Bonus Episode' . Introduction to my Series on Philosophy. (The Ancient World)

My New Season of the Bible Journey daily Podcast begins on Monday 20th June 2026.

"Between the Seasons", bonus Episode:  Introduction to my Series on Philosophy. 

 In Jan 2026, I began attending a new discussion and study group who are studying the History of Philosophy. Due to the request of some Patreons, I was encouraged and enabled to launch a new Podcast this year that will give you my reaction and response to each month's study material. 

This is the first episode of that new revamped version of a very old established podcast of mine. You can subscribe and follow the whole series, wherever you get your podcasts from. at: https://the-living-in-faith-everyday-podcast.buzzsprout.com

Or get early release ad-free versions of all my podcasts at; Jeremy McCandless | Creating Podcasts and Bible Study Resources | Patreon

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Welcome to this special bonus episode of the Living in Faith Everyday Podcast, the Life Podcast. Today is a special introduction to a year-long series I shall intermittently be posting. For the next year, I'm going on a journey, a long one, a kind where you'd normally pack snacks, bring a notebook, and occasionally wonder what have I signed up for. But this time I'm offering to take you on this journey, the one I've decided to take you with me. I'm this month starting a course called The History of Philosophy, and we're using A. C. Grayling's well-known book of the same name as the course textbook. Now, Grayling is a brilliant thinker, and he's a sharp writer, and let's be honest, he's also a committed atheist and a humanist who approaches philosophy with the confidence of a man who never once in his life was tempted to pray about anything. Grayling is in fact part of what is called by some the New Atheist Movement, a movement whose four main intellectuals as figureheads are sometimes humorously referred to as the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The other three fair information are Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great. So you can see what I'm up against here in approaching philosophy through reading and studying this book. Grayling, the author of our course book, is currently Vice President of Humanists UK, and in 2011 Grayling published his famous, some would say infamous book, The Good Book, his self-described godless secular Bible, the Bible for people with no faith, he called it. He brought his good book out deliberately to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the religious Bible, as he calls the original Bible, and in doing so he sparked great debate and controversy. Even some atheists, it's have to be said, raised their eyebrows at the arrogance of doing it at this time, because the world was in the middle of celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James translation of the Bible, and celebrating its majestic impact not just on thinking but on the English language itself. One of the repeated observations made about Grayling's moral guide for atheists is that it was that it just in many ways was not as good or even as interesting as the original. Now, a writer, and certainly no friend of Christianity, English authoress Jeanette Winterton, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, had this to say about it. I personally do not believe in a sky god, but the religious impulse in us is much more than a primitive superstition that's suggested by Grayling. We are meaning-seeking Christians, and materialism plus good works and good behaviours, does not seem enough to me to be enough to provide meanings in their lives for most people. We shall have to go on asking questions, but I would rather that philosophers like Grayling asked them without the formula of an answer. As for the Bible, it remains a remarkable book, and I am going to continue reading it. And that is another atheist speaking there. It seems to me that in publishing his good book, there has been a fundamental mistake made on Grayling's part, being that the Bible, as he seems to think, is not merely a book containing moral guidance. Whilst Christians would acknowledge that, of course, it does contain the moral law of God and shows us how to live our lives, the actual text of the Bible is so much more than that. Inasmuch as Grayling's humanist Bible cobbles together some of the great moral teachings from history, and of course that may be useful or helpful to some people, but even from an atheist perspective, is this really a legitimate task to try and do what he's doing? Without God, what is morality anyway, other than a personal perspective or an agreed social contract? And is he even in the position to be the person to tell a society what they should agree as a set of morals and what they should be? Now, those considered great atheists of the past, like Bertrand Russell, who also rejected religious moral values, at least based their position on arguing that an overarching morality, absolute morality, did not even exist at all. But do philosophers now really want Grayling to reconstruct his versions of morality in its place? While his confidence in his wisdom is clearly abundant, others may not feel the same way, I suspect. In calling his book the Good Book, Grayling, perhaps unwittingly, doesn't even realise he references the story about the rich young ruler found in Mark's gospel. There, this man approaches Jesus and addresses him and says, Good teacher. And Jesus' response, why do you call me good? That was his immediate answer. No one is good except God alone, he says. Now, in saying that, Jesus preempts centuries of philosophical debate about the nature of morality and locates goodness as an absolute that can only be found in the being of God. We are all still challenged by Jesus' questions that day, today to still ask what is goodness, what can goodness be without God? In the meantime, no doubt, the Bible will continue to be