cphil_presoc
GREEK PHILOSOPHY
by Ray Shelton
I. THE PRE-SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY
Pre-Socratic philosophy was concerned with the problem of ontology: what is being?
Main problem:
What is the nature of the basic stuff of which all things are made? What is the nature of the first principle of all things?
a. The first principle of all things is water.
b. All things come from and return to this one substance – phusis.
c. This first principle is not lifeless but alive – hylozoism. All things have a soul, that is, that which gives the thing the power of motion. “All things are full of gods.”
a. The first principle of all things is boundless (aperion) or infinite, that is, without bounds or limits. It is neither water nor any other one of the things call elements, but is something without a definite nature – indeterminate, so that all things can come from it.
b. This first principle is one, eternal, imperishable, inexhaustible.
c. The different elements are formed from this first principle by separation of the opposites which eternal motion causes.
a. The first principle of all things is air.
b. It is one and infinite but not indeterminate but rather determinate.
c. All things are formed from this one principle by condensation and return to it by rarefaction.
a. These Milesians are concerned with the Philosophy of Nature: what is the nature (phusis) of the basic stuff of which things are made?
b. They assumed that this basic stuff is one thing: monism.
c. They are not naturalist or materialist in the modern sense of these terms. They made no distinction between matter and spirit. The first principle was not lifeless but alive: hylozoism.
d. They raised the problem of the one and the many and attempted to explain the many in terms of the one basic stuff or phusis.
a. He was at first a pupil of Pherecydes of Syros, who was the first writer of prose and taught the doctrine of metempsychosis, the transmigration of the soul, reincarnation.
b. He visited Thales, who incited him to study in Egypt, particularly at Memphis or Diospolis (Thebes). He went to Egypt and stayed a long time, perhaps 22 years. He may perhaps after visited Babylon.
c. He returned eventually to Samos where he attempted to found a school but was not successful.
d. Because of this and some political disturbances he emigrated to Croton in Southern Italy. He made friends of the aristocracy and was soon able to gain a leading position among his fellow townsmen. From among the noblest and best of these he founded a religious brotherhood and philosophical school which was an ascetic religious society. The members of the society took an oath not divulge the tenets and discoveries of their school. Because of this secrecy and since its members were mostly from among the aristocrats, it became the object of popular suspicion and hatred. When he was attacked by the plebian party, he fled first to Tarentum and then to Metapontum, where he was murdered in another popular disturbance.
a. As a religious society, it was deeply influenced by the cult of Orpheus, Orphism. Orphism was a reformation of the Dionysiac religion, which centered in and around the Greek god Dionysus. Dionysus was the Greek god of wine and fertility, the son of Zeus and Persephone, the queen of the underworld. The teaching and ritual of this religion was based on the myth of Dionysus which relates how Dionysus was captured by the Titans, who killed him and ate his body. Athena saved his heart which she gave to Zeus who ate it and gave birth to a second Dionysus. In anger Zeus destroyed the Titans with a lightning bolt and their ashes fell to the earth. From these ashes of the Titans, containing the divine remains of Dionysus and the evil remains of the Titans, man was created. Thus man has a good and divine soul imprisoned in an evil and mortal body. This myth of the dying and reborn god is the basis of Dionysiac initiation ritual of killing a bull and bathing in its blood, drinking its blood or wine and eating its flesh. This symbolized the initiates’ participation in the death and rebirth of the god. This is a mystical type of religion, which makes the claim to be the only form of religion that possesses the secret of life, because it is, at bottom, the religion of divineLife which, though it dies, is perpetually reborn. Because it is rooted in this life, mystical religion has itself been reborn a thousand times. Its history is a series of revivals; and every such revival is heralded by the doctrine of regeneration.
But mysticism is also a religion of death and renunciation: man must die in order to live. Hades and Dionysus are the same. Orphism was a revival and reformation of the Dionysiac religion. Orphesus is a Greek mythological character who was musician and poet whose music had the power to charm wild beasts. He revived and reformed the Dionysiac religion. The old Dionysus was a wild, ecstatic, orgiastic or irrational character. Orphesus, the ideal of the Orphic, is a Dionysus tamed, and clothed, and in his right mind. The more savage parts of his ritual are expurgated, or toned down to a decent symbolism. Yet the religion did not cease to be mystical at the root, seeking reunion with divine, the Light. Orphism makes a fundamental contrast between the principles of Light and Darkness, identifying them with Good and Evil. This is a cosmic dualism, the counterpart of the dualism in man. The Soul in its pure state is fire, like the divine stars from which it has fallen. In its impure state, the Soul is infected with baser elements and weighed down by the gross admixture of the flesh. Pythagoreanism was a reformation of Orphism, intellectualizing the content of Orphism. It emphasized the immortality and transmigration of the soul and that the body is a tomb of the soul. Every human soul pre-existed with the gods, but now must occupy a human body and, depending upon its conduct, the soul would return to the gods or would be punished for its sins by a return to the earth. Purification and salvation is attained through knowledge and the study of mathematics.
