A History of Philosophy | 01 The Beginning of Greek Philosophy

the history of Western philosopy begins in that area of the world which I hope you recognize as the egn SE with Greece and uh Asia Minor um the first known philosopher who's talked about at least um thees of myus um came from just about that location in the center of the West Coast of the Asia Minor peninsula in other words the Greek colonies scattered around the Egan now um a question that one usually starts with is how do you account account then for the rise of Western philosophy there in the Egan area in ancient Greece

and um there are several lines of explanation which are important one is of course that it stands at the crossroads between east and west where traditional ideas would be challenged by the interaction with Eastern culture simply because of the way in which the trade routes came through Asia Miner and um down the Meander Valley the river Meander Meander down to the Sea so this is the Meander Valley there and the trade routes come that way uh so all right uh crosscultural stimulation led to the asking of some basic questions um second thing that is emphasized

a great deal and I think appropriately is that the early Greek philosophers were really um pre scientific scientists they were asking questions about the natural world about the natural order about the natural processes uh they raise questions about basic elements what basic element or elements underly all of the rich Furniture of the heavens and the Earth that we see what are the causal processes that account for the variation of things and the changes that occur uh that sort of question um early philosophy of nature primitive cosmology questions about the origin of the cosmos as we

know it began to arise and you could see how they could be connected with the differences between east and west and the stimulation that comes with the mythology of the two interacting and coming into some degree of conflict but there is a third feature that is tremendously important and I think um I've come to think increasingly um of particular importance uh the earlier Greek poets dramatists uh had the conviction that the cosmic order which we observe in nature is also a moral order a notion of cosmic Justice is something that surfaces among some of those

early literary figures uh in between the Odyssey and the ilad it begins to appear in heod it's explicit in escalas and Sly it's present so that the question is whether there is an order to the cosmos that includes a moral order order if this is a moral Universe how do we explain that fact so then we have really two philosophical lines of thought in accounting for the origin of Greek philosophy here one that focuses simply on um reflection about the physical Cosmos and the other without reflection on the moral order which they believed to exist

in the processes of nature so what I want to do today is to focus on the first of these their attention to the physical order and then next time to turn our attention to the moral order take a look at that okay now with that in mind take a look at the out line that um I've just given you of the presocratic philosophers those prior to Socrates uh you notice I've grouped them where the principal grouping is in terms you notice of various kinds of monism under Romans 1 2 and 3 as against pluralism that

is to say the question as to whether there is one basic element that accounts for everything or whether there are many basic elements that would be obviously a kind of qualitative monism or pluralism as the case may be quality qualitative is the one basic element or the many basic elements but uh it also involves a quantitative question um whether there the universe is numerically one allinclusive solid kind of sphere or whether there are numerically many distinguishable things now that sounds obstru for the simple reason that you think you're something different than I am which implies

there are many different things so with a quantitative monism are going to is is going to arise some very fundamental question about the reliability of our sense experience because if sense experience tells us we are many in in number but the theory becomes that everything is one in number there's something wrong either with the theory that everything is one or else something wrong with our sense experience so um that will arise later on when we get down to the group labeled atics absolute monism named eleatics after Elia which is in the toe of Italy where

some of these people were so that quantitative issue arises there but at the outset we're dealing in that naive monism of the milesians with a qualitative pluralism or qualitative monism how many basic elements are there now remember they've never been in the chemistry lecture they've never seen the table of the elements and um impressed as they are by the ordered um arrangement of things uh the initial tendency is to look for one basic element and as you read these materials and I hope you will have read through the primary and secondary materials on the presocratic

by the end of this week as you read these materials uh you'll find that thees thought that everything was ultimately reducible to derived from the one element He called water now for the moment disregard the fact that you don't think it's an element H2O he wasn't to know that poor phes you see uh it still sounds like rather a wild hypothesis everything composed of water well wait a minute water is a remarkably adaptable kind of thing it comes in liquid solid and Vapor it is essential to life not only to your life and mine but

