Ion of Chios

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

Ion of Chios

-born circa 485 BC on the island of Chios
-lived most of his life in Athens
-Believed all things are three in nature: intelligence and power and fortune
-Plutarch referred to him and made an interesting observation: even though fortune and wisdom are very dissimilar, both produced similar results: "both will aggrandize States, adorn men and bring glory and power and dominion"(Barnes, 182).

Philolaus

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

Philolaus
-a Pythagorean
-born in Croton circa 470 B.C.
-left Croton when the Pythagorean school was destroyed and went to mainland Greece
-believed that the universe existed from a harmonizing of limitless and limiting things
-believed all things have a number
-Geometry was the greatest science and gave the best knowledge because it elevates the mind and purifies it, releasing it from perception
-believed that there was fire in the middle at the center (the hearth of the universe/house of Zeus)
"The old theologians and prophets also testify that the soul has been yoked to the body as a punishment and that it is buried in it as though in a tomb" (Barnes, 181).

Fifth Century Pythagoreanism

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

Chapter 13 - Fifth-Century Pythagoreanism

The followers of Pythagoras organized themselves as a communal living group. It was also a political group centered around the cult of Pythagoras.

FMAG - Pythagoras' cult

At some point Magna Graecia erupted in political turmoil and many of the Pythagoreans dispersed and went into exile in Mainland Greece. They were divided into two groups the acusmatici (aphorists) and the mathematici (scientists). The Acusmatici did not consider the Mathematici to be true followers of Pythagoras. The Acusmatici treated Pythagoras as a god and that everything he said was a divine decree.

The Acusmatici had three types of Aphorisms:
1) What a thing is
2) What is the best thing
-What is the most wise thing in the world? Medicine
-What is most noble? Harmony
-What is most good? Happiness
-What is most truly said? That men are wretched
3) What you should and shouldn't do
-Have children (one must leave servants of God for later)
-Always put the right shoe on first
-"Do not help anyone to put down a burden (for one must not become a cause of idleness)" (Barnes, 163).
-Do not speak in the dark
-Labor is good, pleasure is bad
-"Human souls enter all animals except those which it is right to sacrifice; that is why one must eat only sacrificial animals" (Barnes, 164).

Cicero, on commenting about the Pythagorean notion of not eating beans, mentions that it was probably abstained from because of the flatulence it produces and flatulence does not let a mind be at ease during sleep. But, some took the Pythagorean notion, especially from Empedocles' line 'Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hand from beans' as allegorical. In this understanding of the Pythagoreans staying away from beans, the commentaries equate beans with testicles and say that abstaining from beans was abstaining from sexual indulgence. It is possible that it was meant allegorical, but contemporaries mocked the Pythagorean notion of abstaining from beans.

Antiphanes, an comic poet mocked their dietary patterns numerous times: "First, like a Pythagorizer, he eats no meat but takes and chews a blackened piece of cheap bread". Alexis, another poet says, "The Pythagorizers, as we hear, eat no fish nor anything else alive; and they're the only ones who don't drink wine. - But Epicharides eats dogs, and he's a Pythagorean. - Ah, but he kills them first and then they're no longer alive." Alexis also calls the Pythagorean diet a prison diet. These satirical lines are especially for the Acusmatici, not the Mathematici.

The Mathematici were obsessed with numbers. They assigned numbers and ratios to everything. "Everything in numbers and harmonies which cohered with the properties and parts of the heaven and with the universe as a whole, they collected and fitted together; and if there was anything missing anywhere they eargerly made additions so that the whole of their theory should hang together" (Barnes, 169).

Ten was the perfect number for them and since there were only 9 observable celestial bodies they theorized that there was a 10th, a sort of counter-earth.

They believed the heavenly bodies created sounds and that the sounds created a sort of musical quality of immense proportions.

They believed the universe to be infinite.

They believed the soul to be a harmony of blended contraries.

Empedocles

Empedocles

FUTURE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - Empedocles is a wealth of subject matter.

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980

Empedocles

-Empedocles is the first pluralist we know anything about.
-accepted the Parmenidean notion that nothing is created or destroyed
-denied the Parmenidean notion that motion is impossible
-argued that motion took place by things swapping places in the plenum
-The many things that exist are roots: earth, air, fire and water. Each of these roots are a Parmenidean one, eternal, uncreated, indestructible and unchanging
-Two types of motion: Love & Strife
-Love - the motion of uniting
-Strife - the motion of separation
-The world ebbs and flows between total love (absolute mixing of the four roots) and total strife (absolute segregation of the four roots)
-the objects of the perceivable world are unstable combinations of the four roots
-anticipated the survival of the fittest part of evolution in a creative way:

As love begins to come back into the ascendency and take back from strife the world will have a strange look: "At this time the various parts of animals arise in a hit-or-miss way, as Love bit by bit mixes the elements that Strife has separated: 'heads spring up without necks and arms wander bare and bereft of shoulders. Eyes stray up and down in want of foreheads'. As love continues to mix things up, these parts get united in a completely haphazard way: 'these things joined together as each might chance, and many other things besides continually arose'. Eyes might, for instance, 'mix' with hands, feet with shoulders. Such mixtures obviously cannot survive, but in the course of random combinations a successful relationship sooner or later occurs" (Jones, 27).  But the evolutionary process is completely controlled by chance. There is no god guiding it along.

FUTURE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - Empedocles needs to be a sort of mad scientist letting things 'evolve' by random. Weird beasts with no eyes, six hands and a foot, sort of a Dali painting out of a nightmare. 

While Empedocles denied the existence of god in the evolutionary process of love coming into the ascendency, he did worship the overall process as a god like Xenophanes. Also like Xenophanes, the god of Empedocles was not anthropomorphic.

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972

"The mixture of philosopher, prophet, man of science, and charlatan, which we found already in Pythagoras, was exemplified very completely in Empedocles" (Russell, 53).

-Flourished circa 440 BC
-from Acragas, Sicily
-a democratic politician and claimed to be a god
-stories abound of him as a miracle worker, could control the winds, brought a woman back to life after being dead for 30 days
- to prove he was a god he leapt into the crater of Etna
"Great Empedocles, that ardent soul
Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole"
-Like his contemporary Parmenides, Empedocles wrote in verse
-his science and religion were inconsistent with one another
-discovered a crude version of centrifugal force
-wild evolutionary theory
-knew that the moon shined by reflected life (but, thought the sun did too)
-four elements (six in function): fire, earth, water, air (love & strife)
-love and strife are processes that are cyclical. there was a time when love fully wiped out stripe and men only worshiped the Cyprian Aphrodite then. But strife came back and things began to separate again.
-The cycle of life was not teleological. It was only governed by chance.
-His religious leanings were Pythagorean and Orphic
-He also considered himself a god, even if sometimes he felt like one in exile for some sin

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

-Came from Acragas, Sicily
-Came from a rich and distinguished family
-lived circa 495-435 BC
-claimed to be no longer mortal, an immortal god, compassionate for strangers and inexperienced in evil
-was a little conceited, "But why do I attack them as though I were achieving something great if I prove superior to much-perishing mortal men?" (Barnes, 112). This is how Empedocles described being smarter than the average man, eh Boo-Boo. Sextus Empiricus however says that no one even moderately versed in philosophy would have thought him boastful.

Plutarch describes some of his words (the bold are Empedocles, the regular Pultarch):

There is an oracle of necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, that whenever anyone errs and defiles in fear his dear limbs - one of the spirits who have been allotted long-lasting life - he shall wander thrice ten thousand seasons far from the blessed ones. Such is the road I now follow, an exile from the gods and a wanderer. He proves from his own case that not just he himself but all of us are immigrants here and strangers and exiles. For it is not blood, my friends, nor blended breath (he says) which provides the substance and principle of our souls: from these the body has been fashioned, earth-born and mortal; but the soul has come here from elsewhere and he calls birth by the gentlest of terms, a journey abroad. And what is most true, the soul flees and wanders, driven by divine decrees and laws...when it is tied to the body, it cannot recall or remember from what honour and from what breadth of bliss it has come, having exchanged not Sardis for Athens, nor Corinth for Lemnos or Scyros, but the heavens and the moon for earth and an earthly life (Barnes, 113).

