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The Presocratics and their Importance for Environmental Philosophy

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ISBN: 978-1-5165-2856-1 (pbk) / 978-1-5165-2857-8 (br) In memory of our early teachers in Greek natural philosophy:

José Benardete and Catherine Lord, Syracuse University;

Perry Robinson, University of New Brunswick; and

Richard Owsley, University of North Texas. CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi

INTRODUCTION 2

(A) NATURAL PHILOSOPHY (OR NATURAL HISTORY): ITS MEANING AND RANGE 2

(B) THE ORGANIZATION, SCOPE, AND PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK 7

(D) OUR INTERPRETIVE METHOD: THE DIACHRONIC DIALECTIC OF IDEAS 14

(E) WHY PHILOSOPHY SUDDENLY EMERGED WHEN IT DID: A COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION 18

(F) WHY PHILOSOPHY SUDDENLY EMERGED WHERE IT DID: THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT 28

(G) CODA: NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND ETHICS 38

FOR FURTHER READING 43

CHAPTER 1 THE MYTHOPOEIC WORLDVIEW 44

(A) HESIOD’S THEOGONY 44

(B) HESIOD’S WORKS AND DAYS 61

FOR FURTHER READING 70 CHAPTER 2 THE MILESIAN SCHOOL 72

(A) THALES 72

(B) ANAXIMANDER 79

(D) ANAXIMENES 95

(E) WHAT NEXT? 104

FOR FURTHER READING 104

CHAPTER 3 XENOPHANES AND HERACLITUS 108

(A) XENOPHANES 110

(B) HERACLITUS 114

FOR FURTHER READING 131

CHAPTER 4 THE ELEATIC SCHOOL 134

(A) PARMENIDES 135

(B) ZENO 147

(D) WAS XENOPHANES THE FOUNDER OF THE ELEATIC SCHOOL? 164

FOR FURTHER READING 166

CHAPTER 5 THE QUALITATIVE PLURALISTS: ANAXAGORAS 168

(A) AFTER THE ELEATICS 168

(B) PHILOSOPHY COMES TO ATHENS IN THE PERSON OF ANAXAGORAS 171 (C) ANAXAGORAS’S COSMOGONY, COSMOLOGY, AND ARCHĒ 174

(D) ANAXAGORAS’S MIND 185

(E) ONE WORLD OR MANY? 187

FOR FURTHER READING 188

CHAPTER 6 THE QUALITATIVE PLURALISTS: EMPEDOCLES 190

(A) RELIGION AND SCIENCE IN THE “ITALIAN TRADITION” OF PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY 190

(B) EMPEDOCLES’S PERSONALITY 194

(D) EMPEDOCLES’S WAY OF SAVING THE APPEARANCES 200

(E) EMPEDOCLES’S COSMOGONY AND COSMOLOGY 208

(F) EMPEDOCLES’S ZOOGONY 211

(G) EMPEDOCLES’S EPISTEMOLOGY 212

(H) SUCCESSES AND FAILURES OF THE QUALITATIVE PLURALISTS TO SAVE THE APPEARANCES 216

FOR FURTHER READING 219

CHAPTER 7 THE ATOMISTS: LEUCIPPUS AND DEMOCRITUS 220

(A) THE CROWN OF GREEK PHILOSOPHICAL ACHIEVEMENT BEFORE PLATO 220

(B) ATOMISM AND THE ELEATIC CONNECTION 223

(E) MOTION 232

(F) THE ATOMS AS LETTER-ELEMENTS 235

(G) SAVING THE APPEARANCES 237

(H) APPEARANCE AND REALITY 242

(I) THE SOUL 243

(J) COSMOGONY, COSMOLOGY, BIOLOGY, AND METEOROLOGY 245

(K) ANTHROPOGONY AND POLITOGONY 247

- - (L) CHANCE (TUCHE) AND NECESSITY (ANAGKE) 248

(M) DEMOCRITUS RIDENS—THE LAUGHING PHILOSOPHER 250

(N) ETHICS 250

FOR FURTHER READING 252

CHAPTER 8 PYTHAGORAS AND THE PYTHAGOREANS 254

(A) ARISTOTLE’S ACCOUNT OF PYTHAGOREANISM 254

(B) PYTHAGORAS 259

(D) DID PYTHAGORAS INVENT MATHEMATICS? 265

(E) DID PYTHAGORAS INVENT HARMONICS? 268

(F) DID PYTHAGORAS INVENT ASTRONOMY? 270

(G) PYTHAGOREAN COSMOLOGY 273

(H) PYTHAGOREAN NUMEROLOGY 275 (I) ARISTOTLE’S ACCOUNT OF PLATO’S PYTHAGOREAN METAPHYSICS 277

(J) MAKING SENSE OF ARISTOTLE’S ACCOUNT OF PLATO’S PYTHAGOREAN METAPHYSICS 280

(K) PLATO’S EXOTERIC (WRITTEN) AND ESOTERIC (ORAL AND SECRET) PHILOSOPHY 284

(L) THE GOOD AND PLATO’S POLITOGONY 287

(M) PLATO’S GEOMETRICAL ATOMISM AND THE FOUR ELEMENTS 288

(N) PLATO’S COSMOGONY 291

(O) CODA 293

FOR FURTHER READING 295

CHAPTER 9 A NEOPRESOCRATIC MANIFESTO: HISTORY AND RELEVANCE OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 298

(A) HELLENISTIC, MEDIEVAL, AND MODERN NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 300

(B) THE 20TH CENTURY ECLIPSE OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY 309

(D) DEFINING A NEW ROLE FOR PHILOSOPHY AT THE TURN OF THE 21ST CENTURY 326

(E) A 21ST-CENTURY NATURAL PHILOSOPHY RENAISSANCE— ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY, HUMANITIES, AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 333

(F) THE HISTORICAL SEQUENCE OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY 343

(G) A SECOND REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 346 (H) CODA 347

FOR FURTHER READING 348

REFERENCES 354

INDEX 367 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

J. Baird Callicott, known as a founder of the field of environmental philosophy and ethics, has also been researching and teaching Greek philosophy for almost fifty years at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the University of North Texas (UNT). Chapters 1–8 of this book are based on his course lectures. Keith Wayne Brown co-taught Callicott’s introductory Greek philosophy course as a Teaching Assistant at UNT from 1995–2015 and became an instructor of record in his own right, as Callicott retired from UNT. Brown joined Callicott as co-author in the preparation of the course lectures for publication. Callicott was delighted to learn that John van Buren—his co-editor in the book series on environmental philosophy at SUNY Press—was working on the Presocratics from an environmental-philosophy orientation. Upon receiving a preliminary edition of the course-lectures materials, van Buren agreed to become a co-author. His knowledge of contemporary scholarship in the field of Greek philosophy helps bolster the interpretation of the texts; and he brings the book’s classical historical focus to bear on the issues of Greek philosophy’s environmental origins and its relevance for contemporary environmental disciplines. All students of Greek natural philosophy owe an immense debt of gratitude to Hermann Diels (1848-1922). No work of the Presocratic philosophers survived the ravages of time and the fires of religious zealotry in whole and complete form. Diels lived in an era during which the backbone of European education consisted of reading Greek and Latin literature (the “classics”) in the original languages. He was thus prepared to undertake the gargantuan task of combing through all the extant literature from the “Golden Age of Greece” (the 5th century BCE) to Late Antiquity (as late as the 6th century) that provided information about the philosophies of the Presocratics. Diels collected this information in one magnum opus—Die Fragmente der Vorsokatiker, first published in 1903 by Weidmansche Buchhandlung in Berlin—which provided the Greek texts together with a German translation. Diels expanded this work in second, third, and fouth editions, assisted by Walther Kranz (1884-1960). After Diels died, Kranz edited a fifth, revised and further expanded edition, published over the years 1934 to 1937 and a sixth edition, published in 1952, also by Weidmann. It is customary to cite this work simply as “DK”—“D” for Diels, “K” for Kranz. The DK texts are sorted into two data sets: “testimonia” (second- or third-hand accounts or summaries) and “ipsissima verba” (purportedly exact words, that is, direct quotations). A number is assigned to each philosopher and to each item pertaining to that philosopher. These letters and numbers have been adopted as the standard method of citing the Presocratics. For example, “DK 67A8” refers to Leucippus (67)—the inventor of the atomic

xi theory of matter—an account of whose philosophy (A) is 8th in the arrangement of the Leucippus testimonia by Diels and Kranz. The sources from which Diels (and later Kranz) drew the “fragments” (as the ipsissima verba are customarily called) and the testimonia range widely not only over ten centuries but over many genres of literature—from the 5th-century BCE Histories of Herodotus (the earliest extant source) to the 4th-century BCE dialogues of Plato and treatises of Aristotle, to the 1st-century biographies and other writings of Plutarch, to the 3rd-century Christian apologetics of Hippolytus of Rome, all the way down to the 6th-century commentaries of Simplicius of Cilicia, a Neoplatonist. We cite these ancient authors as well so that the readers of this textbook can identify the ultimate source, in each instance, upon which Diels and Kranz drew. We might compare the task that Diels undertook to searching through scores of ancient treasure troves in which hundreds of pieces of dozens of jigsaw puzzles may be found lying in the midst of other materials, then trying to fit the pieces of each puzzle together in the hopes of forming at least part of an intelligible picture. Subsequent scholars may sometimes downgrade a few of the DK fragments to testimonia and many put the puzzle pieces together differently than did Diels and Kranz. In this textbook, we present selected fragments and testimonia of the Presocratic philosophers and other Greek authors in English translation. We have, in every case, worked directly from the Greek texts and have consulted the translations of other scholars in crafting our own: R. G. Bury. 1929. Plato, Timaeus. London: William Heinemann Ltd.; H. G. Evelyn-White. 1914. Hesiod, Theogony. http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ hesiod/theogony.htm and Works and Days, http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/hesiod/ works.htm; H. N. Fowler. 1914. Plato, Euthyphro and Phaedo. London: William Heinemann Ltd.; D. W. Graham. 2010. The Texts of the Early Greek Philosophers. New York: Cambridge University Press; G. M. A. Grube (revised by C.D. C. Reeve). 1992. Plato, Republic. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett; J. Henderson. 1998. Aristophanes, Clouds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; B. Jowett. 1892. Plato, Symposium. New York: Macmillan; G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. 1983. The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press; R. Lattimore, 1951. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; H. Rackham. 1932. Aristotle, Politics. London: William Heinemann Ltd.; Valentin Rose. 1886. Aristotelis Qui Ferebantur Liborum Fragmenta. Leipzig: Teubner; W. D. Ross. 1924. Aristotle, Metaphysics. Oxford: The Clarendon Press; P. Shorey. 1930. Plato, Republic. London: William Heinemann Ltd.; H. Tredennick . 1933. Aristotle, Metpahysics. London: William Heinemann Ltd. We also extensively consulted the Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon.

xii | Greek Natural Philosophy Callicott and Brown thank the hundreds of students enrolled in Introduction to Ancient Philosophy offered by the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of North Texas from 1995 to 2015. They have learned as much from their students as their students have from them. Callicott and Brown also thank their col- leagues in the UNT Department of Philosophy and Religion, both active and retired, living and dead, who were always ready to share their philosophical insights and scholarly acumen with the two of them. Baird Callicott thanks his mentors Catherine Lord and the late José Benardete in the Department of Philosophy at Syracuse University whose approach to ancient Greek philosophy has been a lifelong guide to his own. And he thanks his family, friends, and domestic partners for their love and support throughout an academic career spanning half a century. John van Buren thanks the late Perry Robinson of the University of New Brunswick, who directed his master’s thesis on Plato; his wife Eileen for inspiration and help with interpretive issues regarding Greek and Medieval natural philosophy and metaphysics. Keith Brown thanks his mentor and friend the late Richard Owsley for his inspiration and support. He also extends a profound debt of gratitude to his co-author J. Baird Callicott who has always been a generous teacher and friend. And he thanks his mother, Faye, for her constant faith in him as well as his husband, Christopher, for helping to create a joint lifeworld of open communication. And finally, we authors all thank Gem Rabanera, our Cognella project editor, for her patience as this book took shape in fits and starts, work on other projects permitting, and Sharon Hermann for her excellent copyediting and for her expression of apprecia- tion for our style of presentation.

