Presocratic Philosophy Essay

psychiatric hospital As early Hellenic civilization grew more complex (c. d b. c. e. ), mythology and religion began to develop into doctrine (and later into science). As part of this outgrowth, a new kind of thinker emerged hit the sackn as a sophos, from the Grecian word for wise. These wise men, and they were al to the highest degree exclusively men, asked increasingly sophisticated questions proficient roughly every last(predicate) sorts of social functions, especially natural paradees and the origins and essence of life.Although mythology and religion continued to lean important roles in the lives of frequentwealth for centuries to come, these first philosophers were noted for their attempts to economic consumption priming and observation to figure out how the bea works. Instead of existent a normal life, the sophos devoted himself to asking questions that so-called normal people aspect had already been answered (by religion and mythology) or were unanswe rable (and thus a liquidate of time).In respect to public perceptions, it didnt help that the sophos lived and spoke in counsels that were interpreted as showing disregard and possibly contempt for conventional values, and that set him or (infrequently) her apart from regular folks living normal lives. It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the earliest normal images of philosophers is the stereotype of an odd, absent-minded, starry-eyed dreamer and asker of silly questions. The very first westerly thinkers determine as philosophers were initially concerned with questions round the nature of nature (physis) and of the world order (kosmos).Presocratic Rational Discourse The earliest Western philosophers are referred to as the Presocratics because they appeared prior to Socrates, the first major figure in the Western philosophic tradition. Some of the Presocratic philosophers are described as proto-scientists because they initiated the regeneration of mythology into ratio nal research about nature and the cosmos. A very usual characterization of the breeding of Presocratic philosophy is helpful for placing subsequent philosophical issues and disagreements in context.Ofmost interest for our purposes is the Presocratic philosophers struggle to offer rational, documental arguments and explanations for their views. These concerns played a major role in the origins and historical development of Western philosophy. The first philosophers intense interest in explanations shaped the development of reason by triggering questions of luculent consistency and standards of knowledge that went beyond the sorts of attest that a craftsman could offer to back up his claims to expertise.The Presocratic Philosophers Thales Thales (c. 624545 b. c. e.), traditionally express to be the first Western philosopher, seems to receive believed that water is in some dash central to our understanding of things. This concept was probably base upon a belief that the pri mer coat floated on water, and that all things originate with water. actual opinion holds that Thales believed that whatever is real is in some significant whiz alive. accord to Aristotle, Thales thought that all things are full of gods, and as manifest of such powers even in apparently inanimate nature he points to the remarkable properties of what was referred to as the Magnesian stone.Although Aristotles statement is too sensitive to serve as a sure foundation for judgment, it seems more liable(predicate) that Thales was arguing for the broader presence of life forces in the world than most people imagined, rather than that the real in its conglomeration is alive. Anaximander Thales younger contemporary from Miletus, Anaximander, innate(p) toward the end of the seventh blow B. C. E. , found the explanatory principle of things in what he called the apeiron, a word that might be translated as the indefinite, the boundless, or both.This opens up the possibility that the ape iron is both immeasurably large in its blase and physical extent and also qualitatively indefinite in that it is without measured inner boundaries. The apeiron is further described, according to Aristotle, as being without beginning, surrounding all things, steering all things, divine, immortal, and indestructible. Some have inferred that Anaximanders barely secret purpose was Western philosophys first attempt at demythologization.Equally striking is Anaximanders description of the universe as a closed, concentric system, the outer spheres of which, by their everlasting motion, account for the stability of our earth, a drum-shaped body held everlastingly in a state of equipoise at the center. Whatever the inadequacy in authentic enlarge (the stars are rigid nearer to the earth than the moon), with Anaximander the science of cosmo crystal clear speculation took a goliath step forward. As far as life on earth is concerned, Anaximander offered another striking hypothesis.The fi rst living things, according to him, were natural in moisture, enclosed in thorny barks (like sea urchins), and as their age increased, they came forwards onto the drier part (as phrased by Aetius first to second atomic number 6 C. E. ). Pythagoras Although we know that Pythagoras was a historical figure, it is difficult to determine exactly what Pythagoras himself taught. He wrote null, and the ideas of other members of the