“The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy

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“The legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy.” (Bernard Williams, The Sense of the Past, p. 3)

PHILOSOPHY BEFORE SOCRATES: THE RATIONAL INVESTIGATION OF NATURE A) The goal and the scope of the investigation of nature before Socrates The overriding goal of the investigation of nature before Socrates was to provide explanations of natural phenomena. In this tradition, the investigation of natural phenomena was a search for their causes (aitia, aition), that is, a search for an answer the question “why?”. The ambition was to provide an explanation for all the natural phenomena. More directly, and more boldly, the scope of the investigation of nature before Socrates was everything that there is. EXAMPLE: From Plato’s Phaedo we learn that the investigation of nature crucially consisted in an attempt to provide the relevant explanations of a remarkable variety of natural phenomena, on the crucial assumption that the natural world is, at least to some extent, intelligible to us. <Socrates> (1) When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom (sophia) which they call inquiry into nature (historia tês physeôs), for I thought it splendid to know the causes of everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes, and why it exits. (2) I was often changing my mind in the investigation, in the first instance, of questions such as these: Are living creatures nurtured when heat and could produce a kind of putrefaction, as some say? Do we think with our blood, or air, or fire, or none of these, and does the brain provide our senses of hearing and sight and smell, from which come memory and opinion and from memory and opinion which has become stable, comes knowledge? […] (3) One day I heard someone reading, as he said from a book of Anaxagoras, and saying that it is Mind that directs and is the cause of everything, I was delighted with this cause and its seemed to me good, in a way that was best. If then one wished to know the cause of each thing, why it comes to be or perishes or exists, one had to first find what was the best way for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only about this and other things, what is best. The same man must inevitably also know what is worse, for that is part of the same knowledge. (4) As I reflected on this subject I was glad to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher about the cause of things after my own heart, and that he would tell me, first, whether the earth is flat or round, and then would explain why it is so of necessity, saying which is better, and that it was better to be so. If he said it was in the middle of the universe, he would go on to show that it was better for it to be in the middle, and if he showed me those things I should be prepared never to desire any other kind of cause. I was ready to find out in the same way about the sun and the moon and the other heavenly bodies, about their relative speed, their turnings, and whatever else happened to them, how it is best that each should actor be acted upon. I never thought that Anaxagoras who said that those things were directed b Mind, would bring in any other cause for them that that it was best for them to be as they are. Once he had given the best for each as the cause for each and the general cause of all, I thought he would go on to explain the common good for all, I would not have exchanged my hopes for a fortune. (5) I eagerly acquired his books and red them as quickly as I could in order to know the best and the worst as soon as possible (Plato, Phaedo 96 A-D). B) The style of the investigation of nature before Socrates A r c h a i (= beginnings, starting points, origins) are important for the so-called Presocratics because of the narrative character which their investigation of nature inherited from Homer and Hesiod.1 The Presocratics (see below for more on the origin of this term of art) usually gave an account of each natural thing, as well as the natural world in its entirety, by explaining how they arose, and their goal was to put all the individual explanations into the context of an overall narrative of the coming into existence of the world order (the cosmos). EXAMPLE: Hippocrates, Tradition of Medicine (you find this text in your collection of Hippocratic Writings. This passage is taken from p. 85)

(1) I think I have discussed this subject sufficiently, but there are some doctors and sophists (sophistai) who maintain that no one can understand the science of medicine unless he knows what a man is; that anyone who proposes to treat men for their illnesses must first learn of such things [sc. what man is]. But their discourse/reasoning (logos) takes you into philosophy (philosophia); as may be seen in the writings of Empedocles and all the others who have ever written about nature (peri physeôs); they discuss the origins of man/what man is from the beginning (ex archês) and from what he was created (De Prisca medicina 20)

 

1 Incidentally, this helps us to see that their style of investigation was firmly rooted in, and evolved out of, an earlier and indeed older mode of thinking

 

 

C) Aristotle’s account of the origins of the rational investigation of nature: we derive a good deal of information about the early Greek philosophy directly or indirectly from Aristotle. We need, however, to be on guard against his bias in much of our evidence concerning early Greek philosophy. Today I would like to focus on a crucial aspect of his account of the origins of philosophy. According to Aristotle, the first philosophers were materialists, that is to say, they thought that the principles of everything were material principles. These material principles represent the ultimate level of reality. Put differently, everything is subject to generation and destruction and such does not represent the ultimate level of reality. By contrast, the material principles are that from which and that of which a particular thing is made.

A Presocratics Reader, p. 15: T5 (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.3, 983b6-27) We do not know whether Thales had left any writings. Interestingly enough, Aristotle shows no traces of having read anything by Thales. It is also clear that Aristotle did not think much of Thales and his identification of water as the first principle of all things. Aristotle ventured two conjectures of a biological and physiological kind. However, Aristotle could recognize in Thales the philosophical approach to the study of nature. By his lights, Thales was interested in explanations, and he was interested not just in the explanation of isolated natural phenomena but rather in the explanation of everything that there is. However, Aristotle did not approve of Thales’ materialist, i.e., reductionist, approach to explanation. But he could see in Thales the first thinker engaged in a distinctive style of philosophy. He refers to Thales and the other early philosophers as physikoi, students of nature. He decided that this was sufficient to draw a line between Thales and Homer, Hesiod and the other poets, to whom he collectively refers as theologoi, theologians. In our text (T5), Aristotle refers to these material principles using the term e l e m e n t – in Greek stoicheion. In order to understand what the term stoicheion is intended to evoke it is necessary to go back to the use of this term in the Platonic dialogues. Plato was the first to introduce this term into the technical vocabulary of Greek cosmology.2 Interestingly enough, in the Platonic dialogues this term is normally used in reference to the letters of the alphabet. Philebus 17 A-18 D is certainly among the more significant passages regarding this subject. Here Socrates attributes to the god – or demigod – Theut, first the discovery of the vowels and then the discovery of the other sounds that are not vowels but that can still be pronounced (probably sounds such as /s/ and /m/). After the discovery of the vowels and these other sounds, Theut would have demarcated a third group of mute sounds different from both (probably the consonants). Finally, Theut would have given a name to each sound and would have called the sounds thus distinguished letters – in Greek stoicheia. Evidence that the use of stoicheion in a cosmological context is derived from a reflection on language is implicitly offered in a much celebrated passage from the Timaeus. Here Plato exploits the letters of the alphabet in order to illustrate one of the most characteristic theses of the entire dialogue. According to Plato, the case of earth, water, air, and fire is not analogous to that of the letters of the alphabet. Some of the first philosophers were monists, that is to say, they endorsed the view that there is one material principle from which and of which everything is made. D) Presocratics The first known use of the term “Presocratic” is in a handbook on the history of philosophy published toward the end of the 18th century. The term was not immediately adopted; rather, it prompted a debate because of the difficulties encountered by people who tried to use it in a rigorous, historical manner. It was Eduard Zeller, the founder of modern historiography of ancient philosophy, who established Socrates as the true dividing line in his History of Greek Philosophy (first published between 1844 and 1852). This periodization (before and after Socrates) was accepted by Hermann Diels in his collection of fragments and testimonies of early Greek philosophy: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (first published in 1903). This collection is still the starting pont for any serious scholarly work in this particular field of study. GLOSSARY: Principle (archê), Element (stoicheion), physikoi (students of nature), cause (aition, aitia), wisdom (sophia), sophists (sophistai), philosophy (philosophia), Presocratics.