Acknowledgments | 1 INTRODUCTION

(A) NATURAL PHILOSOPHY (OR NATURAL HISTORY): ITS MEANING AND RANGE

(I) QUESTIONS ABOUT NATURE

The fi rst Greek philosophy was natural philosophy; that is, the fi rst Greek philosophers asked (often only implicitly) and tried to answer questions about nature—ϕυσις (physis) in Greek from which such English words as physics and physical are directly derived. They themselves only infrequently used the term physis (nature) in their writings, which probably had no titles. Shortly thereafter, those writings were given the generic title peri physeōs (Concerning Nature) or, more fully, historia peri physeōs (Inquiry About Nature, or Natural History).1 From the late Medieval period on, the early Greek inquiries into nature were called “natural philosophy.”

1 See Naddaf 2005, pp. 16–35. The Online Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ) gives “inquiry” as the root meaning of historia. (http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=52736&context=lsj&action=from-search retrieved 01-15-17). The Greek word comes over directly into English as “history,” which most commonly means an account of past events, but it also sometimes means “inquiry.” For example, the phrase “natural history” came to designate amateur interest in local plants and animals as they exist presently, exemplifi ed by Gilbert White’s charming 1789 book, The Natural History of Selborne. In his 1927 classic, Animal Ecology, Charles Elton defi ned ecology”“ as “scientifi c natural history”—a tip of the literary hat to Gilbert White and others like him. The Greek historia came to mean an account of past events because the mid-fi fth century BCE book by Herodotus, titled Historiai, in large part, provided an often fanciful account of past events. We exploit the ambiguity of the English word “history” because the inquiries about nature of the Greek philosophers were

2 The fundamental questions that the fi rst Greek philosophers posed were these: (1) Of what is the world composed? (2) By what force(s) or impetus(es) does the stuff of the world move? (3) How did the world come into being, and what is its history? (4) What is the overall shape and structure of the world? (5) What law(s) govern the processes of the world, including human life and conduct? According to Gerard Naddaf, “the fundamental and etymological meaning of the word [physis] is that of growth and … it includes three things: the origin, the process, and the result; that is, the whole process of the growth of a thing from its birth to its ma- turity.”2 Naddaf goes on to note that the fi rst Greek natural philosophers were inquiring into the growth and history, not of particular things but “of all things from beginning to end. In sum, [they] were seeking to explain how the present order of things was established.”3 That order comprised the entire cosmos, its principles and causes, the starry heavens, the divine, the earth, and its fl ora and fauna. And he concludes that because “humanity and the society in which it resides are also part of [the present order of things] it was necessary for [them] to describe the origin and development of humanity and society after those of the cosmos.”4 The word “cosmos” comes directly into English from the Greek kosmos, which combines the concepts of beauty and order. From it is derived “cosmetic” as well as “cosmic.” The cosmos is, thus, the beautiful world order. A “cosmogony” provides an answer to question 3 above—the genesis and history of the cosmos. The “ogony” part of the word comes from the Greek gonos (meaning “offspring”) and is an allusion to Hesiod’s Theogony (literally the “Offspring of the Gods” or more freely translated as the “Birth of the Gods” or “Origin of the Gods”).5 And a “cosmology” provides an answer to question 4. The “ology” part of the word comes from the Greek logos (meaning, among other things detailed in Chapter 3, “account”). Thus a cosmology is an account of the cosmos. The Greek word for humanity is anthrōpos from which “anthropology” and “anthropocentric” are derived. The Greek word for city, the form taken by Greek society, is polis from which “politics” and “police” are derived. Thus, according to Naddaf and other scholars, the Greek natural philosophers felt obliged to provide not only a “cosmogony” but also an “ anthropogony” (the origin of humanity)

in great part historical and because the root meaning of physis (nature) is growth and development from beginning to end; their inquiries concerning nature often took the form of a history of nature—that is, natural history. 2 Naddaf 2005, p. 20. 3 Ibid. 4 Naddaf 1997, pp. 27 and 28. 5 See LSJ http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=23437&context=lsj&action=hw-list-click (retrieved 03-08-17)

Introduction | 3 and “politogony” (the origin of human society, which included ethics as well as politics), and these investigations provided an answer to question 5.6

(II) THE PRESOCRATICS

The first Greek natural philosophers are often called “Presocratics” even though many of them lived and worked during the lifetime of Socrates, who was born in the thirtieth year of the 5th century BCE and died at the age of 70 in the first year of the fourth. Democritus, for example, is counted among the Presocratics even though he was born ten years after the birth of Socrates and died at the age of 90, thirty years after the death of Socrates. The reason that the first natural philosophers are called Presocratics really has less to do with when they lived and worked (before Socrates) than what they thought about: physis (nature). And while they did speculate, some more than others, about anthropogony and politogony, as scholars of Presocratic philosophy point out, cosmogony and cosmology were foremost. In Plato’s Apology, which purports to recount the defense that Socrates put up at his trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, Socrates claims that he has no interest at all in natural philosophy, instead, devoting himself exclusively and tire- lessly to questions of ethics and politics. (In the first book of theMetaphysics , Aristotle confirms Socrates’s lack of interest in natural philosophy as doesXenophon in the first book of his Memorabilia.) Although natural philosophy was, by no means, neglected by subsequent philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, with Socrates, moral philosophy became ascendant. And as great as the Timaeus is (Plato’s principal work of natural philosophy), the Republic is universally regarded as his masterpiece. The distinction, however, between natural philosophy and moral philosophy should not be overdrawn. For, as scholars such as Naddaf point out, Plato begins the Timaeus with a summary of the Republic, thus, linking politogony with cosmogony and cosmology just as many of his Presocratic predecessors had done. And in addition to a cosmogony and cosmology, in the Timaeus, Plato also provides an anthropogony. All this represents a number of contrasts with how philosophy is understood today; and so, it makes studying Greek natural philosophy both challenging and exciting. “Nature” meant not, as it does for us today, a particular region of Being (simply the physical and biological world), but, rather, the whole of Being, including humanity, society, and divinity. Thus, philosophy was not one discipline among many, as it is

6 Naddaf’s terminology is also found in earlier studies of Greek natural philosophy, on which he draws, by other scholars: Guthrie 1965; Kirk et al.1983; and Kahn 1960.

4 | Greek Natural Philosophy for us today, but had a very broad interdisciplinary (as we would now say) structure and, in fact, encompassed all of what we now call the natural sciences (cosmogony/ cosmology) and social sciences and humanities (anthropogony and politogony).

(III) THE SEAMLESS UNION OF NATURAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy (philosophia) literally means “love of wisdom”—sophia (wisdom) in the sense of general learning. As such, Greek natural philosophy presents us with the currently unfamiliar concept of a seamless union of natural and moral philosophy—the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of things human—in which things human are seen to be a microcosmos reflecting the structure of the macrocosmos. This cosmic unity extends not only to humans as a part of nature but also to ethics and politics. In their ethical and political writings, both Plato and Aristotle were adamant that moral virtue was not opposed to the natural order of things as some of the so-called sophists argued.7 Rather, they thought that it was a natural condition of human being and that human beings were by nature political (that is, social) beings. In so thinking, Plato and Aristotle were in agreement with their predecessors. According to both Plato and Xenophon, Socrates adopted as his own the famous moral dictum “know thyself” (gnōthi seauton) inscribed over the entry of the temple of Apollo at Delphi.8 To know oneself is related to Socrates’s claim, which Plato records in the Apology, that wisdom consists of knowing that you don’t know. Knowing oneself did not mean navel-gazing or even serious introspection but had the underlying meaning of “seeking to know, inquiry, investigation.”9 Knowing your limited place in the order of the cosmos—below the all-knowing gods and above the ignorant (or so the Greeks believed) animals—leads to the injunction Don’t overstep! Plato later expressed this idea in his concept of justice as the proper relations between classes in the city-state and between the different faculties in the soul. When each, respectively, refrains from overstepping its boundaries and encroaching on the rightful role of the others, then, justice prevails in the polis and in the soul.

7 This view is vividly expressed by Plato’s character Thrasymachus in the first book of the Republic and by Plato’s character Callicles in the Gorgias. 8 Plato, Alcibiades I (124a, 129a, 132c), Charmides (164d), Phaedrus (229e), Philebus (48c), Protagoras (343b); Xenophon, Memorabilia 4.2.24. 9 See LSJ http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=23292&context=lsj&action=hw-list-click (retrieved 01-19-17) for the full range of the meanings of gnōsis.