to uh vegetation notice how Brown everything is around here we've had quite a drought this summer I think I've mowed my front lawn once since early June which um is a welcome change but it's a tragic one you'll see uh no water is so fun mental to everything that goes on that necessity that understandably th's conjectured but maybe this is the basic stuff well um he um wasn't the only person in the business and you notice the name of an ex amander who because he recognized that you have not only wetness you have only dryness

you have also dryness you began to see you have opposing qualities and the same in other regards heat and cold light and dark male and female and in as much as if you had have opposing properties no one can be more basic than the other he supposed that the basic element must be something that is undefinable and that's what the word ayon means it cannot be defined it cannot be delineated marked off the Greek word Paras means a border a demarcation line the alpha privative makes it negative so a Pyon it has no definition it's

undefinable you see and exines on the other hand thought that air was the basic essential and so you begin to get this variety and what's surfacing if you're familiar with Greek literature what's surfacing is um the fact that they are playing with the various elements that the Greeks um talked about um even in their literature earth air Fire and Water those are the four classic Greek elements some of suggested that they represent the four necessities of life Earth food air breath fire warmth water something to drink and nourish us Earth they a fire and water

for necessities of life but you notice that um here we have anex zimes here we have phes later on we'll find heraclitus and some of the stoics plugging in on fire you see in other words in terms of the elements as they conceive them the elements with which they were familiar which one of these is most basic or is it none of these as an ex Amanda supposed well the milesians were asking these rather simple questions questions uh processes of change they thought could be explained in the case of air with condensation which produces moisture

you see so there are all sorts of um possibilities in these proposals on the other hand Pythagoras and heraclitus incidentally that's the Pythagoras you meet in mathematics the mathematician that um produced what becomes known as Pythagoras Theorem that the square on the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides remember that Pythagoras okay Pythagoras and heraclitus seemingly um uh independently of each other in the uh late 6th Century that's to say before 500 in the late 6th Century we saying that there is um to

uh to Nature as it were two sides each of which is equally important a double aspect theory now you you can get um perhaps a rough idea of what I mean by double aspect if you consider the question about a object that's almost becoming rare in this culture a saucer you know this is the age of mugs rather than delicate English China with teacups and saucers but at least you know the uh the shape of a saucer is a sorcer concave or convex yes from one point of view looking down on it from above it's

concave from the other point of view looking up at it as somebody carries it along it's convex two aspects to it so to say that a sorer is both concave and convex is to talk about the double aspect nature of the sorer okay now what Pythagoras and heraclitus are impressed with is that there are two aspects to everything in nature on the one hand everything seems to be in a process of change on the other hand there is order what we call uniformity of nature predictability is he oh yes to um to think of that

change heraclitus suggested that the basic element is like fire you know fire is always changing uh have you noticed um sitting around a fireplace in the winter you get sort of mesmerized by the flickering Flames that are always changing you see um it's almost hard to concentrate on reading philosophy around the fire for that reason constant ch change you see yet on the other hand this is an ordered Universe there's regularity you know how certain kinds of wood will burn and when they're wet how they won't so you have both change and Order change and

Order and Pythagoras and heraclitus into dependently of each other tried to talk about precisely that the way in which um heraclitus does it is to suggest that what we have is fire or some fiery Vapor heat rising steam Rising everything rising and changing and flickering and burning down and so forth fire plus some sort of um intelligible traceable order that he calls logos now you've run across that word before that's the word that the Apostle John is going to use in the first line of his gospel in the beginning was the word isos in the

beginning the logos you'll see this is where it first begins to appear in Greek thought and John later adapts a Greek conception in the light of Hebrew conceptions to his purposes watch it now on the other hand uh Pythagoras the mathematician also talks of things changing and um the idea of fiery vapor is something he alludes to but instead of talking of logos what he talks about is a kind of mathematical order to things a mathematical order to things um so that uh you can represent all sorts of different shapes numerically you see this is