b. All things are explained by numbers, they believed. Numbers are concrete, not abstractions. The Pythagoreans regarded numbers spatially and expressed them by dots or pebbles or marks in the sand, usually arranged in a row. The Greek name for the dots in these patterns by was a word which originally meant “boundary stones”; the area of space they marked out was called a “field.” Numbers thus defined geometrical form by marking off, or “limiting,” space. Their numbers began with one. All numbers are generated by adding one to the preceding number. Thus the number one is the source and generator of all numbers. All numbers except one are either odd or even, and since odd numbers cannot be divided in half, they are limited, while even numbers which can be divided in half are unlimited. Now the limited or finite is good, right and masculine; while the unlimited or infinite is evil, left and feminine. Thus they associated certain qualities of things with numbers and formed them into a table of ten pairs of opposites qualities: odd and even, limited and unlimited, one and many, male and female, right and left, rest and motion, straight and crooked, light and darkness, good and bad, square and oblong. Thus these opposing qualities are explained by numbers. Certain numbers are square, an oblong, prime, perfect, or triangular.
i. Square number are generated by adding the successive odd numbers. That is, one plus three is four, one plus three plus five is nine, and so on.
ii. The oblong or rectangular number are generated by adding successive even numbers.
iii. The prime numbers are those whose only factors are the number itself and one; the factors of a number are those sets of numbers which when multiplied together give the original number. That is, three is prime because three and one are the only numbers multiplied together that will give three. Four is not prime because besides four times one, two times two will also give four. The numbers one, two, three, five, and seven are prime; the numbers four, six and eight are not prime.
iv. Perfect numbers are those whose factors, including one, when added together, result in the number itself. For example, the factors of six are one, two and three, the sum of which is six; thus six is a perfect number. They discovered the following number theorem relating prime and perfect numbers. Constuct a sequence of numbers starting from one by doubling at each step the previous number: one, two, four, eight, sixteen, and so on. Now begin to add the series. Whenever the sum is a prime number (as one plus two is three, and three is prime), this prime multiplied by the last number added will be a perfect number (as three, the prime, times two gives six, a perfect number. One plus two plus four is seven, a prime; and seven times four is twenty-eight, a perfect number.
v. Triangle numbers are the sum, to any number, of the series of odd and even numbers starting with one. Three, which is the sum of one plus two, six, which is the sum of one plus two plus three, and ten, which is the sum of one plus two plus three plus four, are triangular numbers. These numbers were called triangular because these sums form a triangular pattern of dots when evenly spaced:
Each row of dots in the triangle represents the numbers making up the sum. The particular triangle of dots shown in the figure above is the triangular number ten, and it was particularly significant to the Pythagoreans. It was made up of four numbers: one, two, three and four. They called it tetraktus of the decade. They believed it contained the nature (phusis) from which all thing spring; it was the master-key to the interpretation of the world. The first tetraktus is point, line, surface, solid. The second tetraktus is fire, air, water, earth; the third is tetrahedron or pyramid, octahedron, icosahedron, cube; the fourth is “of things that grow”: the seed, growth into length, into width, into height; the fifth is of societies: the individual, the family, the village, the state; the sixth is the four cognitive faculties: reason, knowledge, opinion, sense; the seventh is four seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter: the eighth is the four ages of man: infancy, youth, manhood, old age. Thus all things could be explained by numbers. Thus the number ten seem to be the ideal number and to embrace the whole of nature. On this basis they asserted that the number of bodies moving through the heavens is ten, and when only nine were visible, they postulated a counter-earth as the tenth which was always invisible from the earth. They also discovered the geometrical theorem that the square of hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. They also discovered number relations in the musical scale (harmonia) and in the heavens. In music they found that the ratios of the octave, the fourth, and the fifth, 2:1, 4:3, 3:2, contained the harmonic proportion: 6:4:3. They also discovered the arithmetic mean and the harmonic mean.
c. The Pythagorean philosophy held that all things preceeded out of the One and will return to it again. The One is God. The manifold world of visible bodies proceeds out of this unity into plurality, out of light into darkness. This movement is revealed in the nature of numbers, and is contained in the tetraktus. Just as every number is not only a many, but also one number, so also are all things one and many. Like the procession of the number series in which all numbers are generated from one by adding one, so all things come from the One passing out into a manifold, yet without losing at all its unity. They said that there is a void to keep the numbers apart, but they identified it with atmospheric air.
d. Philolaus (b. 480 B.C.) [Tarentum, Thebes] developed the doctrines of Pythagoras. He made the suggestion that the different “natures” of the elements really consisted of different shapes of their constituent material particles.
