Augustine, once he discovered that his anxiety was washed away, he gives, recounts a very emotional, where he's very highly upset. He hears the voice of a child singing in the distance who says, tolle lege, take and read. And he realizes Augustine does this is God talking to him. Take and read a book, and he opens up a Bible. He opens up the book and reads it. So on the one hand, there's him. If you fast forward to Aquinas, who will be part of my next volume. Aquinas is active in the 13th century.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
He is.
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
Though he's Italian, he winds up teaching most of his career at the University of Paris, which is the center in Western Europe for academic theology as it was studied then. And two big things are happening that condition Thomas Aquinas's world. The one is institutional, the other is, let's say, textual. And they come together. The institutional piece is that it's in his era that we see the real formation of Western European universities and the University of Paris in his day, he dies in the 1270s, had come into its own with four separate faculties. One is called the faculty of arts. That's where the liberal arts were taught. And there were three higher faculties, medicine, theology and law. And Aquinas was part of that system. So the institutional teaching of, let's say, theology and philosophy together. So that's one. The textual part is that it is in his era that Western Europeans all of a sudden are getting almost all of the works of Aristotle that we have today, most of which they were lacking in the Middle Ages. So what did the Middle Ages have? The Middle Ages had a few of Aristotle's logical works. This is what we call together the organon. And. But they had only a few of those, and they had little fragments of other ones. But all of a sudden, you know, in. In the world of Islam in the early Middle Ages, Aristotle was. Was. Was cultivated and studied. And there were legendary figures who studied Aristotle. And what you find is that in the era of Aquinas, right before his era, there's this great translation movement where either from Greek to Latin, Aristotle's texts are translated, or quite often from Arabic or Syriac intermediaries, Aristotle's texts are translated into Latin along with, by the way, many of these Islamic commentators, perhaps the most famous of which is Ibn Rushd, who's also known to the west as Averroes. So Aquinas is kind of getting all of this stuff. He's getting not only Aristotle, he's getting this rich heritage of Islamic interpretation. These Islamic thinkers set the paradigm in a way, because what they're trying to do is, on the one hand, they realize, wow, Aristotle was incredibly important, right? He covered all these subjects in such a way that was so comprehensive on the one hand. But on the other hand, some of the things in his work don't seem to fit in with our religion. And there were a couple of things. One was, was the world created in time or was the world eternal? Aristotle believed it was eternal. The Abrahamic faiths, right, in Judaism, Christianity and ISL believe that the world was created in time. And then what happens to the human soul after it dies, after the body dies? And Aristotle is kind of ambivalent on that. So Aquinas is inheriting all of this stuff and so differently from Augustine for him, you will often see thinkers in his era separating something. They're calling philosophy from something else. So they'll say things like, well, according to philosophy, we can't prove that the human soul is immortal. And what they mean by that is, according to the works of Aristotle, if we interpret the works of Aristotle really strictly we can't prove it, but we know that the human soul is immortal because of our faith. So you see some separations in those days. I think Aquinas, of all of the medieval philosophers, is probably the one who tries the hardest to unify the two, to bring faith and reason together. But you do see people talking about that kind of separation in that era. And it's interesting because it also foreshadows just a. As a parenthesis. It foreshadows the kinds of debates we're still having today about what sorts of things should you be able to teach in universities? Like, what are the lines? What's free academic expression, what's not free academic expression? And so on. So. Yeah, so. So, good question, good question. Yeah.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
But I'm really looking forward to reading more about that in your second volume. I'm sure there will be more on this topic there. Yeah. And about these separations, it kind of. It may not be relevant, but I read a book some time ago, the Territories of Science and Religion, where it was, I think Thomas Aquinas were talking about religion and scantia, or science and reason being quite being part of the same pack. Maybe. But again, in modern times, we tended to totally separate science and religion into different categories. But anyhow, that's a different topic. Let me get back to the book. You have. Yeah, a couple of chapters, two chapters on Plato, and I must say I found them quite refreshing because. You do? Well, I'm not a student of philosophy, but I've read quite a bit about Plato from my own work, which is mainly literature and again, intellectual history. But I really found it interesting that you've approached this differently from other books that I've read. When it comes to Plato, it seems that there's a strong sense that. That philosophy is kind of emerging out of crisis. There's political instability, execution of Socrates, there's loss of trust in public life. And Plato seems to be concerned with all these questions and the question of truth. And I guess given this context, the allegory of Cave makes more sense. It's not an abstract idea, but maybe he's trying to diagnose what's wrong in society, a society that has lost grip on reality. So do you think that Plato's philosophy is fundamental, responding to a breakdown, maybe in a shared understanding of truth? And why do you think he's. Why do you think. Why does he, let's say, push towards the idea that real knowledge lies beyond appearances?
