Lecture 2: The Pre-Socratics, Socrates, and Plato
© Darrin Durant 2004
The Pre-Socratics, Socrates, and Plato:
Or, why discuss ancient astronomers as if they were trying to
be 21st century astronomers?
Pre-Historic Times…
 Know-how v. theoretical knowledge
 Oral traditions
- Explains and justifies the present
- Based on personal experience
 The invention of writing by 800 B.C Greece
 Writing “froze” oral traditions:
- Skepticism
- Abstraction
 The “Greek Miracle” of the 6th-5th century B.C:
- Use of writing
- Prosperity, contact with others, competitive
culture, social and political organization
The Pre-Socratics
1. The problem of ultimate reality
2. The problem of change
3. The problem of knowledge
 How naturalistic were they?
Democritus (410) & Leucippus (450) v. Empedocles (450)
 What is the ‘ultimate reality’?
Thales (585) v. Heraclitus (500) v. Pythagoreans (6th-5th)
 Is change real?
Heraclitus (500) v. Parmenides (480) & Zeno (450)
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Lecture 2: The Pre-Socratics, Socrates, and Plato
© Darrin Durant 2004
 Sense or Experience as a way to knowledge?
Empedocles (450) v. Democritus (410), Leucippus (440)
 Lindberg’s thesis regarding Socrates:
 Brought about a shift to politics and ethics
 How should we interpret Cicero’s comment (43 B.C) that Socrates
“called down philosophy from the skies”?
Socrates (470-399 B.C)
 Socrates sought an understanding of things in terms of what would
be for the best – i.e.: in terms of their purpose or telos.
 Teleological notion of cause shaped much of the work of Plato
and Aristotle
 Socrates oppose of Ionian & Milesian traditions, or did he offer a
competing way of doing natural philosophy?
 Some context: the Greek tragedians, such as Aeschylus’s Prometheus
Bound, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Euripides’s Supplicants.
 Astronomy as “techne” [arts] & Practical applications
 Late 5th century B.C external threats to Athens (Persians, 431 B.C;
Peloponnesian War, 431-401 B.C) led to internal strife (focus on human
condition)
 Lack of specialization = all domains linked
 Was Socrates an impious, skeptical naturalist?
 The Sophists: mistrust of the possibility of absolute knowledge,
values and standards.
E.g.: Protagoras “man is the measure of all things”
 Response = Socratic method (e.g.: what is a good shoemaker? What
is justice?)
1. We’re all ignorant, and that is a good thing
2. To know, we must know the end in view first
3. Collect instances and find common qualities
4. Thus avoid political and moral anarchy
 Socratic teleology = Pythagorean (intelligible & measurable) +
Parmenidean (rely on reason, not experience) tradition
 A particular way of inquiring about nature and society solves
political problems of internal division
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Lecture 2: The Pre-Socratics, Socrates, and Plato
© Darrin Durant 2004
Socrates in Context
- “They did not tolerate the natural philosophers and chatterers about
things in the sky, as they called them, dissolving divinity into irrational
causes, blind forces, and necessary properties. Protagoras was banished,
Anaxagoras put under restraint and with difficulty saved by Pericles,
and Socrates, though in fact he had no concern in such matters, lost his
life through devotion to philosophy.”
Plutarch (circa 100 A.D) on the Athenians of the 5th century
- Eupolis charged Protagoras with being an “imposter about the
phenomenon of the heavens.”
- Euripides charged that Anaxagoras “had reduced the all seeing Helios,
who traversed the sky every day in his flashing chariot and was the
awful witness of men’s most scared oaths, to the status of a lifeless lump
of glowing stone.”
- In Plato’s Apology (18b-19d) . . .
 Enemies of Socrates = Aristophonic attacks on his piety
 Aristophanes accused Socrates of replacing the authority of
tradition, the sanctification of the Gods, and the power of music
and poetry, with a cold “pure intelligibility” as the criterion of
truth.
- In Aristophanes’s Clouds the final lines sum up the nature of his
charge. As Socrates and his students are driven from the stage:
“Why did you outrage the Gods with your studies?
Why pry into the seats of the Moon?
Chase, strike, beat them, for many reasons, but most
Of all because they insulted the Gods.”
- Plutarch tells that, ca. 440 B.C, “Diopeithes introduced a bill for the
impeachment of those who denied the Gods or taught about celestial
phenomena…”
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Lecture 2: The Pre-Socratics, Socrates, and Plato
© Darrin Durant 2004
- In Plato’s Apology . . .
 Socrates ambiguously states that he values knowledge about
the heavens, but wonders if it is possible to be wise about such
matters (19c).
- In Plato’s Phaedo . . .
 Socrates distances himself from both the physicists and
Anaxagoras. The former leave him doubting even what he
thought he knew (96), while the latter did not distinguish between
causes and mere conditions allowing such causes to work (98b99b).
 Neither of them, claimed Socrates, acknowledged the divine
power that had arranged things as they are (99b-c).
- Socrates “called down philosophy from the skies.”
Cicero’s (106-43 B.C), comment in the Tusculan disputations (43 B.C)
- How to interpret this? . . .
- Rousseau (1712-78): Socrates the heroic opponent of the spread of
‘scientism’
- Nietzsche (1844-1900): Socrates actively spread approaches applied to
celestial phenomenon to the human realm. Aristophanes interpreted
Socrates this way and attacked him for it (attacked him for being
‘scientistic’).
 The Point?:
1. Attaining the status of ‘knowledge’, as opposed to ‘opinion’, has
implications for how power, authority and credibility is
distributed in a community
2. Knowledge can be put to social uses
3. It is often difficult, if not impossible, to separate debates about
knowledge from debates about its social uses and social origins
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Lecture 2: The Pre-Socratics, Socrates, and Plato
© Darrin Durant 2004
Why study astronomy, according to Plato?
Plato (428-348 B.C)
 Familiarity with astronomy would teach a leader about cosmic
harmony. Cosmic harmony modeled personal harmony, which prevents
rulers from becoming tyrants, and informs them about social harmony
(their duty to create and maintain).
 Plato argued that astronomy showed that the lower orders needed to
be obedient if there were to be social harmony, and that social goods
should be distributed on the basis of an antidemocratic “principle of
equality”.
 Social harmony requires the lower orders to be obedient (hence
aristocratic rule)
 The perfect circles of Platonic astronomy meant this hierarchy
of respecting your superiors was a part of the cosmos itself, and
that disobedience would bring divine punishment.
 Political power is concentrated in the hands of an elite because the
pattern of the universe also shows that things are distributed unequally
(a “special principle of equality”)
 We are not all born equal (Myth of Er)
 Masses motivated by self-interest and pleasure = factionalism
 Tyranny is not personally advantageous
 Planetary orbits are not divided equally; musical harmony is a
relation between unequal sounds
 Greek society: aristocracy v. retainers (slaves, workers without
property . . . membership in household = higher status)
 Astronomy confirms the need to resist democracy, and resist the
temptation to become a tyrant (themes of Plato’s political philosophy)
 Plato (Gorgias) and Aristotle (Politics): nature incorporates
principles of restraint and obedience, and social inequality is just one
aspect of the hierarchical structure of nature
 Plato’s task for astronomers: find the ordered and uniform motions
that will account for the apparent disorder of planetary motions.
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