GREEK PHILOSOPHY BEGINNINGS:

 

GREEK PHILOSOPHY BEGINNINGS:

Early philosophers sought the basic ingredients of the world we live in and posed the following question: At a fundamental level is the world made out of water, or air, or fire, or earth, or a combination of some/ all of these or something else entirely?

ELEMENTALISTS: (NATURAL THEOLOGY)

 

THALES:

Only two sayings are recorded of Thales of Miletus, traditionally the founding father of Greek philosophy.

 

1.      They illustrate the mixrure of science and religion[1],

a.      for one of them was ‘All things are full of gods’,

b.      and the other was ‘Water is the first principle of everything’.

Even in antiquity people found it hard to understand Thales’ adoption of water as the ultimate principle of explanation

a.      The earth, he said, rested on water like a log floating in a stream—but then, asked Aristotle, what does the water rest on?

b.      He went further and said that everything came from and was in some sense made out of water.

c.      Again, his reasons were obscure, and Aristotle could only conjecture that it was because all animals and plants need water to live, or because semen is moist.

 

ANAXIMENES:

Anaximenes opted, like Thales, for a single one of the existing elements as fundamental, though again he opted for air rather than water.

1.      In its stable state air is invisible, but when it is moved and condensed it becomes first wind and then cloud and then water, and finally water condensed becomes mud and stone.

2.      Rarefied air became fire, thus completing the extent of the elements.

3.      In this way rarefaction and condensation can conjure everything out of the underlying air.

4.      In support of this claim Anaximenes appealed to experience, and indeed to experiment—an experiment that the reader can easily carry out for herself.

a.      Blow on your hand, first with the lips pursed, and then from an open mouth: the first time the air will feel cold, and the second time hot.

b.      This, argued Anaximenes, shows the connection between density and temperature.

 

XENOPHANES:

Like the Milesians, Xenophanes propounded a cosmology.

1.      The basic element, he maintained, was not water nor air, but earth, and the earth reaches down below us to infinity.

2.      ‘All things are from earth and in earth all things end’

 

HERACLITUS:

Heraclitus once said that the world was an ever-living Fire: sea and earth are the ashes of this perpetual bonfire.

 

1.      Fire is like gold: you can exchange gold for all kinds of goods, and Fire can turn into any of the elements.

2.      This fiery world is the only world there is, not made by gods or men, but governed throughout by Logos.

a.      This universal Logos, Heraclitus says, is hard to grasp and most men never succeed in doing so.a.      By comparison with someone who has woken up to the Logos, they are like sleepers curled up in their own dream-world instead of facing up to the single, universal truth.

b.      Humans fall into three classes, at various removes from the rational Fire that governs the universe:

                                                    i.     A philosopher like Heraclitus is closest to the Fiery Logos and receives most warmth from it;

                                                  ii.     next, ordinary people when awake draw light from it when they use their own reasoning powers;

                                                 iii.     Finally, those who are asleep have the windows of their soul blocked up and keep contact with nature only through their breathing.

c.      Diogenes Laertius tells us that the sequence:

                                                    i.     Fire–air–water–earth is the road downward,

                                                  ii.     Earth– water–air–fire is the road upward.

                                                 iii.     These two roads can only be regarded as the same if they are seen as two stages on a continuous, everlasting, cosmic progress.

d.      Heraclitus did indeed believe that the cosmic fire went through stages of kindling and quenching.

e.      The underlying process has no beginning and no end, but each cycle of kindling and quenching is an individual world that comes into and goes out of existence.EMPEDOCLES:

Empedocles’ philosophy of nature can be regarded, from one point of view, as a synthesis of the thought of the Ionian philosophers. As we have seen, each of them had singled out some one substance as the basic or dominant stuff of the universe:

1.      Thales had privileged water, Anaximenes air, Xenophanes earth, and Heraclitus fire.

2.      For Empedocles all four of these substances stood on equal terms as the fundamental ingredients, or ‘roots’ as he put it, of the universe.

3.      These roots had always existed, he maintained, but they mingle with each other in various proportions in such a way as to produce the familiar furniture of the world and also the resident of the heavens.

4.      Aristotle praised Empedocles for having realized that a cosmological theory must not just identify the elements of the universe, but must assign causes for the development and intermingling of the elements to make the living and inanimate compounds of the actual world.

5.      Empedocles assigns this role to Love and Strife: Love combines the elements, and Strife forces them apart.a.      At one time the roots grow to be one out of many, at another time they split to be many out of one.

b.      These things, he said, never cease their continual interchange, now through love coming together into one, now carried apart from each other by Strife’s hatred.

c.      Love and Strife are the picturesque ancestors of the forces of attraction and repulsion which have figured in physical theory throughout the ages.

2.      For Empedocles, history is a cycle in which sometimes Love is dominant, and sometimes Strife.

a.      Under the influence of Love the elements combine into a homogeneous, harmonious, and resplendent sphere, reminiscent of Parmenides’ universe.

b.      Under the influence of Strife the elements separate out, but when Love begins to regain the ground it had lost, all the different species of living beings appear.

c.      All compound beings, such as animals and birds and fish, are temporary creatures that come and go; only the elements are everlasting, and only the cosmic cycle goes on forever.