Notes on Early Greek Philosophy (Precursors)

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

Thales, though considered the first philosopher, did not operate from an absolute starting point. Instead he drew on two primary sources that influenced his philosophy. The first was his pre-philosophic Greek writers, mainly poets. Two of these were most definitely Homer and Hesiod. Especially in Hesiod's Theogony you see an order forming.

Hesiod claims that the 'race of immortals who exist forever' came from first the Expanse. Expanse bore Darkness and Night. Night bore Ether and Day by joining with Love. Earth and Heaven and Mountains and Sea and Ocean were born as well as other gods. The account of the origins of the earth by Hesiod wasn't scientific, but a scientific story as many of the gods are personifications of naturally occurring phenomena.

What is interesting about Hesiod's origin of the gods poem is that later philosophers used the problem of infinite regress to refute him. Diogenes Laeritus, writing in the 5th century BC basically asks, if Expanse came first How could that be? He had nothing to come from and nowhere to go in the beginning so Expanse couldn't have come first. Therefore, "These things existed always" (Barnes, 5). Likewise Sextus Empiricus (circa 160-210 AD) recounts how Epicurus turned to philosophy. When Epicurus asked the schoolmaster what Expanse came from if it came first, the teacher replied it wasn't his job to explain that, it was the job of the philosopher. From that moment Epicurus took up the mantle of philosophy.

Many of the later ancient Greeks seemed to think think that the early Pre-Socratics got their philosophy going when they visited eastern lands like Assyria and Egypt. In fact there are some resemblances between Hesiod's cosmology and that of the Babylonian Epic the Enuma Elishu and that of the Egyptian Creation Myth.

For Barnes though, "Both the Babylonian and the Egyptian stories bear comparison with Hesiod as examples of mythical cosmogony. Many scholars compare stories more directly with Greek philosophy, suggesting (for example) that Thales' ideas about the importance of water may derive from the primordial significance of Mummu-Tiamat and Nun. To me Thales seems to live in a different and a more luminous world" (Barnes, 8). In other words, while there are superficial resemblances to the precursors to the Pre-Socratics and the creation myths of the Ancient Near East, Thales seems to be a break from those in a more philosophical/scientific way of thinking than the much earlier mythical cosmologies.