However, more thorough [i.e., accomplished] are those who say in regard to philosophy (naming the parts of it) that the one part [i.e., what comprises it] is that which belongs to φύσις, the other part, however, that which concerns ἦθος, and the other part, ultimately that which concerns λόγος. Among those who speak this way, Plato is the one through whom the possibility actually arises [i.e., to look in a unifying way toward all three of these aspects], insofar as he fostered discussion of many things pertaining to φύσις, but also much pertaining to ἦθος, and not least of all of that which pertains to λόγος. However, the above-mentioned classification is most explicitly apparent [i.e., named in terms and defined and codified] in the followers of Xenokrates, and those who come from the Peripatetics, and in addition but less so, also those who come from the Stoa.
As a three-fold division, the three terms ‘logic,’ ‘physics,’ and ‘ethics’ comprise the decisive division of philosophy, and have done so since Plato. According to the account cited above, Plato himself did not establish this trichotomy, but his thinking with regard to λόγος, φύσις, and ἦθος opened new viewpoints and connections whose unity can best be grasped in the three-fold division, and whose unity is sought to be grasped above all when the task is to make what has been thought in advance by the thinker solid and graspable for cognition and the scrutiny of science. This happens each time the thinking of a thinker is granted the highly ambiguous fate of being processed scholastically in a so-called ‘school,’ and being passed on in this state of concretion and ossification. According to Sextus’s account, Xenokrates—or, more precisely, his followers—explicitly established the above-cited three-fold division of philosophy. Following Speusippus [227], Xenokrates became the second head of the ‘Academy’ founded by Plato, and served as its head for two decades. It is difficult to say anything certain regarding the essence of this inceptual founding by Plato. At its core, it was based upon a cult of the Muses, and it cultivated philosophy, through lectures and conversations, as the core of the other forms of knowledge (i.e., mathematics, astronomy, natural science). The Academy was neither merely an association of scholars within an organization of scientific research, nor was it a ‘school of wisdom.’ It must be said, however, that since Plato’s founding of the Academy, and since the corresponding founding of the ‘Peripatetic School’ by Aristotle, that thinking which only now is given the distinguishing title of φιλοσοφία entered into a privileged relationship with what we call ‘the sciences.’ This intertwining of philosophy with the sciences becomes, from that time on, determinative not only for ‘philosophy itself,’ but also for ‘the sciences.’ Since that time, the attempts to think philosophy as a kind of ‘science’—namely, as the most universal, the most stringent, or the highest ‘science’—arise again and again. In these attempts, however, lies the danger of measuring what is more originary than every kind of science (in the sense of τέχνη) by what has first arisen from out of this origin. The curious situation that comes to pass is that the thing which is only the consequence of a prior ground
172 Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos