How did early Greek philosophy evolve? And how does it differ from later Greek philosophy? Roughly, early Greek philosophy is co-extensive with what is commonly called Presocratic philosophy. That is, there was a kind of philosophizing that went on before Socrates, but which is noticeably different from the kind of philosophizing Socrates did, and which was so influential that it changed the course of philosophy forever after.
The recognition, for better or for worse, of a Presocratic phases of philosophy, belongs to the nineteenth century, when scholars like Hermann Diels made the “Vorsokratiker” or Presocratics a distinct category of thought from Socrates and his successors. Here I would like to trace the scholarly account of early Greek or Presocratic philosophy in the twentieth century. Because we are all, in some measure, indebted to and sometimes misguided by authoritative accounts of the historical figures and movements we study.
Aristotle’s Story
But to understand the twentieth and twenty-first century accounts, we have to go back even earlier to Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. Aristotle was arguably the greatest philosopher of antiquity (and perhaps of all time; pardon my bias), and among other things, he left an account of the development of philosophy up to his time. He made numerous observations about his predecessors in his writings, but the most concentrated and influential treatment is that in his Metaphysics Book I or Book Alpha (A). There he started his study of the theory of reality (“metaphysics”—not Aristotle’s word, but taken from the title given his work by later editors) by discussing the development of the understanding of causes or explanations by his predecessors. He started with Thales of Miletus, and continued to the theory of his master, Plato.
Aristotle’s account of his predecessors is not exactly a history of philosophy, for his account is fairly schematic, and while it is roughly chronological and does purport to show a kind of progress from the first philosopher to Plato, it tends to jump back and forth in its narration, and it fails to even consider how one thinker influenced or interacted with another. Yet it offers the first real study of early Greek philosophy, and it has been enormously influential on modern scholarship.
In Metaphysics A, Aristotle describes Thales as grounding philosophy in an archē or principle, from which the world or cosmos emerges by a kind of differentiation. The principle Thales lays down is water. In the beginning, everything was water, from which emerged the other stuffs such as earth and fire, which constituted the cosmos. The cosmos, according to Thales, consists of a flat Earth floating like a raft on a vast ocean of water. When the surface of the ocean becomes choppy, the Earth trembles in an earthquake. For the first time, Thales had offered an account of the origin and nature of the cosmos that was not based on mythology and legend, but on something like a scientific hypothesis. Aristotle saw the same kind of theory in Thales’ successor Anaximenes of Miletus, who said that in the beginning, everything was air, from which earth precipitated out to form a flat Earth floating on a cushion of air. Similarly, Heraclitus of Ephesus said that everything was Fire.
Aristotle goes on to recognize that other philosophers recognize not one principle, but many. For instance, Empedocles has four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Anaxagoras has an unlimited number of stuffs (including Empedocles’ four elements among others, such as aether, bone, and flesh). He also speaks of the Atomists Leucippus and his follower Democritus, who said that everything is composed of atoms, indivisible tiny particles that clump together to make the objects we experience.
Following Aristotle’s own analyses, the earliest Greek philosophers are Material Monists, that is: philosophers who posit only one basic stuff (such as water), which is a kind of matter. According to Aristotle, every other kind of stuff we encounter, such as wood, is really just a modification of water; there is one stuff that appears in many guises, but in essence, every manifestation is really water. Those who posit several elements, as Empedocles does, are Pluralists, positing several basic stuffs that can mix to form mixtures or compounds, such as wood must be; but in essence there are only (for Empedocles) four permanent and basic stuffs. In the case of the Atomists, there are many kinds of atoms, but there they fall into common types such as those that make up stretches of earth, air, water, and fire. Only the atoms themselves are permanent, while the conglomerates they make up are temporary and perishable.
