PREPOD.INFO

Ancient Greek Philosophy. Part 1.
Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.
The pre-Socratic philosophers rejected traditional mythological explanations for the phenomena they saw around them in favor of more rational explanations. Many of them asked:

• From where does everything come?
• From what is everything created?
• How do we explain the plurality of things found in nature?
• How might we describe nature mathematically?

The Milesian school
was a school of thought founded in the 6th Century BC. The ideas associated with it are exemplified by three philosophers from the Ionian town of Miletus, on the Aegean coast of Anatolia: Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. They introduced new opinions contrary to the prevailing viewpoint on how the world was organized.

Philosophy of nature

These philosophers defined all things by their quintessential substance (which Aristotle calls the arche) of which the world was formed and which was the source of everything. Thales thought it to be water. But as it was impossible to explain some things (such as fire) as being composed of this element, Anaximander chose an unobservable, undefined element, which he called apeiron. He reasoned that if each of the four traditional elements (water, air, fire, and earth) are opposed to the other three, and if they cancel each other out on contact, none of them could constitute a stable, truly elementary form of matter. Consequently, there must be another entity from which the others originate, and which must truly be the most basic element of all. The unspecified nature of the apeiron upset critics, which caused Anaximenes to define it as being air, a more concrete, yet still subtle, element. Anaximenes held that by its evaporation and condensation, air can change into other elements or substances such as fire, wind, clouds, water, and earth.
Pythagoreanism
is a term used for the esoteric and metaphysical beliefs held by Pythagoras and his followers, the Pythagoreans, who were much influenced by mathematics.
Like Thales, Pythagoras is rather known for mathematics than for philosophy. His immediate followers were strongly influenced by him, and even until today Pythagoras shines through the mist of ages as one of the brightest figures of early Greek antiquity.
Pythagoras founded a society of disciples which has been very influential for some time. Men and women in the society were treated equally -an unusual thing at the time- and all property was held in common. Members of the society practised the master’s teachings, a religion the tenets of which included the transmigration of souls and the sinfulness of eating beans. Pythagoras’ followers had to obey strict religious orders where it was forbidden to eat beans, to touch white cocks, or to look into a mirror beside a light.
Pythagoras, like no other, embodied the contradistinctions of the mystical and rational world, which is woven into his personality and philosophy. In his mind, numbers, spirits, souls, gods and the mystic connections between them formed one big picture.
After Pythagoras introduced the idea of eternal recurrence into Greek thought, which was apparently motivated by his studies of earlier Egyptian scriptures, the idea soon became popular in Greece. It was Pythagoras’ ambition to reveal in his philosophy the validity and structure of a higher order, the basis of the divine order, for which souls return in a constant cycle.
This is how Pythagoras came to mathematics. It could be said that Pythagoras saw the study of mathematics as a purifier of the soul, just like he considered music as purifying. Pythagoras and his disciples connected music with mathematics and found that intervals between notes can be expressed in numerical terms. They discovered that the length of strings of a musical instrument correspond to these intervals and that they can be expressed in numbers. The ratio of the length of two strings with which two tones of an octave step are produced is 2:1.
Music was not the only field that Pythagoras considered worthy of study, in fact he saw numbers in everything. He was convinced that the divine principles of the universe, though imperceptible to the senses, can be expressed in terms of relationships of numbers. He therefore reasoned that the secrets of the cosmos are revealed by pure thought, through deduction and analytic reflection on the perceptible world.
This eventually led to the famous saying that “all things are numbers.” He associated numbers with form, relating arithmetic to geometry.
Heraclitus of Ephesus
(ca. 535–475 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor.