Introduction | 5 Aristotle made the moral and political maxim “nothing too much” (mēden agan), which was also inscribed over the entry of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the heart of his ethical theory of virtue as the mean between the extremes of excess (too much) and defect (too little). Before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had philosophically incorporated and transformed these Delphic maxims, the early natural philosophers articulated them in terms of the beautifully harmonious balance of nature that they perceived among the powers of earth, air, fire, and water in their surrounding natural environment.10 At the dawn of Greek natural philosophy, Anaximander attributed that natural balance to cosmic Justice (as detailed and documented in Chapter 2); and Plato owes as much or more to Anaximander (and indeed even to Homer and Hesiod) as he does to Socrates for his own moral philosophy and, more particularly, for his own concept of justice (about which more in Chapters 1 and 2). The Greek ideal was to lead a life that was kalokagathos (“beautiful-and-good”), mod- eled on the beauty, harmony, and justice of the cosmos that was so distinctively visible in the natural environment of Greece.11 The religious creation myths of the Greeks had distinct socio-political functions as we reveal in Chapter 1. And as we explain in Chapter 2, Greek natural philosophy reflected and expressed the skeletal concepts of the ancestral myths in more rational terms. Accordingly, unlike today’s ivory-tower philosophy, Greek philosophy had a definite societal, educational, and openly public function and mission. Its natural history was intended to provide for the city-state and its citizens a guiding narrative of where we humans came from, who we are, and where we should be going.12 As we elaborate in Chapter 9, Greek natural philosophy was already, in today’s terms, public philosophy just as it was already interdisciplinary philosophy, applied ethics, and environmental philosophy. Among the Greeks, there was no pure philosophy, unsullied by public concerns and issues, which could, in a derivative and ancillary way, then be applied to these concerns and issues by second-tier workers in the discipline. Indeed, there was no particular discipline of philosophy among a plethora of other disciplines. Presently, we regard questions about nature and their answers as belonging to the natural sciences, not to philosophy. But the fragmentation of human knowledge into distinct disciplines—the trivium (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) and the quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy)—did not occur until more than a thousand

10 See Kahn 1960, pp. 199–215. 11 See LSJ, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=54374&context=lsj&action=from-search (retrieved 01-28-17). The word is a contraction of kalos kai agathos and originally “denotes a perfect gentleman … but later, in a moral sense, a perfect character.” Note that the English word “gentleman” is also a contraction of “gentle” and “man.” 12 See Naddaf 2006, pp. 2, 37ff.

6 | Greek Natural Philosophy years later. And that early compartmentalization of knowledge hardly resembles the narrow specializations that characterize intellectual inquiries in the 20th- and 21st centuries. As recently as the late 17th century, Isaac Newton, in his great work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, set out his scientific (as we would call it) method under the heading “Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy.” And this tradition of calling Newtonian physics natural philosophy continued until the close of the 19th century. Similarly, the so-called father of modern philosophy, Descartes, in the 17th century, and Kant, in the 18th, also understood themselves to be natural philosophers. Moreover, the fundamental questions about nature, which were asked and answered by the Greek philosophers, remain open. The answers to them are still avidly sought today by physicists (often by means of elaborate and very expensive equipment, such as the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Hubble Space Telescope), by environmental scientists (such as geologists and ecologists), by environmental historians, and by a minority of philosophers (such as environmental philosophers). Every subsequent generation of natural philosophers—among whom we include all these kinds of contemporary inquirers— who tried to answer these fundamental questions about nature has built on the work of their predecessors going all the way back to the Greeks. We provide a more extensive and thoroughly documented argument to this effect in Chapter 9.

(B) THE ORGANIZATION, SCOPE, AND PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK

(I) ORGANIZATION

After spending the first of the three sections of their course on the Presocratics, Callicott and Brown move on to sample the philosophy of Plato; and they end their course with samples of the philosophy of Aristotle.13 Suitable texts for these latter units of the course are readily available: the dialogues of Plato and the treatises of Aristotle. The works of the Presocratics, however, did not survive the descent of European civilization into episodes of barbarism and darkness, in the course of which, libraries were burned and with them, these oldest and most precious philosophical works. We have found that contemporary texts providing reconstructions of Greek natural philosophy

13 Here, as in the course, we frequently refer to and often quote both Plato and Aristotle in conjunction with our exposition of the Presocratics.

Introduction | 7 (more about how that is done, shortly) either serve up the introductory student with too much, making digestion difficult, or too little for adequate intellectual nourishment. With this book, we hope to hit the Golden Mean between excess and defect (to adapt the formula for moral virtue from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics). Chapters 2–8 are devoted to the principal Presocratic philosophers. Chapters 1 and 9 contextualize Presocratic natural philosophy—the former in relation to the mythopoeic worldview that preceded it, the latter in relation to the succeeding worldviews that grew from these Greek roots and that continue to grow, presently and in the future. Chapter 1 focuses fairly narrowly on the epic poems of Homer and Hesiod— Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days—which functioned among the Greeks somewhat like the bible among the Hebrews. The latter two epics by Hesiod fairly systematize the prephilosophical Greek worldview, and so, we devote most of our attention in Chapter 1 to Hesiod’s epics, with only supplemen- tary reference to the two great works of Homer. Our concluding Chapter 9, A NeoPresocratic Manifesto: History and Relevance of Natural Philosophy, expands the book’s central historical focus on Presocratic natural philosophy with a review of its subsequent history in the philosophies of later Antiquity, those of the early and later Middle Ages, the philosophies of early and later Modernity, and, finally, 20th-century philosophy. Then we make a case for the relevance of Presocratic natural philosophy to contemporary environmental science and philosophy in the 21st century.

(II) SCOPE AND PURPOSE

We thus employ an interpretive framework that is unique among the many textbooks available on Greek natural philosophy.14 While works on the Presocratics often interpret Greek natural philosophy in the context of the Greek mythopoeic worldview, few, if any, do so in the context of subsequent historical and contemporary natural philosophy. And none at all that are focused on Presocratic natural philosophy relate it to contemporary environmental science and philosophy. Therefore, this novel scope also locates our book on the leading edge of the paradigm shift now in progress as the discipline of philosophy transcends the insular concerns of 20th-century Analytic and Continental philosophy, recovers its pre-20th century inclusion of natural philosophy, and emerges renewed here in the first century of the third millennium.

14 For a survey of interpretive historiographical approaches to the Presocratics from ancient times to present-day analytic and continental philosophy, see Curd and Graham 2008, pp. 9–21.

8 | Greek Natural Philosophy This book, therefore, is not only designed to serve as a textbook for courses in Greek philosophy at every academic level—from an introductory course for undergraduates to a seminar for graduate students. It is also a contribution to the literature of environmental philosophy, performing the sorely needed task of recovering its roots in the mainstream history of philosophy—as natural philosophy, ontology, and metaphysics— a lacuna that has contributed to its marginalization in philosophy today. This book is, accordingly, a bellwether of philosophy’s recovery of its initial, central impetus and turn toward relevance to and engagement with contemporary environment-related social and political concerns. When it first emerged in the latter quarter of the 20th century, most environmental philosophy dismissively criticized the mainstream history of philosophy as ethically too “anthropocentric” and nature-denigrating.15 Thus was fostered the widespread impression in academia that environmental philosophy was a newfangled philosophical subdiscipline. Against this, we argue that environmental philosophy is, in fact, the oldest form of philosophy, going back to Greek natural philosophy—including that of Plato and Aristotle. Simultaneously, most of environmental philosophy focused almost exclusively on both the novel theory and application of “environmental ethics”—if not an anti-metaphysical “environmental pragmatism”—and neglected the history of natural philosophy and metaphysics.16 Thus, too, arose the impression that this newfangled environmental philosophy was confined just to “environmental ethics.” To the contrary, we argue that, at a foundational level, environmental philosophy is rather a revival of natural philosophy, ontology, and metaphysics—and thus squarely within the tradition of philosophy’s long pre-20th-century history. Greco-Roman, medieval, and modern philosophers did have quite a bit to say about the treatment of animals, plants, and the rest of nature. Some of it is suggestive of an exploitative attitude and some of it suggestive of an explicitly non-anthropocentric attitude. Much more extensive, however, are the natural-philosophical and metaphysical writings of pre-20th-century philosophers on nature (cosmogony, cosmology, zoogony) and humankind’s relation to it (anthropogony, politogony). Most of these historical authors themselves did not at all consider the ethical implications of their several natural-philosophical and metaphysical speculations or did so only in a superficial manner. Exploring the ethical implications of these traditional natural/environmental philosophies is one of the most important, but too often neglected, tasks of environmental ethics today. First, however, we need to get clear on what these philosophies are saying about the natural environment, and our book attempts to do this—primarily, of course, only for the Presocratics.

15 For example, see Hargrove 1989; and Oelschlaeger 1997. 16 For a plea for the need for philosophical foundations, see Callicott 1995.

Introduction | 9 (C) RECONSTRUCTING PRESOCRATIC NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

(I) SOURCES OF INFORMATION

Among the works of Greek writers that have come down to us more or less whole, those of Herodotus (484–425 BCE), an elder contemporary of Socrates, provide us with the earliest information about the Greek natural philosophers. Herodotus is, however, as much a fabulist as a historian, and his interest in those of the Presocratics whom he treats is more biographical than philosophical. So, albeit early, Herodotus is a marginal source of information about the philosophy of the Presocratics (and an untrustworthy source of information about their lives and times). Plato (427–347 BCE) often refers to the Greek natural philosophers in his dialogues, also a very early source, as his life, too, overlapped with that of some of them. But Plato appears to be working with them casually from memory, not with their texts before him when he tells us something of what they thought; so, his recounting of their doctrines must be handled with great care. More deeply, but also more indirectly, we find profound Presocratic influences on Plato’s philosophy, which Aristotle confirms. For example, Aristotle (Metaphysics 987a) says that Plato’s skepticism about the possibility of certain knowledge concerning the physical world accessible to our senses was ultimately due to the influence ofHeraclitus via his more extreme follower Cratylus. And Aristotle also says that Plato himself was a follower of the Pythagoreans and often equates Plato’s Forms with Numbers (detailed and documented in Chapter 8). With Plato’s works being available to us, we can gain much insight into the thought of his influential predecessors by the way Plato reacts to or incorporates their doctrines into those of his own. The extent to which Plato was steeped in the works of his predecessors can be illustrated by a rather trifling example. As reported by Plato in the Apology, after Socrates was convicted of impiety and corrupting the youth, by law, he had the opportunity to propose a penalty alternative to the one proposed by his accusers. (There were no statutory penalties in Athens as there are in modern judicial systems; and his accusers proposed the death penalty.) Socrates claimed that he was actually a public benefactor and, as such, he should receive a reward, not a penalty. What reward? The same reward that victors in the Olympic Games received from their cities—their food and drink on the city’s drachma, so to speak—which he claimed that he deserved more than they. For years, Callicott and Brown taught the Apology to our students and, only now,

10 | Greek Natural Philosophy doing research for this book, did we realize that the source of this odd alternative to the punishment that his accusers proposed is Xenophanes:

But if by speed of foot a man should gain the victory, or in the pentathlon at Zeus’s shrine by Pisa’s stream in Olympia, or in wrestling, or by having a painful boxing match, or in that frightful pankration, he would be exceedingly glorious for his fellow- citizens to behold, gain a front-row seat at the games, and get food from the public stores of his city, and a trophy to treasure up. Even if he won with horses, he would get all this, but would not merit it as do I: for better than strength of men and horses is our wisdom. But most vain is the present custom. It is wrong to prefer strength to noble wisdom. For neither if there is a good boxer among the people, nor a pentathlete, nor a wrestler, nor even one swift of foot, which is most honored by men in feats-of-strength contests, would the city be one whit better governed.17 (Athenaeus 10.414c, DK B2)