read widely, to top the bestsellers list, in fact, and engage audience spanning all ages, all backgrounds, and all cultures, and I, for one, will also keep reading it to arrive at my own philosophical worldview. But here's the thing: even when a worldview differs from ours, I still believe there is treasure to be found. What Christians refer to as gifts of God's common grace. There are questions in life that are really worth wrestling with, ideas worth reframing, and moments where the Christian story can shine all the brighter by contrasting it with atheist and humanist worldviews. So every few weeks I shall be taking what's helped from these talks, the readings that I've done, the texts I've read, and the lively discussions that follows, and then react to those ideas from a Christian, well almost philosophical, perspective and worldview, one shaped by scripture and the wisdom of Christian thinking over the years and by my own personal lived experience of faith. Think of it as a guided tour through the great thinkers of history, but with a Christian commentary track running in the background. And occasionally, and you'll no doubt hear me, by the tone of my voice, raise a sort of metaphorical Christian eyebrow at the irony of what is being taught. So, what can you expect? Well, across the year or so, because I think that's how long it takes, I hope to explore how ancient thinkers wrestled with meaning truth and what it meant to live the good, the virtuous life. But also pointing out where these insights resonate with biblical wisdom and what assumptions they have clash and when and where they clash with Christian thinking or theology. And how all of this can help us, if we understood it correctly, live more faithfully, thoughtfully, and indeed compassionately today. Now don't worry, this isn't turning the life podcast into something different, just now 100% Plato through the year. I shall be continuing to release other episodes that respond to cultural moments, exploring spiritual themes, and continue the conversation that we've had already just by you choosing to be here. Think of this philosophy series as a sort of long, steady river running alongside the usual tributaries of reflection and devotion I offer here. You will also continue to see the occasional psychological and cultural detour following wherever the path of life takes me over the next twelve months. And my hope is that you'll stay with me through the whole journey. Not because you're secretly longing to debate Aristotle at dinner parties, but because philosophy at its best helps us love. It helps us love each other and love God with all our minds and all our hearts when we approach it from a Christian perspective. And because, let's be honest, it's always more fun to explore big ideas together than in the corner with just that very thick book from the library. So I would encourage you to keep coming back. Subscribe. Bring your curiosity, bring your questions, bring your sense of humor too. And if at any point you find yourself thinking this is fascinating, but I'm also rather confused, just know you're an excellent company, because confused, that's basically my default state in life, and indeed, in some ways, reflects the entire history of philosophy. So this is our first episode. The book I'm studying in its introduction says he wrote the book for the curious beginner, the kind of person who imagines looks at a bookshelf or a library shelf of philosophy and ancient thinkers and thinks, yes, I'd like to understand all of that, preferably before I shuffle off this mortal coil. It was meant, as he describes it, to open the door for anyone starting in philosophy. Now, of course, if you want to go deeper, there are wonderful books out there that explore particular areas and thinkers in far more detail than I will be doing. But philosophy shouldn't be locked behind an impenetrable curtain of jargon and technicality. Now, sadly, much of modern philosophy has gone into the academic realms and it seems to have missed the memo that ordinary people should understand it as well. Somewhere along the way, the discipline of philosophy sort of has become professionalized in a way that many writers now appear in their writings to be addressing a very small club of people who all agree with each other and they possibly meet once a week in a dusty library on a Tuesday. But it wasn't always like that. Great thinkers of the past, people like Descartes, Hume, and John Stuart Mill, all wrote in their day for a middle class but educated public of their day. Not just for the inner circles of academics or philosophical devotees. They actually assumed ordinary people might be interested in big ideas. Imagine that. My journey aims to do something similar, to take that invitation as an entry point, much like Bertrand Russell attempted in his 1946 History of Western Philosophy, a book that became a near classic, not because it was particularly accurate or impartial, but because it was readable. I devoured it when I first tried to get a grip on philosophy many years ago. Before that, as a teenage schoolboy, I believe I read G. H. Lewis's Biographical History of Philosophy. That was a book published in the 1920. And the fact that both books can still be read easily and even enjoyed today, despite all the scholarship that has emerged since, says something about the enduring value of making philosophy accessible. My aim here is not in any way, of course, at the same level, because I'm not even a philosopher qualified in that field, but I would humbly suggest that it is very much in the same spirit. I want to give as clear and a concise an account as I can of philosophy's major figures and ideas, much as I do in my church history podcast, but of course with a gentle lean towards a Christian perspective when studying in this area. Not a heavy-handed one, not a I'm going to try and rewrite Plato as a Sunday morning sermon approach, but as a thoughtful, gentle reframing. Ask, what can we agree