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Ancient Greek Philosophy Ancient Greek Philosophy “The only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing…”- Socrates Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit Three EA * The Pre Socratics • The Archaic age saw a change in the way people thought of themselves. They became much more individualistic, and less focused on putting the polis before their own needs. • To go along with this change to the focus on the individual one can also look to the development and origins of philosophy. The periods of development of philosophy center on the most renowned of philosophers, Socrates, so that the period of philosophy before him is simply defined as the Pre Socratic Age, and those philosophers who came before him simply as The Presocratics. • So let us examine the history of philosophy in this age by asking you to look out the window at the world around you. What do you see? Everything you can describe is matter. Now look at those things you described and tell me what they are doing. These actions are examples of change. The questions that should occur to you as a result of these observations are, “What is matter?” and “What are all of these things made of?” and possibly “What causes these changes?” • A person of the ancient era would look to religion to answer these questions. For example, the sun is the god Helios, or Apollo, driving his chariot across the sky. A modern person knows the sun is a giant fusion reactor floating in the void of space. So what makes our modern understanding of the nature of the sun different from the ancient one? * The Pre Socratics • Religion tends to be an inflexible thing, so people tend to believe things that are disproven for long after the time that they are. For example, that the sun is a chariot on fire being driven across the sky, despite the fact that no one has ever seen any flying horses. • By contrast, modern people tend to look for explanations in observable nature, through forces we see and understand. For example, though none of us has ever been to the sun, we can observe similar phenomena here on Earth. After general observation of these phenomena, we can apply what we learn about nature on Earth to make conjectures about the sun. Moreover, we are not married to any specific idea or theory, if it can later be proven wrong. “The sun is fire” is not dogma, just an idea, and as an idea we can identify problems with it: • How could a fire’s heat reach too far? • How can you have a fire in a vacuum? • How come the sun does not burn out? • Because we subject our theories to critical analysis, false explanations can be refuted, and as we take in new observations we can come up with new theories to overcome these problems, making refinements along the way. In short, by observing nature, we can understand how it works. We can explain the universe, not by reference to the divine, but by reference to the mundane experiences and observations that make up our lives. * The Pre Socratics • Today we call this process science. In Ancient Greece, they called it philosophy. • The word philosophy is composed of the Greek word philos meaning love of, and sophia meaning wisdom. So philosophy is literally the love of wisdom. • Greeks were engaging in philosophical thought about 200 years before Socrates, even though when we think of Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle automatically come to mind. • The Presocratic philosophers attempted to tackle the same questions that I asked of you at the beginning of this discussion; what are things made of? And why do things change? These questions seem to have begun as a matter of linguistics rather than science. • The heart of the problem was the Greek word esti or to be. If the sun is gas, then the sun is not a man in a chariot. If the sun is here, then the sun is not there. While these may seem like perfectly logical statements to us, logic had not been invented when the first philosophers began writing in 600 B.C. * The Pre Socratics • What upset the Presocratics was not that the sun was not Helios in a chariot, but that the sun both was and was not. It seemed wrong for the sun not to be. Everything must be something at all times, no matter what changes we might see. • A group of philosophers known as Monists decided that everything in the universe was comprised of a single substance. For Thales (624-546 B.C.), the first Greek philosopher, that substance was water. He noted that water could become a solid or a gas or a liquid. Though ice is a solid and is not a liquid, it is always water. From this he determined that everything in the universe must be water in different states. He described water as the first constant in the universe. All of the other presocratics would follow his example in trying to describe the constants, or first principles, of the universe. • For Thales’ student Anaximander (610-546 B.C.) the constant could not be something with set characteristics like water. Instead he argued that the universe was made up of some stuff without any characteristics at all and that matter gains its characteristics (hot, cold, hard, soft, etc.) from being separated from this indefinable whole. * The Pre Socratics • Anaximenes (585-528 B.C.) decided that this stuff without qualities was air. The other elements like earth and water were made by compressing air, while fire was made by spreading out air thinly. • We call these first three philosophers the Monists because they beloved the universe was made of just one material. They are also called the Milesian School because they all came from the city of Miletus. • Meanwhile on the island of Samos, Pythagoras (582-496 B.C.) proposed a very different constant for the universe: numbers. We all remember that Pythagoras was famous for his theorem a2+b2=c2, but Pythagoras was not trying to help you calculate the sides of a right triangle when he came up with this theorem. He was trying to explain a basic constant in the universe, which he would demonstrate as follows: * The Pre Socratics • Pythagoras would have a person draw a right triangle. • He would then use tiles to draw a square on each side (which is where we get the word squared) • He would then have people count the number of tiles on each side, and lo and behold, the number of tiles on the hypotenuse always equaled the sum of the tiles from the other two sides. • Pythagoras realized that by doing this over and over and over again that no matter the size or shape of the right triangle, the number of tiles in the squares of the sides always equaled the number of squares on the hypotenuse. While the many triangles we perceive might seem different, they all follow the same constant rule. • This was not the only constant that Pythagoras discovered. He was also the first to explain the mathematic ratios of music. No matter how long a string is, another string, one sixth its length, would produce a chord. Realizing that these sorts of ratios pop up everywhere, Pythagoras supposed that numbers and ratios were the main constants of the universe. * The Pre Socratics • Heraclitus of Ephesus (534-475 B.C.) had a very different idea. To him, the only constant was change. He believed opposing forces of the universe were constantly trying to tear the world apart. These constants were only held together by a natural law or logos. He compared this to the two ends of a bow pulling away from each other. Left to their own devices this would create a worthless stick, however when held together by the natural string of logos they make a powerful and dynamic tool. • Like Pythagoras, Heraclitus had decided that the constants of the universe were not in matter itself, but rather in how matter behaves. From him we received the adage, “All things change, so that all things may remain the same.” His ideas would later be revived in chaos theory. • Directly opposed to Heraclitus was Parmenides of Elea (510-440 B.C.) Parmenides was so hung up on the is/is not problem that he denied all change of difference in the universe, and his work is some of the most difficult to understand. * The Pre Socratics • Basically Parmenides postulated that the entire universe was one giant sphere of unidentifiable stuff. In this he copied Anaximenes in thinking that to have characteristics of everything, the main stuff of the universe had to have no characteristics of its own. Yet Parmenides went further. • Parmenides denied that this stuff ever broke away from the original stuff to form other things. For him the universe just is. It never was not and it always will be. To say that an apple is different from an orange is to say that the apple is not an orange, and this is unacceptable. For him, things never changed, and they could never move. To say that the apple fell from the tree is to say that the apple is not on the tree any longer. • Parmenides philosophy would have lasting implications for future philosophy by placing ideas on a higher order than observation, as you would have to ignore the evidence from your senses to accept his theory, which would not be very scientific. * The Pre Socratics • Another resident of Elea, Zeno (490-430 B.C.) attempted to demonstrate Parmenides theory with a series of paradoxes.
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