This very early claim by Xenophanes to be a public benefactor confirms the scholarly view that we endorse: to wit, that historia peri physeōs (natural history or inquiry about nature) comprised anthropogony and politogony, no less than cosmogony/cosmology, and was pursued, among other reasons, for moral and political guidance. Among the surviving works of the Greek philosophers, the richest sources of information about the Presocratics may be found in those of Aristotle (384–322 BCE). In none of his treatises does Aristotle set out to write a systematic history of philosophy. Rather, in all of them, he sets out to write his own systematic account of some particular well-defined topic—from logic to biology to astronomy to psychology. And in virtually all of them, he begins by reviewing the opinions of his predecessors on that particular topic, sometimes quoting from their writings. Thus Aristotle presents the views of his predecessors through the lens of his own philosophical system and hence inevitably distorts them. Knowing full well Aristotle’s system, however, we can readily correct for his biases and make use of the rich sources he provides guided by a critical hermeneutic of suspicion. Aristotle’s younger associate, Theophrastus (371–287 BCE), did, it seems, set out to write systematic histories of philosophy, one of which is titled Physikōn Doxai or Opinions of the Natural Philosophers (or, more literally, Opinions of the Physicists). This work,

17 After Graham 2010, pp. 103–104.

Introduction | 11 along with many others by Theophrastus, did survive well into the era of the Roman Empire but was, unfortunately, largely destroyed thereafter. Theophrastus’s histories were the source of information about the Presocratics in many works of later antiquity and the early Middle Ages that have come down to us relatively well preserved. As noted in the Acknowledgments, Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz combed through these extant writings and published two data sets for reconstructing the philosophies of the Presocratics in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. We follow standard scholarly usage and cite this work as “DK.” One data set, called testimonia (Latin for “testimony” or “witness”), consist of paraphrases, summaries, or accounts of the philosophies of the Presocratics; and it is labeled “A.” The other data set, consists of the the ipsissima verba (“exact words”), which are purported to be actual quotations from the writings of the Presocratics. That set is labeled “B” and the items in it are customarily called “fragments.” A number is assigned to each philosopher and to each item in each data set. DK 28B1, for example, refers to the Parmenides collection (28) and the first quotation (B1) in that collection. When it’s obvious which philosopher is being quoted or summarized, it is customary to omit the first number. Thus we cite the fragment simply as “DK B1” in the section of Chapter 4 devoted to Parmenides.

(II) INTELLECTUAL PALEONTOLOGY,

From these materials—some more reliable than others—and from the writings of other scholars, such as W. K. C. Guthrie (who wrote a magisterial history of Greek philosophy in six volumes, the first two of which are devoted to the Presocratics), we here attempt to reconstruct the philosophies of the Greek physicists. We compare our task to that of paleontologists, who, from a few fragments of petrified bone, attempt to reconstruct what a long-extinct animal, such as a dinosaur, looked like. How do paleontologists go about such a task? Especially now, with the ability to analyze DNA, they can identify the most closely related living phylogenetic relatives or descendants of long-extinct species. By studying the skeletons and musculature of the living animals and comparing the parts of their skeletons corresponding with the fossilized bone fragments of those of the extinct animals—supplemented by reasonable assumptions, educated guesses, and a lively imagination—they build a model of the whole ancient form. As noted, the natural philosophy of the present—designated by such names as astrophysics, cosmology, geology, chemistry, quantum mechanics, evolutionary biology, ecology, and environmental history and philosophy—is the direct descen- dant of Greek natural philosophy. So, like the paleontologist, we consult the living

12 | Greek Natural Philosophy manifestations of the lines of thought initiated by the ancients. We also consult the literary remains of the more recent intellectual ancestors of the current descendants of the ancients. Thus, we can work our way back in time to the original ideas of the Presocratics, which we have only in second-hand and fragmentary form. Consider the following example: We may find the latest ideas about the stuff of the world in contemporary quantum mechanics. Present-day theories about quarks and super-strings evolved from the theories of Newton about corpuscles and Pierre Gassendi about atoms. Newton and Gassendi knew of and appropriated the Atomism of Lucretius, set out in his extant poem, De Rerum Natura, written in the 1st century BCE. Lucretius, in turn, drew on the now-lost work of Epicurus (reports of which Gassendi studied closely), who lived in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE and whose life overlapped that of Aristotle. Epicurus would have known and probably adopted (and adapted) the atomic theory of matter first developed by Leucippus and Democritus in the 5th century BCE. We have some fragments and extensive testimonia about the Atomism of Leucippus and Democritus. So, in this way, we can begin to construct an account of the original atomic theory of matter—an account of which we can be quite confident. The currently prevailingontology of 21st-century quantum mechanics has transcended Atomism altogether in favor of various space-time continua, such as electromagnetic fields and the Higgs field. In contemporary Quantum Field Theory, sub-atomic particles (the most recent descendants in contemporary physics of the original Greek atoms), such as the famous Higgs boson, are now considered to be excited locales of the underlying field. In Chapter 7, we find an analog in Presocratic Atomism to the field ontology of contemporary physics, thus providing a completely fresh interpretation of the original atomic theory of physical Being.

(III) TRANSLATION

We have consulted a variety of existing translations (documented in the Acknowledgments) in the course of constructing those provided in this book. Unedited translations by other scholars are cited in the footnotes. We have, more often than not, modified an existing translation—a common practice among Classicists—in an effort to stay as faithful to the original Greek as possible, often at the expense of fluidity. In which case, we indicate that we have done so in the associated footnote with the expression “after So-and-So”—as is customary among Classicists—illustrated here in note 14. In many instances, for the sake of a rendering more faithful to the original,

Introduction | 13 we have provided our own translations, sacrificing elegance for accuracy and consis- tency. Those instances are indicated by no footnote at all. Pursuant to the goal of drilling down as far as possible to original Greek concepts, we have transliterated key Greek words (that is, substituted Roman letters for the Greek) and interpolated them (italicized and in parentheses) into the English translation, following the translation of that word. For example, “… belief (pistis) … opinion (doxa).” There are several reasons for adopting this convention. Many English words are derived directly from the Greek; in our foregoing example, the English word “orthodox” (literally “right opinion”) is derived from orthos (“right” or “correct”) and doxa. Providing the transliterated Greek word will indicate just how deeply the concepts signified by these words have settled into modern Western thought and culture. In many cases, there is no exactly equivalent word in English for a key word in the Greek texts of the ancient natural philosophers, and so, in choosing an English word to trans- late such a Greek word, the translator necessarily becomes an interpreter. Providing the transliterated Greek word, thus, makes the translator’s inevitable interpretation transparent. Further, it is not uncommon for philosophy professors to have more than a passing acquaintance with Greek. For those who do, having transliterations of the key Greek words available to them and their students may enhance teaching as well as learning. Finally, some Greek words are so rich in meaning that no translation of them comes close to being adequate. In those few instances—archē, apeiron, logos, most notable among them—we just use the untranslated transliterations. (See Table 0.1 for a key to transliteration and pronunciation.)

(D) OUR INTERPRETIVE METHOD: THE DIACHRONIC DIALECTIC OF IDEAS

The interpretation of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle are matters of hot dispute by modern scholars. And their writings have come down to us more or less intact! So, of course, the doctrines of their predecessors, which have come down to us only in fragmentary and second-hand form, are open to a wide variety of interpretation. We will not burden and confuse the readers of this text with a review of many such interpretations of one or another of the Presocratics, along with argumentation for or against this interpretation or that, before settling on the one we think is the most plausible. Instead, we will selectively organize and present the most important

14 | Greek Natural Philosophy Table 0.1 Greek alphabet with pronunciation key.

Upper Lower Name Transliteration Pronunciation Α α Alpha A a hah Β β Beta B b boy Γ γ Gamma G g good, tango Δ δ Delta D d dog Ε ε Epsilon E e pet Ζ ζ Zeta Z z zero, adze Η η Eta Ē ē neigh Θ θ Theta Th th thunder Ι ι Iota I i mitt, pizza Κ κ Kappa K, C k, c kind, cosmos Λ λ Lambda L l leak Μ µ Mu M m me Ν ν Nu N n nut Ξ ξ Xi (Ksee) X x sex Ο ο Omecron O o knot Π π Pi P p pot Ρ ρ Rho R, Rh r, rh rot, rhythm Σ σ, ς† Sigma S s sign Τ τ Tau T t tub Υ υ Upsilon U,Y u,y führer, physics Φ φ Phi Ph ph philosophy Χ χ Chi Ch ch character Ψ ψ Psi Ps ps autopsy Ω ω Omega Ō ō note

†Used only when the sigma is the last letter of a word.

Introduction | 15 fragments and testimonia of the most important Presocratic natural philosophers and then develop our own interpretations straightaway. Our interpretations are guided by an assumption that we call a “diachronic dialectic of ideas” (literally through-time through-discussion of ideas): Each successive philosopher builds on the theories of his predecessor, first, by identifying some logical or empirical problems with those theories and, then, offering his own original thoughts as a solution to those problems. We could call it the “Gotcha Principle” of interpretation. The assumption that Greek natural philosophy exhibits a diachronic dialectic of ideas is based on a historical fact. In the course of only three centuries, from very primitive beginnings, astonishingly sophisticated cosmogonies and cosmologies—the answers to questions 3 and 4 at the beginning of this introduction—were crafted. One such has already been mentioned: the atomic theory of matter and the associated cosmogony and cosmology of the Atomists, which involved multiple world systems (we would say solar systems) in a universe both spatially and temporally infinite.Astronomy affords another example. Anaximander, the successor of Thales (whom Aristotle identifies as the very first natural philosopher), thought that the Earth was shaped like a column drum and that we inhabit its flat, round, upper surface. And he thought that the sun and moon were vent holes in wheels of fire, enclosed in hardened tubes of air (detailed and documented in Chapter 2). These are certainly imaginative—but, just as certainly, primitive—ideas. Only a century or so later, the Greek philosophers realized that the Earth was a sphere, a discovery most likely to have been made by the followers of Pythagoras. Just one more century after that, Eudoxus, a member of Plato’s Academy, constructed a geocentric mechanical model of the motions of the planets (a Greek word meaning “wanderers”) in response to Plato’s challenge to account for their observed irregular movements by means of uniform and orderly movements (as would only befit heav- enly bodies to execute). According to Aristotle, the Pythagoreans even asserted that the Earth is a planet orbiting a central fire. Fewer than one hundred years after the death of Aristotle, the Alexandrian astronomer Aristarchus constructed a heliocentric model of what we can, thus, correctly call “the solar system.” (And just as Gassendi in the 17th century would appeal to the authority of Epicurus in support of his atomic theory of matter, so, in the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus appealed to the authority of Aristarchus in support of his radical heliocentric astronomical theory.) Our historically well-grounded assumption of a diachronic dialectic of ideas, thus, leads us to interpret the more shrouded and obscure doctrines of the earlier