FUTURE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - This is why the Greeks live on another planet. They were sent to earth to live abroad by the gods. Some of them are still stuck in a cycle of birth-death in exile on earth, but some have returned to their home planet, where our traveler is being taken. They were sent to earth because of sin they committed, decreed to wander thrice ten thousand seasons far from the blessed ones. But, the gods got bored waiting and followed them to earth, forgot how to get home and have since traveled elsewhere. Only Prometheus, because of his punishment was sent back home to wait. 

-Souls were 'long-lasting spirits' in his poetry because the soul is immortal
-Strife, the process by which things are coming apart in his cosmology punish the souls by forcing them to go from body to body
-the bodies of the animals men eat are the dwelling places of punished souls
-sex is bad because it makes men and women co-workers with strife
-He called those who gain the wealth of divine thoughts happy and those whose beliefs about the gods are dark are wretched
-believed that no part of the universe is empty

His biological evolution theory had four generations:

1st Generation of animals was just body parts
2nd Generation of animals were monstrous
3rd generation of animals are what we see today (properly joined limbs and such)
4th generation of animals is when Love is totally in dominance and all is One

"In the time of Love where many neckless heads sprang up" (Barnes, 142)

FUTUTRE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - A field of 'Love' where neckless heads are being grown like cabbages. There is a scarecrow in the field to scare away the strifebirds.

"Many were born double-headed and double-chested - man-faced oxen arose and again ox-headed men" (Barnes, 143).

For Empedocles blood contained the capacity to understand. Thought is located in the blood.

Empedocles was a vegetarian because he found that the souls migrated from one body to another. Eating an animal was a grave sin because you devour another when you eat meat.

Like Pythagoras, Empedocles said it was a sin to eat beans.

Empedocles had a Utopian ideal. In his Utopian age, the beasts and animals were friendly to man and man friendly to them.

W.T. Jones - Rationalism, Empiricism and Pluralism

Up to this point in pre-Socratic philosophy the development of Greek thought has been Monist in nature. The Milesian Three came up with the idea that the primal stuff became all the things in the world and then went back again to that primal stuff it was. Heraclitus rejected the idea that anything was ever really one thing, but constantly changing. The monist thing for Heraclitus was a process of change. Parmenides (and Zeno and Melissus) rejected the idea of a process being a stuff. They returned to a single thing and because that single thing was a stuff, the idea that it could change made no sense. They built logical theorems that were sound and showed why if everything was one stuff it always had to be that way. Thus, everything is one; it is uncreated; it is indestructible; it is unchanging; and, it will always be that way.

Parmenides (and his followers) were absolute rationalists. They rejected empirical evidence because empirical evidence was gathered by the senses and the senses were deceptive. Not only were they deceptive but what they were perceiving was illusionary anyway. Double fault. Empiricists however rely on sensory perception. Much of the history of philosophy is studying people who took sides with one of these doctrines. But, for the most part accepting an absolute position on either leads to bad results. Pure rationalism ends up leading to some of Parmenides airtight logical arguments that make no sense. It's hard to argue against the logic of Parmenides, but things obviously change. Pure empiricism tends to lead to unsatisfactory results too.

What Parmenides and his followers never considered though was rejecting the monist basis of the Milesian three. Pluralism however was about to replace the monism of the Milesians.

Zeno

Zeno

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980

Zeno's Paradoxes

1) Motion is impossible. Before you go some place you must go half-way there. These half-way theres are infinite. It is impossible to go distances infinite in number. Therefore, motion is impossible.

2) Achilles and the Tortoise - Achilles if he is chasing a tortoise will never actually overtake the tortoise in spite of seeming to be faster. No matter how fast Achilles runs he never catches where the tortoise is because of something akin to the half-way theres paradox. Achilles always ends up at a starting point of the tortoise.

