brief history greek philosophy

8/18/2019 Brief History Greek Philosophy

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Pre-SocratesPythagoras - He founded a religious co mmunity with a set of ascetic a ndceremonial rules, the best-known of which was a prohibition of eating beans.

He taught the doctrine of transmigration os so uls: human beings h ad soulswhich were separable from their bodies, and at death a person’s so ul mightmigrate to another kind of animal. He believed that the soul, having migratedinto different kinds of animal in succession, was eventually reincarnated as ahuman being.

Thales - Mingled geometry w ith religion. He was p erhaps t he rst philosopherto ask q uestions a bout the structure and nature of the c osmos a s a whole. He

maintained that the earth rests o n water, like a log oating in a stream. Butearth and its i nhabitants d id not just rest on water: in some sense, so Thalesbelieved, they were all made out of water. He was c alled a physicist orphilosopher of nature. He said “everything is full of gods”. What he meant isperhaps i ndicated by h is cl aim that the magnet, because it moves i ron, has asoul.

Anaximander - A young co ntemporary of Thales. Made the rst map of the

world and stars. He taught that the earth was c ylindrical in shape, like asection of a pillar. Around the world were gigantic tyres, full of re; each tyrehad a hole through which the re could be seen, and the holes w ere the sunand moon a nd stars. Blockages in the holes ex plained eclipses a nd thephases o f the moon. Eventually the heavenly b odies w ould return to theoriginal re. He says a bout a grand cosmic e thic; the several elements, no lessthan men and gods, must keep within bounds e verlastingly xe d by nature. Hesaid that the basic e lement of everything could be neither water no re, nor

anything similar. It had to be ‘innite’ and ‘unlimited’. ‘The innite is the rstprinciple of things that that exist: it is eternal and ageless, and it contains allthe worlds.’

He was a n e arly proponent of evolution. The human beings we kn ow cannotalways have existed, he argued. Other animals a re able to look a fterthemselves, soon after birth, while humans r equire a long period of nursing; ifhumans h ad originally b een as t hey a re now they could not have survived. He

maintained that in an earlier age there were sh-like animals w ithin which


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human embryos g rew to puberty before bursting forth into the world.

Anaximenes - Said that ultimately e lement was a ir from which everything elsehad come into being. In its stable state, air is invisible, but when it is movedand co ndensed it becomes rst wind and then cloud and then water and nallywater condensed becomes m ud and stone. Rareed air, presumably becam ere. He was t he rst at-earther, at-mooner and at-sunner.

Xenophanes - The rst philosopher of religion. He d etested the r eligion foundin the p oems of Homer and Hesiod, whose st orues b lasphemously at tributedto the gods theft, trickery, adultery, and all kinds of behaviour that, amonghumans, would be shameful and blameworthy. H e said ‘the clear truth aboutthe g ods n o man has e ver seen nor any m an will ever know’. ‘If cows an dhorses o r lions h ad hands and could draw, then horses w ould draw the formsof gods l ike horses, cows l ike cows, making their bodies s imilar in shape totheir own.’ He was a resolute monotheist. He said that of gods w ere many,then they would all have to share equal power. God cannot have an origin;because what comes into existence does so either from what is l ike or what isunlike. He took e arth as t he ultimate element. He was t he rst to drawattention to the existence of fossils. He pointed out that in Malta there were tobe found impressed in rocks the shapes o f all sea-creatures. From this h edrew the conclusion that the world passed through a cycle of alternatingterrestrial and marine phases.

Heraclitus - Early 5 th cent. He denounced the worship in the temple of fertilitygoddess A rtemis, praying to statues w as l ike whispering gossip to an emptyhouse, and offering sacrices to purify o neself from sin was l ike trying to washoff mud with mud. He visited the temple from time to time, but only to play dicewith the children there - much better company than statesmen, he said,refusing to take any part in the city’s politics. He, in that temple deposited his3-book treatise on philosophy and politics, a work, now lost, of notoriousdifficulty, so puzzling that some thought it a text of physics, others a politicaltract.

In this b ook Heraclitus sp oke of a great Word or Logos w hich holds forever

and in accordance with which all things co me about. He wrote in paradoxes,claiming that the universe is b oth divisible and indivisible, generated and


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ungenerated, mortal and immortal, Word and e ternity, Father and S on, Godand Justice.