16 | Greek Natural Philosophy natural philosophers in light of the better-attested and more refined doctrines of their successors. Consider the following example: What are we to make of the Contraries (or Opposites) that Anaximander supposed were separated out of something he called the apeiron? It is not entirely clear how many fundamental Contraries Anaximander thought there are. Nor is it at all clear what he thought the apeiron (variously translated as the Infinite, the Unlimited, the Boundless, the Indefinite) to be or what force or impetus he thought caused them to be “separated out” of it. By the late 5th century BCE, that there were four elemental substances (fire, air, water, and earth, first identified as such by Empedocles) had become a generally accepted view (by both Plato and Aristotle, among many other cognoscenti). In light of that settled opinion, we may confidently interpret Anaximander to have set the stage for the eventual four-elements theory with his Contraries: the Hot, the Cold, the Wet, and the Dry—four of them—epitomized, respectively, by fire, earth, water, and air. And what of the apeiron? Its existence and nature, we may confidently suppose, Anaximander to have posited in response to a problem that he identified with the theory of his predecessor, Thales, who said that water was the one fundamental substance (also detailed and documented in Chapter 2). The problem is this: If everything were composed of water, then everything would be wet. Anaximander’s solution to that problem was to retain the unity of the fundamental substance but to insist that it is qualityless, indefinite—which then points us to the best translation of the name he gave it. Anaximander thought that some motion caused the Opposites to separate out of the apeiron—so we are told in the testimonia—but just what kind of motion is not specified. The theory that the cosmic motion (visible in the movements of the stars and planets) was of the nature of a vortex was later no less widely known and accepted than the four-elements theory. Indeed, so well established in Greek cosmology was the belief in a cosmic vortex motion that the comedic poet Aristophanes, a younger contemporary of Socrates, could make fun of it in his popular satire of philosophy, the Clouds (Chapter 3 provides details and documentation). So we may confidently suppose that the motion, which Anaximander conceived to have separated the four Contraries out of the apeiron, was that of a vortex. Moreover, that supposition stands to reason because the force in a vortex motion is centripetal not centrifugal. And as we see, the denser cold, earthy stuff is driven to the center of the world and the liter, dry, fiery stuff is pushed out on the periphery.18

18 We use the word “lite” and its grammatical variants for the antonym of “heavy,” reserving the word “light” and its grammatical variants for the antonym of “dark.” That’s because Greek also uses two different words, respectively: elaphros and phaos.

Introduction | 17 To state our interpretive principle more generally: the best way to reconstruct the philosophy of one Presocratic philosopher is by reference to the philosophy of another. And even when the doctrines of both philosophers are subject to scholarly dispute, a side-by-side comparison can often decisively resolve the most important contested issues.

(E) WHY PHILOSOPHY SUDDENLY EMERGED WHEN IT DID: A COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION

(I) THE SHIFT FROM THE GODS AND POETRY TO NATURE AND PROSE

In the first book of the treatise that came to be titled Metaphysics, Aristotle notes a sharp boundary between philosophy and the kind of thought that preceded philosophical thought. Prephilosophical thought was expressed in the form of poetry and concerned itself, Aristotle says, with the gods. Although some of the ancient philosophers also expressed their ideas in verse (even some, like Lucretius, living more than half a millennium after the emergence of philosophy), philosophical prose was far more usual than philosophical poetry. And the subject matter was different: the first philosophers concerned themselves with nature, the pre-philosophy poets with the gods, as Aristotle truly observes, and the interaction of the gods with a superhuman class of people called heroes (yes, the English word itself is imported directly from the Greek). As already mentioned, the two most important Greek poets who spun mythic tales were Homer and Hesiod. Both probably lived in the 8th century BCE—no one knows for sure. Homer’s great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, are narrowly focused in time and space on events that probably happened in the 12th century BCE: the siege of Troy by the Greeks and its aftermath. Of Hesiod’s two great epics, the Theogony and Works and Days, the former, as the name suggests, is a cosmogonical work about the birth and genealogy of the gods (and the genesis of the world itself, which was not altogether distinguished from the gods in Hesiod’s account). The latter is a work in anthropogony

18 | Greek Natural Philosophy and politogony, dealing with the genesis of humankind and human affairs and foibles in general, not, as for Homer, about particular and idiosyncratic humans and their foibles and affairs (in every sense of the word). So why, rather suddenly, does a radical shift in subject matter, style of expression, and manner of thought occur just when it did?

(II) THE NATURAL HISTORY AND GREEK MIRACLE ACCOUNTS

The Greek natural philosophers themselves provided answers to this question with their own natural histories of “the present order of things” (in the previously cited words of Gerard Naddaf). They situated the birth of philosophy within grand narratives of the history of the universe and the earth (cosmogony), plants and animals (zoogony), and the human species (anthropogony), which culminated in a politogony. Some—more than others, and usually sorely wanting in details—provided accounts of the evolution of (i) human society from primitive beginnings to the rise of the city- state, (ii) human virtue, (iii) the arts and sciences, and (iv) a kind of general wisdom (sophia) broader than religious myth which eventually was called philosophia—love of wisdom, philosophy. For example, Aristotle’s natural history approach in the first book of his Metaphysics claims that, in the course of the oft-repeated cyclical history of the earth and humanity, the practical arts, such as metallurgy, arose first. When enough of these had been developed, human life got easier, and certain people, whose basic economic necessities of life were taken care of and who were in privileged social-political positions, found themselves with time on their hands. Thus, they had, according to Aristotle, the leisure to turn their minds to less practical matters. And so, they began freely to “wonder” and speculate about the larger world beyond their day-to-day practical concerns. But that hardly serves to explain the difference between mythology and philosophy. Poets, no less than philosophers, need leisure and a sense of wonderment to compose their poems. And Hesiod’s Theogony is no less expansive—no less cosmogonical and no less cosmological—than the prosaic philosophical speculations of Anaximander or Heraclitus. But the Theogony is a genre exemplaire of mythology, certainly not of philosophy. The differences are stark. Hesiod claims to be but the mortal vehicle of the divine muses, whose words he sings. His cosmogony and cosmology are expressed not only in verse form but also

Introduction | 19 in narrative form—that is, as a story replete with godly characters and their dramatic actions. And it’s full of inconsistencies and contradictions as if being logical were of no concern to the poet whatsoever.19 The Greek natural-history approach prevailed in the patristic, medieval, and modern periods until the late 19th century when philosophers, having ceded natural philosophy to the new natural sciences, began to develop an ahistorical and idealist “Greek Miracle” thesis concerning the advent of philosophy.20 According to this thesis, the transition from irrational myth to rational philosophy emerged spontaneously in the early 6th century BCE without substantial external influences or causes as if springing from the Greek genius like Athena, goddess of wisdom, from the head of Zeus. This miracle or brain-in-a-jar paradigm has an analogue in the way 20th-century academic Analytic and Continental philosophy came on the scene and the way it still perceives itself today. Philosophy as a putatively rigorous discipline among other disciplines— centrally concerned with such things as the relation of “sense data” to the “external world” and “intentional consciousness” to phenomena—is thought by its practitioners to have no empirical history in such spheres as natural history and economics. The study of pre-20th-century philosophy is, accordingly, merely a study of free-floating ideas. In 20th-century Classics, however, a reaction to the Greek-Miracle thesis developed which effectively returned to the older natural-history approach though without the cosmogonical and anthropogonical aspects of the full scope of natural history as the Greeks themselves conceived it. Classicists hotly debated the following cultural factors that proponents claimed to be the sufficient condition for the birth of philosophy: economics and technology (George Thomson, Benjamin Farrington, Robert Hahn), the rise of the city-state and democracy (Jean-Pierre Vernant, Geoffery E. R. Lloyd), religious myth (Francis McDonald Cornford, Walker Burkert), and communications technology (Jack Goody and Ian Watt, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, David Abram).21

19 For the influence of religious myth on the birth of philosophy, see Cornford 1957 and chapters 1 and 2 of this book. 20 Santinello 1993, 2010, 2015. 21 For a survey of these different positions, see Hahn 2001, pp. 15–39.

20 | Greek Natural Philosophy (III) A REVOLUTION IN COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY

We argue that no single environmental or cultural factor by itself constitutes a sufficient condition for, or cause of, the birth of philosophy. And we apply our previously explained method of dialectic in a different way to solve this mystery. Accordingly, we suggest that while various environmental and cultural factors are all necessary conditions for the birth of philosophy, they cumulatively and dialectically built on each other. Then, one of them in the series constitutes the threshold (in the mathematical sense of the term, a tipping point in other words); and thus, it becomes the decisive influence or cause. We suggest, accordingly, that the main reason why philosophy suddenly emerged just when it did is because of a revolution in communications technology: the relatively rapid expansion and democratization of alphabetic writing among the Greeks. As noted above, we are not the first to offer this explanation of the sudden emergence of Greek philosophy in the early 6th century BCE. In Orality and Literacy: The Technology of the Word, Walter Ong provides a general account of how human consciousness is transformed by the transition from oral/aural transmission and storage of cultural information to writing/reading.22 Eric Havelock applies such an account to the emergence of philosophy in Greece in The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present and in Preface to Plato.23 David Abram extends the work of Ong and Havelock in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, situating, like the Greeks themselves, the cultural emergence of writing in a broader environmental history of the earth—that is, in cosmogony, zoogony, and anthropogony.24

(IV) A BRIEF HISTORY OF WRITING

The Greeks were, by no means, the first people to use writing. The oldest system of writing, Sumerian cuneiform, long antedating the Greek alphabet, began as little clay figures of trade objects pressed into clay tablets. These images evolved to become stylized pictograms of various things, each corresponding to one name. Pictograms then further evolved into a system of sonograms in which each symbol corresponded to a

22 Ong1982. 23 Havelock 1963; 1986. 24 Abram 1996.

Introduction | 21 spoken syllable. Referents that could not be pictured, such as life or love, were written by means of a rebus—a pictogram that evoked a word referring to a thing whose name sounded like the word the writer intends to convey. The word “I,” for example, could be conveyed by a pictogram of an eye. The Egyptians developed a similar method of writing as did the Maya in Central America. The Chinese system of writing with characters is also much older than the Greek alphabet, but, like the Sumerian and Egyptian systems, the characters originated as stylized pictures and icons, later associated with syllables and words in an arbitrary way. (This permits the same set of characters to be used to write mutually unintelligible spoken languages—in addition to the various dialects of Chinese, also Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.)25 The Hebrew aleph-beth also antedates the Greek alphabet. It represents a completely new approach to writing. Rather than associate stylized pictures of things with words for those things, it provides a visual code for configuring the mouth and tongue for speech. In this regard, it is more like musical notation, which, in the case, say, of playing the guitar, codes where to stop and pluck each of the strings. But Hebrew writing lacked letters for vowels. To continue the guitar analogy, it would be as if the musical notation only indicated where to stop the strings and omitted which strings to pluck and in which order. Each reader of Hebrew had to improvise the sounds between the consonants. That rendered a Hebrew text necessarily participatory and rife with ambiguity, thus allowing the reader some freedom of choice in meaning. The Greek alphabet, complete with vowels, was adapted from the Phoenician abjad (meaning letters for consonants only) and began to be used in the 8th century BCE.26 That puts its origin at roughly the same era in which Homer and Hesiod lived and composed. Democracy, another Greek invention and important factor in the birth of philosophy, facilitated the emergence of “cultural literacy” among the Greeks.27 Writing and reading the large number of pictograms, hieroglyphs, logograms, phonograms, rebuses, and characters in these nonalphabetic systems of signs was a highly special- ized activity, which was confined to a small class of professional scribes. Ong calls it “craft literacy.” The Greek alphabet, by contrast, has only 24 letters and can be mastered in a relatively short time even by children. The simplicity of the system, and its broad availability to the citizens of Greek city-states, enabled the Greeks to become “culturally literate.” Sanskrit, a branch on the same Indo-European language stem as Greek, was also written in alphabetical form with symbols for both consonants and vowels at about the same time as Greek was. But reading and writing Sanskrit was