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, it's a great question. And I don't know if you feel this But I have noticed that given some of the current transformations we are undergoing and the way information circulates, the way we're taking things in today, it gives us a different vantage point on the past sometimes. Right. You know, and. And so I. I think surely the answer is yes to the question, which is that, you know, he. He's definitely responding to crises. And I think a few different things come to mind when thinking of Plato that are worth highlighting. The. The first is that, you know, this figure of Socrates who didn't write anything, but again, was nonetheless considered, you know, a philosopher by everybody, just looms so large for Plato. Right. This is the example. And in some senses, I think Plato's dialogues are. You could almost think of them as a tribute to Socrates. And in fact, scholars who've studied them think that there's sort of three basic periods in Plato's writing. There's early dialogues, middle dialogues, and late dialogues. The early dialogues really are just sort of trying to resurrect the way Socrates talked and thought about certain problems. The middle dialogues, Plato's coming into his own. And the late dialogues, Plato is responsible enough to have heard critiques to his thinking and then works through some of the critiques in the later dialogues. The two that I've talked about in the book most, I mean, I mentioned others, but one is the Republic, where the cave allegory is, as you mentioned, and then the other is the dialogue Phaedo. And both of them have interesting things going on. So the cave allegory surely is the origins of everything we think of. When we think of, is the reality apparent to us all the reality that there is, or could there be something beyond that? And you mentioned literature in your own work. You think of any number of works of literature, including genre literature like science fiction, that in some ways is probably indebted to the staking out of this ground. You know, does the. Does the world as we see it really. Is it really the way as we see it, or is there something beyond it? And can you get to that beyond it by training yourself and thinking hard and being in conversation with people? And so, you know, that myth of the cave is a classic accounting of this notion that, you know, you have all these people, but they're living in shadows, and the prizes they give each other are really for things that they can only see within that limited thing. If they go out, out of that cave and they see the sun, all of a sudden the world looks different. Then when they come back in and they've learned this truth, it becomes Harder to persuade their colleagues and things like that. So that's, I think, one aspect, the second, and I think maybe the one that for me is even more important is something I bring up in both chapters on Plato, and that is the meaning of this word logos. The meaning of the word logos, most basically, most literally in Greek, means word. But it has definitely been a kind of a signifier in the history of philosophy. And on the one hand, you might have people who say, well, logos is rational argument. That's what it is. And there's definitely times when Plato uses it that way, and it does mean that. But then there's other times when it seems to mean something a little bit more. It seems to mean something like conversation and discussion, which presupposes that it's not just one person and one mind engaging in logical argumentation. It's us in a conversation probably always misunderstanding each other a little bit. Right. Because, you know, I'm not inside your head. You're not inside my head. You're speaking, I'm listening. I'm speaking. You're listening. But we're negotiating in a way. We're talking. And I think that that's the most wonderful part of what Plato does. There's a moment in his dialogue, the Phaedo, where this is probably, you could argue, it's maybe the first middle dialogue, the first time when Plato is really coming into his own. And interestingly, just as a footnote, he portrays himself as absent from the discussion. So there's a little bit of a hint there maybe that he wants us to think that, you know, he's sort of setting it up differently. It's a beautiful dialogue. It's a dialogue within a dialogue. Two interlocutors named Phaedo and Eche Crates meet. And one asks the other, oh, Phaedo, you were there on the night before Socrates died. Tell me what the discussions were like. And so you go backward in time. Peter tells the story of Socrates and his best friends, again with Plato, somehow, fictionally anyway, not being there. And of course, the friends are very upset because they know Socrates has been sentenced to death. He has to effectively commit a forced suicide in the next day. And what they talk about is. They talk about that this signal question for. For Platonists, is the human soul immortal? Does it live on after death? And they go through arguments about it. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, and so on, and. And they come to a few moments of, you know, where they. Where they can't get beyond the argument, the argument that they're at, and there's this kind of break in the dialogue. And Phaedo says, you know, what I wondered about most in our great friend Socrates was how he cared for all of us. You know, how he thought of us as his friends and interlocutors. And, you know, I can even read you the quotation, he says. Phaedo says, I've certainly often admired Socrates Echikrates, but never more than on this occasion. That he had something to say was unsurprising. But the first thing by which I was struck was the pleasant, kind and respectful way he received the young men's discussion. That's my translation of the word logos. And how sharply he was aware of the effect the discussion had on us and how well he treated us and how he rallied us as if we had fled and been defeated, and how he turned us around to follow up and consider the discussion together with him. So what this interlocutor remembers about this incredibly dramatic evening, right, where Socrates is, in effect, preparing himself to die, but preparing his friends to live without him, was that Socrates did not care about himself, he cared about them. That's what we're being signaled here. That's a lot like, you know, what that later word caritas will come to mean in the Pauline tradition and Christianity. And then one more interesting moment happens in the dialogue soon thereafter, where Phaedo starts recounting the argument again. And as you return to the knight's conversation, Socrates is encouraging the friends to avoid making an error. And here's what Socrates says to he says, let us not become misologues as those