Introduction to Humanities
Lecture 3
Pre-Socratic Philosophy
By David Kelsey
Philosophical Questions & myths
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In the 6th and 5th century B.C. questions about the nature of the world began to
take importance.
– Questions such as:
• What is the meaning of life?
• Does life end in death?
• What is the best life to live?
– Prior to the 6th century B.C., answers to such questions came in the form of
myths.
Myths
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Myths:
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a story told and retold as a part of tradition.
Often involved the Gods in some struggle, either with each other or with human beings,
and intervening in human life for good or evil.
• The Greeks and their Gods:
– Kronos, Rhea, Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Aphrodite…
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Myths often involve a moral lesson.
An example of a myth
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An example in the first few lines of Homer’s Iliad (page 5 of Melchert):
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Rage--Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.
Begin, Muse, when the two first broke and clashed, Agamemnon lord of men and
brilliant Achilles.
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What god drove them to fight with such a fury?
Apollo the son of Zeus and Leto. Incensed at the king
he swept a fatal plague through the army--men were dying
and all because Agamemnon had spurned Apollo’s priest.
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The Iliad, Book 1, 1-12
Explaining Homer’s Iliad
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What’s Homer on about:
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The theme of the Iliad: rage (the irrational anger of Achilles)
The Greeks capture a beautiful girl in a Trojan raid and the army awards her to
Agamemnon…
Her father, a priest, pleads for her return…
Agamemnon finally gives up the girl but demands Achilles prize, a lovely woman.
Enraged, Achilles refuses to fight
Patrocles pleads with Achilles to return to battle but he refuses.
So Patrocles talks Achilles into letting him use Achilles’ armor to fight himself. During
the battle Patrocles is killed by the great Trojan warrior Hector…
Achilles rejoins the battle and wreaks havoc…He meets Hector in battle and kills him.
Achilles then drags Hector’s body back to the greek camp...
The story ends with Hector’s father, King Priam, travelling at night to the Greek camp
to plead for his sons body…Achilles gives up the body.
New Answers to Philosophical Questions
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During the 5th and 6th centuries B.C. there arose a discontent among some.
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Not content with the myths as answers
In early philosophical thought, certain questions gained precedence.
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The Question of the one an the many:
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The appearance/reality distinction:
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Human reality:
Thales
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Thales of Miletus (625-547 B.C.)
Held that:
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1) the cause and element of all things is water
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2) all things are filled with Gods
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Water is underlying everything…
So the Gods are explanations for why things exist and happen,
Example:
Problem for Thales’ view:
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Why water?
Anaximander
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Anaximander:
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612-545 B.C.
from Miletus as Thales was.
Held the following:
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Given any state of things, Z, it had a beginning
But then some prior state, Y, must have brought Z to be
But Y must have had a beginning
So some prior state X must have brought Y to be
But this reasoning cannot go on forever
So there is something that has no beginning
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What does Anaximander call this thing without a beginning?
Anaximander’s boundless
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The boundless:
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The beginning for all things
No beginning and no end
Called divine
Encompasses all things and steers all things
Indefinite in character
Swirling in a vortex like motion
• Swirling water in a pan…
– Why think that the boundless is swirling in a vortex?
• Just look around.
– Problem: how can one such abstract cause account for all the variety we
see in nature?
• Do we need one big cause?
Pythagoras
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Pythagoras
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570-495 B.C.
Lived in Croton (southern Italy) most of his adult life
Had much influence on Plato
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Much influence on mathematics and music:
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He and his followers first developed Geometry
Developed the Pythagorean theorem
Discovered the mathematical ratios of musical intervals: the octave, the fifth and the fourth
Believed in Dualism.
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The soul…
Reincarnation…
A Vegetarian…
Heraclitus
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Heraclitus:
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540-480 B.C.
Lived in Ephesus (north of Miletus, on the shores of Asia Minor)
Wrote the book of Heraclitus
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His solution of the one and the many:
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We live in a world of many. There is a multitude of apparently different, changing and
conflicting things.
This multitude of things is made one by the logos.
The logos is…
The Logos
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The logos:
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The law like or rational process or structure or pattern which governs all things.
The logos provides structure in chaos…
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Reality is a flux, structured by the logos
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All things are in flux, like a river: ever changing, yet preserving an identity through the changes.
River metaphor: although the water that makes the river is ever changing, it is the same river.
The logos is the structure that unifies the many
In every one, many persist.
Example…
The Logos continued
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The Logos continued:
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The logos is a divine fire:
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Divine fire:
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“All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things…” (DK 22 B 31, IEGP, 91)
Fire both is the world order, I.e. the logos, and manifests itself in that world order
Through the logos there is a harmonious union of opposites
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Reality is in a state of constant change but All things come into being through opposition:
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Without tension, opposition and conflict, the world could not persist
Example:
The divine world order guarantees a balance of opposites:
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Example:
Perceiving the Logos
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Perceiving the Logos:
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Humans pay no attention to the logos.
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We perceive conflict, disorder and chaos.
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But there is structure behind the madness. This is the logos.
The logos:
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all that is and ever will be is ever changing.
The Ethics of
Heraclitus
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The logos and how we should act:
– Always be at one with the logos in one’s actions and character. Act
according to a balance of opposites.
– Moderation is the greatest virtue
• It is never good for man to get all he wishes
Parmenides
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Parmenides:
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from Elea (now the southern part of Italy) &
lived from 515 B.C. to roughly 450 B.C.
