Greek and the Ancient Culture Presocratic Philosophers

As Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (1946) points out, philosophy and practical science were not originally separate. They were born together in the beginning of the 6th century BC and they both involved a transition from a theistic toward a natural way of thinking about the world.Around 800 BC, following a long period of war the ancient Greeks reacquired a written language and by 750 BC two Greek poems the Iliadand the Odyssey (attributed to Homer) were written down. In Greek myths, regarding the creation and deeds of the gods, statements about cosmological topics (e.g., creation and structure of the universe) appeared only incidentally and by implication.

The Homeric gods were the gods of a conquering aristocracy, not the useful fertility gods of the Egyptians or Babylonians. Although the gods of most nations claim to have created the world, the Olympians made no such claim. The most they ever did was conquer it. According to Hesiod (750-700 BC) a farmer who tried to systematize the varied ancient myths into a "Theogeny" these divine constituents of the universe were personal beings. Their occasional causal interventions into universal events or interest in human affairs were likewise personal, self-serving, and motivated by sexuality, hatred, jealousy, and so forth.Greek thinkers, from the ones we now call the "Presocratic philosophers" onward, were particularly interested in the universe (in questions regarding its origin, its fundamental elements, and its ongoing development). In order to ask the kinds of ontological questions they did, they had to make a break with this former mythological way of thinking (see Kirk, Raven, & Schofield, 1983). Russell (1946) reports there were two tendencies at play in this chapter of Ancient Greek culture. One was passionate, religious, mystical and otherworldly. The other was cheerful, empirical and interested in acquiring knowledge of diverse worldly facts. To a point, the early Greek philosophers -from Thales in the 6th century BC, right up through to Aristotle in the 3rd century BC- represent this latter tendency. 

The Greek World 5th-4th century BC "As Greece is a mountainous and rather barren country, its inhabitants have been obliged from remote times to seek new lands that would offer them work and prosperity. At the beginning of the sixth century BC (Before Christ), we find one winding series of coastal colonies, extending from the coast of Asia Minor to Africa, to Spain and to southern Italy. Here the Greeks were so numerous that they outnumbered the inhabitants of Greece properly so called, and hence the name Magna Graecia was given to this far-flung territory. The colonies, favored by democratic liberties and economic well-being, and moreover having contact with a greatly advanced civilization in Persia and Egypt, had an opportunity to develop their own sense of culture.Among the Grecian stocks which have contributed greatly to the formation of philosophy is the Ionian strain, which was spread through Asia Minor, the islands of the Aegean Sea (Ionia), and southern Italy and Sicily. It is among the Ionian colonies of Asia Minor that the story of philosophy takes its beginning, because it was in the flourishing city of Miletus that the first three Western philosophers were born and lived: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes"

Thales (625-545 BC)By convention Presocratic philosophy is said to begin with Thales who can be dated only because he predicted a solar eclipse, which (according to astronomers) occurred in 585 BC. This citizen of Miletus (a commercial city in Asia Minor with trade links to Babylon and Egypt) is said to have declared the "world is made of water" and to have held that the transformation of this fundamental substance is the source of all living things.It is important to note that this first cosmological metaphysic is not only ontologically materialist and empirical but also contains an implicit view of dynamic motion and change. Water can be seen to be transformed from a liquid into other states. By evaporation water turns into steam and hence apparently into air. Water also freezes to become solidified ice. Further, both processes can be reversed. Rain, dew, and condensation were recognized as a return of water from the air and melting snow likewise turns a solid into a liquid. Thales used these commonly observable facts to postulate that things were water all along.Two successors of Thales (also from Miletus) retained a material monist metaphysic but differed from him regarding the details of their cosmological view. Anaximander (610-547 BC) doubted whether any fundamental substance would exist in an observable pure form, because it would not only be "timeless" but also "overpowering." Anaximenes (585-525 BC) suggested that air is the fundamental substance and that observable objects differ in the "quantity" of air contained therein

Anaxagoras (500-428 BC)Anaxagoras of Clazomene (on the Lydian coast of Asia Minor) was the last of the great Ionian philosophers and first to choose Athens as his home. He was a teacher and friend to Pericles (495-429 BC), the famous Commander-in-chief of Greece (for fifteen terms) during a period considered to be the height of that civilization.Anaxagoras is know to have laid down his cosmological views in a prose work, "On Nature," written in the Ionic dialect. Only fragments of this work, however, have survived as quoted and interpreted by others.With regard to the ongoing fundamental element debate, he postulated a near infinite materialist monism by arguing that in anything there is a "portion of everything." By this he meant that even the smallest speck of dust contains some portion of each element. These elements (translated variously as "germs" or "seeds") included not only earth, air, fire, and water; but also blood, gold, hair, and bone. Contained in each such material "seed" are the traditional analytical opposites (a.k.a., qualities) of hot and cold, wet and dry, and also "color." It is of these inherently unified attributes and qualities of matter itself that he is expressly speaking when he says that the things in the "one world" are not truly cut off from one another as if by a "hatchet."

