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 2.1: The Rise of the Sophists
2.1.1 The Lure of Practical Knowledge The mid-fifth century BCE saw the rise of the sophists. The sophists were intellectuals who could claim to be heirs of the wise men previous centuries. One group of wise men came to be known as the Seven Sages, who included Thales, by all accounts the first philosopher. But even here the picture is a bit muddy. For the term ‘philosopher’ (philosophos) which appeared occasionally in early times, was not yet the name of a recognized profession or intellectual activity. Terms like starting with
The Buried Library: A Conference on the Herculaneum Papyri
On perhaps the 24th of October, 79 CE, in southern Italy, Mt. Vesuvius erupted with more force many atom bombs. Within 48 hours, the nearby cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried under up to 80 feet of volcanic ash; thousands of people died in the calamity. In Herculaneum, one lavish villa with an extensive library was buried. In the 1500s, some locals digging below the surface of the land discovered ancient structures and artefacts. They searched and found what looked like small burned logs that turned out to be
Being 1.5.3.4: The Emergence of Ancient Greek Meteorology
Before Parmenides and especially before Anaxagoras, there was no strong distinction between what we would call astronomy and what we would call meteorology. Both had to do with astra, stars or heavenly bodies, and with meteora, mid-air phenomena. On most theories, these were continuous with each other. Anaximander, it is true, had heavenly bodies that were much larger than earth but, my modern standards, not much larger: the sun consisted of a circular tube like a bicycle tire that had a diameter 27 times that of earth; the moon, a
Being 1.5.3.3: Catch a Falling Star
Soon after Anaxagoras had published his theory of the heavens, a shooting star appeared in the daytime, leaving a trail as it plunged through earth’s atmosphere. It crashed to the ground in the vicinity of Aegospotami “Goat Rivers,” a town in the Hellespont in northern Greece. It left a large stone the size of a wagon, presumably in a huge crater.[1] It would become a tourist attraction down to the time of the Roman Empire. It was, in modern terms, a meteorite from outer space. Something strange happened in the
Being 1.5.3.2: Empedocles the Cosmologist
We hear from Aristotle that Empedocles was younger than Anaxagoras, but presumably not by much, since the two philosophers were, by all accounts, contemporaries.[1] Empedocles was a native of Acragas (which the Romans called Agrigentum, the Italians Agrigento), a Greek colony in the middle of the south coast of Sicily. He was influenced not only by Parmenides and other Presocratics, but also by Pythagoras in his views of the soul and religion. Like Parmenides, he composed philosophical poetry in epic verse in two poems, On Nature and Purifications, or perhaps
Being 1.5.3: The Breakthrough
In speculating about the nature of the cosmos and particularly the heavens, Parmenides had done something that no one on earth had ever done before. He had made a major scientific breakthrough. And, as we shall see, soon everybody—well, at least everybody who studied the cosmos—knew it. 1.5.3.1 Anaxagoras the Cosmologist Writing in the early fifth century BCE, Anaxagoras probably led the way in appreciating Parmenides’ breakthrough. Born in Clazomenae, a Greek colony in Ionia on the Aegean coast of Anatolia, he was the first Ionian philosopher to set up
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