PYTHAGORAS TO PLATO were so many things to explain, and the Ideas just added new items calling for explanation: they did not provide a solution, they added to the problem (Metaph A 990b1 V.) Most dissertations that begin with literature searches seek to show that all work hitherto has left a gap that will now be Wlled by the author’s original research Aristotle’s Metaphysics is no exception His not too hidden agenda is to show how previous philosophers neglected the remaining member of the quartet of causes: the Wnal cause, which was to play a most signiWcant role in his own philosophy of nature (Metaph A 988b6–15) The earliest philosophy, he concluded, is, on all subjects, full of babble, since in its beginnings it is but an infant (Metaph A 993a15–7.) A philosopher of the present day, reading the surviving fragments of the earliest Greek thinkers, is impressed not so much by the questions they were asking, as by the methods they used to answer them After all, the book of Genesis oVers us answers to the four causal questions set by Aristotle If we ask for the origin of the Wrst human being, for instance, we are told that the eYcient cause was God, that the material cause was the dust of the earth, that the formal cause was the image and likeness of God, and that the Wnal cause was for man to have dominion over the Wsh of the sea, the fowl of the air, and every living thing on earth Yet Genesis is not a work of philosophy On the other hand, Pythagoras is best known not for answering any of the Aristotelian questions, but for proving the theorem that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal in area to the sum of the squares on the other two sides Thales, again, was believed by later Greeks to have been the Wrst person to make an accurate prediction of an eclipse, in the year 585 bc These are surely achievements in geometry and astronomy, not philosophy The fact is that the distinction between religion, science, and philosophy was not as clear as it became in later centuries The works of Aristotle and his master Plato provide a paradigm of philosophy for every age, and to this day anyone using the title ‘philosopher’ is claiming to be one of their heirs Writers in twenty-Wrst-century philosophy journals can be seen to be using the same techniques of conceptual analysis, and often to be repeating or refuting the same theoretical arguments, as are to be found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle But in those writings there is much else that would