Practicality in Hellenism

Something that strikes me as odd is the amount of practicality that Hellenistic philosophy. Most of the philosophical thinking started on the practical side of philosophy. The search for the good life is the primary concern on their metaphysics.

But that kind of thinking today does not go on today. Today, science takes precedence over philosophy, and the search for the good life is largely replaced by scientism. With the pragmatism brought on by Quine after "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," its curious that no single school of thought has developed similar to this Hellenistic model.

I think its speaks a lot about modern culture that only science is regarded as containing useful knowledge, and something like insights into what makes a person's life go best are largely ignored due to lack of respect towards ethics brought on by early analytic philosophy.

Another curious aspect of Hellenistic philosophy is the completely different mode of discourse for talking about ethics, and I noticed this in Aristotle and Plato also. For them, what is right and wrong are secondary questions, if the question arises at all. Contrast that with modern ethics, which only answers what is right and wrong. It is no accident, then, the modern ethics failed when scrutinized by Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism can analyze statements that try to claim rightness and wrongness, but when discussing what makes a person life best, or what is the highest form of happiness, Logical Positivism cannot intervene.

I think, based on my initial reactions to Hellenism, I can say that modern ethics would be much better off discussing ethics this way. Utility and duty could still have a place, but a more important question would be asked in ethics.