who do become misanthropes, for one can suffer no greater evil than hating conversation. And the word misolog is composed of two Greek roots, missing, which means to hate, and logos, which means all those things I was talking about discussion, conversation, rational argument, and so on. So Socrates is saying, don't come to hate logos, don't come to hate discussion. Because if you do, what you'll really become, what you will be, is you'll be a misanthrope. You'll be someone who hates your fellow people, your fellow men, meaning in the broad sense, men and women. So there's this assumption, I think, in Plato that, you know, we need to have this sense of conversation where there's going to be different opinions, where we're going to disagree, but we're going to go in in good faith and think that hopefully we're going to arrive at a kind of truth. There's another place in the Platonic corpus Where Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues says, you know, like the wind, we have to follow logos wherever it takes us. Right. Meaning, like we have to keep this project of conversation going. So to me, that's a very meaningful piece of the Platonic, you know, the Platonic thing. And I will say I'm not so sure that is something that is often as stressed as it could be in, say, modern academic considerations of Plato.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
I think this is something absolutely needs these days, especially with this polarized political environment everywhere in the world. Yeah. And unfortunately, people are not open to. Even I have some really good friends here who are. They care about the ideas of justice, but they won't. They won't agree to kind of question their favorite politicians. The funny thing, their favorite politicians here, where I live in the Strait, are from the labor government. So. Yeah, but they're not even ready to question some of their assumptions or actions. What I'm saying is that they've kind of turned them into a cult. But this is absolutely, I guess, what we need these days to everywhere in the world.
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Dr. Christopher Silenza
Right. Because I think it's about shaping a self as well. Right. In other words, it's about learning to be introspective. And I think that even our friends who are in academia, you know, we're all very rational people. Right. We all, you know, we. But. But we are just as affected as everybody else by this massive way that information has changed and the way it's circulating. So I do think that this call to introspection that this one strand of the history, History of philosophy alerts us to is probably a good thing for us to listen to inside ourselves. Yeah.
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Morteza Hajizadeh
But one more question I have here is, is that in your discussion of Plato, and I think you also alluded to that when you were talking about Socrates in Plato's Phaedo, if I'm not mistaken, that idea was that he really cared about other people. That's the idea I'm interested to know. So there are arguments even in that way. There are arguments that the soul is important. And what really stays with you is when they talk about Socrates, how Socrates behaved, his calmness, his care for his friends, even when, you know, the way he faces death without fear. So to me, it almost feels like philosophy here is something that is embodied practice rather than something that is discussed or explained. So I'm keen to know how important is this idea that philosophy is something that you demonstrate through your life? And do you think, as an example, for example, Socrates enduring influence, does it come from the way he lived and died, or from his specific arguments.
- [34:28]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, I agree. Thank you for picking up on that too, because it's an important theme of the book. You know, it's funny, I point out in that chapter that a much later thinker, a Renaissance thinker named Erasmus, has this series of adages, and at one of them he actually uses the phrase in Latin. He says, sancte Socrates ora pro nobis, Saint Socrates pray for us. So it's the power of Socrates as an example, right. Lives on through millennia, really. And I think it's true to say that, you know, as you say, an embodied way of thinking about philosophy. What is it like to live in the world with colleagues, with friends and so on? Here's an interesting point. So one, One very important source for the way we think of the history of philosophy. It's an ancient work by an authentic Diogenes Laertius just called the Lives of the Philosophers. And what Diogenes Laertes does there is he tells the history of philosophy as a story of schools of philosophy. Notice there's one leading figure and then there's a school that, you know, follows him. So there's Pythagoras and so there's this italic school, and there's these other schools and so on. And he goes through the lives of each philosopher. And what's interesting about it is that it really is mostly about their lives and not about their abstract thinking. In other words, what he'll do is he'll tell the story of their life, where they're from, he'll tell anecdotes that reveal their personalities. And it's only at the very end of each life life that he just kind of lists their philosophical works and sometimes touches on arguments. And so I found that interesting just because, you know, that's a standard way of thinking about philosophy in the ancient world that has sometimes, you know, been taken a little less than seriously by modern interpreters because it doesn't seem, quote, unquote, serious, but it probably is telling us something that that's the way people wanted to look back and think about these figures. Again, to return this to idea of exemplarity and embodiedness that you were raising,
- [36:19]
Morteza Hajizadeh
let's talk about Aristotle. And that's chapter four, I guess, From Observation to Ethics. And I think when I was reading the book, I sort of noticed the shift when you talk where, for example, Plato is usually talking, he's looking upwards towards forms, that ideal world, something beyond the visible world. But with Aristotle, it seems that he turns the Attention outward to what's actually right in front of you. Nature, behavior, systems, causes. And it feels like philosophy again becomes more grounded, more observational, closer to what we might call science, but still deeply connected to bigger questions about purpose. So I'm keen to know what's really happening in this transition from Plato to Aristotle. Do you think that Aristotle makes philosophy more practical, accessible? Or is there also something lost when you move away from that, from Plato, Plato's more transcendent vision, let's say?