25 Gaur 1992. 26 Ibid. 27 Vernant 1982.

22 | Greek Natural Philosophy neither simple (with more than twice as many letters than Greek), nor was literacy in India “cultural” (sensu Ong)28. Craft-literate cultures—in which the majority of the population remains illiterate (for whatever reason)—are in a state of “residual orality,” according to Ong. In that condition, the illiterate majority is aware of the existence of writing and reading—and its almost magical power to turn runes into words. The way is, thus, paved for the emergence of book worship. In other words, religions—such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—form around books, such as the Torah, the Holy Bible, and the Qur’an. These books seem, to those who worship them, to have a divine power of their own. By contrast, in a state of full cultural literacy, books are just books, not some mysterious font of truth and power as they are for the “People of the Book.”

(V) ORAL VERSUS WRITTEN INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL

Although composed at about the time that the Greeks began to use writing, most Classicists believe that the epics of Homer and Hesiod were not written compositions. Homer ran in aristocratic circles, but he was blind. Hesiod was a poor, unschooled shepherd. Thus, neither poet could read and write. Their works were eventually spelled out some time later. The democratization of reading and writing and the impact on the Greek mind of the widespread use of this new communications technology took time (it seems about two centuries) for it to begin to show up as natural philosophy in the early 6th century BCE. But after another two centuries had elapsed, in the Phaedrus, Plato, a thoroughly literate and urbane sophisticate, could reflect—with conflicted feel- ings, we should note—on the transformation of human consciousness that alphabetic writing had wrought (about which more in Chapter 8). With the development of the Greek alphabet, including letters for vowels as well as consonants, human language, originally embodied only in sound, could be fully and completely embodied in a visible analogue. As Abram points out, Greek readers could pick up a written text, start silently to read, and hear voices and see visions of faraway places that no one else around them could hear and see. Alphabetic writing was, indeed, a kind of magic. It was not a holy mystery; rather, spelling could cast a spell over one’s consciousness.

28 See Pollock 2006.

Introduction | 23 In an oral culture, there are basically three kinds of information that are conveyed by speech. There is personal communication, having to do with family matters, gossip, business transactions, and the like. There are public announcements shouted in public spaces by heralds. And there is collective cultural information—matters of a shared history, ways of doing things, religious beliefs and practices. In a condition of orality, this collective cultural information must be committed to memory and refreshed by repeated recitation because the only way to preserve communal information is to store it in the living memories of community members—in wetware, so to speak. So, a great deal of mental capacity must be devoted to memory. Storing cultural information in written form allows one to devote the freed-up mental capacity to tasks other than memorization and recitation. Greek epic poetry originated not as an art form but as a mnemonic device. If a wrong word is spoken in the recitation of poetry, it will likely be unmetrical and, thus, stand out like a sore thumb. A narrative format is another mnemonic device and also a kind of index. Stories are easier to remember than abstract disquisitions. (Just try memorizing a single chapter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, which is dry as a bone.) And if you want to retrieve a bit of cultural information, say, about medicine, you can mentally scan through the story line of the Iliad until you reach the passage where a posset of Pramnian wine, goat cheese, and barley meal is prepared for wounded warriors, and there you find your recipe. Thus, the Greek epics necessarily consist of character types doing deeds as an indispensable aid to memory and reference. In the narratives of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the character types of both gods and heroes are exaggerated in every way, both physically and psychologically; and the deeds they do are exceedingly dramatic—all this arousing intense interest and emotion in the audience as they hear it all retold for the umpteenth time. We modern readers, too, can as easily get into the Iliad and the Odyssey as into some other equally overblown story like Star Wars. In the cosmogonical/cosmological narrative of the Theogony, the characters are all gods, many of whom are also associated with forms and features of the natural world—first of all Ouranos (Sky, Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Thus, the characters and their actions are totally unbelievable from the point of view of our literate state of mind. We wonder, how could any intelligent person take this genealogy of the gods seriously? But there was no other way to package the precious cultural information in a secure and retrievable way. Oral cultures are necessarily mythopoeic cultures. Down to the time of Socrates, Greek education consisted of memorizing poetry and reciting it to the accompaniment of the lyre, a harp-like stringed instrument. Much of the poetry that young people memorized and recited were shorter compositions in forms other than epic—the lyric poetry, for example, of Simonides and Pindar. And the

24 | Greek Natural Philosophy poets were regarded as divinely inspired fonts of wisdom and morality. Thus, in the first book of Plato’s Republic, Plato’s character Polemarchus naturally (and tellingly) responds to a query of Plato’s character Socrates about justice by reciting a line of poetry. Indeed, Homer was widely acclaimed as the “Educator of Greece,” a reputation to which Plato attests (and contests) later in the Republic. The epic core of preliterate Greek civilization—the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, and Works and Days—were so long that only a professional class of mnemonically gifted rhapsodes could faithfully recite them from beginning to end. Such performances would be communal, performed for a king’s court, an encamped army, or the citizens of a polis. The group as a whole would listen together, share the imaginative and emotional expe- riences evoked by the narrative, and thus, bond as one. Indeed, oral/aural speech itself is necessarily an exchange of information between at least two persons in face-to-face contact. Accordingly, in a condition of orality, personal identity is communal: one’s personal identity is literally merged with that of the group. Spoken words are always spoken by a speaker, here and now. But one can read alone, and the words one reads exist on a small surface seen, at any given time, only by oneself and resounding in the privacy of one’s own consciousness. Literacy, thus, gives rise to a more individual than communal identity and to interiority and subjectivity, a consciousness of consciousness itself. Richard Seaford argues that the use of coined money by the Greeks beginning in the 6th century BCE also fostered the transition from a communal identity to an individual identity.29

(VI) ORAL VERSUS LITERATE CONSCIOUSNESS

In a condition of orality, the content of consciousness consists of vivid images and strong emotions, reinforced by being shared with everyone else. Written words exist independently of the presence of their writers; and writers can later read and reflect on what they themselves have written. Literacy, thus, also gives rise to reflective thought and critical thinking—both on the part of readers, who can mull the written words over, and on the part of writers, who can critically revisit their writings after accumulating further experience. Oral speech is also temporal and ephemeral—the words sounding one after the other in a temporal sequence, momentarily coming into being, then, quickly passing away. Written words exist less in time than in space. Literacy, thus, further gives rise to a more spatial than temporal orientation of mind. And written words are seen while

29 Seaford 2004.

Introduction | 25 spoken words are heard. Simultaneous with the origins of natural philosophy and just as suddenly emergent was a novel interest in geometry among the Greeks. Or, rather, one aspect of natural philosophy was an interest in and exploration of geometry. Geometry—literally “earth-measurement”—was originally a practical science pio- neered by the Egyptians, but in the hands of the Greeks, it soon became the formal science of abstract space. And knowing began to be conceived as analogous to seeing (about which more in section F), a marked characteristic of Plato’s epistemology. And it is with Plato that what the Presocratics, such as Empedocles, had referred to as “the roots of all things” (earth, air, fire, water) came to be metaphorically called stoicheia (“elements” but, literally, “letters of the alphabet”).30 In sharp contrast to mythology, the emergence of individuality, born of literacy, is evident in the deep concern that one finds in philosophy about personal death, the reification of the soul as itself an increasingly immaterial thing, and the ardent desire for personal immortality. The preliterate hero conceived of personal immortality in communal terms—as the survival of his name down through the ages and an endless recitation of the deeds that made him worthy to be long remembered and not forgotten. (And indeed, thanks to Homer, we remember Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus above all the men of their time.)

(VII) ORAL VERSUS LITERATE METAPHYSICS

Written words are static, changeless. Thus, literacy problematizes change itself. And we see this, too, reflected in philosophy. Not just coming into being and perishing, but even change, per se, was denied outright by Parmenides. Plato did not deny the existence of change, but he relegated it to an inferior order of reality. Parmenides’s Being is changeless and eternal; and the objects in Plato’s highest order of reality, the Forms, are eternal, changeless entities. This, too, is fairly attributable to literate consciousness—because the written word is relatively permanent in comparison with the ephemeral spoken word. Perhaps most important for the advent of philosophy, literacy gives rise to abstract ideas. In a condition of orality, a word is embodied in the material of sound. In a condition of literacy, a word is embodied in both the material of sound and in marks on a material surface. Thus, that which the word designates, its meaning, is liberated from material embodiment altogether—neither a sound nor a marking on a surface. The material word, spoken or written, is only a token of a type. The word itself, its

30 See LSJ, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=99763&context=lsj&action=hw-list-click (retrieved 01-26-17).

26 | Greek Natural Philosophy meaning, becomes a disembodied object, an abstract idea or form contemplated by the mind’s eye. That, too, is a marked characteristic of Plato’s ontology. The true objects of thought—expressed in words but transcending the words expressing them—are the Forms, which are immaterial (as well as changeless) abstract entities, the objects of certain knowledge possessing the highest degree of being or reality. As in the case of a shift from a more communal to a more individual identity, Richard Seaford also suggests that coined money fostered the emergence of abstract thought among the Greeks.31 In the spirit of etiological pluralism, with which this section began, we do not disagree. Coined money may have been a significantly contributing factor to the revolution in consciousness so clearly manifest in Greek natural philosophy. Indeed, one characteristic of Greek philosophy is that, unlike mythology, philosophy is the personal expression of the individual philosopher. This, too, is fairly attributable to the emergence of a robust individuality in the context of cultural literacy. But in a state of orality, myths are actually regarded as divine gifts of the muses, via the poets, to the community and, thus, are communal possessions, not personal expressions. The Presocratic philosophers—with but two exceptions, Parmenides, and Empedocles—do not attribute their utterances to divine sources. Except for those two, the philosophers take personal responsibility for what they opine. And despite their mythopoeic trappings, the philosophies of Parmenides and Empedocles were treated by other philosophers as individual human expressions, certainly not as divine revelations. As Aristotle (Poetics 1447b) wryly remarks, the only thing Homer and Empedocles have in common is meter. Because they are utterances from on high, while subject to interpretation, myths are beyond rational criticism in a condition of orality. In a condition of cultural literacy, personal expression of individual philosophical opinion invites critical engagement and sets up the all-important process of a diachronic dialectic of (increasingly abstract) ideas.

