Notes on Early Greek Philosophy (Introduction)

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
Penguin, 2001

Introduction

Greek Philosophy began on May 28, 585 BC when Thales of Miletus, predicted an eclipse of the sun and ended in 529 A.D. When Emperor Justinian outlawed pagan philosophy. But, this is a traditional dates because Thales observed a solar eclipse and even if Justinian wanted to stamp out the pagan philosophy and install Christianity as the sole authority, it wasn't a successful endeavor. But, these eleven centuries can be safely called the era of Ancient Philosophy.

3 Periods of Ancient Philosophy
1) 585-400 BC, the formative years (Pre-Socratic)
2) 400-100 BC, the years of the Schools, Plato, Aristotle, Epicureans, Stoics, Sceptics
3) 100 BC - 529 AD, the years when everyone studied the prior period, systematized it and took "all that was best in the earlier doctrines of the Schools" (Barnes, xi).

Ironically the Pre-Socratic period isn't actually pre-Socrates because Socrates lived from 470 - 399 BC, so many of the pre-Socratic philosophers were his contemporaries.

The word 'philosophy' comes from the Greek philosophia, meaning literally 'love of wisdom'. The ancient Greeks however used this word very broadly and much of the sciences and the liberal arts were included in this wisdom. "The 'wisdom' which a philosopher loves is 'knowledge of things human and things divine'" (Barnes, xiv).

The philosophers that came after the Pre-Socratics divided philosophy into three major branches: logic (including the study of language), ethics (moral and political theory) and physics (which was a broad sense of the science, concerning itself with all the phenomena of the natural world). The Pre-Socratics were primarily concerned with this definition of physics.

"The modern distincition between empirical science and a priori philosophy had no importance in the earliest phase of Western thought, when wisdom was not yet distributed among departments and thinkers were innocent of specialization" (Barnes, XV).

Three things really demarcated the Pre-Socratic philosophers from earlier thinkers, mythologists, poets and rhetoricians.

1) "The Presocratics invented the very idea of science and philosophy" (Barnes, XVIII). The looked at the world in a scientific and/or rational way. They saw the world as something that can be explained and something that was ordered, not something arbitrary or random.

2) The Presocratics accepted the world as something orderly and explicable, but not something that was absolutely willed to be so by gods or subject to their whims. While maintaining some theism, they removed most of the traditional functions of gods and assigned the processes of the world to natural phenomena.

3) The Presocratics explained everything in as little terms as possible. The variety of life is always reduced to some underlying principle that explains the whole mess of things with one fundamental.

The Greek word kosmos (from which comes our cosmos & cosmology) was used a lot by the Presocratics. It means "the world as a whole" on the lips of the Presocratic philosophers. A kosmos is an orderly and beautiful arrangement of the totality of the universe. It is not only beautiful, but pleasant to contemplate. Thus, if the cosmos is the totality of things, and beautiful, and ordered, then it must, at least in principle, be abled to be explained.

There is a great distinction between the natural world (things that occur in nature) and the artefacts (things that are man-made, physical like arts and plows, and non-physical like laws, societies and governments). These artefacts were artificial and non-natural; thus, they had no nature. When the Presocratics studied the natural world, the studied also the nature of those things in the natural world. It was assumed that every natural thing, everything that grows, had its own nature. This also tied into the Presocratic desire to explain things: the nature of any object explains why it behaves in its own unique way.

Arche was another fundamental principle in Presocratic thought. It is a beginning or origin and also a rule or  ruling principle.

Presocratics often asked questions like, if nature is growth "what, then does growth start from? What are the principles of growth, the origins of natural phenomena?..."How did [the cosmos] begin? What are its first principles? What are the fundamental elements from which it is made and the fundamental operations which determine its structure and career?" (Barnes, XXII).

The Presocratics, in their desire to explain the natural world in the most simplest of terms then boiled everything in the cosmos down into the first stuff or stuffs. Questions then pertaining to the principles of the cosmos is a question as to what those first stuff or stuffs are.

Another fundamental term for the Presocratics was the Greek logos, a notoriously tricky word to translate. It means to say or state, but entails more. To give a logos or an account of something is to both describe what it is but also explain why it is what it is. Logos also implies reason and logic. It is possible to contrast the logos of a situation with the perception of a situation. It marks a distinction between how things appear and the way things are, which might not necessarily be the same.

The Presocratics emphasized the use of reason and rationality. They were not, generally speaking, dogmatic in their thinking. Even in some things that seem blatantly crazy, like Thales assertion that everything has a soul were supported by logical and rational thinking. Thales claimed that a magnet, though a stone, has a soul because it causes motion in other things. While this might not be exactly true, the use of reason versus declaring something dogmatically shows the change in thinking that the Presocratics had.

"Parmenides urged his readers to test with their reason what he had said: his urgings went unanswered" (Barnes, XXV). That's funny and could be worked into the Future Modern Ancient Greeks.

What we know about the Presocratics is not usually from surviving works of their own, which exist only in fragmentary form. Quotes from later writers harkening back to these thinkers' now lost works give light on their otherwise lost thought. Other sources are much later thinkers writing and using the Presocratics as examplars or something to be renounced. The latter is less reliable as a source to what the Presocratics actually thought for a variety of reasons.