Greek philosophy Quote by Thomas McEvilley

““The European reception of Greek philosophy has been dominated by a model in which Plato and Aristotle are seen as the centers and others such as Sextus Empiricus—whose extant works are comparable both in extent and in importance to those of Plato and Aristotle and as representative of the Greek philosophical tradition—are not heard of. In fact, Plato too is censored, in that the Parmenides, which Plotinus regarded as the essential Platonic work, is regarded as a joke or a game, and passages such as “destroying the hypotheses” in the Republic are either edited out of the text or interpreted out of the commentary. The fact that Greek philosophy from the very beginning was characterized by critical dialectic and by the ethics of retreat that often attends it is not studied in our schools. When attention is occasionally paid to, say, Pyrrhonic skepticism, it is seen as outrageous and inhuman. Greek philosophy has, in effect, been forced into the mold of European philosophy, when in fact it had a great deal more in common with its contemporaneous Indian thought.””

— Thomas McEvilley