The pre-Socratics — though this may be a broad and perhaps reductionist grouping — were the first tradition in Western philosophy. Their interests were wide and varied, including the natural sciences, but mostly concerned cosmology and ontology. They followed a linear trend in evolution of thought — most adhered to monism, some developed this into pluralism, and atomism as well. This distinguishes them from later philosophers, starting from Socrates, who focused on more practical matters like ethics and politics — though these men also devoted time to cosmology. These philosophers had their ‘heads in the cloud’, and would (perhaps unfairly) set the public perception of philosophers for the rest of time.

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The Origin of the Philosopher

Thales was studying the stars and gazing into the sky, when he fell into a well, and a jolly and witty Thracian servant girl made fun of him, saying that he was crazy to know about what was up in the heavens while he could not see what was in front of him beneath his feet. (Theaetetus, 174a)

In a culture steeped in mythology and superstition, philosophers were unusual thinkers. A poet’s ideas could be understood by the general population, whereas philosophers often spoke in riddles. To be a philosopher was a different lifestyle than, say, that of a sophist — it was to devote your time and effort to questions already answered (by mythology), or questions considered unanswerable. The pre-Socratics, then, were the first of these philosophers.

They did not abandon all religious thought, which would be quite a tough prospect for any individual, but they prioritized rational discourse — a first in Western thought. A ‘fanatical concern with logical consistency and rules of thinking’, leading to some empirically ridiculous but theoretically sound ideas (like Zeno’s Paradoxes), contributed to a suspicious popular perception towards philosophy that still holds today.

The Milesians

Thales is considered the first of all philosophers, and the pre-Socratics. He was born in Miletus, in modern-day Turkey (then a Greek colony). He was a distinguished man in other subjects, but his contributions to philosophy centered along his attempt to find the arche: a single substance that was the source of everything else in the cosmos (world), a sort of sine qua non. This is part of a school of thought, known as monism, that supposes a single substance, sometimes called the One, as the origin of everything else.

Thales supposed this substance to be water, for three reasons:

1. The nutriment of everything is moisture
2. The seeds of everything have a moist nature
3. The substance from which everything is ‘generated’ must also (by definition) arche.

This was not a radical break with, but instead a modification of, religious thought. Thales figured that water, the substance, was pervaded with a divine ‘mind’. This mind was responsible for, among other things, the movement of water.

Thales’ pupil Anaximander held similar interests in cosmology (the study of the cosmos). He also made contributions to the sciences, but his philosophic thought was similar in direction to his teacher. Instead of the more obvious elements (earth, air, water, fire, and so on), Anaximander figured the arche to be a substance he called apeiron (boundless). This substance gave way to pairs of opposites, like hot and cold, or hard and soft in an eternal ‘splitting off’ process. The apeiron is the source of these elements, and also the ‘vessel’ unto which they return. As summer turns to winter, heat returns to the apeiron and cold emerged; then, as winter turns to spring, so to does cold return to the apeiron. Anaximander envisaged the cosmos as a product of this cycle.

Anaximander’s pupil, Anaximenes, carried this line of thought forwards as well, differing on some fundamental issues. For one, he figured the arche to be pneuma (air). A problem Anaximenes identified in Anaximander’s thought is thus: how can ‘one’ substance — the apeiron — contain an indefinite amount of things? How can one thing contain multiple things, but still be one thing? Thus, for Anaximenes, his pneuma is not the arche of all things in his predecessors’ sense — it is all things. Through condensation and rarefaction respectively, pneuma becomes every other substance, and every other substance returns to being pneuma. Pneuma also has a divine quality to it. Through this conception, Anaximenes forms his own sort of evolutionary cycle:

air <-> fire <-> wind <-> cloud <-> water <-> earth <-> stone

Heraclitus

I have heard many men talk, but none who realized that understanding is distinct from other knowledge.

Heraclitus was born in Ephesus along the Ionian coast. His works can be seen as especially and intentionally distinct from other philosophers of his time, and those who came before. Indeed, he denounced his predecessors as people who learned much, but understood little.

He often spoke of a logos, perhaps the logical basis of the universe — a process, not an entity or a substance. Ignorance occurs when people do not comprehend the structure of the human psyche (soul) and its relation to this logos. And indeed, most people are ignorant: “Having heard without comprehension, they are like the deaf; this saying bears witness to them: present they are absent”. This combines with a sort of intellectual ’elitism’ that would be elaborated upon by Plato and Aristotle, as he says: “the many are base, while the few are noble”.

Heraclitus saw the universe as in a sort of ‘disordered order’. In his view, the cosmos was in a constant struggle between opposites. These forces are balanced such that, despite this conflict, the cosmos is in a sort of equilibrium. It appears that everything is at peace, but this apparent permanence is deceptive, and reality is in constant change. He conjures the image of fire, an effective visualization of his thought.

Eleatic Philosophy

Parmenides, born in Elea in modern-day Italy, was a major revolutionizing figure in cosmology, and also brought leading minds into debating ontology (the study of being). His Eleatic school of philosophy believed in an ordered, and static cosmos, in contrast to Heraclitus’s ‘disordered order’. Parmenides works were in poetry, though his ideas were argued logically.