- [37:18]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, no, it's a great question, I think. You know, one of the other big themes about the book that I guess I forgot to mention earlier is I try to also take account of genre and what you might call the material culture of text. So genre meaning, what is the actual genre of writing? Is it a dialogue, is it something else? And then material culture, like literally, how are people. People writing? Are they writing with a stylus, are they writing on papyrus, are they writing on parchment and so on? The genre question is a big one when it comes to Aristotle. He's one of the people who is considered to be the successor of Plato's academy. He doesn't get the nod. A person who did was named Spousippus. And so Aristotle goes and travels for a while and studies the natural world and so on. And, you know, when he does come back to Athens, here he serves actually as Alexander the Great's tutor, has this very interesting life. He comes back to athens in about 335 BCE and then remains there. And he founds the school which is called the Lyceum, which was situated in a grove that other philosophers had used. Anyway, so Aristotle, what we have of his, the reason I bring this up when it comes to genre is what we have of Plato are dialogues, right? What we have from Aristotle, for the most part, are what you might call his lecture notes. In other words, all the famous works that we think of when we think of Aristotle, the Niccompetian ethics, the Metaphysics, the physics, all of the other natural works, things like that. What these are are either his own lecture notes or lecture notes that a student took that Darusal then redacted, or then a professional scribe helped him redact and so on. Interestingly, we do know that Aristotle did write dialogues in the style of Plato. It's just that they've been almost universally lost. There's little fragments of them that exist and, you know, famous scholars have gathered them. So we know, you know, a few, a little bit about them, but there are no really complete dialogues that remain of Aristotle. So part of it is just that it would be interesting to know when Plato is actually teaching in his academy, what would it have looked like? Would it have seemed more practical? Would it have seemed more like Aristotle does, dividing up all the different disciplines, teaching about what your predecessors did, teaching about the practical parts and so on. So that's one thing. I also think it's important to say that they do differ, definitely, at least in the corpora that we have, the dialogues versus Aristotle's things. There are different themes that come out. And Aristotle does definitely seem more, let's say, grounded, which is important. But I think that one of the real differences that we see with Aristotle is he almost seems to me like if there's a proto discipline there, it's almost like that of an anthropologist, especially when it comes to ethics. I think we often read him as, you know, recommending normatively ways to behave, ways not to behave. And I think if you read him carefully, what you see is he's just observing. So when he talks about virtues, like, let's say he talks about the virtue of magnanimity, he's looking around and saying, well, when we consider people who are magnanimous, what do they do? What are their lives look like, what are they like? And he's kind of listing these things. And so I do think he's definitely a little bit different from Plato in some senses, even as I think they both are in agreement that there is something beyond us. Aristotle has this very interesting passage toward the end of his Nicomachean Ethics, where, you know, he's mostly talking this anthropological way, observing what the different virtues are like, what are people like who have these virtues. But then he talks in the very end about the intellect and becoming like a God. And he says that that's really something you can do alone and you should do alone, and if you can do it, it's the highest form of life. Mok most people can't and so on. So there's clearly a way for him that he thinks there's something divine. Definitely not the same way as Plato. He differs from Plato famously on certain things, but. But I think they do share a lot as well. But it's true to say that, you know, in a practical sense, I think that Aristotle divides the world up in so many different ways that he's arguably, you know, the creator of academic disciplines as we think of them today. When you think about, you know, when we study the natural world or when we study certain parts of philosophy, when we study logic, things like that, he's very responsible. You know, in the beginning of most of his works, his big works, he talks about, well, what did our predecessors think? So it's almost like he's doing a proto literature review. And so I think in that sense he's very interesting. But again, the key there is that I do think the genre is important too. Like you'll even see. It sounds like a professor sometimes. So he circles back on himself, he repeats himself, he sort of stops and starts. It feels at times like somebody is lecturing.
- [42:17]
Morteza Hajizadeh
No, and, and, and his discussion of ethics is also quite important again in Aristotle. And it's. It, it also, to me, it also felt very much contemporary and modern, especially his idea that happiness, for example, isn't just a feeling or a moment of success, but it's something that he generally built over a lifetime. It's through habits, discipline, friendships, community. It feels almost like quite a critique of modern ideas of success, especially these days, as something that is immediate or individual. And there's also something quite demanding about his view. It's not easy. It requires effort, consistency, a kind of self awareness as well. So how do you think Aristotle's ideas of you? I could be mispronouncing this. I'm horrible with this lighting what you demonia, if I'm not mistaken. How do you think that idea of flourishing or flourishing or living well, challenged the way we think about happiness today? And what are things like, why are things like habit, character, relationships so essential, especially these days, to living well, in his framework?
