Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes
Thales: First thinker who gave mythological explanations for the physical world. He was a Presocratic philosopher.
Presocratic philosophers attempted to explain the world by appeals to arche. Arche is like, an explanatory principle for the world.
Thales’ arche was water. He thought life truly depended on water, and believed that the earth floated on water…
Anaximander: Student of Thales. Was concerned with both astronomical, meteorological, and then eventually philosophical interests. Similarly to Thales, also studied nature. His arche, was the apeiron, a Greek word that can be roughly translated to the Indefinite, the Infinite, or the Boundless. He talked about opposites, as something separated out from the Infinite. Justice, injustice. When we have two opposites, such as heat and cold, cold comes at the expense of heat. Vice versa, the hot no longer exists when there is cold.
Anaximenes: Pupil of Anaximander. His arche was air, and he helped create the foundations for Presocratic philosophy. He speculated on the cosmology of the world. He thought that a fiery sphere surrounded the earth and broke off to make the sun, moon, and stars. Also thought earth was a cylinder.
- Said the earth maintains its position by maintaining an equilibrium.
- Posited that air was the arche from which things came into being.
- Believed the soul was air. The Greek word pneuma implies both breath and air.
- All things could come from air by becoming more dense or more cold/hot. Therefore, all things were air.
Anaxagoras
Thought that everything was contained in everything else. For example, thought that a sperm contained blood, hair, fingernails, all the pieces it takes to make a person. Focused on mixtures, and the coming together and separation of these mixtures. Being born was a mixture coming together, and dying was a separation of the parts. Believed the mind was separate from the physical stuff of the universe. Gave naturalistic explanations of celestial phenomena.
Empedocles
(c.490-430BC) Empedocles wrote on nature and the cosmos, and is believed to be the first to propose four elements or ‘Roots’. These roots were Shining Zeus, life-bearing Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis: Fire, Air, Earth, Water. He suggested the Universe has a cosmic cycle in which these elements are brought together and separated by Love and Strife. He also had an early form of natural selection, where in creatures are nothing more than the accumulation of body parts, initially scattered but not forming a complete animal.
Heraclitus
- Proposed the idea of logos, and intelligible understanding available to everyone but taken up by only a few
- View of opposites, within the hostility and opposition, there is unity.
- Fire as a principle force
Socrates
- The prototypical philosopher, in fact all philosophers before his time are referred to as Presocratics.
- Focused on ethical matters, sought the universal, constantly seeking definitions
- Never wrote anything, everything we know comes from a handful of contemporaries.
- Was convicted of corrupting the youth and neglecting the gods of Athens, and drank hemlock to commit suicide
- The Socratic Elenchus: He sought definitions of things and looked for the definitions of moral qualities such as temperance, wisdom, or justice.
- Virtue is knowledge
- No one willingly does wrong, but they commit evil acts out of ignorance.
Plato
(c.423-347BC)
- Student of Socrates, set up the first school of philosophy
- The Three-Part Soul: Logical, Spirited, Appetitive
- Logical - Seat of reason
- Spirited - Strong passions
- Appetitive - Bodily desires such as food, drink, and sex
- Theory of Forms: eternal changeless entities from which particular things in the world derive their own being. For example, there is a Form of Beauty, Wisdom, Unity, etc. Each thing that is beautiful is participating in the form of Beauty for a while, until it dies or is no longer beautiful.
- Plato was a believer in reincarnation. He considered the process of learning to be the recollection of knowledge acquired in a previous life.