He holds re as m ain element. There’s a downward path, whereby rebecomes w ater, and water becomes e arth, and a n upward path, wherebyearth turns to water, water to air, and air to re. There is a single world, thesame for all, made neither by god nor man; it has a lways existed and alwayswill exist, passing, in accordance with cycles laid down by fate, through aphase of kindling, which is w ar, and a phase of burning, which is p eace.

Parmenides - ‘Nothing can come from nothing’ is a principle which has b eenaccepted by many thinkers f ar less i ntrepid than Parmenides. But not manyhave drawn the co nclusion that Being has no beginning a nd n o end, and is no tsubject to temporal change. To see why Parmenides d rew this co nclusion, wehave to assume that he thought that ‘being water’ or ‘being air’ was r elated to‘being’ is the same way as ‘running fast’ and ‘running slow’ is related to‘running’. Someone who rst runs f ast and then runs sl owly, all the time goeson running; similarly for Parmenides, stuff which is rst water and then is a irgoes o n being. Whatever changes may take place, they a re not changes frombeing to non-being; they a re all changes w ithin Being, not changes o f Being.

Being must be everlasting; because it could not have come from Unbeing, andit could never turn into Unbeing, because there is n o such thing. If Being couldcome from nothing, what could make i t do so at one t ime r ather than another?Indeed, what is it that differentiates past from present and future? If it is nokind of being, then time is unreal; if it is some kind of being, then it is all a partof Being, and past, present and future are all one being. Being is u ndividedand unlimited.

He wrote 2 poems, the Way o f Truth (doctrine of Being) and the Way o fSeeming (world of senses).

Empedocles - Middle of 5th ce nt. Wrote 2 poems on e o n sc ience and other onreligion. He took a ll four elements o n equal terms a s t he basic e lements o f theuniverse. These elements h ave always e xisted, he believed, but they mingled

with each other in various proportions to produce the furniture of the world.The interweaving and intermingling of the elements, in Empedocles’ system, is


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caused by 2 forces: Love and Strife. Love combines t he elements t ogether,making o ne thing o ut of many, and S trife forces them apart, making manythings o ut of one. History is a cycle in which sometimes L ove is d ominant, andsometimes S trife. All beings a re temporary, only the elements a re everlasting,and only the cosmic cycl e goes o n for ever. He presented a crude theory o fevolution. In a primitive stage of the world, he maintained, chance formedmatter into isolated limbs a nd organs: arms without shoulders, unsocketedeyes, heads w ithout necks. These Lego-like animal parts, again by chance,linked up into organisms, many of which were monstrosities such as h uman-headed oxen and ox-headed humans. Most of these fortuitous organismswere fragile or sterile; only the ttest structures survived to be the human andanimal species w e know.

Human soul was a m aterial compound, and so were g ods, made of theEmpedoclean elements ( earth, air, re and water). He believed in themetempsychosis of the Pythagoras.

Democritus - The fundamental tenet of Democritus’ atomism is t hat matter isnot innitely d ivisible. According to atomism, if we take any c hunk o f any k indof stuff and divide it up as f ar as w e can, we will have to come to a halt atsome point at which we will reach tiny bodies which are indivisible. It is thesebodies w hich Democritus ca lled ‘atoms’. He b elieved that they are too small tobe detected by the senses, and that they a re innite in number and come ininnitely m any d ifferent kinds. They a re scattered, like motes i n a sunbeam, ininnite empty space, which he called ‘the void’. They have existed forever, andthey are always in motion. They c ollide with each other and link u p with eachother; some of them are concave a nd some convex; some are like ho oks a ndsome are like eyes. The middle-sized objects w ith which we are familiar arecomplexes o f atoms thus randomly united; and the d ifferences b etweendifferent kinds o f substances a re due to differences i n atoms. For Democritus,atoms a nd void are the only two realities.

At the time of Socrates-

Anaxagoras - Says t hat at the beginning ‘all things w ere together’, in a unit

innitely complex and innitely small which lacked all perceptible qualities.This p rimeval pebble began to rotate, expanding as i t did so, and throwing off


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brief history greek philosophy

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