partnership were attri moreovered to him as a sign of respect and as a way of lending weight to the ideas.Plato and Aristotle rarely assign ideas to Pythagoras himself, although Pythagorean ideas seem to have influenced Platos philosophy. Pythagoreans take a firm stand that consider is the first principle of all things. They were the first systematic developers of mathematics in the West and seizeed that natural events could be described in mathematical terms, especially as ratios. To the Pythagoreans, the principle of number accounted for everything. Nu mber was a real thing. Somehow, numbers existed in space, not just as mental constructs.According to Pythagorean doctrine, the entire universe is an logical whole consisting of harmonies of contrasting elements. The Greek for ordered whole is cosmos. The Pythagoreans were the first philosophers to use the term cosmos to refer to the universe in this way. The celestial medication of the spheres is the hauntingly beautiful phrase the Pythagoreans coined to describe the sound of the heavens as they turn according to cosmic number and harmony.Xenophanes A fourth Ionian philosopher, Xenophanes of Colophon, born around 580 B. C. E. ,is the first we know of to overtly attack the anthropomorphism of popular religious belief, in a series of brilliant reductio ad absurdum arguments. His own view has been silent, ever since Aristotle, as pantheistic. Xenophanes was also the first philosopher we know of to ask what degree of knowledge is attainable. In B34 we read the clear and certain trut h no man has seen, nor will in that location be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things. Several ancient critics took this to be an indication of Xenophanes total scepticism.On this basis of moderate empiricism and scepticism, Xenophanes offered a number of opinions of varying plausibility about the natural world, one of whicha strong, evolutionary interpretation of the discovery on various islands of fossils of marine animalsis sufficient to constitute a major claim to fame in natural philosophy and ranks with his other significant steps in epistemology (the theory of knowledge traffic with what we know, how we know it, and how reliable our knowledge is), logic (the study of rational inquiry and argumentation), and natural theology (the attempt to understand God from natural knowledge).Heraclitus 1 of the most important and enigmatic of the Presocratics, Heraclitus (fl . 500 b. c. e. , d. 510480 b. c. e. ), said that ignorance is bound to end when we t ry to understand the cosmos when we do not even dig up the fundamental structure of the human psyche ( head) and its relationship to the Logos. The complex Greek word logos is intriguing.It could and at times did mean all of the undermentioned intelligence, speech, discourse, thought, reason, word, meaning, study of, the record of, the science of, the fundamental principles of, the basic principles and procedures of a cross discipline, those features of a thing that make it intelligible to us, and the rationale for a thing. The Heraclitean detonating gismo L Logos is like God, only without the anthropomorphizing (humanizing) of the earlier philosophers and poets who attributed human qualities to the gods.According to Heraclituss im psycheal view of God, the Logos is a process, not an entity. As such, the Logos is unconcerned with undivideds and human affairs, in much the same way that gravity affects us but is unconcerned with us. More radically yet, Heraclitus asserted tha t even though things appear to remain the same, Change alone is unchanging. Traditionally, it has been held that Heraclitus went so far as to claim that everything is always changing all the time. tho whether he really meant that everything is always changing, or that individual things are held unneurotic by energy ( assortment), remains unclear.Anaximenes Anaximanders younger contemporary, Anaximenes, who lived during the sixth century B. C. E. appears to revert to a prior and less sophisticated vision in claiming that the earth, far from being a drum-shaped body held in equipoise at the center, is flat and rides on, supported by air. The same might be said of his contention that the basic, divine principle of things was not some indefinite entity but something very much part of our experience namely, air.Anaximenes view would also no doubt have seemed to be corroborated by the fact that the universe, commonly understood as a living thing and hence needing a soul to vivify it, p ossessed in air that very breath that for most Greeks constituted the essence of such a soul. Parmenides Parmenides of Elea (fift h century b. c. e. ) radically transformed the early philosophers interest in cosmology, the study of the universe as a rationally ordered system (cosmos), into ontology, the study of being. By common agreement he was the giant among the pre-Socratics.According to Parmenides, none of his predecessors adequately accounted for the process by which the one basic stuff of the cosmos transfigures into the some(prenominal) individual things we experience every day. In his search for a solution to the trouble of the one and the many, Parmenides turned to a reasoned analysis of the process of change itself. According to Parmenides, all sensations occur in the realm of appearance. This means that candor cannot be apprehended by the senses. Change