Heraclitus is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe, and that the Logos is the fundamental order of all.
He became famous as the "flux and fire" philosopher for his proverbial utterance: "All things are flowing."
In spite of the difficulties, Heraclitus was admired by his contemporaries for the theory of flux, which influenced many generations of philosophers after him. Let us look at the idea of flux and fire. Before Heraclitus, the world of the ancient Greeks had been fairly static. The Greeks before Heraclitus focused on the essence of things, its nature and being, which they deemed unchangeable. In contrast, Heraclitus said: "You cannot step into the same river twice, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you." This simple sentence expresses the gist of his philosophy, meaning that the river isn't actually the same at two different points in time. - He told people that nothing is the same now as it was before, and thus nothing what is now will be the same tomorrow. With this he planted the idea of impermanence into Greek thought, and indeed, after Heraclitus Greek philosophy was not the same anymore.
Heraclitus held that fire is the primordial element out of which everything else arises. Fire is the origin of all matter; through it things come into being and pass away. Fire itself is the symbol of perpetual change because it transforms a substance into another substance without being a substance itself: "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be eternal fire."
When Heraclitus speaks of God, he doesn't mean the Greek gods, neither a personal entity. Instead he thinks that God is living in every soul and even in every material thing on earth. The fiery element is the expression of God in everything, thus he is in every sense a pantheist.
Another of Heraclitus' main teachings can be called the "unity of opposites". The unity of opposites means that opposites cannot exist without each other - there is no day without night, no summer without winter, no warm without cold, no good without bad.
The Eleatics
were a school of pre-Socratic philosophers at Elea, a Greek colony in Campania, Italy. The group was founded in the early fifth century BCE by Parmenides. Other members of the school included Zeno of Elea and Melissus of Samos.
Parmenides of Elea.
His only known work is a poem which has survived only in fragmentary form. In it, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In the Way of Truth, he explained how reality is one; change is impossible; and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In the Way of Opinion, he explained the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful.
The Way of Truth discusses that which is real, which contrasts in some way with the argument of the Way of Opinion, which discusses that which is illusory. Under the Way of Truth, Parmenides stated that there are two ways of inquiry: that it is, that it is not. He said that the latter argument is never feasible because nothing can not be:
For never shall this prevail, that things that are not are.
Thinking and the thought that it is are the same; for you will not find thought apart from what is, in relation to which it is uttered.
For thought and being are the same.
It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being is, but nothing is not.
Thus, he concluded that "Is" could not have "come into being" because "nothing comes from nothing". Existence is necessarily eternal. He was struggling with the metaphysics of change, which is still a relevant philosophical topic today.
Zeno of Elea
was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher of southern Italy and a member of the Eleatic School founded by Parmenides. Aristotle called him the inventor of the dialectic, and Bertrand Russell credited him with having laid the foundations of modern logic. He is best known for his paradoxes.
Zeno's paradoxes are a set of problems generally thought to have been devised by Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides's doctrine that "all is one" and that, contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion.
Several of Zeno's eight surviving paradoxes (preserved in Aristotle's Physics and Simplicius's commentary thereon) are essentially equivalent to one another; and most of them were regarded, even in ancient times, as very easy to refute. Three of the strongest and most famous—that of Achilles and the tortoise, the Dichotomy argument, and that of an arrow in flight—are presented in more detail below.
Zeno's arguments are perhaps the first examples of a method of proof called also known as proof by contradiction.