a mathematical kind of universe where you can trace out the mathematical order this is why he was interested in geometry you see so you have these two emphasizing that there is an orderedness to nature for all the processes of change and footnote in anticipation of the theme next time that means that amidst all of life's change we should live a rationally ordered life you see the ethic arises from this well by theas and heraclitus uh on the other hand when you get to the ear attics they want absolutely no pluralism no discrimination of two aspects

no world of change and Parmenides in very forthright fashion declares that change is illusory plurality is illusory physical motion is illusory the senses are simply the way of Illusion if you want the way of Truth you have to think in abstraction from all of the senses think abstractly and if you um want to see more of what is meant by thinking abstractly well you can read the palmen Selections in the Koffman Anthology but um give attention to Zeno because Zeno tried to make the case for this absolute monism by posing paradoxes change is a paradoxical

self-contradictory thing that couldn't occur for instance take for instance a hair that is chasing a tortoise does the hair ever catch the tortoise no because you see here is the line along which they Tau is moving but the time it gets to there the hair has gotten that far by the time the toris gets there the hair gets that far by the time the tortoise gets there the hair gets that far and because the hair keeps advancing the toris because the tortoise keeps advancing the hair never catches the tortoise you say he's already eating it

and that's illusory you see um does um a chicken ever cross the street no because if uh this much is the street then first the chicken haves the distance h a l v s haves the distance then the chicken haves the remaining distance then it harves the remaining distance then it harves the remaining distance then the remaining then the remaining then never gets across the street is he um millet seeds uh were regarded as the smallest seeds that there are melet seeds now um to show the paradoxical nature of pluralism xenop POS is this how

much sound would one Millet seed make if you drop it no sound all right drop a sack of 10,000 millet seeds how much sound will it make 0 * 10,000 which is zilch no sound but you heard the third illusion rationally it's impossible the way of Illusion is the way of the senses the plural plurality of things that we see are a loser as plurality processes of change and motion are illusory from a strictly logical standpoint there can be no change no plurality now I I don't think that there has ever developed a school of

thought known as Xeno ISM or paradism uh because um those people represent uh sort of a logical Terminus that um nobody wants to follow them to it's one thing to say that the senses are sometimes auser it's one thing to say that sense perception is relative and changing sure and we'll find lots of people Plato and so on and so forth say that but to say that they are completely auser well um if you say that why would you say it to whom would you say it and why utter any sound in saying it if

that position is correct why even record what Zeno and Parmenides said if that position is correct it's self-defeating you see but the point of is um not the position that they came up with but the kinds of issues they're posing what does it mean to say that everything is one whole that this is a universe well presumably it doesn't mean what Parmenides thought it meant but on the other hand is this a world of radical pluralism with everything disassociated radical individualism in an anarchistic kind of Cosmos with no Law and Order you see in effect

what the presocratic did for us was to pose the issues and very often it's far more important what question surfaces than what answers surface let see it certainly is with these people well when you get to the pluralists you might say um this is a breath of fresh air uh because here you have people imp pedicles an exageras democratus who see a multitude of different things emperically in fact picks up on all four earth air fire and water all four elements and in order to explain the um kind of uh process that's involved he comes

up with some sort of a cyclical view of cosmic history you they seeing things going that way with integration and disintegration um of the elements all the way through the history of the cosmos but the four basic elements and exageras on the other hand thinks there must be um basic elements of every kind of qualitative thing no matter how different he calls them seeds so um your body will have seeds of bone seeds of skin seeds of Flesh seeds of blood seeds of muscle seeds of hair so on so forth and uh there are some