Heraclitus (540-480 BC)Heraclitus (of Ephesus) was the first philosopher we know of to both emphasize the general process of change in nature and to

analyze (carefully) their particular manifestations. He is best known for two important general positions:(1) the Heraclitean "doctrine of flux" which viewed the whole cosmos as in a constant state of change. He expressed this view poetically as a metaphor: "You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you" (Fragment 91).(2) his disagreement with Thales about the basic fundamental element. For Heraclitus, the fundamental element of the universe was firenot water.Starting out with a materialist position similar to that of Thales, Heraclitus went beyond mere debates over fundamental substance by suggesting that the important aspect of the cosmos to account for is its varied dynamic transformations -e.g., ice to water and water to clouds. Fire, he reasoned, is a more fundamental element than water because it is fire (in the sun, or in a forge) which transforms solids into liquids. This fire itself is very active and so too is everything else in the world.Like the earlier Ionians, Heraclitus takes his general stand on a clearly materialist ground: "This world which is the same for all, was made by no god or man. It has always been, it is, and will be an ever-living fire. Kindling with measure and being quenched with measure" (Fragment 30).His specific ontological position is a relational materialist monism achieved by accepting the internal contradictions of particular things (rather than an "absolute," unchanging, or timeless monism). In the process of transforming from one state into another, or from one element into another, there is always contradiction within the object being transformed. Consider, for instance, fuel burning in a fireplace: There is a point at which the fuel is clearly a log and a later point at which it has been changed into smoke and ash. But during the transition (where the fire is), it is smoke, ash, and log. Or said another way, neither merely smoke, nor ash, nor log. The fuel of the fire is what it was and what it will be.In other words, like Thales, Heraclitus viewed this cycle of changing diversified elements as a unity, but in contrast to Anaximander it was not a timeless, unchanging, or absolute pattern. Why? Because the particular principles of change are actually internal to the varied nature of the stuff of the universe itself. Change in any particular object is not merely imposed upon it from outside by some initial timeless or overpowering substance, but is rather to be understood by us by way of our careful metaphoric reasoning and reference to that object itself. The unity in the diversity of the river we are wading in is not timeless (absolute) or imposed upon it by fire but develops along with the age and changing course of the river over time.By utilizing this dynamic kind of reasoning about both general and particular aspects of nature, Heraclitus recognized all apparently fixed states of being as part of a varied process of perpetual "becoming" (in which every object enters existence, stays for a while and passes away). He also went well beyond the predominantly cosmological topics of his Miletian predecessors to considered diverse life phenomena (e.g., sleeping-waking; hunger-fullness; youth-age; and life-death relations). For instance, in considering "life," Heraclitus argued that death is a pervasive feature in our lives. If all things are changing and if change is death to the old and birth to the new, then strictly speaking we have constant experience of death. Just as the river is always changing, so too does everything else including ourselves.

Democritus (460-360 BC)

Democritus (of Abdera in Thrace) was a contemporary of Empedocles, Zeno, Socrates, and Plato. The details of how his materialist ontology or views on cosmological change (motion) differed from his contemporaries are rather important because they are played out again in various eras of subsequent scientific endeavor. Democritus is best known for his doctrine that the world is made of "atoms" (which means indivisible) and for his suggestion that our ability to split objects up into sections (e.g., carving up an apple) implies the existence of a "void" between these indivisible aspects of the material universe.

Democritus is also credited with having proposed a "substantive" theory of mind (see Morris, 1932) along with a second (outside-inward) version of the emanation hypothesis to account for our contact with observable objects. Yet since his theory of mind was intimately tied to his active view of material substance, we will have to return to it only after considering how this more central ontological aspect of his philosophy fits into the ongoing and subsequent course of Greek thought.

First of all, while Empedocles considered his four elements as analytically separate (as an absolute plurality which congeal but do not truly combine or transmute), Democritus proposed an explicitly materialist "monism" which bridged the logical gap between diversity and unity by returning to the "dialectical" insight of Heraclitus (and Anaxagoras). That is, with regard to the relative ontological relation between objects and their constituent elements, the one ismany and the many is one. To put this another way, Democritus seems to have recognized "objective contradiction" in nature.