- [43:35]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I basically, I mean, I agree. I think that this word eudaimonia has these different roots. So eo just means well or. And daimon sort of has something divine about it. And so what it means in a sense in Greek is in a more literal sense, favored by the gods. But we can translate it as you suggest this flourishing. And as always, he looks around and thinks, well, what do people whom we normally consider as flourishing? What does their life look like? What do they have to do? And one thing they have to do is practice different sorts of virtues. And so as you say, habit comes into this, right. Aristotle thinks of virtues in two different ways. One is as a form of practice and other as a means. So if you think about it in terms of practice, he'll say things like, for example, nobody is really just born a courageous person. You have something that he calls a hexis habit that is kind of like a capacity that you bring from potentiality to actuality by doing it. In other words, you don't become a courageous person until you have repeatedly performed courageous acts. So as you were suggesting earlier, this is about discipline and time and living of a life. It's not one thing. It's not one immediate kind of thing. And then of course there's the idea of the mean, which is moderation, meaning that you know, you know, you want, even as a courageous person, you want to be at a mean between, say, being cowardly, like never facing anything that's difficult, and then being rash. In other words, you know, you know, you're one guy and you go to battle against, you know, a thousand people, all of whom have weapons. Right. And so there's some way in the middle there. So there's certain grounding virtues that he'll talk about. And so I do think that that is true to say he says something interesting that's. That often puzzles people who say, well, you can't really judge if someone has been happy until they're, until they're dead, basically, until they've lived a full life. Life. And especially to young people, that's a hard thing to hear because it takes a while to see. But it really is about the living of a life and measuring the different virtues that there are. And I think that's the best takeaway we can have from Aristotle today in our modern world, as you're suggesting, where I do think that we're still living in the long shadow of 19th century romanticism where the focus on the individual and individual achievement, achievement is so marked. But the reality is that, you know, we're all really embedded in social networks of some sort and thinking about how we relate to different people, how we practice virtues with different people. I think it can be one of the keys to us living, you know, fulfilling lives today. And Aristotle is a great window into that. He's. It's, it's a hard read at times because again, these feel like lecture notes when you really read his texts. But. But it's definitely worth making one's way through.
- [46:27]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Let's talk about other parts of the book. And again, I think one thing that in your book stood out for me is that as I was reading, it's not the story about purely the Greeks. So you start to see in the book, you start to see more complex world where ideas are moving. They're between cultures and languages and traditions. You have Greek philosophy that encounters Jewish monotheism and both of them are shaped by political, institutional world of Rome. So I guess you do show that interconnection of different cultures and religions
- [47:04]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
in
- [47:04]
Morteza Hajizadeh
the evolution of Western thought. And it becomes harder to talk about a single clean intellectual tradition, which is, I guess, one of the misunderstandings, because how this idea of the west and Western values are unfortunately hijacked by sometimes, you know, fanatics, ultra conservative people, right wingers, you know, but now, but, but that the west, the Western thought, was also a combination of different cultures and traditions. So how important do you think is this mixing of cultures to the development of what we these today call Western thought? And does it force us to rethink the idea that maybe this tradition, this tradition has a single original identity? Rethink the idea that or misconception that has a single original story or identity?
- [47:55]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And again, that's why I focus on this idea of monumentality, because these are works that just. Or moments that for better or worse, are just in conversation with each other and are shaping each other. And in fact, the theme of volume two actually is going to be exchanges. Exchange between men and women, between religious traditions. And even across geographies and even in this earlier period, there's so much exchange. I mean, even think of the figure I mentioned earlier, Plotinus, right? This somebody who's born in Egypt, right. Moves to Rome but teaches in Greek, right. And so there's all these different identities unfolded just in this one person. And everywhere you look in the ancient world, there is exchange. And so I would agree that I think there's something about a kind of continuous conversation that we can identify as something Western that just happens to be associated, let's say, traditionally with Western. But it is so plural and diverse on the inside and even, you know, plants the seeds of its own self critique. I mean, think about, for example, in the, in the Hebrew Bible tradition of, you know, prophets like Jeremiah, right? I mean, these are critics of their own society, right? They're criticizing their own society. So in other words, this is, this is one of these strands where there's a self criticism that there is. And this in this kind of Western imagination. I think that, you know, one thing, one thing that I start to talk about as the book goes on, and you mentioned the Romans, I may talk a little bit about Cicero and others, but I think one of the important things that comes out of that moment is the use of the Latin language. And this just becomes a very important thing in the Western European Middle Ages. You know, there comes a time when by the end of the early Middle Ages, in other words, after my book ends, Latin really is no longer a native language for anybody anymore. And yet it's the language of, almost universally, of education. It's often the language of commerce. It's often a language of diplomacy. Earlier we were talking about Thomas aquinas in the 13th century in the University of Paris. Latin is the language in which we would be speaking if we were there, in which we would be writing and so on. And so one of the Roman legacies is just kind of that, right? This idea that somehow, because of empire, because of culture, and because the language was used in all the different parts where Rome had a toehold, that becomes the language of Western European Christianity. And so. And, you know, there's even things associated with the Latin language that remains. Certain ideas that Latin carries with it certain senses of what is virtuous, what's not, is a kind of a martial language, often, you know, having to do with war. So I think there's a lot there. But, yes, I would say, like summarizing. I think it's a very, very plural tradition that's still a tradition. Right. And I think that's the sort of. That's the delicate piece of it. Okay.