with here? Where do we differ? And sometimes, how does the Christian worldview offer a different or alternative account to answer the same question? Now, of course, it's impossible to talk about philosophical ideas without wanting to debate them, critique them, attack or defend them, and then any critique or defense of your own position, well by nature that's philosophy. But in a single voice audio project like this, the temptation, that temptation has to be kept on a very tight leash. Not only because it would quadruple the length of every episode, because that really isn't the point of the series. Still, there will be moments when I will need to pause and say, now wait a minute, here's why this idea matters, or here's why Christian people over the years have disagreed so strongly about this thing. So an element of evaluation will be present, just hopefully not overwhelming. But you may still be asking, why does philosophy matter? And why are we doing this? And why should you choose to do this together with me? For most of human history, philosophy simply meant thinking carefully about things that matter. It wasn't that specialist subject tucked away in universities that it seems to be today. It was the everyday work of people simply trying to understand the world they lived in, understand themselves even, and the God who made them. People asked questions, they argued a bit, and they learned from one another. They simply tried to make sense of life, and in that sense, everyone was a philosopher, whether they even meant it or not. Only in more recent times did philosophy become divided into these smallest specialist areas, specialist areas, each with its own vocabulary and its own posse of experts. That's when things started to feel a bit more, well, complicated. Today, if you pick up a modern philosophy book, you feel as though you've accidentally walked into a meeting that you weren't even invited to, one where everybody already knows the secret handshape, and you certainly don't. But at its heart, philosophy hasn't changed. It's still about those big questions. What can we trust as true? What kind of universe do we live in? What does it mean to live well? What does it mean to live a good life, a virtuous life? How should we as people treat one another? And what kind of society helps human beings flourish? And is there a person, an idea, or a morality that lies behind all of this? A designer, a creator? These questions have been asked for thousands of years by people of every age and culture. And even though their answers differ, the questions, of course, are the things that connect us. They remind us that we're part of this long historical conversation, one that stretches back from the most ancient of thinkers right up to our present day. Now some people say you can't understand a philosopher unless you know everything about their time and cultures. But others would argue and say great ideas are timeless and speak across the centuries. And yes, the truth is, I think, probably lies somewhere in the middle of those two perspectives. You need to understand the world these people lived in, but you also need to recognise that many of their concerns are still our concerns. Human beings haven't changed that much. We still wonder and worry and hope and search for meaning. In fact, I would say one of the reasons philosophy matters is that it helps us to avoid reinventing the wheel. When we know how earlier thinkers wrestled with a problem and learned how to address that problem, well, I think we're less likely to repeat the mistakes of the past and we're more likely or enabled, equipped to build on their insights. It also helps us ask better questions in life. Sometimes the hardest part of understanding something is knowing what to ask about it in the first place. And that's where this journey through philosophy comes in for me. I'm going to walk through the story of philosophy and report back to you how I see it and understand it. Not so we can become experts, not to memorize names and dates, but to widen our perspective in life. And here's the important thing: make us feel less afraid to engage with our atheists, friends, and colleagues. To see how people have always tried to make sense of the world, and how even some of the most differing or bizarre views to what we might hold, what ideas or philosophies have they emerged from or are they rooted in? To notice where these ideas came from and where, indeed, on occasion, if they resonate with biblical truth, and where, importantly, they drift off in that other direction. In that we can learn then how our Christian faith can speak into those same questions, the questions that everybody is asking, but with clarity, hope, and a vision of life that is rooted in the love and character of God. Think of philosophy as a discipline as standing at the margin of the light of God, where human understanding meets the unknown, that edge that lies between human understanding and the unknown. I actually believe that every single discipline, every form of science, every field of study is standing somewhere around that edge of the light of God, trying in their own way to push towards that light a little bit further, to widen that understanding a little bit further. But philosophy, in a sense, it is the thing that simply walks the whole perimeter, asking what's in there, it's the light, and what is out there in the darkness. What questions we should be acting? We should be asking. But as Christians, we don't walk alone, friends. We walk with God's word in our hands, and with the wisdom of the 2,000 years of Christian thinking and the church behind us and before us, and with the confidence that God, who made the world, is also the one who can invite us and best equip us to understand it. Now, this opening episode is meant just to set the stage for you, tell you what philosophy is and why it matters, and how the ancient world lost much of its literature. Because the most ancient philosophy occupies