The Paradoxes of Motion

Achilles and the tortoise

“In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.”
In the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise, Achilles is in a footrace with the tortoise. Achilles allows the tortoise a head start of 100 feet. If we suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed (one very fast and one very slow), then after some finite time, Achilles will have run 100 feet, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point. During this time, the tortoise has run a much shorter distance, for example 10 feet. It will then take Achilles some further time to run that distance, in which time the tortoise will have advanced farther; and then more time still to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles reaches somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has farther to go. Therefore, because there are an infinite number of points Achilles must reach where the tortoise has already been--he can never overtake the tortoise.

The arrow paradox

“If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.”
In the arrow paradox, Zeno states that for motion to be occurring, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that in any one instant of time, for the arrow to be moving it must either move to where it is, or it must move to where it is not. It cannot move to where it is not, because this is a single instant, and it cannot move to where it is because it is already there. In other words, in any instant of time there is no motion occurring, because an instant is a snapshot. Therefore, if it cannot move in a single instant it cannot move in any instant, making any motion impossible.
Whereas the first paradox presented divide space, this paradox starts by dividing time - and not into segments, but into points.
Anaxagoras
(500 BC – 428 BC) was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher famous for introducing the cosmological concept of Nous (mind), the ordering force.

Cosmological theory

All things have existed from the beginning. But originally they existed in infinitesimally small fragments of themselves, endless in number and inextricably combined. All things existed in this mass, but in a confused and indistinguishable form. Mind arranged the segregation of like from unlike. This peculiar thing, called Mind (Nous), was no less illimitable than the chaotic mass, but, unlike the logos of Heraclitus, it stood pure and independent, a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations and everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and power, is especially seen ruling in all the forms of life.
Mind causes motion. It rotated the primitive mixture, starting in one corner or point, and gradually extended until it gave distinctness and reality to the aggregates of like parts, working something like a centrifuge, and eventually creating the known cosmos. But even after it had done its best, the original intermixture of things was not wholly overcome. No one thing in the world is ever abruptly separated, as by the blow of an axe, from the rest of things.
Empedocles
is considered the last Greek philosopher to write in verse and the surviving fragments of his teaching are from two poems, Purifications and On Nature.

On Nature

There are about 450 lines of his poem On Nature extant, including 70 lines which have been reconstructed from some papyrus scraps known as the Strasbourg Papyrus. It was this poem which outlined his philosophical system. In it, Empedocles explains not only the nature and history of the universe, including his theory of the four classical elements, but he describes theories on causation, perception, and thought, as well as explanations of terrestrial phenomena and biological processes.

The four elements

It was Empedocles who established four ultimate elements which make all the structures in the world - fire, air, water, earth. Empedocles called these four elements "roots", which, in typical fashion, he also identified with the mythical names of Zeus, Hera, Nestis, and Aidoneus. According to the different proportions in which these four indestructible and unchangeable elements are combined with each other the difference of the structure is produced. It is in the aggregation and segregation of elements thus arising, that Empedocles, like the atomists, found the real process which corresponds to what is popularly termed growth, increase or decrease. Nothing new comes or can come into being; the only change that can occur is a change in the juxtaposition of element with element. This theory of the four elements became the standard dogma for the next two thousand years.

Love and Strife

The four elements are, however, simple, eternal, and unalterable, and as change is the consequence of their mixture and separation, it was also necessary to suppose the existence of moving powers - to bring about mixture and separation. The four elements are eternally brought into union, and eternally parted from each other, by two divine powers, Love and Strife. Love explains the attraction of different forms of matter, and Strife accounts for their separation. If the elements are the content of the universe, then Love and Strife explain their variation and harmony. Love and Strife are attractive and repulsive forces which the ordinary eye can see working amongst people, but which really pervade the universe. They alternately hold empire over things, - neither, however, being ever quite absent.
Like Pythagoras, Empedocles believed in the transmigration of the soul, that souls can be reincarnated between humans, animals and even plants.
Democritus
was a pre-Socratic Greek materialist philosopher (born at Abdera in Thrace ca. 460 BC - died ca 370 BC). Democritus was a student of Leucippus and co-originator of the belief that all matter is made up of various imperishable, indivisible elements which he called atoma (sg. atomon) or "indivisible units", from which we get the English word atom.