and variety (the many) are only appearances they are not real. If this is true, then our most commonly held beliefs about mankind are mere opinions.The senses cannot recognize what is, much less can they discoverobserveit, ever. In other words, whatever we see, touch, taste, hear, or smell is not real, does not exist. Perhaps most unsettling of all, Parmenides solved the hassle of the appearance of change by concludingin direct opposition to Heraclituss insistency that everything is always changingthat the very concept of change is self-contradictory. What we think of as change is merely an illusion. The logic runs as follows Change equals transformation into something else.When a thing becomes something else, it becomes what it is not. But since it is impossible for cryptograph (what is not) to exist, there is no nothing into which the old thing can disappear. (There is no no place for the thing to go into. ) Therefore, change cannot occur. Empedocles posited, against Parmenides, change and plurality as features of reality, but sustain the sempiternality of anything that is real the sphe re-like nature of the real when looked at as a totality and the fact that the real is a plenum, containing no nothingness or nihility.Anaxagoras likewise posited change, plurality, and divisibility as features of reality, yet also affirmed the eternality of the real (understood by him as an eternally existent mixture of the seeds of the things currently constituting the world, rather than the eternal combinings and recombinings, according to certain ratios of admixture, of four eternally existent roots or elemental masses). Leucippus Leucippus of Miletus (c. fi ft h century b. c. e. ) and Democritus of Abdera (c. 460370 b.c. e. ) argued that reality consists entirely of abandon space and ultimately simple entities that combine to form objects.T is button-down view is known as atomistic theory. Leucippus is credited with being the originator of atomism and Democritus with developing it. Rather than reject Parmenides assertion that change is an illusion, Leucippus argued that real ity consists of many discrete ones, or beings. Zeno Zeno, who was born early in the fifth century B. C. E. , was a friend and pupil of Parmenides.In his famous paradoxes he attempt to show by a series of reductio ad absurdum arguments, of which the shell known is perhaps that of Achilles and the tortoise, the self-contradictory consequences of maintaining that there is a real plurality of things or that motion or place are real. The prima facie wiz of many of the arguments continues to impress people, though it soon becomes clear that the paradoxes turn for the most part on the chastening or unwillingness of Zeno, like so many Pythagoreans of the day, to distinguish between the concepts of physical and geometrical space.Zenos way of constructing the problem makes it seem that his primary object is to defame pluralists by attacking the logical possibility of explaining how there can be motion in the world. Gorgias Gorgias has achieved fame for the try on he laid upon the art of persuasion (rhetoric), although whether he wrote the puzzle On What Is Not as a serious piece of ingratiatory reasoning or as some sort of spoof of the Eleatic philosophy of Parmenides and others remains disputed.Its basic, and remarkable, claim is prima facie, that nothing in fact is (exists /is the slip esti or is knowable or conceivable. Any exiguous plausibility that the arguments accompaniment this claim possess turns on our overlooking Gorgiass failure, witting or unwitting, to distinguish carefully between knowing and thinking, along with his various uses of the verb to be. If the failure was witting, the document can be seen as a skillful device for the spotting of fallacies as part of training in rhetoric and basic reasoning.If it was unwitting, Gorgias still emerges as what he was claimed to bea deft rhetorical wordsmith on any topic proposed to him. Protagoras Perhaps the greatest of the casuists was Protagoras of Abdera (481 411 b. c. e. ). Protagoras was an archet ypal Sophist an active traveler and first-rate observer of other cultures who noted that although there are a variety of customs and beliefs, each culture believes unquestioningly that its own ways are rightand roundly condemns (or at least(prenominal) criticizes) views that differ from its own.Based on his observations and travels, Protagoras concluded that morals are nothing more than the social traditions, or mores, of a society or group. The details of Protagorass beliefs remain disputed. When he said, for example, that anthropos humanity is a/the measure for all things, of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not, it is unclear whether he is talking about one person or the sum total of persons about a measure or the measure (there is no definite article in Greek) or about existence or states of affairs or both.The Platonic reading in the Theaetetus, which takes anthropos as generic and measure as exclusive, led to the assertion that the log ical consequence was total (and absurd) relativism. ______________________________ References The Columbia History of Western Philosophy. Richard H. Popkin. Columbia University Press. 1999. Archetypes of comprehension An Introduction to Philosophy. 7th ed. Douglas J. Soccio. Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. 2010.