Furthermore, like Heraclitus, he recognized that matter and motion are different yet they are identical. This appreciation of the unity of such differences emboldened Democritus to suggested (in a similar manner) that the inherent activeness of atoms was the fundamental origin of all change in the cosmos.

Thus while he postulated that such "active atoms" are alike (in their indivisibility) and differ from one another only in terms of "quantity" (size, smoothness, or speed of resonation), he also acknowledged the possibility that an orderly combination of such "like" elements might somehow produce the vast array of palpable objects or perceivable events we deal with in our ordinary lives. As Russell points out, however, the middle part of the latter comment (regarding quantity) is debatable because we only have fragmentary writings and secondhand accounts of Democritus -predominantly from Aristotle- to rely upon. It is traditional though to contrast Anaxagoras who seems to place "qualities" (like color) in the elements (or "seeds"), with Democritus who (after the fashion of Empedocles) seems to deny that they reside in "atoms."

Socrates (469-399 BC)

Socrates (of Athens) taught verbally and did not put his doctrines into writing. We must, therefore, rely on conflicting accounts from his students to reconstruct his life and philosophical approach. All such sources agree, however, that Socrates (the son of a stonecutter and a midwife) was exceedingly ugly, had an unorthodox (lowly) manner of dress and often wandered around barefooted.Socrates was born in the year following the end of a 20 year war in which the army of Sparta and the navy of Athens had combined to fight off a bid by Persia (under Darius and Xerxes) to turn Greece into a colony of their Asiatic empire. After the war, Sparta demobilized, returned to its tradition of xenophobic seclusion and declined economically. The city-state of Athens, however, turned her navy into a merchant fleet and prospered."Sparta relapsed into agricultural seclusion and stagnation, while Athens became a busy mart and port, the meeting place of many races... and of diverse cults and customs, whose contact and rivalry begot comparison, analysis and thought" (Durant, 1933, p. 8).Unlike the Sophists (who were paid for teaching a new class of wealthy economic aristocrats the skills of oration and persuasive argument), Socrates charged no fees and taught students (including women) from various walks of life. He owned a modest home in Athens and drew on a yearly income from moneys wisely invested with one of his business-minded pupils.Socrates is best known for the technique of artful questioning he employed -now called "Socratic dialogue." In such dialogue, teachers help students to define their discursive terms exactly and thereby discover for themselves the implications of holding one position over another. Socrates is said to have demonstrated the utility of this leading-questions technique by helping an uneducated slave to discover the Pythagorean theorem regarding the square-root on the hypotenuse of a right-angle triangle (see Plato's Meno).In contrast to the Sophists, Socrates believed that a distinction could be made between "appearance and essence." According to Plato, the latter entailed an acquaintance with "absolute" truth gained through skillful argument. Despite conflicting accounts of his view on truth it is well-known that Socrates was primarily concerned with issues of ethics ("virtue" and "right action"). His fundamental argument is that the route to virtue is "self-knowledge" because no man sins wittingly. Essential knowledge, as contrasted to easily attained "apparent" knowledge, leads inexorably to virtue and can be found in the mind. Whether absolute or otherwise, his ontology is clearly an objective idealist one -where truth needs only to be "drawn out" of the mind and clarified by skillfully guided discourse.

Relatedly, his implied epistemology is of the "indirect realist" variety. Let's note that the above demonstrative example of his technique of helping people dredge the truth up out of their mind is not one about ethics, but is one about "being"; about some aspect of the real world. The Pythagorean theorem is one that pertains to the way reality is structured on a two-dimensional plane. The Sophists had attempted to counter the early Ionian or Miletian philosophy (of naive materialist ontology in the absence of any systematic epistemology or logic) by replacing it with a form of argumentative discourse in which epistemology was totalized. This was a troubling development which Socrates set out to correct for various reasons.

Plato (427-347 BC)In contrast to the lowly Socrates, Plato was a cultural aristocrat in both birth and political sentiment. He was born in Athens and enjoyed a privileged childhood during the early years of the generation-long Peloponnesian War with Sparta which Athenian