The Twentieth-Century Story
Thus far Aristotle. Now in modern times, starting in the eighteenth but mainly appearing in the nineteenth century, scholars, drawing on Aristotle, saw the evolution of philosophy as proceeding from Monism to Pluralism. And in the twentieth century, scholars identified the reason why: Parmenides’ philosophy had forced a rethinking of how nature works. Parmenides had said that there is only one thing: what-is or being itself. There is no non-being because non-being is nothing, and nothing cannot exist. There can be no coming-to-be or perishing because something could only come-to-be out of nothing and perish into nothing, but there is no nothing. (There have been various subtle ways of spelling out Parmenides’ theory, but I will keep it simple.) Aristotle himself does not identify Parmenides as the turning point, nor does he emphasize the transition from monism to pluralism as a historically motivated, though he does present the first philosophers as being monists.[1]
Since, according to twentieth-century commentators, Parmenides had rejected coming-to-be as impossible, the Pluralists were forced to posit several elements as basic to account for changes we experience in the world. Only thus could they “save the phenomena”: they concede to Parmenides that there is no coming-to-be or perishing, but they insist on less problematic kinds of change, including changing place and changing attributes, so that mixtures or compounds can account for what appears to be changes of nature. If you put milk, flour, and eggs in a bowl, mix them and cook them, you get a cake. The cake is not something new (emerging from nothing), but just a rearrangement of the given ingredients.
So far so good. But do the Pluralists really answer Parmenides and justify a kind of scientific philosophy in the face of his philosophical objections? No, says Jonathan Barnes, one of the most philosophical astute of twentieth-century commentators. Parmenides’ monism leaves no room for change of any kind; it precludes not only coming-to-be and perishing but change of place and alternation (change of properties). The Pluralists’ “revival is a fundamentally a flop: it does not answer Elea” (Parmenides of Elea and his followers).[2]
We get, then, the following scheme:
Material Monists → Parmenides → Pluralists (failure)
First, please note that the twentieth-century story goes beyond Aristotle’s version. Aristotle presents Material Monism as appearing before Pluralism, but he does not explain the latter as the response to a problem produced by the former. In fact, he presents Parmenides as the offering a way out of the dilemma presented by his own system. According to Aristotle, Parmenides is superior to his colleagues Xenophanes and Melissus in presenting a dualistic system in the second part of his poem, where Light and Night (he calls them Hot and Cold, and identifies them as Fire and Earth, respectively), provide the basis for a cosmology.[3] If we follow Aristotle, we will see Parmenides as providing a Pluralist approach which allows us to save the phenomena, and Aristotle as endorsing his approach. If that is so, Parmenides himself abandons, at least for the sake of practical understanding of the world, his own monism in favor of pluralism.
The consensus among twentieth-century commentators is that Parmenides offers his pluralistic cosmology only as an option that has to be rejected because it transgresses his own strictures against plurality: he presents the pluralistic (specifically: dualistic) natural philosophy only to demolish it, and along with it, every other pluralistic theory. Accordingly, the Pluralistic response to Parmenides is a “flop.” Not until we get sophisticated analyses of not-being from Plato (in the Sophist) and Aristotle (in the Physics) do we get a proper refutation of Parmenides that will allow room for a constructive cosmology and natural philosophy.
Problems with the Twentieth-Century Story
There are, however, problems with the twentieth-century story. In the first place, a historical question. Who is Parmenides arguing against? He speaks as if he is attacking benighted thinkers who believe in non-being. But if the scholars are right, at least the progressive thinkers before Parmenides were already monists. They said that there is only one basic reality, water or air or fire (or, if Xenophanes is a Material Monist, earth). True, Parmenides is a much stricter monist than his predecessors, but he does not need to accuse them of positing non-being, because they are only asserting the existence of being. Yet he seems to reserve his most withering criticism for those who believe in coming-to-be and perishing. (According to Aristotle’s own analysis of change, coming-to-be and perishing mark the emergence and disappearance of a substance; these kinds of change are distinct from locomotion, or change of place; alteration, or change of quality, e.g. color; and increase/decrease, or change of quantity, e.g. becoming larger or smaller. He himself defends the possibility of coming-to-be and perishing, but he does not find that kind of change in the early Greek philosophers.) So who, in the first place, is Parmenides attacking?
That question, however, leads us to ask another. What is the evidence that the pre-Parmenidean theorists are Material Monists? Unfortunately, we don’t have their original words in most cases, but, for instance, in reports of Anaximenes’ theory of change, we are told that air comes-to-be (ginesthai) other stuffs.[4] Why does Aristotle (and twentieth-century commentators following him) claim that he and other contemporary natural philosophers do not believe in coming-to-be? Indeed, in the case of Heraclitus, where we do have fairly plentiful quotations, he says of his three basic stuffs, fire, water, and earth, that the death of one is the birth of another?[5] That language explicitly invokes the language of coming-to-be and perishing in its most concrete form, birth and death. That, in turn, suggests that Heraclitus is calling attention to the fact that the transition from one stuff to another is more problematic than Anaximenes and others had thought. If A turns into B and B into C and vice versa, there is no permanent stuff. What is real, then, is not earth or water or fire, but the reciprocal process and balances the bodies of earth, water, and fire.[6] Now we have someone explicitly claiming that the birth of one stuff results from the death of another. We have, in other words, a target for Parmenides to criticize.