- [50:50]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And you have a chapter on Christianity. We have already touched upon this idea of religion and philosophy, but I'm keen to know a little bit more about that, because when you discuss Christianity, when Christianity comes into the story, you do not present it as something replacing philosophy, but actually as something transforming it or even expanding it. The ideas that had been discussed in relatively small, elite circles suddenly becomes part of a much, much wider social and cultural movement, which is, in this case, Christianity. And concepts such as soul, morality, and good life are reinterpreted through the lens of religion, through ideas of salvation and community. So do you see Christianity maybe as something at continuing the philosophical project in a new form, or do you think it fundamentally redirects philosophy?
- [51:45]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
I see it as a kind of amplifier in some ways. And so if you think about some of the classic things we think of, when we think of, let's say, Plato and Platonism, we think of things like, you know, the human soul is immortal. There is a world that is immaterial but is somehow more real than the world we have now. This immaterial world and the divinity within it in some way superintends the world that we live in now. Right now, those are all staples of Plato and the Platonic tradition, but all of a sudden, they become baked into Christianity in some ways, too, right? This idea that. And changed. That's the other thing. They're changed, right. In other words, there is a divinity, but this divinity is Now God, but not just, not just a monotheistic God, but a God who chooses to come and redeem human beings, to become human, in other words. So human beings all of a sudden now can see themselves in this divinity in probably ways that it would have been a lot harder to do in the pre Christian world. You can actually see yourself in this. Like, this is somebody who comes to earth who deliberately chooses to do this, who suffers for the sake of humankind. The second way, I would argue is just to reiterate that if we take this notion of exemplarity being important in the way we think of philosophy, in the broad sense of the search for human wisdom, this exemplary life of Jesus Christ, the episodes just kind of become known to almost everybody. Like maybe not all of them all of the time, but if you, you know, if you look at medieval art, it's mostly Christian art in Western Europe. And so, and so it's just kind of surrounding people. And the third thing I'd say is I think that if you had to pick one book that was most common to everybody among readers and writers, it would be in Western Europe again. It would be. It would be, you know, the Old and New Testament together, the Bible. Right. And so all of these things, in other words, I think, contribute to the notion that Christianity is almost like a hardwired substructure that people have. And so even when they're doing other things, when they're writing literature, when they're writing philosophy, I think it's somehow always sort of there. And so accordingly, it kind of has to. If that's, that's one of your basic tools for reading the world, it's going to have to come out. When you're doing almost anything else intellectual, it'll be there. You'll be either an implicit or explicit dialogue with Christian. And I do think that's something that, at least in the U.S. i think, you know, two generations ago, you probably would have assumed that students, let's say, would have come with just, you know, some basic knowledge of some of these stories related to Christianity and to be frank, even other, other stories, but, you know, other histories of Plato in the ancient world. It's just not that way anymore. So part of the purpose of the book is to just like, reintroduce that notion again, to kind of raise it up, bring it into a leap and remind us, oh, yeah, that was there too.
- [54:40]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Let me ask you about. Now that we are talking about Christianity, I think it's also time to talk about Paul, because your discussion of Paul, to me it felt like it was a turning point because Southern philosophy or these big ethical ideas, discussions about these big ethical ideas become more universal in a way that they were not before. The idea that distinctions are like a status, ethnicity, social role, don't determine someone value. I think this idea was quite radical in that ancient world. And then you have Paul, who is clearly drawing on earlier philosophical language and framework in this case. So how philosophic is it significant do you think Paul's ideas about human equality is? And to what extent does that reshape or challenge the hierarchies that were built into earlier Greek thought?