a world we can only really half remember, a world that existed up to 1,000 years before even the birth of Christ. But understanding that this era spans the whole Old Testament period and beyond will hopefully give you a sense of the big picture that's really going on here. When we turn to the earliest philosophers, the pre-philosophers almost, we're peering through a sort of fog. There's a wall between us and the ancient world, not a literal wall, but the kind made of time, and loss of source materials, and of course the occasional invading Goth or otherwise. In the West, by the time the Roman Empire was collapsing and Christianity was establishing itself in prominence, huge portions of classical culture were already slipping through the cracks. Some historians, like the famous Edward Gibbon, famously blamed Christianity for this cultural decline, and to be fair, the timeline does look suspicious. In 313 Constantine made Christianity legal, but by 380 Theodosus, a following Roman Emperor, had not only made it the official religion of the empire, but banned all others. And when you outlaw every competing worldview, things tend to change rather quickly. From the 4th century onward, the ancient world libraries began to thin out. It is estimated by experts that 90% of all the ancient literature that we have from this era has been lost. 90%. Imagine our descendants today having only four of Shakespeare's 40 plays, or a single Jane Austen chapter, or one lonely Bronte paragraph to study, or maybe in art, a smudge sketch by Michelangelo, and using that to try and assess his value as an artist. That is roughly the situation that we're talking here when we think and look at what is called ancient philosophy. We have scraps, fragments, and the occasional lucky quotation preserved by someone later who wasn't really even trying to be helpful or share that argument, to refute it more often. But don't listen to Gibbon and believe it was only Christians who contributed to this loss. The Huns, the Goths, and various other groups won't be Across the weakening empire, and when they came and conquered, they weren't exactly carrying their library cards with them. Between invasions, political chaos, and the shrinking of educational institutions, fewer books were being created and copied, fewer ideas were being preserved, and more predictions were being placed on what people could even read. The intellectual world narrowed dramatically and became what many still today call the Dark Ages. So we are grateful for what has survived, but what has survived from the ancient history is uneven. Sometimes the greatest thinkers are only represented by a sentence or two quoted by someone centuries later, someone who may not have understood them properly and was more interested in refuting what they said. This is especially true of the very earliest Greek thinkers, the ones who came before Socrates. We call them the pre-Socratic thinkers, and what remains of their work comes down to us mainly in two forms fragments, actual quotations, preserved usually by later writers, and testimonies, summaries, paraphrases, a sort of my friend told me that he said this type of report. Plato and Aristotle quoted them, though not always accurately. In fact, Aristotle is one of the biggest sources of ancient philosophy, but even he was writing about people who had lived two or three centuries before him. Imagine trying to summarize the thoughts of someone from the 1700s using only a few secondhand notes and a few rumours about them. After Aristotle, the thread of connection gets even thinner. Cicero, writing 200 years later than Aristotle, tried to introduce Greek philosophy to Roman readers, and later again Christian writers quoted these early Greek thinkers, but mainly, of course, to refute them, which ironically helped preserve the ideas, the very ideas they didn't like. Others quoted them for their own purposes, sometimes favorably, sometimes not. And every time a manuscript was copied, it's likely a few more mistakes probably crept in. By the time we reached the early Middle Ages, the Academy Plato had founded had been closed by Emperor Justinian, and philosophy teaching was banned across the empire, and the last embers of classical learning they were flickering and going out. Yet even then, just a few dedicated scholars in the 6th century quoted long passages from earlier thinkers simply because the original works were already rare. In some cases, in many cases, in fact, these quotations are the only reason we even know these early philosophers existed at all. And yet today, even today, every so often, archaeology gives us a sort of guest. A sort of gift. An occasional papyrus is dug out of a grave, a charred scroll from a funeral prayer, a fragment that adds a few more lines to a poem or a philosophical argument. These discoveries don't overturn the big picture, but they do help us periodically, even today, refine it. So when we talk about the ancient philosophers, we're talking here about a patchwork, a patchwork of threads gathered from many hands, some friendly, some hostile, some just out and out confused, yet some still surprisingly accurate. But even with all the graphs, a broad outline emerges, and that outline is where our story will begin. And it will begin with those who are described as the pre-Socratic philosophers, and we look at them in our next episode. Follow this and keep up to date with everything I'm releasing across all of my five podcasts by subscribing to my Substack newsletter. The link is in the episode notes. Also, if you'd like to support me in producing these and other podcast episodes, you can do that on Patreon. And if you'd like to have access to my whole back catalogue of all my teachings and Bible studies across all the disciplines in every way and in everything that I do, you can also do that on Patreon. And you only need to subscribe to the free level, the free tier, in order to be able to do that. Thanks for being with me today.