PRINCIPLE BEYOND THE SENSES: (METAPHYSICAL THEOLOGY)

 

PRINCIPLE BEYOND THE SENSES: (METAPHYSICAL THEOLOGY)

ANAXIMANDER:

Anaximander of Miletus left behind a book entitled ‘On Nature’, written in prose, a medium just beginning to come into fashion.

1.      He thinks it is an error to identify the ultimate material of the universe with any of the elements we can see around us in the contemporary world, such as water or fire.

2.      The fundamental principle of things, he said, must be boundless or undefined (apeiron).

3.      He may or may not have thought that his principle extended for ever in space; what we do know is that he thought it had no beginning and no end in time and that it did not belong to any particular kind or class of things.

 

PARMANIDES:

Like Xenophanes, Parmanides was a poet: he wrote a philosophical poem in clumsy verse, of which we possess about 120 lines. He is the first philosopher whose writing has come down to us in continuous fragments that are at all substantial.

1.      The poem consists of a prologue and two parts,

a.      one called the path of    truth,

b.      the other the path of mortal opinion.

2.      The prologue shows us:a.      The poet riding in a chariot with the daughters of the Sun, leaving behind the halls of night and travelling towards the light.

b.      They reach the gates where the goddess welcomes him on his quest and tells him that he must learn both the way of Truth and opinion.

2.      It is the founding charter of a new discipline: ontology or metaphysics, the science of Being.

3.      Whatever there is, whatever can be thought of, is for Parmenides nothing other than Being.

4.      Being is one and indivisible: it has no beginning and no end, and it is not subject to temporal change.

5.      But for Parmenides there are not, in fact, any real changes at all. Being is everlastingly the same, and time is unreal because past, present, and future are all one.

 

ANAXAGORAS:

Anaxagoras had explained everything by nous, or mind.

1.      The Presocratic whom later Greeks revered as a philosopher of mind was Anaxagoras.

Anaxagoras believed that the universe began as a tiny complex unit which expanded and evolved into the world we know, but that at1.      every stage of evolution every single thing contains a portion of everything else.

2.      This development is presided over by Mind (nous), which is itself:

a.      Other things have a portion of everything, but Mind is unlimited and independent and is unmixed with any kind of stuff, but stands all alone by itself.

                                                    i.     For if it (Mind) was not by itself, but was mixed with anything else, it (Mind) would have a share in every kind of stuff.

                                                  ii.     The things mixed with it (Mind) would prevent it (Mind) from controlling everything in the way it (Mind) does now when it (Mind) is alone by itself.

b.      For it (Mind) is the finest and purest of all things, and it (Mind) has all knowledge of and all power over everything.

c.      All things that have souls, the greater and the lesser, are governed by Mind.

                                                    i.     Anaxagoras distinguishes between souls, which are part of the material world, and a godlike Mind, which is immaterial, or at least is made of a unique, ethereal, kind of matter.

3.      Outside the evolutionary process, teleological explanation was more profound than mechanistic explanation.a.      ‘If anyone wants to find out the reason why each thing comes to be or perishes or exists, this is what he must find out about it:

                                                    i.     how is it best for that thing to exist, or to act or be acted upon in any way?’

DEMOCRITUS:

Democritus’ fundamental thesis is that matter is not infinitely divisible.

1.      We do not know his exact argument for this conclusion, but Aristotle conjectured that it ran as follows.

a.      If we take a chunk of any kind of stuff and divide it up as far as we can, we will have to come to a halt at tiny bodies which are indivisible.

b.      We cannot allow matter to be divisible to infinity:

                                                    i.     for let us suppose that the division has been carried out and then ask:

·        What would ensue if the division was carried out?

                                                  ii.     If each of the infinite number of parts has any magnitude, then it must be further divisible, which contradicts our hypothesis.

                                                 iii.     If, on the other hand, the surviving parts have no magnitude, then they can never have amounted to any quantity: for zero multiplied by infinity is still zero.                                                    i.     So we have to conclude that divisibility comes to an end, and the smallest possible fragments must be bodies with sizes and shapes.

                                                  ii.     These tiny, indivisible bodies were called by Democritus ‘atoms’ (which is just the Greek word for ‘indivisible’)

2.      Atoms, Democritus believed, are too small to be detected by the senses; they are infinite in number and come in infinitely many varieties, and they have existed for ever.

a.      He maintained that there was no contradiction in admitting a vacuum: there was a void, and in this infinite empty space atoms were constantly in motion.

                                                    i.     For Democritus, atoms and the void are the only two realities: what we see as water or fire or plants or humans are only conglomerations of atoms in the void.

3.      The sensory qualities we see are unreal: they are due to convention.

                                                    i.     Democritus explained in detail how perceived qualities arose from different kinds and configurations of atoms.

·        Sharp flavors, for instance, originated from atoms that were small, fine, angular, and jagged,·        while sweet tastes were produced by larger, rounder, smoother atoms.

b.      The knowledge given us by the senses is mere darkness compared with the illumination that is given by the atomic theory.

 

 

PYTHAGORAS:

Pythagoras[1] was a mathematically inclined philosopher whose inquiries took quite a different course. A recipe, besides naming ingredients, will contain a lot of numbers: so many grams of this, so many litres of that.

1.      The Pythagoreans were more interested in the numbers in the world’s recipe than in the ingredients themselves.

2.      They supposed, Aristotle says, that the elements of numbers were the elements of all things, and the whole of the heavens was a musical scale.

a.      They were inspired in their quest by their discovery that the relationship between the notes of the scale played on a lyre corresponded to different numerical ratios between the lengths of the strings.

b.      They then generalized this idea that qualitative differences might be the upshot of numerical differences.

                                                    i.     Their inquiry, in Aristotle’s terms, was an inquiry into the formal causes of the universe.

c.      The Pythagoreans’ discovery that there was a relationship between musical intervals and numerical ratios led to the belief that the study of mathematics was the key to the understanding of the structure and order of the universe.

d.      Astronomy and harmony, they said, were sister sciences, one for the eyes and one for the ears.