Also, please note that without some sort of advanced theory of identity, we can’t even raise issues like this. If you said that, for instance, wood is really water, you had better have some sort of way of distinguishing between what something really is and something that is just an incidental feature of that thing. In other words, you need to distinguish between a thing’s essence and its accidents. Aristotle, for instance, will tell you that Socrates is essentially a man, a human being, but he is incidentally pale or tan. When his complexion changes, he is still Socrates; but if he were changed into a toad, he would (according to Aristotle) no longer exist. But the notion of an essence does not seem to appear in early Greek thought until (wait for it) Parmenides, who gives us signposts for what-is.[7]
Parmenides’ Contributions to Science
What about the massive failure of the Pluralists to answer Parmenides and the Eleatic “school”? The one thing that seems to be missing in ancient accounts is any criticism of Parmenides and his followers by the early Pluralists. In fact, both Anaxagoras and Empedocles allude to Eleatic principles such as No Becoming and No Perishing with approval. They endorse at least a good deal of the Eleatic program without demur. But we never find any criticisms or refutations of that program. Yet our ancient sources love to quote passages in which one philosopher bad-mouths another (as Heraclitus often does of his predecessors and contemporaries). Why not? The most obvious reason seems to me to be that they do not see themselves as competitors of Parmenides, but as followers. They read Parmenides’ cosmology as a breakthrough event in which scientific philosophy is put on a firm foundation. They see the second half of Parmenides’ poem as the application of Eleatic principles to scientific problems.
Now they may be wrong about this. But there is at least one good reason for their reading, which often goes unnoticed. In his own cosmology, Parmenides provides three innovative scientific explanations that not only are ingenious but turn out to be true. First, the Morning Star is the Evening Star, the planet Venus appearing sometimes in the morning sky, sometimes in the evening sky. Secondly, the moon gets its light from the sun, which accounts for the changing phases of the moon, reflecting sunlight off an opaque sphere.[8] Third, the earth is spherical in shape. In Parmenides, the dream of natural philosophers to explain reliably natural phenomena by scientific investigations came to fruition. Parmenides was not only a master theorist in ontology, but was a scientific genius who perceived in the heavens what people from time immemorial had looked at but not understood, the relationship between the sun and the moon, that the moon’s phases were a function of its angular distance from the sun. Anaxagoras would soon exploit that knowledge to explain correctly solar and lunar eclipses, for the first time ever. And about a century later, Plato would endorse a spherical earth and Aristotle would offer sound arguments for Parmenides’ conjecture.[9]
So, whatever the details of the following century or so, the historical headlines should be, not the philosophical failure of the natural philosophers who followed Parmenides, but the triumph of their empirical researches into astronomy and cosmology. Indeed, in the third century BCE, Greek astronomers would measure quite accurately the circumference of the earth by using nothing more than observations of the position of the sun at a solstice and solid geometry.[10]
[1] Aristotle’s understanding of the second philosopher, Anaximander of Miletus, remains unclear. He treats Anaximander sometimes as having a single principle, the Boundless, sometimes as a pluralist whose elements emerge from the Boundless. He does not really discuss him in Metaphysics A.
[2] J. Barnes The Presocratic Philosophers (London, 1982), 442.
[3] Aristotle Metaphysics A5, 986b18-987a2.
[4] Simplicius Physics 24.26-15.1; 149.28-150.4 = Theophrastus frs. 226A-B = DK 13A5.
[5] Heraclitus B36; B76.
[6] Heraclitus B31.
[7] Parmenides B8.1-4.
[8] Parmenides B14, B15.
[9] Plato Phaedo 109a; Aristotle On the Heavens 2.14, 297b23-298a20.
[10] Eratosthenes from Cleomedes De motu circulari corporum caelestium 1.10, pp. 90.20 – 91.2; 94.24 – 100.23.