suggestions that it might be um seeds of dark hair or seeds of light hair seeds of curly hair or seeds of straight hair where you're going to stop this sort of pluralism but then having postulated such an infinite diversity of different things all of these seeds how are you going to account for the ordered Unity of the human body and for that matter of the universe and so what an exageras does is to talk about about um what he calls noose or mind as if there is some Cosmic mind drawing things into ordered unity in

an ordered Direction some sort of divine noose you can see that uh in groping for the source of cosmic order they're groping towards some concept of a Supreme Being you see the beginnings of theology in the ancient Greeks in distinction from some of their mythology you see but on the other hand when you get to democratus the picture is different because while edles and anagas were qualitative pluralists okay qualitative pluralists democratus is a qualitative monist everything is of one and the same quality body but a quantitative pluralist that is to say physical things are composed

of infinitesimal atoms an atom the word literally means it cannot be split it cannot be cut an indivisible pellet of matter okay so physical things that we know are composed of a vast numbers of atoms indivisible pellets and the qualitative differences between cats and cabbages and cauliflowers and Kings you see the qualitative differences are due to the combinations of atoms producing those qualitative differences different combination for a king than a cauliflower now the idea is that the atoms come in different shapes and whirling around in some sort of cosmic Vortex natural kind of motion whirling

around in this Cosmic Vortex Collide hook onto each other combin so larger Aggregates form and there is a result of she chance mechanical processes the whole body of things in Heaven and Earth has been formed over the course of history so what you get then in um these last people is particularly interesting because whereas um an exageras is suggesting a teleological explanation a teic explanation that is to say there is this Cosmic mind that orders things in these intelligible ways okay on the other hand democratus has a pure mechanistic explanation has a purely mechanistic explanation

blind forces combining by chance to produce the kinds of conglomerates that make up the cosmos it's as if um somebody took a whole bundle and bundles and bundles of individual letters and wed them around long enough and out came the Sunday edition of The Chicago Tribune you see that sort of explanation the sheer chance but um obviously um here you have two philosophers Hing heading in vastly different directions you see a mechanistic kind of material materialism in which nothing exists but material atoms being moved by chance forces okay and on the other hand a teologico

explanation which is pushing in the direction of either some kind of theistic metaphysic or some kind of idealism but some explanation which sees some immaterial reality of a rational sort uh accounting for the edness of the cosmos now that's been a quick rundown and um before I pick up and pull some threads together let me pause did you get the story what do you want to get clear again Ruth um you were saying that democratus is a qualitative lus but a quantitative right yes because all of the atoms individual atoms are qualitatively the same qualitatively

alike so a qualitative monist but a quantitative pluralist many of them but all of them qualitatively alike yeah does that make sense um getting the terminology under your belt and as part of your active vocabulary is part of the uh part of the task at this juncture um I have question on epid who the first one oh and pedicles okay you say model me um I I'm inclined to say no I think he is grouping towards a teleological view for this reason that in that cyclical picture of the elements combining and disassociating um he ascribes

that cyclical process to uh two forces that he calls love and hate attraction repulsion now depending how you take those terms Love and Hate they could be simply metaphorical terms for attraction and repulsion as we think of it in magnetism and electricity you'll see in which case it would be a mechanistic thing but on the other hand if you take love and hate to be some inner directedness because of natural Affinity you see um it doesn't have to be conscious anymore than a daffodil growing up in the the spring or turning to the light implies

Consciousness you see but as long as there is an order that is end oriented then you could say this is the beginning of a teolog so I'm inclined to say that imp pedicles isn't out into the clear yet one way or the other but I think he's edging towards the um theological view yeah okay um no I I want you to uh to get this General structure of the presocratic period uh down as um well as you can we're not going to spend a lot of time on it just today and next time but we'll

be referring back to it again and again it'll become point of reference okay so keep in mind the milesians okay qualitative MO s of a rather simplistic sort the milesians the double aspect theories of Pythagoras and heraclitus the helics their absolute monism The pluralists Who pose the mechanism versus teleology question and the reading that you doing will put the Flesh on these bones the structure is important now what um what I I want to uh to underscore is um the kind of question that these people are raising um we we think of um thees as