democracy eventually lost in 404 BC. During an era in which large landowning aristocrats and then Spartan-imposed military Oligarchs were being successively edged out of power by a disorderly though democratic citizen Ecclesia (general assembly), Plato was frustrated in his initial youthful efforts to enter politics. Quite early on, therefore, he was drawn to the teachings of Socrates who scorned such amateur "mob rule" for its incompetence.Plato was 28 when the old master died at the hands of a supreme court of 1000 members rotationally selected every few months on the mere basis of alphabetical rote from the roll of all the citizens. This event above all others (including the death of his "Tyrant" uncle Critiason the field of battle) is said to have solidified Plato's disdain of the loose nonprofessional style of Athenian democracy. After a prudent though self-imposed exile in which he traveled widely, Plato returned to Athens at age 40. It was at this time that he is said to have began writing various works designed to influence the general lay citizenry and to have founded the Academy of Athens.Written in the style of "dialogues," Plato's numerous works are notable for their socially stratified views on Utopia; for their elitist advocacy of producing a professional ruling-class of philosophical politicians; and for their appeal to a theory of "abstract ideals" in their related account of knowledge. These works are often said to have contributed to psychology by anticipating later developments such as the introspective method (doctrine of recollection) and faculty psychology (by dividing the "soul" into reason, spirit, and appetite). Most notably, however, Plato not only proposed a third (rather idealist) version of the sensory emanation hypothesis (see our coverage of Aristotle who argued against it); but beyond even that was also one of the main ancient progenitors of the highly problematic "enrichment" theory of perception (where the "senses" and body are considered as hindrances to the ascertainment of "knowledge" which is only obtained through careful reasoning).Plato's Republic, which outlines his views of human nature and the perfect (Utopian) state, was both antidemocratic and heavily influenced by Spartan ideology. The antidemocratic aspect is evidenced in the inequitable role he proposes for three classes of citizens in that state (the common people, the soldiers, and the "philosopher guardians"). The Spartan influence is evidenced in his advocacy of surreptitious selection of couples for mating, open weeding out of "sickly" young, and coeducation of girls and boys along rather bland non-artistic lines equal populations.. Furthermore, in Plato's Utopia, slaves would learn only the menial tasks required to serve the citizens.In Plato's philosophical attempt to counter both the Presocratic materialists and the Sophists, he was deeply concerned with elaborating the difference between particular things (which are revealed by the senses) and ideals (the essence of things) revealed by reason. Plato argued that it is toward immutable "ideas" that the philosopher should turn to capture the true or ultimate realities because the world of mere sensible or perceptible things (material objects or events) is only a vague, transitory and untrustworthy copy of this ideal realm of existence.

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Born at Stagira in Thrace (where his father was a physician to the Macedonian king), Aristotle was first educated by physicians until the age of 18 when he moved south to Athens for a 20 year stint at the Academy under Plato. After Plato's death, Aristotle

traveled briefly and taught notable pupils such as the young Alexander-the-Great but then returned to Athens to found his own philosophical school (called the Lyceum). It is said that he wrote down most of his works in the latter twelve year period (335-323 BC) of his life.In contrast to Plato, Aristotle was both a naturalist and a thoroughly logical thinker who attempted to not only systematize his varied philosophical writings into a single overarching account (i.e., his Metaphysics) but to also present his other works (e.g., his Physics) in a careful, pedantic, consistent, and step-by-step professorial style. Some of these works were definitively naturalistic (e.g., those on the classification and movements of animals). Others were either distinctly psychological (e.g., De Anima, De Sensu, and those coveringmemories and dreams) or developmental (e.g., his short tract on youth and aging). Still others were more logical, political, ethical, or cosmological in their concerns. Several of Aristotle's treatises were also subsequently grouped under the title Organon ["Instrument"] and regarded as comprising his main logical works (Categories; On Interpretation; Prior Analytics; Posterior Analytics; Topics; On Sophistical Refutations).Aristotle is one of the most fascinating figures from this entire Ancient Greek period. I like the naturalistic strivings of Thales, Heraclitus, Democritus, and even Anaxagoras; and I don't intend to slight them in any way. It is indisputable, however, that Aristotle has also remained a potent source of inspiration and error for later generations. Although his system of philosophy strictly speaking (like Plato's) represents an objective idealism, Aristotle's thinking is much more conducive to a naturalistic and scientific account of the world. While Platonism encourages a monastic retreat from the world, Aristotle was far more interested in engaging the worldly events of nature. He also made successive attempts to establish an assumptive methodological basis for clear and "logical" human discourse about observable events, as well as for the carrying out of careful empirical or rational inquiry into their underlying explanatory "causes."Before proceeding to the pertinent details of Aristotle's logical contributions, naturalism, views on cause, and psychology, our first task should be to establish that his overall philosophical approach was objective idealist -most specifically with respect to how it overlapped with that of Plato.In Aristotle's Metaphysics, the Platonic dualism (of matter and ideals) is revised somewhat into an account of"matter" and "form." The most important revision that Aristotle introduced here (aside from changing the latter term) was to reduce the absoluteness of the assumed distinction. What got Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles, and Plato into trouble was their absolutization of the philosophical issues they dealt with respectively. But with Aristotle, there is a notable backing-off from such extremes and the presentation of a more relational ontologically monist position.

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