31 Seaford 2004.

Introduction | 27 Figure 0.1 Ancient Greek world including the lands and cultures nearby. (F) WHY PHILOSOPHY SUDDENLY EMERGED WHERE IT DID: THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

(I) MILETUS—A CULTURAL CROSSROADS

Greek philosophy did not originate in Athens or even on the Greek mainland. Rather, it originated on the eastern fringe of the Greek world in Miletus, a city on the Aegean Sea at the mouth of the Meander River. Shortly thereafter, it migrated westward to Magna Graecia (presently southern Italy and Sicily) and, then fi nally, to the Greek mainland. Miletus was the southernmost city in a region called Ionia, a narrow strip of the Anatolian coast and its offshore islands in present-day Turkey. Ionia was settled, according to legend, by Athenian colonists who spoke the Ionian dialect of Greek. By the early 6th century BCE, Miletus had become a prosperous commercial city with many colonies of its own. To the east of mainland Greece and Ionia lay the much larger territory of Lydia, and southeast of Lydia lay the vast, wealthy, and powerful Persian Empire. To the south, lay another coastal region, Phoenicia, along the Mediterranean

28 | Greek Natural Philosophy Figure 0.2 Ancient Greek city-states and colonies in Asia Minor (Anatolia), Italy (Magna Graecia), and mainland Greece (Hellas). shore of present-day Syria and Lebanon. Like the Jews, still further to the south, the Phoenicians were a Semitic people, famed throughout the Mediterranean Basin as merchant mariners, and, as noted, it was from them that the Greeks borrowed the consonants of their alphabet. Farther south and west lay Egypt, a civilization venerated by the Greeks as much older than and culturally ancestral to their own. As a port city with a vibrant trade-based economy, Miletus would have been a polyglot cultural crossroads. The Milesians would likely have traded in myths as well as in grain, wine, textiles, and other goods. They would have listened to recitations of the Babylonian Enuma Elish as well as to recitations of their own Theogony. They would have heard about great foreign gods and heroes: about Yahweh and Elohim from the Jews, about Marduk from the Babylonians, about Ra and Ptah from the Egyptians, as well as about their own great god Zeus. And they would have heard about the heroic warrior king Gilgamish as well as their own heroic warrior king Agamemnon. With a liberated and refl ective consciousness, a literate person of genius, such as Thales, might think, fi rst, that these mutually contradictory cosmogonical and anthropogonical myths about the divine origin of the world and humankind cannot all be true. And then, he might next think that if they all cannot be true, perhaps, none of them are true. And fi nally, he might come to the conclusion that the deepest questions about the world— how it came to be, of what it is composed, and so on; questions no longer believably

Introduction | 29 answered by the gods themselves speaking through the poets—are questions to try to answer using this new self-conscious state of mind that he knows that he enjoys though, perhaps, knows not how he acquired it. Thales is the first figure of the so-calledMilesian School, succeeded by Anaximander and, then, Anaximander by Anaximenes. The term “school” may be misleading in this context. The sense of “school” intended by the phrase “Milesian School” is closer to the sense of “school” in the phrase “school of fish” than in the phrase “Harvard business school” or “Yale law school.” In the 4th century BCE, Plato founded the Academy (originally just the name of the olive orchard in which he established it), the first institution of higher learning in the history of Western civilization. ButPlato’s Academy was more like a center for advanced study than like a modern college or university. Anaximander was not, as some ancient sources (and following them modern scholars) carelessly say, the pupil or student of Thales; he was, rather, his younger associate (and, indeed, it seems his sharp critic). Anaximenes bore the same relationship to Anaximander as Anaximander to Thales. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes must have been skeptical about the cosmogony, anthropogony, and politogony set out in Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days; otherwise, they would not have dared to offer their personal, speculative attempts to produce more thoughtful prosaic alternatives. Clearly, they freed themselves of the mythopoeic conventions of the Theogony—the phantasmic personages and the verse narration of their phantasmagorical deeds. Evidently, however, they could not free themselves from some of the deepest assumptions of the cosmogony and cosmology of the Theogony. So enthralled were the Milesians by these assumptions that one might fairly say, as the famous Classicist F. M. Cornford did, that, collectively, they succeeded only in demythologizing Hesiod’s cosmogony, anthropogony, and politogony, clothing its cognitive armature with naturalistic rather than mythopoeic vestments.32 For that reason, we begin our survey of Greek natural philosophy by setting the mythological stage on which philosophy made its debut in Chapter 1.

(II) ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

But there’s much more to the answer of the where question, concerning the origins of philosophy, than the cultural-crossroads answer. We think that the natural environment of Ionia, mainland Greece, and Magna Graecia were crucial to the emergence of

32 Cornford 1957.

30 | Greek Natural Philosophy philosophy. Accordingly, where philosophy originated was another necessary and direct causal factor in explaining why it originated. We also think that the natural environment of Ionia, mainland Greece, and Magna Graecia even played an indirect foundational role for the emergence of other causal cultural factors, such as religious myth, economics, politics, and literacy.33 Here, we follow up on David Abram’s previously mentioned work on the emergence of writing in Greece, which situates it in a broader environmental history. More broadly still, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond argues that all of the cultural achievements in Asia Minor, Greece, and, later, Europe broadly were made possible by the favorable environment and postglacial endowment of the Eurasian continent.34 They were not the result of any claimed or implied genetic racial superiority. Our view is also shared by the Greek natural philosophers themselves and by authors of the associated Hippocratic medical writings, who provided the first theories of “environmental determinism” in Western thought—the idea that human beings are shaped not only by cultural but also by environmental influences.35 In their natural histories of the evolution of civilization, of the arts and sciences, and of philosophy (politogony), the Greek thinkers used cosmogony and anthropogony to ascribe the rise and dominance of Greek civilization to the unique geography, temperate climate, and biota of its centrally located Mediterranean ecosystem. Anaximander was the first philosopher to take full advantage of the fully ripened revolution in communications technology and present his thought in written form. He was also the founder of the Greek discipline of geography, which was carried forward by another of his younger associates Hecataeus. Anaximander included in his book on cosmogony a map of the oikoumenē gē, (“inhabited earth”).36 It displayed not only known landmasses and water

33 Our approach is also analogous to the methodology used in environmental histories of religion. See, for example, Hillel 2007, which deals with the environmental influences and ideas which later came into play when, as we review in Chapter 9, patristic, medieval, and modern natural philosophy appropriated and transformed the Greek natural philosophy tradition. 34 Diamond 1998. See especially Chapter 12 on “the evolution of writing.” Diamond’s approach is much like Aristotle’s natural history of philosophy, arguing that the unique east-west axis of Eurasia with Asia Minor and Greece in the middle, as well as the postglacial maximum climate, flora, and fauna of these areas, led to the rise of agriculture, pastoralism, and food surpluses, which, in turn, made possible division of labor and class-structured states, including leisured religious and administrative classes of scribes that developed systems of writing that, along with trade goods, technologies, and ideas, were easily transmitted along the continental east-west axis. 35 See Clarence J. Glacken 1967, pp. 80ff. 36 It is from the Greek noun oikos (house, dwelling place, or habitat of humans and animals) that the modern terms “economics,” “ecology,” and “ecosystem” (in order of their coinage) were derived. The Greek term for moral character (ēthos), found in the ethical-political writings of Plato, Aristotle, and other thinkers, also had, and still retains echoes of, the original geographical and ecological meaning of, “dwelling place” or “habitat” (of animals and humans). That is another indication—on a linguistic level—of the extent to which Greek political and ethical theory (politogony) was situated in a natural philosophy that started with cosmogony, zoogony, and anthropogony. Here, ēthos means one’s character in the sense of how one “habitually dwells” in or “in-habits” the natural and social world. LSJ gives

Introduction | 31 bodies but also the geographical distribution of the different known races of people and—with little modesty—located his homeland at the very center.37 According to some scholars, the map was included in the book because the experi- ential environment of the Greeks and, more specifically, that of Miletus, was the very starting point of Anaximander’s inquiry.38 It, then, proceeded retrospectively in a grand cosmogonical or environmental history to recount the evolution of the heavens, climate, the geographical features of the earth, the flora and fauna, and the human species and its distribution that led to the present inhabited earth depicted on the map. In his classic and enthusiastic study of Anaximander, Charles Kahn presents this Presocratic figure as a geologist and climatologist very much aware of long-termclimate change:

Living things arise in the sea, and later, as the dry earth emerges, adapt themselves to life on land. The appearance of man brings the development to its completion; but the sea is continuing to evaporate, will eventually be dry, and there is some hint of a retrograde process in which (as Xenophanes taught) the earth will subside into the sea, and life on land be extinguished once again.39

As Harold Cherniss put it, Anaximander was not the mere cerebral cosmologist and metaphysicist that Aristotle made him out to be but, rather, also an “astronomer and geographer, cosmogonist and genealogist, meteorologist, biologist, anthropologist, and historian.”40 Today, we would say that he was also an environmental historian, and that—as with the essentially historical narratives of Homer and Hesiod (detailed and documented in Chapter 1)—embodied in the surviving fragments of his lost book is an environmental history of the Greek world.

“house not only of built houses but of any dwelling-place” as the root meaning of oikos; and “an accustomed place” or “haunts” or “abodes” of animals as the root meaning of ēthos and “disposition” and “character” as derivative meanings—http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=74700&context=lsj&action=hw-list-click and http://stephanus.tlg.uci. edu/lsj/#eid=48064&context=lsj&action=from-search (retrieved 01-20-17). 37 For a reconstruction of Anaximander’s map, see Chapter 2. Good candidates for the center of Anaximander’s map are (i) Delphi in Greece, famed not only for being the location of the oracle of Apollo but also for being the omphalos (“navel”) of the world and, therefore, its center or, more likely, (ii) Delos, a small island in the middle of the Aegean Sea about halfway between the Greek mainland and Ionia, famed for being the mythic birthplace of both Apollo and his sister Artemis; Delos also had an omphalos stone, marking the center of the world. 38 See, for example, Marcel Conche, Anaximandre. Fragments et temoignages (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1991). 39 Kahn 1960, p. 199. 40 See Harold Cherniss, 1951: 319–345, pp. 323–324, who appeals to the authority of Heidel 1921.