In his poem, Parmenides illustrates two ‘paths’ of knowledge: the Path of Being, and the Path of Opinion. The former is the more rational, while the latter is inscrutable and is the path of mortals. The fundamental assumption of the former path is that what-is-not, is not worth thinking about — we must simply focus on what-is. Thinking is being; since we can not think about nothing, and ‘what-is-not’ is nothing, it is thus a worthless endeavor to think about what-is-not, even though our senses and (illusory) appearances leads us down this path.

Next, he elaborates on ‘what-is’. What-is is ‘purely positive, simple, and unconditioned’. It is also completely static, since change implies something becoming something else (what-is-not); since what-is-not is nothing, it is impossible for things to change, and thus change is impossible. Everything is ‘what-is’; not in the sense of an original substance, nor in the sense of Anaximenes’ pneuma (an evolutionary process), but in the sense of a fixed amount that never changes, and will never change.

In a set of famous paradoxes, Zeno, Parmenides successor (and lover, perhaps) attempts to reduce the concept of motion itself to absurdity (reductio ad absurdum) — to prove that motion does not exist. The idea is ridiculous empirically (just walk towards a destination!), but was quite revolutionary at the time of conception.

The Dichotomy is the paradox we will consider. This is really the core of the paradoxes. It is (paraphrased):

Assume a particle $P$, starting at origin $O$, and attempting to reach a point $A$ by traversing a distance $d$, is in motion. In order to reach $A$, $P$ will need to traverse an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time — something impossible, and hence it is impossible for $P$ (really, anything) to be in motion and reach $A$.

It has to traverse an infinite number of points, because the distance $d$ is infinitely divisible. For instance, $P$ will first need to traverse half of said distance ($\frac{d}{2}$) to reach $A$. After that, it will need to cover another half ($\frac{d}{4}$), then another half ($\frac{d}{8}$), and so on. This is common sense — in order to reach a point, you need to cross the halfway between that point and your current position. But we can infinitely halve this distance, so $P$ will be stuck traversing an infinite number of half-points to reach $A$.

There are many angles to disprove Zeno’s paradox. One obvious one is that he seems to be begging the question: if anything, Zeno would need to prove to us why his premises are valid, when the conclusion (as he demonstrates himself) conflicts with reality. Regardless, this was one of Zeno’s own contributions to Eleatic philosophy. In this case, he critiques motion, where Parmenides defended the staticity of what-is. Both ideas complement each other.

The Pluralists

The thinkers preceding have all adhered, at least partially, to monism. The Pluralists, on the other hand, believe in multiple substances and multiple realities making up our cosmos, as opposed to the One.

One of these Pluralists was Emepedocles. He agreed with the Eleatics in that motion is impossible because of the staticity and ‘fullness’ of what-is. Where he disagreed is what fills that fullness: Empedocles figured that, at the very beginning of the ‘world cycle’, the cosmos was filled with four basic roots (earth, air, fire, and water). These were united by one of the two basic motions, love. Eventually, the other motion strife took over and the four roots separated, only for love to then return and unite them all once more.

Humans, the earth, and nature are all products of this cycle. We are merely mixtures of these various roots. By pure chance, these mixtures occurred in such a way that we came to be. However, Empedocles was not consistent in his descriptions of this cycle; he also claimed that it was god that actually led this process, not chance.

Anaxagoras was another pluralist who was contemporary to Empedocles. He differs in that he replaced Empedocles’ basic motions with just one: nous (mind). To Anaxagoras, mind was a very vague concept. Regardless, we can infer that it is a whole, and that it acts to set the roots in motion — as a commander orders his men. On the roots themselves, Anaxagoras believed that ‘in everything there is a portion of everything’, echoing the pluralism of Empedocles. He understood that our gross senses could not perceive this, distinguishing between appearance and reality as Heraclitus did.

The Atomists

The efforts of Leucippus of Miletus and Democritus of Abdera bore into the materialist philosophy known as atomism. Atomos are, by definition, indivisible. Note that this is actually different from our modern, scientific understanding of atoms, which are not the smallest particles. Democritus began to develop this concept as part of his ontology.

Borrowing from Parmenides, Democritus argued that the universe consists entirely of the empty (what-is-not), and the full (what-is) that combine to form objects. He does not dismiss the idea of what-is-not like Parmenides, however. In his view, both the full and the empty are alike and equal in degree. The empty is not what-is-not — it is a whole category of thing in itself. What-is-not still exists in his conception, of course.

From here, Democritus develops his idea of how atoms make up the full. They have properties, such as size, shape, position, arrangement, and motion. Combinations of atoms with combinations of properties can be perceived by us — though lay atoms can not. These atoms combine largely through collision — when two atom’s properties are amenable to one another, and they collide, they join together. This process repeats, they become larger, and they become perceivable to us. Environmental forces, however, may break them apart.

Most of this process is thus left to chance — not a Nous or some divine being — a process entirely naturalistic. That does not mean it is completely and utterly chaotic and beyond our understanding. These collisions must follow the mechanics of motion, and the laws governing them — therefore, we can begin to understand them, and maybe even manipulate them.

Another important implication is in our recurring debate of appearance vs reality. We obviously can not perceive lay atoms, we can only perceive their combinations and these combinations’ peculiar appearances, tastes, smells, and so on. These perceptions are only according to our own, human, senses; a human and a dog, for instance, may sense different tastes in the same food. Therefore, all these sense perceptions are convention, and pointless to discuss; the nature of things is only in the atoms and empty that compose it. The nature of things is something that transcends our human senses, and is general to all beings in the universe.