- [55:32]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, no, I think it's a big deal. And I think that, you know, there's long term ways to consider it and then there's, you know, the shorter term way. So the long term way is, you know, you mentioned like he one passage I highlight a few times. He has this passage in his letter to the Galatians where he says that under this new dispensation of Christianity there is no longer, you know, Jew nor Greek, there's no longer a male nor female. There's no longer, you know, slave nor free, bond nor free. And you know, meaning that when we talk about race, gender and class as these categories, he's saying that, you know, that the sort of prison house of these categories doesn't exist. If you enter this new world now, does that mean all of a sudden that this is like a post Enlightenment, you know, theory of human rights? No. Doesn't mean that everybody all of a sudden was treated equally? No. But does it mean that it's a very powerful idea, like a key thread in the, in the fabric of, of Western thinking about what it means to be a person there? The answer I think is yes. So I do think that is quite radical. And I think Paul is important in a number of other ways too because he's somebody who both recapitulates, you know, the letters we have really are the earliest things we have, the closest things we have in a sense to the life of Christ. The Gospels are actually probably written after the Pauline letters. And so even though they come first and the Bible and so Paul, we have this reflection on what does the life of Jesus Christ mean, How do we think about it? And I would say there's a couple of themes that come out in Paul, but the first is again this idea of charity. He talks about these virtues of faith, hope and love, I. E. Charity. This becomes very important for him, the idea that he's the one who really solidifies this Idea that the life of Jesus Christ represents a love that is completely other directed. It's not about him, it's about everybody else. It's about humanity. The nature of God comes up with Paul as well, most famously in his letter to the Romans, where, you know, it really is. He's wrestling with this idea of what does it mean to have a God who is one, right, who is one who knows everything, who is all powerful, but who nonetheless is all good as well. How does that work? Like we see bad things happen to people. How does it work? You know, can you earn your own salvation or are you predestined? He's wrestling with these questions in a big way. And then the final thing I'd say is that he wrestles with this idea of human failing. Meaning, you know, one of the things that came up in the world of Plato and Aristotle, in fact, in one of Plato's dialogues, there's a famous phrase. Well, not that famous phrase, but there's a phrase. Socrates is talking to somebody as a character and he says, you know, nobody sins willingly. You know, nobody makes a mistake willingly. Meaning that if you really knew the right thing to do, you would do it. And so if you did the wrong thing, it was just you didn't know what the right thing is to do. What Paul wrestles with is the fact that he feels like he himself sometimes does know what the right thing to do is, but just can't do it. He fails, he sins, right? Why do we do that? Why does that happen? He wrestles with that, as does Augustine after him, as does. You know what I mean? So, so this becomes, I think, another thing that Christianity does, that it's different. It recognizes this idea that, well, we're fallen somehow as humans, right? We have some flaws that we have to, that we have to address. And I will say that, you know, I, I think whether one is a person of faith or not, this is a meaningful conception, right? Even when it comes to thinking about how do we treat other people, that we're sometimes going to have selfish impulses that we have to keep in check. In other words, even if you're not a person of faith at all, I think you can embrace that sort of a message.
- [59:26]
Morteza Hajizadeh
I've got a couple of other questions because St. Augustine is one of my favorite writers and I've got his book the City of God here. I haven't read the whole book, but I do every now and then pick up the book and read bits and pieces of it.
- [59:37]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
I.
- [59:39]
Morteza Hajizadeh
With Augustine, everything becomes more, I think Things become more inward and more historical at the same time. So you have this deep introspection, let's say, the idea that truth is something that you encounter within yourself through reflection and transformation. On the other hand, there's this sweeping vision of history that is moving towards a final and a kind of divine narrative. And it feels that philosophy is becoming both more personal with Augustine and also more cosmic. Do you think that Augustine, or how do you think Augustine changes the way we think about the self, history, and about the relation between the two?