1. All things change. Some have interpreted this statement to mean that he held that only change is real; but a careful examination of his statements shows that he held that reality is permanent as will as changing. The only permanent thing is change. Since the only permanent thing is change, the permanent is in change and change is in the permanent. This principle or Reason Heraclitus designated by the term Logos, the rational principle which pervaded the universe and keeps it in order, and pervades the thought of man when he is sane and orderly. This Logos is the One in the Many; unity in diversity. This One is the permanent and the basis of change in the many, in diversity and difference. Reality is both one and many, permanence and change.
2. Fire represents the nature of all things, its change and movement. The nature of all things is a strife of opposites and the harmony, and the identity of opposites is what gives anything its temporary reality. Strife is natural and is just.
a. Rejected the Greek polytheism of Homer and Hesiod. He attacked the anthromorphism of the Greek gods.
b. He set forth the doctrine that there is only one ultimate reality, “One god, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals in body or in mind.” He does not have sense organs like men’s, but “the whole of him sees, the whole of him thinks, the whole of him hears.” He sets in motion all things by the power of his mind; he always remains in the same place, moving not at all; he is omnipresent, not needing to move.
Born toward the end of sixth century B.C. and began as a Pythagorean, which later he abandoned.
a. He made explicit the distinction between truth and opinion.
b. He held that “thought and being are the same thing.”
c. He also held that “being is and it is impossible for it not to be; it is impossible that not-being is.” It is impossible to think or say that non-being is.
d. He argued that being is one, since plurality is an illusion.
e. He argued that “being is without beginning and is indestructible; it is universal, existing alone, immovable and without end; nor ever was it nor will it be, since it now is, all together, one, and continuous.”
f. He argued that “since there is a final limit, it [being] is perfected on every side, like the mass of a rounded sphere, equally distant from the centre at every point.” Thus being is finite, simple (without parts), and homogeneous. Some have argued from this that Parmenides is a materialist.
g. He used explicitly what later was called the three law of thought:
i. The Law of Identity [A is A]
(“Being is, an non-being is not”)
ii. The Law of Contradiction [it is false that A and not-A are both true]
(“For it is possible that being is, and it is impossible that not-being is.”)
iii. The Law of Excluded Middle [either A or not-A]
(“Either being exists or it does not exist.”)
h. He rejected all change and motion as illusionary and unreal, because they involve non-being which does not exist.
i. Parmenides thus shifted the central problem of philosophy from the nature of reality to the problem of the reality of change and the many. He also shifted the problem of the one and the many from “how to explain the many in terms of the one basic stuff or phusis” to “is reality one or many?”.
a. He rejected the conclusion of his teacher that Being is spatially finite.
b. He argued that being must be spatially infinite. For if being is finite, then beyond being there would be nothing. But nothing or non-being does not exist. Therefore being must be infinite. Melissus, like Parmenides, rejected a void or vacuum, empty space, as impossible and non-existent, “for what is empty is nothing. What is nothing cannot be.”
c. He argued that being is incorporeal. “Now, if it [being] were to exist, it must needs be one; but if it is one, it cannot have body; for if it had body, it would have parts, and would no longer be one.” Some have argued from this that he is an idealist.
The Eleatics deny the reality of multiplicity and motion. Being is one and motionless. Zeno, a firm adherent of the theory of Parmenides, tried to prove it, or at least to show that is it by no means ridiculous, by demostrating that its opposite, Pythagorean pluralism, involves insoluble difficulties, and that change and motion are impossible even on a pluralistic hypothesis. The arguments of Zeno are a series of reductiones ad absurdum.
a. Arguments against pluralism. If anything exists, it either has magnitude or not. If the former, it will be infinitely divisible with each part having magnitude. Thus it will be infinitely great, since it is composed of an infinite number of parts having magnitude. If everything in the world were infinitely great, then the whole world would be infinitely great. Suppose, on the other hand, that it does not have magnitude. Therefore the whole world would be without magnitude and it would be infinitely small. So if there is a plurality of things, the world will be either infinitely great or infinitely small.
b. Arguments against empty space. Suppose that there is space. If it is nothing, then things cannot be in it. If, on other hand, it is something, it will itself be in space, and that space will itself be in space, and so on indefinitely. But this is an absurdity. Things, therefore, are not in space or in an empty void.
c. Arguments against motion.
i. In order to traverse a given distance, one would have to traverse an infinite number of points. And if one wanted get to other end, one must traverse in a finite time. But how can one traverse a infinite number of points, and so an infinite distance, in a finite time. Indeed, no object can traverse any distance whatsoever, and so all motion is consequently impossible.
ii. A slow runner will never be overtaken by the swiftest, for it is necessary that the pursuer should first reach the point from which the pursued started. But the pursued will have moved from that position to another position. And when the pursuer reaches that position, the pursued will again have moved to another, even if very short. Thus the pursuer will be coming close to the pursued but never actually overtaking the pursued.
iii. In order to traverse a given distance, a moving body must go half the distance. And in order to go that distance, it must go half that distance. And so forth. Therefore the distance cannot be traversed because it is impossible to traverse an infinite number of distances.
iv. Consider an flying arrow. At each moment the arrow will occupy a position in space. But to occupy a given position in space is to be at rest. Therefore the flying arrow is at rest, which is a contradiction.