about 600 BC okay pH about 600 BC by the time we get down to uh Socrates we're about 400 BC so we've got essentially a 200e span in which the presocratic are at work 200e span uh in which in effect they are formulating the philosophical agenda that Western philosophy has worked with ever since they are formulating a philosophical agenda that Western philosophy has worked with ever since now maybe you're inclined to ask well why should we take their agenda well the thing is that it is so interwoven into Western thought patterns in every discipline not

just in philosophy in every discipline for the simple reason that the later Sciences emerged as spinoffs from philosophy you'll see have you noticed how your science professors have doctor of philosophy degrees and many of them never saw the inside of a philosophy classroom except for people like Dr Chapel here who audits philosophy courses bless her heart you see uh simply because um natural philosophy socalled philosophy of nature natural philosophy the sort of thing that these guys are doing is the seed bed out of which the empirical and mathematical Sciences develop subsequently you see if you

um take Dr spradley's courses in the history of science you'll find that the history of science up through or approximately the Renaissance is essentially one strain of what we do in the history of philosophy you see then you begin to get the development of astronomy and physics independently of philosophy later of chemistry and of biology sociology doesn't begin until the mid 19th mid 19th century psychology as a science not until early 20th century it's late as 1910 what's now the Journal of philosophy was called the Journal of philosophy psychology scientific method Etc I know that's

a mouthful but uh that's the way it was so um the agenda that is created you'll see by the presocratic was um carried on in natural philosophy in ancient and medieval times and transmitted into modern times so that in a sense the question we're asking is still um what are the basic elements or if not basic elements what's the basic stuff is whether you want protons or quirks take your choice we're still asking the same kinds of questions and how do you describe the causal processes and the causal forces at work that produce change you

think same type of questions but what is that agenda what is that agenda and I I think you can see um pretty clearly that it's the kind kind of agenda that um you should have been introduced to more or less in your introductory course where um we usually try to get at questions in what we call metaphysics whether or not they're label that way questions in metaphysics having to do with the nature of reality whether it be questions about the natural world mechanism andology or questions about um whether matter is real in itself or not

as George Berkeley thought you see whether mind and matter are two different kinds of substance as in the Mind Body problem in talking of the nature of persons whether everything that occurs is due to causal processes and a deter istic scheme or whether there's such a thing as free will whether there is an ultimate source of cosmic order whether in fact God exists those are metaphysical questions and you can see that that is part of the agenda then posed by the presocratic now I've also suggested that um secondly there is a uh further agenda under

of the surface in epistemology theory of knowledge you'll see where you find there are some of these ancients who are thoroughgoing empiricists saying all that we know comes from sense experience and indeed thees seems to talk like that um certainly the pluralists do though they do have a oal speculation beyond that they're basically empiricists as distinct from rationalists like Parmenides and Zeno who disparage completely sense experience and say that only abstract logical thought really um gives us reliable knowledge see and so epistemological questions are posed about how we know just how reliable is experience just

to what extent can abstract rational thought provide knowledge how are these two related you see that agenda thirdly there is an agenda about ethics and about Society if you like social philosophy because as I hinted both um both Pythagoras and heraclitus Main to Ain that if this is a rationally ordered Universe then we should live rationally ordered lives if we want to fit into the universe want to find our place you see and even democratus suggests that a life Guided by reason is a value in a mechanistic materialistic Universe how come well these blind forces

cause Pleasure and Pain so if you gain enough understanding of the causal processes and guide your life by what you know of the causal processes you can then minimize the pain and pursue the pleasure but that takes a rationally guided life so out of these positions flow ethical positions what is the good life and what do we have to do to pursue it you see so the this um whole agenda of Western philosophy then uh seems to be implied um spelled out at least in its basic terms uh by these presocratic