- [60:18]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, you know, look, he's writing it. He lives from 354 to 430. He's writing in a time of really continued tumultuousness. Right. And in the sense that, on the one hand, right, you still have Rome in quotation marks as the empire, but it is clearly, you know, something where the borders are fraying. There are now, by his day, centuries of people who are Germanic tribes living next to alongside people who had been part of the Roman Empire and so on, intermingling things like that. There's wars, continued incursion of tribes on Rome and on other parts of where he was living in North Africa and so on. So very tumultuous. And I think it's right to say that in his Confessions he does set a new kind of paradigm of how to think about the self in a few different ways. So the first is that there were definitely autobiographical things in antiquity, right? We think of Augustus, you know, listing his deeds. You know, there's a rhetorician named Libanius who talks about his life, but there's really nothing like the Confessions being as introspective as it is. It's addressed as almost exclusively in the second person. It's addressed to God. So it's almost like an extended prayer. But in doing it, he tells the story of his life. And we see that he's very worried, again about this Pauline question about why do I do things that I know are wrong? How could I find who I am? He tells the story, as I noted earlier, just of his trying on for size different types of philosophies, different types of thinking. He's not at peace until he finds Jesus Christ. And all of a sudden, this becomes this exemplar of conversion, right? This exemplar of finding, you know, who you are. He's very indebted as he's. He calls them the plague to the Platonists. And he means by that kind of people like Plotinus and Porphyry and a writer who wrote in Latin, Apuleius, he even uses some very similar language to Plotinus, saying that, well, to find yourself, you don't need a chariot or a ship, you just have to go inside yourself, right? And then on the historical front, I think you're exactly right that with the City of God, what we have, it's very different for Augustine in the sense that one, it wasn't the only way that people in antiquity thought about history. But one typical way is embodied in the historian Polybius, who thought about history as a kind of rising and falling of powers and a shifting from different forms of government. So, you know, you have a monarchy, let's say, and then all of a sudden, you know, maybe it's a good kingship, but then after a certain point it becomes degraded into a tyranny. And so therefore, you know, some of the leading citizens rise up. You have an aristocracy, right? A society ruled by the best people, the aristoid. But then that gets corrupted, that turns into an oligarchy of something that's just ruled by the few who are enriching themselves. And so eventually then you have a democratic uprising at a demos, the people, which can be a good form of government, but then it can degrade into an othocracy. Polybius says the Ahmad rule, right? And then out of that roiling chaos, you have another one person who rises up a king again and the cycle just keeps going. Whereas for Augustine, I think what he wants to see instead is that there's some kind of purpose to history. There's a directionality, there's something, it's going somewhere. And he has this famous concept of the City of God and the City of Man. The City of Man is the world in which we live, the world of everyday politics, you know, the wars, the treacheries, all the things we experience. The City of God is both inside and outside of time, right? The City of God is whoever the faithful are who happen to be living in the City of Man now. But it's also this other thing that will eventually triumph in the end when, you know, time comes to an end and, you know, this messianic figure, Jesus, comes back to judge the living and the dead and so on. And so I think it, it does a lot of different. It does a lot of cultural work thereafter. I think it, it goes a very long way toward conditioning a lot of Western medieval views of history. That's just the first thing, right, that there's going to be, you know, there's a progression in time and it's leading to something. And I think it also sets up a series of tensions because, you know, you can imagine the consequences of that kind of a view. Like, one consequence could be, well, you know, if in the end, you know, all of these things around us that seem so momentous politically really mean almost nothing. They're almost a blip in the eye of God. Maybe, you know, I shouldn't pay that much attention to them. And so when politically, let's say, in your own life, if things aren't going your way, it can actually be very comforting, Right. You can feel like, okay, I'm not happy about the politics in this or that moment, but I know that there's going to be something better over time. But on the flip side, that could also lead to quiescence. Right. There's a lot in the Christian tradition by Augustine's day about justice. Right. And in the Jewish tradition, too, about justice. So should you be acting for justice? Should you be acting in the world or not? And so I think there's an interesting tension there. But I do think that the City of God, as you were suggesting, it really does condition the way people think about history for a long time. Not exclusively by any means, but it's a. An important factor.
- [65:23]
Morteza Hajizadeh
And if I may just bring it to an end with one final question, stepping back from all of this, what I found compelling is that across all these different figures, Plato, Aristotle, Paul, Augustine, there is constant tension between reason and belief, between argument and story, individual understanding, individual understanding. Also the communal life. But at the same time, it feels like they're all participating in a shared conversation. If you had to step back, let's say, identify that threat that holds this entire story together, the whole story that in this volume, across all these shifts and transformation, what is it that makes this continuous tradition, make this a continuous tradition, rather than just a series of disconnected ideas?
- [66:16]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
It's a good question. You know, I would say it is really a story, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit about what is the nature of the human person. And, you know, you identified just now, you said there's often a tension between argument and story. Definitely. Right. And I think story and narrative is so important. What are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and that? What kind of worth do we have just by being a human being? And I think it's a polyphonic, almost never ending dialogue with lots and lots of interlocutors over time. But I do think there is a thread there that works its way through, that shows that despite any number of injustices at this or that time. There's a story about what does it mean to be a human person that is working its way through this tradition. That's what I'd say unifies again, not always on the surface, I think, but I think it's gets there.
- [67:11]
Morteza Hajizadeh
Yep, that that's and, and, and I think that's what stood out to me in the book as well. It's that despite all these differences, you could see that evolution as if. But I've connected as a connected story and I'm really, really keen to read the second volume when it comes out. And I think I've secured a promise from you to interview you on this channel about the second volume as well. Professor Christopher Salonzo, thank much so you so much for taking the time to speak with us about your wonderful book. The book we just discussed was the Evolution of Western Thought from Ancient World to Antiquity, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Thank you so much for your time.
- [67:50]
Dr. Christopher Silenza
It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
- [67:53]
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