Atoms and the void

Democritus agreed that everything which is must be eternal, but denied that "the void" can be equated with nothing. This makes him the first thinker on record to argue the existence of an entirely empty "void". In order to explain the change around us from basic, unchangeable substance he created a theory that argued that there are various basic elements which always existed but can be rearranged into many different forms. Democritus' theory argued that atoms only had several properties, particularly size, shape, and (perhaps) weight; all other properties that we attribute to matter, such as color and taste, are but the result of complex interactions between the atoms in our bodies and the atoms of the matter that we are examining.
Though intelligence is allowed to explain the organization of the world, according to Democritus, he does allow for the existence of a soul, which he contends is composed of exceedingly fine and spherical atoma (now called atoms, as mentioned above). He holds that, "spherical atoma move because it is their nature never to be still, and as they move they draw the whole body along with them, and set it in motion." In this way, he viewed soul-atoma as being similar to fire-atoma: small, spherical, capable of penetrating solid bodies and good examples of spontaneous motion.
Democritus explained senses along these lines as well. He hypothesized that different tastes were a result of differently shaped atoms in contact with the tongue. Smells and sounds could be explained similarly. Vision works by the eye receiving "images" or "effluences" of bodies that are emanated. He stated that, "Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; but in reality atoms and the void alone exist." This means that senses could not provide a direct or certain knowledge of the world. In his words, "It's necessary to realize that by this principle man is cut off from the real." Later philosophers use this to deny that any reliable knowledge can be obtained, but Democritus felt differently:
There are two forms of knowledge: one legitimate, one bastard. To the latter form belong all the following: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. The legitimate is quite distinct from this. When the bastard form cannot see more minutely, nor hear nor smell nor taste nor perceive through touch, then another, finer form must be employed. - Democritus, Fragment 11, The Symmetry of Life
One view purports that this finer form is reasoning, although Democritus does not explain reason's place in the atomistic view.
Classical period of Greek philosophy
Sophists
Greece called into existence a class of teachers known as sophists. They wandered about Greece from place to place, gave lectures, took pupils, and entered into disputations. For these services they exacted large fees, and were, in fact, the first in Greece to take fees for teaching wisdom. The sophists were not, technically speaking, philosophers, but, instead taught any subject for which there was a popular demand. Topics included rhetoric, politics, grammar, etymology, history, physics, and mathematics.
Early on they were seen as teachers of virtue in the sense that they taught people to perform their function in the state. Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos and Hippias of Elis. The aims of the young politicians whom they trained were to persuade the multitude of whatever they wished them to believed. The search for truth was not top priority. Consequently the sophists undertook to provide a stock of arguments on any subject, or to prove any position. They boasted of their ability to make the worse appear the better reason, to prove that black is white. Some, like Gorgias, asserted that it was not necessary to have any knowledge of a subject to give satisfactory replies as regards it.
Protagoras is known primarily for three claims (1) that man is the measure of all things (which is often interpreted as a sort of radical relativism) (2) that he could make the "worse (or weaker) argument appear the better (or stronger)" and (3) that one could not tell if the gods existed or not. Protagoras' notion that judgments and knowledge are in some way relative to the person judging or knowing has been very influential, and is still widely discussed in contemporary philosophy.

A new period of philosophy opens with the Athenian Socrates (469-399 BCE).
Perhaps his most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method or method of "elenchus," which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts such as the Good and Justice . It was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues. To solve a problem, it would be broken down into a series of questions, the answers to which gradually distill the answer you seek. The influence of this approach is most strongly felt today in the use of the Scientific Method , in which hypothesis is the first stage. The development and practice of this method is one of Socrates' most enduring contributions, and is a key factor in earning his mantle as the father of political philosophy , ethics or moral philosophy, and as a figurehead of all the central themes in Western philosophy .
Socrates often said his wisdom was limited to an awareness of his own ignorance. Socrates believed wrongdoing was a consequence of ignorance and those who did wrong knew no better. The one thing Socrates consistently claimed to have knowledge of was "the art of love" which he connected with the concept of "the love of wisdom", i.e., philosophy. He never actually claimed to be wise, only to understand the path a lover of wisdom must take in pursuing it. It is debatable whether Socrates believed humans could actually become wise. On the one hand, he drew a clear line between human ignorance and ideal knowledge; on the other, Plato's Symposium (Diotima's Speech) and Republic (Allegory of the Cave) describe a method for ascending to wisdom.