The first Rationalist: wants to see where reasoning and argument takes us
An argument for Monism:
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Monism is the metaphysical view that there is only one type of thing as opposed to
more than one.
1. Thought and being are the same
2. You cannot think “nothing”
3. Things don’t ever come into being.
And 4. Things don’t ever fall out of existence.
Thus, 5. Things don’t have beginnings or endings and change is impossible.
There is only the One
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So what follows from this argument:
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Time is an illusion
• what is must exist all at once in a continuous present
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What is, is indivisible
• The one has no parts
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There cannot be things of different kinds
• There is only the one. It is eternal, indivisible and unchanging.
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The appearance/reality distinction is also solved:
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So Parmenides view is counterintuitive…
Atomism
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Democritus and Leucippus were the originators of Atomism.
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Not much is known of Leucippus
Democritus:
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460-360 B.C.
lived in Abdera in the middle of the 5th century B.C.
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Atomism gives us a solution to the one and the many problem which isn’t
counterintuitive like Parmenides solution.
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Atomists think we can grant that being and not being are opposites and that not
being is not.
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But they think that from this monism needn’t follow
An Ambiguity
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Atomism calls attention to an ambiguity in Parmenides argument:
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The ambiguity is in the term “what is”.
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For Democritus, what is can be either body or empty space.
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So space can be empty in that it contains no things and yet it can have being of
its own.
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Democritus calls empty space “the void”
Atomism vs. Monism
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Here we see the contrast in views:
Parmenides
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Being Not-Being
Is
Is Not
Atomism
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Being
Is
Thing No-Thing
Body Void
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Not-Being
Is Not
Atoms
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So for Atomism, reality consists of atoms and the void.
Bodies that we can see and touch are composed of atoms.
Atoms:
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Tiny, indivisible, indestructible and exist eternally
In constant motion…
Mechanical laws…
Can differ in 3 ways…
How Atoms form into bodies
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Atoms combine and hook together to form the bodies we can see and touch:
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Atoms move about in the void
Atoms can hook into each other
If enough atoms get hooked together, they can form bodies that are visible to us
Bodies differ…
An explanation of change:
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A body comes into being:
A body passes away:
The Implications of Atomism
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Here are some implications of the view:
– 1-there is no room for intelligent design or purpose in explaining events or
actions:
• The laws of motion and freedom of the will…
– 2-Everything in the universe must be explained in terms of materialist terms,
I.e. there is only atoms, the void and the mechanical laws that govern their
behavior.
• So the mind and the soul must be explained in completely materialist terms.
– Sensations, mental states and qualia…
• Other problems:
– Ghosts, angels and reincarnation
The rise of Athens
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During the 4th & 5th centuries B.C. Athens becomes the center of Greek cultural life
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499 B.C. = Eastern Greek city states (on the shores of Asia Minor) rebelled against Persian
taxation.
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Athens sends 20 ships to defend against the Persians and burns Sardis to the ground.
The Persians respond…
480 B.C. = The Persian king Xerxes took an army of near 200,000 to defeat Athens
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Greece was composed of city states, which included…
The city states each had their own citizens, armies, etc.
Democracy…
Leonidas lead Spartan soldiers to meet the Persians at Thermopylae: many Persians killed but the
Spartans are defeated
The Persians are defeated by the Athenians in a sea battle
The Persians returned a year later to be defeated again
As a result, Athens gains prominence and wealth.
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Athens forms the league for the future defense of Greek lands & rules the sea
The Sophists
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The Sophists were teachers.
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Popular during the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.
Protagoras was one of the greatest
Taught virtue, politics, astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, music and philosophy
Most notably taught rhetoric
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The uses of rhetoric…
Rhetoric are the principles and practice of persuasive speaking.
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By using the principles of persuasive speaking, one can make a case for any position at all.
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Rhetoric was taught:
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The Sophist claimed to teach how to turn the weaker argument into the stronger one
Man is the Measure of All Things
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The Sophists thought man is the measure of all things:
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Since any position can be made to persuade, there are only opinions
So humans are confined to appearances and we cannot discriminate truth from opinion
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Can we gain truth at all?
– So man is the measure of all things:
• There is no criterion, standard or mark by which to judge except ourselves
• This is the view known as Relativism
– Says truth is relative to the individual, group or culture
Physis & Nomos
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Physis:
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Nomos:
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The characteristics of the world or things in general independent of what human beings
impose on it
custom or convention
• Example…
Things for which humans alone have decided that they be so
For the Sophists, morality, virtue and justice were a question of Nomos not
Physis.
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Right and wrong, just and unjust are merely a convention because we sort such
questions out by consulting the laws.
The Peloponnesian War
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The Peloponnesian War:
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Between the Greek city states of Athens and Sparta
Occurred between 431 and 404 B.C.
Death and killing was pervasive throughout…
Lead to the defeat of Athens and the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Greece
The peace treaty and the Thirty…
The Thirty
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The Thirty:
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Were supported by Spartan men-at-arms
Carried out a purge of criminals and wrong doers
Executed criminals and persecuted many…
Lasted almost a year…
The thirty were finally defeated but Athens would never recover…
Results of the Thirty’s reign of terror
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Results of the reign of terror on the people of Athens and Greece:
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Athenians lost confidence…
The world and human affairs seemed beyond managing…
Disillusionment at Sophistry…
A Greek known as Aristophanes wrote ‘The Clouds’…
To Aristophanes, argument was nothing more than a contest that the most persuasive
will always win
The central concern of Socrates…