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

Plato writes a fictional encounter between Zeno and Socrates in his dialogue Parmenides.
-Zeno was 40 when Parmenides was 65 (it was said the two were lovers)
-Zeno visited Athens for a festival when Socrates was very young
-The interaction between Zeno and Socrates has Zeno claiming that while it may seem counterintuitive to assume that only one thing exists, the opposite is actually true. By embracing monism you get less ridiculous logical outcomes than by embracing dualism or pluralism.

Zeno argues that pluralism demands that everything be infinitely divisible. If things are divided so often eventually the parts that constitute the whole will become so small they will decrease to nothing. Nothing cannot exist so there can be no division whatsoever. In this way he aims to show that the pluralists have even more crazy assertions than the monists because if everything is made up of infinitely divisible things then everything is made from things that are essentially nothing, which is a logical absurdity. This is the puzzle of dichotomy.

The whole point of Zeno's puzzles or paradoxes are not to do away with the One of Parmenides, "but rather with a plurality of things (by showing that those who hypothesize a plurality are committed to inconsistencies), thus confirming Parmenides' argument that what exists is one" (Barnes, 104).

Aristotle was not exactly kind to Zeno in his book Physics. He states that Zeno argues fallaciously and that he set up arguments simply to embarrass people. Aristotle tallies some arguments Zeno gives against motion:
1) The infinite half-way there paradoxes
2) Achilles and the tortoise
3) The traveling arrow stands still (based on the half-distances and the Achilles one)

Aristotle argues that Zeno's paradoxes are based on an erroneous presumption that time is made up of instances. But Aristotle argues that time is the limitless thing.

Zeno argues against space and places saying that if anything exists it will be in a place. But if a place exists then it will be in a place and if the place that holds the place exists it will too have to be in a place. Zeno uses the infinite regression to argue that places therefore can't exist.

Another quote from Zeno (though its veracity is doubted) about the impossibility of motion is "What is moving moves neither in the place in which it is nor in the place in which it is not" (Barnes, 108).

Melissus

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathon Barnes
2001

Like Parmendies and Zeno, Melissus was in the Eleatic school.

Melissus was from Samos and at one point defeated Pericles and the Athenians in a sea battle. But, he is better known as a follower of Parmenides. Melissus' known book is actually a prose version of Parmenides' strange poetic work 'The Way of Truth'

Like Parmenides, he insists that whatever exist has always existed because it cannot have come from nothing (nothing can't exist) and it couldn't have come from something else (otherwise it would have always been that something in the first place).

He also agrees with Parmenides that nothing can be destroyed.

He also agrees that it it is limitless. Since it is limitless there can be nothing else. This is the justification for monism.

Since it is uncreated, indestructible and limitless making everything one, there is no change. You can't change anything into something else if there is only one limitless thing.

He also denies the possibility of motion. He does this by reasoning since everything is one, it cannot condense or become rarefied as earlier philosophers said because if it did condense or become rarefied it would be at the same time denser than itself, which is impossible. So since it cannot change it is full. If it is full then there is no chance for anything to move within itself.

"For what does not exist wholly cannot exist always" (Barnes, 94). Nothing can come into being. It exists or it does not.

He has an interesting thought on how the limitless thing cannot suffer pain: "Nor does it suffer pain. For if it is in pain it will not wholly exist; for a thing in pain cannot exist always, nor does it have equal power with what is healthy. Nor will it be similar if it suffers pain; for it will suffer pain by the loss or the addition of something, and it will no longer be similar. Nor could what is healthy suffer pain; for the health which existed would perish and what did not exist would come into being. With regard to suffering anguish, the same argument holds as for being in pain" (Barnes, 96). That's an interesting thought if Melissus equates the limitless with god in a pantheistic way.

The physical world for Melissus was 'the way of opinion', not in 'the way of truth'. The physical world isn't the true reality.

For both Parmenides and Melissus the physical objects of the world only seem to exist but have no true existence.