32 | Greek Natural Philosophy (III) GREEK ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM

“The Greeks themselves,” wrote Eduard Zeller, “connected their mental life with the climate of their sunny land.”41 Thus, among the Hippocratic medical writings, which were heavily influenced by Presocratic natural philosophy, we find the treatise titled Peri Aerōn Hydatōn Topōn (On Airs, Waters, and Places). It expounds the influences of geographical, climatological, and ecological factors on the differences of “temperament” and “intelligence” of peoples located in three different kinds of environment: extreme cold (northern Eurasia), extreme heat (Asia and Africa), and the superior temperate or mean climate between the two extremes (Greece). The Hippocratic theory of the four bodily “humors” (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) and corresponding psychological “temperaments” (sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic) was coordinated with the Presocratic theories of the four corresponding environmental elements—air, fire, earth, and water, respectively. The qual- ities of the humors—warm-moist, warm-dry, cold-dry, and cold-moist, respectively— were thought to determine the composition and behavior of the human soul in a macrocosm-microcosm relationship.42 Hippocrates of Kos, a Greek island lying to the south of the Ionian Coast, may have been influenced by Heraclitus, who was some seventy-five years his senior and was from Ephesus in Ionia. In the extant fragments of Heraclitus, we find the first of the few occurrences of the word philosophos (“lover of wisdom”) in the writings of the Presocratics that have survived the ravages of time: “Philosophers must indeed inquire into many things” (DK B35). Heraclitus provides a climatological and ecological conception of the higher thinking part of the soul. He seems to think that it was composed of the purest air as indicated by his comment on the cyclical transformations of the phase states of the underlying stuff into one another: “Becoming water is death for souls, just as becoming earth is death for water, but from earth water is born, and from water soul” (DK B36). Soul occupies the place of air in the cycle of material transformations first set out byAnaximenes (as detailed and documented in Chapters 2 and 3). Accordingly, “A dry soul,” Heraclitus declared, “is wisest and best” (DK B118). In other words, a necessary condition for achieving wisdom, for the lover of wisdom, was remaining warm, dry, and lite as one inquired into “many things” in the clear light of sunny Ionia.43

41 Zeller 1931, p. 19. 42 Glacken 1967, pp. 80ff. and Macauley 2010. 43 The correspondence is not perfect because air corresponds with the warm-moist humor (blood) in the Hippocratic humoralist system while fire corresponds with the warm-dry humor (yellow bile). But the correspondence is close enough to warrant our suspicion that Hippocrates may have been influenced by Heraclitus. The prominence of fire in Heraclitus’s philosophy may have led to the discrepancy.

Introduction | 33 Aristotle, contrary to the Presocratics, maintained that the cosmos had no absolute beginning and was eternal. Like them, nevertheless, he detailed the evolution of the environmental conditions, related economic conditions (raw materials, agriculture, basic necessities), and political conditions (division of labor, class structure, freedom) necessary for the kind of leisure in which theoretical sciences and philosophy could emerge in different historical periods. In the Politics, Aristotle provides an account of the evolution of human society (anthropogony and politogony). There, he maintains that the optimum political conditions were themselves made possible by the optimum environmental conditions of the geography and climate of Greece. In doing so, he is evidently drawing on the Hippocratic writings and similar ideas of environmental determinism found in the geographical histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Aristotle notes that “the whole inhabited world (tēn oikoumenēn) is divided up among the nations (ethnēsin).” Aristotle traces the levels of spiritedness and intelligence (both of which are required for political organization, rule, and freedom) in the natural characters (tēn physin) of the world’s peoples back to their respective geographies and climates. The extreme cold climate of northern Eurasia accounts for peoples “full of spirit (thumou) but somewhat deficient in intelligence (dianoias) and skill (technēs)”; and the extreme hot climate of Asia for peoples who “are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit.” Only the Greeks, he claimed, combine spiritedness with intelligence because only Greece has the golden-mean environmental conditions of a favorable geography and temperate climate. “The Greek race participates in both characters,” Aristotle avers, “just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent. Hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains constitutional unity.”44 And his student Alexander proved that point. Aristotle made the related claim in the Metaphysics (1074b) that “every art (technēs) and philosophy (philosophias) has probably been repeatedly developed to the utmost and has again perished.” The reason why is elaborated in his Meteorology (351a–353a), in which, like Anaximander, Aristotle presented a cyclical history of the earth. He attributes the rise and fall of human civilizations to continuous, long-term geological, hydrological, and, especially, climatological change. Anticipating current paleo-climatologists and classical historians, Aristotle cites climate change, drought, and, in consequence, crop failure as factors contributing to the collapse of the late Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization (1600–1100 BCE) celebrated in the Homeric

44 Aristotle, Politics 1327b, after H. Rackham, tr. See also Glacken 1967, pp. 93–95 for treatment of environmental determinism in Aristotle’s Problems.

34 | Greek Natural Philosophy writings.45 Its collapse ushered in the Greek Dark Age lasting until about 800 BCE, followed by the rise of city-states during the Archaic Age, and culminating with the birth of philosophy in Miletus in the first quarter of the 6th century BCE. In a trilogy consisting of the Republic (politogony), Timaeus (cosmogony), and Critias (anthropogony), Plato also presented a cyclical natural history of postglacial Mediterranean environmental change accounting for the rise and fall of former civilizations, their arts and sciences, virtue, and wisdom.46 As represented in the mythic account of the Critias, the demise of archaic Athens and Atlantis was due to earthquakes, floods, deforestation, and soil erosion.47 An abrupt rise in sea level of, perhaps, 120 meters did occur at about 12,500 BCE due to the melting of the glaciers that covered most of Europe and about half of Asia and North America. That’s around the time—some 9000 years before his own—that Plato says that the Atlantans attacked the Athenians. A sudden postglacial sea-level rise might account for the ubiquity of flood stories around the world, which Plato exploited for his own Atlantis myth.48

(IV) MODERN ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM

The Greek and, later, Roman ideas of environmental determinism influenced Medieval and, then, Modern thought in figures such as Charles-Luis Montesquieu, Alexander von Humboldt, and Johann Gottfried Herder. They were most extensively applied to the question of the birth of Greek philosophy by the great German geographical historians of philosophy, Eduard G. Zeller, Wilhelm Windelband, and Theodor Gomperz, in the late 19th century.49 Their historiographies were, unfortunately, soon eclipsed by the aforementioned “Greek Miracle” thesis of 20th-century philosophical historiography. “Where we are dealing with the higher intellectual life of a nation,” wrote Gomperz, “the first place is claimed by its geographical conditions,” and so, one should begin with the “natural gifts” from the Greek environment that contributed to the birth of philosophy.50 In the opening sections on Greek geography in their

45 See C. S. Zerefos and E. C. Zerefos 1978 and Drake 2012. 46 Plato himself unites these three dialogues in the Timaeus, which begins with a summary of the Republic through Book V by Plato’s character Socrates, which he had narrated in full on the previous day. The Timaeus also introduces the Critias, which will have been narrated the day after the discourse of Plato’s character Timaeus on natural philosophy. 47 Settegast 2000. 48 Lambeck et al. 2014 49 Gomperz 1906; Windelband 1906; Zeller 1931. 50 Gomperz, 1906, p. 28.

Introduction | 35 monumental histories of philosophy, still used in courses today, one finds these three historians highlighting the role of the following distinctive environmental factors in the birth of philosophy. First, as Anaximander’s map showed, a location at the east-west crossroads between Asia and Europe and at the north-south crossroads between North Africa (especially Egypt) and Eurasia, along with an archipelago of Mediterranean seaports facing in all four compass directions, facilitated the rise of trade-based economic wealth, resultant leisure, and democratic freedoms in stable city-states—all necessary conditions for the flourishing of the arts, sciences, and philosophy. Such a location made possible the fluid cultural transmission of technologies and ideas from the older Near Eastern and North African civilizations to Greece. Second, a sea-girt topography of narrow isolated valleys and plains between high mountains provided natural obstacles to foreign invasion from the great Eastern empires and barriers between the different Greek peoples themselves. Such a topography was conducive to the development of a network of independent Greek polises united by a common language and civilization—small autonomous city- states, domestic cultural diversity, individualism, freedom of thought, and political experimentation. Third, the region’s sunny temperate climate emerged after the end of the last glacial maximum some fifteen thousand years ago. Such a climate fostered not only agriculture and animal husbandry but also the characteristic outdoor settings and dynamics of Greek religious, political, and intellectual life. Greek philosophy was not at all like the cloistered indoor activity of today’s ivory tower discipline. It was essentially an outdoor activity. Its “classroom” was only the surrounding light- and warmth-giving natural cosmos of the sky, the land, the sea, and the public square. Heraclitus did not write his book for other philosophers but deposited it and made it publicly accessible in the wind-swept Temple of Artemis, the goddess of wildlands and the protectoress of animals in his hometown of Ephesus. The Stoics were so called because they hung out and philosophized around the great stoa (“porch”) in the Athenian marketplace. The Cynics were so called because they lived “dog-like” (cynikos) in the streets of Athens. Before them, Plato philosophized, accompanied by his associates, in the aforementioned ancient olive orchard called Academia, which Plato purchased for that purpose. Epicurus’s school was called “The Garden” because it conducted its business in a garden near the founder’s house. Finally, the richness and beauty of the postglacial Greek landscapes inspired the distinctively Greek love of beauty, wonderment, and fascination with “sweetness and light.” It also spurred on “generalizing powers” and the “idealization” of nature and the

36 | Greek Natural Philosophy human form in the arts of poetry and painting; in architecture; and in sciences such as geometry.51 The Presocratic sketches of a beautifully harmonious cosmos and its justly balanced elements of earth, air, fire, andwater reflect the Greek landscapes from which they sprang forth. The Greek verb phainō—meaning “bring to light (phaos)”—was adopted, first, by Democritus to mean that which appears to the senses; it comes over into English as “phenomenon.”52 The Greek noun theōros was originally what an envoy sent to consult an oracle was called and later what a spectator at the Olympic games was called; the related verb theōreō means “gaze” or “look at.”53 Plato and then Aristotle adopted it to describe the basic activity of philosophers—theorizing—and from the sense they gave it comes the English word “theory.” The Greek word eidos originally meant “that which is seen”; from that it came to mean “shape”; Plato and, then, Aristotle adopted it to mean “form” in the abstract sense of kind or type.54 These transformations of common words into quasi-technical philosophical terms all reflect a light-related orientation to vision. For the Greek philosophers, knowing is like seeing—analogous to seeing. Is it really any wonder, then, that Heraclitus, one of the earliest idealizing philosophers, said that all things are an exchange for solar “fire”—the source of the clear light of the sunny Greek landscape?

51 Gomperz 1906, p. 27. 52 See LSJ, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=113091&context=lsj&action=hw-list-click (retrieved 01-23-17). 53 See LSJ, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=49930&context=lsj&action=hw-list-click and http://stephanus.tlg. uci.edu/lsj/#eid=49911&context=lsj&action=hw-list-click, (retrieved 01-23-17); Nightingale 2004. 54 See LSJ, http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu/lsj/#eid=31856&context=lsj&action=from-search (retrieved 01-23-17).

Introduction | 37