They rejected the monism of the Milesian and Eleactic philosophers and replaced it with a pluralism. The world is not one, but many. They refused to accept the absolute dichotomy between being and becoming, and attempted to reconcile the changing of Heraclitus with the unchanging of Parmenides.
He attempted to weld together and reconcile the thought of his predecessors.
a. He accepted Parmenides’ contention that being cannot come into existence or cease to exist, but rejected Parmenides’ argument that being is one, not many. He also accepted the Eleatic doctrine that the void or empty space does not exist.
b. He posited that there are four original or basic kinds of elements or “roots”: fire, air, earth, and water. They do not change.
c. Change is explained, not by a transformation of these four basic elements, but by mechanical process of “mixture and separation.” By mixture things appear to orignate, grow, or to become something else. By separation things appear to decay or are destroyed.
d. He explained motion by assuming the two principles of Love and Hate. Love combines the elements into things and Hate separates them. These two principles cause things to move.
a. He maintained that four qualitatively different elements were not enough and that the two principles or causes of motion were too many.
b. Since four qualitatively unchanging elements will not account for the infinite variety and the differences in the world of sense, the only alternative is to assume as ultimate an infinity of qualitative distinctions. Thus being must contain an indefinite number of kinds of “seeds” or “germs infinite in number, in no way like each other.”
c. Since every combination involves the separation of elements from other groups, one moving principle is sufficient. This principle is Mind (Nous) or Intelligence. Nous is material but it is the purest and most rarefied of things. As an efficient cause, it sets up rotary motion in the originally undifferentiated mass of being, and separation occurs. Aether and air are first separated off. By condensation and rarefaction water and earth are formed.
This philosophy is the logical development of the philosophy of Empedocles. The problem of the Atomists is to explain phenomena and “to save appearances,” while yet maintaining the validity of Parmenides’ postulate of being.
a. Leucippus (fl. 440 B.C.) [Miletus, Abdera] is the founder of the Atomist School but very little is known about him. He may have been a member of the School of Parmenides and a disciple of Zeno.
b. Democritus (460-370 B.C.) [Abdera] was a disciple of Leucippus. The work called the Great Diakosmos, which was subsequently incorporated into the works of Democritus of Abdera, might really be the work of Leucippus. But it is more likely that it is the work of the School. Therefore, in the following account we will not attempt to distinguish between what is due to Leucippus and what is due to Democritus.
i. There are an infinite number of indivisible units called “atoms.” These can not be either created or destroyed. These are imperceptible, since they are too small to be perceived by the senses. Atoms differ infinitely in size and shape, but have no qualities except solidity or impenetrability. Atoms are qualitatively homogeneous.
ii. There is empty space or void in which the atoms move. Denied Parmenides’ doctrine of the non-existence of space. Also denied the Pythagoreans’ identification of the void with atmospheric air, which Empedocles showed to be corporeal, and affirmed the non-reality or non-corporeality of the void. This amounted to affirming that the void or non-being is as real as the plenum or being.
iii. Atoms do not need anything to move them, since they always have been in motion. It is not necessary to explain motion in general if every particular motion is accounted for by mechanical collisions of the atoms. No moving principle was necessary. “Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity.”
iv. As the atoms moved originally in the void, at some point of time collisions between atoms occurred, and those of irregular shape become entangled with one another and groups of atoms were formed. In this way the vortex is set up, and a world began to form.
v. Upon the combination and separation of atoms in space depend the observable characteristics of the world. Qualitative differences observed in the world are explained by the Atomists on strictly quantitative principles. They reduced all qualitative differences to quantitative variations of position and order. Generation or “coming into being” is explained by the union of atoms, and destruction or “passing out of being” is explained by the separation of atoms. Change, then, is the redistribution of atoms in space.
vi. Like the body, the soul is composed of atoms. But the atoms composing the soul are the most mobile. The life of a body is due to the presence of these swiftly moving atoms which interact with the less mobile somatic atoms. Death is the dispersion of the “soul” atoms, and is a constant danger, owing to the fineness and mobility of the “soul atoms.” The dispersion of the soul is prevented by breathing in the surrounding air, which is likewise composed of mobile atoms. The atomist assigned “a shape to each quality.” Sour tastes, for example, are caused by atoms “very large, rough shapes, and many angles and no curves.”