The First Philosophers
an educational website
by
Daniel W. Graham, Ph.D.
The early Greek philosophers are often considered to be bold and imaginative, but to lack the scientific skills to understand the world correctly. Yet in many ways their inquiries produced revolutions in thought that created the intellectual world we have lived in every since. This is the story of the first philosophers of the Western world and their contributions.
Wisdom is one thing: to understand the design that steers all things through all. (Heraclitus)
Projects
THE PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHERS
ΟΙ ΠΡΩΤΟΙ ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΗΣΑΝΤΕΣ
The philosophers before Socrates turned away from mythological explanations of ominous events such as thunderstorms, earthquakes, and plagues. In mythology we find Zeus hurling thunderbolts, Poseidon shaking the earth, and Apollo shooting arrows that produced plagues. The early thinkers, however, proposed natural processes as the cause of natural events. Lightning was caused by wind breaking out of clouds, earthquakes by waves of water under the earth, plagues by noxious vapors. According to Aristotle, the earliest philosophers theorized that a single underlying stuff was the source and substance of all things: for Thales it was water, for Anaximenes it was air, for Heraclitus it was fire. If that was so, then there was no radical change in the world, but only a change in the appearances of the one true reality, for instance water. Yet we find the early philosophers recognizing real change as one stuff turns into another. Parmenides of Elea criticized his predecessors for believing in radical change. So what were the early philosophers saying? How did they understand nature, and what did they learn from it?
SOCRATES
ΣΩΚΡΑΤΗΣ
Socrates is one of the most influential of the first philosophers, and also one of the most enigmatic. He went around asking questions of his fellow citizens, most notably asking them to define a virtue such as justice or courage. He would get them to offer a definition, and then he would proceed to ask more searching questions, which often showed that the person he was asking held contradictory views about the subject. Meanwhile, he claimed not to have any expert knowledge about the subjects he was asking. Yet he maintained that the study of virtue and goodness held the greatest importance for the person’s soul. Was he then just mocking others? Or was he, as the Oracle at Delphi once declared, a thinker than whom none was wiser? His activities led to his trial and death, which did not discourage him from his quest, but rather made him a kind of martyr to his followers. What was Socrates up to? Was he a scoundrel, or was he, as he declared at this trial, the best thing that ever happened to Athens? I am working on an intellectual biography of the enigmatic philosopher that will attempt to answer these questions. Follow it here.
PLATO
ΠΛΑΤΩΝ
A wealthy aristocrat, Plato was fascinated by the barefoot Socrates and turned his considerable intellectual and literary skills to defending him against the charges of being a pernicious influence in Athens. Plato was one of at least seven Socratics who defended the memory of Socrates by writing dialogues that were fictional recreations of the kinds of conversations he had in the streets of Athens. Plato emerged as the greatest writer of the new genre, won a propaganda war against the critics of Socrates, and then turned his character Socrates into a mouthpiece for a new Platonic philosophy, in which Plato fortified Socrates' moral philosophy with supporting theories. While Socrates made the soul the subject of moral virtue, Plato declared it to be an immortal being that underwent reincarnation. In its wanderings the soul encountered a realm of pure ideals, the Forms, that grounded value theory. Knowledge was recollection of the Forms from previous lives. Plato transformed Socrates’ question-and-answer approach from a method of ridding oneself of inner contradictions to a method for recovering timeless truths. He envisaged philosophy not as a path that any man could pursue to attain virtue but as a path for gifted thinkers (whether male or female) to become an elite class of leaders. He even saw an opportunity to introduce cosmology and science to Socratic philosophy, as long as the cosmos could be seen as embodying virtue and goodness. What was Plato's relationship with Socrates, and how did he change the philosophical debate?
ARISTOTLE
ΑΡΙΣΤΟΤΕΛΗΣ
Aristotle was a systematic philosopher in a way that Plato never was. Where Plato offered a comprehensive vision of how philosophy worked, Aristotle worked out details, filling in the blanks--often with insights from Plato, which Plato had never fully worked out. But even in Aristotle there is a kind of tension. In his so-called “Organon” or logical writings, he says that primary substances (the particular realities such as Socrates) are metaphysically simple: there is nothing more philosophically basic than Socrates. Yet in his other works, he subdivides particular substances into form and matter; for instance, he says that the matter of Socrates is his body, the form is his soul. That leads him to ask which is prior: form or matter? Aristotle prefers the former, but he finds that both answers get him into trouble. If matter is the ultimate reality, Aristotle turns into a Platonist, for whom ideals are more real than concrete realities. If form is the ultimate reality, he becomes a lowly materialist like (he believes) many of the Presocratics. What is the way out of this dilemma, and how can Aristotle make his theory work?
EARLY GREEK SCIENCE
ΠΕΡΙ ΦΥΣΕΩΣ ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ
The Presocratic philosophers were for the most part students of nature. They sought to understand how nature worked so that they could explain natural events, including violent events such as storms and earthquakes. Criticized by Parmenides of Elea and his followers for allowing change, they developed more sophisticated theories of how the world works, including the theory of chemical elements and the theory of atoms. The early philosophers of nature have been praised by modern scholars for introducing scientific attitudes, but faulted for not making any actual advances in science. To the contrary, they offered accounts of meteorological phenomena that approximate modern explanations. And they made major discoveries in astronomy that set that study on the path of a science. Parmenides the critic of early Greek science offered the correct explanation of the moon’s light, while a few years later Anaxagoras used Parmenides’ insight to correctly explain both solar and lunar eclipses. This was an epoch-making achievement, accomplished without modern scientific instruments or advanced computations. The study of astronomy was transformed into a set of problems of geometry, and eventually combined with a database of observations from Babylonian astronomy to allow predictions of eclipses that could be built into a hand-held mechanical computer, the famous Antikythera Mechanism. How was this possible?
Featured Project: Socrates and Athens
I am working on a biography of Socrates that will at least attempt for the first time to integrate his thought with his life. There have been illuminating biographies that have emphasized the world he lived in, but without really addressing his thought; and other studies that have stressed his thought, while not quite connecting his activities with his philosophizing. Here I will post the latest installment of the life of Socrates. The text of the life as far as has been published will be found on the Socrates page.
Featured post
16.15 Philosophical Innovations
Until the publication of the Phaedo, Plato had been working in the shadow of Socrates. He was a Socratic, a follower of the idiosyncratic barefoot philosopher—an unlikely one, to be sure: rich, haughty, ambitious, well-educated. He seems to have emerged from the group of Socrates’ supporters in the first place because of his literary genius. He could make Socrates come alive on the page. He could make every inquiry a suspenseful drama in which the