Discussions
Map compliments of the Oxford Classical Dictionary. See https://oxfordre.com/classics/page/maps/maps-of-the-ancient-world.
Studies
The Presocratics
The philosophers before Socrates focused on how the world arose and how it works. They wrote speculatively about nature and the cosmos. Some challenged the possibility of science. And some emphasized practical studies about how people can get along or get ahead in the world. Their speculations led to advances in scientific knowledge.
Socrates
Socrates turned away from cosmology, and while he was fascinated with efforts of the Sophists to pursue on practical subjects, he himself insisted that what we should concern ourselves with was not our own success but what is right and wrong, good an evil. He turned philosophy towards ethics and moral theory.
Plato
A follower of Socrates, Plato wished to put the study of ethics on a firm foundation by developing a science of reality, or metaphysics, a science of knowledge, or epistemology, and studies of political science, education, aesthetics, and, eventually, natural science. He saw the world of experience as subject to an ideal realm.
Aristotle
A student of Plato, Aristotle never accepted his mentor's focus on the ideal realities of another world. He saw the ground of reality as concrete physical objects, from which ideal or universal entities were but abstractions. He developed a powerful account of science, and divided knowledge into most of the departmental studies that make up the modern curriculum.
Early Science
Early Greek science was deeply influenced by most of the early thinkers. The Presocratics believed in making and testing hypotheses. They invented concepts such as those of sources, principles, elements, compounds, atoms and empty space. Aristotle formalized logic and also took over the concept of a logic of scientific discovery and proof from Plato.
Recent Discussions
Being 1.5.2.3: Leucippus’ Atomism
We come at last to the secret success of fifth century BCE pluralism: atomism. We have the advantage of hindsight here: after 25 centuries of toying with the idea that there might be some minimal particles that form the building blocks of all matter, it was discovered that atomism was true. (In the meantime, it emerged that the minimal particles were not pieces of solid matter, but themselves composed of subatomic particles: weird packets of energy. But that is a story for another time. In any case, the ancient theory
Being 1.5.2: Paradigm Shift
Parmenides’ attack on cosmology and natural philosophy did not put an end to the project. If anything, his attack was followed by a more vibrant burst of theorizing and explaining natural phenomena. But there is a notable lack of refutations of Parmenides’ demolition of natural philosophy. According to leading scholars, the Pluralists do not really engage with Parmenides’ offensive, but merely assume without argument that there is a plurality of basic substances that can congregate to produce the objects of our experience, or separate to bring objects to an end.[1]
Being 1.5: the Rebirth of Cosmology
1.5.1 How is change possible? Parmenides had seemingly dealt a fatal blow to cosmology and the proto-scientific project that had characterized the earliest phase of philosophy. But if there was nothing but Being, and Being could not be differentiated and could not change in any way, Parmenides had said everything that could be said about What-Is in a few lines of his grandiose poem. Natural philosophy and science were dead, and there was no obvious way to revive them. According to the wisdom of the twentieth century, Parmenides was the
Being 1.2: The Birth of the Cosmos
The story of the birth of the gods was not unique to the Greeks. Other cultures had similar stories involving different gods. For instance, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, and the Babylonians all had their own stories and often (like the Greeks), more than one version of the birth of the gods and the creation of the human race. The Hebrews had a story about one God who created the world and the human race, but that is a story for another time. But what happened in Greece in the sixth
Being 1.4.4: Parmenides the Revolutionary
Parmenides may well, as most scholars think, have developed his alternative cosmology mainly as an object lesson on the futility of cosmologies. After all, he announced at the outset of his cosmological treatise that positing two “forms” or elements, namely Light and Night, was a mistake. Yet he put a great deal more effort into his alternative cosmology than was really necessary if it was, in the end, only a throw-away theory. Although we do not know how many lines his cosmological treatise took up in the poem, by all
Being 1.4.3: Parmenides the Scientist
So far we can recognize Parmenides as offering a significant alternative to the quasi-scientific theories of his predecessors: a theory in which the world is composed of changeless elements that combine in compounds. It turns out that the insight he developed offered the foundation of the true account of substances arrived at scientifically in the nineteenth century CE. The future development of science was, of course, unknown and unknowable to the thinkers of earlier centuries, and so could not, of itself, have motivated a major shift of thinking about the
Being 1.4.2: Parmenides on How to Build a World
1.4.2.1 Parmenides the Cosmologist The second half of Parmenides’ poem is a cosmology—an account of the structure and nature of the cosmos. It does what most of Parmenides’ predecessors had done, providing a theory of the origins of the world, a quasi-scientific account of the workings of nature. Unfortunately, we do not have extensive quotations from the second half of the poem, as we do of the first half. But by all accounts, the second “half” of the poem was considerably longer than the first half, and elaborately worked out.
Being 1.4: Parmenides and The Discovery of Essence
1.4.1 Essentialism 1.4.1.1 Parmenides the Monist According to later tradition, Parmenides’ great contribution to the debate about being is his claim that there is only one thing in the cosmos: What-Is or Being. Parmenides is a strict Monist who recognizes only one reality. According to Aristotle, however, who is the first thinker to provide something like a history of the beginnings of philosophy, Parmenides was not the first monist. Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus said there was just one thing. In the case of Thales, it was Water. In the case
Being 1.3. Being vs. Not-Being
Parmenides’ Response Just when it seemed to be safe to consider Becoming as supplying the origin of Being, there arose a serious challenge to Becoming. The author was Parmenides of Elea, a Greek city-state in southern Italy, and the first important philosopher to come from a western Greek city. Almost all of the previous thinkers (all but Xenophanes, who was a wandering minstrel), wrote prose treatises. Parmenides offered a poem in epic meter, in which a young man (presumably Parmenides’ avatar) is led by chariot to the House of Night
Being 1.3: The Being of Becoming
What is really real? According to Thales, it was Water. According to Anaximander, it was the Boundless. According to Anaximenes, it was Air. There was a fourth early figure, Xenophanes, who may have held that what was really real was Earth. (Aristotle, one of our main sources for reports of early thinkers, doesn’t think much of Xenophanes, so he tends to get left of the the story. But he has a good claim to be a serious contributor to early thought.) So which stuff deserves to win the prize as
Being 1.1: The Birth of the Gods
There is an ancient Latin saying, ex nihilo nihil fit, “nothing comes from nothing.” It is often supposed that early Greek philosophy is based on this principle. It is not, but, as we shall see, the principle is a “discovery” of early Greek philosophy. But the principle offers a firm foundation for historiography, the study of history. Every step forward is based on a previous step. In the case of Greek philosophy, the previous step consists of a mythological account. Homer, the alleged author of theepic poems Iliad and Odyssey,
A History of Being
Introduction What is there? Why does the world exist? Why is there something and not nothing? These are basic questions. They may be asked by a young child or by an elderly sage. There are no obvious answers. The questions may seem irritating (when asked by a child) or exasperating (when asked by a sage). But somehow we human beings cannot help but ask them. These questions are philosophical questions. Philosophy typically deals with ultimate and often impossible questions. Religion deals with them. Science, now, has begun to deal with